Well-Schooled in Murder

by Elizabeth George

  “I’d like Harry to see this, Sergeant,” he told her. “Give him some help up the ladder, will you?”

  She nodded, fetched the boy, and he joined Lynley in the passageway. Hand on his shoulder, Lynley took him to the room and stood him just inside the door, holding him back against his own body. The boy felt as frail as a reed beneath his grasp.

  “This is where Matthew was taken,” Lynley said. “Someone brought him here, Harry, perhaps having told him that they needed to have a little talk, perhaps having indicated to him that it was time to put an end to grievances, or perhaps having even rendered him unconscious so that it didn’t matter what sort of excuse was cooked up. But this is where he was brought.”

  Lynley turned the boy’s head towards a corner of the room where the dust on the floor was most agitated. “I imagine he was tied up in that corner. See how the cigarette butts litter the floor there? He was burnt with cigarette butts, all over his body. Inside his nose and on his testicles as well. I suppose you’ve heard that. You can imagine what it must have been like for him, smelling his skin burning and feeling the pain.”

  Harry’s trembling was making his body rigid. He gulped for air.

  “You can smell the urine, can’t you?” Lynley went on. “And the faeces. Matthew wouldn’t have been allowed to go to a lavatory, so he would just have had to dirty himself. It wouldn’t have mattered much, as he didn’t have his clothes on. But that’s why the room smells.”

  Harry’s head was flung back against Lynley’s chest. He whimpered.

  Lynley touched the boy’s forehead. It was searingly hot. “It’s guesswork on my part, but I dare say most of it’s the truth, Harry. That’s what happened to Matthew before he died. But only you can tell us who did it to him.”

  Harry shook his head frantically.

  “He knew that you were being bullied. But he wasn’t like the other boys, was he? He wasn’t an ordinary sort who would look the other way, relieved that he wasn’t the one being harassed. He was the sort of boy who couldn’t abide cruelty. Besides, you were his mate. He wasn’t about to stand aside and let someone continue to assault his mate. So he engineered a method to stop it all. He wired your room. He made a tape. I imagine he did it three weeks ago during Friday afternoon games when he got that off-games chit from the Sanatorium, pretending he was ill. That would have given him time to set up his sound system and to try it out with no one—save you, of course—being the wiser. Once the room was ready, all you had to do was wait for the next visitation at night. And it was at night, wasn’t it? That’s when these things generally happen.”

  A heaving of the boy’s shoulders told Lynley that he had begun to cry.

  “After the tape was made, the bullying stopped, didn’t it? It couldn’t go on. So everyone was safe. If the bully so much as stepped out of line again, the tape would be produced, and he would be finished here at the school. Except that I don’t imagine Matthew ever really intended the bully to be expelled. He wouldn’t have wanted to do that, no matter how much the bully deserved it. He probably wanted to give the bloke a fair chance to straighten up. So he didn’t give the tape to the Headmaster, did he? He gave it to someone else. The only thing he didn’t understand was that to a bully the act of aggression is everything. It’s an obsession. It’s a real need. In order to go back to his harassment, our bully needed that tape. He needed the copy that had been made of it. He brought Matthew here to get them.”

  A cry escaped Harry’s throat. His feet marched in place against the floor.

  “Someone’s got to break the silence,” Lynley said. “Matthew Whateley tried, but his way didn’t work. One can’t use half-measures when it comes to the truth, Harry. If nothing else, I hope you see that. Matthew’s dead now because he tried a half-measure. I want the name of his killer.”

  “Can’t. No. Can’t!” Harry gasped.

  “You can. You must. Give me the name.”

  Harry writhed in Lynley’s grasp. His head fell forward against his chest. His arms came up. He tried to prise Lynley’s hands from his shoulders.

  “Give me the name,” Lynley repeated quietly. “Look at this room, Harry. End the silence. Give me the name.”

