Well-Schooled in Murder (52 page)

The office door opened, and Frank Orten entered. His quasi-military cap was pulled low on his forehead, and his jacket and trousers were spotted from the rain. He hesitated in the doorway, looking from Havers to Lynley to the pegboard of keys.

Lynley spoke. “How often is your office unoccupied like this, Mr. Orten? Would you say it’s a fairly common occurrence?”

Orten went to his desk behind the counter. He removed his hat and placed it on a shelf next to a glass jar filled with small pink and white seashells. “Wouldn’t say that,” he replied.

“At least once a day? Twice? More?”

Orten looked offended. “One goes to the toilet, Inspector. No law against that, as far as I know.”

“Leaving the office unlocked?”

“I’m not out of it three minutes!”

“And this time?”

“This time?”

Lynley indicated the state of the man’s uniform. “You’ve been out in the rain. Surely you don’t need to go outside to find a lavatory, do you?”

Orten turned to his desk. A large black binder sat upon it. He opened this. “Elaine has my daughter’s kids with her at Erebus. I checked on them.”

“Your daughter is still in hospital?”

“She is.”

“Which hospital is that?”

Orten swung round in his chair. “St. John’s. In Crawley.” He saw Sergeant Havers make note of his answer. He adjusted his neck against the high collar of his uniform jacket. “What’s this?” he demanded.

“Details, Mr. Orten,” Lynley replied. “I’ve come to use your telephone, if I may.”

Orten shoved the telephone towards Lynley in a fashion that did not hide his irritation. Lynley dialled the number for the Yard and within moments was speaking to Dorothea Harriman. He did not give her an opportunity to deliver her message. Instead, his earlier conversation with Sergeant Havers in mind, he asked:

“Has Constable Nkata reported in yet, Dee?” On the other end of the line, he could hear Superintendent Webberly’s secretary shuffling through papers. In the background, word processor keys tapped and a printer whirred.

“You’re in luck, as usual,” Harriman replied. “He rang from Exeter not twenty minutes past.”

“And?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“That was his message. ‘Tell the Inspector nothing.’ Seemed a bit cheeky to me, but that’s Nkata’s style, isn’t it?”

Lynley didn’t bother to correct her impression of the constable’s message. He understood it well enough. The Exeter investigation into Giles Byrne’s story about Matthew Whateley’s birth was turning up nothing. Sergeant Havers’ intuition was proving accurate.

Harriman was continuing. “You’ve had some information from Slough police that I thought you’d want, Detective Inspector. They’ve completed the autopsy. There’s a clear cause of death.”

“What have they told us?”

“Poisoning,” she replied.

Lynley’s mind began to race with ideas. It
was
as he had thought: something in the food Matthew Whateley had been given while held in the chamber above the drying room; something he had drunk; something that had worked quickly upon him; something a pupil had access to….

Then Dorothea Harriman spoke again, her words cutting through and destroying the entire direction of his thoughts.

“It was carbon monoxide,” she said.

20

It was nearly four o’clock when Detective Inspector Canerone of the Slough CID ushered Lynley into his office, a cramped cubicle furnished in metal and plastic, with a preponderance of Ordnance Survey maps on the walls. An electric kettle—hissing steam from its spout—sat atop one of the three dented filing cabinets, while on another were arranged a child’s collection of Beatrix Potter figurines.

“They belonged to my son,” Canerone said in explanation. “I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away when he moved off with his mum. Tea?” He pulled open one of the cabinet drawers from which he produced a china teapot, two cups, two saucers, and a sugar bowl. “She left this behind as well,” he continued, unabashed. “It seemed a shame to leave it all at home where it’ll never get used. There’s no milk. You don’t mind?”

“Not at all.”

Lynley watched the other detective make the tea. His movements were ponderous, and he paused frequently as if considering whether a potential gesture were a solecism that might cause him social embarrassment.

“You’re working the case alone?” Canerone asked. “That’s not typical of the Met, is it?”

“I’ve a sergeant to assist. She’s still out at the school.”

Carefully Canerone placed teapot, sugar, cups, and saucers on a tray which he carried to his desk. “You think the boy was killed there.” It was a conclusion rather than a point of interrogation.

“I thought so originally,” Lynley replied. “But now I’m not certain. It’s the carbon monoxide that’s thrown me off.”

Canerone pulled open the top drawer of his desk and removed a package of digestive biscuits. He placed two on each of the saucers and filled the cups with tea. Handing one to Lynley, he munched on a biscuit and opened a folder that lay in the centre of his desk.

“Let’s see what we have.” He blew across the surface of his tea and took a noisy sip.

“One usually associates carbon monoxide with cars,” Lynley said. “But one
can
be exposed to it—and die from it—in other ways as well.”

“There’s truth in that.” Canerone nodded. “From coal gas. From a faulty furnace. From a stopped-up flue.”

“In a room. In a building.”

“Certainly.” Canerone used a biscuit to gesture at the report. “But the concentration attached to the haemoglobin was high. So the boy was exposed to it in heavy volume. And, I should guess, in a fairly confined space.”

“The room I have in mind is quite small. Up under the eaves and above a drying room. Lots of pipes running through it.”

“Gas pipes?”

“I’m not certain. Perhaps.”

“Then the room’s a possibility. But I rather think…No. Unless it’s dwarf-sized, I don’t think it’ll work. Not at this concentration in the blood. And not if the lad was the only one to die. You can verify this with our forensic team, but I think you’ll find they agree.”

