Well-Schooled in Murder Page 3

  Like the earlier protestations, there was peculiar force behind Corntel’s declaration, child of a need to take all blame upon himself. Lynley knew that there was usually only one reason for the existence of such a need. If Corntel wanted the blame, no doubt he deserved it.

  “He must have known that he’d be out of his depth with the Morants. He must have felt it,” Corntel said.

  “You seem certain of that.”

  “He was a scholarship student.” Corntel seemed to feel that statement explained everything. Nonetheless, he went on to say, “Good boy. Hard worker.”

  “Liked by the other students?” When Corntel hesitated, Lynley said, “After all, if he’d been invited for a weekend at one of their homes, it seems reasonable to conclude he was liked.”

  “Yes, yes. He must have been. It’s just that…Do you see how I’ve failed the boy? I don’t know. He was so quiet. All he ever seemed to do was his schoolwork. He never had a problem. He never even spoke of one. And his parents were so keen to have him go on this weekend. His father said as much to me when he wrote his permission. Something like ‘Nice to have Mattie move into the world a bit.’ Mattie. That’s what they called him.”

  “Where are the parents now?”

  Corntel’s face pinched with misery. “I don’t know. At the school perhaps. Or at home waiting for word. If the Headmaster hasn’t managed to stop them, they may have gone directly to the police themselves.”

  “Has Bredgar Chambers access to a local police force?”

  “There’s a constable in Cissbury—that’s the nearest village. Otherwise, we’re under the jurisdiction of the Horsham force.” He smiled grimly. “Part of their patch, you’d call it, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes. And I’m afraid it’s not part of mine.”

  Corntel’s shoulders caved in further at this admission. “Surely you can do something, Tommy. Put some sort of wheels in motion.”

  “Discreet wheels?”

  “Yes. All right. Whatever you want to call them. It’s a personal favour, I know. I’ve no rights here. But for God’s sake, we have Eton.”

  It was a draw upon loyalties. The old school tie. That assumption of devotion to the calls of the past. Lynley wanted to cut beyond it as ruthlessly as he could. The policeman in him insisted that he do so. But the boy who had once shared school days with Corntel was not quite as dead as Lynley wanted him to be. So he asked:

  “If he had run off, perhaps with the intention of coming up to London, he’d need transportation, wouldn’t he? How close are you to the trains? To the motorway? To one of the larger roads?”

  Corntel seemed to take this as the extending hand of help he wanted. He answered definitively, eager to be of assistance.

  “We’re not very near anything useful, Tommy, which is why parents feel secure in sending their children to the school. It’s isolated. There’s no trouble to get into. There’s nothing around to distract. Matthew would have had quite a hike to get safely away. He couldn’t afford to hitch a ride too near the school because if he did, the chance would have been very good that someone from the school—one of the instructors, perhaps, or a workman or the porter—might have gone driving by, seen him, and packed him right back where he belongs.”

  “So he probably wouldn’t have kept to the road at all.”

  “I don’t think he would. I think he’d have had to go through the fields, through St. Leonard’s Forest, up to Crawley and the M23. He’d have been safe at that point. He would have been seen as just any child. No one would suspect that he was from Bredgar Chambers.”

  “St. Leonard’s Forest,” Lynley said reflectively. “The likeliest possibility is that he’s still there, isn’t it? Lost perhaps. Hungry.”

  “And two nights without shelter in March. Exposure. Hypothermia. Starvation. A broken leg. A bad fall. A broken neck.” Corntel compiled the list bitterly.

  “Starvation’s unlikely after only three days,” Lynley responded. He did not add the more damning remark that any of the others were distinctly possible. “Is he a big child? Hefty?”

  Corntel shook his head. “Not at all. He’s very small for his age. Delicate bones. Extremely fragile. Good structure in the face.” He paused, his eyes focusing on an image the others could not see. “Dark hair. Dark eyes. Long-fingered hands. Perfect skin. Lovely skin.”

