Child's Play

by Alison Taylor

  ‘Have you sent someone to the hospital?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  McKenna opened the car boot once more, removed the three evidence bags and thrust them at Jack. ‘When you do, tell them to take these to the pathology lab.’ He closed the boot and strode off without a backward glance.

  Jack stayed where he was long after McKenna had been swallowed up by the darkness of the lobby. Close to despairing of the man, he looked heavenwards, where the sky had cleared to a washed-out blue after that summer downpour. The forecourt and drive were already drying into a patchwork of light and dark as the water soaked away to the parched soil beneath, although the drainpipes gurgled still and raindrops slid persistently from the trees, plopping to the ground or ballooning on the well-waxed bodywork of McKenna’s Jaguar.

  Miss Attwill suddenly came into view, trudging head down from the direction of the stables. Her clothes looked sodden and her paddock boots were caked in mud. She stopped by the door to kick off the boots, then she too disappeared. He was about to turn away when a movement caught his attention and he looked up to see Daisy at the dormitory window. She was staring at him fixedly.

  21

  Much of what McKenna had said at the briefing meeting went over the heads of most of the police officers; it was Jack’s terse statements about bullying, about the girls having no safe place, that made an impact. Even that, however, Dewi recalled, was nothing in comparison to the effect Matron’s dramatic arrival achieved.

  Jack had shunted her into the senior officers’ cubbyhole, but her words flowed out in an agitated torrent, and long before she had finished relating her story and pronouncing on its implications, the officers in the adjoining room, listening in total silence, should have been persuaded that it was now a matter of ‘suspect apprehended, case closed’. Some clearly were; others remained intensely sceptical. Dewi heard someone, who must, like Janet, have had the benefit of a university education, say that Imogen’s attacking Nancy and therefore proving herself a killer was ‘just too serendipitous’. Roughly interpreting the remark to mean ‘too good to be true’, he stared at the two officers who had organised the betting. They looked almost as agitated as Matron sounded.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. ‘Did you miscalculate the odds?’

  They ignored him. Gathering up their papers and belongings, they hurried out of the room and started a general exodus.

  ‘Imogen’s down at twenty to one,’ Nona told him. ‘She’s going to cost them an awful lot of money.’

  ‘I hope she bankrupts them,’ Dewi snapped. ‘Have you placed a bet?’ he demanded.

  Nona flushed bright red. ‘No!’

  ‘How come you know so much about it, then?’ Without giving her a chance to respond, he walked away.

  Through the trees he could see brake lights flashing on and off as the drivers in front of him negotiated the bends in the lunatic drive. Nearing the gates, he found a queue of cars; Ken Randall, with his dog beside him, was checking each one as it left. Dewi waited his turn, and was about to move up when he saw Martha Rathbone’s anonymous hire car trying to nose its way in. As he pulled over on to the verge to let her pass, she gave him a brief salute. Alice, sporting a pair of spectacles, was hunched sullenly in the passenger seat.

  The dog trotted up to the car, sniffed the tyres, then put his paws on the door, panting and grinning. Dewi unwrapped a bar of Kit Kat and slipped it between the wicked-looking teeth. Chewing fiercely, the dog watched him intently and Dewi thought it was almost as if the animal were trying to speak to him. He stroked its head, tweaked its ears and ran his fingers through the soft brindled coat, wondering how his parents might respond if he broached the subject of having a dog of his own.

  Once out of the gates, he stopped again, surveying the raggle-taggle of media vehicles on the opposite side of the road. Cups, sandwich wrappers, crushed cans and cigarette packets littered the grass, torn paper and ribbons of plastic bedecked the hedges. Concluding that it was fast coming to resemble a travellers’ camping ground, he left the car and sauntered across, hands in pockets.

  A woman in a dark-grey suit ran up to him, avid for news. ‘You’re Detective Sergeant Prys, aren’t you?’ she asked, with a smile that made no impression on her empty blue eyes. ‘So, what have you got for us?’

  ‘A bit of advice,’ he said. ‘Get this lot cleaned up before I decide to move you on.’

