S.T.A.G.S.

by M A Bennett

  But they never did work it out. The policeman who spoke to me, an inspector with an accent almost as posh as Henry’s – treated me very gently, almost as if he was sorry to have to interview me at all. I said I’d fallen over the side of Henry’s boat and swum to the shore, and I hadn’t seen Henry after that.

  ‘I suppose he went to look for me, and it was dark, and …’

  Suddenly, totally without warning, I started to cry. I didn’t even have to fake it. I suppose after the shock it was just hitting me what had happened.

  The inspector cleared his throat in the way that posh people communicate they are uncomfortable. He patted my hand awkwardly. ‘You mustn’t feel responsible,’ he said in his bluff, stiff-upper-lip way.

  But I did.

  I was responsible.

  At the end of just a morning of questioning, we were allowed to return to school. The remaining Medievals waited for Lord and Lady de Warlencourt, who were driving up from London, while a police officer drove Shafeen, Nel and me back in a squad car. I was just glad it wasn’t Perfect. If he knew what we’d done to his beloved master, he’d have driven us off the road.

  For the second time I endured the journey between STAGS and Longcross in silence, but this time I was glad of it.

  chapter thirty-one

  The police concluded that Henry de Warlencourt, son of Rollo de Warlencourt, 17th Earl of Longcross, had fallen over Conrad’s Force and drowned following a night-fishing trip.

  No one told us officially, but we read it in the press; now that we’d started to use the Saros 7S we couldn’t quite put it back in Pandora’s Box, even at school. Maybe Henry had had a point.

  So, in our first lunchtime back at STAGS, in an empty practice room in Bede, we read the accounts online on all the major newspapers’ websites. They’d got hold of a gorgeous picture of Henry, looking all Gatsby in white tie and tails, and gone to town with it. Even the school didn’t escape scrutiny – paps hung around the iron gates training their long lenses at the school; we started seeing headlines like: ‘Posh STAGS Mourns Model Pupil … Tragic Lordling’s 50K-a-year School.’ A Facebook page went up, started by someone who didn’t even know Henry, just because of his beauty. His looks, his privileged life and the manner in which he died sparked something in the public imagination. Crazy girls from Poland threatened to jump off waterfalls, Oxbridge students had Henry de Warlencourt parties, which were black-tie dinners next to lakes, topped off by a spot of night fishing. Sixth-formers trespassed on the Longcross estate, desperate to take selfies at Conrad’s Force. One girl from Portland, Oregon, posted a video of her clutching Henry’s photo and crying for the entire four minutes and twenty-three seconds it took for R.E.M. to sing ‘Nightswimming’. We all watched it on the Saros in Nel’s room, open-mouthed. ‘Tragic,’ I said. ‘Think how mortified Henry would be.’

  ‘He’s an Internet sensation,’ said Nel, ‘without us having to lift a finger.’

  ‘He was King Sisyphus after all,’ said Shafeen. ‘But he just couldn’t get that boulder to the top of the hill. And it rolled down and crushed him in the end.’ I knew what he meant. Henry was trying to hold back a world that couldn’t be stopped.

  But Henry wasn’t the only one who wanted to hold back the tide. The Abbot – who was really sweet about the whole thing – wrote to our parents about Henry’s death. Didn’t phone. Didn’t email. He wrote a letter home for each of us. Dad was still in South America so I knew the letter would sit in the empty hallway of our little house in Arkwright Terrace until Christmas. I was glad. I wasn’t sure how I’d even begin to explain to my father what had happened. I always told him the truth – that was the deal we had – but I didn’t think I could tell this particular story. It would have to be the first secret I would keep from him. The other thing was that if Dad knew what had actually happened – the whole huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ deal – he’d be on the first plane home, and I wasn’t about to lose him his job. For different reasons, Shafeen and Nel didn’t tell their parents the gory deets either. Shafeen, I thought, was trying to spare his father from reliving what he’d gone through all those years ago. Chanel’s motives were more complicated. I think she wanted to stay at the school, and knew that if she told her parents she’d be taken away – she’d be snatched from this privileged world, and feel that she’d somehow failed. For that matter, I’m sure all of our parents would have taken us away if they’d known the full story, and none of us wanted that. We’d only just found each other. For our own different reasons, we each kept quiet, and the secret bound the three of us together.

