Gentlemen and Players

by Joanne Harris

  “You did know Pinchbeck, didn’t you?” I said.

  Silently she nodded.

  “But then—what about Keane?”

  She smiled. “As I said. He had to go.”

  Well, serve him right, the little sneak. Him and his notebooks. My first glance should have warned me; those lines, those drawings, those whimsical little observations on the nature and history of St. Oswald’s. I remember asking myself then whether it wouldn’t have been better to deal with him straightaway; but I had a lot on my mind at the time, and anyway, there wasn’t much—besides that photograph—to incriminate me.

  You’d think a budding author would have been far too busy with his Muse to go messing with such ancient history. But he had—plus he’d spent time at Sunnybank Park, though he was three or four years ahead of me, and wouldn’t have made the connection straightaway.

  I hadn’t myself for a while, you know; but somewhere along the line, I must have recognized his face. I’d known it before I joined Sunnybank Park; remembered watching as a gang of boys cornered him after school; remembered his neat clothes—suspicious for a Sunnybanker—and, most of all, the library books under his arm that proclaimed him a target. I’d known right then it could have been me.

  It had taught me a lesson, watching that boy. Be invisible, I’d warned myself. Don’t look too smart. Don’t carry books. And if in doubt, run like hell. Keane hadn’t run. That had always been his problem.

  In a way I’m sorry. Still, after the notebook, I knew I couldn’t let him live. He’d already found the St. Oswald’s picture; he’d talked to Marlene, and most of all there was that photograph, taken from God knows what Sports Day at Sunnybank, with Yours Truly at the back (the Thunderpants mercifully out of sight). Once he’d made that connection (and he would have done, sooner or later), it would have been a simple matter of going through Sunnybank’s photo archive until he found what he was looking for.

  I’d bought the knife some months before—£24.99 from Army Stores—and I have to say it was a good one; sharp, slim, double-edged, and lethal. Rather like myself, in fact. A pity I had to leave it, really—I’d meant it for Straitley—but retrieving it would have been a messy business, and besides, I didn’t want to be wandering around a public park with a murder weapon in my pocket. No chance of finding any prints on the knife, either. I was wearing gloves.

  I’d followed him to the cordoned area, just as the fireworks were starting. Here there were trees, and in their shelter the shadows were doubly dark. There were people all around, of course; but most of them were watching the sky, and in the false light of all those rockets, nobody saw the quick little drama that played out under the trees.

  It takes a surprising amount of skill to stab someone between the ribs. It’s the intercostal muscles that are the trickiest part; they contract, you know, so that even if you don’t strike a rib by accident, you have to get through a layer of tensed muscle before you do any real damage. Going for the heart is equally risky; it’s the breastbone, you see, that gets in the way. The ideal method is through the spinal cord, between the third and fourth vertebrae, but you tell me how I was expected to locate the spot, in the dark, and with most of him hidden under a great big Army Surplus parka?

  I might have cut his throat, of course, but those of us who have actually tried it, rather than just watching the movies, will tell you that it’s not as easy as it looks. I settled for an upward thrust from the diaphragm, just below the wishbone. I dumped him under the trees, where anyone seeing him would assume he was drunk, and leave him well alone. I’m not a biology teacher, so I can only guess—blood loss or a collapsed lung—as to the technical cause of death, but he was pretty damn surprised about it, I can tell you.

  “You killed him?”

  “Yes, sir. Nothing personal.”

  It occurred to me that perhaps I was genuinely ill; that all this was a kind of hallucination that said more about my subconscious than I wanted to know. Certainly I’d felt better. A sudden stitch dug painfully into my left armpit. The invisible finger had become an entire hand; a firm, constant pressure against my breastbone that made me gasp.

  “Mr. Straitley?” There was concern in Miss Dare’s voice.

  “Just a stitch,” I said, and sat down abruptly. The muddy ground, though soft, seemed astonishingly cold; a cold that pulsed up through the grass like a dying heartbeat. “You killed him?” I repeated.

  “He was a loose end, sir. As I said, he had to go.”

  “And Knight?”

  There was a pause. “And Knight,” said Miss Dare.