  He returned to the car, gunned the engine and swept away in the direction of the village and Sean O’Connor’s house.

  22

  As she drove to the hospital, with Imogen’s custom-made stick and crutches on the back seat of the car, Janet came to the conclusion that an effect need not bear an authentic or verifiable connection to a cause. She was astounded that McKenna had let one incident, that in context was both reasonable and completely comprehensible, overturn the direction of his investigation and set him on a path she was sure would prove to be disastrously misguided. Imogen could have wielded the stick because she was defending herself from attack; it was Freya Scott who, aided and abetted by Matron, had implied that Imogen’s behaviour was tantamount to guilt for Sukie’s murder. McKenna had allowed himself to be swept along by their deeply flawed and injudicious assumptions, apparently without once considering that for them, such a neat solution was immensely expedient.

  Jack had left her in charge of Matron when he went over to the school in search of McKenna and it had been remarkable how quickly Matron’s near hysteria gave way to what Janet perceived as something akin to callous satisfaction. ‘Mind you,’ she had said, ‘why Imogen should have wanted to kill Sukie is a mystery. But then, who knows what might’ve gone on in the past?’ Favouring Janet with a complicitous look, she had added, ‘They’d been so very close.’ Those few words contrived to sully what Janet would always believe had been only an innocent friendship. ‘Still,’ Matron finished, ‘we won’t have to wonder for ever. It’ll all come out at the trial.’

  ‘Aren’t you getting rather ahead of yourself?’ Janet had asked.

  Matron had smoothed her apron and rather smugly replied, ‘I think you should let Superintendent McKenna decide what’s right and what’s not. He wouldn’t have taken away Imogen’s stick and crutches unless he had the very best reasons. Now, would he?’

  ‘There are plenty of other potential weapons lying about the school,’ Janet had told her. ‘Hockey and lacrosse sticks, tennis racquets, cricket bats—’

  Matron had interrupted her. ‘Maybe so, but he hasn’t confiscated those.’

  She left the stick and crutches in the pathology department, then went to collect their replacements — utilitarian NHS equipment with holes for height adjustment drilled through the metal shafts, and preformed grey plastic handles and underarm supports. After putting them in the car, she returned through the low-ceilinged reception area to the lifts and thence to Torrance’s room. One policeman sat outside the door, another at the bedside, thumbing through a car magazine. Torrance, still comatose, was now wearing navy and cream striped silk pyjamas instead of the hospital-issue gown that had been put on her in the accident unit.

  ‘Any change?’ Janet enquired.

  The policeman looked up from his magazine. ‘She’s been mumbling now and then about this and that, but she’s not making any sense.’

  There was a drip by the bedhead, releasing measured doses of some clear liquid down a plastic tube into a vein on the back of her hand. Janet peered at it. ‘What’s that for?’

  ‘To stop her getting dehydrated.’

  With a last glance at Torrance, she made for the door. ‘It might be a good idea to write down what she says,’ she remarked. ‘Even if it does sound like gobbledegook.’ As she left the room, something someone had said in the long hours since they invaded the school suddenly nudged the back of her mind. Who was it? she wondered, meandering past the nurses’ station. What was it? One of the nurses bade her good evening and drove the memory back into obscurity.

  23

>   At the best of times Miss Attwill was out of her depth with the horses. Justine, realising the woman was fast approaching the point of being overwhelmed by her increased responsibilities, took pity on her and helped out with evening stables, staying behind to clean and check the tack when Miss Attwill returned to school. She was glad of the peace, and the routine occupation, for since McKenna wrecked her equilibrium earlier in the day, she had found herself as restless as the proverbial cat on hot bricks.

  English was a wonderfully rich language, she thought, minutely examining, for the third time, the surcingle straps on Tonto’s saddle. Neither French nor German lent itself to such a wealth of metaphor or analogy, nor the silly little puns and aphorisms Matron proudly presented as insights. Justine wondered if she were the only one who felt at times like screaming at Matron. She recognised her rage for what it was, a reaction to the abnormal and claustrophobic conditions in which she lived, and knew it was not intrinsic to her nature, but she also understood how, in others, that rage might take root in the inner void, and with nothing to check its growth, make monsters.

