Well-Schooled in Murder (59 page)

“Then it’s in the hands of the prosecutors.”

“How convenient for you that is. Your job is done, isn’t it? Wrapped up in a tidy little package. You go on your way, content with the truth having been revealed. The rest of us stay here and deal with it.”

Lynley felt an inexplicable need to defend and deny, but he quelled it, too exhausted and depressed to make the attempt.

“She did it all deliberately,” Byrne said abruptly. “My wife didn’t love Edward Hsu. I’m not sure Pamela has ever loved anyone. But she needed admiration. She needed to see desire in men’s faces. In the end, she needed more than anything to hurt me. It always comes down to that, doesn’t it, when a marriage is falling apart?” In the half-darkness of the church, Byrne’s face looked skeletal, hollowed by the shadows under his eyes and beneath his cheekbones. “How did you know my wife was Matthew’s mother?”

“Your story about his birth in Exeter didn’t hold true. You denied knowing his mother, yet an adoption couldn’t have been arranged as you described it: with only you, a solicitor, and the Whateleys involved. So it came down to only two possibilities. Either the mother was involved in the process of adoption, or she’d abandoned the baby, leaving him to you, the legal—if not the natural—father.”

Byrne nodded his acceptance. “She used Eddie for revenge. Our marriage was running thin when he came into our lives. We had so little in common in the first place. I’d been attracted to her youth and beauty, her vivacity. She’d been on the rebound from a broken engagement and was flattered by my devotion. But you can’t build a marriage on that, can you? It began to fall apart soon enough. By the time we had Brian—as a way to salvage our relationship—it was as good as over, at least on my part. She was a shallow woman, without much substance. I let her know it.”

Lynley reflected on the manner in which Giles Byrne had probably revealed his disenchantment to his wife. No doubt it had been done with little concern about her feelings, little need to spare her pride. Byrne’s next words confirmed this.

“She was no match for me in the arena of derision, Inspector. But she knew how I loved Edward Hsu, so she struck back at me through him. To Pamela’s way of thinking, seducing Edward would serve two purposes. She would punish me while she proved to herself that she still had some value. Edward was merely an instrument to effect those ends. She used him well, right in my study where she could be relatively certain that I’d walk in on them eventually. Which I did.”

“Brian mentioned the study a few minutes ago.”

Byrne raised a hand to his eyes, then dropped it. Age showed in his movements; it was underscored by the lines in his face. “He wasn’t even five years old. I’d come upon them—Pamela and Eddie—in the study. We had a violent row. Brian walked in on it.” Byrne seemed to be watching the play of candlelight upon the melancholy face of the stone angel atop the altar. “I can still see him standing by the door, his hand on the knob, holding on to a stuffed animal and taking it all in. His mother naked and doing nothing about putting on a shred of clothing; his father in a rage, calling her a two-quid whore while she railed at him about his own desire to bed Edward; and Edward, cowering against the cushions of the sofa, trying to cover himself up. And weeping. God, that horrible weeping.”

“How soon after that did he kill himself?”

“Less than a week. He left our house that night and returned to the school. I tried to talk to him repeatedly, tried to explain to him that it wasn’t his fault. But he believed that he had dishonoured our friendship. It was no matter to Edward that Pamela had set out upon a course of seduction that only a dead man might have been able to resist. As far as he was concerned, he should have been strong enough to resist her. But he wasn’t. So he killed himself. Because he knew that I loved him. Because I had been his friend and tutor. Because he had made love to his friend and tutor’s wife.”

“Then he never knew about the pregnancy at all.”

“He never knew.”

“Why did your wife carry the child? Why didn’t she abort?”

“Because she wanted me to remember the manner in which she’d taken her revenge. What better way for me to remember it than seeing her growing bigger every day with Edward Hsu’s child.”

“Yet you didn’t divorce her at once. Why not?”

“Because of Edward. Had I only had the sense to hide my contempt for Pamela’s inadequacies, she would never have sought him out in the first place. Can you understand? I felt responsible for Pamela’s behaviour, for Edward’s suicide, for the baby’s existence. It seemed to me that the only way I could make any expiation at all was to keep Pamela in my life until the baby was born, in the hope that she would tire of the game and give him over to me to dispose of.”

“You didn’t intend to keep the child yourself.”

Byrne glanced at him drily. “Pamela would have clung to that baby like the living embodiment of maternal devotion had she even suspected that I wanted him. As it was, I didn’t want him. I just wanted to provide for him.”

“I take it that Matthew wasn’t born in Exeter.”

“In Ipswich. Pamela stayed in a home there, the sort of place where one can discreetly give birth and then move on to better things. Which is exactly what she did as soon as Matthew was delivered. As the father of record, I placed the baby in a foster home while Pamela returned to London, posing as a grieving mother whose infant had been stillborn. She mourned suitably for a few weeks. I filed for a divorce which she didn’t contest. Later I returned for Matthew and made the arrangements for the Whateleys to get him.”

“Brian never knew about any of this?”

“He never knew. He saw that scene in the study but he didn’t know what it meant. And he never met Matthew.”

“Until Bredgar Chambers.”

“Yes.” Byrne looked round the chapel. At the foot of the stone angel, a guttering candle spilled its wax and went out. The scent of its extinguished wick sharpened the air. “I thought it was the right thing to do, sending Matthew to his father’s school. Just as I’d done with Brian. Just as is done over and over again. Generations of fathers handing down some sort of pathetic torch to their sons, expecting them to carry it, expecting them to use it to light a world that they themselves have utterly failed to illuminate.” Byrne reached for an old hymnal from the back of the pew in front of him. Uselessly he opened it, closed it, opened it again. “I thought it best that he be made into a man. I thought it best not to coddle him. I thought it best that he be made to stand on his own two feet. I thought it
best…
He’s eighteen years old, Inspector. I’m fifty-four. And I’ve been sitting here asking a God I don’t believe in to let me exchange places with my son somehow. Let this happen to me—the arrest, the trial, the publicity, the punishment. Let me bear this burden for him. Let me at least do that.”

