Well-Schooled in Murder

by Elizabeth George

  “In all this time, did he talk to you at all about the school? About his lessons? About his friends? About his teachers?”

  “No. Only that his marks were good.”

  “Dad kept on him about his marks,” Jean Bonnamy added. “We both talked to him about what he wanted to do with his life.”

  “I got the impression that Mum and Dad wanted the traditional sort of thing,” the Colonel said, “although Matt didn’t speak much about them. I think they were pushing him towards science, law, architecture, finance. That would be typical of their heritage. A career like that upholds the honour of the whole family. Mum, Dad, grandparents, everyone. But little Matt was an artist at heart. And that’s what he spoke of. When he talked of school and of the future, he spoke of art.”

  “Dad encouraged him,” Jean Bonnamy said. “Matt promised him one of his sculptures someday.”

  “A boy ought to be what he wants to be, not what his parents decide for him. But these families are so much like that. I’ve seen it a hundred times. Total respect for the parents. Complete submission of the personality. Become what you are told to become. Marry whom you are told to marry. It’s part of their culture. There’s no getting round it. Unless, of course, the child has a mentor who can guide him through the worst of his parents’ disapproval when he sets out on his own way.”

  As he listened, a dawning realisation was setting upon Lynley. But it was tinged with the growing comprehension that, however incongruous the idea might seem, no matter the light Colonel Bonnamy was going to shed upon Matthew Whateley’s life and his death, the case was about to become convoluted beyond his expectations. He felt a growing trepidation as the Colonel continued to speak.

  “At least Matt benefitted from the fact that only one parent would have been caught up in this family-honour business and all the blasted tradition tied to it.”

  “Only one parent?” Lynley asked.

  The Colonel nodded. “The mother. I never met her, but the name Whateley hardly suggests that his father’s Chinese. So I assume it’s his mother. We didn’t speak of it. I should guess it was hard enough for Matt being a mixed race child at that fancy school of his without having to discuss it when he wasn’t there.”

  Next to him on the sofa, Lynley sensed Sergeant Havers’ movement. He himself wanted to spring to his feet and pace the room and fling open the windows and rush out the doors. He did none of this. Instead, he forced his mind back to the photographs he’d seen of the boy, recalling the dark hair, skin that was the colour of blanched almonds, delicate features, eyes nearly black. Eyes…eyes that were full and wide and not Chinese. Welsh perhaps. Even Spanish. But certainly not Chinese. It was impossible. It made no sense.

  “You didn’t know Matthew was mixed race, Inspector.” Jean Bonnamy spoke softly.

  Lynley shook his head, more in confusion than negation. “Have you a picture of the boy who visited you?”

  She got to her feet. “I’ll fetch it.”

  When she left the room, the Colonel spoke. “I’d say if you’re looking for a killer, you might start with the bigots. The sort of people who can’t stand to be in contact with someone a bit different. Ignorant people. The kind who have to obliterate what they can’t understand.”

  Lynley heard the words but could think only of the impossibility of Matthew Whateley’s being anything other than what he had been presented from the very beginning—the son of Kevin and Patsy Whateley, scion of a working class family, scholarship recipient, railway enthusiast.

  Jean Bonnamy returned with the photograph which she handed to Lynley. He examined it and nodded at Havers. “The same boy,” he said and looked back at it again. In it, Matthew and the Colonel sat hunched over the chessboard. Matthew’s hand was extended, as if caught in the act of moving one of his chessmen, but his face was turned towards the camera, and he was smiling much the same smile that had been on his face in the photograph Lynley had seen of him on the banks of the Thames with Yvonnen Livesley, his Hammersmith friend.

  “I’ve met Matthew’s parents,” Lynley said to the Colonel. “Neither is Chinese.”

  The Colonel appeared neither disconcerted nor taken aback to hear this news. “The boy was mixed race,” he said conclusively. “I lived in Hong Kong for thirty-five years. I know when I’m looking at a mixed race child. To you, Matt might well look Occidental. But to anyone who’s spent time in the Orient, the boy was half Chinese.” His eyes moved moodily to the fireplace and lingered on the head of the garish dragon. “Some people like to crush what they can’t understand, the way you’d smash a spider with the heel of your shoe. That’s what you ought to be looking for. That kind of ugliness. That kind of hatred. The sort that says white Britannia is supreme and anything else is beneath contempt. You look at that school. I dare say that’s where you’ll find it.”

