School for Murder Read online

  ‘I remember him from Parents’ Evening. Pretty as a primrose, isn’t he?’

  ‘I saw you—putting on your little girl lost act. Brushing up against him.’

  ‘Oh Gawd—sounds like something out of bleeding Barbara Cartland: “Suddenly she brushed up against him, and he knew that this was the real thing.” Be your age. And if you want to know, I wouldn’t have thought he was the type to be interested—not at all.’

  ‘Hilary Frome would fuck the school cat if he thought he’d get a kick out of it.’

  ‘Probably would at that. Well, I’ll bear it in mind. I do sometimes fancy something a bit more refined.’

  ‘Well, try a stick of barley sugar, for Christ’s sake. If you go interfering with the boys we’re out on our backsides.’

  ‘Since you’re moving out anyway, I don’t see why you worry. I’d really try Crumwallis on this boarding lark.’

  ‘Not a chance. He’s got a head of the boarding section—salary nil per annum.’

  ‘Oh yes, that nice little Toby Whatsit. Now, I’d say he had a really sensitive face, wouldn’t you?’

  Bill Muggeridge groaned.

  • • •

  ‘At least,’ said Penny Warlock, ‘you can say you have taught in a good school. As far as I’m concerned Burleigh is about the most dispiriting way possible to begin a teaching career. I’m beginning to think I’ll leave in summer, whether I get a proper job or not. I’d plump for unemployment, given the choice.’

  She sat back in the large, embracing armchair and took another mouthful of the splendid Spanish omelette. Glenda’s cooking, like her everything else, was supremely competent. Penny made a mental note to get cold food from the delicatessen when she invited Glenda back.

  ‘Of course, Burleigh is the dregs,’ agreed Glenda, elegantly ingesting (rather than eating) the last scrap of food from her plate, and taking a goodly swig of white wine. ‘But it has one enormous advantage over Bedfordshire Comprehensive.’

  ‘Surprise me,’ said Penny.

  ‘It doesn’t have girls.’

  Penny, to her surprise, was surprised.

  ‘I can see . . .’ she tentatively began.

  ‘I have had girls,’ enunciated Glenda, ‘up to here.’

  ‘I don’t suppose there’s many girls that could be that much worse than, say, Hilary Frome,’ put in Penny, out of loyalty to her sex.

  ‘You think not? Oh, Hilary’s a little charmer, I admit. Did I tell you what he did the other day, by the way? He’d been sitting apparently fascinated by my World Religions class, and when he came up at the end I made sure he wanted to ask a question about Zoroastrianism or Thuggee, or whatever damned thing I’d been going on about. Well, he smiled all ingratiatingly, then suddenly he asked if I wasn’t tired of the Lesbian kick? He said he’d be happy to oblige me any time I “wanted it straight”. Isn’t that typically charming?’

  ‘Good God. What did you say?’

  ‘I said any time I wanted it straight I’d have it with someone who really enjoyed it straight. He switched on his sneer and took himself off.’

  ‘My God, that boy . . .’

  Glenda stood commandingly by the mantelpiece and took a cigarette.

  ‘Nevertheless, anyone can take Hilary Frome’s measure. We all have, apart from the Crumwallises, who carry moral and physical imperceptiveness to undreamed-of heights. On the other hand, my little charmer . . .’

  ‘Your . . . ?’

  ‘The one who put me in. Betty Maitland. My Betty, star pupil of the arts line at Bedfordshire Comprehensive. Such a sweet girl. Everybody said so. And such an unblemished record. So that, when she went to the headmistress with what I was supposed to have done to her as we were changing after a singles tennis game, of course everyone believed her. Why would sweet Betty lie? Not a single one of my colleagues doubted for a moment what she said. The solidarity of women!’

  ‘And there wasn’t an atom of truth in it?’

  ‘Not a scrap. I’d got fed up with her everlasting sweetness and shown her up in class the day before. Who would believe a sweet child would take that sort of revenge?’

  ‘Wasn’t there even a suspicion of truth in it? I mean, didn’t you feel . . . perhaps . . . you would like to?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Glenda, throwing her cigarette disgustedly into the grate. ‘You’re just like the rest. Look, once and for all: I prefer men. I don’t go for women, and I never have.’

  Penny was conscious of feeling a twinge of disappointment.

