Well-Schooled in Murder (58 page)

Brian’s head jerked away. The tic that Lynley had seen plague his lip before now pulled at it in a vicious spasm. The boy pressed his knuckles to his face to control the twitching muscle.

“Are you listening to me? Do you hear me, Brian?” his father demanded. “Because if you think I’m going to sit here and watch you—”

“Get out,” Brian said.

His father leaned across the table and grabbed the boy’s arm, wrenching him forward. “You think you’re being clever, don’t you? You’ve got me so I’ll beg. Is that it? Is that what you want? Is that what this performance is all about? Well, you’d better think again, lad. Because if you don’t, I’ll walk out that door and leave you to face this alone. Is that clear? Do you understand? You’ll face this alone.”

“Get out,” Brian said.

“I’m warning you, Brian. This is no game now. You listen to me. Damn you, listen. You can do that much. You
are
still capable of that much, aren’t you?”

Brian tore himself from his father’s grasp. The effort thrust him back against his chair. “Get
out
!” he cried. “Go back to London. Have it off with little Rheva, or whatever her name is. But just get out. Leave me alone. That’s what you do best. It always was.”

“Christ Jesus, you’re like your mother,” Byrne said. “Just
exactly
like. With nothing on your mind save a passing interest in what kind of stimulation goes on between other people’s legs. You’re pathetic. The both of you.”

“Then go!” Brian shouted.

“I wouldn’t give you that pleasure,” Byrne hissed. He reached for his cigarettes, lit one. The match flame trembled. “Ask him whatever you like, Inspector. I wash my hands of him.”

“I’ve no need of you,” Brian hurled back. “I’ve friends enough. Plenty of them.”

No longer
, Lynley thought. “Chas Quilter’s dead,” he said. “He hanged himself this evening.”

Brian whirled to him. “That’s a lie!”

“It’s the truth,” St. James said from his place by the window. “We’ve just come from Stoke Poges, Brian. Chas went to see Cecilia first. And afterwards, he hanged himself from that yew tree in the churchyard. You know the one.”

“No!”

“I imagine he felt that closed the circle of the crime,” Lynley said. “Perhaps he chose the yew tree because he didn’t know exactly where you’d put Matthew’s body. Had he known which tree you’d left Matthew under on Saturday night, I’m certain that’s where he would have hanged himself. It would have been a form of justice that appealed to him. Chas would have wanted that.”

“I
didn’t…
” But the affliction in the boy’s voice gave him away.

“You did, Brian. For friendship. For love. As a way of securing the devotion of the single person whom you admired the most. You killed Matthew Whateley for Chas, didn’t you?”

He began to cry.

His father said, “God.
No
,” and nothing more.

Lynley spoke gently, like a parent relating a bedtime story and not the tale of a barren crime. “I imagine that Chas came to you late Tuesday night, perhaps even on Wednesday. He’d had a phone call from Cecilia, he’d known she was in labour, and he’d done something terribly foolish in order to go to her. He’d taken the minibus. It was an act of desperation, to be sure, and he was just desperate enough to try it. Frank Orten was gone on his regular night off. Chas wouldn’t be missed for a few hours. But when he returned, Matthew Whateley saw him. Chas came to tell you that.”

The boy’s hands were at his face. He wept against his closed fists.

“He was worried,” Lynley said. “He knew Matthew might report what he’d seen. He told you that. He just needed someone to talk to. He didn’t intend that anything should happen to Matthew. He probably just wanted your reassurance, the kind of thing friends give each other all the time. But you saw a way to calm his worries, didn’t you? At the same time as you won his friendship forever.”

“He was my friend. He
was
.”