  There was too much to think about, too much to evaluate. Yet points still needed elucidation, especially in the face of what Lynley thought he knew to be the truth about Matthew Whateley’s family. “Did Matthew speak to you about any of this? About his family’s background? About meeting with some sort of prejudice at the school? About trouble with a teacher or a student or a member of staff?”

  The Colonel shook his head. “He spoke only of his marks. And only when I asked. And nothing else about the school at all.”

  “But there was the motto, Dad,” Jean Bonnamy interjected. “You’ve not forgotten that.” She went back to her stool, speaking to Lynley. “Matthew had seen the school’s motto somewhere—in the chapel, in the library. I can’t recall. But he was quite taken with it.”

  “I’ve not seen the motto,” Lynley said. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know what it was in Latin, but he’d managed to get a translation from someone, and he brought it to us,” Jean Bonnamy replied. “It had to do with honour. He was most—”

  “I’d forgotten that, Jeannie,” the Colonel interrupted pensively. “‘Let honour be both staff and rod.’ Those were the very words. He was quite taken with them. Wanted to spend the afternoon talking about what they meant. Honor sit et baculum et ferula.”

  “Odd topic of conversation for a thirteen-year-old boy,” Sergeant Havers commented.

  “Not for this boy,” the Colonel replied. “Honour’s in their blood. It’s at the heart of their culture.”

  Lynley wished to avoid that area of dispute. “When was this discussion? What brought it up?”

  The Colonel looked at his daughter for help. “When, Jeannie?”

  “Perhaps a month ago? Hadn’t they been talking at school—in a history lesson?—about Lady Jane Grey? And dying merely for the sake of a belief, for the sake of religion? Wasn’t that it? Because I remember Matt asking whether you believed that honour required one to do what was right. You asked him what brought that idea into his head out of nowhere. He said Lady Jane Grey and her decision to die rather than accept the dishonour of renouncing her religion.”

  Her father nodded slowly. “He wanted to know what we thought was more important, a code of honour or a code of behaviour.”

  “You said there was no difference between the two, didn’t you?”

  “That I did. But Matthew disagreed.” The Colonel looked at the picture which Lynley had returned to Jean Bonnamy. “That was the Occidental in him speaking. But his Chinese blood told him they were one and the same.”

  Lynley felt a stirring of irritation at the continual references to a bloodline whose existence had no foundation in any fact. “Yet you never spoke to him about being Chinese. In spite of your own evident love for the culture.”

  “No more than I would speak to you about the old Norse blood that gives you your lovely hair, Inspector. We’re all of us part and parcel of another culture, aren’t we? Some are merely nearer to that other culture in time than you and I are. But all of us spring from another source. Accepting that is accepting life. It’s the people who can’t accept it that become the destroyers. That’s all I can tell you.”

 
Clearly it was the Colonel’s way of ending the interview, and Lynley could see the strain that the conversation had wrought upon the man. His limbs were shaking. His eyes were heavy-lidded with fatigue. There was no point to pushing for further information. He got to his feet, expressed his thanks to the old man, and, with Sergeant Havers, followed Jean Bonnamy out the way they had come in. None of them spoke until they were on the drive once more.

  “Let me ask you this, Miss Bonnamy,” Lynley said. “It’s not to give you pain but to come to some sort of understanding of why your father believes Matthew Whateley was Chinese. Your father’s had four strokes. He can’t have escaped unaffected from them.”

  She looked past him to the privet hedge. Three birds were splashing happily in a puddle of water at its base.

