I mean, of course, Henry de Warlencourt.
You might have read about him online by now, on that creepy Facebook page they set up for him, or seen his picture on the news. But back then he wasn’t famous – or infamous – outside of his own circle. They say you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead so I’ll just say you would never have known by looking at him what a terrible person he was.
I have to really struggle, now, to remember him as I first saw him; to be fair to that first impression, and try to forget what I know now. He was, quite simply, the most gorgeous boy I’d ever seen. Tall for seventeen, all blond hair, blue eyes and tanned skin. When people were around Henry de Warlencourt they watched him all the time, even though they pretended they weren’t. Even the Friars seemed to be in awe of Henry. He never got punished for anything – and that’s not because he didn’t do anything wrong; it’s because he got away with it. He was like one of those really cool frying pans that everything slides off. He thought he was invincible. But he wasn’t.
Henry de Warlencourt was as British as they come, despite his foreign-sounding name. Apparently some distant ancestor had fought in the Frankish army on the Crusades, and had settled in England afterwards, conveniently marrying some noblewoman who owned half of northern England. The de Warlencourts had been fabulously rich ever since. Their house, Longcross Hall, is a beautiful manor house in the Lake District. I know it better than I ever would have wanted to, because Longcross was the scene of the crime.
Because I was in the top set for all my subjects I saw Henry de Warlencourt a lot; him and his five closest friends. The six of them were known as the Medievals. Everyone knew the Medievals, because it was the Medievals – not the Friars – who really ran STAGS.
The Medievals were the unofficial prefects of the school. You’d see them walking in the quad in their immaculate uniforms, long black coats fluttering in the autumn breeze. The Medievals were allowed to wear any colour stockings they wanted under their Tudor coats, and they emphasised this privilege by choosing crazy patterns like leopard print, or tartan, or chessboard checks. But it wasn’t just the stockings that marked them out; it was a particular kind of confidence they had about them. They lolled about like expensive cats. That confidence, that comfort in their surroundings, told you that their houses were probably not that different to STAGS; that they probably had grounds too, rather than gardens, and houses with wings, instead of neighbours. And antlers too, houses with lots of antlers on the walls.
The Medievals were all tall, beautiful and clever, as if they were especially bred for the job. They held court in the Paulinus quad – a beautiful square of perfectly manicured grass, surrounded by four walkways of elegant arched cloisters, at the heart of Paulinus house.
Henry de Warlencourt was always at the centre of the group, his blond head visible, as if he was that king at Versailles, whichever one it was, one of those millions of Louis. Henry was the sun, and the rest revolved around him. They would hang out there in all weathers, talking, reading and, after dark, secretly smoking. There was a sort of ancient stone well in the middle of the quad, and if you ever got close enough to look down it, you could see that about a foot down a circle of chicken wire had been fixed for safety, and the chicken wire was stuffed with cigarette butts. I once dropped a coin through the holes, to see how deep it was. I listened for ages, but couldn’t hear the splash of the coin hitting the water. I assumed that the bottom of the well was so full of fag butts that they were cushioning the coin’s fall. The Paulinus well was just like the Medievals themselves. It looked pretty, but in its depths it was gross.
If Henry was the Medievals’ leader, Cookson was his second-in command. Cookson was actually called Henry Cookson, but he was always known by his second name, as there could only be one Henry in the group. Cookson was good-looking too, as they all were, but he still looked like a bad photocopy of Henry. He was slightly smaller, slightly chubbier and his hair was a dirtier blond. His features were blunter, his skin paler, his voice more braying. But the two were inseparable, as close as the brothers they resembled.
The third boy in the group was Piers. Piers was elegant, and dark, and he had a monobrow that made him look like he was constantly annoyed. Piers added little details to his uniform, like a pocket watch, and a tooled leather belt instead of the regulation slim tan, and handmade shoes from his London bootmaker. Piers had been Henry’s friend since they’d been shipped off to the junior bit of STAGS – the prep school – at the age of eight.
