Child's Play

by Alison Taylor

  ‘You can’t talk to Grace. I said she could spend the night in the infirmary again.’ Matron paused. ‘And I don’t think you should bother Alice. She’s complaining of another headache, even though the optician’s prescribed reading glasses.’ She allowed herself a brief smile. ‘She looks quite the little intellectual when she’s wearing them, though I dare say she’ll get teased unmercifully until everybody’s used to seeing her like that. But then,’ she added indulgently, ‘girls will be girls, won’t they?’

  ‘Girls will be spiteful,’ Janet said, ‘and people underestimate how much harm spite can do, especially in a closed community like this. I’m quite sure Nancy provoked Imogen’s attack through sheer spite.’

  ‘Whatever gave you that impression? Imogen’s not been herself since the accident. It almost unhinged her, in my opinion.’

  ‘All the more reason for her to be sensitive to spite.’

  ‘You do repeat yourself,’ Matron remarked. ‘I don’t think you’ve any idea how the Hermitage functions. After all, you just went to the local comprehensive, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Janet replied, anger staining her cheeks. ‘But oddly enough, we managed not to kill each other.’

  ‘You should learn to control your tongue, madam!’ Matron snapped. ‘And your temper! Before you find yourself in the same boat as Imogen.’ She wheeled away and began clomping up the stairs, her breath coming in furious, noisy gasps.

  Justine waited, listening intently for those unmistakable footfalls, but more than thirty seemingly interminable minutes elapsed before Matron returned downstairs and bustled along the corridor towards her room, just as the headmistress emerged from her study. They spoke briefly, their voices too low for Justine to overhear the conversation, then Matron went into her room and slammed the door. Freya Scott locked her own door and, briefcase in hand, strode across the lobby and out through the double doors into the twilight.

  Wondering what had become of the special assembly the headmistress had planned, Justine took herself back to Imogen’s room, each step laboured and leaden. This time the policeman opened the door for her.

  Imogen was in bed, the duvet up to her chin, auburn lights glinting in her dark hair from the soft glow of the bedside lamp. She had not removed her leg. She looked whole and for a split second Justine forgot the nightmare of the past six months.

  24

  Freya’s house in the school grounds, isolated within a grove of old oaks, was perpetually in shadow and always cold, for the trees stole the warmth, even at the height of summer. Like the school a model of its time, the square, uncompromising building was also painted white inside and out, but here luxurious rugs softened the polished floors and fine furniture and dazzling abstract paintings were carefully arranged in every room. Yet for all their elegance, the spaces were bereft of vigour or genuine purpose.

  Two enormous couches upholstered in dark-blue leather squatted on each side of the sitting-room fireplace. Seated in the middle of one, Freya dug in her long red nails and the leather yielded like still-live flesh, for all that it was as dead as it was cold. She shivered, unable to throw off the sense of evil portent that seemed about to intercept her future. When Sukie and Imogen returned to school after the accident, it was if they had been dragging behind them the shadow of death and now, she thought, viciously jabbing the leather, Sukie, in defiance of the law of God that stated the dead shall have no further part in the world, was creating havoc.

  It was impossible to think of Sukie without thinking of Imogen; they were indivisible, even in death. It was reasonable to suppose that Sukie had died because of her, and the whys and wherefores were immaterial, despite those being the issues that so troubled McKenna. But not any longer, Freya told herself, still amazed by his compliancy, by the ease with which her little show of frailty had brought him to his knees. Those few moments in the lift, the way his mouth had loosened with desire when he felt her touch, would be memories to savour for years to come.

  Reluctantly, she pushed herself off the couch and went upstairs to shower and change before returning, as she must, to the school, to make a show of leadership and compassion. It was the last place she wished to be, for although she had devoted ten years of her life to the Hermitage, it had let her down.

  As she hurried up the path through the near dark, her feet twisting on the uneven surface, a raindrop splashed on her hair and she jumped. She started again when an owl screeched close by, only relaxing once lights were visible behind the phalanx of trees.

