So far (barring a couple of disciplinary faux pas) he has managed to take over Bishop’s job quite nicely. A Headship may follow. Why not? He is clever (clever enough, in any case, not to appear too clever in front of the Governors); competent; articulate; and just bland enough to pass the stringent personality tests applied to all St. Oswald’s staff.
All in all, a nice little piece of antisocial engineering. I say it myself (because no one else can), but actually I’m very pleased with the way things have worked out. Remains one small, unfinished piece of business, and I plan to deal with that tonight, at the community bonfire. After that I can afford to celebrate, and I will; there’s a bottle of champagne with Straitley’s name on it, and I mean to open it tonight.
For now, though, I am idle. That’s the worst part of a campaign such as this; those long, charged moments of waiting. The bonfire starts at seven-thirty; by eight the pyre will be a beacon; thousands of people will be in the park; there will be music booming from loudspeakers; screaming from the fairground; and at eight-thirty the fireworks will start; all smoke and falling stars.
Just the place for a quiet murder, don’t you think? The dark; the crowds; the confusion. So easy here to apply Poe’s law—stating that the object that is hidden in plain sight remains unseen longest—and to simply walk away, leaving the body for some poor baffled soul to discover, or even to discover it myself, with a cry of alarm, relying upon the inevitable crowd to shield me from sight.
One more murder. I owe it to myself. Or maybe two.
I still have Leon’s photograph, a clipping taken from the Examiner, now leaf-brown and speckled with age. It’s a school photograph, taken that summer, and the quality is poor, blown up for the front page into a grainy mess of clustered dots. But it’s still his face; his cockeyed grin; his too-long hair and scissored tie. The headline stands alongside the picture.
LOCAL SCHOOLBOY IN DEATH PLUMMET.
PORTER QUESTIONED
Well, anyway, that’s the official story. We jumped; he fell. Even as my feet touched the other side of the chimney I heard him go—a gutter-rattle of broken slates and a squeal of rubber soles.
It took me a moment to understand. His foot had slipped; perhaps a moment’s hesitation; perhaps a cry from below had spoiled his leap. I looked, and saw that instead of landing squarely beside me, his knee had caught the edge of the gully; he’d slip-slid down the slimy funnel; bounced back; and now he was trapped across the mouth of the drop, holding on to the edge of the gutter with his fingertips, one foot stretched acrobatically to touch the far side of the chimney, the other hanging limply into space.
“Leon!”
I threw myself down, but I couldn’t reach him; I was on the wrong side of the chimney. I didn’t dare jump back in case I dislodged a slate. I knew how brittle the gutter was; how nibbled and scalloped its edges.
“Hang on!” I called, and Leon looked up at me, face blurred with fear.
“Stay there, son. I’ll get you.”
I raised my head. John Snyde was now standing on the parapet barely thirty feet away. His face was a slab; his eyes holes; his entire body shook. Now he edged forward with clockwork movements; his fear rolled off him like a stench. But he was moving. Inch by inch he crept closer—his eyes screwed almost shut in fear—and soon he would see me, and I wanted to run, I needed to run, but Leon was still down there, Leon was still trapped—
Below me I could hear a low cracking sound. It was the gutter giving way; a piece of its scalloped edge broke off and fell into the space between the buildings. There was a squeal of rubber as Leon’s sneaker slid a few more inches down the greasy wall.
As my father approached I began to back away, farther into the shadow of the Bell Tower. Red-blue lights strobed from the fire engines below; soon there would be people all over the roof.
“Hang on, Leon,” I whispered.
Then suddenly I felt it in the nape of my neck, a distinct sensation of being watched. I turned my head and saw—
Roy Straitley in his old tweed jacket, standing at his window not twelve feet above me. His face was gaudy in the lights; his eyes were startled; his mouth drawn down into a tragicomic mask.
“Pinchbeck?” he said.
And in that second came a sound below us—a hollow, ratcheting sound like a giant penny stuck in a vacuum cleaner pipe—
Then—crunch.
Silence.
The gutter had given way.
3
I ran then, and kept running, with the sound of Leon’s fall at my heels like a black dog. Here my knowledge of the roof came into its own; I loped, monkeylike, across my rooftop circuit, cat-leaped from the parapet onto the fire escape, and from there regained the Middle Corridor by the open fire door, and thence, the open air.
I was running on instinct by then, of course; everything suspended but the need to survive. Outside, emergency lights still strobed mystically red and blue from the fire engines parked in the Chapel court.
No one had seen me leave the building. I was clear. All around me, firemen and police, cordoning off the area against the little group of gawkers that had collected on the drive. I was clear, I told myself. No one had seen me. Except, of course, for Straitley.
Cautiously now, I made for the gatehouse, avoiding the parked fire engine with its bank of red-blue lights and the hopeful ambulance sirening its way up the long drive. Instinct drove me. I made for home. There I would be safe. There I would lie under my bed, wrapped in a blanket, as I always had on Saturday nights, door locked, thumb in mouth, waiting for my father to come home. It would be dark under the bed; it would be safe.
The gatehouse door was wide open. Light came from the kitchen window; the lounge curtains were open, but light shone from there too, and there were figures standing against the light. Mr. Bishop was there, with his megaphone. Two policemen were standing by the patrol car that blocked the drive.
And now I could see someone else there, a woman in a coat with a fur collar; a woman whose face in the lights seemed suddenly, fleetingly familiar.
The woman turned, full face to me, and her mouth dropped in a great lipsticked Oh—
“Oh, sweetheart! Oh, love!”
The woman, running toward me on kitten heels.
Bishop, turning, megaphone in hand, as a cry went up from the firemen at the far side of the building. “Mr. Bishop, sir! Over here!”
The woman, hair flying; eyes wet; arms like batwing doors to scoop me in. A sensation of shrinking; a tickle of fur against my mouth; and suddenly there were tears; tears boiling out of me as everything came back in a tidal wave of memory and grief. Leon, Straitley, my father—all forgotten; left far behind as she gathered me into the house, to safety.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this, love.” Her voice was shaking. “It was going to be a surprise.”
In that second I saw it all. The unopened plane ticket. The whispered conversations on the phone. How much? Pause. All right. It’s for the best. How much for what? To give up his claim? And how many scratch cards, how many six-packs and takeaway pizzas did they promise him before he gave them what they wanted?
I began to cry again, this time in rage at their joint betrayal. My mother held me in a scent of something expensive and unfamiliar. “Oh sweetheart. What happened?”