Child's Play

by Alison Taylor

  Alice was an odd choice to be her best friend, but in truth, it had never been a matter of choice. The first term was three days old when Daisy arrived, and as Alice was the only first former not already joined in some alliance, leftover and latecomer made their own. Three stultifying years later, Daisy felt trapped in the same kind of oppressive relationship her parents endured, but while divorce was theirs for the taking, even had she been sure that was what she wanted, she did not dare break the bond with Alice. When friendship died at the Hermitage, its body was picked apart, its bones stripped of every scrap of flesh and ounce of marrow, and the one who killed the friendship broken on the wheel. Betrayal, of a certain kind, was still a capital offence in this small, cynical world.

  She heard the lift whine at the far end of the building, then footfalls overhead and the thud of bedroom doors. She listened avidly for whatever might come next, as she listened at home for the furious, savage coupling that closed each bitter row between her warring parents, but although she waited until her ears began to hum, nothing arose to divert her agitation. Suddenly she reared up in bed and yelped, dragging the other girls from the shallows of sleep.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ she asked, her voice throbbing with horrified excitement.

  ‘Hear what?’ someone mumbled.

  ‘That awful sloshing noise in Sukie’s room. It must be her ghost!’

  For a long time Torrance had regarded the arcane traditions of the Hermitage as simply ‘quaint’, because her New World eyes misread the cosy, wrinkled face of the Old World. Her eventual realisation that brutality and malice were the school’s lifeblood brought with it a profound and crippling sense of helplessness, and that feeling returned with a vengeance when she made the rounds of the Tudor dormitories that night. She could actually smell the tension and fear gripping the school, and she searched deep for the brave face she presented and the calming words she spoke. The only light moment in a dreadful half-hour came courtesy of the ever acerbic Alice, when Torrance asked, ‘How’s your breathing now, little sister?’ and Alice, rigid with stress and grey as a corpse, replied, ‘Fine, thank you, Torrance, and would you please stop calling me “little sister”. You may want to run Tudor like a sorority house but, as I’ve told you before, this is not America.’

  On the way to her own room, Torrance saw Ainsley going into the showers. She sat on the bed, waiting and counting, and exactly eight minutes later Ainsley returned. Three more minutes passed before she heard the thump of books, the rustle of paper and the click of a lamp switch as Ainsley settled down to one hour of intellectual gymnastics, and Torrance knew that ten minutes after Ainsley eventually went to bed she would be muttering in her sleep, her overstretched brain unable to quiet itself. The prospect made her feel like screaming.

  Vivienne’s room was tonight as quiet as the grave. There were no soft giggles or heartbreaking sobs, no scraping matches and no cloying scent drifting through the open window. Perhaps, for once, sheer exhaustion had sent her to sleep.

  Torrance went for her own shower, and was sitting on the bed, drying her hair, when she heard screams from the floor below, quickly followed by Matron’s shouts. Hair flying, she ran from her room and down the stairs, to find Matron hovering over the crumpled figure of Grace Blackwell.

  It’s all right,’ Matron said, hauling Grace to her feet. ‘I’ll put her in the infirmary for tonight.’

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’

  ‘Daisy was teasing the dorm. I’ve already told her off.’

  ‘She — she s-s-said she could h-h hear Sukie’s ghost!’ Grace almost choked on the words. Her eyes glittered.

  Torrance recoiled as if she had been punched in the stomach.

  ‘Daisy’s a very naughty girl,’ Matron was saying, patting Grace’s arm. ‘You’ve had enough frights for one day with that stupid police dog, haven’t you?’ She set off for the infirmary, trudging on leaden feet, with Grace tottering beside her like a drunk.

  Leaning weakly against the wall, Torrance watched until they were out of sight and several more minutes passed before she felt strong enough to return upstairs. Once back in her room, she draped a towel round her shoulders and spread out her hair to dry, then sat by the open window. Lights glowed in the police caravan, from where she could hear the occasional voice, and she realised that its presence underscored the sense of menace she felt at every turn. She shivered. ‘Damn Daisy!’ she muttered, wanting to throttle the little horror. Matron would have done no worse than chide her gently, for Daisy was one of her particular pets and her mischief, according to Matron, was quite harmless. Was Daisy perhaps retarded, Torrance asked herself, realising that the girl’s emotional attachments, as well as her behaviour, were decidedly infantile. She exchanged one idol for another as a child jumps from toy to toy. For a while she had plagued Torrance with her affections and insinuating presence, before dropping her for Justine, who was ousted in favour of Imogen.

