The police concluded that Henry de Warlencourt, son of Rollo de Warlencourt, 17th Earl of Longcross, had fallen over Conrad’s Force and drowned following a night-fishing trip.
No one told us officially, but we read it in the press; now that we’d started to use the Saros 7S we couldn’t quite put it back in Pandora’s Box, even at school. Maybe Henry had had a point.
So, in our first lunchtime back at STAGS, in an empty practice room in Bede, we read the accounts online on all the major newspapers’ websites. They’d got hold of a gorgeous picture of Henry, looking all Gatsby in white tie and tails, and gone to town with it. Even the school didn’t escape scrutiny – paps hung around the iron gates training their long lenses at the school; we started seeing headlines like: ‘Posh STAGS Mourns Model Pupil … Tragic Lordling’s 50K-a-year School.’ A Facebook page went up, started by someone who didn’t even know Henry, just because of his beauty. His looks, his privileged life and the manner in which he died sparked something in the public imagination. Crazy girls from Poland threatened to jump off waterfalls, Oxbridge students had Henry de Warlencourt parties, which were black-tie dinners next to lakes, topped off by a spot of night fishing. Sixth-formers trespassed on the Longcross estate, desperate to take selfies at Conrad’s Force. One girl from Portland, Oregon, posted a video of her clutching Henry’s photo and crying for the entire four minutes and twenty-three seconds it took for R.E.M. to sing ‘Nightswimming’. We all watched it on the Saros in Nel’s room, open-mouthed. ‘Tragic,’ I said. ‘Think how mortified Henry would be.’
‘He’s an Internet sensation,’ said Nel, ‘without us having to lift a finger.’
‘He was King Sisyphus after all,’ said Shafeen. ‘But he just couldn’t get that boulder to the top of the hill. And it rolled down and crushed him in the end.’ I knew what he meant. Henry was trying to hold back a world that couldn’t be stopped.
But Henry wasn’t the only one who wanted to hold back the tide. The Abbot – who was really sweet about the whole thing – wrote to our parents about Henry’s death. Didn’t phone. Didn’t email. He wrote a letter home for each of us. Dad was still in South America so I knew the letter would sit in the empty hallway of our little house in Arkwright Terrace until Christmas. I was glad. I wasn’t sure how I’d even begin to explain to my father what had happened. I always told him the truth – that was the deal we had – but I didn’t think I could tell this particular story. It would have to be the first secret I would keep from him. The other thing was that if Dad knew what had actually happened – the whole huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ deal – he’d be on the first plane home, and I wasn’t about to lose him his job. For different reasons, Shafeen and Nel didn’t tell their parents the gory deets either. Shafeen, I thought, was trying to spare his father from reliving what he’d gone through all those years ago. Chanel’s motives were more complicated. I think she wanted to stay at the school, and knew that if she told her parents she’d be taken away – she’d be snatched from this privileged world, and feel that she’d somehow failed. For that matter, I’m sure all of our parents would have taken us away if they’d known the full story, and none of us wanted that. We’d only just found each other. For our own different reasons, we each kept quiet, and the secret bound the three of us together.
As it turned out, the snail-mail delay worked out well for all of us. The time when we’d needed our folks had come and gone – I could really have done with one of my dad’s legendary hugs on the night Henry died. And by the time the other two had communications from their parents, they were over the shock and wanted nothing more than to stay at school with their fellow conspirators. We would all be seeing our parents over the long Christmas break in less than six weeks anyway, when my dad would be back from Chile, Nel would be going to Cheshire and Shafeen to Rajasthan. Till then the three of us needed each other. No one else would understand every single emotion we were going through; how it felt to be murderers, yet not murderers, to be innocent and yet guilty, sorry Henry was dead but glad he was gone.
The school did, however, seem to think that we should all have access to counselling – it was probably the most progressive thing they’d ever done. They engaged this shrink for us. She was the only adult presence at the school – besides the Abbot – who didn’t have to be called Friar. She was called Mrs Waller, but insisted we call her Sheila. This was a bit modern even for me. ‘Sheila’ was a well-intentioned hippy who had messy curly hair and wore lots of scarves and beads. We met in a small office I’d never seen before, which had nothing in it but two chairs and a low table with a box of tissues sitting pointedly on it. I almost felt she would be disappointed if I didn’t cry. ‘Sheila’ was always prodding me – ‘How do you feel?’ But I didn’t even know that myself. I could hardly tell her that I’d liked Henry, then I didn’t like him, but I sort of still did, and then I’d murdered him. I couldn’t tell her that Henry had kissed me and told me I was beautiful but I now thought he’d been lying, and then Shafeen had told me I was beautiful and I thought he was telling the truth. I couldn’t share that Shafeen had told me he’d come huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ in order to protect me, having avoided going for years. I couldn’t confide that Shafeen hadn’t said a word about my beauty since, or the reason that he’d come to Longcross, because we, ya know, had just murdered someone between us and had more important things to talk about – like if we were actually going to go to prison. Nor could I say that a tiny part of me still wanted to go up to him and say, Hey, you know how we killed someone by making him jump off a waterfall? Well, can we just put that to one side for a second while I ask you exactly what you meant when you told me, the night before we committed the most heinous crime in the book, that I was beautiful, and that you came to Longcross to protect me? I began to dread the therapy sessions, and kind, well-meaning ‘Sheila’. I had to tell lie upon lie, and tied myself in knots trying to remember which fibs I’d told, to the point where the sessions were actually more stressful than therapeutic. Shafeen and Nel felt the same. None of us needed Sheila. We only needed each other.
