School for Murder

by Robert Barnard

  ‘Well, Patel of 3A, what can we do for you?’

  ‘I don’t suppose it’s anything of real importance,’ said Patel in his perfect English that unfairly sounded more charming for coming from an apparently foreign mouth. ‘But you see, I read detective stories, and there they say that every little thing has importance in an investigation. I wondered whether that was true in real life?’

  ‘Well,’ said Pumfrey, considering. ‘Perhaps not every little thing, no. You have to discard a lot. On the other hand, we obviously have to know every little thing, so that we can decide whether it’s important or not.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Patel seriously. ‘Yes, I see.’

  ‘So if you’ve got anything that you think just might have something to do with this—’

  ‘Yes. Well, it can’t do any harm, I suppose. You see, it’s like this. The boys are saying that all these things that have been happening around here are probably connected. Is that right?’

  ‘We don’t quite know yet. They might be.’

  ‘You see, after the last Parents’ Evening—you’ve heard what happened then, have you?’

  ‘Yes. The boarders got rather drunk.’

  ‘That’s right. They looked awful the next morning. Well, the next day I was kept in, and so I was walking home on my own. And as I was going down the drive here, I saw a bottle—a bottle of vodka.’

  ‘Ah! Where was that?’

  ‘In the undergrowth round the trees over there. I’ll show you.’

  They began walking down the drive. Mr Makepeace, the last teacher to depart, watched them curiously, and then looked airily the other way. Patel stopped half-way up the drive.

  ‘It was about there, see? And I thought that if it was found, it might get someone into trouble. Because it wasn’t hidden, or anything. So I just kicked it further into the undergrowth.’

  ‘Did you, now? Do you remember which direction you kicked it in?’

  ‘Oh—I suppose towards that thick stuff over there. To keep it hidden, you know.’

  Together the three of them went gingerly in the direction of the stout old tree and the massed jungle of weeds around its base. They circled round it carefully, Pumfrey warning Patel from any over-enthusiastic plunges into the undergrowth. Finally it was Fenniway who pointed, and there, nestling under nettles, they saw the bottle with the Russian imperial crown on it. It was empty. Pumfrey took out a plastic bag from his pocket. He secured the bottle round the neck with a piece of string. Then he pulled it from the surrounding greenery and put it into his bag.

  ‘Thank you, Patel,’ he said. ‘I think this might be important. And I think I know whose fingerprints are going to be found on it. Thank God we’ve had fine weather all this week. That’s the first bit of luck we’ve had in this case.’

  CHAPTER 16

  TRUTH

  It was after nine when the results came through from the labs. Fenniway had been up to the dormitories to see if Pickerage was back from his dinner with his mother, and when he returned empty-handed, Pumfrey was picking up the phone.

  ‘Yes? You’ve got them? Good . . . Smudged, are they? No, I’m not surprised . . . Ah—they’re Dr Frome’s, are they? . . . Yes, I did . . . How did you come to have his prints, by the way? . . . Just one of these hysterical women patient cases, you mean? . . . Oh yes. Sure. They happen all the time . . . It wasn’t taken seriously? . . . Well, you’ve been very good. I appreciate it. I wanted to get it settled tonight . . . Yes, I think it pretty much sews it up . . . ’Bye.’

  He slapped down the phone.

  ‘Hear that?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fenniway. He was a cautious, steady soul, and so he added: ‘But it doesn’t sew it up quite as neatly as you made out, does it?’

  ‘No. I know,’ said Pumfrey. ‘Malcolm back yet?’

  ‘No. He phoned Toby to say that his mother was taking him out to the pictures.’

  ‘Good God. What’s got into her?’

  ‘It’s probably The Stud, or something. Perhaps she’s trying to pump all the info she can out of him, for use on her cocktail circuit.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised. But she’s a nuisance. It’s us who ought to be doing the pumping, and we’d be a good deal better at it, I should think. That’s what I’d like to be doing now. Still . . .’

  Fenniway waited. When Pumfrey was near the end of a case he tended towards the impetuous. Fenniway was willing to bet what the next step would be.

