The Lying Tongue (12 page)

He roused himself as if suddenly waking from a dream. “Sorry. This is far too much. You don’t need to know all this. I don’t know why I’m telling you. All I meant to say was that I know what it’s like to be in your situation.”

It was the first time I had heard Crace say anything in detail about his own personal life. And I made sure to memorize every single word.

I wanted to know more. I steeled myself to ask a question. “Did you feel attracted to any other members of staff, besides her, besides this Ruth?”

“I did feel drawn to another, but he… they… were not members of the faculty,” he said.

“Someone who worked in the village? Someone you met outside the school?”

The question was too much for Crace. It was as if the conversation we had been having had never taken place.

“I thought I told you never to probe into my life, my personal life. That was one of the areas we went over and over in the interview, and you said that you would abide by my rules—”

I had to interrupt him, to make him see sense. “But, Gordon, it was of your bidding. I didn’t ask you to talk about the past. You initiated it, don’t you remember? You said it might help me…with my dilemma…my attraction to other boys.”

I stared hard at him. His lips worked silently, as if trying to form ghost words, phrases and expressions he would have used if he had continued in his attack on me.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to raise my voice,” I said. “It’s just that you started it all off. Talking, I mean.”

He frowned and his eyelids flickered. He concentrated so hard that it looked as though he was trying to untangle a piece of memory tape that had knotted itself inside his head.

“Oh, yes, so it was. How silly of me.”

“Obviously I wouldn’t have asked you anything, but I thought you wanted me to. I thought you wanted to help me…help me understand.”

Surely there was no harm in trying. After all, a little self-pity might elicit some more information.

“You’re right. You’re perfectly right,” Crace said. “Perhaps it’s time I got it off my chest. What is there to be afraid of?”

He paused.

“I’m not sure where to start.”

The lines from his face seemed to melt away and he looked, for a moment, like a lost little boy.

“What about at the school?” I suggested. “Your time there?”

“Ah, yes, the school—Winterborne Abbey, a truly splendid place. Really quite magical. Surrounded by woods, in a hidden valley. Named after the medieval abbey next to it, now used as the school chapel. In fact, the abbey is full of fine sculpture and fascinating pieces, relics and such like.”

He was beginning to waffle. But I felt that I couldn’t interrupt him. Anything he said was material.

“You know that for years Winterborne had been a private house. But before then a village once stood on the land. A proper settlement, you know, with three public houses, a high street, common land. But then around 1780, this chap—something of an upstart, I should imagine—bought the land, decided he didn’t like the view or the smell or the people and cleared it all out. He shifted the village a mile or so away and had it rebuilt for his estate workers. Then he employed Capability Brown to landscape the valley and had a house built for himself. Quite an achievement, I suppose.”

“So you had a happy time there?”

“Oh yes, the boys were a delight to teach. So full of curiosity, eager to learn, a great sense of intellectual freedom about them. They sucked up information like little sponges, the dear things.”

“You must have had your favorites.”

“You’re right there, Adam. I did, yes.”

“So you say you felt similar to me? Didn’t your relationship with the other teacher—the woman—work out?”

“No, it didn’t, for one reason or another. And then I fell in love.” As he said this the muscles in his face seemed to go into a kind of spasm. “Oh, for God’s sake, man, spit it out,” he said to himself. “It’s only Adam, that’s all. He wouldn’t say anything, would you Adam?”

He turned to look at me. “I fell in love…with a pupil, with one of my boys…his name was Chris—Christopher Davidson. He was not one of the younger boys, so please don’t think I’m like that.”

“What did he look like?”

Crace narrowed his eyes as if by doing so he could conjure forth an image of the boy.

“Blond hair, a beautiful color, like ripened corn.”

“How did you meet? I mean, how did you, you know—”

“Become intimate?”

“Yes.”

“He was a scholarship boy, only there because his father got a job as the school’s organist. Parents didn’t have a bean. But he had a natural aptitude for poetry and language, almost an instinctive ability to read underneath the words, if you know what I mean. I recommended that he read English and try for either Oxford or Cambridge, and we met up after school for regular tutorials. His parents did not have any books in the house and yet they produced this angel of a son.”

“So what happened?”

“I still find this terribly difficult to talk about, Adam. I’m not sure—”

“Look, I find what you are saying really helpful to me. It may even—”

“I’ll try, but I’m just warning you—”

“Don’t worry. It might even help you to—”

“Perhaps you’re right.”

He took another deep breath.

“We spent more and more time together—it was totally above board. I was intrigued by him, and I suppose he must have looked up to me. Dreadful thing happened with his father, lost him, poor thing.”

“And then?”

“Surely, Adam, you’ve got the gist of it, haven’t you? For God’s sake, boy, what do you want? Blood? The next thing I know, you’ll be getting a tape recorder out or taking a sworn statement from me.”

Do not blush, I told myself. Don’t laugh awkwardly. Just look as normal as possible.