  She replaced Tonto’s saddle on the rack, took down the next one, subjected that to an intense scrutiny, then moved on. Once she was satisfied no more nasty surprises lay in wait, she turned her attention to the bridles that hung on pegs below the saddles; they too were in proper order. Head collars and martingales were shaken out and rehung next, alongside the carefully looped lead and lungeing reins. Then, she rearranged the feed sacks, tidied an already neat stack of empty buckets, checked each horse’s grooming kit to make sure the dandy brushes, curry combs, hoof picks, mane combs, scrapers and body brushes were all there, counted brushing hoots, overreach boots and similar horse paraphernalia, looked at the turnout rugs and sweat sheets in case any were dirty or mouldy, and almost panicked when she could not find the electric clippers, before she remembered that Dr Scott, having had to pay over two hundred pounds for them, insisted on keeping them in her study. With nothing more she could conceivably do, Justine reluctantly switched off the lights and shut the stable doors behind her.

  The horses were on the far side of the pasture, in a group beneath the trees. Elbows on the fence, she stood watching them, her gaze wandering over the thin grass, the semicircle of trampled earth in front of the gate and back to the animals. In the dusky light, they looked as insubstantial as ghosts and seemed to cast no shadow. She stared, perturbed by a sense of something amiss with the natural order of things, before she understood, for the first time in all the years she had been in this place, that the overpowering presence of the thousands of trees surrounding the school created its own light, and one which seemed to flout the laws of nature.

  Suddenly beset by crude terror, she took flight up the path. The school was no haven, she thought, bursting into the lobby and leaving a trail of filthy footprints in her wake, but it was at least the devil she knew.

  She turned for the stairs and met another devil, Daisy, on the way down. She appeared to be prodding Alice in the back — probably with a pitchfork, Justine said to herself. Clinging to the rail, Alice crept from stair to stair as if blinded, every so often lurching forward when Daisy urged her on. At every move her new spectacles slid further down her nose.

  ‘Glasses are supposed to help you to see,’ Justine said witheringly.

  Alice peered at her, watery-eyed and looking rather sick. ‘I haven’t got used to them yet.’

  ‘What are they for?’

  ‘Reading.’

  ‘Then why are you wearing them now?’

  ‘Like she said,’ Daisy lisped, ‘she’s getting used to them.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ Justine was tempted to slap both of them. ‘Act your age!’ She pushed past, stamped up to the first landing, then remembered she was still wearing her dirty boots. Crouching down to remove them, she chided herself for being so irritable. No harm had been done; Alice was merely being asinine, which was nothing unusual, despite her undoubted intelligence, and Daisy was only running true to form. Daisy, she reflected, picking up the boots and going on her way, caused problems wherever she went, using her considerable powers of imagination to create trouble out of nothing and taking enormous delight in the mayhem that followed. But perhaps, Justine thought, as she reached the top landing, the girl had no awareness of her faults. They might lie too deep for recognition, for all that they compelled her progress through life.

  She stopped in her tracks when she saw the policeman outside Imogen’s door.

  He heard her gasp and raised his head. ‘There’s nothing to worry about, miss.’

  Hand to her breast, Justine asked, ‘Then why are you sitting there?’

  ‘Orders.’ With that he clamped shut his lips.

  Dropping the boots outside her room, she ran along the corridor to the common room and found the whole of the sixth form congregated there, listening to what she thought at first was an impromptu lecture from Dr Scott. As she stood by the door, looking for a vacant seat, she quickly realised her mistake.

  ‘And so,’ the headmistress was saying, ‘Superintendent McKenna was forced to the conclusion that Imogen killed Sukie. It’s a terrible, harrowing situation and I pray you will all, despite your own distress, do your utmost to guide the younger girls through this dreadful time. Inevitably, they’re already aware that something is horribly amiss and I intend to call a special assembly before lights out to tell them what has happened. It will be immensely difficult for them to grasp the brutal facts, but it would be very dangerous to allow rumour and hearsay to gain the upper hand.’ She paused, looking down at the floor, then threw up her head. ‘Now we know how Sukie died, the school can move on and away from the tragedy. Nonetheless, we must pray for Imogen. She is in torment, whatever her sins.’

