Well-Schooled in Murder (38 page)

As Lynley and Havers sat, Byrne coughed catarrhally into a handkerchief before he lit a cigarette. Rhena reached for an ashtray on the table next to the sofa and held it in her right hand for him. She placed her left hand on his thigh.

“You no doubt know we’ve come to speak to you about Matthew Whateley,” Lynley said to Byrne. “No matter where we’ve turned in the investigation so far, your name has come up as a recurring theme. We know Matthew was adopted, we know that you arranged the adoption, we know that Matthew was part Chinese. What we don’t know—”

Byrne’s cough broke into Lynley’s words. He spoke abruptly once he had it controlled. “What does any of that have to do with the more salient fact that Matthew is dead? A child’s been brutally murdered. God knows what sort of paedophile’s on the loose. And you’re checking into the boy’s genealogy as if someone on his family tree might actually be responsible. I don’t see how that makes any sense.”

Lynley had witnessed Byrne at work often enough to recognise the ploy. He would put the subject on the defensive and batter him with a barrage of comments to which he felt he must give competent answers. Yet Lynley knew if he tried to deal with any of the comments, Byrne would move skilfully forward like the verbal swordsman he was, slicing his responses to bits with challenges to their credibility and consistency.

“I’ve absolutely no idea what it has to do with Matthew’s murder,” he said in reply. “That’s what I’ve come to discover. I admit that my curiosity was piqued yesterday when I learned that you were once close to a Chinese student who killed himself. Piqued even more when I learned that, fourteen years after that student’s death, you promoted another student—this one part Chinese—for a scholarship for which he was not the best qualified. And then that student ended up dead as well. Frankly, Mr. Byrne, in the past two days I’ve found myself running into far too many coincidences for all this not to be tied together in some fashion. Perhaps you’d like to address yourself to that.”

Byrne took in this response from behind the smoke that curled upwards from his cigarette. “The facts of Matthew Whateley’s birth have nothing whatsoever to do with his death, Inspector. But I’ll tell them to you if that’s what you’re so intent upon discussing.” He paused to tap his cigarette against the ashtray. He drew in on it again before he went on. His voice was raspy. “I knew of Matthew Whateley because I knew—and loved—his father. Edward Hsu.” Byrne smiled as if reading a reaction on Lynley’s face. “No doubt you were thinking that I was the father, a man with a fatal proclivity for things Chinese. Sorry if the truth’s a disappointment to you. Matthew Whateley was no child of mine. I have only one son. You’ve met him.”

“And Matthew’s mother?” Lynley asked.

Byrne reached in his jacket pocket, brought out a packet of Dunhills, and lit a second cigarette from the glowing half-smoked stub of the first. This he crushed out in the ashtray, coughing viscously into his hand.

“It was a particularly unsavoury situation, Inspector. Matthew’s mother wasn’t some attractive little dewy adolescent with whom Edward had become enamoured. Considering the boy’s single-minded devotion to his studies, a romantic entanglement with a sixteen-or seventeen-year-old girl was unlikely, to say the least. On the contrary, the mother was an older woman who seduced the boy. For the thrill of the conquest, I should guess, or the gratification of knowing she was still desirable, or the tremendous ego boost of having a younger man want to possess her. Choose which you will. I can only assume her motivation was one of them.”

“You didn’t know the woman?”

“I knew only what I managed to get Edward to tell me.”

“What was that?”

Byrne sipped his whisky. Next to him on the sofa, Rhena sat motionless. Some moments before, her eyes had dropped to her hand on his leg. She kept them there.

“The barest facts. She invited him to tea several times. She professed an interest in his well-being. That’s how it began. It ended in the bedroom. I’m sure it was a lubricious kick for the woman to initiate such an innocent into the rites of passion. And what a feather in her cap to be found desirable by a teenager on the brink of manhood. I suppose the only thing she didn’t allow for was becoming pregnant by him. But once she was, she used her condition in a failed attempt to force Eddie to get money from his family. Extortion. Blackmail. Call it what you will.”

