‘He told me much the same when I rang,’ Dewi said.
‘He’s fairly certain Sukie was murdered, but until Dr Roberts comes up with the goods, he’s hedging his bets.’ Janet turned away from the bed then, to resume her seat on the window ledge. ‘Talking of which,’ she went on, ‘I hear some enterprising colleagues have opened a book on the killer. Who’s your money on?’
‘It isn’t,’ Dewi replied flatly. ‘I don’t approve of gambling at the best of times, but that’s just sheer bad taste.’
‘It’s human nature,’ Janet said. ‘I expect there’s another book open now, as well, on the next likely victim.’
14
When he finished addressing the school, McKenna had stepped down from the dais and had stood for several minutes by the refectory doors, watching the girls rearrange the benches beside the tables before setting out crockery and cutlery. They functioned like well-drilled army units and in the corridor behind him another platoon, this one made up of domestics and kitchen staff, waited beside their enormous hot trolleys, with Fat Sally in the vanguard. As she led the way into the room, her flesh wobbled grotesquely and indecently with every movement and, for a moment, he had been won over by Ainsley Chapman’s seductive argument. This obese cook, the homely Matron, the lesbian games mistress he had met that morning were, he thought, such stereotypes, while Freya Scott’s whole objective turned on never fitting into the scenarios she created.
Spinning on his heel, he made for the lobby, where he came upon Jack, who was lounging against the door jamb, hands in pockets.
‘Can you tell what they’re getting for lunch?’ he asked. ‘From the smell of the food?’
‘No,’ McKenna replied. ‘Institutional cooking always smells the same. It could be anything.’
‘Why is that, though?’
‘I don’t know. Does it matter?’
Not really.’ Jack followed him on to the forecourt. ‘But if you want, you could partake of whatever it is in Scott’s study. She asked me to extend the invitation.’
‘I don’t want,’ McKenna said shortly.
‘She suggested it when we were waiting for you to get back after Torrance’s accident.’
‘Torrance didn’t have an accident. She had a cunningly contrived fall, which could easily have killed her.’
‘Scott didn’t like that explanation at all,’ Jack commented. ‘She tried to convince me the surcingle straps had rotted because Sukie didn’t look after the tack properly, so I told her there were clear cut marks, from something like a Stanley or Swiss Army knife, or even a scalpel. Once she’d taken that on board she was very quick to let me know that Sean O’Connor keeps Stanley knives in his workshop, which he doesn’t always lock, despite her explicit orders.’
‘There’ll be knives of one description or another all over the place,’ McKenna said. ‘And Matron, who looks the type to harbour the tools of her trade, may well have the odd scalpel in her room.’ He mounted the steps of the mobile incident room. ‘Once forensics give us a lead, we’ll start looking, although I shouldn’t imagine the saboteur is stupid enough to leave the thing lying around. It’s doubtless at the bottom of the Strait or buried deep inside a muck heap.’
Jack frowned. ‘There aren’t any muck heaps when the horses are living out. The stables are empty.’
‘As Sean would tell you, because it’s yet another of his jobs, droppings have to be cleared from the pastures to keep the grazing free of parasites.’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘But don’t panic. You won’t find yourself elbow deep in horse manure. We’ll set Bryn scouting if necessary.’
Jack dogged his footsteps into the senior officers’ cubbyhole. ‘If we take Scott’s lead, we won’t bother. She’s already fingered Alice Derringer for the saddle, on the basis that she’s one of a handful with the necessary know-how, and the only one with a motive for hurting Torrance.’
‘What motive is that?’
