Child's Play (26 page)

Jack
had placed himself in the front row, and sat with his legs crossed, arms folded and his chin sunk in his chest, but the expression on his face remained all too visible. McKenna looked over his head, but it proved much harder to ignore the implication of negligence in what he had said. That nagged persistently at the back of his mind, threatening to distract him even further.

‘
Dr Roberts has now confirmed that Sukie’s death was a homicide,’ he began, ‘and although we can’t exclude anyone at this stage, she was probably killed by one of her fellow pupils. How, then, can we distinguish that person from the rest? The paper you received this morning presents a series of factors, antecedents and warning signals that help to build a profile of the potentially murderous child, who usually bears a very close resemblance to the murderous adult. The difference lies in the fact that we don’t
expect
children to kill and we therefore tend always to be in denial.’

Glancing
quickly at the key points he extracted from the paper, he went on, ‘One important factor is a family background inhabited by violence, alcoholism, mental illness and characterised by poor parenting and serious emotional deprivation. Material poverty also features very frequently. Children take their lead and learn how to behave from the adults within their orbit, and although this is not the place for a debate on nature versus nurture, it would be a rare child who did not react and respond to such an environment. The need for personal and psychological survival forces the development of coping strategies, which may manifest themselves in various ways: truancy, substance abuse, violent mood swings, aggression, extreme timidity, perpetual conflict with those around them, coldness, absence of empathy and social responsibility, intellectual deterioration, confusion, depression, apathy, unnatural secretiveness, habitual dishonesty and lethargy. At a certain point, disentangling coping from copying becomes impossible, for the onlooker and for the child, who is effectively trapped in a profound and unreachable state of complete disaffection where life’s normal transactions mean nothing. That is when the child turns into a ticking bomb.’

He
waited for questions, but none was forthcoming; his audience seemed both bemused and close to exhaustion. Fighting with his own fatigue of the spirit, he said, ‘The Hermitage girls have a natural family and a school family, of which the latter probably exerts the greater influence on the majority. This school family appears to border on the classically dysfunctional. Our presence here inevitably adds to existing stresses, but we’re seeing them at their worst because their worst exists and is, I suspect, barely below the surface at the best of times. So the effect of the school’s ethos, functioning and personalities is crucial to our profiling process. Unfortunately for that process, many of the girls will be at least a reasonably good fit, partly because of the law of averages, partly because the school has made them so. I hesitate to say we should be on the lookout for someone who could be described as a natural-born killer — aside from the difficulty of recognising such a person, murder is usually motivated by mundane, rather than esoteric, considerations: loss or gain, love or hate, revenge—’

At
that moment, every telephone in the room began to ring. McKenna picked up the one on the table beside him, to hear Freya, her voice very subdued, saying, ‘Would you come to the school immediately? There’s been an incident.’

20

She
was waiting for him in the lobby. ‘Please come upstairs.’ There was no ambiguous invitation in her manner, only undisguised anxiety.

‘
What’s happened?’ He followed her into the lift.

Imogen
lashed out with her stick at Nancy. She almost brained her.’ Freya stared at him unblinkingly. ‘Is that what happened to Sukie?’

The
lift whined jerkily upwards. ‘You know I can’t tell you.’

Without
warning, her knees buckled and she fell against him. ‘Dear God!’ she moaned. ‘It
was
Imogen!’

His
hands fluttered about her shoulders and, despite himself, settled there. She was trembling from head to foot. Then the lift jolted to a stop and they heard Matron, shouting hysterically, in the adjoining room.

Freya
lifted her head to look into his eyes. ‘How great
is
your need, I wonder?’ she murmured, her lips quivering. Then, she broke away, dragged open the lift door and stepped into the corridor.

For
long moments he remained in the lift, the rational and the physical at total war, before he was able to pull himself together. When he walked into Imogen’s room, he found a different kind of battle in progress.

