School for Murder

by Robert Barnard

  ‘That pathetic little Makepeace,’ said Mrs Frome. ‘Like a church mouse. Hilary just despised him.’

  ‘And the science teaching was pretty poor, too,’ said her husband. ‘Maths and science—just the subjects Hilary would need if he was going to be a doctor. I was giving up a great deal of my own time, I may say, just to supplement the inadequate teaching he got at Burleigh. Ridiculous . . . Time thrown away—now.’

  ‘Did you want him to become a doctor?’

  ‘It was a possibility. One of the options. But you’ve got to be first-rate academically to get into medical school. Hilary always said he’d never make it, not from Burleigh . .. He was also interested in Communications . . . He was a very personable boy, Superintendent. People responded to him. Respected him. He could have gone anywhere, done anything.’

  ‘So the headmaster said,’ agreed Pumfrey cautiously. ‘What about his friends? Did he have any especially close ones?’

  ‘Well, there was young Willis,’ said Mrs Frome, who had been quietly rubbing her eyes with a small handkerchief. ‘He was round here now and then. And Peter Quigly. Both very nice types. We know the parents socially. And he had such a nice little girlfriend . . . Well, not girlfriend, because he was too young, but . . . you know. Margaret Wilkinson was her name. Very nicely spoken. But we don’t know the parents there, do we, John? And we hadn’t heard so much about her recently, anyway.’

  ‘This boy Pickerage, who he was with when—just before he died. Had you heard of him?’

  ‘Was that the boy in the sick bay? No, I’d never heard Hilary mention him,’ said Mrs Frome. But she suddenly puckered her forehead. ‘But I have heard the name . . . That’s right: someone rang up and asked for him the other day. But he wasn’t a friend of Hilary’s, not so far as I know.’

  Frome had been sitting quiet, looking down at his hands. At length he spoke.

  ‘How did it happen, Superintendent? Do you know yet?’

  ‘No. There won’t be anything substantial from the labs for a few hours yet. We do know that the headmaster spoke to him early in the evening, and suggested he might like a glass of sherry later on—’

  ‘Sherry? You mean the headmaster offered his own sherry? What a damnfool thing to do.’

  ‘And we know that Hilary did go and get himself one.’

  ‘So it could have been the headmaster who—?’

  ‘We’re trying not to draw conclusions this early on, sir. How used was your son to drink?’

  ‘Well, of course, just the occasional one, on special occasions,’ chipped in Mrs Frome, almost defensively. ‘Like Christmas, and birthdays, and occasionally out with us in the evening. We hoped he would drink in a civilized way.’

  ‘So he went down,’ said Frome, as if puzzling it out, ‘and he helped himself to the headmaster’s sherry.’

  ‘That’s right. We know too that he took a glass from the medicine cupboard in the sick bay.’

  Dr Frome slapped himself violently on the thigh.

  ‘That’s it! I knew it! My God! I blame myself—a doctor. I knew perfectly well that woman was a menace. Supposed to be matron, and knew no more than a charwoman. Less. Prescribed all sorts of rubbish—just willy-nilly. I thought it just was rubbish, and couldn’t do any harm. But she’d no idea of method, hygiene—anything. I bet there was something left in that glass.’

  ‘It’s a possibility, and we’ve thought of that. We certainly have the impression that Mrs Crumwallis is not the person to treat sick boys. Now, I wonder if I might trouble you. I’d like to see Hilary’s room.’

  Heavily, bitterly, the Fromes led the way upstairs. In the door leading to the kitchen Pumfrey noticed a girl of ten or so. She was regarding them with wide, dark eyes, full of uncertainty. But the eyes were quite dry, and not red.

  Hilary Frome’s bedroom—ample, handsomely decorated, as befitted the solidly middle-class status of the family residence—was as studiously bland as the face Hilary kept for public occasions. It was unnaturally neat, and it carefully refrained from revealing any signs of individuality. There were school books, and one or two old Enid Blytons, but no sign of current reading tastes, nor any well-thumbed magazines. On the wall was a framed Miró. What kind of boy, Pumfrey marvelled, would choose a picture like that to decorate his room? When he left he took a pile of exercise books, a scrapbook and a diary, but a first glance at their contents did not suggest that they were going to be fruitful.

  The wide, dry eyes followed them from the kitchen as they took their leave.

