Well-Schooled in Murder

by Elizabeth George

  “Brian can’t do that?”

  “House prefects should be boys who aren’t needy themselves.”

  “Needy in what way?”

  “For friendship. For approval. Anxious to be liked. That doesn’t work well in a prefect. Never has. Never will. How can a lad discipline younger boys if he’s so intent upon being liked by one and all? And that’s Brian for you. If I’d had anything to do with it, he’d not have been selected.”

  “But doesn’t the fact that Brian Byrne became a prefect indicate that he had someone’s strong approval in the first place?”

  “Indicates nothing.” Orten cut the air with his hand. “Only who the father is, and what the Headmaster does when the Board of Governors tells him to jump.”

  A piece of china clattered to the floor in the next room. A howl accompanied it. Elaine Roly got to her feet. “Let me see to that, Frank,” she said and left them.

  Orten spoke again as soon as the door closed behind her. “Works hard, does Elaine. John Corntel doesn’t come near to appreciating the kind of matron he has in that woman. But you’ve come for the clothes, not to hear about Corntel. Come along with you both.”

  He led them out of the house, about fifty yards along the main drive to where a secondary lane, bordered thickly by lime trees, veered off to the right. Orten marched ahead of them, his blue cap pulled low upon his forehead. They walked without conversation, Havers reading through her notebook, underlining here and there with a vague, growling mutter while Lynley at her side drove his fists into the pockets of his trousers and thought about Frank Orten’s and Elaine Roly’s statements.

  The structure of any institution generally made it a place where people at all levels jockeyed for whatever power seemed within their grasp. That was no different here than it was at the Yard. While it seemed reasonable to conclude that a school’s headmaster would wield the most influence, Orten’s words suggested otherwise. The Board of Governors—and any examination of the board led inescapably to Giles Byrne—seemed to weigh heavily in the balance of power. Matthew Whateley had to fit into the picture somewhere. Lynley was sure of it. He’d been chosen for the governors’ scholarship, after all, perhaps against the wishes of the school’s headmaster. He’d been sent to live in Erebus House, where Byrne himself had once been a student. As had Edward Hsu. There was a rudimentary pattern in all of it.

  The unmistakable, acrid odour of smoke became more pronounced as they reached a fork in the lane. Frank Orten led them once again to the right, but Lynley paused, looking down the other fork at the buildings a short distance away. He recognised the back of the science building and the four boys’ houses. Calchus was the closest.

  “What you want is this way, Inspector,” Orten said impatiently.

  The right fork was some twenty-five yards long, and it dead-ended at a large doorless shed. This housed three minibuses, a small tractor, an open-back lorry, and four bicycles, three of which sported flat tyres. Only the roof and walls protected the school’s utility vehicles from inclement weather, for the windows were paneless, and if the front of the building had ever been hung with doors, they had long since been removed. It was a decidedly unattractive structure.

  Frank Orten said, “Essentials are last to be seen to and worked upon these days. Spit and polish on exteriors to catch the public eye, and to hell with what parents aren’t likely to see.”

  “The school’s in disrepair,” Lynley remarked. “We couldn’t help noticing that yesterday.”

  “But not the theatre. Or the sports hall. Or the chapel. Or that smart sculpture garden people seem to fancy so much. Or anything else that might be looked at on parents’ day. And those’ll keep enrollment up, won’t they?” He gave a bark of sardonic laughter.

  “The school has financial trouble, I take it.”

  “You take it dead-on.” Orten paused in his march, looking west where through the lime trees the distant chapel caught the morning light. The hollow sound of a bell began its call for morning prayer. It resembled a dirge. Orten turned away with a shake of his head. “Time was, Bredgar was the best of the lot. Pupils off to Cambridge—to Oxford—as fast as they could go.”

  “That’s changed?”

  “Well changed. But I’m not the one to speak of it.” He smiled bitterly. “Porters know their place, Inspector. The Headmaster sees to it I’m reminded of mine often enough.”