  Havers tapped a pencil against her notebook. She looked at Lynley. Seeing her do so, Corntel stopped speaking. Colour dashed across his face in great bruising patches.

  Lynley pushed his chair away from his desk and let his eyes rest on one of the two prints on his wall in which an Indian woman dumped a basket of peppers onto a blanket. It was a compilation of vibrant colours. Her veil of black hair, the living red of the vegetables, the tawny velvet of her skin, her purple gown, the blend of rose and blue background that called the time of day sunset. Beauty, he knew, always offered its own form of seduction.

  “Have you brought a picture of the boy?” Lynley asked. “Can you write out an accurate description of him?” The last question, he thought, would probably be unnecessary.

  “Yes. Of course. Both.” Never before had Lynley heard such relief.

  “Then if you’ll leave them with the sergeant, we’ll see if there’s anything we can do from this end. Perhaps he’s already been picked up in Crawley and is too afraid to give his name. Or even closer to London. One can never tell.”

  “I thought…I hoped you’d help. I’ve already…” Corntel reached into the breast pocket of his coat, bringing out a photograph and a folded page of typescript. He had the grace to look faintly abashed by the assumption of Lynley’s cooperation that was implied by his possession of both.

  Lynley took them wearily. Corntel had been confident of his man indeed. The old Viscount of Vacillation would hardly desert one of his former schoolmates now.

  Barbara Havers read the description that Corntel had left with them. She studied the photograph of the boy as Lynley dumped out the ashtray that she and Corntel had managed to fill during the interview. He wiped it carefully with a tissue.

  “God, you’re getting to be an unbearable prig over this smoking business, Inspector,” Barbara complained. “Should I start wearing a scarlet S on my chest?”

  “Not at all. But either I clean the ashtray or find myself licking it in desperation. Somehow, cleaning seems closer to a behaviour I can live with. But only just, I’m afraid.” He looked up, smiled.

  She laughed even through her exasperation. “Why did you give up smoking? Why not march right into an early grave with the rest of us? The more the merrier. You know the sort of thing.”

  He didn’t answer. Instead, his eyes went to the postcard propped up against a coffee cup on his desk. So Barbara knew. Lady Helen Clyde did not smoke. Perhaps she would find more acceptable upon her return a man who had given up smoking as well.

  “Do you really think that’s going to make a difference, Inspector?”

  His reply was as good as ignoring her altogether. “If the boy’s run away, I shouldn’t be surprised if he turns up in a few days. Perhaps in Crawley. Perhaps in the city. But if he doesn’t turn up, as callous as it sounds, his body may. Are they prepared for that, I wonder.”

  Barbara skilfully turned the statement to her own use. “Is anyone ever really prepared for the worst, Inspector?”

  Send my roots rain. Send my roots rain.

  With those four words pressing into her brain like a persistent melody, Deborah St. James sat in her Austin, eyes fixed on the lych gate of St. Giles’ Church outside the town of Stoke Poges. She scrutinised nothing in particular. Instead, she tried to count how many times over the last month she had recited not just those final words but Hopkins’ entire sonnet. She had started every day with it, had made it the force that propelled her from beds and hotel rooms, into her car, and through site after site where she took photographs like an automaton. But beyond every morning’s determined recitation of those fourteen lines of supplication, she could not ha
ve said how many times during each day she had returned to it, when some unexpected sight or sound she was unprepared for broke through her defences and attacked her calm.

  She understood why the lines came to her now. St. Giles’ Church was the last stop in her four-week photographic odyssey. At the end of this afternoon she would return to London, avoiding the M4, which would take her there quickly, and choosing instead the A4 with its traffic signals, its congestion round Heathrow, its infinite stream of suburbs grimy with soot and the grey end of winter. And its additional blessing of extending the journey. That was the crucial part. She didn’t yet see how she could face the end of it. She didn’t yet see how she could face Simon.