  For a moment, an awful moment, my breath caught. I hadn’t liked the boy, but he was one of mine, and in spite of everything I suppose I’d hoped—

  “Mr. Straitley, please. I can’t have this now. Come on, stand up.” She put a shoulder under my arm—she was stronger than she looked—and hauled me upright.

  “Knight’s dead?” I said numbly.

  “Don’t worry, sir. It was quick.” She wedged a hip against my ribs, half hoisting me to my feet. “But I needed a victim, and not just a body, either. I needed a story. A murdered schoolboy makes front-page news—on a slow day—but a missing boy just keeps on giving. Searches; speculation; tearful appeals from the distracted mother; interviews with friends; then as hope dwindles, the dragging of local ponds and reservoirs, the discovery of an item of clothing and the inevitable DNA testing of listed pedophiles in the area. You know how it is, sir. They know, but they don’t know. And until they know for certain—”

  The cramp in my side came again, and I gave a smothered gasp. Miss Dare broke off at once. “I’m sorry, sir,” she said in a gentler voice. “None of that’s important now. Knight can wait. It’s not as if he’s going anywhere, is it? Just breathe slowly. Keep walking. And for God’s sake, look at me. We don’t have much time.”

  And so I breathed, and I looked, and I kept walking, and slowly we limped, I hanging like an albatross around Miss Dare’s neck, toward the sheltering trees.

  2

  Bonfire Night, 9:30 P.M.

  There was a bench under the trees. We staggered there together across the muddy grass, and I collapsed onto the seat with a jolt that set my old heart twanging like a broken spring.

  Miss Dare was trying to tell me something. I tried to explain that I had other things on my mind. Oh, it comes to us all in the end, I know; but I’d expected something more than this madness in a muddy field. But Keane was dead; Knight was dead; Miss Dare was someone else, and now I could no longer pretend to myself that the agony that flared and clawed at my side was anything remotely resembling a stitch. Old age is so undignified, I thought. Not for us the glories of the Senate, but a rushed exit in the back of an ambulance—or worse, a doddering decline. And still I fought it. I could hear my heart straining to keep moving, to keep the old body going for just a little longer, and I thought to myself, Are we ever ready? And do we ever, really believe?

  “Please, Mr. Straitley. I need you to concentrate.”

  Concentrate, forsooth! “I happen to be rather preoccupied at the moment,” I said. “The small matter of my imminent demise. Maybe later—”

  But now that memory came again, closer now, almost close enough to touch. A face, half-blue, half-red, turning toward me, a young face raw with distress and harsh with resolve, a face, glimpsed once, fifteen years ago—

  “Shh,” said Miss Dare. “Can you see me now?”

  And then, suddenly, I did.

  A rare moment of overwhelming clarity. Dominoes in line, rattling furiously toward the mystic center. Black-and-white pictures leaping into sudden relief; a vase becomes lovers; a familiar face disintegrates and becomes something else altogether.

  I looked; and in that moment I saw Pinchbeck; his face upturned, his glasses strobing in the emergency lights. And at the same time I saw Julia Snyde with her neat black fringe; and Miss Dare’s brown eyes under her schoolboy’s cap, the red-blue flashes of the fireworks illuminating her face, and suddenly, lik
e that, I just knew.

  Do you see me now?

  Yes, I do.

  I caught the moment. His jaw dropped. His face seemed to slacken; it was like watching rapid decay through time-lapse photography. Suddenly he looked far older than his sixty-five years; in fact in that moment he looked every bit the Centurion.

  Catharsis. It’s what my analyst keeps talking about; but I’d never experienced anything like it until then. That look on Straitley’s face. The understanding—the horror—and behind it, I thought perhaps, the pity.

  “Julian Pinchbeck. Julia Snyde.”

  I smiled then, feeling the years slip from me like deadweight. “It was staring you in the face, sir,” I said. “And all the time you never saw it. Never even guessed.”

  He sighed. He looked increasingly ill now; his face was hung with sweat. His breath rattled and churned. I hoped he wasn’t about to die. I’d waited too long for this moment. Oh, he’d have to go in the end, of course—with or without my killing knife I knew I could finish him easily—but before that, I wanted him to understand. To see and to know without any doubt.