  As it turned out, the snail-mail delay worked out well for all of us. The time when we’d needed our folks had come and gone – I could really have done with one of my dad’s legendary hugs on the night Henry died. And by the time the other two had communications from their parents, they were over the shock and wanted nothing more than to stay at school with their fellow conspirators. We would all be seeing our parents over the long Christmas break in less than six weeks anyway, when my dad would be back from Chile, Nel would be going to Cheshire and Shafeen to Rajasthan. Till then the three of us needed each other. No one else would understand every single emotion we were going through; how it felt to be murderers, yet not murderers, to be innocent and yet guilty, sorry Henry was dead but glad he was gone.

  The school did, however, seem to think that we should all have access to counselling – it was probably the most progressive thing they’d ever done. They engaged this shrink for us. She was the only adult presence at the school – besides the Abbot – who didn’t have to be called Friar. She was called Mrs Waller, but insisted we call her Sheila. This was a bit modern even for me. ‘Sheila’ was a well-intentioned hippy who had messy curly hair and wore lots of scarves and beads. We met in a small office I’d never seen before, which had nothing in it but two chairs and a low table with a box of tissues sitting pointedly on it. I almost felt she would be disappointed if I didn’t cry. ‘Sheila’ was always prodding me – ‘How do you feel?’ But I didn’t even know that myself. I could hardly tell her that I’d liked Henry, then I didn’t like him, but I sort of still did, and then I’d murdered him. I couldn’t tell her that Henry had kissed me and told me I was beautiful but I now thought he’d been lying, and then Shafeen had told me I was beautiful and I thought he was telling the truth. I couldn’t share that Shafeen had told me he’d come huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ in order to protect me, having avoided going for years. I couldn’t confide that Shafeen hadn’t said a word about my beauty since, or the reason that he’d come to Longcross, because we, ya know, had just murdered someone between us and had more important things to talk about – like if we were actually going to go to prison. Nor could I say that a tiny part of me still wanted to go up to him and say, Hey, you know how we killed someone by making him jump off a waterfall? Well, can we just put that to one side for a second while I ask you exactly what you meant when you told me, the night before we committed the most heinous crime in the book, that I was beautiful, and that you came to Longcross to protect me? I began to dread the therapy sessions, and kind, well-meaning ‘Sheila’. I had to tell lie upon lie, and tied myself in knots trying to remember which fibs I’d told, to the point where the sessions were actually more stressful than therapeutic. Shafeen and Nel felt the same. None of us needed Sheila. We only needed each other.

  The Abbot seemed to agree with this sentiment. He had us three murderers and the five remaining (weirdly calm) Medievals into his panelled study for sherry – the upper-class equivalent of a nice cup of tea – and preached benevolently at us.

  ‘I’ve been teaching for a long time,’ he said, hitching his gown onto his shoulders and looking over his half-glasses in a fond-uncle kind of way, ‘and I have found the best thing for young people in situations like this is normalcy, continuity and a restoration of order.’ I exchanged a look with Shafeen and Nel. How many situations like this had he had to face during his time at STAGS? How would he feel – this s
weet old Santa Claus of a man – if we told him that every terrible ‘accident’ he’d had to deal with in his thirty years was probably connected to huntin’ shootin’ fishin’? Henry’s victims. His predecessors’ victims. And now Henry. ‘We could send you all home on an exeat until after Christmas, but in consultation with the police and Mrs Waller’ (Sheila), ‘I have concluded that it would not benefit you to be isolated from your contemporaries.’

  I certainly wasn’t isolated from my contemporaries. Not any more. We three murderers were always together now, bound in guilt. We spent every waking moment in our little group, talking in a little huddle. I tried to concentrate on my schoolwork, but it was pretty difficult. I sometimes wondered, during the rest of that Michaelmas term, if they could take scholarships away, as my work was so poor. I think, looking back, that they must’ve given me a break because of the whole Henry thing, otherwise I would have been on the first train home. My essays made zero sense, and my rubbish efforts were made worse by the fact that I was sort of being haunted. You know that movie The Sixth Sense, where that goofy little kid sees dead people? Well, that kid was me. I kept thinking I saw glimpses of Henry. Henry playing on the green grass of Bede’s Piece in the middle of a rugby scrum, Henry’s blond head in chapel, or the tail of Henry’s Tudor coat just disappearing around a corner. I’d wondered if he’d attend his own funeral, like Tom Sawyer.