“Is that why he killed himself?”

“He killed himself because he believed the school would expel him if the truth were told. The rules about sexual licence are fairly explicit. But even if that weren’t the case, Eddie believed he’d dishonoured his family’s name. They’d sent him to be educated at considerable cost. Sacrifices had been made for him, and he had disgraced them.”

“How do you know all this, Mr. Byrne?”

“I’d tutored Eddie in written English since he was in the fourth form. He’d been here in my home nearly every holiday. I knew him. I was fond of him. I could see he was depressed in the last few months of his upper sixth year, and I didn’t let up until I had the story from him.”

“He wouldn’t reveal the woman’s identity?”

Byrne shook his head. “Eddie would have believed it was honourable to hold his tongue about that.”

“I can’t think that he didn’t see—or wasn’t told—how much more dishonourable killing himself would be,” Lynley commented. “Especially in a situation that was not entirely of his own devising.”

Byrne appeared completely unruffled, in spite of the accusation behind Lynley’s words. “I don’t intend to argue Eastern culture with you, Inspector. Or with anyone else. I’ll just give you the facts. This
woman
”—he gave bitter emphasis to the word—“could have had an abortion without Eddie’s ever being the wiser. But she wanted money, so she informed the boy that if he wasn’t able to tell his family the truth, she would tell them herself. Or she would talk to the Headmaster to make sure that Eddie did ‘his duty as a man.’ It was a threat that led either way to disgrace and dishonour.”

“Surely even at Bredgar Chambers there were extenuating circumstances,” Lynley noted.

“I explained them to him. I told him that it wasn’t all his fault, that he hadn’t raped this woman, that he had been seduced, that the Headmaster would take this into account. But Eddie couldn’t—he wouldn’t—see beyond what he had done to himself, to his family, to the school. He couldn’t study. He couldn’t work. Nothing I said made the least bit of difference. I think he’d decided to kill himself once he learned about the pregnancy in the first place. He was only waiting for the opportunity.”

“He left no note?”

“None.”

“So only you know the truth.”

“I knew what he told me. I didn’t pass the story on.”

“Not even to the boy’s parents? You didn’t tell them that they were going to have a grandchild?”

Byrne’s answer was weighted heavily by disgust. “Of course not. To tell them that would have made Eddie’s death even more senseless than it already was. He died to protect them from knowledge he believed would hurt them. Holding my own tongue respected his wish to protect them. It was the least I could do.”

“But you did more than that, didn’t you? You went after the child. How did you find him?”

Byrne handed his empty glass to Rhena, who placed it on the table. “The only piece of information he gave me about the woman was that she’d gone to Exeter to have the baby. I hired someone to track her down. It wasn’t difficult. Exeter isn’t that large, after all.”

“And the woman?”

“I never knew her name. I didn’t want to know it. Once I’d discovered that she’d left the baby behind for adoption, I didn’t care any longer what happened to the bitch.”

“Was she someone from the school?”

“From the school, from the village, from the area. That’s all I know. After Eddie’s death, all I cared about was somehow making sense out of the waste by seeing to it that his son at least had a decent life. I knew the Whateleys. I arranged for them to adopt the baby.”

Still, there was a nagging problem—a snag in Byrne’s story—that couldn’t be ignored. “Surely there were many people ahead of the Whateleys hoping to adopt a child. How did you manage to pull strings to get past them?”

“A mixed race child?” Byrne scoffed. “You must know that the line of people wanting mixed race children doesn’t exactly stretch to infinity.”

“And even if it did at that time, I expect you exerted enough power to see to it that the Whateleys got the boy.”

Byrne lit a third cigarette from the second. Rhena extinguished the second one for him, removing it from between his fingers and crushing it out in the ashtray.

“I admit that. I don’t regret it. They’re good, hardworking people without pretensions.”

“People willing to submit to your holding on to the reins of power in Matthew’s life?”

