Well-Schooled in Murder (21 page)

He couldn’t remember ever being this close to the Headmaster before. Even though they were separated by an expanse of carpet, by two chairs and the width of a desk, Harry could still see details, and he didn’t much like them. A shadow of new whiskers made the Headmaster’s skin look blue-black. His neck was pimply and reminded Harry of the skin on a badly plucked chicken that he’d seen once in the window of a Chinese restaurant in London. His nostrils flexed every time he inhaled, like a bull about to charge. His eyes went from Harry to the window to Harry to the window, as if he were wary of an eavesdropper’s presence outside beneath the sill.

Seeing all this, Harry steeled himself to get through the interview, to say nothing, to reveal nothing, and above all not to cry. Crying always made everything worse.

“Sit down,” the Headmaster repeated. He opened his hand in the direction of the conference table, so Harry chose a chair there. Again, his feet did not quite reach the floor. Mr. Lockwood joined him, pulling a chair out from the table, turning it to face Harry, and sitting down himself. He crossed one leg over the other, carefully pinching the crease in his trousers. “You didn’t go to your lessons today, Morant.”

“No, sir.” It was an easy enough reply, made without lifting his eyes from Mr. Lockwood’s shoes. Just inside the left instep was a crust of mud. Harry wondered if the Headmaster knew it was there.

“Did you have an exam you were afraid to take?”

“No, sir.”

“A paper or report that was due?”

There
had
been the history panel. He had been more than prepared to do his section of it. That had nothing to do with his skipping his lesson. Still, it seemed a logical hook onto which he could hang the excuse for his behaviour. How hard could the Headmaster beat him for that?

“History panel, sir.”

“I see. You weren’t prepared?”

“Not as well as I ought to be, sir.” Harry heard himself become practically eager when he said, “I understand. It was naughty. You must cane me, mustn’t you?”

“Cane you? What are you thinking of, Morant? We don’t cane boys at this school. Where did you get that idea?”

“I thought that…I’d a message that you wanted to see me, sir. The senior prefect was the one who found me in the sculpture garden. I thought that meant…”

“That the senior prefect had reported you for a beating? Does that sound like Chas Quilter to you, Morant?”

Harry didn’t reply. The backs of his knees began to prickle. He knew what the expected answer was, but he couldn’t force his lips to form the word, nor could he force himself to say it. The Headmaster went on.

“Chas Quilter told me that he found you in the garden. He said you seemed terribly upset. It’s about Matthew Whateley, isn’t it?”

Harry heard the question and knew only that Matthew’s name couldn’t pass his lips in any way. He knew that if he said it once, if he allowed Matthew access to his consciousness, the floodgates would open, it would all come pouring out. After that there would be nothing but oblivion. He knew it. He believed it. It was the only reality in his life at the moment.

The Headmaster was continuing to speak. He was trying hard to sound soothing, but Harry had heard that kind of insincere compassion before. He felt the undercurrent of urgency beneath Mr. Lockwood’s words, the way his parents sounded when they were trying to be understanding while all the time a quarter-hour late for a golf game.

“You and Matthew were mates, weren’t you?” the Headmaster was asking.

“We were in Model Railway.”

“But he was a special friend to you, wasn’t he? Special enough to be invited for your birthday with all the other boys this last weekend. That sounds like more than just knowing him.”

“I suppose. We were mates.”

“Mates talk to one another, I imagine. Don’t they?”

Harry felt the prickling move from his knees to his spine. He saw where this was heading. He sought to avoid it. “Matt never talked much. Not even during games in the afternoon.”

“But you knew him in spite of that? Well enough to want him to go along to your house and meet your parents and your brothers and sisters?”

“Well…yes. He was…” Harry squirmed. His resolve weakened. Perhaps he could tell the Headmaster the truth. It wouldn’t be so bad. It wouldn’t take much. “He helped me out. That’s how we were friends.”

