School for Murder

by Robert Barnard

  Wattling turned uncertainly to the table, took up cautiously the pile of saucers, and started with them waveringly to the sink. Before he got half way, they dropped with an almighty crash on to the stone floor. A delighted howl of laughter went up, drowning the eldritch shriek of Mrs Crumwallis.

  ‘I say, Wattling—hic—you’ve dropped the saucers.’

  ‘You are a clot—what?’

  ‘Boys!’

  ‘Try again, Wattling. There’s another pile.’

  ‘Bet you can’t get them to the sink, Wattling.’

  ‘You can’t walk straight, Wattling.’

  ‘Yes, I can, see. I tripped.’

  ‘BOYS!’

  ‘Go on, Wattling, pick ’em up.’

  ‘I say, Wattling can’t find the saucers. He can’t see properly.’

  ‘Can, see. They’re there.’

  ‘Good old Wattling. Bet you can’t walk straight with them.’

  ‘Go it, Wattling.’

  ‘BOYS!’

  It was at the height of the disorder that the noise penetrated to Toby Freely. He was the last to leave the sitting-room, calculating that the parents of boarders would talk to the regular teachers before coming along to talk to him. The giggling was usual enough, but the quality of it was not normal, and it augmented itself to laughter that was even more hysterical, then to delirious hics, and jeering shouts. The sound puzzled him: it was wrong for boys in the presence of Mrs Crumwallis. And when he heard the first crash he determined to intervene, in some way that would not dispute the authority of the headmaster’s wife. By the time he had worked out how to do this the riot had increased, and he was forced to fling open the door.

  Crash. Another pile of saucers went.

  ‘Mr Freely!’ shrieked Mrs Crumwallis. ‘They’ve gone mad! I can’t do anything with them!’

  ‘They’re not mad, Mrs Crumwallis. They’re drunk.’

  ‘Drunk? Nonsense. They’ve only had my fruit cup.’

  ‘Sir! Toby!’ yelled a boy. ‘Look at Tilney. He’s going to spew.’

  And Tilney, leaning greenly over the kitchen table, began with a spectacular heave to do just that.

  ‘See to him, Mrs Crumwallis,’ yelled Toby. ‘I’ll get this lot out. The parents can’t see them like this.’

  And grabbing three of the smallest around their necks, he started pushing them out of the back door, into the fresh air, and towards the outer door of the boarding section.

  ‘Right—follow them,’ he commanded the rest. ‘Broughton, I’m surprised at you. Don’t make so much noise. Go to the outer door and then go up to the dorms, but do it quietly. I’m right behind you, but you mustn’t let the parents hear. Quiet, you there . . .’

  It was as he was shepherding the tail end out that the headmaster made a belated appearance.

  ‘Freely!’ he fumed. ‘What is this deplorable disturbance? Get those boys back to the dormitories at once.’

  For the headmaster, pusillanimous in action, was always ready to follow up the action of others.

  • • •

  Major Tilney, when he left the main block of Burleigh, lit a cigarette as he walked down the drive to the road. He had expected to have a little chat with his boy, but the headmaster had explained that he had been put to bed early because he had an important French test the next day.

  The Major had not been deceived. He knew that boys of twelve did not have French tests so important as to prevent their seeing their fathers. He knew there had been alcohol in the fruit cup, and plenty of it. He had heard the hiccups from the kitchen. The boys had got drunk.

  He enjoyed the thought hugely. It reminded him of his boyhood reading. It wouldn’t do the kids any harm. He was in Cullbridge for the night, and he’d see his lad in the morning. He’d be willing to bet he’d be as bleary as hell. He smiled again. No harm in it. Damned good jape. No harm in it at all.

  The headmaster thought otherwise. He said so to his wife when everyone had finally gone home. He took the matter very seriously indeed. It was an outrage, and somebody was going to pay. If it hadn’t been for his quick-mindedness, he said, goodness knows what scandal might not have ensued. He intended to regard it as an incident of the utmost gravity.

  And though the Major was a man of very much greater intelligence than the headmaster, it was in this case, for once in his life, Mr Crumwallis who was in the right.