  • • •

  Tom Tedder’s flat was comfortable and untidy, like himself. Like him, too, it was daubed with paint. Specifically, several of his pictures hung on the walls, and one stood on an easel in the centre of the living-room. One and all testified to a staggering lack of talent. He had some of the techniques but none of the instincts of a painter. When he deprecatingly called them his ‘daubs’, nobody contradicted him. They depressed even him, though they comforted Dorothea Gilberd, who saw their value, and knew that Tom Tedder would never disappear to Chelsea, Arles, Florence or the South Seas.

  Empty plates with crumbs from a chicken pie littered the floor around them as they sat in the late evening peace, that Monday night. Tom sprawled in the armchair, in an open, smock-like shirt, smoking. Dorothea sat at his feet, her head in his lap. If the spectacle of a woman well into her fifties in love with a man twelve years her junior is ridiculous, then they were ridiculous. Onyx Muggeridge would certainly, in her language, have had hysterics. But perhaps to more sympathetic eyes they were more touching than risible, and no more grotesque than many other lovers in whose relationship one loves overwhelmingly, and the other lets himself be loved, for whatever reason—convenience, self-importance, pity. Tom Tedder stroked Dorothea Gilberd’s hair.

  ‘That was good,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed. Adding in her honest way: ‘I didn’t make it.’

  ‘Feeling better now?’

  ‘Oh yes. Much. You don’t know.’

  ‘Want to talk about it?’

  Dorothea Gilberd thought. Thought back to the afternoon, as she stood in the delicatessen, that valued resort of the hard-pressed teacher bent on entertaining. Remembered Hilary Frome and Peter Quigly marching round the shelves singing ‘Little Tommy Tedder, Sang for his supper’. Remembered the horrible, fair, insinuating Frome sidling up to her at the counter and suddenly, unexpectedly, braying out for the whole shop to hear in exaggerated cockney: ‘Better not fatten him up too much, love, or he’ll be too heavy to baby-snatch.’ And the blush that rose, the helplessness, the looks of the other customers. No, she couldn’t tell him, she just couldn’t. And why spoil the perfection of this moment? Let it pass.

  ‘Oh, I think I over-reacted,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t much. Let’s forget it.’

  Tom Tedder grinned, behind her head. He thought: I bet she made it all up. He ruffled her hair affectionately.

  • • •

  On Monday afternoon and evening Toby once again enjoyed undisputed sway in the boarding annexe of Burleigh. Mr Crumwallis’s brief eruption of activity was now again quiescent. Like all basically lazy people he was content to let things be not only when they were going well, but also when they merely appeared to be going well. The parents, he was convinced, had perceived nothing of the incident last Thursday, and therefore he was happy to relegate it to the back of his mind, and do nothing further about it.

  After the usual bread and jam left out by Mrs Garfitt, Toby went and played a few games of rounders with the young boys. But his heart was not in it. He was turning over in his mind the best way to have a little talk with Pickerage.

  He had been unable to prevent Pickerage going off on his own on Sunday. Sunday was the one day of the week when all the boys—particularly those of thirteen or over—enjoyed the largest possible freedom. It would have demanded from Toby a display of powers he was by no means sure he possessed to prevent Pickerage going off with Hilary Frome. Any appeal to the headmaster wo
uld have been quite useless, for at the mention of Hilary’s name there would have snapped over his eyes those rose-tinted contact lenses he automatically assumed for viewing that young man. So he had adopted the feeble expedient of ringing the Frome household around tea-time, and asking to speak to Pickerage.

  ‘Who?’ Mrs Frome had asked. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know any boy of that name. Hilary’s away for the day—gone on a long hike to tune himself up, as he put it. So sensible. I’m afraid I can’t help you.’

  ‘Sorry you’ve been troubled,’ Toby had muttered, like a long-ago switchboard operator.

  So presumably either Pickerage was lying about his date with Hilary Frome, or the pair had been up to something the whole of Sunday. Pickerage had gone straight to bed when he got back, and that day, Monday, had been something less than his dottily exuberant self. Toby was worried.

  But it was far from easy to get to talk to him alone, at least without making a ‘thing’ of it, and that Toby was determined he would not do. Pickerage, with the cunning of adolescence, was finding expedients that kept him well out of Toby’s way. He only appeared when the boys were half way through supper (corned-beef hash), and by then it was practically time for bed. Perhaps he could get him between breakfast and school.

