Let The Bones Be Charred

by Andy Maslen

  Having delivered himself of what he considered an unbeatable parting shot, he got up and walked out, leaving her door wide open.

  84

  MONDAY 10TH SEPTEMBER 12.05 P.M.

  SHAFTESBURY

  Something in the vehemence of Haddingley’s denial struck Stella. She decided to let Garry continue with his line of questions. She glanced at him for a second, then back at Haddingley. Garry picked up the subtle signal she’d sent him; one of the many pleasures of working with the same man for a few years was the almost telepathic rapport you built up.

  ‘So you weren’t her lover?’ he asked.

  ‘What? No! Of course I wasn’t!’

  ‘Why “of course”? I’ve seen a photo of Amy. She was an attractive young woman. Single, as you said. Full of,’ Garry checked his notebook, ‘energy.’

  ‘I’m married, for one thing.’

  Garry pursed his lips.

  ‘I know you’re a bit isolated out here, but even you must know, James, that married men have been known to play away from home.’

  Garry had a certain way of speaking when he was sure of something. Stella thought of it as his ‘man-to-man voice’. Quiet, but assured, with just a hint of amusement, as if to say, ‘come on, we both know what’s going on here’.

  Haddingley simply stared at Garry. Stella counted to five before he answered, in a low voice.

  ‘This is a Christian school, as I told you before. The governors appointed me to maintain a very particular set of values. It would be… difficult, for me… professionally… if anything about my private life were to find its way to their ears.’

  Stella pressed her right boot toe gently against Garry’s left ankle, out of Haddingley’s sight. She spoke.

  ‘We’re not in the business of stirring up gossip, or blighting people’s careers, James. We simply need to get to the truth about the circumstances of Amy’s death. So if there’s anything you can tell us that will help us to do that, even perhaps something personal, now would be the time to speak up.’

  Seemingly resigned to his fate, as he apparently imagined it, Haddingley inhaled, then spoke on the out breath.

  ‘Amy and I were seeing each other. Sleeping together, to save you the trouble of asking. It started at the leavers’ do just after the end of the summer term. At the end of the party, the school band always plays a slow dance and the children were egging the staff on, and we ended up together dancing to ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’. We kissed, and, oh god, poor Amy!’ he wailed, covering his face with both hands and slumping back in his chair.

  Stella and Garry exchanged a look. Transmitted in the few, fleeting seconds of minutely varying facial expressions were a number of separate ideas.

  I had to ask.

  I know.

  He didn’t do it.

  I know.

  Let’s leave the alibi question.

  Sure.

  ‘I’m sorry we have to ask these questions,’ Stella said. ‘And I assure you we will keep your private life private.’ Unless you’re Lucifer, in which case I will personally expose you to the world for what you are.

  ‘Thank you. Is there anything else you want to ask me?’

  ‘Yes. Can you tell us whether Amy had any sort of public profile? Outside school. Was she a blogger? Did she have a magazine article published, anything like that?’

  Haddingley shook his head. He looked eager to help now that his secret was out.

  ‘No, nothing like that. She had a Twitter account and she was on Facebook, like we all are, but it was just personal news and school stuff. You have to be so careful these days. The kids will pick up on anything and, before you know it, your drunken party antics are all over Whatsapp. Speaking metaphorically,’ he added, quickly, glancing nervously at each detective in turn.

  ‘OK, thanks. That’s it for now. We’ll contact you once we have the warrant for the leavers’ data but, until then, we’ll let you prepare for your meeting with the governors.’

  ‘Thank you. Is Sylvia looking after you?’

  ‘Yes, she’s a star. We’ve even got a posh coffee machine, haven’t we, Garry?’

  ‘Better than anything at Paddington Green,’ he lied, smiling.

  ‘Good. Well, if you’ll excuse me then,’ he said, then stood and offered his hand again.

  The meeting with Marcus Duckett was purely a housekeeping exercise and yielded nothing of any value, evidentiary or otherwise. He explained how he’d noticed the racket coming from Amy Burnside’s classroom and gone in to investigate but could offer no new insights into her character, or her social or professional circles.

