Hazard Night, page 11
My mouth went very dry. ‘Oh.’
‘Oh,’ Bette mimicked savagely. ‘Hurts, doesn’t it? You thought the two of you were friends and in fact he was playing you the whole time. Sniggering behind your back. Laughing at you, betraying me.’
‘I don’t know what he was thinking,’ I said weakly. She was right: it did hurt. Like a punch to the gut. With a knuckle-duster.
‘He was thinking with his dick. All that crap he spouted about respecting me too much to pressure me into anything … my God. What a fool I’ve been.’
‘I’m sorry—’
‘So you fucking should be. I guess you were too busy drooling over my boyfriend to remember where your loyalties lie.’
‘I never … drooled.’ I was struggling to keep my calm. I’m not used to rows, maybe because I’m not used to friendship. I couldn’t even tell if Bette’s reaction was extreme or not.
‘Bullshit. You were always hoping the two of us would implode, weren’t you? I bet you’re loving this. Little Miss Nobody’s chance to shine. So now you can go slithering off to that bastard, offer him a shoulder to cry—’
‘Hello?’
We both froze. It was Pa. ‘Oh dear,’ he said mildly. ‘I seem to be interrupting something.’ He rubbed his beard thoughtfully, then turned to Bette. ‘Perhaps you’d like a cup of tea? A glass of water?’
Bette ignored him. She thrust her head towards me. Her eyes were burning slits, her voice a furious rasp. ‘Don’t ever talk to me, don’t so much as look at me again. If you see me coming, you’d better turn and walk away. Fast.’
The door slammed behind her.
The silence afterwards rang in my ears. After a while, Pa put his hand on my shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, my dear. But perhaps it’s for the best, hm?’
He went into the kitchen and brought me a glass of water. ‘Here, it’s a sunny day. You need to keep hydrated.’ He sighed and said, almost as if to himself, ‘Really, it’s beginning to seem as if the old guard were right. Admitting girls into the school was a mistake.’
I hurled the water glass across the room. It exploded into shards against the door. Then I left.
I went to my bench. I walked quickly, mechanically, barely looking where I was going. There was a weird sort of low keening sound, and it took a while for me to realise it was coming from me. I came to a halt and clenched every muscle as hard as I could. Get a grip of yourself.
It was still warm, still sunny, still preternaturally quiet. Rain was due to come in overnight, but there was no hint of cloud. It would have been fitting, perhaps, if there’d been a menacing pressure in the air or a bank of darkness broiling at the horizon. But there wasn’t. It was just a lovely June day.
I reached the Lavender Walk only to find that Margaret Mumford was already occupied. Even worse, it was Lindsey Bates who was in possession of it, her bare legs slung over the armrest and a jacket rolled up at the other end to make a cushion. She was smoking and sunning herself, apparently without a care in the world. An apple core and an empty crisp packet lay on the ground beside her.
I looked around. The path was deserted: most people would be in class. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’
‘Nice to see you too, Alice. How’re the mocks going? History this morning, wasn’t it?’
She was trying to spook me, and it worked. I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of letting her see it, though.
‘History was fine, thanks. How’s the security business?’
She blew a languid plume of smoke in my direction. ‘Oh, the usual. Cracking heads, breaking hearts.’
I was used to this breezy confidence in Cleeve boys, not townie girls. And in a different girl, I might even have admired it. Her breasts strained against the thin cotton of her T-shirt. I stared at her chipped tooth, her spidery eyelashes, the pencil-thin arc of her over-plucked brows. And yet, lounging on that bench, Lindsey didn’t look out of place. She somehow managed to look as if she owned it, and the rest of Cleeve too.
‘Don’t get too comfy,’ I told her. ‘Henry’s girlfriend knows about the two of you and she’s raging.’
‘Is that a fact.’ Another lazy drag on the cigarette.
‘I’d steer clear if I were you. She’s got a lot of friends here.’
I knew how pathetic I sounded even before Lindsey laughed.