  Ages ago when she had accepted this assignment to photograph a selection of the literary landmarks of the country, she had planned it so that Stoke Poges, where Thomas Gray composed “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” would fall directly after Tintagel and Glastonbury, and thus bring her month of work to a conclusion only a few miles from her doorstep. But Tintagel and Glastonbury, rich with ineluctable reminders of King Arthur and Guinevere, of their ill-fated and ultimately barren love, had only given teeth to the despondency with which she had begun the trip. Those teeth bit; today on this final afternoon, they tore, working upon her heart, laying bare its worst wound….

  She wouldn’t think of it. She opened the car door, took up her camera case and tripod, and walked across the car park to the lych gate. Beyond it she could see that the graveyard was divided into two sections and that midway down a curved concrete path, a second lych gate and second graveyard stood.

  The air was cold for late March, as if deliberately withholding the promise of spring. Birds tittered sporadically in the trees, but other than the occasional muffled roar of a jet from Heathrow, the graveyard itself was quiet. It seemed a suitable spot for Thomas Gray to have created his poem, to have chosen as his own resting place.

  Closing the first lych gate behind her, Deborah walked along the path between two lines of tree roses. New growth sprouted from them—tight buds, slim branches, tender young leaves—but this springtime regeneration contrasted sharply with the area in which the trees themselves grew. This outer graveyard was not maintained. The grass was uncut, the stones left to lurch at odd angles with haphazard disregard.

  Deborah went under the second lych gate. It was more ornate than the first and, perhaps in the hope of keeping vandals away from the delicate oak fretwork along the line of its roof—or perhaps from the graveyard and the church itself—a floodlight was secured to a beam. But this was a useless safeguard, for the light was shattered and shards of glass lay here and there on the ground.

  Once inside the interior churchyard, Deborah looked for Thomas Gray’s tomb, her final photographic responsibility. Almost immediately, however, as she made a fleeting survey of the monuments and markers, she saw instead a trail of feathers.

  They lay like the result of an augur’s handiwork, a rebarbative collection of ash-coloured down. Against the manicured lawn, they looked like small puffs of smoke that had taken on substance rather than drifting off to be absorbed into the sky. But the number of feathers and the unmistakably violent way in which they were strewn about suggested a vicious battle for life, and Deborah followed them the short distance to where the defeated party lay.

  The bird’s body was about two feet from the yew hedge that separated inner and outer graveyards. Deborah stiffened at the sight of it. Even though she had known what she would find, the brutality of the poor creature’s death evoked in her an answering rush of pity so intense—so utterly absurd, she told herself—that she found her vision momentarily obscured by tears. All that remained of the bird was a frail blood-imbued rib cage covered by an insubstantial and inadequate cuirass of stained down. There was no head. Frail legs and claws had been torn off. The creature could have once been a pigeon or a dove, but now it was a shell in which life had once existed, all too briefly.

  How fleeting it was. How quickly it could be extinguished.

  “No!” Deborah felt the anguish well within her and knew she lacked the will to defeat it. She forced herself to think of something else—of burying the bird, of brushing the scurrying ants from the serrated ridge of one cracked rib—but the effort was useless. Hopkins’ sonnet, whispered in a rush against a rising onslaught of sorrow, was insufficient armour. So she wept, watching the dead bird’s image blur, praying that a time would soon come when she could put an end to grief.

  For the last four weeks, work had been an anodyne. She turned to it now, backing away from the bird, clutching her equipment in hands that were cold.

  The job called for a set of photographs which reflected the piece of literature that had inspired them. Since late February, Deborah had explored the Brontës’ Yorkshire and given herself over to Ponden Hall and High Withens; she had set up camera and tripod for a moonlit examination of Tintern Abbey; she had photographed the Cobb and most particularly Granny’s Teeth from which Louisa Musgrove took her fatal fall; she had wandered the tournament field in Ashby de la Zouch, sat on the sidelines and watched the comings and goings in the pump room in Bath, walked the streets of Dorchester looking for the slow hand of destiny that destroyed Michael Henchard, and felt the enchantment of Hill Top Farm.