  Stella and Garry slumped in two of the plastic, steel-framed chairs in the office Sylvia Royal had provided.

  ‘These remind me of school,’ Garry said, grinning. ‘They were uncomfortable then and they’re no better now. You’d think Charlotte and Jonty would have their soft little bottoms cushioned a bit better than this, wouldn’t you?’

  Stella laughed.

  ‘Maybe they do. Maybe the lovely Mrs Royal laid these on especially for us. And was that a little bit of chippiness from you, DS Haynes?’

  ‘Me? Chippy? What, can’t a black kid from Balham make a joke without being called a class warrior?’

  ‘I didn’t call you a class warrior. I just asked if you were a bit chippy. Now I think maybe you are after all, eh, Garry? Going to start throwing rocks through those lovely mullioned windows, are we?’

  ‘I sincerely hope not,’ a voice said from the doorway.

  Stella and Garry looked round in perfect synchrony to see Sylvia Royal smiling archly at them.

  ‘How long have you been standing there, Mrs Royal?’ Stella asked.

  ‘Let’s just say the children’s little bottoms,’ she raised an eyebrow while looking at Garry, ‘are cushioned by nothing more than their clothes.’

  ‘Sorry, Mrs Royal,’ Garry said.

  Then she did something unexpected. She laughed. A full-throated sound that filled the small office.

  ‘Oh, my goodness, DS Haynes, you sound exactly like a teenage boy who’s been sent for chores.’

  Seizing the opportunity, Stella spoke while the senior secretary was wiping her eyes with a lace-edged handkerchief.

  ‘Mrs Royal, could we ask you a few questions about Amy Burnside?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she answered, all seriousness now. She pulled the door closed behind her and pulled up a third chair, forming a triangle with the two cops. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘We asked Mr Haddingley about whether Amy might have had any enemies here at Monksfield. He was very sure she hadn’t. Would that be your view as well?’

  Mrs Royal took her time answering. Stella sensed, not the evasive pause of a suspect trying to construct a lie they could stick to, but something softer. As if she were weighing up how best to help the police without compromising the reputation of the school.

  ‘I think James is, broadly, right. Amy had no enemies. Not as such. I think a couple of the older teachers, and myself, if I am being brutally honest, felt that she was a little too keen to shake things up before she’d fully worked out which bits of the jigsaw went where. But as the headmaster probably told you, disagreements in school life are generally fought on the battlefield of the staffroom carpet or the governors’ meeting. You may have already deduced, if that is the right word, that I have been at Monksfield for a long time. A very long time, in fact. James is the fourth headteacher I have served. Not the best, I have to say, but certainly not the worst.’

  ‘So you know how the jigsaw fits together,’ Garry said.

  ‘Indeed I do. Monksfield is a good school. And a peaceful one, by and large. It—’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Royal,’ Stella interrupted, ‘What do you mean, “by and large”?’

  Mrs Royal looked away, then back at Stella.

  ‘A figure of speech, that’s all.’

  ‘I know it’s a figure of speech, but you strike me as a woman with a long and efficient mem
ory, and a real sense of the school’s history. So when you said it was a peaceful school, “by and large”, I think you were thinking of something in particular that wasn’t so peaceful, weren’t you?’

  Stella smiled as she added the final question but inside she had that indefinable feeling all good coppers get, that something is about to happen.

  Sylvia Royal sighed. Then she patted her hair at the sides. She folded her hands in her lap and regarded Stella with that same, hawkish stare she’d used earlier.

  ‘I suppose you’d only look it up anyway or go ferreting around in our bank accounts, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Oh dear. We’ve kept it quiet for nineteen years, which isn’t too bad considering what happened. I shan’t bother asking you to keep it quiet any longer. James would. But I’ve been around a little longer than he has. I know how the world works.’

  Her pulse racing, Stella willed herself to keep her voice level. But that feeling of something had just multiplied to a full-blown certainty.

