Well-Schooled in Murder

by Elizabeth George

  She had not, however, played it with John Corntel. Emilia felt the sickness swell within her at the thought of John, and she tried to concentrate on something else. The effort was useless. Stubbornly, he intruded, forcing himself upon her, forcing her to dwell upon the distance they had travelled from colleagues and acquaintances nineteen months ago to what they were now. And what was that? she wondered. Friends? Lovers? Two individuals without any other connection, who gave in to a moment of physical weakness? Or perhaps, what was more likely, a cosmic joke, a monumental jest of a laughing God?

  She liked to believe it had all started out innocently between them, with nothing more on her part than a desire to befriend a man who was painfully shy. But the reality was that from the beginning she had seen in John Corntel the possibility of coming home to rest with what she truly wanted. Her friendship with him represented a first link in the chain of husband, family, and security. So although she had told herself initially that she only wanted to help him feel less ill at ease round women, the truth of the matter was that she had only wanted him to feel less ill at ease round her. That newly found comfort in a woman’s presence would lead, she believed, to a more permanent relationship.

  What she had not expected, setting forth so cold-bloodedly to capture the man and secure her own future, was that she would fall in love with him as well, that she would come to care so much about his every thought, about his pain, about his turmoil, about his past, about his future. It had been such a seductive act, this falling in love with him. Until she was in the midst of it, she hadn’t even realised it had happened to her. Once she had come to understand how strong her feelings for John really were, once she had decided to act upon those feelings in the forthright manner that was characteristic of her, everything had fallen apart in the most horrible and irreparable fashion.

  Not the man I thought he was. She laughed inwardly at the ease with which she drew the conclusion. How convenient it would be to dismiss John Corntel as quickly as that. A mistake. A grievous misunderstanding. I thought that you…and you thought that I…oh, let’s forget it, shall we…let’s go back to being friends as we were before…

  But it wasn’t possible. One didn’t move from love to friendship. It wasn’t like switching off the lights. In spite of everything that had passed between them—her horrified tears, his mortification—she knew she still loved and wanted him, even though she no longer understood him at all.

  The opening of the laboratory door roused her from her thoughts, and she looked up from her position on the dais at the front of the room to see that Chas Quilter had come to join the lesson, notebook and textbook under one arm. He smiled his apology for being late and said, “I was—”

  “I know. We’re addressing ourselves to the three problems on the blackboard at the moment. Catch us up as quickly as you can.”

  He nodded and took his accustomed place at the second worktable. There were only eight students in the class—three girls and five boys—and the moment Chas settled in and opened his notebook, two of them whispered his name urgently.

  Emilia waited only long enough to hear one of them say, “What did they want to know?” and the other ask, “What was it like? Are they easy to—” before she spoke firmly.

  “You’ve a lesson to do. See to it. All of you.”

  There was a moment of surprised grumbling at the curt instructions, but Emilia didn’t worry about what offence she might be giving. That couldn’t be helped at the moment. There were considerations beyond the satisfaction of idle curiosity, and the prime consideration was the boy sitting right next to Chas Quilter at the worktable.

  Brian Byrne bore responsibility for much of what had happened to Matthew Whateley. He was house prefect of Erebus. It was his duty to see to it that the house ran smoothly, that the boys adjusted to their life at the school, that rules were followed and discipline was maintained and punishments were meted out where necessary.

  But somewhere along the line, Brian Byrne had failed, and Emilia could see the burden of that failure weighing on the boy in the set of his shoulders, in his downcast eyes, in the tic that was pulling on the right side of his mouth like a form of palsy. Her heart went out to him.

  Brian would face the worst kind of castigation as a result of Matthew Whateley’s death. The rebukes he directed towards himself would be bad enough, but those he received from his father would be worse, stinging and chosen with remarkable acuity. Giles Byrne knew how to denigrate people, knew exactly what weapons to use. He especially knew how to find all the chinks in his own son’s pathetically insubstantial armour. Emilia had seen him do as much on parents’ day last term, running his eyes over Brian’s history paper that had been posted with other papers and projects along the east cloister. Byrne had given it barely a minute’s evaluation before remarking, “Ten pages, is it?” and then with a frown, “I think you’d better do something about your handwriting if you really expect to go to university, Brian.” Then he moved on, dispassionate, uninvolved. As if he were monumentally wearied by it all. A member of the Board of Governors, naturally, could hardly profess an interest that was more marked towards his own son’s work than the work of the other pupils.

  Emilia had been coming down the cloister and had seen the expression on Brian’s face, that blending of hurt, rejection, and shame. She would have gone to him and smoothed past his father’s words, but Chas Quilter came out of the chapel at that moment and seeing him, Brian’s entire demeanour changed. Within seconds he was talking to Chas, laughing and following him in the direction of the dining hall.

  Chas had been very good for Brian. Their friendship had served to draw Brian out of himself allowing him to move into a world of more self-assured and self-possessed students. But as Emilia watched both boys at the worktable now, each one with his eyes cast upon his own paper, she wondered if Brian’s failure with Matthew Whateley would work upon his friendship with Chas. It reflected poorly upon Chas as senior prefect. It reflected poorly upon the whole school. Ultimately it reflected upon his father as well. No matter what happened, Brian stood to lose.

