Well-Schooled in Murder (2 page)

Teenagers
, he thought.
We’re in for it now, Pats. The boy’s growing up
.

Patsy’s response startled her husband, who thought himself not so easily read. “I know what you’re thinking, Kev. He’s getting bigger. Won’t want his mum fussing over him all the time. There’s truth to it. I know.”

“So…?” he encouraged her.

“So I’ll wait a bit before I ring the school.”

It was, Kevin knew, the best compromise she would offer. “That’s my girl,” he replied and went back to his sculpture.

For the next hour he allowed himself the bliss of complete absorption into the delights of his art, losing track of time entirely. As was usually the case, his surroundings faded into insignificance, and existence was reduced to the immediate sensation of marble coming to life under his hands.

His wife had to say his name twice to return him from the twilight world he inhabited whenever he was called there by his particular muse. She’d come back to the doorway, but this time he saw that she held a black vinyl handbag in place of the tea towel, and she was wearing her new black shoes and her best navy wool coat. She had inserted a coruscating rhinestone pin haphazardly into the lapel—a sleek lioness with one paw raised and ready to strike. Its eyes were tiny specks of green.

“He’s in the Sanatorium.” She spoke the last word on a high note of incipient panic.

Kevin blinked, eyes drawn to the dance of light diffracting from the lioness rampant. “Sanatorium?” he repeated.

“Our Matt’s in the Sanatorium, Kev! He’s been there all weekend. I’ve just rung the school. He didn’t ever go to the Morants’ at all. He’s sick in the San! That Morant boy didn’t even know what was wrong. He hadn’t seen him since Friday lunch!”

“What’re you up to, girl?” Kevin queried shrewdly. He knew full well what the answer would be and sought a moment to ponder how best to stop her.

“Mattie’s ill! Our boy! Lord knows what’s wrong. Now, are you coming with me to that school or planning to stand there with your hands on that woman’s flipping crotch for the rest of the day?”

Kevin hurriedly removed his hands from the offending part of the sculpture’s anatomy. He wiped them down the sides of his work jeans, adding white abrasive cream to the dust and dirt already embedded along the seams.

“Hang on, Pats,” he said. “Think for a minute.”

“Think? Mattie’s ill! He’ll be wanting his mum.”

“Will he, luv?”

Patsy worked on this thought, her lips pressed together as if in the hope of keeping further words at bay. Her spatulate fingers worried the clasp of her handbag, snapping it repeatedly open and shut. From what Kevin could see, the bag was empty. In her rush to be off, Patsy had thought nothing about putting inside a single belonging—a pound coin, a comb, a compact, anything.

He pulled a piece of old towelling from the pocket of his jeans and rubbed it along his sculpture fondly. “Think, Pats,” he gentled her. “No boy wants Mum flying out to his school if he’s got a bit of flu. He’s liable to be a bit choked over that, isn’t he? Red in the face with Mum hanging about like he needs his nappies changed and she’s just the one to do it.”

“Are you saying I just let it be?” Patsy shook her handbag at him to emphasise her words. “Like I wasn’t interested in my own boy’s well-being?”

“Not let it be.”

“Then what?”

Kevin folded his towelling into a small, neat square. “Let’s think this out. What did San Sister tell you’s exactly wrong with the boy?”

Patsy’s eyes dropped. Kevin knew what that reaction implied. He laughed at her softly. “They’ve a nurse right there on duty at the school and you’ve not rung her, Pats? Mattie’ll have stubbed his toe and his mum’ll go running out to West Sussex without a thought given to ringing up to see what’s wrong with the boy first! What’s to become of the likes of you, girl?”

Hot embarrassment was climbing its way up Patsy’s neck and spreading onto her cheeks. “I’ll ring now,” she managed to say with dignity and went to place the call from the kitchen phone.

Kevin heard her dialling. A moment later he heard her voice. A moment after that, he heard her drop the phone. She cried out once, a terrified keening that he recognised as his own name wailed in supplication. He flung his ragged towel to one side and flew into the cottage.