  Without waiting for a reply, Orten strode off the paved lane at the edge of the vehicle shed and led them round the corner of the building into a scarred plot of land where the school’s rubbish was burned. It was an area redolent with the odours of smoke, damp ashes, burnt weeds, and clippings. These emanated from a cone-shaped pile of smouldering debris. To one side of this pile sat a green wheelbarrow with the clothing in question lumped inside it.

  “Seemed best to leave it where it was,” Orten said. “Not on the fire, but as close as possible.”

  Lynley scanned the ground. The soil was hard-packed, threaded with mangled, beaten weeds. While footprints showed upon it, the impressions left were too vague to be made any decent use of—here a toe print, there a heel, here part of a sole. There was nothing substantial.

  “Have a look at this, sir,” Sergeant Havers said from the side of the pile nearest the vehicle shed. She had lit a cigarette, and she used it to gesture at the ground. “Decent print, that. Woman’s?”

  Lynley joined her and squatted to look at the print. It had sunk into the softest area near the fire, where a layer of ash had formed a muddy bed. He saw by looking that it was a gym shoe, probably typical to the wardrobe of every person on the campus. “Possibly a woman,” he admitted. “Or one of the younger boys.”

  “Or an older lad with small feet.” Havers sighed. “Where’s Holmes when you need him? He’d crawl through this muck and have the case solved in a quarter-hour.”

  “Soldier on, Sergeant,” Lynley replied.

  As she continued her examination of the area, Lynley went back to the clothing in the wheelbarrow. Frank Orten stood to one side, gazing in the direction of the vehicle shed. His own lodge stood at the other side of a large expanse of open field beyond it.

  Lynley reached for his spectacles, put them on, and pulled several neatly folded plastic bags out of his pocket. He donned latex gloves, although even as he did so, he realised the uselessness of such precaution. By now the clothes had so many contaminants upon them after a period on the rubbish heap followed by a night in the wheelbarrow, that it was ridiculous to assume that any usable evidence might be gleaned from them once they were turned over to a forensic team.

  There were seven items altogether, their charred exteriors filthy with soot. Lynley looked at the blazer first. It bore no name tag, but ragged threads along the neckline gave indication that one had been removed. This same applied to the trousers and the shirt. He looked up when he came to the tie and saw the pair of shoes beneath it.

  “How did you happen to find all this?” he asked Frank Orten.

  Orten’s eyes shifted to him in preparation for his answer. “I do the burning on Saturday afternoon. Always have. Always make certain the fire’s well out before I go on to other things. Noticed on Saturday night that it’d sprung up again. Came to have a look.”

  Lynley straightened slowly. “Saturday night?” he repeated. “Saturday night?”

  The man’s face was guarded. “Saturday night,” he replied.

  Across the rubbish pile, Lynley saw Sergeant Havers stop her exploration, toss her cigarette to one side. One hand went to her hip. “Matthew Whateley was reported missing on Sunday,” she said. Lynley saw that her face was flushed. “And you never got round to mentioning these clothes until Monday night even though you’d found them on Saturday? Why’s that, Mr. Orten?”

  “Thought it was a bit of a prank when I first saw the fire. When I went out to check on it, it was dark. I just shovelled some soil onto it to put it out. I didn’t see the clothes then, not until the next day. Didn’t think much about it at
the time. Didn’t know a boy’d gone missing until Monday morning.”

  “But even then, we were here most of the day yesterday. Didn’t you even think to tell us then? Do you know what kind of position suppressing evidence puts you in?”

  “Didn’t know it was evidence,” Orten retorted. “Still don’t.”

  Lynley spoke. “Yet when you phoned Scotland Yard, you made mention of the fact that the clothes belonged to the dead boy, didn’t you? They were quite specific about that part of the message.” He watched the man, saw the single spasm of a muscle in his cheek. “Who convinced you of that? Who persuaded you to phone the police? Miss Roly? The Headmaster? John Corntel?”

  “No one! Now you’ve seen what you’ve come for, I’ve work of my own.” That said, Orten spun on his heel and moved swiftly back the way they had come. Havers was after him in an instant.

  “Wait,” Lynley said.

  “But—”

  “He’s not going anywhere, Sergeant. Give him time to simmer.”

