Who Saw Him Die? (9 page)

But this was November. Fog hung over the valley and obscured the view. Even though it wasn't raining, moisture from the trees dripped on to the pupils as they hurried from one part of the school to another. The new sixth-former, dodging through the drips, found his unaccustomed rural surroundings disenchanting.

‘I say – are you Matthew Napier?'

Matthew – approaching seventeen, his eyes brown like his mother's but his features and bearing haughtily unlike hers – turned at the call of a stocky boy of about the same age who came bounding up behind him. He acknowledged his identity.

‘I'm Ben Clarke,' said the stocky boy. ‘Someone said you've come from the City of London School, and I wondered if you knew my cousin who's there. Edward Clarke? Rugby player – first fifteen this year!'

‘Good for Edward Clarke,' said Matthew in a voice that sounded disdainful. He himself was not a games player. Then, because the disdain was a cover for newcomer's loneliness and he was not sorry to have someone to talk to, he added abruptly, ‘I know the name, but I don't recall having seen him. City of London's a day school, and the playing fields are miles away.'

‘What do you think of Saxted, then?' said Ben Clarke. The boys were making for the Technology Centre, Ben jollying through the fallen leaves, walking backwards as he talked, kicking at conkers.

‘Not a lot,' pronounced Matthew, turning up the collar of his blazer with a haughty flick and marching on. Although he had felt pressured and unhappy at his father's old school, he knew that it ranked a good deal higher in the public school league than Saxted. And wretched as his father had made him, he had learned from Austin Napier to be a snob.

‘Oh, you'll soon get used to it,' promised Ben. ‘Anyway, you've only got a couple of years here. What made you change schools at this stage?'

‘Divorce,' said Matthew shortly.

‘That's tough,' said Ben. ‘But you'll get used to that, too,' he added cheerfully. ‘
My
parents divorced when I was eight … it's
really
rough at that age. But what you have to think of are the benefits! Both parents feel so guilty that they shower you with money and presents. And then when they both marry again you get two complete sets of parents and double the number of grandparents, all competing with each other to provide you with goodies. You can't lose!'

Ben Clarke hesitated, then bent to pick up a conker and fling it as far as he could across the misted grass. His bright look had changed to a momentary bleakness. ‘Unless of course you happen to miss your real family life, and your real father …'

‘God, no!' Matthew Napier, preoccupied with his own problems, misinterpreted his companion's lament as a question. ‘I'm thankful to be free of my father. I couldn't
stand
him.'

‘Couldn't stand'was an understatement, but Matthew had no intention of admitting to anyone that his father had terrified him. Family life, at their home in Highgate, had been dominated by Austin Napier's moods. The atmosphere had seemed to be one of permanent tension, heightened by the fact that the barrister communicated with his wife and son almost exclusively by cross-examination.

Matthew had dreaded his father's return home each evening, because it meant the immediate exposure of his academic failings. That was why the boy had begged – in vain – to be allowed to go to boarding school, in an attempt to escape the daily torment. It was not that he had anticipated any form of punishment. His father had never punished him; he had no need to. Austin Napier was a master of sarcasm who could flay – and enjoy flaying – his son with his tongue.

‘You were lucky that your parents divorced, then,' said Ben Clarke. ‘At least you won't have to see him very often.'

‘Hah – you don't know my father! He's coming here today to take me out to lunch.'

‘On a Wednesday? We're not supposed to go out except at weekends.'

‘It's not
my
idea,' said Matthew. ‘It's the last thing I want to do. Apparently my father's in court at Ipswich this week, and he rang the Headmaster this morning and fixed things.'

‘I expect he'll take you to The Crown,' said Ben, almost wistfully. ‘You'll get a good nosh-up anyway … Make sure you go à la carte – the steak there's usually pretty good …'

But Matthew wasn't listening. He was dreading the meeting with his father, and angry at the way it had been engineered. Austin Napier had no right of access to him during term time. The boy's first thought, when the Headmaster's secretary had told him of today's arrangement, had been to telephone a complaint to his mother. But that would have upset her, and he would far rather endure an hour of his father's company than do that.