  ‘What are you talking about, Mrs Royal?’

  ‘I think based on what I’m about to tell you, you should probably call me Sylvia.’

  85

  MONDAY 10TH SEPTEMBER 1.00 P.M.

  SHAFTESBURY

  Stella fished out her digital recorder from her bag and showed it to Sylvia.

  ‘I have a feeling we’re going to need a verbatim transcript of what you’re about to tell us, Sylvia. Would you be OK with me recording our conversation?’

  Sylvia nodded graciously.

  Garry sat with his pen poised over his notebook. Belt and braces.

  Checking the voice-activated recorder was working, Stella turned to Sylvia.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked.

  ‘Let’s start with when, shall we? It was the summer holiday in 1999, so July and August. As with most boarding schools, we have a few children who, for one reason or another, can’t return home in the holidays. A few from military families, a few whose parents are overseas, diplomats, business executives and so on, you can imagine.

  ‘One of our stayers-on was a girl, well, a young woman, really, named Lauren Bourne-Clarke. She was in the lower sixth, seventeen at the time and one of those girls you just know will go on to do great things. Lauren was what we still like to call an all-rounder. Good at sports, captain of several teams but also academically brilliant. She was also extraordinarily beautiful in that way only the very young seem able to achieve. Clear skin, even-featured and, oh, you know, that, that radiance.

  ‘One of our other stayers-on was a boy named Malachi Robey. He was,’ she paused and compressed her lips for a moment, ‘troubled. I suppose that’s the fashionable word for it. Omit the final letter and I think you’d be closer to the truth. He was obsessed by the more violent stories in the Bible. The gorier the better. Hardly surprising, given his name. I mean, what sort of parents name a boy Malachi Jeremiah in this day and age? He asked so many questions in RE that his teacher referred him to the local parish priest.

  ‘He excelled in art, too, although there again, he was disciplined after creating these truly disgusting,’ she wrinkled her nose, ‘models, I suppose you’d call them. Miniature re-enactments of people being tortured. He made them in clay and painted them to look realistic. He called them his martyrs. His classmates complained about them. Said they made them feel sick.’

  ‘You said he was trouble,’ Garry said. ‘Anything else you can tell us about him?’

  ‘He used to absent himself from school to go hunting in the woods outside the school grounds. There,’ she said, pointing to a distant splotch of dark green beyond fields golden with ripe cereal crops. ‘Once he brought back a young doe he’d killed and asked the cook to roast it for dinner. He’d skinned it already, and cut out its eyes and its teats. He was covered in blood. The poor woman fainted.’

  Stella could feel her copper’s instincts firing like an electrical storm as she listened. Mutilating animals as a child was one of the cornerstones for the diagnosis of psychopathy.

  ‘Go on,’ she said.

  ‘Well, to cut a long story short, Lauren presented herself at the office in a very sorry state, claiming that Malachi had raped her.’

  ‘And then what?’ Stella prompted.

  ‘And then the whole thing was hushed up.’

  ‘Hushed up, how? Didn’t you call the police?’

  Sylvia shook her head, making her delicate drop earrings shake a little.

  ‘I wanted to, but the then headmaster, a Mr Alfreston, forbade me. He actually laid his hand on mine as I was reaching for the receiver. I can remember his words very clearly. He said, “Wait, Sylvia. Think of the school. Think of our reputation.” I was thinking of the crying young woman in front of me and what would happen to her reputation, but he was a very domineering man. It was impossible to argue with him.’

  ‘You could have, though, couldn’t you?’ Garry asked. ‘You could have called the police and told Alfreston where to put the school’s reputation.’

  Sylvia sighed and Stella thought she saw the real woman behind the frosty facade. She had a narrow gold band on her ring finger and Stella wondered whether she had children of her own. And whether Alfreston had.