  ‘Still, I don’t think it need stop us. Let’s get along there now.’

  Fenniway knew better than to urge caution. He could just picture the bristling of the moustache, the glare of the eyes if he did. He accepted the inevitable.

  ‘Shall we clear up here?’ he asked.

  ‘Just take the vital things. We’ll have to come back tomorrow—to see Pickerage, inform Coffin. He’ll be pleased, by the way.’

  ‘Unless he was counting on it being one of the hopeless teachers.’

  ‘That would have been bad for the school in the short term, however terrible a teacher he was. And Coffin’s having to think in the short term at the moment. No, this will be better. Coffin will be delighted.’

  Pumfrey packed up the desk, put into his briefcase his folder, his notes, Hilary Frome’s diary and the assembled bric-à-brac of the case. Then they put on their coats and went to the door. Before he put the lights out, Pumfrey looked round.

  ‘Well,’ he said, still scowling at the room in dissatisfaction, ‘I hope the first thing Coffin does is put these books into some kind of order.’

  ‘Anybody’d think you were Hercule Poirot,’ said Fenniway.

  Then the light went out, symbolically extinguishing Edward Crumwallis and all his works. Pumfrey locked the study door, and the two of them went out to the police car.

  As they drove towards Maple Grove Fenniway tried, in his steady way, to put a damper on his superior’s inbred precipitancy. Moral certainty on their part, Fenniway felt, really got them very little of the way.

  ‘It’s not going to be easy,’ he said tentatively.

  Pumfrey swivelled round at him.

  ‘Trying to rein me in?’ he grunted. ‘I know you, Fenniway. You think I have a headlong tendency, don’t you? God, it sounds like a splinter group in the Labour Party. Well, I tell you, I want to get this over and I intend to. Loose ends we can tie up in the morning.’ Then he conceded Fenniway’s point. ‘No, it’s not going to be easy. Damned sticky, in fact, if he takes the line I expect.’

  ‘I suppose you’ll have to play it slow? Lead up to it carefully? He’s obviously no shirker when it comes to threatening court actions and the like. He could be on to the Chief Constable in two shakes of a bunny’s tail.’

  ‘He could indeed,’ admitted Pumfrey. ‘That was interesting, what Margaret Wilkinson was telling us. A chap who’s that quick with the slander action has got something to hide. I think I heard something about some faulty diagnosis some time ago . . .’

  ‘Yes, I did too,’ said Fenniway. ‘Not really relevant, though.’

  ‘No, of course not. But he’s obviously jumpy. As to how I’m going to play it, I suppose it will be by ear. It usually is. It’s not as though we’re without evidence.’

  ‘There’s the bottle,’ conceded Fenniway, who in fact thought their case paper-thin. ‘Though that’s far from conclusive, isn’t it? There’s the diary—ditto. We hope there’ll be something from Pickerage, but we haven’t got it yet.’

  ‘There’s the question of access to poison.’

  ‘His having had access doesn’t prove anything, does it, sir? It doesn’t add up to a great deal, taken as a whole.’

  ‘There are my two questions. Nothing concrete in them, but to my mind they speak volumes. And they ought to lead us to some real evidence. But we’ll have to see. As far as I’m concerned, I want to put the case to bed tonight. But at the worst I’ll just bring it out into the open. We’ll certainly have work to do in the next few days . . .’ He peered out into the darkness
, at the large, detached residences they were passing. ‘I think this is what they call a nice area, isn’t it? To me it’s the most boring part of Cullbridge. Funny, you know, but I think the Fromes are pretty boring people too. Odd, isn’t it?’

  They drew up outside Deauville. Through the hedge, clipped into the shape of guardsmen’s busbies, they saw lights in the living-room. There was not a sound coming from the house.

  ‘Right,’ said Pumfrey, looking at Fenniway. ‘Let’s get it done.’

  They shut the car door softly, opened the gate, and walked up the path. They listened for a moment at the door, and then rang the bell. The silence was suffocating. All the street seemed to have gone into mute mourning, in sympathy. The two men almost welcomed the sound of footsteps in the hall.