Matthew loved his mother. Frightened as he had always been of his father, he had grown up to realise that his mother's fear was even greater. She, Matthew had observed, trembled in her husband's presence. She flinched when he spoke harshly to her.

Even so, it had taken Matthew some time to appreciate that his mother was far more of a victim than he was. Unlike him, she had had physical symptoms: those bruises on her wrists, and on her neck; the way she sometimes used to wince when she moved. And then there had been the night of that terrible cry from his parents' bedroom, a quickly smothered, nerve-tingling shriek of pain that had hooked him, dry-mouthed and sweating, out of his sleep.
No Austin – please, please no
–

Loving her, longing to protect her, it was Matthew who had urged on her the plan of escape. They had no need to remain with his father, he had pointed out, if only she would swallow her pride and stop trying to keep up appearances.

She had a small income of her own, the boy knew; enough, he had imagined, to support them both in some interesting town a long way from London, until she could find a job. And he could go to a local school until he was old enough to leave and get a job too. They'd be
all right
, he had persuaded her, as long as they were together, and free.

And getting away would be perfectly easy. All they had to do was to leave a note, one day when Austin Napier was self-satisfiedly destroying some innocent witness in court, load their luggage into her car and take off. It would have been so brilliantly simple, so exciting, so satisfactory – if only the bloody car hadn't broken down in the pouring rain somewhere out in the wilds of Suffolk …

‘You're on to a good thing, you know,' said Ben Clarke cheerily. ‘Your mother'll probably marry again, and –'

‘She already has.'

‘Quick work! What's your stepfather like?'

‘He's a slob.'

Ben thought it funny. ‘No accounting for women's tastes, is there?' he laughed. ‘My stepfather's a complete idiot … he's generous, though, I'll say that for him. Is yours?'

‘Oh yes …' This time, Matthew's disdain was genuine. ‘Loaded with money, and such an oaf that he doesn't know what to do with it.'

‘Take him for all he's got, then,' advised Ben, entirely without malice.

‘I intend to.'

‘Good for you. Is your home far away?'

Matthew hesitated, aching with homelessness.

After they had fled from Highgate, he and his mother had settled in Colchester. It was well away from his father, and yet near enough to London for him to be able to travel by train to and from his former school, which his father had insisted he must continue to attend at least until he'd done his ‘O'levels.

Matthew had liked Colchester. The house had seemed cramped, after Highgate, but the atmosphere – after Highgate – was wonderfully happy. The only snag, in the boy's view, was that it had been much too close to Ipswich, and that appalling yob Jack Goodrum …

But the Colchester days were over. His mother had been married from there in September, two days after Matthew had left to begin his first term as a boarder at Saxted College. She and Jack Goodrum had lived in Colchester until their house in Breckham Market, The Mount, was ready, and then the only home where Matthew had ever been happy had been sold.

Presumably he was now expected to consider The Mount as his home. That was where he had been obliged to spend his October half-term holiday. The house itself, Georgian with a big garden, wasn't at all bad – if only Jack Goodrum hadn't been strutting round it, trying to ingratiate himself by making a big deal about giving his stepson a choice of rooms and furniture. What Matthew had wanted, when he had organised the escape from his father's tyranny, was to provide his mother and himself with independence. Instead, it seemed that they had become dependent on another man, and one he despised.

‘My mother lives in Breckham Market now,' he said distantly.

‘Oh, that's almost on the way to Yarchester, where my father lives. Tell you what – my old man has access to me one weekend a month, lucky devil, and he'll be coming to fetch me for the day next Saturday. We can give you a lift as far as Breckham Market, if you like.'

‘No thanks.'

‘Why not? Good grief, don't say you'd rather stay here than be spoiled rotten by an apologetic step-parent!'

‘
Much
rather,' said Matthew haughtily. Bad enough to have to face the prospect of living with his mother's new husband during the Christmas holiday; but at least that was a long way ahead. ‘I can't abide my stepfather. My mother should never have had to marry a man like that, but she couldn't really afford to keep us both while I'm still at school. She only married him for his money.'