Mr. Lockwood leaned towards him. “You know something, don’t you, Morant? Something Matthew Whateley told you? Why he ran away?” When he spoke, Harry felt the Headmaster’s breath on his face. It smelled of a mixture of lunch and coffee. It felt very hot.

Want a grind, nancy boy? want a grind? want a grind?
Harry stiffened to escape the memory.

“You know something, don’t you? Don’t you, boy?”

Want a grind, nancy boy? want a grind? wantagrind?

Harry braced himself against the back of the chair. He couldn’t. He
wouldn’t
. He offered the Headmaster the only words possible.

“No, sir. I only wish I did.”

It was half-past five when Lynley and Havers reached Hammersmith. A cold wind was blowing off the Thames, scattering the damp pages of a newspaper along the pavement. A sodden photograph of the Duchess of York lay in the gutter, a tyre print corrugating her left cheek. Round them, the neighbourhood noises swelled and receded much like the ebb and flow of the tide, and the omnipresent scent of exhaust fumes funnelled along the street from the flyover’s burden of rush-hour traffic. Darkness was fast approaching, and as they walked towards the river, the lights on Hammersmith Bridge came on, casting a glow against the untroubled surface of the water.

Without speaking, they descended the steps to the embankment, pulled up the collars of their coats, headed into the wind, and made their way to the fisherman’s cottage next to the Royal Plantagenet pub. Its front curtains were drawn, but dim lamplight shone against the material like a pool of amber. They entered the low tunnel between the cottage and the pub, and Lynley rapped on the door. Unlike the response to his knock last night, footsteps approached within seconds, a bolt was drawn, the door was pulled open. Patsy Whateley stood before them.

As on the previous night, she wore the nylon dressing gown with its coil of slithering, demonic dragons. The same green slippers were on her feet as well, and her hair was disarranged, inexpertly tied back from her face with a shoelace, once white but now discoloured to grey. When she saw them, she lifted a hand as if to smooth back her hair or to straighten the gaping neckline of her dressing gown. Her fingers and palms were crusty with flour.

“Biscuits,” she said. “Mattie did like his biscuits. Took them down to school in his tuck box at half-term, he did. He liked gingers the best. I was…today…” She looked at her hands, rubbed them together. A fine shower of dust drifted from them to the floor. “Kev went to work this morning. I should have, shouldn’t I? But I couldn’t. It seemed so final. And I thought if I made the biscuits—” Somehow, miraculously, Matthew would appear at the cottage to eat them. Not dead any longer. Not irretrievably lost. But alive again. And home with his mother, where he belonged. Lynley understood.

He introduced Sergeant Havers. “May we come in, Mrs. Whateley?”

She blinked. “I wasn’t thinking, was I?” She shuffled back from the door.

Freshly baked biscuits filled the sitting room with the combined fragrances of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and cooked sugar. But the air in the room was itself very cold. Lynley walked to the corner where the electric fire sat and switched it on. It hummed faintly as its bars came to life.

“Getting late, isn’t it?” Patsy noted. “You’ve not had your tea, I expect. Let me get some. And the biscuits…I’ve made too many for Kev and I to eat. So you’ll have some. Do you like ginger?”

Lynley wanted to tell her not to trouble herself, but he knew that she was determined to adhere to a course that would hold off the inevitable process of mourning as long as possible. He didn’t reply as she went to the shelf that held her teacups.

“Have you ever been to St. Ives?” she asked, caressing the handle of one of the cups.

“I grew up not far from St. Ives,” Lynley said.

“You’re Cornish?”

“After a fashion.”

“Then you shall have the St. Ives cup. And for the sergeant…Stonehenge. Yes, Stonehenge will do. Have you been there, Sergeant?”

“On a school trip once,” Havers said.

Patsy picked up both cups and their saucers. She frowned. “I can’t think why they’ve fenced Stonehenge off. Years ago you could walk across the plain and there it was. Just standing there. All those rocks. So quiet. Just the wind. But when we took Mattie to see it, it was only from a distance. Someone said that once a month they let you walk among the stones. We meant to take Mattie back so he could do it. We thought there was time. We didn’t know…” She raised her head. “The tea.” She moved towards the rear of the cottage, through an open door that led into the kitchen.

