The White Devil (30 page)

“SIR ALAN,” SHE
said. The damp evening air curled her breath into white puffs.

“Judy,” came the familiar voice. “I apologize for the abrupt visit. This is Ronnie Pickles, from the Health Protection Agency. We’ve just been to the Three Arrows Inn, looking for Andrew Taylor, who’s in serious trouble. We’ve searched for him back at his house, and were led here. Ah, hello Piers. Now the story comes together. May we come in?”

The four of them crowded into Dr. Kahn’s entryway, next to a row of coat pegs and an umbrella stand.

“How can I help you?” Dr. Kahn said stiffly.

“Piers can tell you,” said Sir Alan. But Fawkes stared coldly back at him. Sir Alan continued. “Andrew Taylor may have tuberculosis, which is disturbing enough, but now he’s gone missing.”

“Missing?” said Fawkes.

“Your assistant housemaster called me, saying you ran off after getting a call. Made it sound like there was trouble at the hotel; the boy wasn’t staying put. I called Mr. Pickles, here, from the HPA, to return to school and join me; and sure enough . . . no Andrew Taylor in room twelve.” His eyes bored into Fawkes. “Funny, Piers, I’ve been at Headland for four years now, and I haven’t lost a single boy. But here in the course of a few months, you’ve got one missing, one in hospital, and one dead.”

Fawkes took a step forward. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“My daughter’s in hospital because you let someone with tuberculosis run coughing through the Hill,” Sir Alan snarled, shedding his polite façade and himself stepping closer to Fawkes. They were a mere foot apart, in street-fighting pose. “I’ve been at her hospital bed. I think I know what I’m talking about.” The two men glared at each other. “You’ve nearly shut us down. But you’re not through yet. You’re hiding the boy, God knows why, and making this into a real catastrophe. Stop mucking about and put the boy under the proper care.”

“I can’t do that.”

“And just why the devil not?”

“Because he doesn’t know where he is,” put in Dr. Kahn, quickly.

“Really.” Sir Alan’s sarcasm was thick.

She continued. “Piers told the boy to come here, but he never showed. We’ve no idea where he is. He’s probably back at the Lot by now.”

“We’ve just come from there,” said Pickles. He looked fatigued, and out of his depth.

“Well, maybe he went out for food, or to sneak a pint,” Dr. Kahn replied tartly. “He’s a teenager, not a toddler. He’ll turn up.”

“You seem awfully cool about the spread of tuberculosis in Greater London, Judy. I doubt the authorities would share your sangfroid
.
Going out and eating and breathing in public is exactly what he’s
not
supposed to be doing. Easy for you to say, when you haven’t got a sick daughter. What about you, Fawkes? Any theories about where the boy might have vanished to?”

“None.” Fawkes still looked like he wanted to take a bite out of Sir Alan.

“Well, I have one.” Sir Alan adopted a new voice: that of a litigator cross-examining a witness with a weak story. “Andrew Taylor, an arrogant American student, decides for himself that, despite the orders of his school, the recommendation of the government health department, and the risk he poses to other people, he doesn’t like staying at the Three Arrows. He’d rather go to a friend’s house. That
friend
,” Sir Alan continued, with a nod at Dr. Kahn, “gives him a sandwich.” The plate still sat on the coffee table, with two crusts. “That
friend
then hears the mean old health authorities knocking . . . so the
friend
takes him to an upper room to hide,” he pointed upward, to the second story, “where he won’t be discovered. And the friend cleverly turns on the light while the mean old health authorities are still standing on the stoop, where they can see everything. Not exactly an inspired plan. Perhaps the
friend
isn’t as bright as she makes herself out to be.”

Dr. Kahn blushed scarlet. “Get out of here,
Alan
.”

“Let me see him,” he demanded.

“I said
get out
.”

“Take me upstairs, Judy. I want to see that room.” He stood his ground, puffed up and furious. It looked like he wanted to run past her and make a break for the stairs.

“Sir Alan!” she shouted. “Remove yourself from my home or I will call the police!”

“Go ahead,” he sneered. “Let
them
find him. I should have thought of that myself.”

Dr. Kahn’s eyes bugged. “
Piers
,” she appealed.

Fawkes took a step into the center of the hall. But Sir Alan scoffed. “You’re going to have the poet rough me up? I’d rip you apart, and enjoy it.” His eyes flashed. “But I don’t need to go that far. You’re sacked, Piers.”

“What?”

“Effective immediately.”

“You don’t have the authority,” Fawkes challenged, disbelieving.

Sir Alan twisted out a smile. “You’re right. I don’t. I already have it from the head man. When I told him what was happening, he gave the word in about five seconds.”

He turned his back and stomped outside. Pickles scampered behind. Outside, on the walkway in the dark, Sir Alan stopped and faced the upstairs window.