  Harry’s head lifted. Lynley knew he was looking at the room one more time—at the filth, at the debris, at the scarred walls with their bawdy drawings, at the rusty stains, at the dust-covered floor. He knew the boy could smell the evidence of Matthew Whateley’s terror. He knew he could feel the malevolence that had brought about his death. Beneath his hands, he felt Harry straighten, felt him draw in a breath that scathed the air.

  “Chas Quilter,” he cried.

  18

  Eventually they found Chas Quilter in his bed-sitting room. It was not where he was supposed to be. He had a biology lesson scheduled for that morning, and they had gone first to the science building in search of him. Failing to find him there, they had checked the chapel, the theatre, and the Sanatorium before at last making their way to Ion House. It was the northernmost building on the campus, and unlike the other houses, which were perfectly symmetrical, the proportionate balance of Ion was marred by a single-storey addition that jutted out from the east end of the building. A sign on the closed door of this wing read “Upper VIth—Members Only,” and seeing this, Lynley decided to have a look at the interior of the upper sixth social club.

  There wasn’t much to it. It was a large room with a bank of windows that looked out across the lawn to Calchus House. Furniture consisted of four overstuffed sofas, a billiard table, a Ping-Pong table, three initial-carved trestle tables, and a dozen cheap plastic chairs. Against one wall a television stood with a video recorder below it. Nearby a shelf held a stereo system. Running the length of another wall was the bar.

  “What keeps the kids from coming in and helping themselves to a pint whenever they feel like it?” Sergeant Havers asked, following Lynley to the bar. “Surely,” she noted sardonically, “it can’t be honour. Upholding the school rules and all that rot?”

  “After the past few days, I wouldn’t argue with you about that.” Lynley examined the three taps behind the bar. “They appear to be locked into position. No doubt someone in authority has the key.”

  “Chas Quilter? There’s a comforting thought.”

  Lynley looked towards the windows. He leaned against the bar. “You can see Calchus House from here, Havers. I imagine you can see it from anywhere in the room.”

  “Save for a tree here and there.”

  “Most of the path to Calchus is out in the open.”

  “I see that. Yes.” As usual, she followed his train of thought. “So anyone going to Calchus House on Friday evening during the upper sixth party could have been seen from these windows? There are lights on the path, aren’t there? And”—Havers riffled quickly through the pages of her notebook—“Brian Byrne told us that Chas Quilter left the upper sixth party at least three times. He claimed it was to take phone calls. But it could have been to slip out another door and see to Matthew. If Brian was sitting right here and saw him on the path, he’d want to protect him, wouldn’t he?”

  “Let’s see if we can find him,” Lynley answered.

  A door at one end of the social club took them into the Ion House common room. Beyond it a corridor led to the stairs. They began to climb these and on the first landing found a charwoman at work with a roaring vacuum cleaner. She directed them to Chas Quilter’s room on the second floor, shouting her instructions over the din. The noise faded as they climbed the second flight of stairs, and it disappeared altogether when the corridor door swung shut behind them. Aside from the faint sound of a stereo playing in one of the rooms, the second floor was still.

  They followed the music, a haunting combination of sounds produced electrophonically by a Moog synthesizer. It came from behind the sixth door in the corridor. Lynley paused in front of it, listening, before he rapped sharply, and getting no response, let himself and Sergeant Havers into the room.

  The bed-sit did
not seem typical to an eighteen-year-old boy. Its furniture was standard institutional issue, but the linoleum floor had been covered with a piece of Donegal carpet and the walls had been hung not with the posters or photographs that Lynley and Havers had come to expect but rather with a selection of framed quotations. They formed a circular, sunburst pattern, representing nearly five hundred years of English literature. Spenser and Shakespeare rested hand in glove with Donne and Shaw. The Brownings were present, as were Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley. Byron had a place between Pope and Blake, and central to the arrangement was the final stanza of Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” this one larger than the rest, and—unlike the others, which were hand-printed neatly upon thick, creamy paper—it was written in calligraphy upon fine parchment. The words seemed to leap from the frame.

  Ah, love, let us be true

  To one another! for the world, which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new,

  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  In the lower right corner of the parchment was the signature Sissy.