‘I got friends too. But what about you, Alice? They’re not as nice as they look, your Cleeve boys.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘And right here’s a case in point.’
I turned round. Rupert von Aldstine was strolling along the path, with the happy ease of a man with an unconditional offer to study Geography at Durham and a summer full of clubbing and yachting ahead.
Rupert was reckoned to be one of the best-looking boys in school but I’d never seen the appeal. He was ruddy and muscular, with white eyelashes and an overgrown thatch of baby-blond hair. Today, I thought he looked particularly unappealing, in baggy worn-down mustard cords and a grey hoodie, his bucket hat worn at a jaunty angle.
He looked straight through me but grinned at Lindsey. ‘Greetings, oik. What are you doing up at the big house? Shouldn’t you get out of here before they release the hounds?’
‘The only dirty dog around here is you, Rupes.’
‘Woof! Woof!’ He laughed delightedly. ‘Watch out for this one, Fishface.’ It had been so long since anybody’d called me this it took a moment to realise he was talking to me. ‘She’ll have the coat off your back if you as much as turn it for a minute.’
Off he sauntered. I hadn’t understood any of their exchange but, like Henry, Rupert seemed to know Lindsey surprisingly well.
Lindsey watched him go thoughtfully. ‘Never bet against the house, Alice. First rule of the game.’ Then she went to stub out her cigarette on the wrought-iron arm of the bench.
I put out my hand to stop her. ‘Don’t do that.’
‘Why should you care?’
Why should I indeed? The cigarette wouldn’t hurt the metal. All the same, the gesture infuriated me. ‘It’s disrespectful.’
She looked at me as if I was mad. ‘To a bench? It’s not your private property.’
‘The bench is a memorial, though.’ Which I’ve adopted for my mother, I added silently in my head.
‘Yeah, I’m aware.’ Lindsey flicked the carved lettering on the back. ‘That’s my cousin Peggy. So if anyone’s got dibs on this thing, it’s me.’
The wood was aged and weathered; the bench must be close to twenty years old. I didn’t hide my scepticism. ‘Why is there a memorial to your cousin at Cleeve?’
‘My auntie worked here back in the day. I s’pose she or the people she worked with organised it.’ Lindsey touched the name again, this time more gently. ‘It was a suicide, poor kid. I never knew the girl, and my auntie’s passed and all. But this here bench is a good place for thinking.’
‘Also smoking and littering, apparently.’
‘Hm.’ Lindsey looked at me knowingly. ‘Bugs you, don’t it, that us Bateses have a stake in this place, just the same as your Ruperts or your Henrys or your God-bothering dad?’
I felt a twinge of guilt. ‘I’m sorry about your cousin. And you’re right – it’s a nice spot for a memorial.’
‘No better place to survey the crime scene.’
I was startled. ‘What?’
‘Never mind. I’m only messing with you.’ The Clock Tower bell struck four, and Lindsey swung her legs off the bench. She kicked the apple core into a flower bed. ‘Well, I’d best be off. Don’t want to be late for my appointment.’
An appointment at Cleeve? With who?
She put on a pair of dark glasses, fluffed out her hair and smiled her sleepy smile. ‘Tell Henry I said hi.’
It was Hazard Night that night. The last one in the long history of Cleeve, though of course nobody knew it at the time. The event took its name from an apocryphal saying by a nineteenth-century headmaster, who warned his boys not to be ‘blind to the hazards of too much liberty’. Revelries began, as they always did, at 5 p.m., with the sixth formers’ game of Fox and Hounds.
First, they drew the hound’s name out of a hat. Then the foxes – i.e. everyone else – tucked coloured scarfs into the backs of their waistbands to make tails and ran off to hide themselves around the campus. The hound went running after them; as soon as he or she tagged a fox, the fox discarded their tail and became a hound. The last fox standing was the winner.
Playing was a privilege of the upper and lower sixth, but Bette had said I should join in too this year – ‘You’re practically one of us.’ No chance of that now. I’d always secretly thought it looked fun, though I used to roll my eyes and huff if someone pushed me out of the way as part of the chase or – as on more than one occasion – tried to use me as a human shield.