  A movement outside caught her attention. A figure was crossing the forecourt from the police caravan, trailing an ever lengthening shadow. She stared out as she had on Tuesday night, when the silence was disturbed by the scream of a military jet low overhead and the rustle of trees in its aftermath. Almost immediately, she had heard another noise, as if someone had kicked a stone, then what had sounded like the whisper of voices. She had peered into the darkness until her eyes glazed, but still could not be sure whether what she saw was a trick of the light or a shape flitting among the trees.

  Suddenly bone weary, she removed the towel, twisted her hair into a loose plait and fell into bed. Hearing Ainsley’s sporadic gabbling through the wall, Torrance remembered that she too had suffered Daisy’s attentions for a while, before Sukie became the latest passion. Then thoughts and images of the dead girl that she had resolutely thrust aside all evening flooded her mind and she began to weep.

  *

  Alice had not shed a single tear when Sukie’s death was announced, nor during the strange, disturbing, dragging evening that followed, when the school’s inviolate routines collapsed about her ears. Tea was late, prep was abandoned, and showers and bed turned into a brawling, shouting mêlée that subsided into simmering unrest once Dr Scott and Matron had made their rounds. Alice blamed the atmosphere for her bitchiness towards Torrance, who called her charges ‘little sister’ only to make them feel protected, not to promote Dr Scott’s sinister notions of a surrogate family to which every girl must offer herself like a sacrifice. Dr Scott was a hypocrite, Alice decided as she fell asleep, and she made hypocrites of others, for the Hermitage was, in truth, just a gigantic cardboard box where parents abandoned their daughters as if they were unwanted puppies.

  Grace’s ear-drilling screams wrenched her awake. She shot upright to see Grace tearing towards the door and Daisy, flapping her arms and howling, in pursuit. She chased her into the corridor, then came running back and dived into bed, giggling like a lunatic. She went on giggling even when Matron burst into the dormitory and began shouting at her. Although Daisy shouted back that she had only been joking and had not heard anything from Sukie’s room, her silly, nasty antics set the cauldron seething again, and Matron and Grace were long gone before even a semblance of quiet fell in the dormitory.

  Alice tossed and turned interminably, cursing Daisy one moment, the next feeling cold with dread about what the future held for her friend, for sooner or later, she knew Daisy would go a step too far, with deadly consequences. Wanting to warn her, she rolled over, but Daisy, looking quite cherubic, was fast asleep.

  With a sigh, Alice tucked her arm beneath her head, sniffing her flesh where the smell of horses still lingered. Wondrous creatures that they were, horses stripped her of all human misery or pretension and made her feel like nothing at all except part of the earth, and she knew Torrance shared that understanding. Earlier, in the paddock, with the handsome policeman a bemused and silent witness, when Torrance told Purdey and the other horses that Sukie was dead, the electricity in the air had made her hai
r stand on end. Alice smiled drowsily, for although the memory was heart-wrenching, it was also beautiful.

  Faintly, in the distance, she heard one of the horses cry. Thinking it must be Purdey, grieving for her dead mistress, she choked back the sob welling in her throat, but the next one defeated her and she began to weep quietly but convulsively.

  Alice’s restlessness brought Daisy out of a nightmare where a ravening dog with bloody fangs was chasing her through the woods. When Alice slid out of bed to go to the lavatory she followed, padding barefoot through the dawn gloaming.

  Bleary-eyed, still in her other world, Alice emerged from the cubicle to wash her hands and she almost fainted with shock to find Daisy perched on the edge of the sink. ‘What’re you doing?’ she grumbled. ‘You frightened me half to death!’

  Daisy licked her lips greedily. ‘Did you think I was Sukie’s ghost?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’ Ostentatiously turning her back, Alice washed her hands.

  ‘Bet you did!’

