Well-Schooled in Murder (4 page)

“And the hockey master—was it Cowfrey Pitt?—didn’t inform you that he’d gone to the Sanatorium?”

“Cowfrey assumed the San would let me know. That’s how it’s usually done. And if I’d been told Matthew was ill, I
would
have gone to the San to see him. Of course I would have.” The strength of Corntel’s protestations was curious. With each of them, the man spoke more intently.

“You’ve a head of house as well, don’t you? What was he doing all this time? Was he in school this weekend?”

“Brian Byrne. Yes. A senior boy. A prefect. Most of the seniors were off on exeats—at least those who hadn’t gone to a hockey tournament in the North—but he was there. Right in the house. As far as he knew, Matthew was with the Morants. He didn’t check into that any more than I did. Why should he have done so? If any checking was to be done, it was my responsibility, not Brian’s. I’ll not foist it off onto my prefect. I won’t.”

Like the earlier protestations, there was peculiar force behind Corntel’s declaration, child of a need to take all blame upon himself. Lynley knew that there was usually only one reason for the existence of such a need. If Corntel wanted the blame, no doubt he deserved it.

“He must have known that he’d be out of his depth with the Morants. He must have felt it,” Corntel said.

“You seem certain of that.”

“He was a scholarship student.” Corntel seemed to feel that statement explained everything. Nonetheless, he went on to say, “Good boy. Hard worker.”

“Liked by the other students?” When Corntel hesitated, Lynley said, “After all, if he’d been invited for a weekend at one of their homes, it seems reasonable to conclude he was liked.”

“Yes, yes. He must have been. It’s just that…Do you see how I’ve failed the boy? I don’t
know
. He was so quiet. All he ever seemed to do was his schoolwork. He never had a problem. He never even spoke of one. And his parents were so keen to have him go on this weekend. His father said as much to me when he wrote his permission. Something like ‘Nice to have Mattie move into the world a bit.’ Mattie. That’s what they called him.”

“Where are the parents now?”

Corntel’s face pinched with misery. “I don’t know. At the school perhaps. Or at home waiting for word. If the Headmaster hasn’t managed to stop them, they may have gone directly to the police themselves.”

“Has Bredgar Chambers access to a local police force?”

“There’s a constable in Cissbury—that’s the nearest village. Otherwise, we’re under the jurisdiction of the Horsham force.” He smiled grimly. “Part of their patch, you’d call it, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes. And I’m afraid it’s not part of mine.”

Corntel’s shoulders caved in further at this admission. “Surely you can do something, Tommy. Put some sort of wheels in motion.”

“Discreet wheels?”

“Yes. All right. Whatever you want to call them. It’s a personal favour, I know. I’ve no rights here. But for God’s sake, we have Eton.”

It was a draw upon loyalties. The old school tie. That assumption of devotion to the calls of the past. Lynley wanted to cut beyond it as ruthlessly as he could. The policeman in him insisted that he do so. But the boy who had once shared school days with Corntel was not quite as dead as Lynley wanted him to be. So he asked:

“If he had run off, perhaps with the intention of coming up to London, he’d need transportation, wouldn’t he? How close are you to the trains? To the motorway? To one of the larger roads?”

Corntel seemed to take this as the extending hand of help he wanted. He answered definitively, eager to be of assistance.

“We’re not very near anything useful, Tommy, which is why parents feel secure in sending their children to the school. It’s isolated. There’s no trouble to get into. There’s nothing around to distract. Matthew would have had quite a hike to get safely away. He couldn’t afford to hitch a ride too near the school because if he did, the chance would have been very good that someone from the school—one of the instructors, perhaps, or a workman or the porter—might have gone driving by, seen him, and packed him right back where he belongs.”

“So he probably wouldn’t have kept to the road at all.”

“I don’t think he would. I think he’d have had to go through the fields, through St. Leonard’s Forest, up to Crawley and the M23. He’d have been safe at that point. He would have been seen as just any child. No one would suspect that he was from Bredgar Chambers.”