“Indeed. He was. But there was a chance you would lose him when he went to Cambridge, especially if you weren’t accepted yourself. So you needed a way to bind him to you, to have a connection with him beyond that tenuous old school tie. Matthew Whateley provided it. As did Clive Pritchard. Clive helped you without even knowing he was doing so, didn’t he, Brian? You knew he wanted to find the duplicate tape Matthew had made of the bullying. You knew Matthew was scheduled to go to the Morants’. So I imagine you masterminded the entire scheme for Clive. He would nab Matthew after lunch on Friday and go on to games himself—a bit late, no doubt, but that was probably par for the course for Clive—while you would put an off-games chit with Matthew’s name on it in Mr. Pitt’s pigeonhole. Everyone benefitted from your plan. Clive was able to have his fun with Matthew—torturing him with lit cigarettes on Friday after games in the chamber above the drying room in order to encourage Matthew to reveal the location of that duplicate tape—Chas would be able to rest easy in the knowledge that all his secrets were safe once Matthew was dead, and you would be able to offer Chas irrefutable proof of your infinite friendship—Matthew Whateley’s corpse.”

Giles Byrne spoke. “It’s not true. It can’t be. Tell him. It
can’t
be.”

“It was clever, Brian. A tribute to sheer, audacious intelligence. You would kill Matthew to protect Chas, but Clive would think he himself was responsible for the boy’s death. I imagine you took Miss Bond’s school keys from her pigeonhole in the masters’ common room. It would be easy enough to do so, and she wouldn’t miss them on the weekend. Then late Friday night you fetched Matthew from Calchus House. You took him to the chemistry lab, killed him in the fume cupboard, and returned his body to Calchus House so that when Clive next went to see him, he would find him dead and—not knowing how he died—assume responsibility. He would panic, come to you for advice. And you would offer to dispose of the body. Clive would be grateful. He would even help. He would hold his tongue and protect you, because in protecting you, he would assume he was protecting himself. But Chas knew the truth, didn’t he? I suppose you had to tell him. It was the only way to reveal your supreme act of love for him. So he knew. Perhaps not at once. But eventually. When the time was right for you to reap his gratitude.”

Alan Lockwood protested. “How could all this have happened? There are
hundreds
of pupils…there’s a duty master…it’s an impossibility. I don’t believe it.”

“Most of the pupils were on exeats. Others were at a hockey tournament. Still others had been partying heavily and were no doubt sleeping off a booze-up. The school was virtually deserted as a result.” Even now, Lynley found that he could not add that the duty master—John Corntel—had forgotten to patrol, that Brian probably knew Corntel wasn’t alone for the evening, that since his room adjoined Corntel’s, he would surely know that Emilia Bond was with him and he would suspect how they would be spending their time, that, as a result, the school was his to do with as he pleased.

“But why?” Lockwood demanded. “What had Chas Quilter to fear from anyone?”

“He knew the rules, Mr. Lockwood. He’d got a girl pregnant. He’d taken one of the school vehicles to go to her. He’d hidden the truth about Clive Pritchard’s bullying of Harry Morant. In his mind, he was the strongest candidate for expulsion, and he believed that expulsion from Bredgar Chambers would destroy his future. His mistake was in telling Brian that. For Brian immediately saw how to use it in order to win Chas’ love. But Brian didn’t take into account that Chas would feel the weight of both guilt and responsibility, not to mention the anxiety of potential discovery. You see, the chance of discovery didn’t end with Matthew Whateley’s death. Chas found out that the boy had written to Jean Bonnamy about seeing him Tuesday night. He was with us when Sergeant Havers and I found the draft of a letter to her. I’ve no doubt that Chas spoke to Brian about that. And Brian saw that while he could do nothing to assuage Chas’ guilt or lighten the burden of responsibility that weighed upon him, he could do something about the potential for discovery. So he decided to remove the final possibility of endangerment to Chas. He went after Jean Bonnamy, as another gift of love.”

Brian looked up. His eyes were dull. “Am I supposed to confirm what you’ve said? Is that what you want?”

“Brian, for God’s sake,” his father pleaded.

But Lynley shook his head. “There’s no need. We’ll have the forensic evidence from the lab, the minibus, and the chamber in Calchus House. We have Jean Bonnamy’s description of you, and no doubt we’ll find traces of her blood, her hairs, and fragments of her skin on your clothes. We have your knowledge of chemistry. And ultimately, I should guess, we’ll have Clive Pritchard telling the truth. Unlike Chas, I shouldn’t think Clive’s going to be willing to kill himself rather than implicate you in Matthew Whateley’s death once he learns how the boy really died. So there’s no need, Brian. I’ve not brought you here for that.”