The three girls were pretty similar in appearance, all blonde-haired and blue-eyed. We’d been studying Homer in Greek that term and they reminded me of the Sirens: beautiful mermaids who looked gorgeous but would actually lure sailors to their deaths. Their names were Esme, Charlotte and Lara. They were all pretty, and slim, and they managed to make the strange ecclesiastical uniform look like something from the catwalks of Milan. Charlotte was some distant cousin of Henry’s, Esme was minor royalty, and Lara, seemingly as British as the rest of them, was from a Russian family with an Oligarch-level fortune. They all had that hair that lifts at the hairline and falls over one eye, and they constantly flicked it from one side to the other as they talked. My hair (bobbed, black, heavy fringe) doesn’t behave like that, but all the other girls at STAGS (including, tragically, my roommate Jesus) tried to copy their style. To begin with I made the mistake of mixing the Medieval girls up, dismissing them as all the same. If Dad was here to play our film game we’d be saying Heathers or Mean Girls, but those movies don’t really do justice to the evil that lived behind the white smiles. They weren’t dumb blondes, those girls, they were highly intelligent; you underestimated them at your peril, and that’s exactly what I did.
All of the Medievals were incredibly rich – Henry’s family had been coming here for centuries, and the school theatre was even called the De Warlencourt Playhouse. Lara’s family, it was rumoured, paid for the pool. This made them behave as if they owned the place; because they kind of did.
There were only ever six Medievals, three boys and three girls from Six Two – the second year of sixth form. But beyond this hard core there were a whole bunch of hangers-on who idolised them, and did exactly what they wanted in the hope that in Six Two they would become Medievals themselves. Every year, six Medievals leave and a new pack is forged, so there are plenty of wannabes hanging around. Jesus is definitely one – she would die to be a Medieval.
All of the Medievals were OK individually; I was in a lot of their classes and they could be quite human. But when they were in a pack, like hounds, that’s when you wanted to be invisible, like Aidan’s stag. They mostly left me alone; occasionally the three girls would mimic my accent and snigger behind their hands once I’d walked past them in the quad. I’d feel like there was a cold stone of unhappiness lodged just below my ribs, and the feeling wouldn’t subside until I’d gotten out of their eyeline. But I had it easy. Some people seemed to be in their crosshairs all the time. People like Shafeen.
The Medievals called Shafeen the Punjabi Playboy. He was tall and quiet, with a handsome, serious face and unreadable dark eyes. The nickname they had given him was wilfully inaccurate. For one thing, he was not from the Punjab at all. For another, he was painfully shy around girls, quite the opposite of a playboy. But that, of course, was what they found so funny. From the Medievals’ perspective, if a nickname sounded good, and it made them laugh, it stuck. Shafeen was one of the only people who talked to me; we’d chosen the same subjects for A level, and we were in the top set, so we talked about our classes a bit. You could say he was the nearest thing I had to a friend that first term, but as he was in Honorius and I was in Lightfoot, he wasn’t much comfort. I didn’t know much about Shafeen at the beginning – of course, I know him now. (Guilt is quite a bond, I’ve discovered, and since Shafeen is a murderer too, we now have a very particular connection.) People said Shafeen was some sort of prince back in India, so you might have thought the Medievals would welcome him into their group. But they teased him mercilessly, and, as I found out later, their dislike of Shafeen came from some old quarrel that took place at STAGS about a million years ago, between Shafeen’s father and Henry’s. Shafeen too had been at STAGS since he was eight. He’d been all the way through the prep bit and the main school to the sixth form, as his parents were in India. But although Shafeen knew all the rules, and even spoke like the Medievals did, he somehow managed to be an outsider too.
I’ve asked myself many times why Shafeen accepted The Invitation when he knew what the Medievals thought about him. He can’t not have known what they thought about him; they made it so public. Even in lessons Shafeen wasn’t safe. I heard one exchange in history that made me a bit scared for him.
We were in the Bede library, seated at our single desks in rows, with the weak autumn sun streaming through the stained-glass windows and brightening our black coats with multicoloured patches. We were studying the Crusades, a tussle between the Christians and the Muslims over the city of Jerusalem that started in 1095, when STAGS, unbelievably, was already four centuries old.
‘Who can tell me about the Battle of Hattin?’ asked Friar Skelton, our round and cheerful history professor. ‘Mr de Warlencourt, one of your family was actually there, wasn’t he?’
Henry smiled; the Medievals always took the trouble to be charming to the Friars. ‘Yes, he was, Friar. Conrad de Warlencourt.’
Friar Skelton tossed a piece of chalk in one hand. ‘Perhaps you could give us the family perspective.’
‘Certainly,’ said Henry. He sat a little straighter in his chair and I couldn’t help thinking that in the black Tudor coat, with the sun striking his blond hair, he looked a bit like a young Crusader himself. (‘Henry V,’ said Dad in my head, ‘or maybe Kingdom of Heaven.’) ‘The forces of Guy of Lusignan met the Sultan Saladin’s forces at Hattin. The Christian army was already starving, and dying of thirst. Desperate for water, they were lured to Lake Tiberius, where they found their way blocked by the sultan’s army. It was a trap.’
