A (Very) Public School Murder

by Parke, Simon;

  Tamsin paused . . . in shock.

  ‘Why is she apologizing for you abusing her?’ she asked.

  ‘The blame has hardly been one way!’

  ‘Answer my question.’

  ‘It was just a moment,’ said Ferdinand.

  ‘It’s always just a moment, Reverend. Prisons are full of moments. But my question remains: why is the child apologizing to the adult for the adult’s crime?’

  Ferdinand’s eyes were hollow.

  *

  It was warm, the sun taking hold through the common room windows, spilling across the wood-tiled floor. Holly took off her Stormhaven Towers sweat top, revealing a turquoise shirt underneath. It was the last remaining piece of school clothing she’d been wearing.

  ‘That looked a bit symbolic,’ said Geoff.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘A farewell to the uniform, Holly – a farewell to the school. Out of here and good riddance, eh?’

  This hadn’t crossed Holly’s mind.

  ‘Well, I suppose we all have to leave sometime – sir.’

  ‘I think it’s Geoff now, Holly – or Mr Ogilvie . . . or whatever other name seems appropriate in the real world. Or to avoid any names at all, simply cross over the road when you see me coming, and walk by on the other side of the street! It’s traditional among ex-pupils.’

  Holly thought that seemed a lonely remark and she felt sorry for him.

  ‘Are you happy here?’ Crispin paused. ‘Geoff?’

  Crispin too had dispensed with uniform this morning, appearing now in jeans and a loose-fitting red jumper.

  ‘Happy? That’s pushing it a bit, Crispin. I was happy once, when I was starting out. But you don’t want to hear this.’

  ‘I do, sir – Geoff.’

  ‘Well, you’ve got ambition then, the promise of everything good waiting for you in the future. All you have to do is get out there and seize it! But somewhere along the line – well, I became what Jamie King would call “the passed-over and the pissed-off!” – he had a way with words. And now I’m asking myself, “Can I do this for another fifteen years, as they move the pension age ever closer to eternity?” And the answer is, “I don’t know.” So am I happy, Crispin? I’m looking forward to a walking holiday in the south of France. Does that count?’

  ‘Sounds good to me, Geoff.’

  *

  ‘I believe the bones are Roman,’ said Bart, ‘and I want them checked – but not in England.’

  He’d already told Tamsin and Peter of his discovery – or rather, that of a friend of his who claimed to have found another Roman burial site in Loner’s Wood. And it was these bones that had brought Bart to Stormhaven Head on the afternoon of the murder. He’d been lowering them over the cliff to a designated spot for collection by boat.

  ‘If the bones are checked in England they’ll stay in England.’

  ‘Is that so bad?’

  ‘They deserve to go home – home to Italy. Ten skeletons have already made it home.’

  ‘Where a museum is paying you rather handsomely?’

  ‘They also believe in the cause – the return of Italians to Italy!’

  ‘And how about you, Bart?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Well, I mean, I’m no psychologist but isn’t this more about you than the Romans, who – let’s be honest – probably don’t care much any more?’

  ‘Of course they care! They want to go home. They’ve waited all these years in the cold soil of Loner’s Wood.’

  Bart – or Bartolomeo Buffone to give him his birth name – had been brought to England, aged five, by his mother, when she divorced her Italian husband. But Bart hadn’t wanted to come to England with his mother; he’d wanted to stay in Italy with his father. And over the years, Bart had grown more Italian rather than less. When he heard about the Roman burial site, the gathering of bones far from home, something stirred – it became ‘this obsession’, in his words. Tamsin thought him quite mad . . . though even as she judged him, there were echoes inside her, something about being a stranger in your own home. Where was home for Tamsin?

  ‘Perhaps it’s time to stop thinking about everyone else’s wellbeing, Bart – and ponder your own.’ Bart nodded. ‘That, I think, is what the abbot would say, at least. I’m not designed for conversations like this.’

  ‘So you won’t charge me?’

  ‘Not if you let sleeping Romans lie. Perhaps they wanted to be here – perhaps they were happy migrants who fell in love with this sceptred isle?’

  The determined figure of Mrs Docherty was now firmly in the doorway.

  ‘When are you lot going to be out?’ she asked, curtly. ‘I mean, no offence, but I need to clean this room before I go, and I’m off at two. It won’t clean itself over the summer!’

  ‘We’re all leaving now,’ said Tamsin, collecting her stuff and the others followed suit. It was time to go.

