So, Ollie was a turbulent cook and it showed in the food he produced. Cold meat and salad was the chef’s ultimate revenge . . . which made alcohol all the more attractive to the residents. Once coffee – instant, not ground – had been served, a long evening lay ahead for the remaining staff and pupils of Stormhaven Towers; they needed liquid support . . . including Abbot Peter, who’d apparently been on G&Ts all evening.
‘Not really a drink for a man,’ had been Geoff’s comment to Benedict, before glancing down and seeing this was also Benedict’s choice.
‘Well, each to their own,’ he’d replied, with a smile fresh from the glaciers of Antarctica.
Holly and Crispin sat staring into space, while Bart read a book – after a long conversation with the abbot. Everyone had wondered what they were talking about, because really, what do you talk about with an abbot for an extended period of time? After initial pleasantries, what is there to be said other than: ‘So how was your monastery?’
And then, suddenly, the abbot’s embarrassing speech.
‘I do know the murderer,’ said Peter, stepping uncertainly out to the front. ‘No, really I do – I know who they are!’ And all conversation stopped, as he delivered his cringeworthy oration. He chose the place where Jamie would stand for the weekly briefing on Monday mornings, with Geoff and Penny alongside him, in their senior management roles. But tonight, Peter stood flanked by no one – and there’s none lonelier than an emotionally charged drunk. ‘The police haven’t a clue,’ he proclaimed loudly. ‘Halfwits, the lot of them!’ The abbot pondered his half-empty G&T – or was it half-full? What did it matter? He finished it off with a flourish.
‘No one offer him another,’ said Penny, firmly.
‘But I’ll have my moment of glory – they won’t deny me that,’ he continued. ‘I’ll have it here, tomorrow morning, at nine.’ He spoke in tones of slurred triumph. ‘Tomorrow, at nine, the hour of reckoning – when all will be very much revealed! And the police – the police can learn and listen . . . or rather, listen and learn.’ The abbot then stumbled towards the door, aiming straight but unable to stay fully within the navigational beacons of chairs and tables. ‘It is someone in this room, by the way.’ He now turned around. ‘Oh yes, someone in this room! I knew it almost straight away. You made a mistake with the phone.’
He looked around at the faces. Penny eyeing him as if he was mad; Cressida, cold assessment; Benedict, slight concern; Geoff, amusement; Crispin, fear; Holly, worry; Ferdinand, professional disdain; and Bart, blank. ‘So don’t be alone with anyone tonight . . . but yourself. You can only be with yourself. If you hate yourself, as most people do, then it’s going to be tough – but that’s life, isn’t it, campers! Life’s a beach . . . particularly in the Sahara – and then you die!’ Ferdinand tut-tutted.
‘We really don’t have to listen to this, Abbot,’ said Penny. ‘Take yourself to bed, you sad little man.’
‘Was that an offer, Penny?’ asked Peter, leering at Penny and then stumbling towards the door. On the way, he tried to take Penny’s hand to kiss it, but she pulled it away in disgust. ‘Well, that’s not very nice!’
‘You’re a disgrace,’ said Penny.
‘Believe me, I’m even bored with myself!’ he added. ‘So I’m off on a run to Loner’s Wood. It’ll suit me.’ Bart smiled. ‘I deserve it, a good run – it’s how I and my genius relax.’ He started to run on the spot to show his fitness, but the habit didn’t help and he tripped over a chair.
Holly held her hand over her mouth in shocked amusement. This was certainly unexpected entertainment for everyone. Peter picked himself up slowly, rubbing his shin. He became serious, as the drunk sometimes does, lecturing others about their lives.
‘But for you,’ he said, ‘the curfew starts at eight and must be obeyed without exception. You must all lock your doors, lock your windows . . . let no one beguile you like the serpent beguiled Eve in the Garden of Eden. Not a good day, that one. So keep yourself to yourself until morning comes, and – as long as you’re not the murderer – sweet dreams!’