  It was, Emilia thought, so damnably unfair.

  For the second time that afternoon, the laboratory door opened. Emilia felt her muscles constrict in automatic reaction: flight or fight. It was the police.

  When they entered the chemistry laboratory, Lynley saw that Sergeant Havers had not exaggerated her claim that the building and its rooms had not experienced significant alteration since Darwin’s time. The lab was hardly an example of scientific modernity. Gas pipes ran along the ceiling, there were gaps in the parquet floor, the lighting verged upon intolerably dim, and the blackboard was so worn that the problems written on it seemed to melt into the ghosts of hundreds of other problems that lay beneath them.

  The eight pupils present sat upon impossibly tall wooden stools, and they laboured at nicked white worktables that were topped by pitted sheets of pine. Small rectangular porcelain basins broke into the surface of these tables as did rusty iron gas jets and copper taps. To one side of this work area, glass-fronted cabinets lined a wall of the room, and they were filled with graduated cylinders, pipettes, flasks, beakers, and a remarkable assortment of corked bottles containing chemicals and bearing hand-printed labels. High on the top of these cabinets, tall burettes were lined up in wooden stands, ready to be used to mix chemicals together a single drop at a time. Such mixing would be done in the fume cupboard on a work top across the room, and it too was ancient, a structure of glass and mahogany with only a rusting fan for ventilation.

  The entire laboratory should have been gutted years ago. That it had not been modernised gave evidence of the school’s financial situation. It also spoke of the multiple pressures Alan Lockwood faced to keep the school running, to encourage new applicants, and somehow to raise the funds required to bring all the facilities up-to-date.

  As if she recognised the implicit condemnation in Lynley’s observation, the teacher walked to the fume cupboard and lowered it
s front window. A filmy residue clouded the glass. She turned back to the pupils who had one by one stopped their work to stare at Lynley and Havers.

  “You’ve problems to complete,” she informed them and crossed the room to the door. “I’m Emilia Bond. The chemistry teacher. How may I help you?”

  She spoke crisply, with assurance, but Lynley did not miss the fact that a pulse beat rapidly in her throat.

  “Inspector Lynley, Sergeant Havers, Scotland Yard CID,” he replied, although he could tell from the young woman’s behaviour that the introduction was largely unnecessary. Emilia Bond knew quite well who they were and, undoubtedly, why they had come to her laboratory. “We’d like to have some time with one of your students, if we may. Brian Byrne.”

  Every eye save the teacher’s went to a boy who sat next to Chas Quilter. He did not immediately look up but rather kept his attention on the notebook open in front of him, over which he held a pencil. It did not move.

  “Bri,” Chas Quilter murmured.

  At this, the boy raised his head.

  Lynley knew that Brian Byrne, as an upper sixth student, would have to be either seventeen or eighteen years old, but he looked both unaccountably younger and older at the same time. The youth came from a rounded face without the emerging definition of features, the toughening of skin, or the incipient lines at mouth and eyes that were the signs of approaching adulthood marking the faces of his peers. On the other hand, the maturity came from an odd combination of hairline and physique. The former was already receding and would probably leave him bald before he was thirty years old. The latter was muscular, like a wrestler’s body that had been developed through the use of weights.

  As Brian began to slip off his stool, Emilia Bond spoke. Her body moved slightly, an unconscious block between Brian and the police. “Is this necessary, Inspector? The lesson ends in less than thirty minutes. You can’t see him then?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Lynley replied. He made a final survey of the room. Three girls: two leggy, long-haired, and attractive, and a third resembling a timorous mouse. Five boys: three nice-looking and well-built, one very scholarly with spectacles and a slightly humped back, and Brian Byrne somehow the odd man out.

  Brian joined them at the door. Lynley nodded his thanks to Emilia Bond.

  “If you’ll take us to your room,” he told Brian, “I think we’ll have the privacy we need.”

  The boy said only, “It’s this way,” and preceded them down the corridor and out of the building.

  Erebus House was directly across from the science building, with Mopsus House to the west of it, Calchus House just to the east, and beyond it, Ion House, the home of the sixth form social club. They walked down a path, crossed a stretch of pavement down which cars, small lorries, and minivans could make deliveries to the buildings, and went into Erebus House by the same door that they had used earlier that day.

  Brian’s room was on the ground floor, adjacent to the door that gave access to the private quarters of John Corntel, the housemaster. Like the other rooms in the building, Brian’s was not locked. He shoved open the door and stepped back to give Lynley and Havers entrance before him.

  The room was fairly typical boarding school fare. It would be euphemistically called a bed-sitting room in the school prospectus, an appellation whose verity depended upon the presence of a single bed, a chair, a desk, and three bookshelves along with the requisite pressed-wood cupboard and a small chest of drawers. The reality was that it was little more than a cell with a single leaded casement window, one pane of which was broken. A black sock had been stuffed into the gap to keep out the cold. The air smelled of wet wool.

