School for Murder Page 16

‘Certainly I’d think twice if it were my own.’

  ‘Would you? Too sweet. Of course I value your opinion enormously. And now there is some money, it would be possible. Perhaps I’d better take him out to dinner, then I can tell him I’ll look for somewhere with just a tiny bit of prestige. God knows, he’s no brain, so he’ll need any old school network that might be going if he’s going to make anything of himself.’

  ‘Well, you could discuss it,’ said Mike Pumfrey, knowing very well the congenital disinclination of children to change schools, and thinking Pickerage had had enough material for traumas for one day. ‘If I were you I’d let him make the final decision.’

  She looked at him as if the idea of children having the right to any opinion on their own future seemed to her quirky in the extreme. Then she smiled her soft, feminine smile.

  ‘I expect he’ll do as I say,’ she said. ‘But you must tell me more about the Crumwallises. You never know, this may hit the headlines. So thrilling to be in the thick of it. Do people think he did it? Is that why they got the boot?’

  ‘We’ve no reason to suspect Mr Crumwallis,’ said Pumfrey severely. ‘The internal affairs of the school are no concern of ours, but I don’t think it’s quite accurate to say he got the boot. I gather parents got anxious when rumours started going around about the medicine. There were doubts about Mrs Crumwallis’s competence in general. There was a danger of the school folding up altogether, and Mr Crumwallis snatched at the best offer for the school he could get.’

  ‘Really? Is that all? Parents are so silly and protective, aren’t they? Not that it’s not appalling to think that Malcolm might have drunk that stuff . . . But you know, there might be something else there. Malcolm told me about this Frome last time I was here. Couldn’t stop talking about him, you know what children are like. I’ve forgotten most of it, if I ever really listened, but he did I’m sure say he was the apple of the headmaster’s eye, and all that. Did you say he was a handsome boy?’

  ‘I didn’t, but yes: I think most people would say he was that.’

  ‘Well, there you are. They’d probably had a fumble, or worse, and the boy was blackmailing him. They’re so up in things these days, aren’t they? I suppose it must be the television. But then, there’s so much of it around, isn’t there, they’re bound to hear things. I heard that fearsome Miss Grower lost her job for something of the kind. Terrifies me, darling, really she does! Not that, of course, but that look she gives me every time we meet, that just shows she thinks me a social butterfly or something of the kind!’

  She smiled, and fluttered her wings, or her eyelashes.

  ‘You say Malcolm told you about Hilary Frome. Could you remember anything he told you, I wonder?’

  ‘Oh, darling—that is asking a lot. I mean, a boy talking about another boy! I didn’t even realize the boy was fifteen, and even if I had . . . Not my weakness, I assure you . . . No, he just burbled on about him, you know, in the way kids do, and it did occur to me to wonder, if you know what I mean. But that kind’s usually been horribly mothered, haven’t they, and I assure you that’s one thing Malcolm simply can’t accuse me of. Oh, he talked about this and that—mostly about jokes this boy had played on the teachers, and things he’d said to them. All that Tom Brown stuff isn’t really to my taste, as you can imagine. To tell you the truth—I wouldn’t admit this to everyone—having a boy Malcolm’s age is really a bit of an embarrassment.’

  She said it in an outburst of candour, apparently expecting it to come as a revelation. Mike Pumfrey sighed.

  ‘I see, well—’

  ‘There! I can see I’ve taken up much too much of your time,’ said Veronica Furley, standing up, and fixing him with a look of crushing intimacy. ‘I’d better collect the little brute and take him off somewhere. Where on earth, I ask you, does one take a thirteen-year-old boy to dinner? In Cullbridge, too. And if I drive out to one of these madly expensive little country places, it would be sure to be full to the brim with people I know. It happens all the time when I’m with . . . Oh well—so pleased to have met you, Mr—’

  ‘Miss . . . er . . . Furley—’ said Mike Pumfrey, standing up in his turn but furrowing his brow, knowing that something had got past him in the foregoing chatter, but not sure what it was. ‘There was something else. Something you said I meant to ask you about . . . Oh, yes. Money. You said, when you were talking about schools for Malcolm, that there was more money now.’