“What happened then is that we fell in love. Okay? That’s what happened, Adam. We left the school soon after Chris turned eighteen. We moved to London, and Chris enrolled in an English literature course. But, encouraged by me, the stupid fool I was, I told him to drop out of university after only one term. He had had amazing A-level results and showed a lot of potential, but after a great deal of thought, I believed that his talent was such that he should really start creating something of his own. Looking back, I’m sure I was jealous of his youth, his beauty. I was afraid that if he stayed on at university, he might meet someone of his own age.

“So I kept him. Kept him with me where I could see him. Both of us wrote, or at least tried to write, every day. He became more and more frustrated. He started drinking—both of us did. A case of a little drink to put us in the mood for writing—you know, accessing the subconscious and all that bollocks. A whiskey and soda after breakfast to help harness the muse—what utter crap! I tried to help; I went over his work, but it seemed as though he didn’t have…well, he didn’t have much to say. Of course, he didn’t have anything to say. He had barely begun to live.”

Crace snorted with self-hatred. “What was I thinking of? Chris, my beautiful boy. I should have let him go. I should have forced him from me. That life was no good for him, and it was obvious he was unhappy. I wouldn’t let him out of the house. I wanted him there, you see, with me. Do you understand?”

As he looked at me, his eyes pleading with me to say something, I almost felt sorry for him. I filed the words away in my head, ready to transcribe them as soon as I got to my room. My notebook was filling up gradually as I gathered the raw material for my book. Crace in his own words, his own pitiful, miserable, sordid little words.

After this outburst, Crace said no more. His head drooped forward onto his chest and he resumed that position of fatigued defeat I had seen him adopt so many times before. It was as if all the life had been sucked out of him, his corporeal body reduced to a shell. I stood up to leave the room, and he waved me away with a skinny hand.

In my room I took out my notebook from my rucksack, which I had stashed away out of sight under my bed, and wrote down our conversation as quickly, but as accurately, as possible. Then I fished out the letter from my pocket and tore open the envelope. It was written in the same scrappy hand as before. The paper was thin and cheap, and black Biro smudges covered the page like squashed flies. A dirty fingerprint marked the top right-hand corner.

I was beginning to see the pieces fall into place. I now knew that Chris was much more than Crace’s “tenant.” And the implication from this shabby blackmail attempt was that there was something suspicious about the way he had died. No wonder Crace felt so damned guilty. No wonder he couldn’t write.

I was certain I wasn’t going to find the answers by simply asking Crace. He had already told me much more than he had ever wanted to say. If I pushed him any harder, even if I did use the excuse that his words helped me cope with my sexual confusion, I doubt I would get much further with him. I suppose his reticence on the subject spoke for itself; if there were something suspicious about how Chris had died, Crace wouldn’t want to talk about it, would he?

A phone call to Mrs. Shaw—that was the obvious first step.

I shoved the letter in my pocket, found my phone card in my wallet—I didn’t want to use my mobile in case Mrs. Shaw kept a note of my number—and walked back down the portego. I peeked into the drawing room; Crace stared ahead in an unseeing daze, blind to the world.

“I’m just going to pop out to get a bottle of wine for supper,” I said. “I think both of us could do with a drink.”

Crace nodded. “Very well.” His voice sounded distant, sad, as if talking about the past had infected the present. “Don’t be long now.”

As soon as I was outside, I took out the letter and read it once more. I was filled with excitement. This latest twist was a biographer’s dream. Subject as potential murderer—I couldn’t get better than that. I walked down the calle and through the meandering streets imagining my future. Jake had filled me in on the often ridiculous amounts of money paid by some British newspapers for serialization rights of certain newsworthy books. How much would they pay me? More than enough money to buy time so I could then get down and write the novel. I would make my name, perhaps even do a deal with a publisher for two books, first a biography and then my novel. That would show my father. That would show all those people back home who never had any trust in me, Eliza and Kirby. Better revenge than a mere broken arm.

I stopped at a phone outside a bar and dialed the number. There was a slight delay before a connection was made and then it seemed to ring forever. I was on the point of replacing the receiver when I heard a crackle on the line.

“Hello?” The voice was that of a man’s, old and rasping.

“Can I speak to Mrs. Shaw, please?”

The man cleared his throat. “There’s no Mrs. Shaw here,” he snapped.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “Is this 01258 893489?”

“Who’s speaking?”

“It’s Adam Woods. Mrs. Shaw wrote me a letter—about the writer Gordon Crace? She said that I should telephone this number.”

“Oh, I see,” The man’s voice suddenly took on an ingratiating, weaselly tone. “Yes, of course, of course, Mr. Woods. Very nice of you to call.”

“Can I speak to Mrs. Shaw, please?”

“I’m afraid you can’t. I’m afraid Mrs. Shaw is no longer with us,” he said.

I was beginning to have my suspicions that the whole thing was a setup, that it was all some kind of hoax. What was going on?

“It was me who wrote you that letter. I’m, or I was, the nearest thing to what you might say was Chris’s stepfather. Mrs. Shaw—Maureen—died in February. Cancer ate her away. Nothing but skin and bone at the end. She got so weak—”