Well-Schooled in Murder (33 page)

“Please. Sit down, Inspector, Sergeant,” Jean Bonnamy said. She removed a stack of newspapers from a slip-covered sofa and returned to her father to push his chair closer to the police. A rattan stool stood on the other side of the chess table, and she fetched this and sat next to her father, her hand on the arm of his wheelchair. She had yet to wash from her work in the orchard, and the proximity of her hand to her father’s chalky claw made her seem at once both slovenly and uniquely alive.

“How does one become involved with the Bredgar Volunteers?” Lynley asked. “It’s my understanding from talking to Mr. Pitt at the school that Matthew wasn’t the first Volunteer to visit here.”

“First one with any sense,” Colonel Bonnamy muttered. He coughed and gripped the arm of his chair with his good hand. His right arm shook.

His daughter spoke. “Dad’s a bit of a curmudgeon when he wants to be. Don’t deny it, Dad. You know you are. I thought it would be a good idea for him to have some company other than myself. I’d read about the Volunteers on the notice board at church, so I phoned the school and made arrangements. This was summer term last year.”

“Fools they all were, till Matt,” her father added, head bent forward and eyes on his lap.

“We tried six or seven of them. All ages. Boys and girls. None of them worked out, save Matt. He and Dad got on from the start.”

“Today.” The Colonel’s voice hardened. “He was to come here today, Jeannie. The chessmen were just as we left them Tuesday last. Just as we
left
them. And you say”—he raised his head with a visible effort and looked at Lynley; his eyes were grey, sharp with intelligence—“murdered.
Murdered?
”

“Yes. I’m sorry.” Lynley leaned forward. Next to him, Sergeant Havers rustled through her notebook. “He was found in Stoke Poges, Colonel Bonnamy. His body was nude. There was evidence of torture. But his clothing was left on the school grounds.”

The Colonel assimilated the facts quickly. “Someone on staff then. Some hidden bum-boy pretending to be holier-than-thou. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”

“We don’t know what to think. Initially, it seemed that Matthew had tried to run off and had got picked up hitchhiking by someone who abused him for pleasure and then murdered him when he was through having his fun.”

“There was no running off for a lad like that. Matt Whateley was a fighter.” He fussed with the blanket across his knees. His daughter adjusted it, tucking it in round his legs. “Not the kind of fighter they’d be used to at that school. But a fighter all the same.”

“What sort of fighter?”

Colonel Bonnamy pointed to his temple. “The sort that fights with his brain.”

“You seem to have been closer to the boy than most,” Lynley said. “Did he confide in you?”

“He didn’t need to confide. I could see well enough. I could tell.”

“But, as you said, you got the impression that he fought with his brain.”

“Chess,” the Colonel replied.

Apparently Jean Bonnamy felt the response did nothing to clarify her father’s description of the boy, for she spoke. “Dad taught Matt to play chess. And no matter how difficult it was for the boy, no matter how many times Dad won, he refused to give up. I don’t think he even felt discouraged. He’d just march in here every Tuesday afternoon, set up the board, and have another go at it.”

“Fighter,” her father declared again.

“In all this time, did he talk to you at all about the school? About his lessons? About his friends? About his teachers?”

“No. Only that his marks were good.”

“Dad kept on him about his marks,” Jean Bonnamy added. “We both talked to him about what he wanted to do with his life.”

“I got the impression that Mum and Dad wanted the traditional sort of thing,” the Colonel said, “although Matt didn’t speak much about them. I think they were pushing him towards science, law, architecture, finance. That would be typical of their heritage. A career like that upholds the honour of the whole family. Mum, Dad, grandparents, everyone. But little Matt was an artist at heart. And that’s what he spoke of. When he talked of school and of the future, he spoke of art.”

“Dad encouraged him,” Jean Bonnamy said. “Matt promised him one of his sculptures someday.”

“A boy ought to be what he wants to be, not what his parents decide for him. But these families are so much like that. I’ve seen it a hundred times. Total respect for the parents. Complete submission of the personality. Become what you are told to become. Marry whom you are told to marry. It’s part of their culture. There’s no getting round it. Unless, of course, the child has a mentor who can guide him through the worst of his parents’ disapproval when he sets out on his own way.”