  Veronica Furley sat down again, gracefully but determined. Pumfrey wondered whether he had been wise to ask, because it was clear this was a subject bitterly close to her heart, and he wondered whether he would ever be able to get her out of the study. There was an expression of long-suppressed grievance on her lovely, soap-advertisement face.

  ‘Well, of course there is, now. When I think how much I needed it when I first sent Malcolm here, and how I tried to screw more out of his father, and not a penny did I get without running to lawyers every week of my life. And now . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, now: there it is. Not mine, though, more’s the pity. And really, I’d have thought it should have been. He was my father, after all. He died about six months ago. You may have read about it in the papers. A release, a blessed release. Not for him, it was quite sudden, but for me. Well, he was in agriculture, you know, very big: he’d been high up in the National Farmers’ Union, that’s why it was in all the papers. You wouldn’t think I was practically born in Wellington boots, would you? Anyway, most of it went to my brother, who runs the businesses—farms and orchards and things—but he left forty thousand to Malcolm. In trust, I may say. That did rather hurt me, I admit. Of course, he and Malcolm had always got on like a house on fire. That’s where he went mostly in the holidays. But I mean—his lawyer and my brother are the trustees. I thought that a bit of cheek, not including me. Though I admit that money does have a habit of running through my fingers, quite remarkably quickly sometimes. But the fact is, I’m expected to crawl to the trustees every time I want the smallest little thing for Malcolm. I have thought of sending them every single bill, for socks and vests, the lot. But anyway, in this case, if it was a matter of Malcolm’s education, I imagine they could hardly refuse, do you?’

  ‘Probably not,’ admitted Pumfrey. ‘If that’s what the boy wants. So if things go according to plan, your son will come into a fair income when he is—what—twenty-one?’

  ‘That’s right. If only Daddy had made it eighteen I might have hoped to wangle something out of him, but he’ll probably be frightfully adult at twenty-one, and cling to it like grim death.’

  ‘And if he were to die?’

  ‘The money? Oh heavens, I don’t know. You don’t think it could be poor little me, do you? But I don’t think so, Superintendent, so please don’t start putting me down as an unnatural mother who slips poison into her own child’s drink, like that awful woman Sian Phillips played in the television series about Rome or wherever it was. I should think it just gets distributed among the other grandchildren, or goes back into the estate, or something. I tell you, Daddy and I simply didn’t get on. He thought me—you can’t imagine—flighty! Ah well. Goodbye, dear Mr Pumfrey. You will keep me posted, won’t you. I shall be waiting for a call—positively on tenterhooks!’

  And she waltzed out of the room to undertake the heavy duty of taking her son out to dinner.

  ‘Stupid bitch!’ said Pumfrey. ‘Stupid, made-up, pretentious, shallow bitch.’

  ‘Quite a dish, though,’ said Sergeant Fenniway.

  ‘I hate her type,’ said Pumfrey, entirely unnecessarily. ‘I’d like to think she might have slipped into the annexe and done it, but she would hardly have come along volunteering that information about the money if that’s what she’d been occupying her spare time with. But money there is: another piece towards the puzzle. Why do people always compare an investigation to a jigsaw puzzle, Fenniway? Half the pieces don’t fit into the picture because they’re totally irrelevant. This may well b
e one of them. But still, it’s a solid motive—for someone.’

  ‘Makes a change, anyway,’ said Fenniway, who liked his killings clear-cut, and usually got them just that.

  ‘Precisely. A change from the option of a series of pranks—dangerous and nasty ones, some of them—leading up to the biggest prank of all, a murder.’

  ‘Or alternatively a series of pranks which someone takes advantage of, so that the murder looks like part of a series.’

  ‘Exactly. Or, now, a third possibility: that there is no connection between the two, and the murder was an attempt by someone outside the school to kill Pickerage—someone who had no knowledge of what had been going on here. There’s something to be said for the third option: as you said, it’s the first solid motive, though forty thou’ is by no means so solid a motive as it would have been ten or fifteen years ago.’