“Then for what?”

Lynley removed the Bredgar Chambers ties from his pocket. He uncoiled them on the table and then loosened the knot that held them together.

“One of these ties is predominantly yellow,” Lynley said. “The other is blue. Will you tell me which is which, Brian?”

The boy lifted a hand a few inches off the table. He dropped it weakly, as incapable of making the decision now as he had been when choosing the correct jersey to wear for a hockey game two days before. “I…I don’t know. I can’t tell. It’s the colours. I—”

“No!” Giles Byrne lurched to his feet. “God damn you. This is enough.”

Lynley stood. He wrapped the ties round his hand and looked down at the boy. He wanted to feel that mixture of rage and glory, that black satisfaction of a murder avenged and a killer sent on his way to the bar of justice. But he knew quite well there was no possibility that even the most rudimentary vengeance might grow from the ruins of the past few days. “When you killed him,” he asked heavily, “did you know Matthew Whateley was your brother?”

Sergeant Havers used the Headmaster’s study to make the requisite telephone calls to the Horsham and Slough police. They were courtesy calls. The formal exchange of information would come later, after statements were compiled and reports were written.

St. James and Lockwood remained in the council room with Brian Bryne while Lynley went in search of the boy’s father. Giles Byrne had left the room only moments after Lynley asked his final question, not remaining to hear Brian’s answer, not remaining to face the confusion, the dawning comprehension, and ultimately the horror as each crowded past the other across his son’s face.

Brian had seen the reality quickly enough. It was as if Lynley’s single question had unlocked a series of memories within him, each one more wrenching than the last. He said only, “It was Eddie. It was
Eddie
, wasn’t it? And my mother. That night in the study…They were there…” before he gave a strangled cry. “I didn’t
know…
” He lowered his head to the table, burying his face in the crook of his arm.

After that, the story came out in disjointed pieces, erupting between Brian’s wretched sobs. It was not so very different from Lynley’s conjectures. Central to the tale was Chas Quilter: whom Brian had accompanied to Stoke Poges late Saturday night; who in his distraction had not noticed the blanket-shrouded figure on the floor in the rear of the minibus; whose need to see Cecilia alone had prompted him to agree wholeheartedly when Brian had offered to wait for him outside the Streaders’ house in the bus; who did not know that Brian had used the time in Stoke Poges to dump Matthew’s body in St. Giles’ churchyard.

Listening to Brian, Lynley saw the manner in which Matthew’s murder, committed under the guise of friendship, was in actuality a form of insidious blackmail in which the payoff was to be a lifetime of loyalty and love.

Chas had heard the story of Matthew Whateley’s disappearance on Sunday afternoon with everyone else. But unlike everyone else, when given the information that the boy’s body had been found in Stoke Poges, Chas knew at once not only the identity of the killer but also the motive behind the crime. Had Brian rid himself of Matthew’s body in any other location, Chas might have spoken up to see that justice was done. But Brian was far too clever to allow Chas the option of unburdening his conscience, so he had created a set of circumstances in which Chas’ speaking up—or pointing the finger of accusation at anyone else—meant that he would be condemning himself, and condemning himself meant abandoning Cecilia when she needed him most. There was absolutely no way for the senior prefect to win, and no way for him to emerge with a conscience that was not stricken by remorse. So he had removed himself from the game.

Now, with a glance that told St. James to stay with the boy, Lynley left the room. The corridor outside was dark, but at the far end the door to the foyer stood open and beyond it Lynley could see a pale light against the stone floor. The chapel was open.

Giles Byrne was sitting beneath his memorial to Edward Hsu. If he heard Lynley’s footsteps, he gave no sign. Instead, he remained upright in the pew. Every muscle of his body seemed painfully controlled.

When Lynley joined him, he spoke. “What’s going to happen?”

“Horsham CID will send a car for him. And for Clive Pritchard. The school’s in Horsham’s jurisdiction.”

“And then?”