  Brian closed the door behind them without speaking. He shifted from foot to foot, shoved one hand in his trouser pocket, and waited, jiggling some coins or keys.

  Lynley was in no hurry to begin the interview. He examined Brian’s choice of room decoration as Sergeant Havers took a seat on the narrow bed, removed her jacket, and brought forth her notebook.

  The walls, Lynley saw, were sparsely adorned. They held only a small collection of photographs. Three were of school athletic teams—the rugby first fifteen, the cricket first eleven, the tennis first six. Brian was featured in none of them, but it took only a moment to ascertain the common element in each picture. Chas Quilter. The senior prefect was also the subject of a fourth photograph, this one with a girl held to his side, her arms round him, her head resting on his chest, and the wind blowing their hair about and scuttling brilliant clouds across the sky. A girlfriend, no doubt, Lynley thought. It was an unusual picture to find hanging in another boy’s room.

  Lynley pulled the chair from beneath the desk and gestured Brian into it. He himself remained standing, leaning one shoulder against the wall near the window. The only view it provided was of a bit of lawn, of an alder just beginning to leaf, and of the side door of Calchus House.

  “How does one get into the sixth form social club?” Lynley asked.

  The question obviously took the boy by surprise. His eyes—an indefinite shade somewhere between blue and grey—darkened as the pupils enlarged in reaction. He didn’t immediately respond.

  “The initiation?” Lynley prompted.

  Brian’s mouth twitched. “What does that have to do—”

  “With Matthew Whateley’s death?” Lynley asked and smiled. “Nothing at all, as far as I know. I’m merely curious. Wondering whether schools have changed much since I was at Eton.”

  “Mr. Corntel went to Eton.”

  “We were there together.”

  “You were mates?” Brian’s eyes flashed to Chas’ pictures.

  “Fairly close ones at the time, although we’d lost track of one another through the years. These aren’t the best circumstances under which to renew a friendship, are they?”

  “Rotten to have to renew it at all,” Brian said. “Good friends should stay good friends.”

  “Chas is that to you?”

  “My best friend,” he said frankly. “We’re going up to Cambridge together in October. If we’re accepted. Chas will be. His marks are good and he’ll do well on his A-levels next term.”

  “And you?”

  Brian lifted a hand, wiggled it back and forth. “Not a certainty. I’ve plenty of brains, but I don’t always use them as well as I could.” It sounded like an adult’s evaluation of him, something that would be written home to a parent.

  “Your father could help you get into Cambridge, I assume.”

  “If I wanted his help. I don’t.”

  “I see.” That was admirable enough, a determination to make it on his own without the considerable influence that a man of Giles Byrne’s reputation could wield. “And the initiation to the social club?”

  Brian grimaced. “Four pints of bitter and”—his face flushed hotly—“getting sauced, sir.”

  The expression was unfamiliar to Lynley. He asked for elucidation, and Brian continued, giving an awkward laugh.

  “You know. Putting hot sauce—or deep-heating rub—on your…you know.” Warily, his eyes went to Havers.

  “Ah. I see. That’s getting sauced? Rather uncomfortable, I’d think. Are you a member of the club? You’ve gone through the initiation?”

  “Sort of. I mean, I went through the initiation but I got sick. Still, I’m in.” He frowned, as if realising what he had just done in admitting to the fact of an initiation at all. “Did the Headmaster ask you to suss this out, sir?”

  Lynley smiled. “No. I was curious.”

  “It’s just that we’re not supposed to do that sort of thing. But you know how schools are. Especially here. There’s not much else to do.”

  “What does the social club do when it gets together?”

  “Parties. On Friday nights usually.”

  “All the upper sixth pupils belong?”

  “No. Just people who want to.”

  “What happens to the rest of the upper sixth?”

  “They’re losers, aren’t they?
They keep to themselves. Don’t have mates. You know.”

  “Was there a party this past Friday night?”

  “There’s a party every Friday night. This one was smaller than usual, though. Lots of the upper sixth were gone for the weekend. Lower sixth and fifth as well. There was a hockey tournament in the North.”

  “You didn’t want to go?”

  “Too much prep. And an exam this morning that I was cramming for as well.”

  “Lord. I remember how that is. Did that upper sixth party Friday night keep you from seeing to the younger boys here in Erebus House?” Even as he asked the question, Lynley hated himself for the ease with which he had drawn the boy to this point. There had been nothing clever about it, just an admission of similar background and experience to form a loose bond, then each question drawing him further and further out of the protective shell everyone wore—guilty or innocent—when questioned by the police.

  “I was back by eleven.” Brian became guarded with this response. “I didn’t check on them. I just went to bed.”

  “When you left the sixth form club, were there other seniors there?”

  “A few.”

  “Had they been there all along? Had anyone left the party at all during the evening?”

  Brian was no fool. His face told Lynley that even if he had not done so before, he saw the direction the questions were taking. He hesitated before saying, “Clive Pritchard was in and out. He’s a bloke from Calchus House.”

  “A prefect?”

  Brian looked wryly amused. “Not prefect material, if you know what I mean.”