  Justine reeled into the corridor, astounded by the woman’s appalling cant: she had looked triumphant.

  Convulsed with shudders, she stumbled back to Imogen’s room. The policeman leapt to his feet and tried to bar her way, but she dodged round him and threw open the door.

  Imogen used the window end of her wall counter as a desk. She was seated there, writing, the bottle of painkillers and a clean glass at her elbow, and when Justine erupted into the room she looked up, placing her hand over the paper.

  Questions tripped over each other in Justine’s mind: How do you address a murder suspect? Is this another of those stiff-upper-lip occasions when the British behave as if nothing is wrong? What can I say? Why do I want to shrink away as if she’s carrying the plague? The policeman, breathing down Justine’s neck, reached out to put his hand on her shoulder.

  Imogen spoke. ‘It’s OK,’ she told him with a smile that was ludicrously serene. ‘Justine’s a friend.’

  Muttering about having to leave the door ajar, he backed off. Justine heard his chair creak as he sat down. ‘I take it you know,’ Imogen said quietly.

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Justine’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Dr Scott is saying you probably killed Sukie.’

  ‘It’s a logical assumption.’

  ‘I don’t believe it!’

  ‘That’s sweet of you,’ Imogen said, ‘but I expect you’re in a minority.’ She turned the writing paper face down, then, leaning her elbow on the counter, levered herself round to face Justine. ‘You see, I tried to hit Nancy over the head with my stick, so Superintendent McKenna decided I must have done the same to Sukie.’

  ‘But we don’t know what happened to her!’

  ‘We might not,’ Imogen reminded her gently, ‘but the police obviously do.’

  ‘Oh, God!’ Justine put her hands to her face.

  ‘In a strange sort of way I’m glad,’ Imogen went on. ‘About Nancy, I mean. Things are out in the open now. Everything’s so much clearer.’

  ‘Why did you hit her? What had she done?’

  Imogen shrugged. ‘Nothing much. Just the usual needling and bitching. But all of a sudden I wondered why we put up with her, so I thought I’d give her a taste of her
own medicine.’ She looked up at the other girl. ‘Don’t upset yourself. They won’t find Sukie’s blood on my stick or the crutches.’

  Justine gaped. ‘McKenna took your crutches, too? How in God’s name does he expect you to manage?’ she demanded angrily.

  ‘They’re borrowing some from the hospital.’ After a moment Imogen added, ‘Would you see if they’ve got them yet?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Justine replied vaguely, still trying to grasp the enormity and the sheer horror of what had transpired while she was killing time in the stables. ‘Do you want anything else? A drink? Some food?’

  Imogen smiled yet again. ‘Later, perhaps.’

  Muttering to herself in every language she knew, Justine walked very slowly down to the ground floor. Her body was numb, her flesh stone cold, and her capacity for thought and reason had deserted her. She felt in the midst of such horror she feared the school was about to be swamped by a tide of blood.

  Matron was in the lobby, standing foursquare in front of Janet Evans, a pair of crutches and a cheap-looking walking stick in her hands. Justine sidled around the side of the staircase to linger in its shadow, eavesdropping.

  ‘I’ll take these up to Imogen later,’ Matron was saying. ‘She won’t need them just yet.’

  ‘Suppose she wants to go to the toilet?’

  Matron sniffed. ‘I’m sure I can be relied upon to look after her, whatever she’s guilty of.’ With a frown she pursed her lips. ‘Why don’t you go home? Most of your colleagues are long away.’

  ‘I was hoping to finish with the fourth formers tonight.’

  ‘Isn’t it a bit late to be asking questions?’ Matron consulted her fob watch. ‘And what, may I ask, is the point? You know what happened to poor Sukie.’

  ‘Even so, we must finish taking statements from everyone,’ Janet replied evasively. ‘I’ve got about ten girls left from the fourth, including Grace, Alice and Daisy.’