He staggered from the common room, with a final stumble by the door.
‘So what did you make of that?’ said Ferdinand to Penny in the shocked silence that followed.
Peter set off slowly
towards Loner’s Wood. He’d changed from his habit into the running clothes purchased by PC Wilson – back in the days when Tamsin had wanted him on the case and seduced him with new running gear. He’d been able to ask for privileges then, his bargaining position strong. Now things had changed, and privilege quickly removed. He felt like an outgoing cabinet minister – status, pay and chauffeur-driven car lost in a moment.
It was panic that had led to the betrayal; and now he was sidelined, removed from the case. Somewhere along the line, Peter had been found guilty of ‘not being a policeman’, a difficult charge to refute. And really, if Wonder or Tamsin were the icons on offer, he had no wish to refute it. He was angry at being the scapegoat for the fractured outcomes of the case; and the anger gave him energy, like a force through his body; though it might get him killed . . . for anger does this too.
The new sports gear was a bonus for Peter; he’d never run in such luxury. Previously, he’d worn long shorts, last modelled by nineteenth-century archaeologists excavating the Pharaohs’ tombs; while his shirt had been an old rugby top from school, a faded and frayed affair. But now his body was hugged by rather tighter, more colourful gear – and lighter. He’d previously regarded it as slightly effete when he’d seen such clothing on other runners – an almost obscene display of the body’s contours. But such lightness and ease of movement now warmed his heart and quickened his pace, years of judgement melting away. Perhaps Peter could grow to love the obscenity – and certainly tonight he wished to be seen. Well, he did and he didn’t . . . his courage came and went as he pondered the hours ahead.
*
The evening light was beginning to fade with a cloudy sky above and a south-westerly behind him. He’d picked up the path at Splash Point after which the climb becomes steep to Stormhaven Head, where Jamie had fallen. To his right was the site of the cliff chapel, long gone and probably very small – but once used as a hermitage by another recluse, also called Peter. Peter the Hermit had received royal protection in 1272, possibly for providing some service to the area, such as lookout duties. No one saw like a hermit saw and the sea needed watching in those days, with those French, the neighbours from hell.
Nine centuries on, however, royal protection was removed. The abbot was alone with the grassy path at the start of the chalk-white Seven Sisters. He ran at first with the empty golf course on his left, giving way to fields and grazing sheep, the ewes still mindful of their young. They were lambs no more, with spring long gone. But here they were, parents still bent on the survival of their offspring, gathering them close as Peter came near.
It was hard to say who his own parents had been. His biological father was the Armenian mystic and teacher G. I. Gurdjieff. He’d had a brief liaison with one of his pupils, Yorii Khan, as gurus sometimes do. But Yorii was not ready for a child and offered Peter up for adoption. And so young Peter, nine months old, moved from a commune in southern Spain to Eltham in south London, where he was brought up by Mr and Mrs Payne, who felt they should have a child but who, despite several attempts at sex, had so far failed to conceive one.
The idea of a child was perhaps more important for the Paynes than the child itself. Peter did not remember childhood as a happy time . . . it was a thin line between protection and suffocation. He remembered his childhood bedroom, a bland room, in a bland house in a bland road. What would he do now if allowed back? And what would he say to the boy who once slept there, gasping for life, hoping against hope for something better? His adopted parents had changed his name from Peter to Graham, the same name as Mrs Payne’s father, who was dying of cancer at the time. Abbot Peter grew up a
s Graham Payne.
He was educated at a minor public school in mid-Sussex, which Mr Payne, a civil servant, had attended and where he’d been ‘very happy, I think’. (Feelings were always expressed as thoughts by Mr Payne. They were safer as thoughts – more distant things.) But young Graham had not been happy, and though head boy at the time, was expelled for organizing a sit-down protest in the school chapel – the more disruptive as it was halfway through a Founder’s Day service. So he’d been glad to get to St Edmund Hall in Oxford where he read history. The expulsion from school had seemed to make him more interesting to the college selection panel, as if anarchy was a sure sign of intelligence – though Peter knew it was merely the shaking fist of rage.