  *

  ‘Cutting was her mother’s name,’ said Benedict, as he walked with Peter towards Matron’s Landing. ‘She chose her mother’s name. I was always a disappointment to her – she blamed me for the end of the marriage, of course. She said I pushed her mother away. But I didn’t push anyone – she floated away like a balloon with no string, like a boat unmoored. She lost interest in me – well, who wouldn’t? And I lost interest in her . . . we waved goodbye to each other from some distance.’

  ‘I’m sorry for all this,’ said Peter. The successful pursuit of a murderer leaves various victims in its wake, not all of them criminal. ‘It must be the most difficult of times.’

  ‘It’s a horrible relief, if I’m honest. I think that describes it. A lanced boil – yet such regret, from which there’s no recovery, Abbot – I don’t think so.’

  They’d reached the wardrobe on Matron’s Landing. Benedict paused here. This was as far as he wanted company.

  ‘And the affair?’ said Peter.

  ‘Oh, I think you spotted the affair, Abbot . . . eventually.’

  ‘An affair not with a person but with an idea – the idea of excess.’ Benedict nodded.

  ‘She was quite captivated.’

  ‘As you said, it’s ideas that really wield the knife.’

  ‘She said I drew too many lines in the sand, walled her in with my dos and don’ts. I don’t remember that particularly, but it was how she felt . . . and so the growing urge to smash the walls, to stamp on those lines, to obliterate every boundary. And I saw her, you see.’

  ‘How do you mean, you saw her?’

  ‘It was Monday night. I was going for my night walk, when I came across her in the common room.’

  He remembered it well. He’d been walking past the common room at midnight when he heard a noise inside. Curious, he’d looked in and had seen Cressida at the sink.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked his daughter in the half-light.

  ‘Why does it matter to you? Washing up?’

  ‘Washing up in the common room at midnight? Don’t you have a sink at home – or is this charity work?’ It was then he saw the phone in her hand. ‘Washing phones?’

  ‘I suggest you carry on keeping yourself to yourself, Father. This is just something that had to be done. Good night.’

  She’d walked right past him, out of the common room and down the corridor, making her way home, via the side door and the bins. It was not a well-policed route . . .

  ‘A dangerous doctor,’ said Peter.

  ‘A very good doctor, as you know. But she began to celebrate excess like some frustrated teenager. It was there when we spoke, I heard it . . . and it led her by the snout . . . to this . . . such anger. The sins of the fathers, eh,’ said Benedict as he stepped inside the wardrobe and closed the door behind him.

  Peter listened to his footsteps on the stairs . . . they sounded weary.

  The comm
on room

  had been thoroughly cleaned for the first time since Easter. The whirlwind that was Mrs Docherty had been ruthless in her purge of dust, spillage and stain. And Tamsin and Peter were allowed to sit in the corner only so long as they didn’t add to it.

  There were no half-measures with Mrs Docherty. You cannot half-clean a room, this was her take on the matter, just as you can’t half-wash up. Sometimes Mr Docherty left the saucepans to ‘soak’ – as if that was washing up! ‘You’ve washed up, Mr Docherty, when the saucepans are cleaned, dried and in the cupboard!’

  ‘And they never wash their cups!’ she muttered to herself and the world. Mrs Docherty offered a running commentary on the appalling housekeeping habits of the staff as she cleaned. ‘Whatever they teach the children, it isn’t about washing cups. Or if they do wash them, they’re happy to leave the stain on the inside! As if someone else wants their stain! A cup has an outside and an inside and both need washing!’

  ‘I couldn’t agree more,’ said Tamsin. A stained cup should never be offered to a guest.

  So the cups had been washed, the sink cleaned, the tables dusted and sprayed, the floor energetically vacuumed and all magazines and newspapers thrown in a large plastic bag. And just when they thought she was finished, she discovered the fridge.

  ‘Now that is disgusting!’

  Ten minutes – and much elbow grease – later, Mrs Docherty surveyed her work, and she was pleased.

  ‘And none of those staff in here to ruin it for eight weeks!’ she declared, hands on triumphant hips.

  It was now two and Mr Docherty was picking her up. He’d wanted to stop on the way back for a cup of tea on the seafront, but she’d told him they didn’t have time for that malarkey. ‘He’s all for stopping, Mr Docherty. He could stop for England, that one!’ They were off to their caravan in Dorset the next day . . .

  Tamsin and Peter were now alone in Stormhaven Towers. The common room, such a theatre of emotion these past few days, seemed at peace, easy with the sunlight and the smell of coffee, furniture polish and bleach. The abbot was packed and ready to leave but Tamsin had said, ‘Perhaps a quick catch-up?’ There was awkwardness between them, the air full of the unresolved.