At first he thought his wife was having an attack of some sort. Her face was grey, and the fist at her lips suggested that a shrieking-out in pain was being withheld by an act of will. When she heard his footsteps and swung to face him, he saw that her eyes were wild.

“He’s not there. Mattie’s gone, Kevin. He wasn’t in the San. He’s not even at the school!”

Kevin struggled to comprehend the horror that those few words implied and found he could only repeat her own statement. “Mattie? Gone?”

She seemed frozen to the spot. “Since Friday noon.”

Suddenly that immense stretch of time from Friday to Sunday became a breeding ground for the sort of unspeakable images every parent must confront when first acknowledging a beloved child’s disappearance. Kidnapping, molestation, religious cults, white slavery, sadism, murder. Patsy shuddered, gagged. A faint sheen of perspiration appeared on her skin.

Seeing this, fearing she might faint or have a stroke or drop dead on the spot, Kevin grasped her shoulders to offer the only comfort he knew.

“We’ll be off to the school, luv,” he said urgently. “We’ll see about our boy. I promise you that. We’ll go at once.”

“Mattie!” The name rose like a prayer.

Kevin told himself that prayers were unnecessary at the moment, that Matthew was only playing the truant, that his absence from the school had a reasonable explanation which they would laugh about together in the time to come. Yet even as he thought this, a vicious tremor shook Patsy’s body. She said their son’s name beseechingly once again. Against all reason, Kevin found himself hoping that a god somewhere was listening to his wife.

Thumbing through her contribution to their report one last time, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers decided that she was satisfied with the results of her weekend’s labour. She clipped the fifteen tedious pages together, shoved her chair back from her desk, and went in search of her immediate superior, Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley.

He was where she had left him shortly after noon that day, alone in his office, blond head cupped in one hand, his attention directed towards his own section of the report which was spread across the top of his desk. The late Sunday afternoon sun threw long shadows against walls and across the floor, making perusing typescript without artificial light next to impossible. And since Lynley’s reading spectacles had slipped disregarded to the end of his nose, Barbara entered the room noiselessly, certain that he was fast asleep.

That would not have surprised her. For the past two months Lynley had been burning the candle not only at both ends but right through the middle. His presence at the Yard had been so unceasing—generally requiring her own reluctant presence as well—that he’d been jokingly christened Mr. Ubiquitous by the other DI’s in his division.

“Go hame, laddie,” Inspector MacPherson would roar when he saw him in a corridor, in a meeting, or in the officers’ mess. “Ye’re black’ning the rest o’ us. Hearkening aifter a super’s position? Canna rest on the laurels o’ promotion if ye’re deid.”

Lynley would laugh in his characteristically affable fashion and sidestep the reason behind this sixty-day stint of unremitting toil. But Barbara knew why he remained on the job long hours into the night, why he volunteered to be on call, why he took other officers’ duty at the first request. It was all represented in the single postcard that lay at the moment on the edge of his desk. She picked it up.

It was five days old, badly creased from a hard journey across Europe from the Ionian Sea. Its subject was a curious procession of incense bearers, sceptre-wielding officials, and gold-gowned, bearded Greek Orthodox priests who carried a bejewelled sedan chair upon their shoulders, its sides made of glass. Resting within the chair, his shrouded head leaning against the glass as if he were asleep and not more than a thousand years dead, were the remains of Saint Spyridon. Barbara turned the card over and unabashedly read its message. She could have guessed before doing so what the tenor of the words would be.

Tommy darling, Imagine having your poor remains carried through the streets of Corfu town four times a year! Good Lord, it does give one pause to think about the wisdom of dedicating one’s life to sanctity, doesn’t it? You’ll be pleased to know that I’ve made my bow to intellectual growth with a pilgrimage to Jupiter’s Temple at Kassiope. I dare say you’d approve of such Chaucerian endeavour.

H.