“St. Leonard’s Forest,” Lynley said reflectively. “The likeliest possibility is that he’s still there, isn’t it? Lost perhaps. Hungry.”

“And two nights without shelter in March. Exposure. Hypothermia. Starvation. A broken leg. A bad fall. A broken neck.” Corntel compiled the list bitterly.

“Starvation’s unlikely after only three days,” Lynley responded. He did not add the more damning remark that any of the others were distinctly possible. “Is he a big child? Hefty?”

Corntel shook his head. “Not at all. He’s very small for his age. Delicate bones. Extremely fragile. Good structure in the face.” He paused, his eyes focusing on an image the others could not see. “Dark hair. Dark eyes. Long-fingered hands. Perfect skin. Lovely skin.”

Havers tapped a pencil against her notebook. She looked at Lynley. Seeing her do so, Corntel stopped speaking. Colour dashed across his face in great bruising patches.

Lynley pushed his chair away from his desk and let his eyes rest on one of the two prints on his wall in which an Indian woman dumped a basket of peppers onto a blanket. It was a compilation of vibrant colours. Her veil of black hair, the living red of the vegetables, the tawny velvet of her skin, her purple gown, the blend of rose and blue background that called the time of day
sunset
. Beauty, he knew, always offered its own form of seduction.

“Have you brought a picture of the boy?” Lynley asked. “Can you write out an accurate description of him?” The last question, he thought, would probably be unnecessary.

“Yes. Of course. Both.” Never before had Lynley heard such relief.

“Then if you’ll leave them with the sergeant, we’ll see if there’s anything we can do from this end. Perhaps he’s already been picked up in Crawley and is too afraid to give his name. Or even closer to London. One can never tell.”

“I thought…I
hoped
you’d help. I’ve already…” Corntel reached into the breast pocket of his coat, bringing out a photograph and a folded page of typescript. He had the grace to look faintly abashed by the assumption of Lynley’s cooperation that was implied by his possession of both.

Lynley took them wearily. Corntel had been confident of his man indeed. The old Viscount of Vacillation would hardly desert one of his former schoolmates now.

Barbara Havers read the description that Corntel had left with them. She studied the photograph of the boy as Lynley dumped out the ashtray that she and Corntel had managed to fill during the interview. He wiped it carefully with a tissue.

“God, you’re getting to be an unbearable prig over this smoking business, Inspector,” Barbara complained. “Should I start wearing a scarlet S on my chest?”

“Not at all. But either I clean the ashtray or find myself licking it in desperation. Somehow, cleaning seems closer to a behaviour I can live with. But only just, I’m afraid.” He looked up, smiled.

She laughed even through her exasperation. “Why did you give up smoking? Why not march right into an early grave with the rest of us? The more the merrier. You know the sort of thing.”

He didn’t answer. Instead, his eyes went to the postcard propped up against a coffee cup on his desk. So Barbara knew. Lady Helen Clyde did not smoke. Perhaps she would find more acceptable upon her return a man who had given up smoking as well.

“Do you really think that’s going to make a difference, Inspector?”

His reply was as good as ignoring her altogether. “If the boy’s run away, I shouldn’t be surprised if he turns up in a few days. Perhaps in Crawley. Perhaps in the city. But if he doesn’t turn up, as callous as it sounds, his body may. Are they prepared for that, I wonder.”

Barbara skilfully turned the statement to her own use. “Is anyone ever really prepared for the worst, Inspector?”

Send my roots rain. Send my roots rain
.

With those four words pressing into her brain like a persistent melody, Deborah St. James sat in her Austin, eyes fixed on the lych gate of St. Giles’ Church outside the town of Stoke Poges. She scrutinised nothing in particular. Instead, she tried to count how many times over the last month she had recited not just those final words but Hopkins’ entire sonnet. She had started every day with it, had made it the force that propelled her from beds and hotel rooms, into her car, and through site after site where she took photographs like an automaton. But beyond every morning’s determined recitation of those fourteen lines of supplication, she could not have said how many times during each day she had returned to it, when some unexpected sight or sound she was unprepared for broke through her defences and attacked her calm.