  “I see,” he said. (I knew he didn’t.) “It was a dreadful business.” (That it was.) “But why take it out on St. Oswald’s? Why blame Pat Bishop, or Grachvogel, or Keane—and why kill Knight, who was just a boy—”

  “Knight was bait,” I said. “Sad, but necessary. And as for the others, don’t make me laugh. Bishop? That hypocrite. Running scared at the first breath of scandal. Grachvogel? It would have happened sooner or later whether I had a hand in it or not. Light? You’re better off without him. And as for Devine—I was practically doing you a favor. More interesting is the way in which history repeats itself. Look how fast the Head dropped Bishop when he thought this scandal might damage the school. Now he knows how my father felt. It didn’t matter whether he was to blame or not. It didn’t even matter that a pupil had died. What mattered most—what still matters most—was protecting the school. Boys come and go. Porters come and go. But God forbid that anything should happen to besmirch St. Oswald’s. Ignore it, bury it, and make it go away. That’s the school motto. Isn’t that right?” I took a deep breath. “Not now, though. Now, at last, I’ve got your attention.”

  He gave a rasp that could have been laughter. “Perhaps,” he said. “But couldn’t you just have sent us a postcard?”

  Dear old Straitley. Always the comedian. “He liked you, sir. He always liked you.”

  “Who did? Your father?”

  “No, sir. Leon.”

  There was a long, dark silence. I could feel his heart pumping. The holiday crowd had long since dispersed, and only a few scattered figures remained, silhouetted against the distant bonfire and in the near-deserted arcades. We were alone—as alone as we could be—and all around us I could hear the sounds of the leafless trees; the slow, brittle creaking of the branches; the occasional sharp tussle of a small animal—rat or mouse—in the fallen leaves.

  The silence went on so long that I feared the old man had gone to sleep—that, or had slipped into some distant place to which I could not follow him. Then he sighed and put out his hand toward me in the darkness. Against my palm, his fingers were cold.

  “Leon Mitchell,” he said slowly. “Is that what this is all about?”

  3

  Bonfire Night, 9:35 P.M.

  Leon Mitchell. I should have known. I should have known from the start that Leon Mitchell was at the bottom of this. If ever a boy was trouble incarnate, he was the one. Of all my ghosts he has never rested easy. And of all my boys he haunts me most.

  I spoke to Pat Bishop about him once, trying to understand exactly what had happened and whether there was something more I might have done. Pat assured me there wasn’t. I was at my balcony at the time. The boys were below me on the Chapel roof. The Porter was already on the scene. Short of flying down there like Superman, what could I have done to prevent the tragedy? It happened so fast. No one could have stopped it. And yet hindsight is a deceitful tool, turning angels into villains, tigers into clowns. Over the years, past certainties melt like ripe cheese; no memory is safe.

  Could I have stopped him? You can’t imagine how often I have asked myself that very question. In the small hours it often seems all too possible; events unspooling with dreamlike clarity as time and again the boy falls—fourteen years old, and this time I was there—there at my balcony like an overweight Juliet, and in those small hours I can see Leon Mitchell all too clearly, clinging to the rusty ledge, his broken fingernails wedged into the rotting stone, his eyes alive with terror.

  “Pinchbeck?”

  My voice startles him. A voice of authority, coming so unexpectedly out of the night. He looks up instinctively—his grip breaks. Maybe he calls out; begins to reach up; his heel stropping against a foothold that is already half rust.

  And then it begins, so slow at first and yet so impossibly fast, and there are seconds, whole seconds for him to think of that gullet of space, that terrible darkness.

  Guilt, like an avalanche, gathering speed.

  Memory, snapshots against a dark screen.

  Dominoes in a line—and the growing conviction that perhaps it was me, that if I hadn’t called out just at that precise moment, then maybe—just maybe—

  I looked up at Miss Dare and saw her watching me. “Tell me,” I said. “Just whom do you blame?”

  Dianne Dare said nothing.

  “Tell me.” The stitch-that-wasn’t clawed fiercely into my side; but after all these years the need to know was more painful still. I looked up at her, so smooth and serene; her face in the mist like that of a Renaissance Madonna. “You were there,” I said with an effort. “Was I the reason Leon fell?”