  ‘Go on, Sylvia,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Yes, of course I could have done. I should have done. And my inaction on that day is something I have lived with and regretted every single day of my life since then. So, instead of calling the police, we called Lauren’s parents. I say, “we”, but it was me who had to do it. Alfreston’s courage deserted him at that point. I told them that there had been an incident at the school involving Lauren and they needed to return to England to collect her urgently. They were film people, and at the time they were in Morocco, but I impressed upon them the seriousness of the situation, without giving the details, and two days later they arrived.’

  ‘And how exactly did you, the school, I mean, hush it up?’ Garry asked.

  ‘Oh, the headmaster had consulted the governors by then. They’d approved an ex gratia payment from the school’s contingency fund. One hundred thousand pounds. Malachi denied everything. He said she had seduced him. The difference in their ages made that a plausible story as far as the governors and Mr Alfreston were concerned.’

  ‘How old was Malachi?’ Stella asked.

  Stella watched a flicker of anger cross the older woman’s face. The cheeks lost their tinge of pink and her lips pulled back from her teeth, just for a microsecond, but Stella noticed it. A wild expression. A mother wolf protecting her cubs.

  ‘Fourteen.’

  ‘And they didn’t pursue it through the courts?’ she asked.

  Sylvia shook her head.

  ‘In the end they agreed it would be best all round if Lauren was spared that ordeal. It was only nineteen years ago but the legal culture towards rape victims was still rooted in suspicion of the accuser. Not like now with all that “Me Too” business. They took Lauren away that day and that was the last we heard of them. All parties signed a confidentiality agreement. I still have a copy in the school archive if you’d like to see it.’

  ‘Yes please,’ Stella said.

  ‘I’ll dig it out for you before you go.’

  ‘So, what did you do with Malachi?’ Garry asked. ‘You must have been worried he’d do it again.’

  Sylvia sniffed. Her eyes were glistening in the sunlight streaming in through the window.

  ‘He was expelled the next day. The head called his father. Said if he didn’t come and get his son immediately, he’d personally drive him to the station and put him on a train back to London.’

  Inside, Stella was feeling cautiously optimistic. Admittedly, Malachi Robey had left years before Amy Burnside arrived, so he couldn’t possibly have known her. But on the credit side of the balance sheet, they had a boy at a religious school who’d raped a girl three years older than him, then been expelled. He was never punished for his crime, which would have emboldened him
still further. It wasn’t the murderer’s fingerprint in the victim’s blood, but it was close. But there were other lines of enquiry emanating from the school that they still needed to follow up.

  ‘Sylvia, you have been so helpful,’ she said, a form of words she and Garry used to signal to the other that an interview was over. She heard him close his notebook. ‘If you could dig out the confidentiality agreement and the record of Malachi’s expulsion, that would be fantastic.’

  Sylvia smiled thinly.

  ‘Strictly speaking, I should remind you that you need a warrant for these documents, but…’ she continued, holding up her hand to forestall Stella’s next remark, ‘that won’t be necessary. I’ve had enough of the secrecy and the lies. My husband and I want to travel before we get too old. If the school wants to pursue me for breaching the rules, it’ll have to deal with my newfound openness about what went on here in 1999.’

  Stella nodded. She understood what was going on in Sylvia Royal’s brain, or in her heart, perhaps. Once you decided enough was enough and that justice had to be done, nothing stood in your way. Certainly not a board of governors and the headmaster of a minor public school that had covered up the rape of one of its own students by another. She decided to try her luck just a little further.

  ‘That’s a very courageous decision. When we talked to Mr Haddingley, he said we would need a warrant for the records of your leavers from the last two years. I don’t suppose…’

  Sylvia’s eyes flashed fiercely again. Clearly she’d reached some sort of crossroads in her moral life. She stood and turned to a filing cabinet and unlocked it with a key on a ring she brought out from a pocket in her jacket. Then she looked straight at Stella.

  ‘I’m going to get Malachi’s file and the confidentiality agreement, then take them into my office to make copies for you. Please don’t look in the third drawer down, because that’s where the hard copies of the leavers’ records are filed and, as the head said, you need a warrant for those.’