  ‘Still, even today, forty thou’, coming at the right time,’ began Sergeant Fenniway, for whom now would certainly be the right time for forty thousand to come. He could well have waxed lyrical on the subject, being a prospective father and a would-be house-buyer, but he was interrupted by a knock at the door.

  ‘Come in,’ roared Pumfrey, in his most fearsome voice. He feared it might be Mr Crumwallis, come for further heart-searching, or perhaps to unburden his soul on the loss of his school, and he was getting into a suitably off putting mood. But the head that poked itself round the door turned out to be Penny Warlock’s, and she did not appear to be intimidated.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry to bother you, but I saw that awful woman swanning it down the drive with poor Malcolm, and I thought you might be free.’

  ‘Come in, come in,’ said Pumfrey, with a sudden switch to genuine geniality. He thought how attractive, how very attractive Penny was, and what a refreshing, common-sense change after his last encounter. Sergeant Fenniway, too, looked as if his thoughts had easily been diverted from his insubstantial forty thousand.

  ‘Come in and sit down,’ said Mike. ‘I suppose you’ve remembered something you ought to have told us?’

  ‘No,’ said Penny, staying by the door. ‘It’s nothing to do with me, at all.’ She darted a look into the hall, then shut the door and came over to the desk. ‘It’s this girl. I found her outside, wandering about in the drive, when I slipped out for a breath of air. I found I couldn’t bear any more Hilary Frome in the Common Room, and I went out the front door and there she was—’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘She says she’s Hilary Frome’s girlfriend. She says she’s looking for you. For the policeman investigating his murder. She doesn’t seem to have anything special to tell you, as far as I can make out, but she just wants to talk to you. And she is in a terrible state. Of course she has no business to be in the school grounds at all, so I spirited her in here, which is really private quarters. Do you think you could see her?’

  ‘Oh God,’ said Pumfrey. ‘I suppose I’d better.’

  ‘You will be gentle with her, won’t you?’ said Penny. ‘She’s very upset.’

  ‘I do have girls of my own, Miss Warlock,’ said Mike Pumfrey in a tired voice, as if he’d never bullied anyone in the entire course of his police career.

  ‘Oh—of course. Sorry,’ said Penny, and she backed out of the room.

  But when she had bundled her charge into the room (and darted away thankfully herself), Pumfrey could see that she had certainly not exaggerated about the girl’s being upset. It was difficult to imagine a more pathetic bundle of teenage misery than the one standing by the door: her face was streaked by salt tears and dirt, her hair was in rats’ tails around her oval face, her skirt was dirty and damp, perhaps from her collapsing to the ground in despair. A steady rhythm of sobs racked her body, and when they lurched convulsively out into the open she dabbed at her face with a sodden handkerchief. Only when, now and then, she straightened her shoulders to let a violent burst emerge did the two men notice that she was well-formed, had the beginnings of a fine figure. Thinking back to their own schooldays, they could imagine that in adolescent circles she might well have been a catch, and perhaps also a tease.

  Pumfrey took from an inside pocket an enormous clean white handkerchief, and gestured to her with it.

  ‘Here. Have this. Come and sit down.’ The girl let out a howl, as if she were being shown Hilary Frome’s shroud. But she came over, took the handkerchief, and made some more effective efforts to dam the flood and repair the damage to her face. Finally she sank down into a chair.

  ‘That’s better. You wanted to see me, you know, so you’ve got to get yourself in hand if you want to have a talk. You’re Margaret Wilkinson, aren’t you?’

  She opened her eyes with shock, and suddenly the sobs stopped.

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Oh, your name has come up. In the course of conversation. You’re Hilary Frome’s girlfriend, aren’t you?’

  ‘I was!’ A single sob, almost a cry, escaped her.

  ‘Oh—you mean it was over?’

  ‘No! I mean that he’s dead!’ She dabbed at her face, but then she looked up at Pumfrey, and he saw how beautiful she one day would be: almond-shaped face, beautifully-moulded eyebrows, firm, regular mouth. How like Hilary Frome to pick an incipient stunner. In a second she had looked down again, and then she said:

  ‘Well, perhaps the other too.’

  ‘You were cooling off?’

  ‘He was. We weren’t going out much anymore. Before, we were going out all the time. Discos and dances and concerts and things. You know. But recently . . .’