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ Alice reached for her towel. ‘And grow up, why don’t you? You really scared Grace.’

  ‘She’s stupid.’

  ‘She isn’t, she’s just nice. Unlike you. Sometimes you’re really horrible!’

  ‘We are up our own arse tonight, aren’t we?’ Daisy sneered. ‘Could that be because Miss Wonderful picked you to help with evening stables, I wonder?’

  ‘You’re only jealous, although I can’t think why. You don’t like horses.’ Her next words tripped out before she had even entertained the thought. ‘And horses positively hate you. You frighten them.’

  ‘Crap!’ Daisy snapped. ‘Daddy’s going to buy me a horse for my next birthday. So there!’

  ‘So what? Mummy would buy me one before my next birthday if I asked.’

  ‘I sometimes forget you don’t have a daddy to ask,’ Daisy put forward thoughtfully. ‘I guess he didn’t love you enough to stick around.’

  Alice flushed. ‘You are horrible! And stop trying to copy the way Torrance speaks. You sound silly.’

  ‘Better than sounding like a love-struck booby,’ retorted Daisy. ‘Bet you’d like to marry her, wouldn’t you?’ she added maliciously. ‘You’ll be lucky! Miss Wonderful’ll probably marry her bloody Tonto. She’s weird enough.’

  Ignoring her, Alice hung up the towel.

  Daisy pinched her arm. ‘Did you hear me? I said she’s queer.’

  ‘I heard. I don’t know what you’re talking about and I don’t want to know.’

  ‘Well, you should! You should steer well clear of her.’

  ‘Horse shit!’

  ‘You think?’ As Alice turned for the door, Daisy grabbed her by the hair, and Alice had no option but to stand still and listen. ‘Well, you didn’t see what I saw in the stables a couple of weeks ago.’ She paused, head to one side, eyes bright, face flushed. ‘I heard Sukie crying, so I went to see why.’ She moistened her lips again. ‘She was in one of the empty stalls.’

  ‘Well?’ Alice demanded. Her neck ached from the pressure Daisy was exerting.

  ‘Miss Wonderful was there, too. She was raping her.’

  She released Alice’s hair and stood back to assess the effect of her words. ‘SHE - WAS - RAPING - SUKIE,’ she repeated, laying horrible stress on the word ‘raping’.

  Ashen-faced, Alice gaped, bony chest heaving as she tried to draw breath. Suddenly she lunged violently. ‘Liar!’ she croaked. ‘Liar!’

  Daisy stumbled backwards, clutching at air, and fell against a cubicle door, striking her face. As Alice reeled from the room she yelled after her, ‘She murdered her! Sukie was going to snitch. I know she was because she told me. So, there!’

  Friday 9 June

  1

  Had Fluff and Blackie not been determined to wake him, McKenna would have slept until the alarm clock wailed at seven thirty, but he was driven from his bed long before then. As soon as he was on his feet the cats stopped howling, raced down the first of the steep narrow staircases and skidded around the corner to the second. One day, he said to himself, they’ll trip over their own noses and roll over and over like a car gone off a mountainside, then realised they would probably bring him down first. When he was at his groggiest, they would wait halfway down the stairs before shooting under him as his foot was in the air and his balance almost irredeemably compromised. The point of no return had so far been avoided only by a cat’s whisker.

  By the time he reached the parlour they were at the back door. Once he let them out, they roamed about the little garden, then scrambled across the ivy-clad wall into next door’s overgrown patch. Leaving the door open to the fresh morning air, he resolutely turned his back on the enchanting view, which embraced the city, Strait and Puffin Island, as if, like the face of someone once beloved but now dead, it were already a thing of the past.

  At seven thirty, gritty-eyed from lack of sleep, Jack plodded into McKenna’s office with some papers under his arm and a mug of tea in each hand. ‘Berkshire police have sent us a fax,’ he said, setting the mugs on the desk, ‘to say there’s absolutely nothing on the Melvilles. I was expecting a drink-drive on John, at least.’

  ‘They have a chauffeur,’ McKenna reminded him. ‘So Melville can drink to his heart’s content, wherever he is. What do they say about the accident?’