The game was timed to end when senior supper was served. The boarding-house day ended, as it always did, with cocoa followed by quiet time. Then between ten and midnight the back doors were unlocked, and the soon-to-be leavers were let loose.
I spent the last Hazard Night just as I had spent the sixteen ones before: at home alone with the curtains drawn. I had spent most of the afternoon in my bedroom, too, lying in the semi-darkness, listening to the distant laughter and howls and barks from the hounds. Henry was probably running about and baying at the shadows without a care in the world. Laughing at both of us, like Bette said.
As night fell, I became increasingly jumpy. A couple of times in the past, our windows were egged. Another year a crucifix with a blow-up sex doll was planted outside the Chapel. Mostly, though, Pa and I were left alone. Each graduating year competed for the biggest and best prank, but they were pretty much all variations on the same theme. Classrooms covered in tin foil or filled with balloons. Hallways carpeted in bubble wrap. The rugby pitch stuck all over with plastic forks … It was a major pain in the arse for the staff who had to clear all of it up in the morning, even though the Facilities department always brought in reinforcements. But at school reunions, years later, all the old buffers would tear up with pride at what comic geniuses they’d been. Even the ones who’d had a shit time at school, who never got picked for any teams or who were themselves pranked relentlessly … even they used to raise a chuckle.
There were still rules, of course. The first – on pain of expulsion – was that no student who wasn’t a school leaver was allowed to participate. The second was that all eligible students had to be back in their boarding houses and checked off by their housemaster by midnight. The final rule was three-fold: no booze, no sex, no criminal damage. If any of this was detected, or even suspected, then the leavers’ commemoration service and ball would be cancelled. This had only happened twice in my seventeen years: back in 1986, when someone threw a bottle of Bollinger through a Mansion window, and again in 1991, when two boys from Miles House were fifteen minutes late for check-in. Harsh, everyone agreed, but fair.
So, yeah, it was just another night of innocent fun.
Until they found the body.
EVE
The rain came in at about one in the morning, a good hour after the Hazard Night-ers were safely back in their dorms, though none were asleep. While the rest of the boarding houses snored, the soon-to-be leavers sprawled on the beds of their confederates and murmured together, first in torch light and then in the pale glow of dawn. Their exhilaration was mingled with solemnity, because this night together would be their last. True, they would spend one more night on campus, after the leavers’ ball, but the rest of the school would be gone by then, along with most of the rites and sacraments that had bound them to the place, and each other, over the last seven years. And so they sprawled on their beds together, reminiscing like old men, laughing like children, as the warm summer rain drummed against the glass.
Eve also lay sleepless, listening to the rain. She had wanted to be alone – craved it – but she had also been sure that Peter would come knocking on the door, admitting his sins. It had been three days since their quarrel and he was still sleeping in the guest bedroom.
No doubt their estrangement was exacerbated by Hazard Night. It was always a testing event for housemasters, and Peter was more than usually on edge during the run-up to this one. Although some staff treated the event with fond tolerance, Peter found it less amusing than he used to. Eve suspected he was torn between his loyalty to the school’s traditions and eccentricities and his own increasingly risk-averse nature. Then there was the fact that this year’s leavers had several veteran troublemakers among them. And so Peter and his colleagues were bracing themselves for an especial onslaught – students with a wild-child reputation always did their utmost to live up to it on Hazard Night, in the hope of pulling off a stunt that that would go down in the Cleeve annals of greatness.
(And so it proved. The crowning glory of the night was a recreation of Stonehenge, constructed out of benches on the Lawn, with Headmaster Parish’s beloved Triumph parked in the middle. It would have been hailed as an epoch-defining prank had it not, of course, been for the murder.)
As yet ignorant of all of this, Eve lay in bed and tossed and turned and quietly seethed, not sure who she was most angry with: her husband, her friend or herself.