  Chas Quilter was seated at his desk, a thick volume in front of him. He appeared to be deep in his studies at the moment, perhaps preparing to begin some work in biology, for as Lynley approached the boy, he saw that the book was a medical text—heavily underscored in dark ink, with notations in the margins. Across the top of the page to which it was open was the heading APERT’S SYNDROME and beneath it a list of medical terms and their attendant definitions. A spiral notebook lay next to this, but if Chas had intended to make a record of his reading, he hadn’t got far. Instead of useful biological notations, he had written only “a fiery deluge, fed with ever-burning sulphur unconsumed” in letters that themselves were licked fancifully by a mass of hand-drawn flames. Lynley recognised the source of this contradictory line when he saw it also lying on the desk, open but face downward. Paradise Lost.

  Chas, however, was looking at none of this. His attention was focused on matters of neither science nor literature. Instead, he was giving it to the perusal of a photograph that stood on the windowsill behind the desk. In it, he himself stood, his arms round a long-haired girl who rested her head against his chest. It was the same picture which Lynley and Havers had seen on Brian Byrne’s wall.

  Chas started in surprise when Sergeant Havers went to the bookshelves and punched off the tape deck. “I didn’t hear—” he stammered.

  “We knocked,” Lynley said. “You were obviously preoccupied.”

  Chas closed the medical volume, did the same to Milton. He ripped from his notebook the page on which he had written the line from the poem and crumpled it into a ball. This he kept in his hand. It crackled as he clutched it.

  In the cramped confines of the room, Sergeant Havers moved past Lynley to the bed where she sat, pulling meditatively upon her earlobe. Her gaze upon Chas Quilter was steely.

  Lynley went to the bookshelves where the tape deck sat. He punched a button. The music resumed. He punched another button. It stopped. He punched a third button. The cassette ejected.

  “Why aren’t you in your biology lesson?” Lynley asked the boy. “Have you an excuse from the Sanatorium? Perhaps something like an off-games chit? They appear to be fairly easy to come by.”

  Chas’ eyes were on the cassette. He didn’t respond. Lynley continued.

  “I don’t think you did the actual bullying,” he said. “I don’t think that’s what Harry Morant meant when he gave me your name.” He passed the cassette back and forth between his hands. In response, the boy bit his upper lip, but it was a reaction of a single second’s duration. Had Lynley not been watching him, he would have missed it altogether. “I think Harry’s too terrified to give me the name I want. After what he’s been through, and after what happened to Matthew, it’s reasonable enough to assume that he wouldn’t think himself safe no matter what I or anyone tried to do or say to reassure him. Or perhaps he’s still trying to live under some sort of Bredgardian code of honour. One doesn’t sneak on another student. You know the sort of thing. But I think Harry believed, even beyond his fear, that he had to give us something. It was the only way he could make reparation for Matthew’s death. Which, of course, he feels largely responsible for causing. So he gave us Matthew’s sock. And then—up above the drying room in Calchus House—he gave us your name. Why,” Lynley asked, placing the cassette on Chas’ desk, “do you suppose he did that?”

  Chas’ gaze followed the cassette, then raised back to Lynley. Without speaking, he opened one of the two drawers in the desk. From the very back underneath a stack of papers and notebooks, he took out another cassette, and he handed it to Lynley.

  The boy said nothing, but there was no need for him to do so when his features so explicitly delineated the struggle in which he was engaged. Lynley had seen such a struggle before, more than seventeen years ago at Eton. He had been warned off twice for two bouts of drunkenness. A third bout and he knew he would be expelled. So he had deliberately brought the gin into his room—because somehow gin seemed so much worse than anything else he might choose to drink, so much more indicative of irredeemable dissolution and disgrace—and had drunk nearly half of the bottle. Because he had wanted to be expelled. Because he had wanted to go home. Because the last thing he could continue to face was being cut off from his sister and his brother and his mother while his father lay dying. If expulsion was the only way to get home, what did it matter that his family would be hurt by it, that it would bring an additional misery in circumstances in which they could bear no more? So he had drunk. But instead of the housemaster, it was John Corntel who had found him. He remembered watching the anxiety on Corntel’s face as he tried to decide what to do about his schoolmate who lay in a semi-stupor across his bed. To fetch the housemaster would uphold the school rules. To do anything else would put himself at risk. Lynley remembered how he waited in drunken happiness for Corntel to make the move that would ruin him. He remembered his bleak satisfaction when the boy left his room. But when Corntel returned, he had St. James, not the housemaster, with him. Together they disposed of the alcohol, covered up for Lynley, and safeguarded his place at the school.