  Oh, how clever you are, I thought. My analyst could learn a trick or two. To throw that sentiment back at me—hoping perhaps, to gain a little more time…

  “Please,” he said. “I need to know.”

  “Why’s that?” I said.

  “He was one of my boys.”

  So simple; so devastating. One of my boys. Suddenly I wished he’d never come; or that I could have disposed of him, as I’d disposed of Keane, easily, without distress. Oh, he was in a bad way; but now it was I who struggled to breathe; I who felt the avalanche poised to roll over me. I wanted to laugh; there were tears in my eyes. After all these years, could it be that Roy Straitley blamed himself? It was exquisite. It was terrible.

  “You’ll be telling me next he was like a son to you.” The tremor in my voice belied the sneer. In fact, I was shaken.

  “My lost boys,” he said, ignoring the sneer. “Thirty-three years and I still remember every one. Their pictures on my living room wall. Their names in my registers. Hewitt, ”72. Constable, “86. Jamestone, Deakin, Stanley, Poulson—Knight—” He paused. “And Mitchell, of course. How could I have forgotten him? The little shit.”

  It happens, you know, from time to time. You can’t like them all—though you try as best you can to treat them the same. But sometimes there’s a boy—like Mitchell, like Knight—whom, try as you may, you can never like.

  Expelled from his last school for seducing a teacher; spoilt rotten by his parents; a liar, a user, a manipulator of others. Oh, he was clever—he could even be charming. But I knew what he was, and I told her as much. Poison to the core.

  “You’re wrong, sir,” she said. “Leon was my friend. The best friend I ever had. He cared for me—he loved me—and if you hadn’t been there—if you hadn’t yelled out when you did—”

  Her voice was fragmenting now, becoming—for the first time I had known her—shrill and uncontrolled. It occurred to me only then that she planned to kill me—absurd, really, as I must have known it from the moment of her confession. I supposed I ought to be afraid—but in spite of that, in spite of the pain in my side, all I could feel was an overriding sense of irritation with the woman, as if a bright student had made an elementary grammatical mistake.

  “Grow up,” I told her. “Leon didn’t car
e about anyone but himself. He liked to exploit people. That’s what he did; setting them off against each other, winding them up like toys. I wouldn’t be surprised if it had been his idea to go up on the roof in the first place, just to see what would happen.”

  She drew a sharp breath like a cat’s hiss, and I knew I’d over-stepped the mark. Then she laughed, regaining her control as if it had never been lost. “You’re fairly Machiavellian yourself, sir.”

  I took that as a compliment, and said so.

  “It is, sir. I’ve always respected you. Even now I think of you as an adversary rather than an enemy.”

  “Be careful, Miss Dare, you’ll turn my head.”

  She laughed again, a brittle sound. “Even then,” she said, her eyes gleaming, “I wanted you to see me. I wanted you to know.” She told me how she’d listened in at my classes, gone through my files, built her store from the discarded grains of St. Oswald’s generous harvests. For a time I drifted as she spoke—the pain in my side receding now—recounting those truant days; books borrowed; uniforms pilfered; rules broken. Like the mice, she’d made her nest in the Bell Tower and on the roof; collecting knowledge; feeding when she could. She had been hungry for knowledge; she had been ravenous. And all unknowing, I had been her magister; singled out from the moment I first spoke to her that day in the Middle Corridor, now singled out again to blame for the death of her friend, the suicide of her father, and the many failures in her life.

  It happens, sometimes. It’s happened to most of my colleagues at one time or another. It’s an inevitable consequence of being a schoolmaster, of being in charge of susceptible adolescents. Of course, for female members of staff it happens daily; for the rest of us, thank God, it is only occasional. But boys are boys; and they sometimes fixate upon a member of staff (male or female)—sometimes they even call it love. It’s happened to me; to Kitty; even to old Sourgrape, who once spent six months trying to shake off the attentions of a young student called Michael Smalls, who found every excuse to seek him out, to monopolize his time, and finally (when his wooden-faced hero failed to live up to his impossible expectations) to disparage him on every possible occasion to Mr. and Mrs. Smalls, who eventually removed their son from St. Oswald’s (after a set of disastrous O-level results) to an alternative school, where he settled down and promptly fell in love with the young Spanish mistress.