The Poisoned Crown: The Sangreal Trilogy Three. Jan Siegel
He said, still fighting his corner: ‘Nathan’s also an accomplished athlete. He’s on the school team for both rugby and cricket.’
‘No doubt,’ said the head, with a thin smile. ‘I don’t believe in favouring a boy for such reasons. This isn’t Cambridge, where they tolerate almost anything if a student can wield an oar.’ In his youth, he had been turned down for Magdalene, and still bore a grudge.
‘Father Crowley had a very high opinion of Nathan,’ Brother Colvin persisted.
A tactical error.
‘Father Crowley,’ said the head loftily, ‘was, I am sure, a naïve and trusting soul, as befits a man of the cloth. I, alas, am expected to take a more worldly view. The governors installed me as his successor since they needed someone with secular experience and the people skills that come from a life lived in the rough-and-tumble of the wider world.’ (He’s quoting from the speech he made when he first came here, Brother Colvin thought with a sinking heart.) ‘Trust me: I understand these boys. I can sense a bad apple even before I bite into it. Besides,’ he added, obscurely, ‘we have a good ethnic mix here.’ Belatedly, Brother Colvin realised this was a reference to Nathan’s dark complexion. ‘Think of Aly al-Haroun O’Neill – Charles Mokkajee – just the sort of pupils we need.’
‘If the corruption charges against Mr Mokkajee senior stick,’ Brother Colvin said rather tartly, ‘he’ll be spending a long time in a Bombay jail. Hardly the most desirable parent.’
‘Now, now,’ said the head, with a tolerant smile. ‘He’s innocent until proven guilty: we mustn’t forget that. Anyhow, I gather the case will be bogged down in the Indian legal system for some years. And by the way, it’s Mumbai, not Bombay. We don’t want to offend Charles’ ethnic sensibilities, do we?’
‘No – of course not,’ said Brother Colvin. Seething with frustration and other, still more unchristian, emotions, he took his leave.
On Thursday night Annie stood over Nathan while he took the painkillers. He tried not to be glad about it. He wasn’t yet ready to face the sea again.
In Thornyhill woods, it was raining. Water drizzled out of the sky and dripped through the trees with the peculiar persistence of English rainfall. Hazel, peering out of a latticed window, thought the weather could keep it up all night and all the next day and probably right through the following week. It was that kind of rain. Although it was barely seven, she felt as if it had been dark for hours. Evening had set in midway through the afternoon with no real daylight to precede it, just the grey gloom of overcast skies and general Novemberitis. Bartlemy had cheered her up by allowing her to abandon maths for supper – wild rabbit roasted in honey and chestnuts, creamed spinach, home-grown apple tart – and now they were discussing the shortcomings of Hamlet and why too much thinking was bad for you.
‘He was stupid, wasn’t he?’ Hazel insisted. ‘Not stupid like me, but clever-stupid, if you see what I mean.’
‘I see exactly what you mean,’ Bartlemy said. ‘He used thought as a substitute for action, and when he did act, it was in the wrong place at the wrong time – a common failing of highly-strung, over-sensitive adolescents. Of course, he was only sensitive to his own feelings, not other people’s, or he would have been less prone to commit haphazard murders. As it was, the native hue of resolution, got sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.’
‘That’s what I said,’ Hazel averred.
‘However,’ Bartlemy resumed, ‘I didn’t know you were stupid. This is hardly a stupid conversation.’
‘My teachers say I am,’ Hazel mumbled, caught off guard. ‘Anyway, my mum’s not that smart – nor’s my dad. To be clever, you have to have clever genes. That’s right, isn’t it?’
‘Don’t underrate your mother. Or your father, for that matter. Everyone has brains. The question is whether they choose to use them. How will you choose?’ Hazel was silent, briefly nonplussed. ‘Pleading bad genes is a very poor excuse for unintelligence,’ Bartlemy concluded.
That was the point when she wandered over to the window, evading a response, staring darkly into the dark.
Neither of them saw the figure on the road nearby: little could be distinguished through the rain curtain and the November gloom. Only Hoover lifted his head, cocking an ear at the world beyond the manor walls.
The man on the road wore jeans that flapped wetly round his calves and a heavy-duty sheepskin jacket without a hood. Raindrops trickled down his hair inside his turned-up collar. His face was invisible in the dark but if it hadn’t been a passer-by would have seen lean, tight features clenched into a lean tightness of expression, grimmer than the grim evening – grim with determination, or discomfort, or something of both. But there were no passers-by. The road was empty and almost as grim as the man.
He had left his car more than a mile back, close to the Chizzledown turning, when the slow puncture became too hazardous for driving. No one would want to change a wheel on such a night, but he was a chief inspector in the CID, on more or less official business: he could have rung a subordinate to pick him up, or called the AA, or a local garage whose owner owed him a favour after he had prevented a robbery there. Instead, he chose to walk through the woods, wet and growing wetter, wearing his grimness like a mask under the water-trickle from his hair.
It wasn’t even the best route for him to take, on foot or by car, but he often drove that way, though this was the first time in over a year he had found a reason to stop. There was no light on the road and from time to time he stepped in a puddle, cursing under his breath as the water leaked into his shoes. The only sounds were the squelches of his own footfalls, the hiss of the occasional oath and the murmur of the rain. He didn’t know what made him turn round – instinct perhaps, a sixth sense developed over years of seeing life from the dark side. He could make out little in the murk but he had an impression of movement along the verge, a rustle beyond the rain – the susurration of bending grasses, the shifting of a leaf. And then, light but unmistakable, the scurrying of many feet – small feet or paws, running over the wet tarmac. An animal, or more than one: nothing human. Nothing dangerous. In an English wood at night, the only danger would be human. There were no panthers escaped from zoos, no wolves left over from ancient times – he didn’t believe in such stories. No animal could threaten him …
He was not a nervous type but all his nerves tensed: Fear came out of the dark towards him. Fear without a name, without a shape, beyond reason or thought.
Fear with a hundred pattering feet, just out of rhythm with the rain …
He knew it was illogical, but instinct took over. He turned and ran. Ahead, he saw the path through the trees, the gleam of a lighted window. He slipped in the wet and almost fell, lurching forward. Inside the house a dog barked once, sharp and imperative. The front door opened.
The man stumbled through the gap into Bartlemy’s entrance hall.
‘Chief Inspector Pobjoy,’ Bartlemy said. ‘What a pleasant surprise.’
In the living room he found himself seated by the fire, sipping some dark potent drink that was both sweet and spicy. Hazel surveyed him rather sullenly; after all, he had once treated her as a suspect in a crime. He said: ‘Hello,’ and, on a note of faint surprise, ‘you’ve grown up.’ He wondered if he should congratulate her on becoming a young lady, but decided she didn’t look like an eager aspirant to young-ladyhood, and he would do better to keep quiet. In any case, the Fear had shaken him – the violent, inexplicable Fear reaching out of the night to seize him. It wasn’t even as if it was very late.
Bartlemy said: ‘There’s some apple tart left,’ and threw Hazel an admonitory look when she muttered something about waste.
The apple tart was hot, blobbed with clotted cream. If Eve had prepared such a tart, the gods would have forgiven her the theft of the fruit.
Between mouthfuls, Pobjoy said: ‘I had a puncture.’
‘I’m