  ‘Oh—Superintendent.’

  Mrs Frome had done something to her hair, and put a light make-up on. But she seemed still as if she were drained. Some essential life appeared to have been sucked out of her, and she seemed almost fearful. Was she anticipating further horrors to come?

  ‘Will you come in? I hope you’ll excuse . . .’

  Her voice trailed away as she led them into the hall.

  ‘I’m grateful that you . . .’

  But again it faded as she ushered them towards the living-room.

  She opened the door. In a far corner, under a standard lamp, Dr Frome was sitting. His face was flushed and gleaming, and there was a glass of whisky on the table at his side. Over the room there hung a smell of grief, and stale smoke, and drink. Frome’s eyes were red and tired as he peered at his wife, and then made out the figures in the shadow behind her.

  ‘It’s the Superintendent, dear—’

  Frome pushed himself forward and got up. He was not altogether steady, but his eyes began to gleam, and he could hardly control the excitement in his voice, which quivered, even though he was speaking quite unnaturally loudly.

  ‘Superintendent. Good of you to come round. Has anything come up? Have you got results? Can you give me the name of the bastard who killed my son?’

  ‘Yes, Dr Frome, I can,’ said Mike Pumfrey. ‘I’m afraid that your son unwittingly killed himself.’

  CHAPTER 17

  LIFE AFTER DEATH

  It is not easy to celebrate the solution of a murder case without seeming at the same time to celebrate the death of the victim. In the case of the murder of Hilary Frome that consideration seemed to the staff members of Burleigh School to have less than the usual weight. At any rate, on Saturday morning they went right ahead and celebrated.

  They did it tactfully. When Septimus Coffin rang round to some of them to tell them the outcome of the police investigations, the favoured few then began ringing round to the others, and the outcome of all the intense exchanging of confidences was a decision to meet at lunch-time in a little-frequented saloon bar in a dark side-street down from the bus station. It was a drinking place highly unlikely to be frequented by any parents who might look askance at a degree of modest revelry over the death of Hilary Frome.

  In fact, celebration was not the first priority, though Percy Makepeace was, it is true, inclined to attribute the entire affair to divine intervention. What they really wanted—like any Sunday newspaper reader—was information, details, the background fill-in. A lunch-time Cornish pasty, a pint of bitter or a gin and something, rendered piquant by acres of speculation and circumstantial detail—these seemed the most desirable thing in the world, to relieve the tensions of the last few days. They were glad when Septimus Coffin promised to absent himself for a few minutes from his Herculean task of rebuilding the temple, for it was Septimus who had enjoyed the confidences of Superintendent Pumfrey. So at half past twelve they were all there, even Iain McWhirter, who had never before been known to grace the inside of a public house, but who shuffled in five minutes before the appointed time, ordered a gin and angostura, and huddled on a bench by the fire, snuffling delightedly to himself.

  ‘Poetic justice!’ he chortled. ‘Never did I think to see it so beautifully exemplified, so close at hand.’

  Others were more seemly in their satisfaction, particularly Septimus Coffin. The mantle of headmasterhood sat lightly on him, but sit it did. He collected a Scotch and water, and sat down at the little table by the fire, insisting that he could only stay a few minutes.

  ‘Duty calls,’ he said, ‘the business of saving your jobs and mine on the foundering vessel forsaken by the Crumwallises. There are parents to ring, ruffled feathers to smooth, domestic details to be ironed out—’

  ‘Then shoot,’ said Glenda Grower, as direct as she was impatient. ‘How do they know he did it himself?’

  ‘Ah well, that seems to be the only possible deduction from the evidence,’ said Septimus, expansive and expository, as if outlining the strategic decisions taken by Caesar at the climax of a battle against the Gauls. ‘I feel the Superintendent was remarkably clever here. He tells me that right from the start he posed to himself two questions.’ (Here it may be noted that Mike Pumfrey was less than totally honest with Septimus Coffin. It was only right at the end of the investigation that the two questions had formulated themselves for him with any clarity. Policemen, however, even in these degenerate times, must be allowed their professional pride, especially when dealing with schoolteachers.) ‘These questions were: “Why did Hilary Frome insist on Pickerage taking his medicine?” and “How come the poison worked so fast?” Now they solved the second, initially, by assuming that it was in the sherry, because they knew Hilary had had one while he was downstairs. But the discovery that the poison was in the medicine blew that one to smithereens.’