Barbara knew that this card was the tenth such communication from Lady Helen Clyde that Lynley had received in the last two months. Each previous one had been exactly the same, a friendly and amusing commentary upon one aspect of Greek life or another as Lady Helen moved gaily round the country in a seemingly endless journey that had begun in January only days after Lynley had asked her to marry him. Her answer had been a definitive
no
, and the postcards—all sent to New Scotland Yard and not to Lynley’s home in Eaton Terrace—underscored her determination to remain unfettered by the claims of the heart.

That Lynley thought daily, if not hourly, about Helen Clyde, that he wanted her, that he loved her with a single-minded intensity were the facts which, Barbara knew, comprised the heretofore unspoken rationale behind his infinite capacity for taking on new assignments without protest. Anything to keep the howling hounds of loneliness at bay, she thought. Anything to keep the pain of living without Helen from knotting steadily, like a tumour within him.

Barbara returned the card, retreated a few steps, and expertly sailed her part of their report into his In tray. The subsequent whoosh of air across his desk, the fluttering of his papers to the floor, woke him. He started, grimaced disarmingly at having been caught sleeping, rubbed the back of his neck, and removed his spectacles.

Barbara plopped into the chair next to his desk, sighed, and ruffled her short hair with an unconscious energy that made most of it stand on end like bristles on a brush. She spoke. “Ah yes, do ye hear those bonny bells of Scotland calling to ye, lad? Tell me ye do.”

His reply made its way past a stifled yawn. “Scotland, Havers? What on earth—”

“Aye. Those wee bonny bells. Calling ye home to that land of malt. Those blessit smoky tastes of liquid fire…”

Lynley stretched his lengthy frame and began to gather his papers together. “Ah. Scotland,” he replied. “Do I imagine this sentimental journey into the thistle is an indication that you’ve not tipped into your weekly allotment of alcohol, Sergeant?”

She grinned and sloughed off Robert Burns. “Let’s pop round to the King’s Arms, Inspector. You can buy. Two of the MacAllan and we’ll both be singing ‘Coming Through the Rye.’ You don’t want to miss that. I’ve the very devil of a mezzo-soprano sure to bring tears to your lovely brown eyes.”

Lynley polished his spectacles, replaced them on his nose, and began an examination of her work. “I’m flattered by the invitation. Don’t think I’m not. A proffered opportunity to hear you warbling touches me right to the heart, Havers. But surely there’s someone else here today into whose wallet you haven’t dipped your hand quite so regularly as mine. Where’s Constable Nkata? Didn’t I see him here this afternoon?”

“He’s gone out on a call.”

“More’s the pity. You’re out of luck, I’m afraid. I did promise Webberly this report in the morning.”

Barbara felt a twinge of exasperation. He’d dodged her invitation more adroitly than she’d managed to phrase it. But she had other weapons, so she trotted out the first. “You’ve promised it to Webberly in the morning, sir, but you and I know he doesn’t need it for another week. Get off it, Inspector. Don’t you think it’s about time you came back to the land of the living?”

“Havers…” Lynley didn’t change his position. He didn’t look up from the papers in his hand. His tone alone carried the implicit warning. It was a laying-down of boundaries, a declaration of superiority in the chain of command. Barbara had worked with him long enough to know what it meant when he said her name with such studied neutrality. She was barging into an area off-limits. Her presence was not wanted and would not be admitted without a fight.

Well and good, she thought with resignation. But she could not resist a final sortie into the guarded regions of his private life.

She jerked her head towards the postcard. “Our Helen’s not giving you much to go on, is she?”

His head snapped up. He dropped the report. But the jarring ring of the telephone on his desk precluded reply.

Lynley picked up the phone to hear the voice of one of the girls who worked reception in the Yard’s unfriendly grey-on-black marble lobby. Visitor below, the adenoidal voice announced without preliminaries. Bloke called John Corntel asking for Inspector Asherton. That’s
you
, I s’pose? Though why some people can’t ever keep a body’s proper name straight…even when a body takes to stringing names together like some flipping royal
and
expects reception to know each and every one so’s to sort it all out when old schoolmates come calling—