“You’ve messed with the wrong family!” Dr. Kahn rushed to her front door.
Sir Alan! Stop it!
But he was possessed by rage. “You should see Persephone now!” he shouted. “She’s barely alive. Because of you.
Eh?
” The upstairs curtain did not move. “I know what you did,” he continued shouting. “I talked to Persephone. Yes, I know it all. You’re a disgusting,
druggie shit
!”

With this final shriek, he stomped to the car that stood waiting at the end of the walkway. He turned back for one last assault.

“Do his parents know where he is?” he called out to Dr. Kahn and Fawkes. “Do you have their permission? Or maybe you want a kidnapping charge added on to all your other mistakes tonight?”

With that parting shot he leapt into the car and gunned the engine, and barely waited for Pickles to climb in the passenger side before he pulled away with a screech. Down the street, a porch light illuminated, and a worried neighbor stepped outside to investigate.

“Come on,” muttered Dr. Kahn, pulling a stunned Fawkes inside the house after her.

23

Redeeming a Whore

THE THREE OF
them took turns pacing, and sitting despondently in Dr. Kahn’s living room, but in the end they decided there was nothing to do about Sir Alan.

“Their main goal is to get Andrew out of the Lot. Whether he’s at the Three Arrows or here—it makes little difference,” argued Fawkes. “Jute won’t make any more of a row than he already has.”

“I don’t want the police calling and accusing me of kidnapping,” fumed Dr. Kahn. “Do we have to hide Andrew in the attic like Anne Frank?”

“The police won’t get involved. This will seem like an internal school matter to them—if Sir Alan were even to call them, which I doubt.”

“You’re awfully rational for someone who just got sacked.”

Fawkes smiled thinly. “I saw it coming.”

“I never called my parents,” Andrew said. “What if Sir Alan calls them first?”

Fawkes shook his head. “He will assume I called them long ago. Which I never did.” Dr. Kahn shot him a questioning look. Fawkes tried to explain. “After our visit to the hospital, Andrew vanished, off to Cambridge—thanks to you, Judy. It didn’t seem like the moment.”

“Should I call them now?” offered Andrew. “It’s just lunchtime there.”

Fawkes chewed a nail. “No,” he said. “We need twenty-four hours. If you get sick, we’ll call them.”

“Reassuring,” said Dr. Kahn. “And what will we accomplish in twenty-four hours?”

“Andrew will complete the research about who Harness really murdered. Father Peter will bless the Lot. We’ll get rid of John Harness. That can be done in twenty-four hours, surely?” At that Fawkes stood; it was his turn to pace the small, carpeted living room. “But for some reason I have a nagging feeling. Like I’ve misplaced something.”

“What were you saying, just before Sir Alan came?” asked Dr. Kahn. “You were holding a piece of paper.” She began shuffling through Andrew’s printouts, which were splayed across the table.

“Something about the victim being both a girl and a boy,” offered Andrew.

“Thank you, yes!” Fawkes cried. “Yes, yes.” He threw himself back onto the sofa and joined Dr. Kahn in picking through the white printer paper. He scanned through the pages, muttering—
no, no
—then continued this operation one-handed as he shook a cigarette out of the pack and into his mouth. Then: “Got it,” he said, slapping the page down on the table. “Covent Garden!”

“That’s what you said before,” Andrew noted.

Fawkes lit the cigarette, never taking his eyes from the page. “
September 1808. Continues debauchery in London. Dinner at Mrs. Moroney’s brothel in Covent Garden
. God bless Reggie Cade. This is it. This is it!”

“Would you mind explaining?” Dr. Kahn asked, suppressing exasperation.

Fawkes flopped back into the cushions. “After leaving Cambridge, Byron went into one of his more unsavory periods. Maybe he was heartbroken about being forced to split with Harness. Maybe he was just being twenty, bored, and rich. Or both. He lolled around Cheapside. He hung out with professional boxers, lowlifes. He borrowed money anywhere he could—Jews, his landlady—to keep himself and his entourage drunk all the time. One night . . . in
Covent Garden
”—Fawkes picked up the page from Andrew’s pile—“he held a little party. Four friends. Seven hookers. I always remember that. It’s an elegant ratio.” Fawkes grinned. “Anyway, at this party, he met a whore. He really, really liked this whore. So, being Byron, he bought her.”

“Like a slave?” asked Dr. Kahn.

“More or less. Byron relieved her of her obligations to her madam. The madam, I suppose, was Mrs. Moroney,” he said, eyeing the sheet in his hand. “The girl’s name was Mary. Mary Cameron. Does that ring a bell, Andrew?”

He shook his head.