  ‘Can I give you a lift?’ asked Tamsin.

  ‘That’s kind. It would be helpful if you could take my bag and leave it by the door.’

  ‘But not you.’

  ‘Not me, no.’

  ‘So what are you doing?’

  ‘I need to walk before I can rest. I need to return to Loner’s Wood, for a start . . . and all that happened there.’

  ‘And you need to go alone?’

  ‘Of course.’ He didn’t mean it to sound quite so definite. ‘And then I’ll walk back via Stormhaven Head – it would be good to speak with Jamie . . . and with Jennifer at Tide Mills.’ He paused. ‘Their ghosts must pass through me, but they haven’t passed through yet.’

  ‘No,’ said Tamsin, with no understanding of his words. This was not her world or her way.

  ‘And then perhaps some fish and chips on the way home,’ said Peter, ‘that will be good. We didn’t have fish and chips in the desert. It’s one of the happier aspects of my move to Stormhaven.’

  A silence fell between them. Peter’s words had merely been postponing it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Tamsin.

  ‘Sorry for what?’

  ‘Not my finest hour. Though . . .’

  ‘Tamsin, you must do what you must do – until you stop doing it.’ Tamsin’s eyebrows were raised.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It means what it means.’

  ‘Which is nothing.’

  ‘But for now, I’ve had an adventure which I wouldn’t have had but for you. Shall we leave it there for the present?’

  Though Tamsin couldn’t leave it there.

  ‘So why did you think it was Cressida so early in the investigation? You said you knew.’

  ‘It was Penny’s phone. Why would the killer want to put the phone back in circulation, given that they had rendered it unusable? They could have got rid of it in a hundred different ways. So why didn’t they? Why did they leave it in the common room? The only reason I could think of at the time was to point the finger of suspicion at one of those using the common room. Cressida was the only suspect who wasn’t – she was living at home at the time.’

  ‘Tenuous.’

  ‘But strangely solid in the moment.’ It was a reprimand. ‘And then of course there was the overgrown garden we both witnessed.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘The initial interview. Seemed out of character for such an ordered person. And then Mr Thomas told me Dr Cutting was too snooty to have him work in her garden . . . but Gerry, his predecessor, had spent a lot of time there.’

  ‘The one who died.’

  ‘Of course – he’d found the aconite growing beneath the sycamore tree in the corner. It’s quite a distinctive flower.’

  ‘You mean she killed him?’

  ‘I don’t know. It could have been an accident, they do occur. Perhaps he didn’t know what it was. But she certainly didn’t want another gardener there. Given the choice of a well-kept garden or her precious aconite plants – well, that was easy, for one so intrigued by poison.’

  They were leaving the common room as they spoke. Peter gave one last glance around before he closed the door. They walked to her car in silence. He opened the rear door and placed his bag on the back seat.

  ‘We’ll speak soon,’ she said, getting into the car.

  ‘We will,’ said Peter.

  And then she drove away from the flint walls of Stormhaven Towers.

  Peter stood for a moment, watched her leave and then followed the car on foot, a solitary figure in habit and trainers. On reaching the school gate, beneath the gaze of the stone seagulls, another car pulled up alongside him, heading out into the world. He didn’t recognize the young female driver. But he did know the two figures in the back.

  ‘Can we give you a lift?’ asked Holly, sitting alongside Crispin. ‘My friend is driving us to her place for the night and then we’re going travelling.’

  ‘Travelling? Where to?’ asked the abbot.

  ‘We don’t know,’ said Holly.

  ‘Then you won’t be a needing a map.’

  ‘We’re rubbish with maps!’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ said Crispin.

  Peter smiled.

  ‘Maps can be overrated. But I don’t need a lift, thanks,’ he said. ‘I have a little journey of my own – on foot.’

  ‘You’re quite fit for an old man,’ said Crispin.

  ‘That’s so gay,’ said Holly.

  Peter didn’t quite know what to say.

  ‘So go well, the two of you – I think you will. Trust the path and you’ll be fine. It’s a good world – though it does have its moments.’

  ‘Goodbye then, Abbot!’ said Holly. ‘You’re a really good drunk!’

  ‘Cheers, Abbot!’ said Crispin gruffly, as the car pulled out of the gates and away from the school, disappearing slowly down the lane . . . though Peter stayed awhile, by the side of the road, across from the grand school gates where Terence had . . .

  ‘It was never God you had to worry about,’ said Peter. ‘It never is.’

  He then set off towards Loner’s Wood . . .

 

 

 
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