‘The way Scott tells it, Alice is eaten up with resentment because the fight at breakfast wouldn’t have happened if Torrance hadn’t wanted her to help with evening stables yesterday, which is another thing that’s bothering Scott because she reckons it smacks of bestowing a special favour.’ Jack sat down and tweaked the creases on his trousers. ‘I pointed out it could mean anything or nothing, or just perhaps that Torrance knows Alice is efficient because she fags for her.’ He smiled then. ‘She really doesn’t like the term “fagging”. She says doing a bit of housework teaches the girls something about duty, they all serve their time at it, there’s no likelihood of the seniors coercing the juniors into providing other, less innocent services, and it isn’t free labour, whatever Avril O’Connor might have told me. She got very voluble on the subject of Avril. She sacked her because she was lazy and slipshod, and a gossip to boot, and Scott will not, and I quote, “have the school’s affairs bruited abroad by anyone”. Needless to say,’ he went on, ‘I asked what “affairs” she meant. Very condescendingly she informed me that the Hermitage is a family and in all families there are not only things people prefer to keep private, but things which should be kept private.’
Chin on hand, McKenna gazed across at him. ‘Denting her armour isn’t easy, is it?’
‘I did my best,’ Jack replied. ‘I said a girls’ boarding school must attract a fair number of lesbian teachers, the way paedophiles congregate around children’s homes, so she informed me that although women aren’t bound to betray trust just because they’re that way inclined, undesirables would be flushed out and removed. She doesn’t run a laissez-faire establishment sympathetic to perversions.’ He smiled again. ‘And, of course, if any of the girls got too close, she’d deal with it. Managing people, whatever the circumstances, is her forte. She’s even got certificates to prove it. They’re hung up behind her desk.’
‘I’ve seen them,’ McKenna said. ‘Are they kosher?’ he asked. ‘Or the sort you can buy mail order from places in the Far East and America?’
Jack laughed. ‘Oh, they’re definitely genuine. So are all the aristocrats, models, political wives and other high flyers in the photos of old girls she’s got in her study. I recognised quite a few of them.’
‘I didn’t know you read the society pages,’ McKenna remarked.
‘The twins like to keep up with what the A list is doing so they spend my hard-earned cash on fripperies like Hello! magazine,’ Jack said. ‘If Scott’s right, Charlotte Swann might be gracing its pages before long. She’s set her heart on modelling now the bottom’s fallen out of the Princess Di lookalike market.’
‘That girl’s a tragedy waiting to happen,’ McKenna said, his voice suddenly gloomy. ‘God knows what her childhood was like. Justine Salomon showed me some pictures of Charlotte’s mother getting married for the fifth or sixth time, before telling me the woman was no better than a tart.’
‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ Jack commented, ‘but Charlotte is illegitimate. Scott told me, when she was giving me the Hermitage-is-a-family spiel. In other words this is the only family Charlotte has, despite her legions of relatives by marriage. Dysfunctional backgrounds, irresponsible parents and promiscuous mothers are par for the course, apparently.’
‘I wonder how Hester Melville would have turned out if she hadn’t married that dipsomaniac?’
‘Well, she did. There’s not much point in that sort of speculation.’ Jack paused, before saying quietly, ‘But it would help to know where we’re going with Sukie’s death. After what happened to Torrance, I don’t understand why you’ve still got doubts about her being murdered.’
‘I haven’t, but as we can’t be sure when the saddle was tampered with, we can’t say Sukie wasn’t the intended victim.’
‘I overheard somebody saying Torrance was jumping Purdey yesterday. Surely the girth would have given then.’
‘Perhaps,’ McKenna conceded. ‘It would depend on how deep the cuts were.’
‘Scott told me she couldn’t understand why Torrance didn’t notice them when she
saddled up,’ Jack said. ‘And much as it pains me to agree with her, I must say she’s got a point.’
‘No, she hasn’t. She’s trying to pass the buck, so that Torrance gets all the blame for being careless.’ Lighting a cigarette, McKenna added, ‘The girls here, like a lot of people, have a habit of undoing the girth only on the left-hand side. The right side’s left attached to the saddle, so next time it’s used, it’s buckled up again on the left. Whoever messed with Purdey’s saddle knew that and made the cuts on the right-hand side, knowing they were most unlikely to be noticed.’
15
As Martha followed Matron into her office-cum-surgery, she thought the woman’s steps were beginning to drag almost like her own. Her brisk, puffing efficiency had all but evaporated.
‘Alice was sick, you say?’ Matron frowned. ‘She actually vomited?’
Martha nodded, easing her aching bones into a chair. ‘Halfway through lunch.’