“Byron wrote a poem about her, ‘To Mary’—I told you about it; it was excluded from Byron’s first collection for being ‘too warm.’
And smile to think how oft were done, What prudes declare a sin to act is
.”

Andrew nodded in vague recollection. “But what does this have to do with Harness?”

“Not for the last time, Byron really fell for this tart. They lived together; cohabiting like modern lovers. Which really meant shagging her all day long. Sorry, Judy. He wrote some very dirty letters about it, and some quite tender poetry, too: all about breasts and watching her as she slept, lyrical stuff about golden hair.”

“But Harness never said anything about a whore, or even a girlfriend,” protested Andrew.

“That would make sense,” Fawkes nodded.

Dr. Kahn made a face. “Why does that make sense?”

“Byron’s snobby Cambridge friends were scandalized by the relationship with Mary and tried to hush it up. They’d come to the flat and be received by this gutter wench as if she were, you know, Lady Byron. Byron
wanted
to marry her. Across class lines. Unthinkable at the time. His friends told him he was insane. So if Byron couldn’t make her a legitimate spouse or consort, he had to think of another way to keep her around. Byron took her to friends’ houses, to Brighton . . .”

“The Brighton trip was in Harness’s letters,” broke in Andrew.

“. . . while
dressing Mary as a boy
. They pretended she was his cousin. There he was, taking tea in country drawing rooms, with this streetwalker in drag, speaking in an atrocious Cockney. And poor Mary always got the setup wrong; she kept referring to Byron as her brother. Her
bruvva
. There are letters about it. Pure farce. It’s hard to dislike Byron when you hear stories like that.”

“Wait,” said Andrew. “You’re saying the rival was a female prostitute dressed as a boy . . . not a boyfriend. Harness got it wrong.”

Fawkes threw up his hands. “Harness made a mistake!”

“What happened to Mary?” asked Dr. Kahn.

“She drops out of sight. Most biographers assume Byron threw her back in the gutter. Got bored, the way he usually did.”

“Could she be the one Harness killed?”

Fawkes thought about this. “I can’t see why not.”

“It would explain the cross-dressing victim,” mused Dr. Kahn.

“Yeah, but the dead girl was here, at Harrow. For Speech Day,” protested Andrew. “Would Byron really bring a hooker to Harrow?”

“He took her everywhere else.”

“It’s rather touching, if he did,” said Dr. Kahn. “Taking a lover to your old school. It’s a sentimental gesture.”

“He wanted to marry her,” Fawkes reminded them.

“Yeah. But instead,” said Andrew, “Byron comes back from getting drunk with his friends at Speech Day, and he finds her dead in the inn.”

They contemplated this grim prospect.

“How do you
know
all this, Piers?” asked Dr. Kahn after a moment.

“Mary was one of my nominees to be Byron’s great love, for the play. I have a folder on her, back in my study.”

“But she’s not in the play at all,” Andrew pointed out.

Fawkes smiled ruefully. “Harness is not the only one to underestimate Mary Cameron.”

“Sexism, pure and simple,” snorted Dr. Kahn.

“But you shouldn’t take my word for it,” said Fawkes. “This is just . . . background. Historical-literary anecdote. Andrew is the one who saw her. Right, Andrew? What do you think? Could it be her?”

Reluctantly, Andrew conjured up the picture of the struggle he had witnessed; the circling, scratching fight for life and death.

Oo
’er you?

She had a delicate, pointed nose; a mouth shaped like a bird in flight. Her cheeks had grown blotched red in the wrestling match; her eyes had blazed with fear. Yet there was a canniness there, a familiarity with the fight for survival. And in the moment she began to lose that fight, there had been a disbelief, that her survival skills, long honed and effective until now, had failed her.

Then, the corpse. The breasts revealed so peremptorily. So disrespectfully. They were small, young. Andrew shivered. He hovered uncertainly over Mary Cameron’s tangled, despoiled body, her secret unraveled with her hair. He peered; he was not able to help; he was merely a voyeur. He pulled away.

“It was her,” he said. “Although it’s a stretch to call her hair golden.”

Fawkes smiled sadly. “Poetic license.”

THEY HAD A
plan. Fawkes would return to the Lot to retrieve his folder on Mary Cameron. Andrew would stay at Dr. Kahn’s and begin writing his essay immediately.

“Do I even need to write the essay?” he said. “I feel like we know everything now.”

“If the departed spirit of a murderer shows up to Essay Club, I think you’ll want to have your ideas clearly organized,” Dr. Kahn advised primly.

“And how are we going to make sure Harness attends Essay Club?” Fawkes asked.

“The ghost seems to have no trouble locating our young friend,” Dr. Kahn replied.

“What about tonight? Can we be sure Andrew’s safe from Harness, here?”

They both looked at Andrew.