“I’ll help you,” Havers said and followed her.

Left alone in the sitting room, Lynley wandered to the shelf beneath the front windows. He saw that since the previous night, two additional sculptures had been added to the collection. They were entirely different from the posturing nudes among which they rested.

Both were marble, and as Lynley studied them, he was reminded of Michelangelo’s belief that the object being created from stone was simply imprisoned within the rock itself, that the duty of the artist was to act as liberator. He remembered seeing such a sculpture in Florence, an unfinished piece in which the head and torso of a man seemed to writhe to free itself from the marble. These two pieces before him were much like that, save for the fact that the emerging figures were themselves polished and buffed—suggesting completion—while the rest of the stone was left in its natural state.

Small, rectangular pieces of paper were taped to the base of each sculpture, and Lynley read the uneven handwriting that scrawled across them,
Nautilus
upon one and
Mother and Child
on the other.
Nautilus
was carved from dusky pink marble, and the shell of the mollusc rose out of the stone in a slow, smooth curve that seemed to have neither beginning nor end. White marble had been used for
Mother and Child:
two heads bent together, the suggestion of a shoulder, the shadowy form of a single arm embracing and protecting. Each was a metaphor, an intimation of reality, a whisper rather than a raucous shout.

Lynley couldn’t believe that the creator of the nudes had made such a quantum leap forward in his art. He bent, touched the cold curve of the shell, and caught sight of the initials chiselled into the very bottom of the stone.
M. W.
He glanced at the nudes, saw
K. W.
carved into them. Father and son could not have had a more different artistic vision.

“Those’re Mattie’s. Not the nudes, I mean. The others.”

Lynley turned. Patsy Whateley was watching him from the kitchen doorway. Behind her, a kettle whistled with shrill brevity, followed by the sounds of Sergeant Havers seeing to the tea.

“They’re lovely,” he replied.

Patsy’s slippers slapped against the thin carpet as she joined him at the shelf. This close to her, Lynley caught the biting odours of her unwashed body, and he wondered with an irrational catch of anger what sort of man Kevin Whateley was, that he would leave his wife to face the first full day of this agony alone.

“Not finished,” she murmured, gazing fondly upon the mother and child. “Kev brought them in last night. They were in the garden with Kev’s other work. Matt started them last summer. I can’t think why he never finished them. It wasn’t like him not to finish something he began. He always was a finisher. Never could rest until whatever he was doing was done. That was Mattie. Up half the night working on this project or that. Always promising to be off to bed in a tick. ‘In a tick, Mum,’ he’d tell me. But I’d hear him moving round in his room till half-one in the morning. Still, I can’t say why he didn’t finish these. They would’ve been quite nice. Not as real-looking as Kev’s, but quite nice all the same.”

As Patsy spoke, Sergeant Havers came out of the kitchen carrying a plastic tray which she set on the metal-legged coffee table in front of the sofa. Among the teapot, cups, and saucers sat a plate of the promised ginger biscuits bearing telltale signs of having been part of a batch left too long in the oven. Serrations scored their edges where a knife had been used to remove burnt portions.

Sergeant Havers poured, all of them sat, and they spent the next few moments seeing to their tea. As they did so, heavy footsteps passed the front of the cottage, made the turn into the tunnel, and stopped by the door. A key was thrust into the lock, and Kevin Whateley entered. He stopped short at the sight of the police.

He was filthy. Dust covered his thinning hair and creased into the wrinkles on his face, neck, and hands. Exertion and sweat had dampened it there, so it blotched his skin with uneven patches. He wore blue jeans, a denim jacket, and workboots, all of which were equally covered by grime. Upon seeing him, Lynley recalled what the boy Smythe-Andrews had told him about Kevin Whateley’s profession as a tombstone carver. It seemed inconceivable that Whateley had managed to face that sort of work today.