She understood why the lines came to her now. St. Giles’ Church was the last stop in her four-week photographic odyssey. At the end of this afternoon she would return to London, avoiding the M4, which would take her there quickly, and choosing instead the A4 with its traffic signals, its congestion round Heathrow, its infinite stream of suburbs grimy with soot and the grey end of winter. And its additional blessing of extending the journey. That was the crucial part. She didn’t yet see how she could face the end of it. She didn’t yet see how she could face Simon.

Ages ago when she had accepted this assignment to photograph a selection of the literary landmarks of the country, she had planned it so that Stoke Poges, where Thomas Gray composed “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” would fall directly after Tintagel and Glastonbury, and thus bring her month of work to a conclusion only a few miles from her doorstep. But Tintagel and Glastonbury, rich with ineluctable reminders of King Arthur and Guinevere, of their ill-fated and ultimately barren love, had only given teeth to the despondency with which she had begun the trip. Those teeth bit; today on this final afternoon, they tore, working upon her heart, laying bare its worst wound….

She
wouldn’t
think of it. She opened the car door, took up her camera case and tripod, and walked across the car park to the lych gate. Beyond it she could see that the graveyard was divided into two sections and that midway down a curved concrete path, a second lych gate and second graveyard stood.

The air was cold for late March, as if deliberately withholding the promise of spring. Birds tittered sporadically in the trees, but other than the occasional muffled roar of a jet from Heathrow, the graveyard itself was quiet. It seemed a suitable spot for Thomas Gray to have created his poem, to have chosen as his own resting place.

Closing the first lych gate behind her, Deborah walked along the path between two lines of tree roses. New growth sprouted from them—tight buds, slim branches, tender young leaves—but this springtime regeneration contrasted sharply with the area in which the trees themselves grew. This outer graveyard was not maintained. The grass was uncut, the stones left to lurch at odd angles with haphazard disregard.

Deborah went under the second lych gate. It was more ornate than the first and, perhaps in the hope of keeping vandals away from the delicate oak fretwork along the line of its roof—or perhaps from the graveyard and the church itself—a floodlight was secured to a beam. But this was a useless safeguard, for the light was shattered and shards of glass lay here and there on the ground.

Once inside the interior churchyard, Deborah looked for Thomas Gray’s tomb, her final photographic responsibility. Almost immediately, however, as she made a fleeting survey of the monuments and markers, she saw instead a trail of feathers.

They lay like the result of an augur’s handiwork, a rebarbative collection of ash-coloured down. Against the manicured lawn, they looked like small puffs of smoke that had taken on substance rather than drifting off to be absorbed into the sky. But the number of feathers and the unmistakably violent way in which they were strewn about suggested a vicious battle for life, and Deborah followed them the short distance to where the defeated party lay.

The bird’s body was about two feet from the yew hedge that separated inner and outer graveyards. Deborah stiffened at the sight of it. Even though she had known what she would find, the brutality of the poor creature’s death evoked in her an answering rush of pity so intense—so utterly absurd, she told herself—that she found her vision momentarily obscured by tears. All that remained of the bird was a frail blood-imbued rib cage covered by an insubstantial and inadequate cuirass of stained down. There was no head. Frail legs and claws had been torn off. The creature could have once been a pigeon or a dove, but now it was a shell in which life had once existed, all too briefly.

How fleeting it was. How quickly it could be extinguished.

“No!” Deborah felt the anguish well within her and knew she lacked the will to defeat it. She forced herself to think of something else—of burying the bird, of brushing the scurrying ants from the serrated ridge of one cracked rib—but the effort was useless. Hopkins’ sonnet, whispered in a rush against a rising onslaught of sorrow, was insufficient armour. So she wept, watching the dead bird’s image blur, praying that a time would soon come when she could put an end to grief.