‘Hm. Could be a tummy upset from the heat, I suppose.’ She stood with her back to the window, chewing her lower lip. ‘Where is she now?’
Where indeed? Martha thought. When she drove into the forecourt, Daisy was leaning against the ornamental wall, smirking like an evil pixie. Without a word to her mother, Alice dived out of the car and hastened away with her and, as they reached the trees, Grace Blackwell, the other side of their triangle, came to meet them. The three of them moved as if joined by an invisible bond and, watching them, Martha wondered, somewhat fearfully, if they had persuaded themselves that life was a riddle whose solution they could only find together.
Dragging her attention back to Matron, she said, ‘She went off with Daisy and that other girl they knock about with.’
‘Well, she’ll be all right, then,’ Matron said, in a rush of relief. ‘Daisy would tell me immediately if Alice were poorly. She looks after her like a sister.’ She offered Martha one of her tight-lipped, uncertain smiles. ‘Daisy’s such a nice girl, isn’t she?’
‘Is she?’
‘She is indeed! Always happy, always smiling! If there were more like her my job wouldn’t be half the trial it is.’ Squeezing behind her desk to sit down, she added, ‘She doesn’t even get upset when she’s teased about her lisp.’
‘Perhaps you only see one side of her,’ suggested Martha, to whom Daisy’s ever ready smile was not a meaningless social gesture nor a true smile, but more a baring of teeth.
‘Oh, I don’t think so.’ Matron was adamant. ‘Everybody likes her. I’ve never heard a bad word said about her.’
‘But wasn’t she involved in the fracas at breakfast?’
Matron shook her head. ‘Dear me, no. That was between Alice and Nancy Holmes, and I must say you could have knocked me down with a feather when I heard. Alice swearing, of all things!’
‘I suppose the tension’s getting to her. It must be hard on everyone.’
Matron kneaded her hands. ‘It’s dreadful,’ she admitted. ‘One thing on top of another! I shudder to think where it might all end.’
‘At least Torrance wasn’t badly hurt.’
‘Not this time, but who knows what’ll happen next?’ Fear deadened Matron’s voice. ‘First poor Sukie, then Torrance. Who’s next? I ask myself. Who’s next?’
16
Vivienne used cannabis because other people had told her it numbed the capacity to feel and although they were yet to be proved entirely right, until today she had believed it took the edge off her pain. Now, utterly wretched after the emotional Armageddon of an hour with Imogen, she knew better, but perversely, the only hope of respite still lay in her addiction and so, as soon as lunch was over, she sidled out of the refectory.
She was about to set foot on the staircase when Jack Tuttle almost pounced on her. ‘Superintendent McKenna asked me to see you,’ he said.
She swallowed hard. ‘Why?’
‘You all have to be interviewed. Had you forgotten?’ He began herding her up the stairs, chatting amiably. ‘If you don’t mind, we’ll go to your common room. Somebody’s using the visitors’ room. Would you like to have a woman officer with you?’
‘What?’ She half turned.
‘Shall I ask a woman officer to be present?’
‘No.’ Taking the second flight of stairs two at a time, she hurried along the corridor towards the smokers’ den, with his footsteps thumping determinedly in her wake. The room stank of stale tobacco. She threw open the window, perched on the ledge, pulled cigarettes and lighter from her pocket, and started to speak even before he had found himself a seat. ‘You know I smoke dope. My parents did too, but they grew up and took to drink instead.’ Fingers shaking, she cupped her hands round the lighter flame. ‘I don’t know if they ever got busted because we’re not hot on communication, but they won’t be surprised when I do. I doubt if they’ll even care.’
The bluish tinge to her skin made Jack think of the undead in a horror film. She was just as pitiful, too, he realised and probably just as doomed. He smiled gently at her. ‘From our perspective, nailing the suppliers is more important than prosecuting users.’
‘Dream on!’ She grinned fleetingly, with the mirth of a death’s head. ‘I don’t fancy being crippled by a baseball bat.’ Then her mind’s eye was filled with a picture of Imogen’s terrifying stump, with its glistening scars and raw calluses, and her hands remembered the feel of taut, angry flesh and knotted muscle. She was afraid the touch of that mutilated limb would stay with her until the day she died.