“If that means allowing me to make crucial decisions about the boy’s education and his future, yes, they submitted. They wanted the best for him, after all. They were grateful enough to have him. So everyone won under the arrangement. I could keep my eye on Eddie’s son as he grew. The Whateleys finally had the child they longed for. Matthew was placed in a loving home, with a future that went beyond the boundaries of his family’s life. No one lost.”

“Save Matthew. Save the Whateleys. In the end.”

Byrne leaned forward in a quick, angry movement. “Do you think I feel nothing about this boy’s death?”

“How much does your son Brian know about the circumstances of Matthew Whateley’s birth?”

Byrne looked surprised. “Nothing. Only that Eddie committed suicide. He didn’t even know that much for years.”

“Brian doesn’t live with you during the holidays, does he?”

The other man’s face remained impassive. “He used to live with me, but when he went away to school, he decided he’d prefer to spend the holidays with his mother in Knightsbridge. A bit more fashionable than Hammersmith.”

“Fashion generally doesn’t dictate where a teenage boy will live. I should think he’d prefer to be with his father.”

“Another sort of boy might, Inspector, but not Brian. My son and I parted ways nearly five years ago when he entered Bredgar Chambers and discovered that I wasn’t about to put up with his constant snivelling about the school.”

“Snivelling? About what? Was he bullied?”

“He was ragged, as are all new boys. But he couldn’t face it, so he wanted to come home. He wanted to be rescued. He phoned here every night. I finally stopped accepting his calls. I wouldn’t consider withdrawing him from the school, and he was bitter about that. So he went to his mother. I suppose he saw it as a way to punish me. But that didn’t solve his problem. The last thing Pamela wanted was a thirteen-year-old boy hanging about her flat. She agreed to have him on sufferance only during the holidays. But the rest of the time, he was packed off to the school. I see him there occasionally, but nowhere else.”

It was the ill-concealed acrimony behind Byrne’s words that prompted Lynley to ask the man how much time he spent with Matthew Whateley and whether Brian was aware of the depth of Byrne’s interest in the boy.

Byrne’s quick response indicated his understanding of where the questions were heading. “Can you possibly be suggesting that Brian murdered Matthew because he was jealous of a relationship that I shared with the boy? A substitute son?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I saw Matthew only occasionally—on the green or by the river where he played. His parents kept me apprised of the boy’s progress in school, and I interviewed him as part of the procedure to get him into Bredgar Chambers on the governors’ scholarship. But that was the extent of my relationship with him. I did what I could for him out of love for Edward. And I don’t deny loving Edward. He was a brilliant pupil, worthy of anyone’s love. He was like a son. He was more than a son, certainly more than the son I have now. But he’s dead, and I didn’t replace him with Matthew. What I did for Matthew, I did because of Edward.”

“And for Brian?”

Byrne’s lips thinned. “I’ve done what I can. What he’ll allow me to do.”

“Such as seeing to it that he was made a house prefect?”

“I don’t deny that. I thought the experience would be good for him. I pulled strings where I could. He needs it on his record if he wants to go to university.”

“He hopes for Cambridge. Did you know that?”

Byrne shook his head. “We don’t communicate. Obviously, he doesn’t find me the most empathetic of fathers.”

Nor, Lynley thought, the most accessible role model. The lack of physical beauty aside, how could any son hope to compete with a father having Giles Byrne’s background, his reputation and accomplishments? Not to mention his inexplicable success with at least one beautiful woman.

“What kind of role did you play in getting Alan Lockwood his appointment to the school?” Lynley asked curiously.

“I urged the Board of Governors to offer him the job,” Byrne admitted. “New blood was needed. Lockwood had it.”

“I expect his presence allows you to have considerably more authority on the Board of Governors now, perhaps more power than you would otherwise have.”

“That’s the nature of any political system, Inspector. Power.”

“Something you like, I should imagine.”

Byrne took out his packet of cigarettes and lit up again. “Don’t deceive yourself about power, Inspector. It’s something everyone likes.”