  “Time to cook up a flaming good story about why he waited till Monday night to report a piece of evidence he’d found on Sunday!”

  “He’s had plenty of time for that already. A bit longer isn’t going to improve on what he plans to tell us. Look at this.”

  He held out a single sock on his palm, flipped it inside out, and pointed to the tag attached to it. It had been badly blackened by the fire, but it was still legibly the number 4.

  “So these are Matt Whateley’s,” Havers said. “But where’s the other sock?”

  “Either burned in the rubbish pile before Orten got to it or, if we’re lucky, dropped somewhere on the way to the pile.”

  Havers watched as Lynley began to bag each article of clothing. “We’ve an entirely different case now, don’t we, sir?”

  “In part, yes. All Matthew’s clothes are accounted for. Leisure clothes, games clothes, school clothes. Unless we want to assume that for some bizarre reason he left the campus stark naked on Friday afternoon, we have to conclude that he never intentionally left the campus at all. Someone spirited him away.”

  “Alive or dead?”

  “We don’t know that yet.”

  “But you’ve a guess, haven’t you?”

  “Yes. I’ve a guess. Dead, Havers.”

  She nodded, exhaled moodily. “So he wasn’t running away.”

  “It doesn’t look like it. But if he wasn’t running away from something, we’ve a docket of questions unexplained at the moment. His father said he’d changed over the past few months, he was moody. Then there’s Harry Morant and whatever’s at the root of his unwillingness to talk to you. On top of that, consider Wedge, Arlens, and Smythe-Andrews when I interviewed them.” Lynley picked up the plastic bags and handed two of them to Havers. He removed his spectacles and peeled off the latex gloves. “The question is, if Matthew Whateley wasn’t running away from this school last Friday afternoon, what was really going on?”

  “Where to begin?” Havers asked.

  Lynley looked towards the lodge across the field. “I think Frank Orten has had enough time to simmer.”

  Rather than use the lane, they returned to the lodge by edging along the one hundred yards of open field that separated the porter’s vegetable garden, his garage, and his house from the vehicle shed and the rubbish fire beyond it. Choosing this direction, they ultimately followed a neat brick path between garden and garage that took them to the back door of the lodge. Elaine Roly admitted them into the kitchen.

  Unlike the sitting room, it appeared to have benefitted from a recent cleaning, for work tops were spotless, fresh curtains hung at the window, and the only dishes in the sink were obviously from that morning’s breakfast. The odour of bacon grease hung in the air, its source a frying pan that stood on the stove, a slice of bread sizzling within it.

  Elaine Roly turned off the burner beneath the frying pan and forked the fried bread onto a plate which already held two poached eggs. She said, “He’s in here, Inspector,” and indicated that they should follow her into the dining room.

  This was where the children had been squalling earlier, and they were continuing to do much the same now, one from a highchair upon which he banged a tin cup insistently and the other from the floor in a corner of the room where he beat his heels against the carpet and his fists against his forehead, all the time shrieking, “No! No! No!” Neither appeared to be more than four years old.

  Frank Orten was bent over the highchair, inexpertly wiping the last bit of breakfast from his younger grandson’s face with a damp cloth.

  “Have these eggs, Frank,” Elaine Roly said. “You’ve not touched your coffee. I’ll see to the little ones. Time they had a bit of a wash.” That said, she lifted the one from the floor and the other from his highchair. The older boy poked at the lace collar of her dress, but she stoically ignored his jabbing fingers and carried both yelping children from the room.

  Orten pulled a chair back from the table, sat, and made short work of his eggs and bread. Lynley and Havers took chairs themselves, saying nothing until the porter pushed his plate to one side and gulped some coffee.

  “What time did you notice that the rubbish fire had been rekindled?” Lynley asked.

  “Twenty past three in the morning.” Orten lifted his coffee mug. Gramps was painted on it in bright blue letters. “I had a look at the clock before I went to the window.”

  “You were awakened by something?”

  “Not asleep, Inspector. Insomnia.”

  “So you heard no noise?”