  We live by codes, he thought. We call them our morals, our standards, our values, our ethics, as if they were part of our genetic make-up. But they are only behaviours that we have learned from our society, and there are times to act in defiance of them, to fly in the face of their conventions because it is right to do so.

  “We’re not talking about having a smoke in the bell tower, Chas,” Lynley said. “Nor pinching someone’s jersey. Nor cribbing during an exam. We’re talking about aggression. About torture. And murder.”

  Chas raised a hand to his brow. He bent his head to meet it. His skin was the colour of dirty paste. A shudder passed through his body, and his legs pressed together as if for warmth or protection. “Clive Pritchard,” he said, and Lynley took the measure of how much the words cost him.

  Without a sound, Sergeant Havers opened her notebook and produced a pencil from her jacket pocket. Lynley stayed where he was by the bookshelves. Beyond Chas, he could see the morning sky framed in the window, filled with the blinding purity of great cumulus clouds.

  “Tell me about it,” he said.

  “It was a Saturday night about three weeks past. Matt Whateley brought me the tape and played it for me here in the room.”

  “Why didn’t he give it to Mr. Lockwood?”

  “For the same reason I didn’t. He didn’t want Clive to be expelled from the school. He just wanted him to leave Harry Morant—and everyone else—alone. That was what Matt was like. A decent little bloke. Live and let live.”

  “Clive knew you had the tape?”

&n
bsp; “He’s always known. I played it for him. Matt knew I’d do that. It was the only way to get Clive to leave Harry Morant alone. So I had him come up here and listen to it, and I told him if it happened again, I would hand the tape over to Lockwood. Clive wanted the tape, naturally. He even tried to get it. But Matt told me he’d made a duplicate, and I told Clive as much, so he saw there was no point in trying to pinch this one from me. Not unless he could get to the duplicate.”

  “You told him it was Matthew who had done the taping?”

  Chas shook his head. Behind his spectacles, his eyes were bleak. A thin line of sweat beaded his upper lip. “I didn’t tell him that. But it didn’t take Clive long to figure it out for himself. Matt was Harry’s closest mate here at school. They did model railways together. They were always hanging about together. They were both…a bit young for their age.”

  “I can try to understand keeping the tape to yourself once Matthew Whateley gave it to you,” Lynley said. “Especially if it put the bullying to an end. I may not agree with your having done that, but at least I can understand. What I can’t understand is the past three days. You must have known—”

  “I didn’t know anything for sure!” Chas protested. “I still don’t. I knew Clive had bullied Harry Morant. I knew Matthew made the tape. I knew there was a duplicate. I knew Clive wanted it. But that’s all I knew.”

  “When Matthew went missing, exactly what did you think?”

  “What everyone else thought. That he’d run off. He wasn’t very happy here. He didn’t have many friends.”

  “And when his body was found? What did you think?”

  “I didn’t know. I don’t know. I still don’t…” The boy broke off wretchedly. He slumped in the chair.

  “You chose not to know,” Lynley said. “You chose not to ask questions. You chose to turn a blind eye to the obvious, didn’t you?” He shoved the cassette into his pocket and looked at the display of quotations on the wall. The room seemed stifling. The smell of sweat and nerves burned into the air. “You forgot Marlowe,” he told the boy. “‘There is no sin but ignorance.’ Perhaps you’d like to add that to your collection.”