‘I expect they wanted to have sex in comfort, too,' said Ben, whose parents' marriage had foundered on extra-marital affairs conducted under his childish scrutiny. ‘At their age, they can't make it unless they've got all night together in a double bed!'

Matthew Napier's stomach contracted. Appalled by the obscenity of the suggestion, he turned in fury on his companion. ‘How
dare
you say that about my mother? How bloody dare you!' He seized the shorter boy by his mist-dampened hair and shouted into his face. ‘Apologise, do you hear? Apologise or I'll knock your stupid teeth in!'

‘S-sorry!' Ben Clarke spluttered, in pained astonishment. ‘Ouch – I'm
sorry
… I was't being rude about your mother, honest. How could I be? I've never met her.'

Matthew Napier pushed him away contemptuously. ‘And you never will. It's yobboes like you I intend to protect her from.' He wiped his hands on his blazer. ‘Bog off, Clarke,' he ordered. ‘I don't have to waste my time talking to you, just because your oik of a cousin went to my old school. Bog off, and keep out of my way in future.'

Ben shrugged, pushed his hands into his trouser pockets and jollied in another direction, kicking at conkers and whistling nonchalantly. The taller boy, breathing hard, watched him go. Then, seeing a particularly large horse chestnut on the path in front of him, he picked it up and flung it viciously, with all his strength, against the wall of the Tech Centre.

The conker rebounded on to the path and lay there, split. Matthew Napier shattered it with his heel, ground the fragments of white nut and brown casing into the damp gravel, and stalked away.

Felicity Goodrum was so happy in her new marriage and her new home that as she moved lightly about the house, she sang. Her music had neither words no recognisable tune; it was a gentle, melodious
la-la-la
, a warble of complete content.

Although she had lived for the whole of her adult life in London, she had been born and had spent her youth in the Northamptonshire countryside. Her first husband had been so much a London, Inns of Court, man that she had never anticipated returning to the country, much as she would have liked to. Coming with her new husband to settle in Suffolk was therefore a delightful bonus.

Her future life in the country would not, she realised, be the kind of life she had been brought up to know. Felicity came from an established middle-class background – her father had been chairman of the leather manufacturing company founded by his great-grandfather – and her social life before her first marriage had been active: dances, dinner parties, picnics, tennis, and frequent weekend visits to and from old school and family friends.

Her marriage to Austin Napier had soon put a stop to all that. Austin had demanded her undivided attention and had chilled off her own friends. But the network of which she had once been a part was still there, and had she been remarried to someone from her own background she would soon have fitted into the social life of whichever county they decided to live in.

Marriage to Jack Goodrum, though, had put her socially beyond the pale. Jack was, as Felicity's elderly parents had written to her in horror after they had first met him,
not one of us
. Even though, by that time, Jack's appearance and habits had considerably improved, his rustic aura made him permanently unacceptable. But Felicity, who had known this from the start of their relationship, was too happy with him to care.

Jack's money would of course have given them an entrée to a different social set. There were a good many ostentatious
nouveaux riches
living in Suffolk: land and property dealers, gravel extractors, haulage contractors, opportunists of every kind. The men were instantly recognisable by their swagger and gold jewellery, their wives (often considerably younger – their glamorous former secretaries, married after their outworn first wives had been dumped) by their structured hairstyles and Caribbean sun-tans. But Felicity was too much a product of her background to want to mix with them, and Jack was not a golfing, gambling, horse-racing man.

No; the Goodrums intended to belong to no set but their own. It was not that they were unsociable. Jack enjoyed going out on rough shoots with farming acquaintances, and playing an occasional game of snooker. And Felicity, who had been brought up to understand the importance of doing good works, had already made herself known to various Breckham Market charity organisers. She had sold poppies for the British Legion, she was on the roster for delivering Meals on Wheels to housebound old people, and she had volunteered to help man a stall at a forthcoming county bazaar in aid of the Save the Children Fund. She would have been interested, too, in doing some voluntary work for the Red Cross; but in view of the fact that the local vice president was Miss Eunice Bell, whose brother had been so tragically run over – accidentally, of course – by Jack, Felicity had thought it tactful to keep out of her orbit.