  CHAPTER 4

  BOYS

  The life of the boarding annexe next day was dominated by ten young boys with horrendous hangovers. Such pains and miseries as they did not feel, they acted out: acting, indeed, at this level of ham had not been seen since the last World Cup, or the Peter O’Toole Macbeth. The act was performed with particular virtuosity when Mrs Crumwallis dosed them all with castor oil, an old-fashioned cure-all in which she had a fiendish trust: then the boys’ performance resembled nothing so much as an acted-out illustration for Nicholas Nickleby. Toby Freely felt somewhat out of his depth, not confident enough to sort out the genuine from the assumed. The ten boys were patently enjoying their notoriety, though, and after lunch-time Toby decided that sympathy had better give way to a brisk, enough-of-this approach if the boarding block was ever to return to normal. With such a sure-fire topic for reminiscence and speculation, however, this was far from easy to achieve.

  Mr Crumwallis, inevitably, conducted what he described as a ‘rigorous inquiry’. Equally inevitably, it got nowhere. He had none of the equipment of a detective, neither being particularly observant nor having any great insight into the psychology of small boys. In the end he slippered Pickerage and called it a day. His action was unfavourably commented on in the Staff Common Room. As Septimus Coffin pointed out: if he had really thought Pickerage had done it, he would have caned him; if he didn’t know whether he had done it or not, he shouldn’t have slippered him.

  Later one of the day boys, on his way home after being kept in, saw an empty bottle of Smirnoff’s in the long grass near the drive. After some consideration he kicked it still further into the undergrowth.

  By Friday evening Toby Freely congratulated himself that the boarding block was beginning to return to normal. The boarding annexe at Burleigh was an unlovely square built on to the main house in the nineteen-twenties—it was the cause, in fact, of the original owner going bankrupt and being forced to forsake the licensed trade. The main part of the school was considerably more attractive, being a red-brick residence, rambling but characterful, built for the vendor of wine and spirits in the last years of the Old Queen, when people were beginning to wonder if she would ever go. Situated on the outskirts of Cullbridge, it was reached by a long drive edged by trees and shrubs. The front part of the house, being somewhat darkened by evergreens, was given over to the Staff Common Room, with the classrooms of the senior forms on the first floor. The back part of the house, being lighter and pleasanter and giving out on to the lawn, was the headmaster’s residence. There were also some additional classrooms, built on in the ‘forties, when building controls were strict and architectural standards were low: this extension was a long, straight line of jerry-built square rooms, projecting from the right of the original house.

  The boarding annexe had its own outside door, leading towards the headmaster’s lawn, where the boys sometimes played (quietly, of course, insisted Mr Crumwallis) on spring evenings. It also had a door leading into the main house, connecting with the headmaster’s hall, whence Mr Crumwallis made his occasional incursions. On the ground floor of the annexe there was a large room where the boarders, and those day boys who took it, ate school lunch (it was called dinner at the Cullbridge Comprehensive, but lunch at Burleigh—which somewhat excused the meagreness of it, though not the high price charged for it). Above were the boarders’ dormitories, a recreation room or two, the sick bay (only one boy was allowed to be sick at a time) and a small bedroom for Toby. It was not a comfortable environment for the boarders, but its very shabbiness made it liveable in.

  The routine of the annexe on
Friday after school was disturbed by Mr Crumwallis making ineffectual invasions of it from time to time. He had been alarmed by the narrowly-averted disaster of the previous evening, and felt the need to assert his presence.

  ‘All present and correct?’ he would demand of Toby, or ‘What are the boys doing now?’ Eventually his little spurt of concern subsided, and he collapsed in front of the television in his own quarters, engrossed in a long-running J. B. Priestley serial.

  ‘I feel better now,’ said young Tilney to Toby, as the boys sat around eating supper—a potato pie that Mrs Garfitt had left for them, and which Toby had put in the oven. ‘Do you think I might eventually get a taste for alcohol?’

  ‘I’ve no doubt you will,’ said Toby. ‘But do you mind trying not to get it just yet?’

  ‘Toby,’ said Wattling, shovelling in a forkful, ‘who do you think did it?’

  There was no point in asking what it was. There was only one topic of conversation at Burleigh that evening.

  ‘The headmaster,’ said Toby carefully, ‘decided that Pickerage must have done it.’