  The place was teeming with police officers, each offering a brief salute as she passed. She unlocked her study, checked the telephone for messages, then left the room. Therese was standing in the lobby, her unmistakable bulk silhouetted in the light from the other corridor. ‘Did you want something?’ Freya called.

  Therese advanced, every action slow and ponderous. The nickname ‘Lump’ suited her perfectly, Freya thought, for the figure coming towards her looked as if it might be made from yard upon yard of the fat, greasy sausage Frau Obermeyer’s factories spewed out by the mile.

  The girl stood to attention with her hands by her side. Her face, its lineaments distorted by superfluous flesh, was devoid of expression. ‘You told us there would he a special assembly,’ she said. ‘With prayers for Imogen.’

  ‘And I asked Matron to let you all know I’d decided to wait until the morning,’ Freya said impatiently. Then she made an effort to soften her tone. ‘How is Imogen?’

  ‘She was asleep when Justine last went to look. One of us will go again soon. She will want supper.’

  ‘Where’s Matron?’

  Therese shrugged her massive shoulders. ‘I don’t know.’ Then the girl Freya dismissed as stolid and stupid astounded her. ‘You are wrong not to hold an assembly tonight, Dr Scott. The school is disintegrating. If you do not take control a new order will emerge that you cannot control.’ She paused, her lower lip trapped in her teeth, looking uglier than ever. ‘We are near to being the monsters human beings become when constraints are lost.’

  ‘Are you?’ Suddenly, Freya’s mouth was dry. ‘In what way?’

  ‘Nancy and Charlotte caused Imogen’s anguish, so they must suffer.’ She spoke like vengeance personified. ‘I should like to lock Nancy in the cellar with the spiders that terrify her. All night, I would stand outside the door listening to her screams.’

  ‘And Charlotte?’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Therese gnawed her lip. ‘Charlotte the harlot. It would he good to cut her face,’ she added chillingly, ‘but I contented myself with throwing nail varnish on her clothes.’ She offered what was meant to be a smile. ‘They are ruined.’

  Eventually, her mind consumed by implications and consequences, Freya asked, ‘Does she know yet?’

  ‘Do you hear her screaming yet?’

  Enraged, Freya went upstairs, cursing the shiftless, spineless individuals around her, but above all, cursing Sukie. The girl she had judged in life as a nonentity had in death grown into a malign, dangerous presence, so powerful she could reach out from the mortuary to jerk so many strings it was as if the Hermitage had become her very own puppet theatre.

  Therese’s words chanting remorselessly through her head, Freya strode along the corridor to the sixth-form common room. But for the light flickering from the television, it was in darkness. She stood at the door, counting heads. Charlotte’s blonde halo shone like a beacon. She went next to the smokers’ den, wrinkling her nose at the stench. Vivienne and Francoise Dizi were, as ever, wreathed in clouds of smoke. Surprisingly, several others were with them, including the two Russian girls, Elisabeth von Carolsfeld and Justine, who offered Freya a brief, civil nod that implied all was relatively well with the world.

  What, Freya wondered, was likely to happen when they had finished watching television, talking and drinking coffee, and Charlotte went to open her cupboard and drawers to find her luxurious garments streaked and splattered with nail varnish as if with the blood of a score of murders? How, she as
ked herself, could she pre-empt the inevitable? Slowly retracing her steps, she decided the problem was far from hers alone and resolved to share it among those who had helped to provoke its creation. She knocked on Ainsley’s door and turned the handle. The lights were on but the room was empty. Then, from the corner of her eye, she saw Vivienne coming along the corridor. Rather than speak to her, she took to the stairs and went in search of Matron.

  25

  Cigarette in hand, McKenna paced his office; desk to window, window to door, door to desk; berating himself at every step for being such a damned fool — a blind fool, he muttered savagely. He had believed himself in control, convinced he had Freya Scott’s measure, yet he walked headlong into the trap she had the wit to fashion from a chance incident and the penetrating insight that alerted her to his famine years without the warmth of a woman’s flesh. She could make whatever she wished of those few, contrived moments in the lift and, no matter how much he protested, the doubts would stick to him like greasy smoke. At best he would be judged a willing party; at worst guilty of a deliberate assault. Jack had warned him to be on his guard and he had been right, but McKenna would never be able to tell him.