  ‘Time for bed for the younger ones,’ he said at nine o’clock.

  There was a general groan, but then they started upstairs, ragging and fighting and telling terrible jokes. Pickerage was in bed in two shakes—again unlike him—and apparently deep in a book under the sheets. Toby looked at him, and imperceptibly shook his head. He looked round at the rest of them. Young Tilney was cleaning his teeth with that concrete drill effect in the bathroom beyond the dormitory.

  ‘You haven’t washed your face, Wattling,’ said Toby. ‘Come on, hurry up—I know you haven’t.’

  With a groan Wattling got out of bed, and then danced cheekily into the bathroom. Toby saw him take up the pile of wet flannel from beside the bath and chuck it at his face. Then there was a piercing, terrified scream.

  When he dashed into the bathroom Wattling’s face was covered with blood, pouring from a gash that stretched from eye to chin. The palm of his right hand was oozingly red from another gash. Toby ran to the sobbing boy and took the flannel, and as he did so a naked razor blade fluttered down and tinkled on to the floor. The two of them looked at it, as blood dripped down on the cold linoleum.

  CHAPTER 6

  A CONCATENATION OF CIRCUMSTANCES

  It was typical of Edward Crumwallis that, even at this stage, his first reaction was an instinctive determination to cover up. It may be that he had missed his metier, and that he would have made a greater mark had he gone into politics.

  ‘Ah—most unfortunate,’ he said, standing in the blood-bespattered bathroom of the boarding section and looking at the pool on the floor as if it were a spilt cup of tea. ‘But not very deep cuts. Now, perhaps if Mrs Crumwallis were to put some iodine on . . .’

  ‘No!’ howled Wattling.

  ‘No,’ said Toby, very firmly. Mrs Crumwallis’s medical ministrations were so notorious for their vagaries that even Toby, a healthy young man with no great tolerance of the sick, would not willingly subject a boy to them.

  ‘Well, perhaps just a bandage,’ said the headmaster.

  ‘No,’ said Toby again, his heart in his mouth. ‘The boy needs a doctor.’

  ‘Mr Freely,’ whinnied the headmaster, ‘I think you—’

  ‘It would be criminal not to get him proper attention. If that cut isn’t seen to by somebody qualified the boy could be scarred for life.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense. Fiddlesticks. Nothing but a surface cut. Naturally the cheek bleeds a little.’

  ‘Do you think his parents are going to be happy when he comes home for the holidays with a scar the length of his face?’

  Mr Crumwallis perceptibly weakened, and cleared his throat.

  ‘They’re going to ask what medical attention he had.’

  ‘Mr Freely, I think you are usurping . . . er . . . I think you can rely on me to know . . . er . . .’

  ‘Headmaster, I’m grateful to you for giving me almost sole charge of the boarders. I’m proud of your trust. But I feel I’m responsible for these boys now, and I feel I’ve failed them. If you don’t phone for a doctor, I’m leaving Burleigh tomorrow.’

  Mr Crumwallis gazed at him in amazement, as if the worm had turned, and left him flabbergasted at the depths of human ingratitude suddenly exposed. Then he caved in, and pottered off, muttering to himself, to telephone the school doctor.

  Toby, next morning, was inclined to regard it as a great victory. It wasn’t bad, he said to himself, at the age of nineteen, to be able to carry your point like that, especially when your antagonist was the headmaster, and you were an unpaid temporary assistant. In this appraisal of the situation Toby deceived himself. There is nobody in a stronger position than someone who is doing a good job of work for nothing, especially when his employer is stingy and congenitally idle.

  Mr Crumwallis was very insistent that ‘none of this should get out’. It was ‘just an unfortunate accident,’ he said. ‘One of the senior boys being criminally careless.’

  And certainly Broughton and one or two of the older boarders regularly drew a cheap safety razor over the blonde fuzz on their cheeks, and anxiously inspected the shavings as if they were virility tokens. Toby held his peace. He had won a victory, the doctor had come and put Wattling together again, and perhaps—though he didn’t expect it—everything might return to normal.

  Except, of course, that it was quite impossible that ‘none of this should get out’. Next day it was all over the school. Ghoulish tales were told, by the boarders in every class, of the hideous pools of blood on the bathroom floor, of Wattling’s terrified and ghastly aspect. In the very first hour one of Dorothea Gilberd’s little boys had told her, and naturally at lunch break in the Staff Common Room she told everybody else. By the time Toby came in it was clear that the whole school knew. There was no point in holding anything back, so he didn’t.

