Well-Schooled in Murder (12 page)

Edward Hsu—beloved student—1957-1975
. Unlike the other memorials which named boys—and two girls—who were entirely faceless, this memorial had been fashioned in such a way to include a photograph of the dead boy, a handsome Chinese. The words
beloved student
held a fascination for Lynley, since they suggested that one of the boy’s teachers was responsible for creating this fond tribute to him. Lynley thought immediately of John Corntel but pushed the thought aside. It wasn’t possible. Corntel would not have been teaching here in 1975.

“You must be Scotland Yard.”

Lynley swung round at the hushed voice. A black-gowned man stood at the smaller chapel door.

“Alan Lockwood,” he said. “I’m Bredgar’s Headmaster.” He came forward and extended his hand.

Handshakes were the sort of detail Lynley always took note of. Lockwood’s was firm. His eyes darted to Sergeant Havers, but if he was surprised that Lynley’s partner was a woman, he was careful not to show it. Lynley made the introductions.

Havers, he saw, had flopped into a small pew at the rear of the chapel where she was awaiting direction. Without bothering to camouflage what she was doing, she made a concerted study of Bredgar Chambers’ Headmaster.

Lynley himself recognised the details that his sergeant would memorise and deem worthy of later comment. Lockwood appeared to be in his mid-forties, and although his height was average, he positioned his body on a subtle angle so that he seemed not to stand but to tower. His elaborate clothing served to emphasise the sense of domination he wished to project, for his academic gown was edged in crimson and he carried a mortarboard under his arm. His suit was impeccably cut, his shirt pristinely white, his tie perfectly knotted. Everything about him suggested a man who gave orders without expecting to be questioned. Yet the entire effect—including the man’s handshake—seemed cultivated somehow, as if Lockwood had done research in the area of “headmaster grooming” and had sculptured himself to fit an image not quite in keeping with his character.

At the back of the chapel, Havers reached into the side pocket of her green wool jacket and pulled out her notebook, flipping it open. She smiled with perfect insincerity.

Lockwood turned back to Lynley. “A bad business, this is,” he said soberly. “I can’t tell you how relieved I am to have Scotland Yard take it on. You’ll want to talk to the boy’s teachers, no doubt, to John Corntel again, to Cowfrey Pitt—he’s our third form hockey master. Perhaps to Judith Laughland, our San sister. And the children. Harry Morant as well. He’s the boy Matthew was supposed to be visiting this past weekend. I should think Morant would know Matthew the best. They were rather special chums, as I gather.”

“I’d like to start in Matthew’s dormitory,” Lynley said.

Lockwood adjusted the collar of his shirt. It rode high on his neck, which was puckered with a rash from shaving. “His room. Yes. That makes proper sense.”

“Alan?” a woman murmured hesitantly from just outside the small chapel. “The service’s just ending. Do you want—”

Lockwood excused himself and disappeared in the direction of the main chapel. After a moment, they heard his voice—strangely distorted without a microphone—dismissing the students to their classes. There was a general shuffling of feet but no talking as the students began filing out to start the school day.

Lockwood returned. With him was a woman, simply dressed in a serviceable skirt, blouse, and jacket. She was scrubbed and clean-looking, with pretty features and attractively styled iron-grey hair.

“My wife, Kathleen.” Lockwood picked a speck of lint from her shoulder, and before she had time to respond to the introduction, he continued speaking, with a quick examination of his watch to illustrate his point. “I’ve an appointment with a parent in just a quarter-hour. Kathleen will give you over to Chas Quilter. He’s our senior prefect this year. Son of Sir Francis Quilter. You’ve no doubt heard of him.”

“Sorry. No.”

Kathleen Lockwood smiled. It was lovely, but tired-looking, drawing energy from her face. “Dr. Quilter,” she explained. “He’s a plastic surgeon. In London.”

“Ah.” With, no doubt, a Harley Street address and the better secrets of two dozen or more society women under his scalpel.

“Yes,” Alan Lockwood said, in agreement with nothing in particular. “I’ve spoken to Chas. He’ll make himself available for as long as you need him. Kathleen will take you to him now. He’s just gone into the vestry with the rest of the choir. When he’s shown you round the school, perhaps you and I—and the sergeant, of course—can have a chat. Later in the day.”

Lynley saw no need to establish dominance over the Headmaster at this juncture. If it was important to the man to seem in control of the investigation, he was more than willing to let him harbour that illusion.

“Certainly,” he replied. “You’re being more than helpful.”

“Whatever we can do.” Lockwood gave his wife momentary attention. “You’ll see to the
hors d’oeuvres
this afternoon, Kate. Make certain they’re better than the last lot you served, will you?” With that, Lockwood lifted a hand—farewell or blessing, it was hard to tell—and was gone.

In her husband’s absence, Kathleen Lockwood murmured, “I had no real chance to speak to the poor boy’s parents yesterday. They were here in the afternoon when we thought Matthew had run off. Then they left. And once we’d had the word that the boy’s body had been found…” She rubbed her knuckles along the line of her jaw, her eyes cast down. “Let me take you to Chas. Please come this way. It’s just through the chapel.”

She led them to the main aisle from which the chapel’s ethereal beauty was demonstrated to high effect. Since the aisle ran from north to south, its windows faced east so that the morning sun shone upon the medieval stained glass and cast pools of colour across the pews and the worn stone floor. Smoky-looking panelling covered the walls to the height of the windows, and high above them a fan-vaulted ceiling displayed a series of intricately detailed bosses. Candles had been lit during the service and recently extinguished, so their scent still hung heavily in the air, mixing with the perfume of flowers that stood at intervals along the aisle.