Absalom, Absalom
, Lynley thought. It was the cry of every father who had stubbornly failed to bind his life and his love to his son. But just like David’s mourning the death of Absalom, this sudden flowering of Giles Byrne’s solicitude could not change reality. It came far too late.

22

The night’s storm had tapered to a drizzle as Lynley pulled the Bentley away from the east entrance to the Bredgar Chambers quadrangle. Ahead of them, the unmarked police car from Horsham CID passed under the trees and disappeared round a curve in the drive. Aside from the lights that glowed intermittently upon the paths between buildings, the grounds were dark and deserted. If a duty master walked a designated round to check upon buildings and the whereabouts of pupils, he was nowhere to be seen.

In the rear seat of the car, Sergeant Havers yawned. “I can understand how Brian got Matthew from Calchus House to the science building,” she said. “Poor little bloke probably thought he was being rescued in the middle of the night by his own house prefect. He’d cooperate well enough, wouldn’t he, even if Brian hadn’t removed the gag or untied his hands. And by the time he realised his saviour was leading him in the wrong direction—to the science building and not to Erebus House—no doubt Brian made short work of tying his feet again. And carrying him into the building. And tossing him into the fume cupboard. But what I can’t see is how Brian managed to get Matthew’s body from the science building back to Calchus House and then from Calchus House to the minibus the next night without being seen.”

“There was no one to see him in the dead of night on Friday,” Lynley replied. “Corntel wasn’t patrolling the school, most of the pupils were gone, the others were asleep. It’s a short enough distance from Calchus House to the science building. Even carrying Matthew over his shoulder, I should guess it took no more than thirty seconds—perhaps less—to dash across the lawn, across the lane, and back into Calchus House. The real risk was on Saturday night, but that was minimised by the fact that Brian was no longer working alone. Clive Pritchard, thinking he himself was responsible for Matthew Whateley’s death, was there to help, all the time assuming that Brian was saving him from discovery and never realising the truth was just the opposite.”

“The vehicle shed is just down the lane from Calchus House,” Havers said thoughtfully.

Lynley nodded. “They took the blanket from the attic, rolled Matthew into it, and carried him down to the vehicle shed. It was late, and as long as they stayed off the lane and kept themselves under the protection of the trees, they ran little risk of being seen. Since the lane itself is a service road and not a main artery of the school, even if they had walked along it carrying the blanket between them, chances are no one would have come along.”

“Doesn’t that lane go right by the porter’s lodge?” St. James asked.

“It sweeps around past it about fifty yards away. But even if Frank Orten had been able to hear the bus at that distance—even if hearing a vehicle might have raised his suspicions in the first place—he was gone that night. The boys knew that. Elaine Roly had told Brian Byrne. And even if Orten had returned while they had the bus, he parks his own car in a garage near the lodge so he wouldn’t necessarily know the bus had been taken.”

“Then once Clive helped load Matthew into the minibus,” Sergeant Havers said, “he was free to skip on to Cissbury, where he established his alibi.”

“While Brian and Chas headed for Stoke Poges.”

“Rather late to go calling on someone,” Havers pointed out. “It must have been well after midnight when they got there.”

“But Cecilia knew that the Streaders were spending the weekend with their daughter,” St. James added. “She told the police that Sunday night. So it hardly mattered what time Chas arrived, as long as he arrived eventually.”

“She knew he would have to hitchhike or take the minibus again,” Lynley finished, “so in either case, she wouldn’t have been expecting him early.”

“What a bloody waste,” Havers said in summation. “Inspector, why didn’t Chas Quilter just tell the truth? Why did he kill himself? Why did he choose death?”

“He felt trapped, Havers. He saw his situation as hopeless. Beyond that, any move he might have made would have resulted in a betrayal of someone else.”

“He wouldn’t sneak,” she concluded contemptuously. “That’s what it came down to, didn’t it? That’s the sum total of what he’d learned at Bredgar Chambers. To withhold the truth out of loyalty to one’s mates. How pathetic. What miserable creatures these places breed.”

Lynley felt the impact of his sergeant’s words. He didn’t respond. He couldn’t. There was too much accuracy in what she had said.

They drove past the porter’s lodge. Elaine Roly was standing on the narrow front porch, opening a tattered umbrella. Framed in the doorway behind her, Frank Orten held a sleeping child in his arms, the older of his two grandsons.

“How long d’you suppose she’ll keep hoping to bag him?” Havers asked as the lights from the Bentley passed over them for an instant. “After seventeen years, you’d think she’d have given up.”

“Not if she loves him,” Lynley answered. “People give up on all sorts of other things, Havers. But they rarely, if ever, give up on love.”

Although it was midnight when the knock sounded on their cottage door, Kevin Whateley and his wife were prepared for visitors. They had received the telephone call from Bredgar Chambers before eleven, so they knew that the Scotland Yard detectives would be paying a final visit to their home that night.

The police brought a third person with them, a whip-thin crippled man who wore a steel brace through the heel of his left shoe and walked with a twisted gait. Detective Inspector Lynley introduced him, but Kevin heard only the word
forensic
before he drifted out of the conversation and sat on a chair at the dining table, divorced from the others who remained in the sitting room. Patsy asked them if they would have coffee. All three refused.