  In each case, the site itself—and her research into the literature that had grown from it—inspired her camera. But as she looked round this final location and caught sight of the two structures that, from their proximity to the church, had to be the tombs she had come to inspect, she felt the pricking of irritation. How on earth, she thought, was she ever going to make something so inordinately mundane look attractive?

  The tombs were identical, constructed of brick, slabbed across the top with lichened stone. The only decorative detail that had been supplied them had been done so by two hundred years of visitors who had obligingly carved their names into the bricks. Deborah sighed, stepped back, and examined the church.

  Even here there was little scope for artistry. The building fought with itself, two different periods of architecture moulded together to form a whole. Plain fifteenth-century Tudor windows set into a faded redbrick wall existed hand-in-glove with the perpendicular structure of a lancet window nearby, this set into the older chalk and flint of the Norman chancel. The effect could hardly be called picturesque.

  Deborah frowned. “A disaster,” she murmured. From her camera case she took the rough manuscript of the book which her pictures would illustrate and, spreading several pages across the top of Thomas Gray’s tomb, she spent a few minutes reading not only “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” but also the interpretation of the poem supplied by the Cambridge don whose manuscript this was. Her eyes stopped thoughtfully, with growing understanding, upon the poem’s eleventh stanza. She dwelt upon it.

  Can storied urn or animated bust,

  Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?

  Can honour’s voice provoke the silent dust,

  Or flatt’ry soothe the dull cold ear of death?

  She looked up, seeing the graveyard as Gray had intended her to see it, knowing that her photographs had to reflect the simplicity of life that the poet had sought to celebrate with his words. She cleared her papers from the tomb and set up her tripod.

  It would be nothing lush, nothing clever, just photographs that used light and dark, angle and depth to depict the innocence and beauty of a country evening at dusk. She worked to capture the humble quality of the environment in which Gray’s rude forefathers of the hamlet were sleeping, completing her catalogue of impressions with a photograph of the yew tree under which the poet ostensibly wrote his verse.

  That done, she stepped away from her equipment and gazed towards the east, towards London. There was, she knew, no more putting it off. There was no further excuse to keep her from home. But she needed preparation prior to facing her husband. She sought it by going into the church.

  Her curse, she saw, would be the centrepiece of the nav
e, that object upon which her eyes fell when the door closed behind her. It was an octagonal marble baptismal font, dwarfed beneath the arched timber ceiling. Each side of the font bore intricate carving, and two tall pewter candlesticks stood behind it, waiting to be lit for the ceremony that brought another child to Christianity.

  Deborah walked to the font and touched the smooth oak that covered it. Just for a moment, she let herself imagine the infant in her arms, the tender pressure of its head against her breast. She let herself hear its cry of indignation as the water poured over its sweet, defenceless brow. She let herself feel the tiny, fragile hand curve over her finger. She let herself believe that she had not—this fourth time in eighteen months—miscarried Simon’s child. She let herself pretend that she had not been in hospital, that the last conversation with her doctor had never occurred. But his words intruded. She could not escape.

  “An abortion doesn’t necessarily preclude the possibility of future successful pregnancies, Deborah. But in some cases it might. You said it was more than six years ago. There might have been complications. Scarring, that sort of thing. We won’t know that for a certainty until we do some thorough tests. So if you and your husband really want—”

  “No!”

  The doctor’s face had shown immediate comprehension. “Then Simon doesn’t know?”

  “I was only eighteen. I was in America. He doesn’t…he can’t…”

  Even now she reeled from the thought of that. She felt in panic for the edge of a pew and, jerking open its small door, she stumbled inside and dropped onto the seat.

  You will, she told herself with a ruthless desire to inflict as much pain as possible, never have another child. You might have had one once. You might have felt that frail life take shape within your body. But you destroyed it, discarded it, threw it away. Now you pay. Now you are punished in the only coin you can understand. You will never have Simon’s child. Another woman might. Another woman could. But the mingling of your body and your love with Simon’s will not produce a child. That will never happen. You will not do this.