  “None. But I smelled the smoke and went to the window. Saw the glow. Thought that the fire had reignited somehow, so I went to have a look.”

  “You were dressed?”

  His fractional hesitation seemed without purpose. “I got dressed,” he said. Without being prompted, he continued. “I went out the back, through the field. Not by way of the lane. Got there and saw the flames had begun to grow fairly strong. Blasted idiots, I thought. Some sort of prank the senior boys were pulling, without thinking of the danger should the wind come up. So I took a shovel and used it to put the fire out.”

  “Are there outdoor lights you might have switched on?”

  “Lights on the front of the vehicle shed, yes, but they were off and there are no lights to the side. It was dark. Told you that earlier, Inspector. I saw no clothing then. Main concern was to get the fire out.”

  “Did you see anyone, notice anything out of the ordinary aside from the fire itself?”

  “Just the fire.”

  “Was it unusual that the lights on the vehicle shed were off? Are they normally kept on at night?”

  “Normally, yes.”

  “What do you make of that?”

  Orten looked in the direction of the kitchen, as if he could see through its walls for an answer that might be in the vehicle shed across the field. “I suppose if the lads were playing a prank, they’d want the lights off so they’d not be seen, wouldn’t they?”

  “And now that you know it wasn’t a prank?”

  Orten lifted a hand and dropped it back to the table. It was a gesture indicating acceptance of the obvious. “Same thing, Inspector. Someone not wishing to be seen.”

  “Not a prankster, but a killer,” Lynley said thoughtfully. Orten made no reply, merely reaching for his cap that lay like a centrepiece upon the table. The letters B.C. decorated the front of it, yellow upon blue, but they were soiled here and there, needing to be cleaned and restored to their original colour. “You’ve been at the school for years, Mr. Orten,” Lynley went on. “You probably know it better than anyone. Matthew Whateley disappeared on Friday afternoon. His body wasn’t found until Sunday evening. We’ve good reason to believe it was dumped in Stoke Poges on either Friday or Saturday night. Since we have the boy’s clothes, and since his body was nude when it was found, we can assume he was nude when he was taken from the school and that he was probably taken after dark. But the question is, where was he from the time
he failed to show up at games after lunch on Friday until he was taken?”

  Lynley waited to see how Orten would react to the implicit invitation to be part of the investigation. The porter looked from Lynley to Havers and pushed himself a few inches back from the table. The movement gained him not only physical distance but an intriguing degree of psychological distance as well.

  He answered openly enough, however. “There’s storage areas, I suppose. A wing of them beyond the kitchen, near the masters’ common room. More in the technical centre. More in the theatre. Trunk rooms in the houses. Attics as well. But everything’s locked.”

  “And the keys? Who has them?”

  “Masters have some.”

  “Keys that they keep with them?”

  Orten’s eyes flickered momentarily. “Not always. Not if they have too many to carry about in their trousers.”

  “What do they do with them, then?”

  “Hang them in their pigeonholes, usually. Right outside the masters’ common room.”

  “I see. But surely those aren’t the only keys to the buildings and the rooms. There must be duplicates should any get lost. Master keys, even.”

  Orten nodded, but it was as if his head was automatically doing what his mind intended him not to do at all. “I’ve a set of all the school keys in my office up in the quad. But that office is kept locked, if you’re thinking that anyone could get in there and pinch them.”

  “Even now, for example? Is it locked now?”

  “I imagine the Headmaster’s secretary’s unlocked it. She’d do so if she arrived before me.”

  “So she has a key to it.”

  “She does. But you’re hardly suggesting the boy was nabbed by the Headmaster’s secretary, are you? And if not her, who’s going to go in in the middle of the schoolday when I’m not about and pinch some keys? With no way of knowing what door the keys will open? Not much good that would do, I say. Keys I have in my office aren’t marked with anything more than a single word. Theatre. Technical. Maths. Science. Kitchen. No way to tell what room in any building the key would open. Not without looking through my code book. So if someone pinched keys, someone took them from the pigeonholes in the entry outside the masters’ common room. And since that’s kept locked, the only person who could have done the pinching was one of the masters.”