“Seems like Harness has withdrawn, for a while anyway,” Andrew said.

“If he’s clever,” said Fawkes, “he’s in retreat, preparing for battle.”

“He’s clever,” confirmed Dr. Kahn, grimly.

“And your plan for rousting the others—the living members of Essay Club?”

“I’ll send an email. Emergency session.”

Fawkes scoffed. “The first ever emergency essay.”

“I’m the advisor. I declare when an emergency session is needed.”

Andrew remained anxious. “Do you think it will be enough?”

“I’ll mark the email high priority,” Dr. Kahn replied drily.

“I mean for Harness.”

They exchanged glances.

“For Persephone’s sake, it had better be,” said Fawkes. “And where the hell is Father Peter?” He checked his mobile. “Still no calls. No messages. I’ve been texting him every hour, practically.”

FAWKES STEPPED OUTSIDE,
leapt over the shallow stoop, and zipped up his jacket; only then did he raise his eyes to notice what had happened since they had last opened Dr. Kahn’s front door. Her quiet street—a few cottages huddled into a leafy nook in Metroland—had been brushed white. Silence padded the air. Fog. It streamed over the housetops in wisps and tendrils, and punched across the lane in cloudheads like big fists. The streetlights were muffled; the sounds of traffic seemed faraway, directionless, under its cloaking. The prospect of venturing into it seemed, suddenly, to be madness.

Something primitive seized Fawkes.
Turn around. Go back inside and have tea
. He stood for a moment contemplating this. Then shook himself. What would he say? That he had changed his mind, because of the weather? No, it was absurd. He began his journey, but with a slower and more cautious stride.

At the next turn, he cheered somewhat. There were more houses on Roxborough Hill: porch lights, bedrooms, flickering blue television screens. He strode up the hill with purpose. But soon the houses looked unfamiliar. Doubt pushed its way into his mind. Was this really the right road? Had he veered off somewhere? And if he could lose himself so quickly, in a place he knew so well—could this fog be here by design? Had John Harness brought it? All the wetness and moisture of the past months. Harness—if it was Harness;
the fact that you’re even assuming it could be Harness shows how much you’re panicking; stop it
—it seemed, had turned all of Harrow-on-the-Hill into one of his own spongy, diseased lungs. Had wrought upon them all the dampness and disease, the claustrophobia and terror of his own death by tuberculosis. One reads about diseases of the past, Fawkes reflected, but rarely thinks about how they get at you; what the end would really be like, with your own oxygen cut off, with your own blood dribbling out of your mouth. His eyes twitched about the road, hyperalert. Could Harness be here now? Was he using this fog to hide? Andrew had made a comment about Roddy and Rhys seeing something, feeling something there in the room with them, when Roddy sickened. Had it been Harness, frigid, centuries-old? As much as he wanted to help Andrew, Fawkes did not want to see such a thing. Not firsthand. The fog carried a chill into his clothes. It wrapped around his neck, causing him to shiver. He zipped his jacket to the top and sped on.

At last Fawkes reached a familiar turning. He was not lost. This was the High Street, thank goodness. Yet his mind did not turn to sunny thoughts. The street lights and upper windows here, too, took on moist halos—muted, as if seen through a scrim. His morbid turn of mind persisted. This was the way a dead person sees our world, Fawkes imagined, and he immediately thought of Persephone. He had put on a brave face for Andrew; but now, alone, his fears came at him. Could she really be so sick? Sir Alan seemed at the verge of grief. She might be expiring in a hospital room, even at this moment. Was she dying alone? Dread of the end: it came at him with white fingers. He rushed, started to jog. He passed through the Lot gates. He was almost home.

A figure came at him in the drive. Dark, heavy, swift, under the gloom of the plane tree.

“Oh my God!” Fawkes reared back, raising a hand protectively.

“Piers? Is that you?” came a tenor voice.

Fawkes controlled himself. He had been an ass, panicking like that. “Who’s there? You should be inside,” he snapped, thinking it was a Sixth Former.

“It’s Father Peter,” said the shadow, stepping closer. Fawkes made out the priest’s wire-frame glasses, his skinny neck, and the clerical collar under a raincoat buttoned tight against the fog and chill. “I’ve come straight here from the train station.”

“Where have you been? I’ve been calling,” Fawkes said, more testily than he intended.

Father Peter’s eyes went wide. “Have you?” he said. He fumbled in his pocket and fished out a gleaming new mobile phone. Its screen lit the fog around them a bluish white. “My wife bought me this.” Father Peter squinted at the screen unhappily. “I haven’t learned to use it yet.” He gave one of the icons a poke, as if this might bring the machine into submission.

“Come in,” Fawkes said with relief, putting a hand on the priest’s shoulder. “I am very glad it’s you.”