  ‘But don’t some poisons sometimes work more or less instantly?’ queried Dorothea Gilberd. ‘They do in books.’

  ‘Because it’s a jolly sight more exciting that way,’ said Corbett Farraday. ‘Not many of them do in fact, unless you’ve got a wonky heart, which I’m sure Hilary Frome hadn’t.’

  ‘Oh, Hilary had a very wonky heart,’ said Septimus, ‘but only in the more sentimental meaning of the term. No, Corbett is right: hardly any poison works like that, and certainly not any of the aconite-related ones. Now one answer could have been that the poison was—through Mrs C.’s inefficiency—in the glass that Hilary took down when he went to get the sherry. But Mrs C.’s medicaments were almost all of a virtually harmless nature, and the fact is that the poison was in the medicine bottle as well. The only other answer, then, was that Hilary started vomiting and heaving because he knew what he had drunk, and was trying to get rid of it.’

  ‘What an awful moment for him,’ said Dorothea.

  ‘My heart bleeds,’ said Glenda. ‘Go on, Sep.’

  ‘Now, to go back to the first question: that too leads one back to Hilary. We all know what Hilary’s attitude to Burleigh School was, and by the time Pumfrey had finished he had a good idea as well. Hilary always made a great big V sign at the place, and all its rules and personnel. And Pickerage was his friend. Yet suddenly here he was insisting that Pickerage take some perfectly useless medicine prescribed by Mrs Crumwallis, when normally he would have been quite happy to have poured it down the sink—would have insisted on doing so, in fact, as a gesture of defiance. Why? And the only answer possible was because that it was he who poisoned it.’

  ‘But it is so horrible,’ insisted Dorothea Gilberd. ‘I mean, they were friends. Why would he do a thing like that to Malcolm?’

  ‘One thing I’d bet,’ said Penny. ‘It was part of a campaign to ruin the school, wasn’t it? So that his parents would take him away and put him in the Comprehensive.’

  ‘That’s it. A campaign that was going to increase in seriousness the longer it had to go. So the first stage was something quite innocuous, something that looked like nothing more than a schoolboy jape from the old Magnet: he took a bottle of vodka from his father’s apparently copious store and laced the boarders’ fruit cup with it. It was never missed, but his father’s prints were on it, some of them smudged with his own glov
ed ones. Thanks to Toby, that little episode was completely hushed up.’

  ‘Due entirely to the quick thinking of Mr Crumwallis,’ said Toby. ‘As he told us himself, frequently.’

  ‘Quite. Requiescat in pace, you monumental old fraud. So Hilary put a little V for vodka in his diary, and goes back to the drawing-board. But then he made a mistake.

  ‘I know!’ said Glenda. ‘I bet I know. He tried to recruit Malcolm. People always thought Malcolm was his lieutenant, but they never could point to anything he’d actually done.’

  ‘That’s it. Last Sunday they took the day off together and went to Stanhope Woods. And among other things, which I won’t go into, Hilary told Pickerage about his campaign, in a suitably edited version, I would guess, and told him he wanted him to hide a razor-blade in Wattling’s flannel, and put a bit of glass into some suitable dish prepared by Mrs Garfitt: shepherd’s pie, fish cakes or whatever.’

  ‘And Malcolm refused?’

  ‘Yes. Poor little chap—it’s sad really: he said, “It’s the only home I’ve got,” and dug his heels in. After all, he’s a bright enough little chap, even if he is ignorant as hell, and he knew that if someone tries to swallow glass they can quite easily kill themselves, and almost certainly would give themselves a nasty injury. He knew that if it was just stuck into the pie it could be anyone who copped it. It could be one of his pals, just as he knew that Wattling could really get his face carved up through Hilary’s plans. And nothing Hilary could say would persuade him.’