I expected that once we were all back at STAGS after that fateful weekend at Longcross, the Medievals would never speak to us again. I was wrong.
I wouldn’t say they treated us nicely, but they certainly never bullied any of us again. It was like there was a strange force field around the three of us. They were almost afraid. They knew I had been pushed out of the boat, and that I had seen them all refuse to help me, but they could not, I suppose, know what had happened between the three of us and Henry. All they knew was that I’d turned up alive, and Henry had turned up dead. I wondered if they were worried about how much I knew; they didn’t know how much, if anything, Henry had told me before he pushed me into Longmere, but if they’d ever seen any movies at all they should know how supervillains always feel they’re kind of freed up by the fact that their victim is about to die, so it doesn’t matter how much they tell them. Like the Six-fingered Man in The Princess Bride who describes the pain machine to Westley before he turns it on. For all the Medievals knew, Henry could’ve done something similar. I could literally know where all the bodies were buried. So they were all carefully civil. The girls were guardedly friendly to Nel and me, and the boys civil to Shafeen. All talk of the Punjabi Playboy and Carphone Chanel was dropped. And life at the school went on as normal.
Actually it was a little bit too normal.
In short, although there was an outpouring of grief from strangers online, no one at STAGS seemed to be mourning Henry quite as much as they should. Even Lara didn’t seem to be as devastated as she surely should have been. She’d lost her ‘Hen’, the guy she presumably liked, even loved, along with what she probably loved more: the Longcross package – all those lands and that lovely house and all that cash.
I assumed she must be keeping it all bottled up inside. ‘Poor Lara,’ I said to Shafeen and Nel on Bede’s Piece one day, watching her – quite cheerfully, it has to be said – playing lacrosse.
Nel turned to me in surprise. ‘You don’t feel sorry for her, do you?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘not for her.’
‘For Him then?’
She meant Henry. We always meant Henry when we said Him or He with that extra emphasis that meant the word had a capital letter. Henry, that devil, was now referred to as if he was God.
‘You don’t feel sorry for him, do you?’ Nel prodded again.
I thought about this. I kind of felt sorry that the nice Henry, the one who had kissed me on the rooftop and taught me to fish, didn’t have a chance at life. But I wasn’t sorry for the bad Henry, the real Henry. So I shook my head. ‘No. You?’
‘No. I’m glad he’s gone. Now other kids are safe. I feel sorrier for that African kid, and that scholarship girl. They were murdered. Not by him, I know. But I still kind of wish he’d been brought to justice.’
‘Maybe better not,’ said Shafeen. ‘If they started poking around into Henry, they might start poking around into us. Maybe we’re lucky the police were as inefficient as they seemed to be.’
Shafeen was voicing a feeling that had been nagging at me. ‘You think so too?’
‘What do I think?’ he asked.
‘Well, do you think it was all a bit, well, straightforward? They interviewed all of us, but don’t you think they let us get away a bit easy?’
‘How do you mean?’ asked Nel.
‘Well, I’ve watched a lot of films. A lot. And whenever there’s an unexplained death, the authorities go into tons of detail – police, coroners, crown prosecutors, you name it. They definitely should have shaken me down a little bit more – I mean, I was the last one to see him alive. They should have asked loads more questions. Why was I wearing a wetsuit? Why didn’t Henry and I catch any fish before I “accidentally” fell in Longmere? Why was he at the top of the waterfall when we were fishing down on the lake? The police should be interested, the Medievals should be interested, the de Warlencourt family certainly should be interested.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘That there’s some sort of cover-up. Obviously the Medievals don’t want it to come out about the huntin’ shootin’ fishin’, but it seems like no one else does either. What did Henry call it? “The British establishment”?’ I watched Lara score a goal and do a little celebration with Esme and Charlotte, their blonde ponytails flying as they hugged and jumped about. It seemed, well, wrong. ‘I mean, I’m really glad no one probed, as it lets us off the hook –’ too late I noticed the fishing pun – ‘but it just seems odd.’
The lacrosse match was over, and we started to stroll towards school, our black Tudor coats flapping and wrapping round our legs. Shafeen said grimly, ‘Well, don’t relax just yet. I suppose the next thing will be the inquest. We’ll just have to hope that nothing nasty turns up at that.’
I’d forgotten about the inquest. Of course – I should’ve known from the movies. They always have a court session to discover what happened in a suspicious death. I clutched at my stomach. More waiting, and wondering. I wondered how much more I could take.
Shafeen, Nel and I weren’t allowed to go to the inquest, since we were under eighteen. All the Medievals who were in Six Two and were eighteen got to go. We watched them leave the school with the Abbot in the school minibus. It looked weird – like they were going on a really dark school trip.
They didn’t come back for hours, and the three of us did our best to pretend it was just a normal school day. But just after lunch the minibus came back up the drive and we stopped pretending that we could talk about anything else. ‘I’m going to ask,’ I said decidedly. ‘Come with me?’
Shafeen and Nel shared a look. ‘Sure.’
We knew where to find the Medievals. They’d be hanging out, as they always did, at the well in Paulinus quad; and there they were, gathered like crows in the winter sunshine.