  “It’s all in his head?” she asked with a smile. “I wish I could make it easier for you, Inspector. It would be easier if I’d only agree, wouldn’t it? But I can’t. You see, I lived in Hong Kong until I was twenty years old. And the moment Matthew Whateley walked into our cottage last September, I knew without a doubt that he was a mixed race child. So it has nothing to do with my father’s mind or whether he’s in possession of his faculties. Because even if he isn’t, it doesn’t matter. I’m certainly in possession of all of mine.” She rubbed at dirt that was trapped in the lines crisscrossing her palms. “I wish I could change just a few things, however.”

  “What?”

  She shrugged. Her lips trembled, but she controlled them and spoke calmly. “When I took him back to school last Tuesday night, it was late. I drove him past the porter’s cottage and I was going to take him directly to the door of Erebus House. But he had me stop at the road to the vehicle shed because it was easier to turn my car around there. He said he could walk the rest of the way. He was thoughtful like that. That was Matthew.”

  “That was the last time you saw him?”

  She nodded and continued, as if her words would act as a form of exorcism for sorrow. “I let him out of the car. He started to walk off. Then a minibus came along the lane and its lights struck Matthew. I remember that quite well because he heard the bus and turned. He waved goodbye to me. And he smiled.” She wiped at her eyes. “Matthew had the loveliest smile, Inspector. When I saw it last Tuesday, lighting up his face, I knew how dear he’d become to me. I only wish now that I’d told him.”

  “We found a draft of a letter to you among Matthew’s belongings. Did he write to you last week?” Lynley took the piece of notebook paper from his pocket and handed it over to her.

  She read it, nodded, and handed it back. “Yes. I received a note like this on Friday. Whenever he had dinner with us, he wrote a note of thanks. Always.”

  “He makes reference to a boy who saw him. Evidently you got him back to the school after curfew.”

  “He and Dad were quite involved in a game and time got away from all of us. I phoned Matthew on Wednesday to make sure there’d been no trouble. He said one of the older boys had seen him.”

  “Had he been reported to the Headmaster?”

  “Evidently not. At least not yet. I think Matt intended to speak to the older boy anyway. To explain where he’d been.”

  “Would Matthew have faced disciplinary action for being out after curfew even if he was with you?”

  “Apparently. The students are supposed to be responsible enough to get themselves back to campus on time, no matter the circumstances. That shows maturity, I suppose.”

  “The punishment had Matthew been caught after curfew?”

  “He might have been confined to the house for a week. Perhaps warned off. I can’t think they’d do anything else to him.”

  “But to the other boy?”

  Jean Bonnamy drew her eyebrows together. “The other boy?”

  “The one who saw Matthew.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  It was a twist to the circumstances which Lynley had not seen until this moment. He had previously thought only in terms of Matthew’s house prefect—Brian Byrne—not reporting a boy missing during bed check. But now he saw an added dimension. If Matthew Whateley had been out after curfew on Tuesday night, so had someone else.

  14

  “This thing tastes like sawdust, Inspector! It’s disgusting. Must’ve been made last week. Fresh sandwiches! Ha! Someone ought to put that bloke in the nick for false advertising.” Crumbs from her cheese sandwich powdered the front of her maroon pullover. Sergeant Havers brushed at them with a scowl, distributing them generously onto the floor of Lynley’s car. He said her name in useless protest. She shrugged. “We could’ve stopped. We could’ve gone to that pub. Fifteen minutes to eat wouldn’t exactly put us in the dock for dereliction of duty.”

  Lynley inspected his own selection, roast beef and tomato, and saw that both were rather too green to be considered wise for consumption. “It seemed a good idea at the time,” he said.

  “Besides,” Havers groused now that she had his agreement, “we’ve not exactly got a reason to go rushing back to the school, have we? As far as I can tell, working through this flaming case is like stepping into quicksand. We’re up to our necks now, and all it’s going to take is one more blasted detail that creates one more blind alley and down we go. Suffocating.”

  “Rather a lot of mixed metaphors, Havers.”

  She scoffed. “You tell me what we’ve got. We started out with class differences. Matt Whateley running off because he couldn’t fit in with the la-di-da types at the school. Then we decided it was bullying, with Matt running off because he was afraid of some tough who was pushing him about. Then we went in for homosexuality and perversion. And now we’re playing with racial bigotry. Not to mention someone being out after curfew. Now, there’s a fine motive for murder.” She pulled out her cigarettes and lit one defiantly. Lynley lowered his window. “I don’t know where we’re heading with this muck any longer, and I’m getting to the point that I don’t even know where the hell we’ve been.”