She
was threshing about on the bed, the shoeless artificial leg thumping the quilt, while Matron, red in the face and puffing furiously, tried to hold her down. The silver-topped stick lay on the floor. When she noticed McKenna at the door, half-hidden behind Freya, she stopped struggling, but her eyes were alight with rage.

Freya
’s voice shook. ‘Why on earth did you hit her?’

‘
Because she’s a bloody bitch!’ Imogen seethed. She fought free of Matron’s weakening hold to drag herself upright, then stood beside the bed, swaying alarmingly. Her body contorted itself grotesquely when she bent to retrieve her stick.

‘
Don’t touch it!’ McKenna warned.

She
twisted her head to look at him. ‘Why not?’

‘
You know why.’

Falteringly,
she straightened up, still swaying. ‘I didn’t kill Sukie. How could I?’ The anguish in her voice and expression betrayed her completely.

He
glanced around the room. ‘Where are your crutches?’

Freya
touched his arm. ‘Must you? She needs
some
support.’

‘
The hospital will lend us replacements.’ Hoping Matron would take the hint, he added, ‘Perhaps Matron would ask Inspector Tuttle to arrange it.’ He took a pair of surgical gloves from the inside pocket of his jacket, snapped them over his hands and picked up the stick. ‘The crutches, please,’ he said to Imogen.

‘
They’re under the bed.’ As he knelt down, she watched intently, and when he rose again, she said, ‘You won’t find any blood. She saw it coming and dodged.’ She was still swaying and he began to feel dizzy, then a little nauseous. ‘Never mind, eh?’ She leered fiendishly. ‘There’s always the next time.’

Holding
her face in her hands, Matron rocked back and forth, looking as if she had been literally crushed by events. ‘Dear God!’ she lamented, echoing Freya. ‘
Dear
God!’ The bedsprings screeched beneath her.

He
leaned the stick and crutches against the wall, put his hands under her elbows and dragged her off the bed. Harrying her from the room, he pushed her into the lift, again instructing her to go straight to Jack.

‘
What shall I do then?’ she wailed, grasping the lift gates to stop them closing.

‘
Whatever you would normally do at this time of the day,’ he said curtly.

She
seemed to collapse with relief. Her bosom drooped over the wide elastic belt, her jowls relaxed and her mouth fell open, and his last view of her before the lift gates closed was of the swags of tartar staining her lower teeth.

As
he stood in the corridor, analysing his own contribution to the spiralling tension within the school, he heard Imogen’s sharp, well-bred voice telling Freya that she wanted to be left alone.

Freya
demurred. ‘What if Nancy comes back?’

‘
I’ll lock myself in,’ Imogen snapped.

When
he moved the few paces to her door, he found she was no longer swaying but clutching the back of a chair for support. ‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ he said. ‘I’ll make sure Nancy keeps her distance, although I’d very much like to know what provoked you.’

‘
And whatever your differences with anyone,’ Freya added, ‘violence is not the solution.’

Imogen glared at them.
‘I lost it! OK?’ She inched around the chair and sat down, muttering something unintelligible.

*

The reptilian Nancy was in the sixth-form common room, entertaining a large audience with the lurid details of her encounter. Charlotte, bearing an even greater resemblance to her deceased role model, crouched at her side, clutching her hands.

His
eyes like flints, McKenna stared at them. ‘If any of you goes within twenty feet of Imogen Oliver you’ll regret it. Do I make myself clear?’

Haughtily,
Charlotte threw back her head, eyes flashing. ‘Why haven’t you arrested her?’ When he made no response, her pencilled eyebrows disappeared under her blonde fringe. ‘Are you actually letting that sick freak get away with what she did? Nancy could have been killed!’

When
Janet described Charlotte’s utterances as ‘incontinent’, she had been right, he thought, sorely tempted to take Imogen’s lead and set about her with the stick.