  Jack scanned the papers. ‘No mechanical faults in the chassis, brakes, steering, wheels, etc. etc. and no post-crash fire to muck things up. Nor was there any ice around, black or otherwise, contrary to what Hester believes. Based on the physical evidence, it appears the car was travelling well in excess of seventy-five miles an hour when it left the road, so they came to the obvious conclusion that the driver simply lost control. Unfortunately,’ he went on, ‘and I quote, “prolonged and exhaustive forensic examination of the vehicle failed to establish which of the two females present had been driving. Both were wearing gloves and no viable fingerprint evidence was therefore available.” So that appears to be that, although as they’d like us to phone, they may want to talk off the record. Will you do that, or shall I?’

  ‘I’ll call them after the briefing,’ McKenna said. ‘I want you to interview Sean O’Connor. You should be able to catch him before he leaves for work.’

  ‘Which hat do I wear? “Nice copper” or “nasty copper”?’

  ‘You know how you function best.’ McKenna gave him a lopsided smile.

  ‘I trust Scott will be given the really nasty copper routine?’

  ‘I haven’t decided quite how to handle that yet,’ McKenna admitted. ‘I’ve been indulging in displacement activity and thinking about Sukie’s horse. I wonder what will happen to it?’

  ‘If the Melvilles are as broke as Hester reckons,’ Jack replied mordantly, ‘they’ll probably have to sell it to pay for her funeral.’ When McKenna winced, he added, ‘But I’m sure it’ll find a good home. Better than it’s got now, most likely, because I don’t see how one teacher, with other responsibilities to boot, can look after seven horses properly, even with help from the girls. They need a full-time groom.’

  ‘What “other responsibilities”? According to the prospectus, Miss Attwill is a full-time riding mistress.’

  ‘She might be full-time and she might be the riding mistress,’ Jack commented, ‘but she also teaches geography and social studies, so she’ll be one of the economies Scott grasps at every opportunity. Have you noticed,’ he went on, picking up his tea, ‘how many part-time staff and contract workers she employs? There’s nothing necessarily wrong in trimming excess, but to my mind she’s a cheapskate. The prospectus boasts about grand schemes for future expansion, yet in reality the school’s a dump.’ He grinned briefly. ‘I tried to talk to her about the staffing levels yesterday, but all I got was an ear bashing about market forces, market expectations, and market this, that and the other. Trying to get her to stick to the point was like pushing a bus up Snowdon.’

  ‘She’s adept at wearing down opposition,’ McKenna said, ‘as well as de
flecting attention elsewhere when she can’t. She’s very guileful and very clever. Don’t forget she’s got a doctoral thesis under her belt and to prove her particular point, that Shakespeare was the first to record the human capacity for insight, she must not only have jumped forwards, sideways and backwards through a lot of mental hoops, but persuaded a lot of others to follow her blindly.’ He took out his first cigarette of the day. ‘If she weren’t quite so clever, I wouldn’t mind telling her that her thesis is total rubbish, but she’d misuse the transaction. I’d end up compromised, one way or another.’ Gazing thoughtfully at Jack, he smiled slowly. ‘Then again, Dewi knows as much as me about the insights to be found in early-medieval Welsh poetry. I’m sure he’d jump at the chance to tell her.’

  *

  When McKenna reached the briefing room shortly after eight o’clock, he found it already full, even though many of the officers there had been working at the school until very late the night before, completing interviews, collating statements and putting information into the computers.

  ‘Dr Roberts,’ he began, ‘is still unable to specify the circumstances of Sukie Melville’s death, although he’s disinclined to regard it as accidental.’ Then he told them of the car crash, discussing its implications and the doubts surrounding the identity of the driver. ‘Sukie had no memory of the crash, but believed she was responsible for maiming her closest friend. Day after day, she’s been forced to confront the consequences of her actions in the shape of Imogen’s amputation. A burden of guilt of that magnitude could have made her suicidal. However,’ he went on, Imogen may have been the driver. If she took advantage of Sukie’s memory loss to pass the blame, she would be living in fear of Sukie’s memory returning: hence a possible motive for murder. Although she appears to be physically incapable, we mustn’t make assumptions about the extent of her disablement. Nor must we assume that she couldn’t have had an accomplice.’