La Buckfast gave me a pitying smile. ‘Your friend Eric Scoones used to teach at King Henry’s, didn’t he?’
‘Ten years after Conrad’s death,’ I said, a little too quickly. ‘Between 1982 and 1990.’ I heard the defensiveness in my tone, and winced. Of course La Buckfast did not mean to imply anything inappropriate. But on the subject of Eric I am more than a little sensitive. The man is dead. Now let him lie. And yet, her words had troubled me. What was she implying? That Scoones, with his predilections, might have been a suspect in a boy’s disappearance? No. That isn’t possible. Eric may have been deeply flawed, but he was never a murderer. I would have known it if he were. I would surely have seen it.
La Buckfast gave that smile again. ‘I was once a supply teacher at King Henry’s myself, for a while. Just for a term, in 1989. One of their French Masters fell ill and they needed someone at short notice.’
‘Really?’ I was a little surprised. King Henry’s – even more than St Oswald’s – has always prided itself on its enduring traditions. What survives at St Oswald’s as a slightly grubby kind of academic folklore has evolved at King Henry’s as a Gothic edifice of pretension, including doctoral robes in Assemblies, straw boaters for the rowing team and a multitude of arcane traditions designed to make outsiders feel uncomfortable. Our boys call theirs ‘Henriettas’, and even though the school has since evolved to include some of the more prestigious and lucrative policies of the twentieth century (mixed-sex classes, Academy status, Drama, Social Sciences), it still retains a (somewhat undeserved) reputation for exclusivity. As a result, predictably, Ozzies and Henriettas have always been bitter enemies, which made old Eric’s abrupt defection even more bitter to swallow.
La Buckfast smiled. ‘It was an experience.’
‘I’ll bet it was.’
‘In fact, I worked with Mr Scoones. I’ll tell you about that, too,’ she said. ‘But for now, I have a meeting with Dr Markowicz and the Chairman of Governors. Would you allow me a day’s grace? All this has rather shaken me.’
Has it? I thought. She looked calm enough. And yet, now I came to think of it, wasn’t her smile a little forced, her face rather paler than usual? I felt a stab of sympathy. It couldn’t be easy, thinking back to those old, traumatic events. The death of a brother is hard enough. But a disappearance is far worse. It tears at the soul. It never rests. And Hope is the ghoul that will not die, and will not lay the dead to rest.
Of course, I was an only child. I lost my parents years ago, and mourned them out of duty. But losing Eric has taught me about grief. We were only two years apart; brothers in everything but name. I know how sometimes an absence can feel more substantial than flesh itself, like an amputated limb that still demands attention. I’ll admit it. I wanted more. I wanted to hear what Eric had been like during his time at King Henry’s. Perhaps, most of all, I needed to hear that his abuse of one of our boys had been but a single incident. One long-ago aberration, revealed at the end of his career. I said: ‘Of course. I understand.’
‘Tomorrow, after school? Shall we say, five-thirty?’
I nodded. ‘It’s a date.’
3
St Oswald’s, September 5th, 2006
The things we say from embarrassment. A date? I must have really shaken him. Good. I need him shaken. The mention of Scoones will have done that. Most importantly, I need him to believe that I am vulnerable.
And so I am, but maybe not for the reason Straitley thinks. Scheherazade may have lived a thousand nights under sentence of death, but she was always the one in control. And I do not need a thousand nights: a week or two should cover it. Straitley is a romantic at heart. Like the White Knight in Alice, he sees himself in the chivalrous role; allowing me to tell my tale as he leads me to security. Of course, this is very far from the truth. I direct the narrative: I tell him only what he needs to know. A tale of misdirection, to keep him on my side until the danger is averted. The rest – the deeper history, the messy, tangled guts of the tale – will stay securely packed away, like handkerchiefs in lavender. And yet, I can feel the echoes of the woman I was all those years ago; that young and brittle woman, still under the shadow of Conrad, and under her show of confidence, still awaiting the inevitable.
Mr Smallface. Oh, that name. That name, in my daughter’s handwriting. How naïve I was to believe that scars such as mine could just disappear. Two words on a piece of paper. That’s all it took to bring them back. Two words and a shapeless picture: a figure with a tiny head. Two words, and a sudden memory, as sharp as the scent of burning: myself, aged five, in a plastic chair, and two adults in uniform, one at each side; shiny, hopeful faces flushed with mounting fatigue and frustration:
‘Did you see where Conrad went? Did he go off with anyone?’
And my answer, again and again, in that tiny, whispery voice: Mr Smallface took him away. Took him through the green door.
‘Where does he live, Becky? Where’s the green door?’
Down the sink hole.
‘Underground?’
It wasn’t much, I know, but it was the only possible lead they had. They followed it as far as they could: asked me to draw Mr Smallface; asked me where he lived, who he was, and why he would want to take Conrad. They tried again and again to find out what I meant by the green door. They searched the basement of the school, as well as the basements of various abandoned buildings in Malbry, Pog Hill and the neighbouring villages. They searched in culverts and clay pits and the sites of disused collieries. The literal-minded idiots even went as far as to bring into the station a local man afflicted with microcephaly, in the hope that I might give them a lead on a potential suspect.
But although the man did indeed have a small face (and a hopeful, nervous smile revealing a set of short, stumpy teeth, and a habit of pulling out hairs one by one from the crown of his head as the officers kept repeating: Look at him, Becky, is that the man? Is that the man who took Conrad?), I would only shake my head. Even so, the local papers got hold of the name of the small-headed man, whose house unfortunately happened to have a greenish door. He finally left the village, was tracked down again by the News of the World, and ended up taking his own life in a caravan park near Blackpool. And as the trail grew colder, Conrad was – if not quite forgotten, simply pushed to the bottom of the pile, as other cases took precedence.
Except in my own home, where instead of fading, his image had grown, eclipsing everything else in our lives. His room was kept just as he’d left it, except that his bed was made afresh every day. A place was set for him at meals. My parents spoke of him all the time, as if he had simply stepped out for an hour instead of having disappeared a week (ten days, six months) ago. Time passed everywhere else, but in my parents’ house it did not. It simply crystallized, like a roll of black velvet gathering salt in the Dead Sea. Even all those years later, as my daughter came to me with her primary-school drawing, the house on Jackson Street had remained just as it had been in 1971, with Conrad’s photos on the walls; his place set at table; the poster of The Doors by his bed. Our parents hated that band so much. But Conrad loved them, so it stayed. Sometimes my mother even played his records when she cleaned his room, as if he were still there at his desk, listening to the music. It was better than the numbers stations, but I didn’t like it. I much preferred classical music, the hymns we used to sing in church. I later discovered I had a voice, and I enjoyed deploying it. But however hard I sang, my parents did not hear my voice above the tinnitus of grief. And so I left, and found my voice again – this time, as a teacher.