Part 23 (1/2)

I smiled then, feeling the years slip from me like dead weight. '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, or Light 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 favour. 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 G.o.d 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 towards me in the darkness. Against my palm, his fingers were cold.

'Leon Mitch.e.l.l,' he said slowly. 'Is that what this is all about?'

Bonfire Night 9.35 p.m.

LEON MITCh.e.l.l. I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN. I SHOULD HAVE known from the start that Leon Mitch.e.l.l 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 a.s.sured 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 Mitch.e.l.l all too clearly, clinging to the rusty ledge, his broken fingernails wedged into the rotting stone, his eyes alive with terror.

'Pinchbeckl'

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 s.p.a.ce, 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. fa 'Tell me.' The st.i.tch-that-wasn't clawed fiercely into my e; 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 a.n.a.lyst 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 Mitch.e.l.l, of course. How could I have forgotten him? The little s.h.i.+t.'

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 Mitch.e.l.l, like Knight - who, 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 1 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 I had known her -- shrill and uncontrolled. It occurred : only then that she planned to kill me -- absurd, really, I must have known it from the moment of her confession. I ought to be afraid - but in spite of that, in spite pain in my side, all I could feel was an overriding of irritation with the woman, as if a bright student had made an elementary grammatical mistake. I told her, 'Leon didn't care about anyone but himself. He liked to exploit people. That's what he did; 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 overstepped 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 cla.s.ses, 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, 1 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 G.o.d, 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 ca lled 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.

Now, it seemed, I was in the same boat. I don't pretend to be Freud or anyone, but it was clear even to me that this unfortunate young woman had somehow chosen me in much the same way that young Smalls had chosen Sourgrape, investing in me qualities - and now, responsibilities - that were quite out of proportion with my true role. Worse, she had done the same with Leon Mitch.e.l.l, who, being dead, had attained a status and a romance to which no living person, however saintly, might hope to aspire.

Between us, there could be no contest. After all, what victory can there ever be in a battle with the dead?

Still, remained that irritation. It was the waste, you see, that troubled me; the confounded waste. Miss Dare was young, bright, talented; there should have been a bright, promising life stretching out ahead of her. Instead she had chosen to shackle herself, like some old Centurion, to the wreck of St Oswald's; to the gilded figurehead of Leon Mitch.e.l.l, of all people, a boy remarkable only by his essential mediocrity and the stupid squandering of his young life.

I tried to say so, but she wasn't listening. 'He would have been somebody,' she said in a stubborn voice. 'Leon was special. Different. Clever. He was a free spirit. He didn't play to the normal rules. People would have remembered him.'

'Remembered him? Perhaps they would. Certainly I've never known anyone leave so many casualties behind him. Poor Marlene. She knew the truth, but he was her son and she loved him, whatever he did. And that teacher at his old school. Metalwork teacher; a married man, a fool. Leon destroyed him, you know. Selfishly; on a whim, when he got bored of his attentions. And what about the man's wife? She was a teacher, too, and in that profession it makes you guilty by a.s.sociation. Two careers down the drain. One man in prison. A marriage ruined. And that girl - what was her name? She can't have been more than fourteen years old. All of them victims of Leon Mitch.e.l.l's little games. And now me, Bishop, Grachvogel, Devine - and you, Miss Dare. What makes you think you're any different?'

I had stopped for breath, and there was silence. Silence so complete, in fact, that I wondered if she had gone away. Then she spoke in a small, gla.s.sy voice.

'What girl?' she said.

Bonfire Night 9.45 p.m.

HE'D SEEN HER IN THE HOSPITAL, WHERE I HAD NOT DARED go. Oh, I'd wanted to; but Leon's mother had been there at his bedside the whole time, and the risk was unacceptable. But Francesca had come; and the Tynans; and Bishop. And Straitley, of course.

He'd remembered her well. After all, who wouldn't? Fifteen years old and beautiful in that way that old men find so inexplicably heart-breaking. He'd noticed her, first for her hair and the way it fell across her face in a single swatch of raw silk. Bewildered, perhaps, but more than a little excited by the drama of it all; the real-life tragedy in which she was a player. She'd chosen black, as if for a funeral, but mostly because it suited her, for after all, Leon wasn't actually going to die. He was fourteen, for pity's sake. At fourteen, death is something that only happens on TV.

Straitley hadn't spoken to the girl. Instead he'd gone to the hospital cafeteria to bring Marlene a cup of tea, whilst waiting for Leon's visitors to leave. He'd seen Francesca on her way out - still fascinated perhaps by that hair as it moved like an animal across her lower back - and it had crossed his mind that the roundness at her stomach looked more p.r.o.nounced than the usual adolescent tubbiness; in fact with those long, slim legs and narrow shoulders, that weight around her abdomen made her look more than a little-- I breathed deeply, using the method my a.n.a.lyst had taught me. In for five beats; out for ten. The scent of smoke and dank vegetation was very strong; in the mist my breath plumed like dragonfire.

He was lying, of course. Leon would have told me.

I said it aloud. On the bench the old man lay very still, denying nothing.