  When the fax machine hummed, he stopped in mid-stride. Paper bearing the heading of the hospital’s pathology laboratory began to roll out and curl up. He waited until the guillotine severed the last sheet, gathered them together and dropped into his chair, grateful for anything that might distract his attention, even this densely written and jargon-laden scientific report on the residues from Sukie’s body.

  To the naked eye, apart from the few dead leaves and spears of grass clinging to her corpse, her hair and clothing had appeared merely saturated with dirty water, but the microscope had revealed the secret, teeming life of that water and the traces her killer could not destroy. He pored over minute detail of the fungi, algae, seeds, leaves, grasses, petals, chemicals, fish scales, bio-organisms, fish, animal and human excreta and hazardous waste in her clothing and hair, and the traces of soap, powder, deodorant, perfume and cosmetics on her skin, then turned to the analysis of the blow that stunned her before she was consigned to the Strait. Again, her skin had seemed barely broken, but the hugely magnified photographs included in the report showed a complex of tiny wounds at the back of her skull in which were embedded the splinters of wood her thick hair had protected from the water. Reduction of those splinters into their constituent elements proved that she had been attacked with a length of rotting beech that had lain in the cannibal mud for many years.

  The telephone rang as he was completing a second reading of the report.

  ‘I take it you’ve got the scientific analysis?’ Eifion Roberts began. ‘It’s probably not as much as you hoped for, but it’s certainly enough to let that young amputee off the hook. She can have her fancy stick and crutches back. And you won’t need to trouble yourself confiscating every stick-like object within two miles of the school.’

  ‘Imogen Oliver could still be the killer,’ McKenna said wearily. ‘What’s to stop her using a broken branch instead of the stick or a crutch?’

  ‘Likelihood,’ the pathologist replied tetchily. ‘In most cases people use what’s nearest to hand and especially so when they’ve only got one leg. Think about it; she’d have been flat on her face in the mud the moment she dropped her supports to try to pick up anything.’

  ‘So, we’re back to square one.’

  ‘Are you? What the devil have you been doing for the last couple of days, then?’

  ‘Looking for non-existent facts. We can’t focus on anyone, we can’t eliminate anyone.’

  ‘Rubbish!’ Roberts exclaimed. ‘You’re just not putting your mind to things. What’s happened to your famous lateral thinking?’ After a long pause, when there was no response, he asked, ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ McKenna said tightly.

  ‘You’re fibbing. I know you too well, Michael.’

  McKenna stared blankly at the Queen’s portrait over the door. ‘I’ve got to move house,’ he said at last. ‘The council’s condemning the whole terrace.’

  ‘There’s a surprise!’

  ‘And Jack thinks I’ve completely fouled up the investigation.’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I seem to have lost focus.’

  ‘And I’ve seen it coming for months,’ Roberts told him. ‘You’ve been hiding in that poky slum of a house, but now it’s crunch time and you’ve got to move out, you’re going to pieces.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ McKenna snapped. ‘And don’t start lecturing me!’

  ‘You’ve only got to put down the phone if you don’t want to listen.’ The other man’s voice was suddenly gentle. ‘But who else, apart from me, can you turn to for a bit of advice, unwelcome though it may be?’

  ‘I don’t need advice. I need facts.’

  ‘All the facts you need are probably staring you in the face, but you’re too screwed up to see them.’

  ‘Stick to pathology, Eifion. You’re not a psychiatrist.’

  ‘See? You always get nasty when someone strikes a nerve. I’m your friend and I don’t like what’s happening to you.’

  ‘Nothing’s happening to me!’

  ‘A moment ago you admitted you’re not even doing your job properly. What’s the next step?’

  ‘I’ll resign and go and work for the RSPCA. You’ve often said I care far more for animals than people.’

