Well-Schooled in Murder (11 page)

The house was so hushed that the front doorbell sounded like splintering glass.

“Who on earth…?” Deborah murmured. Then she heard the easy, familiar voice, followed by brisk footsteps on the stairs.

“I couldn’t believe it when I saw Deb’s name come across that computer screen last night,” Lynley was saying to Deborah’s father. “What a homecoming that must have been.”

“Upset the girl a bit,” was Cotter’s polite response.

Hearing it, Deborah found herself grateful for once that her father habitually slipped into the role of servant whenever someone came to the house.
Upset the girl a bit
was sufficient information to answer a casual remark of Lynley’s. It hid reality while it served as reply.

As he entered the lab with the role of servant pulled out of his repertoire, Cotter said, “Lord Asherton’s here to see you, Mr. St. James.”

“To see Deb, more accurately, if she’s about this morning,” Lynley added.

“She is,” Cotter replied.

Deborah rued the fact that she had not shut herself in the darkroom with the warning light burning to indicate she was not to be disturbed. Seeing anyone at the moment for friendly conversation seemed an unendurable pretence to have to live through. Seeing Lynley and being exposed for even an instant to his intuitive ability to read moods was excruciatingly worse. But she could hardly escape. Her father had nodded in her direction before leaving them, and Lynley had already come far enough into the lab to see that the darkroom door stood open. Simon, she saw, was studying a set of fingerprints in a far corner of the lab.

“You’re up early enough,” he said by way of greeting his friend.

Lynley’s eyes swept the room and came to rest on the wall clock. “Havers isn’t here yet?” he enquired. “It’s not like her to be late.”

“Late for what, Tommy?”

“A new case. I need to talk to Deb about last evening. You as well if you had a chance to see the body.”

Deborah realised that it could not be avoided. She left the darkroom. She knew she looked terrible with her hair shoved back haphazardly, her complexion dull, her eyes without life. But she was not prepared for how quickly Lynley made his assessment, looking from her to Simon, then back again. He started to speak. She deflected his words quickly by crossing to him and greeting him in her usual manner, brushing a kiss against his cheek.

“Hello, Tommy.” She smiled. “Look at what a dreadful sight I am. Find a body, fall apart. I don’t think I could survive a day in your job.”

He accepted the lie although his eyes told her that he didn’t believe it. He knew, after all, that she had been in hospital less than two weeks prior to leaving for her trip. “I’ve been asked to head up the investigation,” he explained. “Will you tell me about finding the body last evening?”

The three of them sat at one of the worktables, perching on tall stools, leaning their arms among the comparison microscopes, the vials, and the slides. Deborah recounted her finding of the body much the same way as she had the night before for the Slough police: taking the photographs, going into the church, seeing the fighting squirrels, finding the child.

“And you noticed nothing out of the ordinary in the graveyard?” Lynley asked. “Even something that might appear to be unrelated to all this?”

The bird. Of course, there was the bird. It seemed so silly to tell him about it, let alone run the risk of confronting the upheaval of emotion that had struck her yesterday.

Typical of him, the gift he brought to policework, Lynley saw it in her face. “Tell me,” he said.

Deborah looked towards her husband. He was watching her gravely.

“It’s ridiculous, Tommy.” She attempted to keep her words light, an endeavour that was only marginally successful. “Just a dead bird.”

“What sort of bird?”

“I really couldn’t tell. Its head…you see, it had no head. And the claws were torn off. There were bits of feathers everywhere. I felt sorry for the little thing. I ought to have buried it.” Again she felt the emotion of the day before, hating herself for allowing it any degree of rein. “I could see its ribs. They were bloody and broken and…it’s not even as if a larger animal were after it for food. It looked like sport.
Sport
, can you imagine? And…oh, this is so ridiculous. It was probably nothing of the kind. Just some tomcat playing the way cats do when they catch a smaller creature. It was just inside that second lych gate, so that when I walked in…” She hesitated, struck by something she had not remembered until this moment.

“You saw something else?”

She nodded. “No doubt the Slough police have already told you because they could hardly have failed to notice, but there’s a security light just on the inside of the second lych gate. It was broken. It must have happened recently because there was glass here and there, brushed to one side.”

“That would be how the killer brought the body into the graveyard in the first place,” Lynley said.

“Drive into the car park, black out the security lights, carry the body to the wall, and dump him under the trees,” St. James noted.

“But why go to that much trouble?” Deborah asked. “And why choose that, of all locations?”

“If, indeed, it was a matter of choice.”

“What else could it be? The church is virtually in the middle of nowhere. Down a little lane that veers off from a country road. One wouldn’t exactly come upon it by chance.”

“If the boy was a local child, the killer might well be a local man as well,” St. James suggested. “He’d know about the church.”

Lynley shook his head. “The boy’s from Hammersmith. He was at school in West Sussex. Bredgar Chambers.”

“A runaway?”

“Perhaps. Whatever the case, the body was apparently moved sometime after death.”

“Yes, I did see that.”

“And the rest?” Lynley asked. “How close a look did you get at the body, St. James?”

“Only a superficial one at best.”

“But you did see…” Lynley hesitated, glancing at Deborah. “I spoke to Canerone on the phone last night.”

“He told you about the burns, I take it. Yes, I saw them as well.”

Lynley frowned. Restlessly he twirled an empty test tube. “They’ve a backlog of work at Slough, so Canerone said they won’t have the autopsy results for a day or so, but the preliminary examination showed the extent of the burns.”

“Made by cigarettes, I should guess. That’s what they looked like to me.”

“On the inside of his arms, on his upper thighs, on his testicles, inside his nose.”