There in the city of dreaming spires and perspiring dreams, he discovered a different sort of unhappiness, a sense of tedium at the game being played out. But he completed his degree – he was a completer – before mental breakdown . . . or whatever it was called then, an inability to proceed. He was placed in a London psychiatric unit for four months, halfway up Highgate Hill. Through his window, he could see Dick Whittington’s cat on the road, immortalized in metal. And significant events occurred in that place. It was there he had the religious experience – these things are best not talked about, an experience of beauty – which led eventually to the monastery. It was also there on Highgate Hill that he decided to return to his birth name of Peter; and there that he fell in love with a nurse called Rosemary.
This was not a matter he could celebrate, despite some vista being opened in his soul. (Perhaps he would celebrate it one day, but for now it was just a wound.) Nurse Rosemary could not reciprocate his feelings, though sometimes gave the suggestion that she might . . . enough at least to stir the dream.
But the door, with hindsight, had only ever been closed, and when the end came – an unspoken affair, never quite expressed, a slow fade – Peter took it badly. It was the end of the world and the collapse of all things. It was only after five years in the desert that he could speak of his rejection with some sense of thanks, seeing that Rosemary was exactly like his mother, and not what he needed at all.
But these were long ago things and faraway – so much sand between then and now; and it was another man who ran along the cliffs tonight, the sea light fading. He ran with increasing fear, a tightness round his heart – because while he’d made his plans, they were creaky support – frequently stamped on and splintered by life. He could be at home now . . . he could be sitting at home with a whisky – he did not need to be out here tonight, bait for a killer of cold savagery.
But for some reason, he had to walk into the fire . . . just as he always had. Just as he’d organized the protest in the chapel . . . and just as he’d run into Stormhaven’s cold sea in January, screaming. He had to face the danger – taken there by deep will, as if to test the human spirit, beyond the anaesthetized life of pretty words and rational solutions. He screamed at the sky tonight, he shouted as he ran, for reasons way beyond the murderous snarling of Stormhaven Towers where a killer had broken loose, like a cannon careering across the deck of a crowded boat.
He could turn back. He could always turn back and if he was to do so, here at Cuckmere Inn was the place to turn . . . but he didn’t turn. He ran on, along the rough pavement and then over the Eastbourne road.
Why did the chicken cross the road?
Because he wanted to get to Loner’s Wood, where he’d meet the killer of Jamie King, Jennifer Stiles – and, in a way, Terence Standing.
The woods were dark as he entered; and they’d get darker still before morning came.
Stormhaven Towers was closing down
for the night. The ground-floor rooms – the last residences of a school year extended by murder – were individually lit and curtained. It was eight and PC Wilson checked to see that the common room was empty and the lights turned out. He stood alone in the dark, intrigued. It smelled of alcohol and teachers . . . they had a stale, tweedy smell all of their own, and one which still made Wilson nervous. Instinctively, he began to pick up the used glasses, scattered on tables – he’d worked in a bar for two years while he’d wondered what to do with his life. He still didn’t know the answer, but at least he was paid for not knowing and given the security of a uniform.
Outside in the corridor, two women were talking. These were Penny Rylands, Director of Girls, and Cressida Cutting, the headmaster’s widow. Penny was suggesting a drink in her room, and Cressida replying, with a giggle, that she didn’t think that was allowed, was it?
‘And of course you only do what you’re allowed, Cressida!’
And then they laughed and Wilson went out into the corridor. Standing as firmly as he was able, he suggested that they remain alone tonight, to stay safe from the killer. This was harder than it might have been – him telling them what to do. He felt like the pupil here and they the teachers. And anyway, he’d always felt inferior to these kinds of women, the smart, confident ones.