  ‘That’s true and you’re not really a natural policeman. You’re more of a crusader; a deliverer, even,’ Roberts remarked. ‘But does your preference for animals stem from knowing they won’t deliberately hurt you? I mean, even if you happened to be dying from Cat Scratch Fever, you wouldn’t blame whichever little moggie had delivered the fatal blow because there wouldn’t have been any malice behind it. Similarly,’ he added, ‘if you got chucked off a horse and your head smashed to smithereens, you’d exit this vale of tears praying the horse wouldn’t be shot for having killed you.’

  Despite himself McKenna had to smile. The pathologist’s next words erased that smile completely.

  ‘The thing is, Michael,’ he said, ‘bar that bloody journalist who somehow got hold of your divorce petition earlier this year, who but me knows your ex-wife used to batter you to hell and back?’ He waited, but the silence lengthened. ‘You wouldn’t tell Jack,’ he went on. ‘You think he’d judge you badly, although you’re doing him a disservice to assume he’s so lacking in understanding. And you aren’t close enough to anyone else.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So while you might have got rid of your wife, you haven’t got rid of the damage she did and until you face up to that it’ll go on festering inside you.’

  McKenna could find nothing to say.

  ‘As you haven’t hung up on me, I assume you’re at least willing to listen.’ Again, Roberts waited. ‘Right, then,’ he began. ‘Symptoms first. General loss of focus, capacity and perspective; apathy, bewilderment, chronic fearfulness, insomnia, lethargy, mental exhaustion, fatigue, blunted sensibilities, increasing depression. Next, the coping mechanisms. You found a bolthole and dug in, devising all sorts of convoluted strategies to keep the demons at bay. But now the real world’s reared its ugly head again and the demons are back with a vengeance, vivid as the day they were born. Time hasn’t tarnished them one little bit. So,’ he continued, ‘you don’t know which way to turn. The progress you thought you’d made was nothing of the sort. You’re virtually paralysed, almost too bloody scared to put one foot in front of the other, because you can’t see a way forward. Or,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘because you expect to get slapped down again as soon as you budge.’

  McKenna remained silent.

  ‘I’m not getting much feedback, am I?’ the pathologist asked. ‘Still, the fact that you’re not jumping down my throat must mean something.’ He paused, then said, ‘If the marital boot had been on the other foot, as it were, this would be a classic case of batter
ed wife syndrome. There’s a corresponding battered husband syndrome, which, as yet, people aren’t too keen on recognising, especially if they happen to be a victim. Goes against the macho grain and suchlike crap.’

  With growing despair, McKenna realised he had not moved a muscle since Roberts began his observations, as if he were indeed paralysed, as his friend suggested.

  ‘You need help, Michael, and fast, before everything collapses about your ears. You’re hanging on by your fingernails.’

  ‘I can’t walk out in the middle of an investigation.’

  ‘Why not? Jack’s more than capable. What if you got knocked down by a bus?’

  ‘That would be different.’

  ‘Only in the detail. Listen, whatever you do or don’t do has a direct impact on your colleagues and, by your own admission, you’re barely functioning at the moment. D’you want a disaster on your hands?’

  ‘I admitted nothing of the sort,’ McKenna insisted obstinately. ‘I simply said I seem to have lost focus.’

  ‘Oh, suit yourself! You usually do.’

  ‘And,’ McKenna went on, ignoring the outburst, ‘I’d hoped you’d give us something that might help.’

  ‘You’re back in denial,’ Roberts commented tersely, ‘but it won’t work. You’re facing the inevitable, just like Hester Melville, who has, by the way, discharged herself from hospital. Against advice, I might add.’

  ‘She has that prerogative.’

  ‘And you obviously think you’ve got your own prerogative,’ Roberts said angrily, ‘despite the possible consequence. Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you!’

  26

  Dewi drove up and down the village street twice, looking for a parking space near the O’Connors’ house, but in the end had to leave his precious car in a narrow alley.

  Avril welcomed him like a long-lost relative and all but dragged him into the hallway.

  ‘Actually,’ Dewi said, ‘I was looking for Sean. Inspector Tuttle thought it might be useful to have another chat with him.’ When he saw the naked fear on her face he added, ‘Just to see if he can fill in a few blanks.’