  “The Bonnamys confused the issue, didn’t they?”

  Havers blew out a stream of smoke. “Chinese. Chinese? It’s not a go, Inspector. We both know that. We’ve a sick old man with an overactive imagination and a heart back in Hong Kong. And in the same house a lonely spinster daughter with fancies of her own. They see a dark-haired little boy who reminds them of the past and without any questioning, they assume he’s part Chinese.”

  Lynley did not disagree. “It’s pushing things. But there’s something more to evaluate here, Sergeant.”

  “What?”

  “The Bonnamys don’t know Giles Byrne. They don’t know that he was once devoted to a Chinese student at the school—Edward Hsu. Is it mere coincidence that out of the blue they would tell us they’re sure Matthew Whateley was part Chinese?”

  “Are you saying that the fact that Matthew was Chinese—accepting that as truth for a moment, which I don’t, by the way—was what attracted Giles Byrne to him in the first place?”

  “It’s a thought, isn’t it? Because isn’t it peculiar that both Edward Hsu and Matthew Whateley are dead? Not only the two students with whom Giles Byrne was involved, but two Chinese students.”

  “If you want to accept that Matthew Whateley was Chinese. And if he was, who was he? Patsy Whateley’s son, the product of an affair that her husband doesn’t know about? Kevin Whateley’s son, taken in and loved by the sainted Patsy? Who was he? What’s his story?”

  “That’s what we’ll have to find out. Only the Whateleys can tell us.”

  He made the turn onto the school drive. At the porter’s lodge, Elaine Roly was struggling to put Frank Orten’s younger grandson into an antique pram while the other child, disregarded for the moment, threw pebbles at the lodge’s bay window. Elaine Roly didn’t look up at the sound of the car’s passing.

  “I should think a bit of time with those two would put her off Frank Orten for good,” Havers commented, stubbing out her cigarette in the ashtray. “Do you think she’s after him, Inspec
tor?”

  “She may be. But from what we saw this morning, he doesn’t appear to be encouraging her, does he?”

  “Well,” Havers said casually in a manner that told Lynley he had inadvertently given her an opening that she intended to use, “when it comes to love, some people don’t need to be encouraged to hang on, do they?”

  He ignored the question and accelerated the car. They swept down the drive and parked at the front of the school. When they entered the main foyer, they saw that the chapel door stood open and that the choir was gathered in the nave. Today the boys wore their school uniforms rather than the cassocks and surplices that had lent them such a celestial air the previous day. They were obviously engaged in some sort of rehearsal, for in the middle of what Lynley recognised as one of the choruses from the Messiah, the choir master stopped them impatiently, blew three separate notes upon a pitch pipe, and made them begin again.

  “Getting ready for Easter, aren’t they?” Sergeant Havers said. “Under the circumstances, that’s a bit much for me. Glories and hallelujahs and one little bloke murdered right under their noses.”

  “But surely not by the choir master,” Lynley replied. He was watching the rehearsal, his eyes seeking and finding the senior prefect.

  Chas Quilter was in the last row of boys. Lynley observed him, brooding over what it was about the prefect that had caused him to feel such a twinge of apprehension from the first moment of their meeting. The choir master stopped the boys again and said, “Let’s go on with Mr. Quilter’s solo now. Have you the place, Quilter?”

  Lynley turned away. “Let’s rout out Mr. Lockwood, Havers.”

  Across the foyer from the chapel, two doors admitted visitors into the administrative wing of Bredgar Chambers. One door led into the porter’s office, the other into a corridor decorated with trophies won by the school’s victorious athletic teams. They walked the length of this to the Headmaster’s study, where Alan Lockwood’s secretary was working at a word processor. Seeing them, she got to her feet with an alacrity that suggested flight rather than welcome. Behind a closed door across the hall, the murmur of conversation rose and fell.