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.
Kevin saw Inspector Lynley’s dark eyes taking in his wife, moving over the bruises on her arms, her blackened eye, the tentative manner in which she walked with one arm pressed beneath her breasts as if in the need to protect her ribs. Dimly he heard the inspector’s quick question. Patsy’s response was calm. It was a fall on the stairs. She even added a creative touch to the story. She’d fallen up the stairs, she told them. Can you credit that?
She was careful not to look at Kevin as she spoke. But the inspector did so. He was, Kevin saw, nobody’s fool. He knew what had happened. As did the lady sergeant with him. She put it nicely enough. Is there anyone I can phone for you? A friend, perhaps, that you’d like to visit? It helps, sometimes, to have a friend nearby when you’ve lost someone you love. Her meaning was clear. Best be out of the house, Pats. No telling what might happen here next.
Patsy did not seem offended by the suggestion. She merely drew her foul-smelling dressing gown round her and took a seat on the vinyl settee. Her bare legs squeaked against the material, drawing attention to themselves. Kevin could see the dark growth of hair like lead tracing upon them.
We’ve made an arrest, the inspector said. I wanted you to know at once. That’s why we’ve come so late.
The words came to Kevin from a great distance, tingling through his skull and working into his brain. We’ve made an arrest. So it was over.
He heard Patsy’s voice but her response to the detective did not register. Nothing registered save the initial statement. We’ve made an arrest. Somehow, that idea suggested a finality that Kevin had not expected. It made Matthew’s death quite real. It was no longer the nightmare from which Kevin had hoped he might one day awaken. Arrest nullified that. The police do not arrest based upon the occurrence of a nightmare. They only arrest if the nightmare is real.
Kevin didn’t know he had got to his feet until he heard his wife say his name. By that time, he was already at the stairs, mounting them numbly, walking in a mist. Below him, he heard the conversation continue. Questions were asked. Names were mentioned. Condolences were expressed. But none of that mattered to Kevin any longer. Only the stairs mattered—climbing them, feeling the wood beneath his feet, turning on the landing, seeking the top of the house.
The door to Matthew’s bedroom stood open. Kevin went inside, flipped on the light, and sat on the bed. He looked at everything, making a detailed study of one object at a time, attempting to use each to conjure up a separate vision of his son. There stood the chest of drawers where Matthew would have dressed in the morning, pulling on clothes in a helter-skelter fashion in his rush to be out of doors. There the desk where he would have done his schoolwork and constructed the model buildings for his railway set. There the expanse of corkboard on the wall where Matthew posted photographs of
family outings, of locomotives, of holiday memories they all had shared. There the shelf where he kept his books and the tattered stuffed animals too cherished to be thrown away. And the window from which he leaned to watch the boats on the Thames. And the bed in which he slept in safety for thirteen years.
Kevin saw all of this. He studied it. He examined. He memorised. All the time he fought to conjure up the image of his son. All the time he fought to hear Matthew’s voice. But nothing came. Only the single word arrest and the incontrovertible knowledge that an end had been reached, a finality achieved which he could not ignore.
“Mattie, Mattie, Matt,” he whispered. But there was no answer. There was nothing at all save the objects in the room. And they were not his son. Try as he might, he could not bring Matthew forth from the wood and the paper and the glass and the cloth that comprised the environment in which he had lived.
Lookit me, Dad. Watchme, watchme.
Kevin wanted to hear it. The words did not come. Only if he said them himself could they take on life now. But Matthew would never say them again.
We’ve made an arrest. It was over.
Kevin forced himself to rise from his son’s bed and went to the chest of drawers. Leaning against it was the piece of marble he had taken from the tombstone works only last night. He picked it up, carried it back to the bed, laid it across his knees. In his pocket was the pencil he used at work, and he felt for this, grasped it, stared down at the stone.
It seemed to Kevin that sketching the outline of that first terrible word was an admission of defeat, an open assertion that he had failed his son just at the moment when he needed him most. It seemed to Kevin that it meant acceptance, that it meant resignation, that it meant going on. How could he do that? How could he commit such an act of disloyalty? How could he let his agony go?
His hand trembled above the fine, veined stone. “Mattie,” he whispered. “Mattie. Mattie. Matt.”
He pressed the pencil against the cold marble. He formed the first letter. He sketched the name. Beneath it, the words beloved son. Beneath them, the fragile curve of a shell.
“It’ll be a nautilus, Mattie,” he said. But there was no response. Matthew was gone.
“Kev.”
His wife had come into the room. He could not face her. He went on with his work.
“They’ve gone, Kev. The inspector says we can fetch Mattie now. The police in Slough have done with him.”
He could not speak. Not now. Not about Matthew. Not to his wife. He went on with his work. She crossed to the bed. He felt her sit down next to him and knew she was reading what he was writing on the stone. When she next spoke, her voice was tender. She covered his knobby, callused hand with her own.
“He’d like that, Kev. Mattie would like the shell.”
Kevin felt the dreadful tightness come over him, felt the swelling of a grief he could no longer control. That she should speak to him still. That she should still love him. That she should be willing to reach out and understand.
He dropped the pencil. He clung for a last moment to the cold solidity of the marble on his lap.
“Pats—” His voice shattered.
“I know, luv,” she said. “I know. I do.”
He began to cry.
Barbara Havers waited until Lynley had driven off before she walked the remaining distance to her house in Acton. Because of the hour, he had wanted to take her right to her front door, but she had managed to convince him to leave her at the corner of Gunnersbury Lane and the Uxbridge Road, telling him that she needed a few minutes’ stroll in the rain-washed night air to clear her head.
Lynley had protested at first. He made no pretence of liking the fact that she wanted to walk home alone through the dark streets of a London suburb after midnight.