Lynley knew he had to adjust his thinking. He did so reluctantly. “Could the boy have died while being transported somewhere in a vehicle?”

Canerone seemed interested in this line of thought. “That’s more sensible than the room, to be sure. Bound and gagged in a vehicle—perhaps in the boot—with the driver not knowing that the exhaust was leaking inside to kill the boy. That’s a good possibility.”

“And when the driver reached his destination and discovered what had happened to the boy, he dumped the body in Stoke Poges and fled.”

At this, Canerone shook his head. He popped the rest of his first biscuit into his mouth. “That’s unlikely. Lividity had already set in. The body had been moved from the site of death into that cemetery quite some time
after
death. Our man’s guessing, at the extreme, twenty-four hours.”

“So Matthew would have had to be dead in that vehicle for an entire day before his body was moved.”

“A risky business,” Canerone pointed out reasonably. “Unless our killer’s sure that no one’s going to prowl round his car. But whatever the truth turns out to be, it’s a certainty that the boy didn’t die on the hour’s drive between the school and the churchyard.” Thoughtfully he tapped the report against his desk. “Perhaps our killer was intent upon taking him somewhere else. Perhaps he reached his destination, found the boy dead, panicked, left the car, and took twenty-four hours to come up with a way to dispose of the body.”

“By removing it from his car to another vehicle? A minibus perhaps?”

“There’s something in that,” Canerone agreed. “I’d say a bit of evidence as well, since one wouldn’t want to risk having a body lying openly in a minibus.” He turned a page of the report and handed a document to Lynley. “You recall the fibres caught up in the boy’s hair? Wool and rayon. What does that suggest to you?”

“Anything. A piece of clothing. Rug from a car.”

“Coloured orange.” Canerone attended to his second biscuit.

“The blanket,” Lynley said.

Canerone raised his head questioningly. Lynley told him about the drying room, about the chamber above it, about the room’s contents. “Horsham CID have taken the blanket for analysis.”

“Get us a patch of it. We’ll see if we can match the fibres.”

Lynley had no doubt that a match would be made. The fibres would connect Matthew Whateley to the blanket. The blanket would place Matthew Whateley in the room. If Havers had any luck with Daphne, Clive Pritchard would be associated with the room as well. The circle of the crime was beginning to close, overriding Clive’s story about how he spent Saturday night.

“…the analysis on the deposits under the boy’s toenails and on his shoulders and buttocks.” Canerone broke into Lynley’s thoughts.

“Sorry?”

“We’ve completed that analysis. It’s potassium hydroxide, but its two other names might be more familiar to you. Caustic potash. Lye.”

“
Lye?
”

“Odd, isn’t it?”

“Where could Matthew Whateley have come upon lye?”

“If he was held, bound and gagged, somewhere,” Canerone pointed out, “he would have picked up the lye in that location, I should guess.”

Lynley weighed the implications of this against what he had come to know about Bredgar Chambers. As he did so, Canerone continued, his manner affable.

“Every schoolboy knows the basics about lye, that it’s used in soap and detergents. So I should think you’re looking for a storeroom of some sort. Perhaps a place where the cleaning agents are kept. A shed. An outbuilding.” Canerone poured himself a second cup of tea. “Or there’s the possibility that he came into contact with the lye in the boot of the vehicle in which he died. If that’s the case, you may be looking for a service vehicle, one that does hauling and clean-up for the school.”

Canerone went on, and although Lynley made appropriate replies, his thoughts drifted elsewhere. He evaluated the information he had and admitted to himself the possibility that he was twisting the facts to fit a case that he had sketched out in his mind, instead of collecting the facts and building a case upon them. Failing to maintain an objective distance until all the information had been gathered was always the risk of policework. He had walked this perilous route once before, so he recognised his tendency to draw a conclusion too soon. More significantly, he recognised his propensity for letting loyalties from the past colour his interpretation of the present. He put up his guard against that proclivity and forced himself to assess the relative strength of each piece of evidence they had come across.

The danger inherent to an investigation into murder grew out of the need for haste. The more quickly the police gathered pertinent details, the likelier that an arrest would follow. But the attendant hazard was that reality could become easily blurred. The need to fix guilt often resulted in the unconscious suppression of a fact that might otherwise lead in a new direction. Lynley was aware of this. He saw how it was acting upon the investigation now.

The carbon monoxide poisoning had turned the case on its ear. It made the chamber above the drying room an unlikely location for Matthew Whateley’s death. If the new reality was that Matthew Whateley had died elsewhere, then the additional new reality was that—no matter how Lynley longed to pin guilt upon him—Clive Pritchard was not only not involved, but also telling the truth. Inexorably, then, that truth led back to the photographs. The photographs led back to John Corntel.

There had to be a way to verify that the room in Calchus House could not have been a source of the poison that killed the boy. Before moving on, that verification had to be made. Lynley knew beyond a doubt the very man who could make it. Simon Allcourt-St. James.

“Tuesday last,” Colonel Bonnamy said. The words slurred into one another. That was always the case late in the day when his strength diminished. “Tuesday last, Jeannie.”

Jean Bonnamy poured her father less than half a cup of tea. Because he suffered from tremors as he grew more exhausted, a half-cup was all he could manage without spilling, and he refused to allow her to hold a fuller cup to his lips. Rather than suffer the ignominy of being fed and watered like a toddler, he took his tea and his food in smaller portions. His daughter didn’t mind. She knew how important dignity was to him, and little enough remained of that once she’d helped him to dress or bathe or get to the lavatory.