I could see, looking at the shuttered expression on his face, that it hurt him. Crazily, Henry de Warlencourt still minded what had happened to his ancestor all those years ago.
Friar Skelton hadn’t seen it. ‘Then what?’ he asked cheerily, chalk poised in mid-air.
‘They made a mess of us, Friar. The Crusader army was completely destroyed. The defeat led directly to the Third Crusade. The sultan took the True Cross and the city of Jerusalem too.’
I registered that ‘us’. Henry really was taking this personally. ‘The survivors were captured, but Saladin didn’t want to be burdened with prisoners. His men begged to be allowed to kill the Christians. They were lining up to do it. With their sleeves already rolled up.’ He jabbed his pen viciously on his writing pad. ‘They only let my ancestor go on condition that he told Richard the Lionheart what had happened. And he did. It was a war crime, an atrocity.’ His voice rang out around the old library.
Shafeen, sitting just beyond Henry, made a tiny sound. He shook his head and smiled ever so slightly. I was well placed to see it, because I was sitting just behind them all.
Henry shot him a look, his eyes suddenly very blue. But Friar Skelton beamed; he loved a debate. ‘Got something to add, Mr Jadeja?’
Shafeen looked up. He cleared his throat. ‘Yes, Hattin was an atrocity. But there were atrocities on both sides. The “Lionheart”, as you call him, murdered three thousand Muslim prisoners at Acre in cold blood. That wasn’t even in battle. They were unarmed, and tied up.’
‘Good point,’ said Friar Skelton, pointing his chalk at Shafeen. ‘More of the events at Acre later. But for now –’ he knocked on the blackboard, his gold signet ring making a sharp metallic sound – ‘we must return to Hattin. I would like you to write a short essay about, and form some understanding of, how the topography of the area contributed to the Crusaders’ rout. And please watch your punctuation, or I will be obliged to remind you, once again, that the sentence “Hannibal waged war, with elephants” does not convey the same meaning as the sentence “Hannibal waged war with elephants.” He wrote both examples on the blackboard (there were no whiteboards at STAGS), making a huge deal of chalking in the comma. ‘The former means that elephants were his war machines. The latter means that a great Carthaginian general was fighting a bunch of big-eared mastodons.’ Normally we might have laughed – we all liked Friar Skelton – but today the atmosphere was too strained.
Friar Skelton turned away to rub his sentences off the board and replace them with a drawing of the horns of Hattin. Cookson saw his opportunity and leaned forward in his chair towards Shafeen. ‘I suppose one of your ancestors was at Hattin too, eh, Punjabi?’ he said out of the side of his mouth. ‘On the camel-jockey side?’
Now, I knew nothing about Shafeen’s religion, if he even had one, but what Cookson had done was to look at the colour of Shafeen’s skin and place him firmly with Saladin and the ‘infidels’. The message was clear: the Christian white boys against the Muslim brown.
Shafeen did not look at Cookson. He was doodling a black Crusader cross on his pad of lined paper, filling it in so firmly that his knuckles paled. I thought, irrelevantly, how long his eyelashes were in the stained-glass sunlight. He said, quite clearly, ‘Perhaps you should pay as much attention in geography as you do in history. The Punjab is nowhere near Jerusalem. Neither is Rajasthan, which is where I’m actually from.’
I was amazed. I had never heard Shafeen speak so many words at once, and with such confidence and command. He didn’t sound afraid of them at all.
Friar Skelton turned back to the class and Cookson subsided into his seat. He’d just been owned, and I could see he didn’t like it. ‘Little shit,’ he hissed, under his breath.
‘Not little,’ murmured Piers. ‘He’s a long, brown shit.’
‘Like the ones you do after a vindaloo,’ agreed Cookson. ‘Long and brown and smelling of curry.’
Piers sniggered. ‘We’ll settle him.’
Cookson rocked back on his chair and stretched extravagantly. ‘Not long now,’ he agreed.
There was such venom in their voices that I felt sorry for Shafeen. I tried to smile at him, but he didn’t catch my eye, staring instead, unseeing, at Friar Skelton’s chalk stickman rendering of long-dead Crusaders. I knew Shafeen had heard every word. I glanced at Henry. Blond head bent, he was painstakingly copying the diagram onto his pad. As ever, Henry had not taken part in any name-calling; he had done nothing but look at Shafeen, but his attack-dogs had sprung to his defence. Back then I still thought Henry the best of them, before I realised he was the worst.