Penny reacted angrily to the idiot constable, but Cressida said he was only doing his job – though it would have been nice to meet up. And so the two women parted company after some extended chat to put the policeboy in his place. Both knew what needed to be done this evening and first on Penny’s list was some gardening . . . flowers didn’t look after themselves, while Cressida must pay a visit to a bedroom three down from hers.
Meanwhile, Holly and Crispin sat together in his room – Holly on the bed, Crispin in the chair. They were whispering, not wishing to draw attention to themselves, should any policeman come snooping. ‘You’d better not be the murderer, Crispin!’ said Holly, with only a little fear.
Ferdinand, two doors down, sat on his bed with his prayer book, wishing he was in the chapel. He opened his curtains to witness the glory of evening sky, but there, quite suddenly, was a policeman looking in. Quite ridiculous! So he closed the curtains quickly. ‘God spare us from the long nose of the law,’ he muttered.
It was hard to pray in this small, characterless room – so cramped compared to the high arches of the chapel, though whether there was a God to pray to, he did sometimes wonder. He castigated himself endlessly for such faithless thoughts, but – well, he’d scarcely been led to the Promised Land these past few years. Life had been relentlessly hard for the chaplain and you had to wonder why this was so. You can only blame everyone else for so long . . . you must get to God eventually.
Benedict, meanwhile, sat in his upper room . . . pondering. He held a whisky in his hand – a rather better malt than the common room swill. He rolled it gently against the side of the glass. It possessed a luminous transparency unavailable to his life at present. He had wished to make things better – that had been his intention in coming here. But he hadn’t made things better, this was quite clear now. Had he in fact made things worse? Whatever the truth, he needed to end this matter tonight. He put down the whisky, got up from his chair and exchanged slippers for shoes . . . while downstairs, in his smaller room, Geoff pondered the holdall beneath his bed. He was looking for comfort, and this was where he usually turned. He bent down, pulled the holdall out, lifted it onto his bed. A thousand times he’d tried to throw this suitcase and its contents away . . . and a thousand times he’d failed. He clicked the lock open and contemplated the contents.
Further down the corridor, two doors away, Bart put on his running shoes. He knew exactly what he had to do and was excited to be doing it.
Peter was deep into the wood
when he heard the footsteps – expected and dreaded. They were somewhere behind him in the deepening night. He’d found a track of soft soil – springy beneath the feet, like a cushion – and made a circuit of it, perhaps half a mile in length. He was at the start of the third lap when he sensed company. For a while, the visitor seemed to run alongside his own path, but now they were behind – or at least he thought they were behind, because sound does bounce around trees; it arrives from one
place when it started from another. But Peter had company in Loner’s Wood, he knew that – and he doubted it meant him well.
In the faint distance, the sound of a lorry, even a flash of headlights through the branches, as it made its late way to the Newhaven ferry. And then silence again, except for the steps behind, light, plodding but persistent. They were tracking Peter as he approached the quarry site, ‘Danger’ signs all around. He’d keep a steady pace along the leafy path, night vision good – lost in the headlights but recovered now . . . though he missed the log in his way, jumping at the last minute, tripping, falling, lying still – and listening beyond his breath.
Silence. The woods were silent again. It would be nice to hear the nightingale now, that haunting beauty. The ‘baa, baa’ of the sheep in the distance calmed him. And then a barking dog, guarding a farm perhaps?
He got to his feet. There were no steps in the woodland around, and he could see nothing, peering through the gloom. Perhaps he should wait here – just wait. But no, he felt too vulnerable, a sitting duck. What good was paralysis now? How could caution help his cause? So he started to run again, one foot in front of the other along the woodland floor – and then they returned, almost immediately, the steps behind, the hunter and the hunted, playing out some game. He’d keep steady on the path, they seemed to want him further into the wood, they were not in a hurry, he was the pacesetter – the other feet, whoever they belonged to, were happy to wait. They moved him on, like a sheepdog on the Downs, chasing, harrying, guiding from behind. Silence again . . . or was it silence? Peter stopped to listen – this was mad, he was going home.
A (Very) Public School Murder Page 21