  We weren’t invited to Henry’s funeral. For one thing, we were not considered to be close friends – none of his family had met us, and for all they knew we’d just been one-off weekend guests. I was glad. I don’t think I could have stood it. A funeral is no place for the deceased’s murderers. It was, we knew, to be held at Longcross, at the church I’d seen from Henry’s roof, with all the county families in attendance. The Abbot went, as did the remaining Medievals. We saw them drive away from school that Friday morning in a cortege of long black sedan cars. All that day I imagined what it was like at the funeral; I pictured it like a scene from The Godfather. People wailing, and wearing black lace, and throwing handfuls of dirt and roses onto the coffin. A man who looked just like Henry, in profile, looking at his son’s coffin, his face a map of pain. A well-dressed lady sat beside him, too well bred to shed a tear. Rollo de Warlencourt and his wife. I never did get to meet Henry’s parents.

  But the ghost of Henry wouldn’t leave me alone. Most of all I became obsessed with that film that I’d told him about in our very last conversation at the top of Conrad’s Force, just before he fell. I now wished, since it was going to become our last conversation, and thus assume this enormous significance, that we’d talked about some really worthy movie like Citizen Kane. But I suppose last conversations are never like that; you never know when you’re going to check out, so people probably quite often drop dead after talking about the shopping list or the laundry. But that last exchange about, of all things, that dumb Sherlock Holmes movie kept coming back to me. I kept thinking about the part where Sherlock tumbles off the Reichenbach Falls but isn’t actually dead, and he comes back and hides in Watson’s room, and then when Watson finishes Holmes’s last adventure and types THE END, Holmes comes out when Watson is answering the door and types a question mark after the word END. When I’d handwrite my essays (no tech, remember) and leave them on my desk in Lightfoot, I kept expecting to come back and find a little question mark written at the bottom in Henry’s scrawling handwriting. After all, we hadn’t actually seen his body. Just a sealed-up bag. Maybe he wasn’t dead. Sometimes, on the rare occasions when I was alone in the room, when Jesus was out playing real tennis or something, I’d go to the windows and quickly whip back the floor-length curtains, to see if Henry was hiding there. Honestly, I was becoming a real fruit loop. I tell you, I almost went back to ‘Sheila’ to get my head read.

  chapter thirty-two

  I expected that once we were all back at STAGS after that fateful weekend at Longcross, the Medievals would never speak to us again. I was wrong.

  I wouldn’t say they treated us nicely, but they certainly never bullied any of us again. It was like there was a strange force field around the three of us. They were almost afraid. They knew I had been pushed out of the boat, and that I had seen them all refuse to help me, but they could not, I suppose, know what had happened between the three of us and Henry. All they knew was that I’d turned up alive, and Henry had turned up dead. I wondered if they were worried about how much I knew; they didn’t know how much, if anything, Henry had told me before he pushed me into Longmere, but if they’d ever seen any movies at all they should know how supervillains always feel they’re kind of freed up by the fact that their victim is about to die, so it doesn’t matter how much they tell them. Like the Six-fingered Man in The Princess Bride who describes the pain machine to Westley before he turns it on. For all the Medievals knew, Henry could’ve done something similar. I could literally know where all the bodies were buried. So they were all carefully civil. The girls were guardedly friendly to Nel and me, and the boys civil to Shafeen. All talk of the Punjabi Playboy and Carphone Chanel was dropped. And life at the school went on as normal.

  Actually it was a little bit too normal.

  In short, although there was an outpouring of grief from strangers online, no one at STAGS seemed to be mourning Henry quite as much as they should. Even Lara didn’t seem to be as devastated as she surely should have been. She’d lost her ‘Hen’, the guy she presumably liked, even loved, along with what she probably loved more: the Longcross package – all those lands and that lovely house and all that cash.