  When they arrived back at Burleigh the hallway of the headmaster’s quarters was a mass of whispering groups. Tom Tedder and Corbett Farraday were muttering by the door which led into the main school; the headmaster, towering yet crumpled, was surrounded by a little group of teachers in the centre of his hall; and by the door leading to the boarding quarters Mrs Crumwallis was going over the events of the night before with her cook, Mrs Garfitt.

  ‘ ’Eaving up, was he?’ said that lady, licking her fat lips with ghoulish relish. ‘Throwing up and ’olding ‘is stomach? Sounds like something ’e het, don’t it? Nothing from my kitchen, anyway. What ’appened then?’

  ‘Then he died,’ said Mrs Crumwallis. She seemed to lack any Dickensian sense of the poetry of death.

  ‘Fancy. Died. There on your lap. ’Orrible for you, Mrs C. But he always was very white and fair, wasn’t ’e? Some’ow you can imagine ’im as one of those marboreal effigies in church. Tell me again what ’appened when you got ’ome. The shepherd’s is unfreezing, so there’s no rush for lunch. You got ’ome, and you ’eard sounds, is that it?’

  The headmaster’s little group of himself, Septimus Coffin and Penny Warlock was joined by Mr McWhirter, limping late into school on his way to his first class. Catching wind of the disturbance, he poked his head around the door and in his early-morning voice, like a flute with catarrh, he threw the inquiry in the direction of Mr Crumwallis.

  ‘Something wrong, eh?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Crumwallis in an undertaker’s voice. ‘A boy has died.’

  ‘Oh, is that all?’ Mr McWhirter began a painful right turn, but then a thought struck him. ‘Which one?’

  ‘Alas—it was Hilary Frome.’

  ‘Ha! Really? Ha! No great loss.’

  The headmaster, ignoring Mr McWhirter’s privileged position, was about to enter a stinging demurrer when the phone rang.

  Mr Crumwallis froze.

  ‘The telephone again.’

  His voice was that of a breaking man. He walked with palpable reluctance in the direction of his sitting-room. Septimus Coffin cast a brief glance towards Iain McWhirter. Then the various groups, still muttering anxiously to each other, began to evaporate in various directions. Mike Pumfrey, now back in the study with Sergeant Fenniway, put his finger to his lips and picked up the extension phone.

  ‘My dear Mr Martins, I beg you to reconsider, to make no hasty decision,’ came the headmaster’s voice, raised to a sort of wail that was anything but confidence-creating. ‘I feel sure this thing will turn out to be an unfortunate accident. . . Well, it’s all very well to say that accidents like that shouldn’t happen, but . . . Naturally you don’t want to take risks with your boy, I can see that perfectly well, but—’

  Mike Pumfrey laid the receiver down gently, and raised his eyebrows at Fenniway.

  ‘Not the first today, I’d be willing to bet.’

  ‘Nor the last,’ said Fenniway.

  • • •

  Never had morning worn on more agonizingly slowly. Never, even at Burleigh School, had less been taught.

  Pumfrey, respecting the routine of the school, though there was little enough cause to, interviewed the teachers when they had a free period. Bill Muggeridge, he noted with regret, had been free for the first hour, when Pumfrey and Fenniway had been busy with the Fromes, but was not free again until after lunch. The rest were available at one time or another. The first to come, and one of the most interesting from Pumfrey’s point o
f view, was Tom Tedder, who sprawled easily in his chair, seemed as little tensed up as it is possible to be when involved in a murder case, and told them all they needed to know about the teachers’ attitude to the school’s star pupil.

  ‘Frightful little shit,’ he said. ‘And it didn’t help his being the headmaster’s publicly proclaimed “boy most likely”. That just gave him the more confidence.’

  ‘Confidence to do what?’

  ‘Oh, raising riot and rebellion in the usual schoolboy way. He was only a schoolboy, after all: we all tended to forget that. But there was something more with Frome. The way he needled the staff, for example. Picked on their weakest points, twisted the knife . . .’

  ‘Yes. Who are you thinking of?’

  ‘Most of us, really. Makepeace, of course, was easy game. But he’d take on someone like Glenda Grower, who’s a much tougher customer. Make some snide remark about what happened in her last school.’

  ‘Oh. And what did happen?’

  ‘Some ghastly little girl accused her of lesbian advances.’

