Well-Schooled in Murder (48 page)

“This is daft,” Clive responded. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about. What plan? Whose plan?”

“The plan to nab Matthew Whateley.”

Clive gave a short laugh. “You’re pinning that on
me
? Have a go with it, Inspector, but it won’t get you far.”

In spite of himself, Lynley admired the boy’s nerve. Aside from the occasional physical reaction that gave evidence of information withheld, Clive was practically impenetrable, a fencer in more ways than one. Lynley decided to try a more direct approach.

“I disagree,” he said. “Pinning it on you will take me right to the end, Clive.”

The boy snorted derisively and went back to his cuticles.

“Here’s how I imagine you did it. Once you had the chit, you filled it out with Matthew Whateley’s name and placed it in Mr. Pitt’s pigeonhole so he wouldn’t expect to see the boy at games that afternoon. Then directly after lunch, you picked up Matthew. I should guess you ambushed him on his way to Erebus House to change into his games clothes. You hid out long enough for the other students to be off at games. Then you took him to the chamber above the drying room before going off to games yourself. You tortured him through most of Friday night while the rest of the students were busy elsewhere, or home for the weekend, or at the sixth form social club where you had put in an obligatory appearance. When the fun was over, you killed him.”

Clive rolled down the sleeves of his shirt. He buttoned them and reached for his pullover. “You’re crazy.”

“You’re not going anywhere, Pritchard,” Lockwood said. “Regardless of this”—he flung his hand in Lynley’s direction—“you’re confined to your room until someone from your family arrives and takes you off my hands. Provided the police don’t wish to do so immediately.”

The Headmaster’s curt dismissal of him seemed to snap the boy. “Oh, right!
Too
right!” he exploded. “I’m expelled over a little push and shove. Where were the bloody rules when
I
was third form? Who gave a shit that
I—
”

“That’s enough!”

“No, it isn’t enough! It bloody well isn’t. Because I took my knocks, see? And I didn’t peep about it. Not to my mates. Not to anyone. I just took it.”

“And waited to pass it on to someone else when you had the chance?” Lockwood demanded.

“What if I did? It was my right!”

Lynley saw how the boy was manoeuvring them away from Matthew Whateley. It was expertly done, a conversational legerdemain worthy of a man twice his age.

“How did you kill him, Clive?” Lynley asked. “Give him something to drink? Something special to eat?”

“Kill? Morant’s alive! I never…” His face empurpled. “You think I killed
Whateley
? Whoever told…” His head turned in the direction of Ion House, just visible through the trees outside his window. “Son of a
bitch
!” Still seated on the bed, he whirled towards Lynley. “You’ve sussed it out, haven’t you? So tell me how I did it. How’d I get the body up to Stoke Poges? Sleight-of-hand?” He laughed and jumped to his feet, curving his hand round an imaginary microphone. “What about this? ‘Beam him over to Buckinghamshire, Scottie.’ Think that would have worked?”

“Not at all,” Lynley replied. “But I think it would have worked easily enough to break into the porter’s office in the east quad, to take the keys to one of the minibuses from behind the counter where they’re hanging in plain sight, and to use that to transport Matthew’s body to Stoke Poges on Saturday night while the porter was off seeing to his daughter. It was probably quite late when the bus was taken. Probably the early hours of Sunday morning when it was returned.”

Clive laughed again, his fisted hands on his hips. “Lovely. Really fine. There’s only one problem. I wasn’t
here
Saturday night, Inspector. I was in Cissbury. Having it on with a nice little piece I picked up in the village. Once in the bus shelter and twice more in the car park next to the pub. The last was after time was called. Ask the barman. He found us by the rubbish bin.” Clive grinned and made a rude gesture with his hands. “She wanted it standing up on the last go-round. So we were leaning against the bin when the barman came out. Just ask him what he saw when he came to dump the night’s rubbish. Quite an eyeful he got. An earful as well, ’cause she was yowling like a pig every time I stuck her.”

“If you expect us to believe—”

Clive cut off Lockwood’s words. “I don’t care what you believe. I’m out of here anyway. And glad to be gone.” In a step he was at his desk, and he jerked open a drawer. He pulled out a notebook and flung it on the desk. A set of photographs slid out halfway. They were singed round the edges. “Take a look at those, if you’re so hot and heavy after Matt Whateley’s killer,” he said. “I didn’t nab him, I didn’t torture him, I didn’t kill him. But I sure as hell can tell you who did.”

Lynley lifted the pictures. He felt revulsion seep through his skin. “Where did you get these?”

Clive’s smile was triumphant, as if he’d waited for this moment and now that it had arrived he intended to savour it. “Found them on the rubbish pile Saturday night,” he replied. “Just as I came over the wall on the return from Cissbury. Sweet Mistress Bond—Bredgar’s Queen of Chemistry—was trying to burn the lot of them.”

19

Sergeant Havers lit a cigarette without apology, and standing next to her, Lynley did not complain. They were in the council room across the corridor from the Headmaster’s study in the east quadrangle. Although the windows looked out upon the cloisters down which both students and staff members passed, their voices amplified by the vaulted ceiling, neither Lynley nor Havers gave them the slightest notice. Instead, their attention was riveted upon the set of photographs Clive Pritchard had given them.