  She suddenly spotted the little pile of personal things that Pumfrey had retrieved from Hilary Frome’s room, and she snatched at the tiny Boots’ pocket diary.

  ‘See—look!’ She fumbled with it, and opened it at January. As Pumfrey had thought at a cursory glance, the diary did not appear to be any different from most such pocket diaries: monumentally unrevealing. But when the girl pointed he saw in all the weeks of January the initials MW, and sometimes a time, marked against day after day. At least twice a week, sometimes more.

  ‘You see. We were going together all the time. The other girls were awfully jealous, really sick. He was so dishy. And so . . . remote. They’d have given their eye teeth to get him away from me . . . I wonder who did.’

  ‘You think someone got him away?’

  ‘I suppose so. You see, in February we didn’t get out together so much. And then in March . . . He kept making excuses . . . He said he had something on, always something on. Some cow or other stole him.’

  Pumfrey looked at the later entries. He saw the initials MP against the preceding Sunday.

  ‘Somebody, at any rate,’ he said. ‘So, you didn’t formally break it off, then? He never told you what he had on?’

  ‘No. He just went . . . sort of remote. With some girls he made dates, pretending to be all enthusiastic, and then just didn’t turn up. We used to have a good giggle, thinking of them waiting.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ said Pumfrey, thinking of Onyx Muggeridge.

  ‘I was sort of glad he didn’t do that to me. But I knew he must have got interested in somebody else.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ said Pumfrey sympathetically, trying to think back to the pains of his own adolescence. ‘Can you tell me something about Hilary Frome? I’ve heard a lot about him, but not much from his own age group.’

  ‘Oh—he was wonderful. So cool. Like ice. Marvellous. He could just stand there, you know, and I’d look at him, and shivers would go down my spine.’

  Pumfrey could easily imagine it.

  ‘He had such control. Over himself, over everyone around him. I mean, he never needed anybody, you know? He took what he wanted. And he was so confident. It was so marvellous just being with him, having the others see me with him . . .’

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  ‘Talk? Oh—you know: music and that. He always knew the sounds that were just coming in, always on the ball, long before the othe
rs. And of course we talked about school. He hated this place. I mean, he despised it. It was just beneath him, coming here. He was too big for Burleigh, and he knew it.’

  ‘Did he talk much about the teachers?’

  ‘Oh yes. He talked about all of them at one time or other. The head he just strung along, did a great big act for. He didn’t care a damn for the rest.’

  ‘Who did he talk about particularly?’

  ‘Like who did he hate, you mean? Well, Makepeace he just despised. He thought he was the feeblest thing he’d ever seen. He used to drive him to desperation, you know, he just put the knife in—’

  ‘Why?’

  She opened her eyes. Apparently it was a silly question.

  ‘Well, like I said, he despised him. I mean, if a teacher can’t keep order, he’s no good, is he? Hilary never liked weak people. It was the same with that Corbett Farraday. Hilary’s father was having to give him tuition to make up for Farraday’s lousy teaching. Hilary used to say: “Marvellous. Dad pays a thou a year for me to go there, and then he has to do the teaching himself.” The only one he had a good word for was Miss Grower.’

  ‘Oh? Why Miss Grower? Did he respect her?’

  ‘As a teacher. Oh yes, he did. He wasn’t really interested in history, but he said her classes were fabulous. And she did World Religions, too, and she didn’t do all that Christian stuff—most of these teachers just get you reading rotten old parables and things from the New Testament, and telling them what you think they meant, as if anyone cared. But he said she would go into Hinduism, and Buddhism, and all sorts of queer things like Thuggee and Zoro—Zoro-something-or-other. He thought she was trying to take the mickey out of religion altogether, because she was forced to take the subject and she thought it beneath her. He liked that. He thought it was a fabulous thing to do. He asked me to get anything I could on her, but I never managed to.’

  ‘He asked you what?’

  ‘To get anything on her.’ She opened her eyes at him, as if it was the most normal thing in the world, and he was being particularly dim. ‘Like she’s a lesbian, you know. And he wanted to know if she’d made up to any of the girls around here.’