As he listened, a dawning realisation was setting upon Lynley. But it was tinged with the growing comprehension that, however incongruous the idea might seem, no matter the light Colonel Bonnamy was going to shed upon Matthew Whateley’s life and his death, the case was about to become convoluted beyond his expectations. He felt a growing trepidation as the Colonel continued to speak.

“At least Matt benefitted from the fact that only one parent would have been caught up in this family-honour business and all the blasted tradition tied to it.”

“Only one parent?” Lynley asked.

The Colonel nodded. “The mother. I never met her, but the name
Whateley
hardly suggests that his father’s Chinese. So I assume it’s his mother. We didn’t speak of it. I should guess it was hard enough for Matt being a mixed race child at that fancy school of his without having to discuss it when he wasn’t there.”

Next to him on the sofa, Lynley sensed Sergeant Havers’ movement. He himself wanted to spring to his feet and pace the room and fling open the windows and rush out the doors. He did none of this. Instead, he forced his mind back to the photographs he’d seen of the boy, recalling the dark hair, skin that was the colour of blanched almonds, delicate features, eyes nearly black. Eyes…eyes that were full and wide and not Chinese. Welsh perhaps. Even Spanish. But certainly not Chinese. It was impossible. It made no sense.

“You didn’t know Matthew was mixed race, Inspector.” Jean Bonnamy spoke softly.

Lynley shook his head, more in confusion than negation. “Have you a picture of the boy who visited you?”

She got to her feet. “I’ll fetch it.”

When she left the room, the Colonel spoke. “I’d say if you’re looking for a killer, you might start with the bigots. The sort of people who can’t stand to be in contact with someone a bit different. Ignorant people. The kind who have to obliterate what they can’t understand.”

Lynley heard the words but could think only of the impossibility of Matthew Whateley’s being anything other than what he had been presented from the very beginning—the son of Kevin and Patsy Whateley, scion of a working class family, scholarship recipient, railway enthusiast.

Jean Bonnamy returned with the photograph which she handed to Lynley. He examined it and nodded at Havers. “The same boy,” he said and looked back at it again. In it, Matthew and the Colonel sat hunched over the chessboard. Matthew’s hand was extended, as if caught in the act of moving one of his chessmen, but his face was turned towards the camera, and he was smiling much the same smile that had been on his face in the photograph Lynley had seen of him on the banks of the Thames with Yvonnen Livesley, his Hammersmith friend.

“I’ve met Matthew’s parents,” Lynley said to the Colonel. “Neither is Chinese.”

The Colonel appeared neither disconcerted nor taken aback to hear this news. “The boy was mixed race,” he said conclusively. “I lived in Hong Kong for thirty-five years. I know when I’m looking at a mixed race child. To you, Matt might well look Occidental. But to anyone who’s spent time in the Orient, the boy was half Chinese.” His eyes moved moodily to the fireplace and lingered on the head of the garish dragon. “Some people like to crush what they can’t understand, the way you’d smash a spider with the heel of your shoe. That’s what you ought to be looking for. That kind of ugliness. That kind of hatred. The sort that says white Britannia is supreme and anything else is beneath contempt. You look at that school. I dare say that’s where you’ll find it.”

There was too much to think about, too much to evaluate. Yet points still needed elucidation, especially in the face of what Lynley thought he knew to be the truth about Matthew Whateley’s family. “Did Matthew speak to you about any of this? About his family’s background? About meeting with some sort of prejudice at the school? About trouble with a teacher or a student or a member of staff?”

The Colonel shook his head. “He spoke only of his marks. And only when I asked. And nothing else about the school at all.”

“But there was the motto, Dad,” Jean Bonnamy interjected. “You’ve not forgotten that.” She went back to her stool, speaking to Lynley. “Matthew had seen the school’s motto somewhere—in the chapel, in the library. I can’t recall. But he was quite taken with it.”

“I’ve not seen the motto,” Lynley said. “What is it?”