  Pickerage let out an exaggerated groan.

  ‘Well, I didn’t. I’ve had alcohol before, and I don’t like it. I know what it does to you, and I don’t want to feel like I feel now, thanks very much. Anyway, the head didn’t really think I did it.’

  ‘ ’Course he did,’ said Hoddnett, one of the older boys. ‘Otherwise he wouldn’t have slippered you.’

  ‘He slippered me because there had to be someone slippered. But he didn’t slipper hard.’

  ‘You yelled like a stuck pig.’

  ‘Of course I did. That’s part of the game. But he didn’t slipper hard. Personally,’ he added, saying that word in a very considered and grown-up manner, ‘I think one of the teachers did it.’

  ‘What nonsense, Pickerage,’ said Toby firmly. ‘They weren’t even around the kitchen.’

  ‘Well, they were—see. Several of them. Before they went through to the staff room to take up positions when the parents arrived. And Miss Gilberd and that awful Muggeridge always come through the back, because it’s the quickest way from their homes. Muggeridge and his soppy wife were in there for ages on their way through—she was ear-bashing Mrs Crumwallis.’

  ‘And the Grower went back to get herself another cup of coffee,’ said Wattling, ‘though we were supposed to do that.’

  ‘I bet it was one of the Muggeridges,’ said Tilney.

  ‘What absolute bilge, Tilney,’ said Toby, forced into solidarity with one of his least favourite fellow members of staff. ‘Why on earth would either of them do a thing like that?’

  ‘He’s a spiteful bugger,’ said Wattling. ‘You never played footer with him, Toby. I expect he just wanted to make us very ill.’

  ‘Rubbish. If he’d got a down on you, he could get back at you any time he wanted.’

  ‘Perhaps she did it, to get him into a jolly big row. So that he had to get a job elsewhere—somewhere much better,’ said Pickerage.

  Toby tried to see Onyx as an Eton gamesmaster’s wife. He failed. He looked at his watch.

  ‘Come on. Time for bed for the young ones.’

  The young ones, as always, made a frightful racket as they got ready for bed. The whole thing was a sort of ritual, with the same motions performed night after night. Tilney always managed to make the business of cleaning one’s teeth sound like an electric drill demolishing part of the Barbican, while Wattling’s idea of washing his face was to chuck his flannel at it and spatter water all over the bathroom. Wattling’s father was in the army, and his mother spent half of the year in Singapore or wherever he happened to be stationed, so his state was even more bereft than Tilney’s, whose parents were divorced but whose father was stationed less than fifty miles away. Pickerage had a mother somewhere or other, who liked to descend on the school at inopportune moments, always driving a different car, the property of her current escort (she was the sort of woman who, even in this day and age, had escorts), and embarrassing Pickerage by the demonstrable falsity of her pretended affection. Toby prided himself that at the moment none of these boys, or the two dozen others, was conspicuously unhappy.

  When they had got into bed, it was Toby’s custom to read them a chapter or two of a book—the school had a tattered library of elderly boys’ books, most of them left behind by ex-pupils. Luckily boys don’t notice datedness too readily, and the boarders seemed to lap up Biggies, or John Buchan, or even Edgar Wallace. Tonight, though, they were all too excited to be read to.

  ‘I’ll tell you what Hilary Frome says about—’

  There was a general groan against Pickerage, in which Toby gladly joined.

  ‘No, shut up, let me tell you,’ said Pickerage. ‘After all, he should know.’

  ‘Why should he know?’ said Toby. ‘Put a sock in it, Pickerage. I’m sure the boy doesn’t want to be quoted as if he was a cross between the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Authorized Version.’

  ‘He knows all about this school,’ said Pickerage obstinately. ‘And he says old Coffin and McWhirter would like to take over Burleigh. Get out the Crumwallises and run it themselves. He says it was probably old Coffin.’

  ‘Well, one thing I know about Mr Coffin is that he was born in the early nineteen-twenties. That makes him over sixty. Can you really imagine anyone hatching a devious plot to take over the school at his age?’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ said Tilney, who was at the age when the more outrageous the idea, the better. ‘They say the population is getting older and older, so he probably has years to go yet.’