Kathleen Lockwood walked towards the altar. Behind it, a carved marble reredos formed a bas-relief triptych whose three panels displayed Abraham stopped in the act of obediently slaying Isaac, Adam and Eve cast out of Eden by an unforgiving archangel, and in the centre Mary weeping at the foot of the crucified Christ. More flowers decked the altar in front of this, along with six candles and a crucifix. All of it seemed excessive, too much of a display of religious fervour to be in good taste.

“I do the flowers myself,” Kathleen told them. “We’ve a conservatory of our own, so I can have flowers on the altar all year long.”

It seemed a dubious blessing.

The vestry opened directly off the chancel. At the moment it was crowded with the members of the choir, some forty boys all in the process of removing cassocks and surplices, which they hung on numbered hooks in the wall.

None of the students seemed surprised when Mrs. Lockwood ushered Lynley and Havers into the room. Conversation went on, the happy sort of noise that young people make when they are particularly pleased with themselves. Activity appeared to be conducted as it normally was. The only indication of interest or concern that any student gave at the presence of the strangers was a voice coming from nowhere that said a single name monitorially:

“Chas.”

At that, talk slowly died. Students stole furtive glimpses of one another. Lynley saw that they spanned the entire range of age at the school, from the youngest third formers at twelve and thirteen to the oldest upper sixth boys approaching or beyond their eighteenth birthdays. There were no girls. Nor was a teacher present at the moment.

“Chas Quilter,” Kathleen said tentatively.

“I’m here, Mrs. Lockwood.”

A boy with a face to die for stepped forward.

6

Lynley’s first reaction to the boy’s appearance was the thought that he deserved a more exalted name than Chas. Raphael or Gabriel came to mind immediately, or, carried to an extreme, Michelangelo would have done well enough, for Chas Quilter looked like an eighteen-year-old angel.

Nearly everything about him suggested celestial perfection. His hair was blond, and although it was cut short, it capped his head with the sort of ringlets one sees upon cherubim in Renaissance paintings. His features, however, had none of that amorphous lack of character inherent to those angelic creatures on sixteenth-century canvases. Instead, they could have come off a sculpture, so pure of definition were they: wide brow, firm jaw, finely shaped nose, square chin, and an unblemished complexion carrying a faint colour in his cheeks. He was six feet tall with the body of an athlete and the grace of a dancer. The only human imperfection he seemed to possess was a need to wear spectacles, which he knuckled into place as they slipped down his nose.

“You must be the police.” He was pulling on his blue school blazer. On its left breast pocket the ensign of Bredgar Chambers, a tripartite escutcheon, bore a small portcullis, a crown hovering above a sprig of hawthorn, and two roses twined together, one red and one white, all symbols close to the heart of the school’s founder. “The Headmaster asked me to show you round. I’m glad to be whatever help I can.” Chas smiled and continued with disarming honesty, “Gets me out of lessons for the morning, doesn’t it?”

Around them, the other boys resumed donning their own jackets, as if they had been waiting to see how the senior prefect would manage his greeting of the police. Apparently satisfied that Chas had done it well, they seemed prepared to carry on themselves. They gathered schoolbooks from the benches that lined the vestry walls and within moments had exited the room, not back through the chapel but through another door that led into an adjoining room. Their voices echoed, a third door opened, and sound faded altogether.

Alone with the adults, Chas Quilter seemed perfectly comfortable. There was no adolescent anxiety in his behaviour, no shifting of weight, no awkward posture, no hunt for conversation.

“I expect you’d like to see some of the school first. It’s easiest if we go out this way.” That said, with a nod of farewell to Mrs. Lockwood, Chas directed them towards the door which the other students had used.

This opened into an empty rehearsal hall, disused by the look of it, and by the smell, which was fusty and heavy with dust that clung to the patchy velvet curtains which hung from the proscenium of a small stage. They walked across a scratched parquet floor and through another door which took them out into the cloister, the oldest part of the school. Here, unpaned lancet windows gave them an ample view of the quad with its four matched squares of grass, its four intersecting cobbled paths with Henry Tudor’s statue at their centre, and in the corner closest to the chapel, a bell tower with a crusty steeple.

“This is the humanities section,” Chas said as they walked. He raised a hand in greeting to three boys and a girl who dashed past, shoes clattering against the stone floor. “Late for a fifth time and you’re gated for two weeks, aren’t you?” he called out to them.

“Sod you, Quilter,” was the reply.

He smiled, unoffended. “Senior prefect gets no respect from other seniors,” he explained to Lynley. He seemed to expect no response to this gentle self-denigration. He merely continued on his way, pausing at one of the windows to explain the layout of the quad.

Four buildings comprised it. Chas indicated each one as he identified its purpose. The entire eastern structure, he explained, contained the chapel on one side of the main entry to the school and on the other side the administrative offices of the bursar, the porter, and the secretaries, along with the Headmaster’s study, and the council room shared by the Board of Governors and the school prefects. The south building held the library, the original big schoolroom used in the days when Bredgar Chambers had admitted its first forty-four pupils, the masters’ common room where the staff took their meals and received their mail, and the kitchen. The west building held the pupils’ dining hall and a string of humanities classrooms, and the north building through which they were walking was the home of the music department. Above them, on the first floor of all four buildings—which were joined by a series of corridors and doorways—were the classrooms devoted specifically to English, social science, art, and languages.