  ‘According to the headmaster, it was just one of the older boys being careless with a used blade,’ he concluded.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Septimus Coffin. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘The older boys hardly ever have used blades. One lasts them a term at least. And this one wasn’t old. I picked it up off the floor, and it looked perfectly new.’

  ‘Was it lying on top of Wattling’s flannel?’

  ‘No—as far as I can make out it was hidden in it. It must have been. Wattling always leaves his flannel lying in a heap by the bath. If the razor was on top of the heap, he would have been cut as soon as he touched it. My guess is that it was concealed inside.’

  ‘Nasty,’ shivered Dorothea Gilberd. ‘Really malignant.’

  ‘Taken with the other thing, you begin to wonder,’ said Corbett Farraday. ‘Has someone got a down on the school?’

  ‘Or is it a maniac with a hatred of boys?’ suggested Tom Tedder.

  ‘He doesn’t have to be a maniac to hate boys,’ grunted Bill Muggeridge.

  ‘But they’re not weally the same, are they?’ put in Mr Makepeace diffidently. ‘I mean, the first was just a silly twick, a boy’s pwank.’

  ‘You mightn’t have thought so if you’d seen them the next day,’ said Toby.

  ‘But you wouldn’t think of that, the hangovers and all that, when you laced the fwuit cup, would you? But this is diffewent—weally vicious.’

  ‘Well,’ sniffled Mr McWhirter, with apparent relish, ‘much more of this sort of thing and Crumwallis is going to start losing pupils.’

  ‘Which would be good for none of us,’ said Tom Tedder.

  The odd thing was, that didn’t seem to be how it struck McWhirter.

  • • •

  In the kitchens Mrs Crumwallis and the school cook were having one of their comfortable morning confabulations.

  ‘And I said to ’im, I said: “All right, Mr Hodge, all righ
t. There are other butchers in this town. Them neck-chops we ’ad last Friday was all fat an’ gristle. They was rubbish, and they was full price. We don’t mind you giving us rubbish, provided you charges us for it as rubbish.” Now, was I right, Mrs C?’

  Mrs Garfitt, fat, voluble and slovenly, paused for breath and gave a perfunctory stir to something that looked like workhouse broth on one of the meatless days.

  ‘Quite right, Mrs Garfitt. A bit of fat never did a boy any harm, but we’re not going to pay for it as if it was lean. We’re not made of money.’

  ‘I know that, Mrs C. Got to look to every penny. Got these at the baker’s for next to nothin’, by the by.’ She drew from an enormous hold-all an array of archaeological cakes and buns, and displayed them with pride. ‘Might put ’em in the oven, freshen ’em up a bit.’

  ‘That’s a good idea, Mrs Garfitt. Is there a fairly good one there? We’ve got a boy in the sick bay.’

  Mrs Garfitt picked up a cream horn and sniffed at it warily.

  ‘Smells all right. Who is it? Hasn’t got tummy trouble, has he?’

  ‘No, no. It’s Wattling. He had an accident with a razor blade.’

  ‘Cor! Cheeky young blighter! All of thirteen and ’e’s shaving ‘isself. Makes you laugh, dunnit?’

  Mrs Crumwallis’s thought had apparently glided elsewhere, for she did not correct Mrs Garfitt.

  ‘Now, lunch today is fish-cakes, and there’s sausages tomorrow, Cornish pasty Thursday and shepherd’s on Friday. Is that right?’

  ‘Right. And that Hodge promised me some good cheap mince for the shepherd’s. I’ll make it tomorrow and shove it in the freezer.’ She gave a final stir to the enormous pot. ‘There. That’s done. Though I says it as shouldn’t, I could almost fancy a bowl o’ that meself.’

  • • •

  It was next day, Wednesday, that Bill Muggeridge went to Mr Crumwallis and said he would be unable to take the Burleigh team to the All-Swessex Schools Swimming Championships on Thursday.

  ‘Oh—ah—that’s—er—most unfortunate. May I ask—er—why?’

  Bill had expected that question, but he could not prevent there coming across his inward eye the memory of the grubby calendar in Onyx’s kitchen, with the new red ring round Thursday the twenty-ninth.