  ‘And is she a lesbian?’

  ‘Personally I’d guess not. Since the women’s movement started bringing all the lesbians out, anyone with a bit of presence gets accused of it. And Glenda’s certainly got presence. As I say, I’d guess not, but she never talks about it, and nobody’d dare bring it up. Except Hilary Frome.’

  ‘I see. What else did he throw at you teachers?’

  ‘Oh, he said something to poor Miss Gilberd the other day.’ He stopped. ‘At least, he may have done.’

  ‘Why are you unsure?’

  ‘Well, at the time—’he stopped, embarrassed, but saw he was in too far—‘I thought she might have . . . have made it up. Well, I’d better tell you. I thought she might have made it up as an excuse for coming round to see me. She wouldn’t tell me exactly what he’d said. But in fact, he seemed to have quite a campaign going against the staff, so he might easily have said something.’

  ‘What sort of thing would he have said?’

  ‘Oh, something about her and me. Poor old Dorothea thinks it’s a state secret, but in fact everybody giggles over it.’

  ‘I see. And what about you, sir?’

  ‘Me? Oh, I don’t take the older boys, or only the dimmer ones in the lower streams. I hadn’t had Hilary since he was in the second year.’

  ‘So he’d never done anything special to you?’

  Tom Tedder remembered one morning, four years back, when he had taken into class a picture he had painted, and rather liked—a picture of Florence from Fiesole. He remembered the admiring glances of the other boys, and the expression of ineffable contempt on the face of the young Hilary Frome, an expression that told him that even an eleven-year-old could see through him, could tell he was no good.

  ‘No. He never said anything special to me,’ he said. ‘His general foulness didn’t ripen till later.’

  • • •

  The progressive questioning of the staff made for a terrible atmosphere in the Staff Common Room. Indeed, if they had thought about it, it would have been all too ludicrously reminiscent of being called up before the headmaster.

  ‘Well,’ said Dorothea Gilberd, coming in sweaty and harassed from a Geography class with 1A, ‘there’s certainly no prospect of getting anything done today.’

  ‘Weally?’ said Mr Makepeace. ‘I found 4A tewibly quiet.’

  ‘I don’t wonder. That’s Hilary Frome’s class. They would be. That doesn’t mean they’re taking anything in.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t ask for miwacles. Who’s with the Superintendent at the moment?’

  ‘McWhirter, I think,’ said Dorothea. ‘Tom went first,’ she said, artlessly revealing what was on her mind. ‘I haven’t seen him since. What’s the man asking us about?’

  ‘Where we were yesterday after school,’ said Glenda Grower, apparently little concerned. ‘And what were our impressions of Hilary Frome.’

  ‘He asked me if I’d been teaching them about poisonous plants,’ said Corbett Farraday. ‘As if I would! Of course, we did do some elementary botany . . .’

  ‘Hmmm,’ said Septimus Coffin. ‘And on the subject of Hilary, what is the party line? Are we being honest?’

  ‘Well, I was, in moderation,’ said Glenda. ‘The funny thing is, I felt rather rotten about telling him what I thought of Hilary. I mean, the boy was only fifteen or sixteen. He was a ghastly little tyke, but it is quite awful that he’s dead. People who are little horrors in school quite often grow up into all right individuals.’

  ‘And vice versa, of course,’ said Septimus Coffin. ‘The point about one’s schooldays is that they are the most irrelevant days of one’s life.’

  ‘Don’t talk rubbish, Sep,’ said Dorothea briskly. ‘If you thought that, you wouldn’t be a schoolteacher . . . Oh dear, I wonder what Tom told them.’

  ‘Why? Does he have anything to tell them?’

  Dorothea blushed, as if automatically.

  ‘No, of course not. And luckily we’ve both got a very good alibi for last night. I . . . I happened to have an extra ticket for the recital last night . . . Holmes, the violinist, you know . . . and I rang up Tom on the off-chance that he’d like to come.’

  Glenda Grower, out of sheer mercy, changed the subject.

  ‘Alibi,’ she said. ‘I notice you’re all assuming that the boy was murdered. Aren’t we jumping the gun a bit? I bet the Superintendent hasn’t made up his mind about that yet, not judging by the tone of his questions.’