“I don’t know what it was in Latin, but he’d managed to get a translation from someone, and he brought it to us,” Jean Bonnamy replied. “It had to do with honour. He was most—”

“I’d forgotten that, Jeannie,” the Colonel interrupted pensively. “‘Let honour be both staff and rod.’ Those were the very words. He was quite taken with them. Wanted to spend the afternoon talking about what they meant.
Honor sit et baculum et ferula
.”

“Odd topic of conversation for a thirteen-year-old boy,” Sergeant Havers commented.

“Not for this boy,” the Colonel replied. “Honour’s in their blood. It’s at the heart of their culture.”

Lynley wished to avoid that area of dispute. “When was this discussion? What brought it up?”

The Colonel looked at his daughter for help. “When, Jeannie?”

“Perhaps a month ago? Hadn’t they been talking at school—in a history lesson?—about Lady Jane Grey? And dying merely for the sake of a belief, for the sake of religion? Wasn’t that it? Because I remember Matt asking whether you believed that honour required one to do what was right. You asked him what brought that idea into his head out of nowhere. He said Lady Jane Grey and her decision to die rather than accept the dishonour of renouncing her religion.”

Her father nodded slowly. “He wanted to know what we thought was more important, a code of honour or a code of behaviour.”

“You said there was no difference between the two, didn’t you?”

“That I did. But Matthew disagreed.” The Colonel looked at the picture which Lynley had returned to Jean Bonnamy. “That was the Occidental in him speaking. But his Chinese blood told him they were one and the same.”

Lynley felt a stirring of irritation at the continual references to a bloodline whose existence had no foundation in any fact. “Yet you never spoke to him about being Chinese. In spite of your own evident love for the culture.”

“No more than I would speak to you about the old Norse blood that gives you your lovely hair, Inspector. We’re all of us part and parcel of another culture, aren’t we? Some are merely nearer to that other culture in time than you and I are. But all of us spring from another source. Accepting that is accepting life. It’s the people who can’t accept it that become the destroyers. That’s all I can tell you.”

Clearly it was the Colonel’s way of ending the interview, and Lynley could see the strain that the conversation had wrought upon the man. His limbs were shaking. His eyes were heavy-lidded with fatigue. There was no point to pushing for further information. He got to his feet, expressed his thanks to the old man, and, with Sergeant Havers, followed Jean Bonnamy out the way they had come in. None of them spoke until they were on the drive once more.

“Let me ask you this, Miss Bonnamy,” Lynley said. “It’s not to give you pain but to come to some sort of understanding of why your father believes Matthew Whateley was Chinese. Your father’s had four strokes. He can’t have escaped unaffected from them.”

She looked past him to the privet hedge. Three birds were splashing happily in a puddle of water at its base.

“It’s all in his head?” she asked with a smile. “I wish I could make it easier for you, Inspector. It
would
be easier if I’d only agree, wouldn’t it? But I can’t. You see, I lived in Hong Kong until I was twenty years old. And the moment Matthew Whateley walked into our cottage last September, I knew without a doubt that he was a mixed race child. So it has nothing to do with my father’s mind or whether he’s in possession of his faculties. Because even if he isn’t, it doesn’t matter. I’m certainly in possession of all of mine.” She rubbed at dirt that was trapped in the lines crisscrossing her palms. “I wish I could change just a few things, however.”

“What?”

She shrugged. Her lips trembled, but she controlled them and spoke calmly. “When I took him back to school last Tuesday night, it was late. I drove him past the porter’s cottage and I was going to take him directly to the door of Erebus House. But he had me stop at the road to the vehicle shed because it was easier to turn my car around there. He said he could walk the rest of the way. He was thoughtful like that. That was Matthew.”

“That was the last time you saw him?”

She nodded and continued, as if her words would act as a form of exorcism for sorrow. “I let him out of the car. He started to walk off. Then a minibus came along the lane and its lights struck Matthew. I remember that quite well because he heard the bus and turned. He waved goodbye to me. And he smiled.” She wiped at her eyes. “Matthew had the loveliest smile, Inspector. When I saw it last Tuesday, lighting up his face, I knew how dear he’d become to me. I only wish now that I’d told him.”