  ‘Anyway—that’s enough speculation for tonight, right?’ said Toby, getting up. ‘And enough Hilary Frome.’

  He shouldn’t have mentioned the name.

  ‘Hilary’s taking me home on Sunday,’ said Pickerage, fighting against sleep. ‘He’s going to introduce me to his parents. And he’s going to teach me to play squash.’

  Is he, by God? thought Toby, firmly switching off the light.

  Later that evening, when he was playing a desultory game of Scrabble with Broughton and Hoddnett, two of the older boys, he casually brought the subject up.

  ‘We really get our fill of Hilary Frome from young Pickerage at the moment,’ he said.

  The two boys laughed blandly, giving nothing away.

  ‘Hilary’s the great man in this school these days,’ said Hoddnett. ‘Every great man has to have disciples.’

  ‘I wish him luck of Pickerage,’ said Toby. ‘Personally I’d feel safer with Judas Iscariot.’

  The two laughed, but they loosened up a little.

  ‘He’s a bright lad, Pickerage,’ said Broughton. ‘Lively. Up to anything.’

  ‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ said Toby. ‘I don’t want this Frome leading him into trouble.’

  ‘Oh, Hilary wouldn’t do that,’ said Broughton. ‘Hilary’s a smart operator. He keeps within the limits.’

  ‘His limits,’ said Hoddnett.

  • • •

  Earlier that day, when school had ended at a quarter to four, Hilary Frome had walked down the long road towards Cullbridge with Willis and Quigly. Quigly, Willis and Frome—it would have formed a sufficiently high-sounding trio of names to grace a solicitors’ firm. And indeed the fathers of all three boys were professional men, filling positions of trust or responsibility, and ones bringing a degree of social prestige. They all belonged to golf clubs or sailing clubs, took their holidays abroad, and were devoted Masons; two of them had stood for the local council. Like clings to like, and in so far as Hilary Frome had friends of his own age—mostly he had followers—those friends were Willis and Quigly.

  As they walked along, weaving through the little groups of fighting or jesting juniors, the three boys were discussing what they were to do over the weekend.

  ‘I’m going swimming on Saturday,’ said Willis, in an assumedly bored voice that was modelled on Hilary’s. ‘My dad’s all enthusiastic about swimming, God knows why
. Times me, and hands over a quid when I cut a fraction of a second off my record—can you imagine? Then I suppose I’ll go to that disco over at Hadleigh. Everyone seems to be going.’

  ‘All the more reason for not,’ said Hilary Frome. ‘All those sweaty bodies . . .’

  ‘I didn’t know you had anything against sweaty bodies,’ said Quigley. ‘Won’t you be there, then?’

  ‘Margaret wants me to go with her,’ said Hilary, with a languid gesture. ‘Perhaps that’s another reason for not going.’

  ‘Tired of the heterosexual kick, Hilary?’ asked Quigly.

  ‘Nothing remains a kick long, does it?’ said Hilary, scooping back a lock of fair hair from over his eye. ‘And one sees so much of the hetero thing at school: the Gilberd mooning after Tedder; Billy Bunter Farraday mooning after little Penny; sweet little Toby mooning after little Penny . . .’

  ‘Makes a change from la Grower mooning after little Penny,’ said Willis, and they all laughed.

  ‘Well, I hope she wins,’ said Hilary. ‘One does get so sick of the normal and the expected.’

  ‘Then you’d better keep away from the disco,’ said Willis. ‘If there ever was anywhere given over to the normal and the expected, it’s a disco at Hadleigh.’

  ‘I expect I’ll give it a miss,’ said Hilary. ‘Weep your eyes out, Margaret. In any case, I have this date with Pickerage on Sunday.’

  The other two laughed.

  ‘That’s more our Hilary,’ said Willis.

  ‘Better make your mind up,’ said Quigly. ‘Get yourself sorted out.’

  ‘Sorted out? Do you have to sound like the vicar, Quigly? I see no reason why I should sort myself out. The world is over-stocked with sorted out people.’

  ‘And what is your line?’

  ‘Me? I sample. I savour. I roll the flavour of the month round in my mouth. I flit from flower to flower, and I pick up different things from different flowers.’

  ‘Bully for you. And what is the flitting bee going to do on his date with Pickerage?’