“Holy heaven,” Havers said, mixing reverence with disgust. “I’ve seen…I mean, one can’t go forever in CID without coming across pornography, can one? So I’ve seen it. I’ve
seen
it, sir. But this…”

Lynley understood exactly what Havers meant. He, too, had seen his share of pornography, not only as a police officer but also as a curious pre-adolescent, eager to understand, if not to experience first-hand, the mysteries of adult sexuality. Grainy photographs of men and women coupling for cameras in a variety of postures had always been obtainable if one had the money to pay for them. He could remember the guilty schoolboy giggling that accompanied a group perusal of such photographs, the sweat that smeared finger and palm prints across them, and the urgent self-grappling in the darkness that followed. Each boy wondered who would be his first woman and when it would happen and what it would mean if it didn’t happen soon.

As unsavoury as those photographs had been with their bleach-haired women of sagging flesh and pockmarked men mounting them with grimaces of feigned pleasure, they were mild and innocuous compared with what lay before Lynley and Havers on the conference table. These photographs addressed themselves to more than mere voyeurism. Both the subjects and the poses in which they had been captured served as a titillation that was masochistic in origin and clearly paedophilic in design.

“This could be Lockwood’s worst nightmare come true,” Havers murmured. Ash fell from her cigarette onto one of the pictures. She brushed it off.

Lynley couldn’t disagree. The pictures were all of nude children and adults, in both cases male, in all cases the child a subject of sexual bondage, under the power of the adult. This power was expressed through the use of weapons as props: a gun to the temple of a child in one picture, a knife pressed to the testicles in a second, a rope binding a blindfolded child in a third, a threatening live wire shooting sparks in a fourth. In all cases, the children performed upon grinning, aroused adults as if forced to do so, like little slave boys in a world of perverted sexual fantasy.

“It verifies Colonel Bonnamy’s contention,” Havers continued.

“It does that, doesn’t it?” Lynley asked. For beyond the egregious attractions of paedophilia implied by the photographs, beyond the prurient interest in homosexuality they revealed, there remained the fact that every picture was biracial, as if each one represented a twisted commentary on the problems inherent to miscegenation. Whites mixed with Indians, blacks with whites, Orientals with blacks, whites with Orientals. Reminded of Colonel Bonnamy’s contention about the racist connotation behind Matthew Whateley’s death, Lynley knew it was impossible to avoid the connection between the boy’s murder and the photographs before them.

Havers drew in on her cigarette and paced to the window overlooking the cloisters and quad. “It looks bad. It does look awful. But if you think about it, sir, there’s something too convenient in Clive Pritchard having those snaps in his room. Just as if he was waiting for us to come along and question him so he could put them on the table and divert suspicion away from himself.” She examined the end of her cigarette, her eyes narrowed in speculation. “Because without those snaps, things look pretty bad for our boy, don’t they? He had easy access to an off-games chit—”

“As had everyone else, apparently, if it comes to that, Havers.”

“—which he used so no one would miss Matthew Whateley when he nabbed him. He had access to that chamber above the drying room and seeing as it’s in his own house, I’d say that makes it even more likely that he’s our man. He had a motive as well. No matter his fancy couldn’t-care-less talk about being booted out of Bredgar Chambers, you can’t tell me that doesn’t cause him some trouble at home.”

“I see all that, Sergeant. But I also see what’s before us on the table at the moment. Like it or not, we can’t ignore either the subject matter of these pictures or the obvious possibility of a connection between them and Matthew Whateley’s death.”

Havers rejoined him, stubbed out her cigarette in a crystal ashtray in the centre of the table. She sighed, not with reluctant submission to the implicit order from a superior officer but rather with an acceptance of an unpleasantness to come. “Time for a visit with Emilia, I take it?”

“Quite.”

They found the chemistry mistress alone in her laboratory on the ground floor of the science building. Her back to them as she worked at the glass and mahogany fume cupboard, Emilia Bond looked shrouded beneath her long academic gown, like a child playing dress-up in Renaissance garb. She peered over her shoulder as Lynley and Havers entered the room and closed the door behind them. The movement of her head ruffled her baby-fine hair like feathers.

“Setting up for a bit of fun,” she explained and went on with her work, giving it her full attention.

They joined her. The front glass panel of the cupboard—built like a window—was pulled down nearly all the way, leaving room only for her hands to work deftly beneath it. Upon the cracked, white interior tiles stood a beaker of liquid into which she was adding a solid substance. She stirred the mixture with a clear glass rod and watched as a second, new solid began forming.

“Ammonium hydroxide and iodine,” she announced, as if they had come to evaluate her performance. “They form ammonium tri-iodide.”

“That’s the bit of fun?” Lynley asked.

“Pupils invariably love it. It appeals to the prankster in all of them.”

“And the danger involved? What does that appeal to?”

“Danger?” Her forehead creased with confusion.

“You’re working inside the fume cupboard,” Lynley pointed out. “I’m assuming your chemicals release some sort of gas.”

She laughed. “Oh! No, there’s no danger involved. Just a lot of mess if one isn’t careful. Look. I’ve made one batch already.” From a corner of the cupboard, she pulled forward a petrie dish that contained a small pyramid of yellow powder. She tapped a bit of this onto one of the tiles and pressed it with another glass rod. In answer, the powder popped and splattered up against the glass sides of the cupboard. Some of it landed like bright freckles on Emilia’s arms. “It’s mostly used for pranks,” she admitted with a grin. “Occasionally I like to show my fifth formers a bit of chemical fun. It keeps their attention. Frankly, I’ll do
anything
for their attention, Inspector.”

She withdrew her hands from the cupboard, closed it, wiped the yellow speckles from her arms with a bit of rag from her pocket, and pushed down the sleeves of her academic gown. “I understand you’ve found Matthew Whateley’s sock.” She sounded businesslike. “Does that bring you any closer to the truth?”