“Good God,” Deborah murmured. She felt weak and faint.

“There’s a perverted sexuality here, St. James. More evidently so when one considers how lovely a child Matthew Whateley was.” He shoved the entire rack of test tubes away from him and got to his feet. “I can never understand a child’s death, you know. With millions of people desperate to have a child of their own, it always seems…” He stopped abruptly. His face drained of colour. “Christ. I’m sorry. What a
bloody
stupid thing—”

Deborah halted his words. Her own were rapid, spoken without thought, heedless of answer. “Where will you start with a case like this, Tommy?”

Lynley looked grateful that she had got them through the moment. “At Bredgar Chambers. As soon as Havers shows up.”

As if in reply, the doorbell shrilled a second time that morning.

Set into two hundred acres partially hewn from St. Leonard’s Forest in West Sussex, Bredgar Chambers appeared to provide the ideal environment for serious students. There were absolutely no external distractions. Cissbury, the nearest village, was three quarters of a mile away, and it boasted nothing more than a cluster of houses, a post office, and a pub; there was no major thoroughfare within five miles of the campus, and the country lanes that surrounded it were largely untravelled; although there were several isolated cottages in the vicinity, they were inhabited almost entirely by retired people who had no special interest in the life of the school. Nearby were vast fields, rolling hills, several farms, and extensive woodland. But beyond the combined stimulation of eternally fresh air and generally blue sky, there was nothing. Thus the school could in good faith promise hopeful parents that their children would be exposed to a monastic existence in which education, manners, moral fibre, and religious training were inculcated into them.

Bredgar Chambers was not in itself, however, an inherently ascetic environment. A surfeit of beauty prevented this. Access to the school was gained by means of a long serpentine drive that passed a neat porter’s lodge and curved beneath ancient beech and ash trees whose spring growth furled in tight specks of green. On either side of this drive, manicured lawns, broken by scattered copses of fir, pine, and spruce, swept to the flintstone walls that served as the school’s formal boundaries. The buildings themselves were not typical to a district of the country in which knapped flint was generally used for construction. Rather, they were made of honey-coloured Ham stones, named for the village in Somerset near which they had been quarried, and they were roofed in slate. No vines grew upon them, and in the morning sun, palpable warmth seemed to exude from their ashlar walls.

Lynley had felt Sergeant Havers’ disapproval the moment they passed the porter’s lodge. She didn’t wait long to voice it.

“Lovely,” she remarked, stubbing out her cigarette. She’d been smoking like a fiend ever since they’d left the city. The interior of his Bentley smelled like the aftermath of a conflagration. “I always did want to see where rich nits send their little buggers to learn how to say
pater
. La-di-da.”

“I imagine it’s a bit more Spartan on the inside, Havers,” he replied. “These places usually are.”

“Quite. Oh, yes.”

Lynley parked in front of the main school building. Its front door stood open, acting as frame for the lovely picture of a grassy quad beyond it and more importantly, no doubt, for the statue that stood at the quad’s centre. Even from a distance, Lynley recognised the regal profile of Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, later Henry VII and the putative founder of Bredgar Chambers.

Although it was nearly nine, no one appeared to be out on the grounds, an odd circumstance in a school claiming an enrollment of six hundred. But as they got out of the car, they heard the swelling notes of an organ, followed by the opening of “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” sung by a well-practised congregation.

“Chapel,” Lynley said in explanation.

“It’s not even Sunday,” Havers muttered.

“I’m sure an exposure to prayer won’t corrupt our secular sensibilities, Sergeant. Come along. Try to look suitably devout, will you?”

“Right, Inspector. It’s one of my better acts.”

They followed the sounds of organ and singing through the school’s main door, where they found themselves in a cobbled vestibule off which the chapel opened, taking up half the eastern quarter of the quad. They entered quietly. The singing continued.

Lynley saw that the chapel was typical of those found in independent schools throughout the country, with pews facing into the centre aisle after the fashion of King’s College, Cambridge. He and Havers stood at the south end of the building, between two minor chapels set aside for other use.

On their left was the War Memorial Chapel, sombrely panelled in walnut upon which was carved the grim accounting of what Bredgar Chambers had lost to two brutal world wars. Above these names of boys fallen in battle scrolled the epigraph:
Per mortes eorum vivimus
. Lynley read the words, dismissing the pitiful solace that was supposed to arise from such a simplistic resolution to loss. How could anyone shrug off death by concluding that if others benefitted from it—no matter how violent or disgusting it had been—it perpetuated an intrinsic good? He had never been able to do so. Nor had he ever quite come to terms with his country’s love affair with the nobility of such sacrificial offerings. He turned away.

The second chapel, however, had much the same theme. On their immediate right, this small chamber was equally dedicated to the passing of students. But Lynley saw that war had not caused their untimely deaths, for memorial plaques recorded the length of their short lives, and all of them had been far too young to be soldiers.

He entered. Candles flickered upon a linen-covered altar, surrounding a tender-faced stone angel atop it. Seeing this, he was struck all at once by a powerful image, one which he had not suffered in years. In it, once again he was that sixteen-year-old boy who knelt in the tiny Catholic chapel at Eton, tucked to the left of the main altar. He had prayed for his father there, comforted by the presence of four towering, gilded archangels that guarded each corner of the room. Although he himself was not a Catholic, somehow those fierce angels, the candles, the altar had made him feel as if he were closer to a god who might listen. So he prayed there daily. And his prayer was granted. Indeed, how it was. The memory felt like a wound. He sought a distraction and found it in the largest memorial in the room. He began to study it with unnecessary intensity.