For a moment as we approached I could have sworn that Henry was standing there, in the middle of his little cohort. My heart started to thud; the phantom who had been haunting me would show himself at last. But as we got nearer I could see there were only five heads, and the blond one at the centre was actually Cookson. He was leaning on the well just as Henry used to do, in the accepted position of the leader of the Medievals. He even looked like Henry. His hair looked blonder (had he done something to it?) and he was slimmer (had he been working out?). His hair was cut to look like Henry’s and he even wore chessboard-check stockings under his black Tudor gown, just as Henry used to do.
‘I’ll go,’ I said, and Nel and Shafeen fell back at the edge of the quad. I felt, as I’d felt ever since we came back from Longcross, that I had a certain power, a cloak of invulnerability like something out of Clash of the Titans. I had something on them – that they hadn’t helped me out of the lake – and they were wary of me, especially as they didn’t know how much more I knew. But as I walked across the grass towards them, feeling their watchful eyes on me, I was as nervous as I’d been on my first day at STAGS. They looked, as a group, as they always had: comfortable, entitled and forbidding. I had to separate one from the pack; and if you want an answer, as my dad always says, go to the top. ‘Cookson,’ I called, pleasantly enough, ‘can I have a word?’
He sort of pushed himself off the well, hands still in his pockets, and I was struck by a memory of Henry at Longcross, pushing himself off the panelled wall in exactly that manner. It was uncanny. Cookson strolled easily to meet me, in the middle of the grass, as if we two were about to fight a duel, with our seconds standing a little way behind.
He stopped, facing me in his duelling stance. I suddenly felt the old hostility return and that my cloak of invulnerability had been stripped away. What had gone down at the inquest? Had we been dropped in it?
‘Hi, Cookson,’ I said, not really sure how to start.
‘It’s Henry actually.’
I was a bit taken aback. I’d almost forgotten his first name was Henry. All that time we’d known him as Cookson because there could only ever be one Henry. And now, here was another one, this BTEC version. ‘Henry,’ I began. It sounded weird. ‘I … We were just wondering what happened at the inquest.’
He stared me down with eyes that looked bluer than usual, eyes that were suddenly like the old Henry’s. For a moment I thought he’d refuse to answer. Then he said, grudgingly, ‘The coroner ruled it was death by misadventure.’
I needed to be quite sure. ‘What’s misadventure?’
‘An accident due to a dangerous risk taken voluntarily,’ he stated in a superior voice. ‘The coroner decided that Henry had climbed Conrad’s Force voluntarily, so the fact that he fell off it was his own fault. Misadventure.’
Misadventure. It was a good way to describe the whole weekend at Longcross. An adventure gone wrong. ‘Did he say anything else?’
‘What else could he possibly say? It was a terrible accident,’ he said pointedly. ‘And that’s all.’
So that was it. I stood very still while I processed the information, the sharp breeze stirring our Tudor coats, the rooks cawing in the trees. It took me a minute to realise what it meant.
The matter was closed and we were off the hook.
The thing is, so were they.
I felt massive relief coupled with a keen disappointment. It’s not like I had wanted some earth-shattering revelation about the huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ to come out at the inquest, but at the same time I felt weirdly let down. It felt like nothing had changed.
Just then the bell rang from the chapel spire for afternoon lessons. Lara called to Cookson, like the siren I’d always thought her, in an alluring, tempting voice. ‘Hen,’ she said, ‘come on. We’ll be late for Greek.’ I went cold. Hen had been her nickname for Henry. As his girlfriend, she had been given the unique privilege of shortening his name. Now she’d passed on the nickname, along with her affection, to this second Henry, who turned and sauntered to join her, supremely confident in his gait. He leaned down – he even seemed to have gotten taller – to kiss her on the mouth. Then, hand in hand, they walked to the Honorius building, leaving me open-mouthed in the middle of the quad. Shafeen and Nel came to meet me, and we all stared after them.
Shafeen gave a long, low whistle. ‘The King is Dead,’ he said with something like awe. ‘Long Live the King.’
Nel sighed. ‘Is this another one of those King Sisyphus conversations?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Yes. Sort of. “The King is Dead, Long Live the King” was the traditional proclamation in medieval England when the king died. It meant the people were never without a king. It made everyone feel secure, and there was no opening for a pretender to seize the throne. It represented tradition, continuity, all the things that the Medievals are so fond of.’
‘What are you getting at?’ said Nel.
‘Don’t you see what’s happened? They’ve gone seamlessly from one Henry to another. Even the queen, in this case Lara, has hooked up with the new king. It’s like Hamlet.’
He was right. I hadn’t seen the play, but in the Kenneth Branagh version when his dad RIPs, his mum (Julie Christie) starts spooning his uncle Claudius (Derek Jacobi) before you can say, ‘To be or not to be.’ I nodded. ‘And just like that,’ I said, ‘order is restored.’
At that moment a shaft of weak winter sunlight penetrated the quad, and it was as if the same light, at last, illuminated my stupid brain. ‘Order,’ I said. ‘That’s it.’ I grabbed both my friends by their black sleeves.
‘Where are we going?’ asked Shafeen.
‘Nel’s room. Now.’