‘People worry about you,’ Jack said.
Vivienne knew it was important to concentrate, in case he trapped her into a dangerous admission, but she felt dreadfully dislocated; part here, part still with Imogen, part elsewhere and, as ever, out of reach. ‘Yeah, I know,’ she said at last. ‘And look what happens to them.’
‘Are you referring to Torrance?’
‘Who else?’
‘If there’s a connection between your drug taking and what happened to her, there must be a pusher in the school.’
‘You’re twisting my words. I just meant that bad things happen when people bother about me. I kept telling her to leave me alone, but she wouldn’t. She’s a stubborn cow.’
Jack regarded her hungry eyes and jittery limbs. ‘You’ve got youth, looks and brains, and you must have money or you wouldn’t be here. So why take drugs?’
The death’s-head grin flickered once more. ‘Because I’m here.’
‘Most girls would give an arm and a leg for an education like this. I know my own daughters would.’
‘Stop talking about missing limbs, will you?’ she pleaded.
Baffled by the surreal turn of the conversation, he stared at her.
‘I smoke dope because it helps pass the time,’ she went on tonelessly. ‘There’s an awful lot of it.’
‘You subscribe to the view that life is pointless, do you?’
‘Isn’t it?’ Shifting uneasily on the window ledge, she dragged hard on the cigarette. ‘What was the point of Imogen losing her leg? What was the point of Sukie being born?’ She turned to blow smoke through the window. ‘And please don’t tell me they’re being punished for something they did in another incarnation.’
Somewhere, Jack remembered, he had read that the pain and grief of youth were pleasurable, because they were no more than a rehearsal for the real thing, but this girl’s grief and pain would be her dark escort to the grave. ‘That would be very crass,’ he said. ‘But the fact that apparently pointless things occur doesn’t make life futile.’ In an effort to reach her, he added, ‘Even if you feel you’re just filling in time between being born and dying.’
The smoke from her cigarette wriggled in the draught. ‘You must be a good father. You take the trouble to think.’
‘I’m not sure my girls would agree with you.’
‘They wouldn’t be normal if they did. You always think your parents are the world’s worst.’
‘Are yours?’
She shrugged. Dunno. They’re so laid-back
their heads bump on the floor.’ She ground out the cigarette in an ashtray overflowing with stubs, knotted sweet wrappers and balls of tinfoil. ‘Anything goes, as far as they’re concerned.’
‘Taking drugs probably destroyed their capacity to care.’
‘I wonder why they don’t do the same for me?’
‘Perhaps they never will. You could save yourself a lot of money and no end of unhappiness by giving them up as a lost cause.’ He met her wary eyes. ‘I can’t condone lawbreaking, but you need help rather than punishment and some constructive occupation.’ He paused then, hoping for comment on the school’s much-vaunted pastoral care and its impact on her own welfare, but she said nothing. ‘So,’ he asked eventually, ‘what will you do when you leave here?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘No plans to follow in Ainsley Chapman’s footsteps?’
‘Don’t be funny! I flunked two A level papers. I won’t get into the reddest redbrick, never mind Oxbridge.’
‘What’s to stop you doing resits?’
‘Where? Scott can’t wait to see my rear view.’
‘You could find a crammer.’
‘Maybe,’ Vivienne agreed, sliding off the window ledge and into a chair in one liquid movement. ‘How old are your kids?’
‘They’re twins, the same age as you. They’ve both got places at Bangor University.’
‘So you’re stuck with them for another few years.’ When she smiled, her face lit up. ‘But I don’t expect you mind, do you?’
‘If anything, I’m glad.’
Elbows on knees, she leaned forward, staring at the floor. The cheap hair-cord carpet was spotted with coffee stains and holed with cigarette burns. ‘I went to prep school at seven, like my brothers, then came here. We see our parents during the holidays, but we hardly know each other. The people at school are really your family.’ She grimaced. ‘Tough if you don’t get on.’
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