Then
Nancy sniggered. ‘Yeah, like Sukie,’ she remarked. ‘D’you think he’s made the connection yet?’ she asked conversationally. She looked him over, deliberately and insolently, then her gaze came to rest on the stick and crutches in his hand. ‘Well, goodness me, as Matron might say. Perhaps he isn’t just a thick-headed Irish plod after all.’

When
McKenna reached the lobby, he found Jack there and he felt as if he had walked blindly into another ambush.

‘
What the
hell’s
going on?’ Jack demanded. ‘Matron came staggering into the MIR, looking all set for a heart attack and squawking fit to bust about Imogen.’ Then he noticed McKenna’s freight. ‘What are you doing with those?’

‘
What does it look like?’ McKenna snarled.

Jack
bit back the riposte he was about to make. ‘I gathered from Matron that Imogen took a swipe at Nancy — with her stick — and you want us to borrow a stick and crutches from the hospital.’

‘
Yes.’

‘
Why?’

‘
Why d’you bloody think?’ McKenna marched out on to the forecourt, strode over to his car and, opening the boot one-handed, took out three large evidence bags.

After
a moment Jack followed. He watched him fill and seal each bag, then said, ‘Imogen might have tried to clobber Nancy, but there’s a world of difference between bashing the school bitch in the heat of the moment and the cold-blooded murder of your one-time dearest friend.’

In
the act of stowing the bags in the boot, McKenna rounded on him. ‘Not an hour ago you said Imogen’s got “motives by the bucketload”.’

‘
And
you
,’ Jack reminded him, holding on to his temper with the greatest difficulty, ‘were sure she isn’t a killer.’

McKenna
tore off his surgical gloves, threw them into the boot and slammed down the lid. ‘I
had
to take her stick and crutches. I had no choice.’ Bleakly he added, ‘Anyway, it’s done now. It’s too late to backtrack.’

‘
Yes, it is, isn’t it?’ Jack stared at him. He felt furious, confused and sickeningly afraid for Imogen. ‘By now,’ he said, ‘it’ll be all over the school not only that Sukie was murdered, but that Imogen did it and they’ll be waiting with bated breath for the big finale, when we clap her in irons and chuck her in the back of a Black Maria. Maybe, though, you should arrest her now,’ he went on, his voice steely, ‘while she’s still relatively in one piece. You’ve left her at the mercy of a bunch of pack animals and I don’t rate her chances overmuch.’

‘
I’ve already warned Nancy and her hangers-on to keep away from her and I intend to place a guard outside her room.’ Deliberately McKenna avoided Jack’s eyes. ‘While I attend to that,’ he went on coldly, ‘perhaps you’d finish the briefing. You know what to say.’

‘
I’ve said it. I discussed the effects of persistent and vicious bullying in a place where kids are shut up with the bullies for months on end. Then I told most of them to go off duty. Everyone’s had enough for one day — more than enough, in fact.’

‘
Have you sent someone to the hospital?’

‘
Not yet.’

McKenna
opened the car boot once more, removed the three evidence bags and thrust them at Jack. ‘When you do, tell them to take these to the pathology lab.’ He closed the boot and strode off without a backward glance.

Jack
stayed where he was long after McKenna had been swallowed up by the darkness of the lobby. Close to despairing of the man, he looked heavenwards, where the sky had cleared to a washed-out blue after that summer downpour. The forecourt and drive were already drying into a patchwork of light and dark as the water soaked away to the parched soil beneath, although the drainpipes gurgled still and raindrops slid persistently from the trees, plopping to the ground or ballooning on the well-waxed bodywork of McKenna’s Jaguar.

Miss
Attwill suddenly came into view, trudging head down from the direction of the stables. Her clothes looked sodden and her paddock boots were caked in mud. She stopped by the door to kick off the boots, then she too disappeared. He was about to turn away when a movement caught his attention and he looked up to see Daisy at the dormitory window. She was staring at him fixedly.