Eve and Fen had watched the game of Fox and Hounds from the bell-room of the Clock Tower. Eve had done everything by the book, arranging for someone from the Facilities team to let them in and signing some sort of health and safety form. She had brought ear-plugs, for when the mechanised bell rang, and bottled water, but no booze. Although the embrasures were covered in wire netting, presumably to stop any would-be Lady Lilians from jumping out, the view was undeniably impressive. Eve felt her spirits lift. Up here, high in the warm blue air, she and Fen could gain a much-needed sense of perspective. Everything was simpler when seen from a distance.
Certainly, from this God-like new vantage-point, it was possible to view Cleeve as Peter did: as its own small harmonious world, thriving and thrumming with purpose. A green and pleasant land, where everything was in its rightful place and everyone was doing his or her rightful best.
The First Lady had described this ecosystem as fragile. Unsafe, even. As the evening light grew low and honeyed and the shadow of ancient trees washed along the grass, Mrs Parish’s words seemed even more absurd. Love it or hate it, Cleeve was impregnable. Eve watched the foxes and hounds dash about below, letting out whoops of triumph or dismay, yapping and bellowing as they darted between shelters or sprang after prey, and the ridiculousness of the game didn’t annoy her like it had before. After all, despite the privilege and the posturing, they were just kids, and most of them fairly ordinary ones at that. Just overgrown, excitable kids, running about in the sun.
Fen, however, seemed in a less charitable frame of mind. She’d come late, saying she’d had someone to see, but without sharing further details. Eve had half-expected her to complain about the lack of alcohol or to suggest they sabotage the clockwork. Instead, Fen looked out at the view with unseeing eyes and silently picked at a patch of loose mortar in the brickwork. Perhaps she was merely tired. She’d mentioned that her insomnia was back. But the fidgeting was new.
‘Are you nervous?’ Eve asked.
Fen drew back. ‘Why would you say that?’
‘Because of Hazard Night. In theory, everyone’s a target. How do you think the Classics department will fare?’
Eve worried Gabriel Easton might come off badly. Peter hadn’t ever suffered anything worse than butter on a doorhandle, but less popular gogs didn’t do so well.
‘They’ll leave Gabriel alone if they’ve got any sense,’ said Fen shortly. ‘I learned that the hard way.’ And she went back to picking at the brickwork.
As a distraction, Eve pointed towards the Lawn. ‘Looks like we have a winner.’
The last fox standing was the von Aldstine boy. He donned an orange-plastic fox mask and was born aloft on the shoulders of cheering hounds. The rest of the players streamed after them towards the Hall, yapping and yodelling, arms slung around waists and shoulders in happy camaraderie. Colourful ribbons of polyester – the discarded fox tails – littered the ground in their wake. Fen watched dispassionately.
‘In a real hunt, the fox ends up dead,’ she said.
‘That would certainly up the stakes. But I don’t think it would do much for admissions.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Maybe a death match could be incorporated into the selection process. See which of the little darlings has the necessary killer instinct.’
This sounded more like the old Fen. Eve smiled. ‘Do you think any of the students ever guessed what we were up to, with our list of expectations?’
‘If they did, they would have despised us for it. Perhaps they would’ve been right to. Whatever were we thinking, with our silly games? I’ve been the worst. All that empty artistic posturing – what a clown.’
Fen wasn’t saying anything that Eve hadn’t thought herself on occasion. But Fen’s self-abasement was so out of character as to be alarming. And there was more.
‘“It’ll all end in tears.” That’s what everyone’s mother used to say. And everyone’s mother was right.’ Fen laughed sourly to herself. ‘Here’s another one: “It’s all fun and games until somebody loses an eye.”’
‘We both know you can’t take Cleeve too seriously, else you’d go mad,’ said Eve lightly. ‘Or turn into Nancy Riley.’
‘But you should take this place seriously, Eve. I didn’t. I’m beginning to see that was a mistake.’
Her sudden intensity was unnerving. ‘Fen … What’s going on? Is everything all right?’
‘Not exactly.’
But Fen didn’t continue. She was frowning a little to herself. She didn’t look visibly upset, more as if she was trying to weigh something up.
