Officially, it was said that Sue had died of some rare congenital condition which wasn’t contagious. David was reported to have been killed in a tragic accident while he had been checking the safety of the pavilion. Legends soon spread around the school that the secretary had killed herself in the wake of a disastrous love affair, while the deputy head had sacrificed his own life rescuing me from the collapsing pavilion. Such a heroic fiction seemed fitting for a deputy head of Edleybury. It was certainly better than the picture painted by the police, of a psychopathic sexual predator.
New members of staff knew little about the victim of the collapsed pavilion apart from what they heard in Nick’s eulogy, that David had been an exceptional deputy head, and a true servant of the school. As for the pupils, they moved on up through the school ignorant of the true facts of David’s life and death. Spinning sensational fantasies about the staff, they never suspected their stories were nowhere near as lurid as the truth.
Epilogue
Faint cries reached us from a group of boys playing cricket on the far pitch. Behind them the paintwork of a new pavilion gleamed white against a bank of rhododendrons, its leafy profusion dotted with splashes of scarlet. Everything looked vibrant in the afternoon sun.
A cluster of Japanese boys strolled across the near pitch in the direction of the boarding houses.
‘I had a letter from the agency in Tokyo recently,’ Nick said, as the boys disappeared among the silver trunks of a copse of birch trees. ‘They want to send someone over to look around the school.’
‘Is everything all right?’
He nodded. ‘They say they want to do more to promote us in Japan, so they’re coming here on an information-gathering visit. I don’t think they’re checking up on us.’ He gave a low laugh.
‘Who are they sending?’
‘I don’t know. But whoever it is, we’ll make them feel welcome.’
‘Of course.’
In silence we watched white-clad figures waving bats and running around in the distance.
When Nick spoke again, his voice was so low I had to strain to hear what he was saying. ‘I didn’t really love her, you know.’
Several years had passed since tragedy had struck in our inaugural year at Edleybury, but I knew straight away who he meant.
He continued hesitantly, as though choosing his words with care. ‘It was never going to last... I thought you would have understood, would have been more patient. Everything that happened... there was no need.’
‘I wanted it to end, but not like that,’ I replied. ‘Not like that.’
He sighed, and above us a breeze whispered in the leaves of the birch trees.
‘It was you, all along,’ he said.
He could have been declaring his enduring love, or telling me that he had always known I had murdered two women to protect our marriage and preserve our way of life.
The breeze in the birch trees died away; only occasional cries from the young cricketers disturbed the peace. Staring straight ahead, Nick no longer seemed aware of my presence beside him, or of the shouts from the cricket pitch. Perhaps he was remembering a different game, played out in front of a rickety old pavilion, in a lost world of innocence and tranquillity.
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