The Abbot seemed to agree with this sentiment. He had us three murderers and the five remaining (weirdly calm) Medievals into his panelled study for sherry – the upper-class equivalent of a nice cup of tea – and preached benevolently at us.
‘I’ve been teaching for a long time,’ he said, hitching his gown onto his shoulders and looking over his half-glasses in a fond-uncle kind of way, ‘and I have found the best thing for young people in situations like this is normalcy, continuity and a restoration of order.’ I exchanged a look with Shafeen and Nel. How many situations like this had he had to face during his time at STAGS? How would he feel – this sweet old Santa Claus of a man – if we told him that every terrible ‘accident’ he’d had to deal with in his thirty years was probably connected to huntin’ shootin’ fishin’? Henry’s victims. His predecessors’ victims. And now Henry. ‘We could send you all home on an exeat until after Christmas, but in consultation with the police and Mrs Waller’ (Sheila), ‘I have concluded that it would not benefit you to be isolated from your contemporaries.’
I certainly wasn’t isolated from my contemporaries. Not any more. We three murderers were always together now, bound in guilt. We spent every waking moment in our little group, talking in a little huddle. I tried to concentrate on my schoolwork, but it was pretty difficult. I sometimes wondered, during the rest of that Michaelmas term, if they could take scholarships away, as my work was so poor. I think, looking back, that they must’ve given me a break because of the whole Henry thing, otherwise I would have been on the first train home. My essays made zero sense, and my rubbish efforts were made worse by the fact that I was sort of being haunted. You know that movie The Sixth Sense, where that goofy little kid sees dead people? Well, that kid was me. I kept thinking I saw glimpses of Henry. Henry playing on the green grass of Bede’s Piece in the middle of a rugby scrum, Henry’s blond head in chapel, or the tail of Henry’s Tudor coat just disappearing around a corner. I’d wondered if he’d attend his own funeral, like Tom Sawyer.
We weren’t invited to Henry’s funeral. For one thing, we were not considered to be close friends – none of his family had met us, and for all they knew we’d just been one-off weekend guests. I was glad. I don’t think I could have stood it. A funeral is no place for the deceased’s murderers. It was, we knew, to be held at Longcross, at the church I’d seen from Henry’s roof, with all the county families in attendance. The Abbot went, as did the remaining Medievals. We saw them drive away from school that Friday morning in a cortege of long black sedan cars. All that day I imagined what it was like at the funeral; I pictured it like a scene from The Godfather. People wailing, and wearing black lace, and throwing handfuls of dirt and roses onto the coffin. A man who looked just like Henry, in profile, looking at his son’s coffin, his face a map of pain. A well-dressed lady sat beside him, too well bred to shed a tear. Rollo de Warlencourt and his wife. I never did get to meet Henry’s parents.
But the ghost of Henry wouldn’t leave me alone. Most of all I became obsessed with that film that I’d told him about in our very last conversation at the top of Conrad’s Force, just before he fell. I now wished, since it was going to become our last conversation, and thus assume this enormous significance, that we’d talked about some really worthy movie like Citizen Kane. But I suppose last conversations are never like that; you never know when you’re going to check out, so people probably quite often drop dead after talking about the shopping list or the laundry. But that last exchange about, of all things, that dumb Sherlock Holmes movie kept coming back to me. I kept thinking about the part where Sherlock tumbles off the Reichenbach Falls but isn’t actually dead, and he comes back and hides in Watson’s room, and then when Watson finishes Holmes’s last adventure and types THE END, Holmes comes out when Watson is answering the door and types a question mark after the word END. When I’d handwrite my essays (no tech, remember) and leave them on my desk in Lightfoot, I kept expecting to come back and find a little question mark written at the bottom in Henry’s scrawling handwriting. After all, we hadn’t actually seen his body. Just a sealed-up bag. Maybe he wasn’t dead. Sometimes, on the rare occasions when I was alone in the room, when Jesus was out playing real tennis or something, I’d go to the windows and quickly whip back the floor-length curtains, to see if Henry was hiding there. Honestly, I was becoming a real fruit loop. I tell you, I almost went back to ‘Sheila’ to get my head read.