When Winter had left, I poured myself a glass of wine and made myself a Welsh rarebit, and read one of Harry’s old diaries. Nothing much there; except for a note about Eric Scoones, who was in charge of the French film club, showing La Cage aux Folles, and a sketch of Dr. Devine as a drill sergeant, sharp nose twitching fretfully, watching a phalanx of schoolboys running laps around the Quad. From his mouth came a speech bubble, containing the words Quick, march! Beneath it, the legend: Metro-gnome.

My eyesight was protesting by then. Or maybe it was the smoke from the fire. And so I put the book away and thought about my partner-in-crime, alone in his dead mother’s house, his face illuminated in blue from the glow of the computer screen, talking with his invisible friends. It seems a very lonely way for a man of his age to live. And yet he seems to enjoy it. Of course, he may feel the same about me. But I have St. Oswald’s. For now, at least—and forever, I hope—

Thank gods, I have St. Oswald’s.

Part Five

PART FIVE

Veritas nunquam perit.

—SENECA

Chapter 1

1

January 1982

It was the morning of New Year’s Day when the police arrived at my door. Two officers, both men, both with the look of officials with an unpleasant task to perform.

“Roy Straitley?”

“Mea culpa,” I said.

Perhaps not the happiest choice of words. But I had been expecting them. I was Nutter’s form master. And it had been a couple of days now since the boy’s disappearance. Two officers, one old, one young, both with the same appraising eyes—they might almost have been father and son. I invited them in, but they would not sit down, remaining in the hallway, like door-to-door salesmen with nothing to sell.

I told them what I knew, which wasn’t much; that the boy had been away from School during the last two weeks of term; that I had been making inquiries.

The elder of the two men, a man in his fifties called Stackhouse, said: “Why’s that?”

I explained that one of Nutter’s friends had expressed concern.

“Concern about what?”

I shook my head. “He just thought Nutter wasn’t himself.”

“And what do you think he meant by that?”

I thought back to my interview with little Johnny Harrington. “I’m really not sure,” I said at last. “Something about not going to Church, and seeming preoccupied.”

Stackhouse wrote something in his notebook. “And did you speak to Charlie Nutter about this?”

“No,” I said.

“Why not?”