  I assumed she must be keeping it all bottled up inside. ‘Poor Lara,’ I said to Shafeen and Nel on Bede’s Piece one day, watching her – quite cheerfully, it has to be said – playing lacrosse.

  Nel turned to me in surprise. ‘You don’t feel sorry for her, do you?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘not for her.’

  ‘For Him then?’

  She meant Henry. We always meant Henry when we said Him or He with that extra emphasis that meant the word had a capital letter. Henry, that devil, was now referred to as if he was God.

  ‘You don’t feel sorry for him, do you?’ Nel prodded again.

  I thought about this. I kind of felt sorry that the nice Henry, the one who had kissed me on the rooftop and taught me to fish, didn’t have a chance at life. But I wasn’t sorry for the bad Henry, the real Henry. So I shook my head. ‘No. You?’

  ‘No. I’m glad he’s gone. Now other kids are safe. I feel sorrier for that African kid, and that scholarship girl. They were murdered. Not by him, I know. But I still kind of wish he’d been brought to justice.’

  ‘Maybe better not,’ said Shafeen. ‘If they started poking around into Henry, they might start poking around into us. Maybe we’re lucky the police were as inefficient as they seemed to be.’

  Shafeen was voicing a feeling that had been nagging at me. ‘You think so too?’

  ‘What do I think?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, do you think it was all a bit, well, straightforward? They interviewed all of us, but don’t you think they let us get away a bit easy?’

  ‘How do you mean?’ asked Nel.

  ‘Well, I’ve watched a lot of films. A lot. And whenever there’s an unexplained death, the authorities go into tons of detail – police, coroners, crown prosecutors, you name it. They definitely should have shaken me down a little bit more – I mean, I was the last one to see him alive. They should have asked loads more questions. Why was I wearing a wetsuit? Why didn’t Henry and I catch any fish before I “accidentally” fell in Longmere? Why was he at the top of the waterfall when we were fishing down on the lake? The police should be interested, the Medievals should be interested, the de Warlencourt family certainly should be interested.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘That there’s some sort of cover-up. Obviously the Medievals don’t want it to come out about the huntin’ shootin’ fishin’, but it seems like no one else does either. What did Henry call it? “T
he British establishment”?’ I watched Lara score a goal and do a little celebration with Esme and Charlotte, their blonde ponytails flying as they hugged and jumped about. It seemed, well, wrong. ‘I mean, I’m really glad no one probed, as it lets us off the hook –’ too late I noticed the fishing pun – ‘but it just seems odd.’

  The lacrosse match was over, and we started to stroll towards school, our black Tudor coats flapping and wrapping round our legs. Shafeen said grimly, ‘Well, don’t relax just yet. I suppose the next thing will be the inquest. We’ll just have to hope that nothing nasty turns up at that.’

  I’d forgotten about the inquest. Of course – I should’ve known from the movies. They always have a court session to discover what happened in a suspicious death. I clutched at my stomach. More waiting, and wondering. I wondered how much more I could take.

  Shafeen, Nel and I weren’t allowed to go to the inquest, since we were under eighteen. All the Medievals who were in Six Two and were eighteen got to go. We watched them leave the school with the Abbot in the school minibus. It looked weird – like they were going on a really dark school trip.

  They didn’t come back for hours, and the three of us did our best to pretend it was just a normal school day. But just after lunch the minibus came back up the drive and we stopped pretending that we could talk about anything else. ‘I’m going to ask,’ I said decidedly. ‘Come with me?’

  Shafeen and Nel shared a look. ‘Sure.’

  We knew where to find the Medievals. They’d be hanging out, as they always did, at the well in Paulinus quad; and there they were, gathered like crows in the winter sunshine.

  For a moment as we approached I could have sworn that Henry was standing there, in the middle of his little cohort. My heart started to thud; the phantom who had been haunting me would show himself at last. But as we got nearer I could see there were only five heads, and the blond one at the centre was actually Cookson. He was leaning on the well just as Henry used to do, in the accepted position of the leader of the Medievals. He even looked like Henry. His hair looked blonder (had he done something to it?) and he was slimmer (had he been working out?). His hair was cut to look like Henry’s and he even wore chessboard-check stockings under his black Tudor gown, just as Henry used to do.