  ‘My boys in 1A aren’t convinced of it either,’ chipped in Dorothea gratefully. ‘They’d like it to be murder, because that would be more sensational, and they’d like to see someone dragged off, but they really think it was an accident. They haven’t worked it out yet, but they’re sure it’s something to do with Mrs C. and her damned medicines.’

  ‘They have a point,’ said Glenda. ‘Precisely what I think.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ said Septimus Coffin. ‘If it is . . .’

  They all looked at him inquiringly.

  ‘I pwesume,’ said Percy Makepeace, ‘you think that would be the end of Burleigh.’

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Septimus. ‘I think it would be the end of Crumwallis at Burleigh.’

  ‘What’s this, Sep?’ said Tom Tedder, coming in from his last class, and acting rather as if a load was now off his mind, or as if he was trying to conceal one. ‘Writing off the Crumwallises already?’

  ‘Only,’ said Coffin judiciously, ‘in certain circumstances.’

  ‘Like his lovely lady wife having inadvertently poisoned off his star pupil, you mean? No, it wouldn’t exactly foster confidence, would it? Actually the idea that that’s what happened has probably got round the parents already. Boys talk, you know, and everyone was aware of her medicinal vagaries. Mr C. is looking like Dr Jekyll after a nasty spell as Mr Hyde, by the by. And he’s on the phone again.’

  ‘Really?’ said Septimus Coffin. And before long he drank up his coffee and slipped out.

  ‘Tom,’ said Dorothea urgently, ‘what was it like? What did he ask you about?’

  ‘Same as everyone else, I should think. Where I was last night, and so on. I told him about the concert.’

  ‘Was that all?’

  ‘Then he wanted to know what I thought of young Hilary,’ said Tom. He swallowed, as if making a decision. ‘I told him that as far as I was concerned he was junior shit of all time. I—er—I told him about his insulting you.’

  ‘Oh Tom—’ wailed Dorothea. ‘You didn’t!’

  ‘Well, after all, what’s the odds? He needs to know what a ghastly little prick the boy was. The headmaster would never tell him, and most of this lot will pull their punches. And we’ve got perfect alibis.’

  But Dorothea Gilberd was not to be comforted.

  ‘I don’t know that alibis are all that much use,’ she said. ‘Not in poison cases.’

  • • •

  ‘But Mrs Quigly,’ shouted the headmaster down the phone
, oblivious in his desperation of the fact that his sitting-room door was slightly ajar, ‘I will not be condemned without trial in this way . . . Yes, I realize you are under no obligation to keep Peter here. But I think I can say that we have never betrayed the trust that you have reposed in us . . . That is a most unwarranted slur . . . My wife has never laid claim to medical knowledge, Mrs Quigly . . . I must beg you to take a few days to consider . . . All this will be sorted out, perhaps in a matter of hours . . . Mrs Quigly! Mrs Quigly!’

  He stood by the fireplace, gazing despairingly at the mouthpiece of the telephone. It was at this point that the door swung open.

  ‘I think, Mr Crumwallis,’ said Septimus Coffin, marching in, ‘that we’d better sit down and have a really good talk.’

  CHAPTER 11

  DECLINE AND FALL

  ‘But that’s hardly more than I paid for it!’ protested Edward Crumwallis, his voice high with outrage and fear. ‘Allowing for inflation, it’s very much less than I paid for it.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Septimus Coffin.

  ‘It’s an unthinkable proposition. You take no account of the way I have built the school up.’

  ‘Oh, I do,’ said Septimus Coffin. ‘And also of the way it is currently collapsing about your ears.’

  ‘Nonsense! Fiddlesticks! A temporary setback.’

  ‘Oh no. This school will never recover as long as you and your wife are here. Unfair, perhaps, but there it is. Even if Frome’s death has nothing to do with your wife’s . . . ministrations, the word has spread now. One thing parents can’t afford—especially our sort of parent—is that the whisper might be put about that they had been willing to toy with their own children’s safety. Just wait and see: that phone will ring again within the next ten minutes.’

  Mr Crumwallis jumped, and looked nervously at the instrument.

  ‘But what would we do?’

  ‘That’s rather up to you, isn’t it? Retire gracefully for a time. Then quietly buy another school. I’ve known teachers go on to other posts in the private sector without any trouble after far worse things than you will ever be accused of. Or why not try some other kind of institution? A private nursing home for old people, for example. Under proper medical supervision, of course.’