Nonetheless, she had insisted, and perhaps he had heard beyond the surface of her words to the resolute need for privacy beneath them. Perhaps, hearing that, he had understood how important it was to her that he not see the conditions under which she lived her life away from New Scotland Yard. He was, after all, an astute observer and he could hardly have failed to notice the degree of decay in some of the neighbourhoods through which they had just driven. In any case, he had reluctantly agreed, stopping the car beneath a streetlight and watching with a frown as she got out.
“Havers, are you certain…” He had lowered the window. “This can’t be the best of ideas. It’s late.”
“I’ll be fine, sir. Really.” She rustled in her shoulder bag, brought out her cigarettes. “See you in the morning, all right?” She said good night to St. James and stepped back from the car. “Go home, Inspector. Get some sleep.”
He grumbled a response, raised the window, and drove off. Barbara stood for a moment and watched the receding rear lights of the automobile mark their progress back into the heart of the city. She lit a cigarette and dropped the match into a puddle of water on the pavement. It sizzled for an instant, leaving a tiny plume of smoke like a miniature cirrus.
The night was oddly quiet. A heavy bank of rain clouds that obscured moon and stars served to muffle sound on the ground below. The only noise that broke into the stillness was the rhythmic slapping of her shoes on the pavement. Even this was muted and absorbed by the damp.
In front of her house, she flicked her cigarette into the wet street and watched as an oily puddle extinguished it. She crossed the patch of earth to the front door, noting that the rain had not managed to alter the rock-hard condition of the ground. Her car was still in the underground parking at New Scotland Yard where she had left it that morning, insisting upon meeting Lynley there rather than letting him pick her up on his way to Bredgar Chambers. As a result, she would have to ride the underground to work tomorrow—a disagreeable prospect but far less disagreeable than it would have been to see the expression on Lynley’s face had he had a glimpse of her family’s home. It hardly held up to a comparison with his own Belgravia town house.
She climbed the front steps, rooting for her doorkey. Fatigue drained her to weakness. It had been a gruelling day.
The humming struck her the moment she opened the door. It was a mindless sound, two notes repeated over and over, discordantly, with barely a pause for breath. It came from the lower part of the stairway, and Barbara saw a figure crouched upon the second step, arms hugging legs, head upon knees.
“Mum?” she whispered.
The humming continued. Into it her mother inserted a wavering few words. “Don’t try to see Ar-gen-ti-na.”
Barbara went to her. “Mum? Why aren’t you in bed?”
Her mother’s head lifted. Her mouth curved into a vacuous smile. “There are llamas there, lovey. In that zoo. In California. Only I don’t think we can go.”
Despite the fact that her conscience demanded some sort of apology to her mother for not having let her know how late she would be, Barbara felt the pricking of irritation. Surely her mother knew by now that if she didn’t telephone, it was because she was caught up in a case. Surely it wasn’t necessary for her to check in like a schoolgirl if the calls of her job kept her away from home for an evening. Surely her father had enough sense left to explain to her mother what Barbara’s absence meant.
She became aware of a second noise in the house that she hadn’t heard upon entering, the monotone buzzing of the television, tuned in to a station that was off the air for the night. She looked towards the sitting room.
“Mum!” She gave in to exasperation. “Isn’t Dad in bed either? Have you let him fall asleep before the telly? For God’s sake, you know he’s got to have some decent rest. He can’t get it in an armchair. Mum, you know that.”
Her mother reached out and caught at Barbara’s arm. “Lovey. We can’t go, can we? And the llamas are so sweet.”
Barbara disengaged her mother’s hand. She stifled a curse and went to the sitting room. Her father, she saw, was in his armchair. No lights were on. Barbara switched off the television and started to reach for the floor lamp next to her
father’s chair. Her hand stretching past his head, she realised suddenly what was wrong in the room, in the house itself. For she had heard the humming. She had heard the buzzing of the television set. But she had not heard the one sound that the years of his illness had accustomed her to hearing. She had not heard her father’s laboured breathing. She had not heard it from the door. She had not heard it from the stairway. She was not hearing it now from her position directly next to his chair.
“God. Oh God.” She fumbled for the light.
He had probably died sometime in the early afternoon, for his body was cold and rigour had already set in. Still, Barbara lunged for his oxygen, turning valves wildly, muttering a prayer.
If she could only get him from the chair. Onto the floor.
The two-note humming came into the room, accompanying her mother’s utterly distracted voice. “I brought him soup, lovey. Just like you said. At half-twelve. But he didn’t move. I spooned some for him. I put it in his mouth.”
Barbara saw the soup stain on her father’s shirt. “God, oh God,” she whispered.
“I didn’t know what to do. So I went to the stairs. I waited. I waited on the stairs. I knew you’d come, lovey. I knew you’d see to Dad. Only…” Mrs. Havers looked in confusion from Barbara to her father. “He wouldn’t eat the soup. He wouldn’t swallow. I poured some in his mouth. I held it closed. I said you must eat, Jimmy, but he wouldn’t answer. And—”
“He’s dead, Mum. Dad’s dead.”
“So I left him to sleep. He needs the rest, doesn’t he? You said that yourself. And I waited on the stairs. My lovey will know what to do, I thought. I waited on the stairs.”
“Since half-past twelve, Mum?”
“That was the right thing to do, wasn’t it, lovey? To wait on the stairs?”
Barbara looked at the lines on her mother’s face, at the gaunt cording of her neck, at the vacant expression, at the uncombed hair. All she could think of by way of threnody to greet her father’s death was the mental repetition of the same two words: Oh God, oh God, oh God. They summed the count of her emotion. They delineated despair.
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