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right.’
    ‘You rather suggested that you knew somebody connected with him. Who was it?’
    ‘His housemaster.’
    I don’t know what reply I had expected but it certainly wasn’t this, and I felt a twinge of disappointment. My own housemaster had been so painfully dull and dry that it was difficult to credit Turnbull’s with the slightest significance. And as an enlightening revelation, the statement seemed worthless.
    ‘Yes,’ she mused, ‘Freddie Felter, we knew him in India. My husband Jacko was governor of the school where he taught maths – St Austin’s, the British college in Jaipur. Some of the boys were being coached for the Civil Service exams, including Turnbull. Felter used to bring them to tea occasionally and Jacko would supply a few tips … Yes, Freddie Felter – probably the most unpalatable person I have ever met.’
    ‘Goodness,’ I exclaimed, suddenly interested. ‘Whatever was wrong with him?’
    ‘Most things,’ she said simply.
    ‘Such as?’
    ‘For one, he had the most awful moustache, even worse than Jacko’s. It made him look like a thin walrus.’
    ‘But Maud,’ I protested, ‘you can hardly hold his moustache against him!’
    ‘Oh yes I can, it was dreadful.’ She grinned a grimace, and added, ‘But there were other things.’
    ‘Go on.’
    ‘Well, to begin with, he was an inveterate liar. Tried to convince Jacko he took a double first at Cambridge and had turned down a Fellowship.’ She gave a wry laugh. ‘One didn’t spin yarns like that to Jacko, he could spot a humbug from a hundred yards. “Holmes of the Civil Service”, that’s what they called him! Personally I called him plain nosy, but that’s another story. Anyway, Jacko soon sniffed out the truth: a diploma from a teacher training college. A paltry enough fabrication, I grant you, but there were so many others. The man was a walking falsehood – and nasty with it.’
    ‘In what way?’ I asked, replenishing her glass.
    ‘He was a manipulative bully, but not directly. He would get others to do his dirty work, Turnbull more often than not … there was something wrong with that boy, very wrong. Liked nothing better than to get out the knuckle-duster – figuratively speaking at least. A sort of Moseley thug in the making. The younger boys hated him, but he was always perfectly agreeable when he came to tea with us. Yes, a pretty smooth little sadist really.’ She broke off to water the dog’s gin. (‘Can’t have him boozy for his trot in the park, can we?’)
    Thug in the making … That fitted. And I recalled the fate of little Castris in France, strung up on the door jamb in his own dining room. But I also pictured Turnbull in the sedate ambience of Brown’s tea lounge being the model of temperate good nature. It was amazing how diverse a person could be! And then rather uneasily I started to think of my own diversity. But surely in my case there was far more consistency. From what I recalled of those fateful moments in the wood, the deed had been done almost in passing and with no obvious transformation of character. I wondered: did that make me more or less dangerous than Turnbull? Difficult to say …
    However, there was no time to cogitate, for, dilution achieved, my companion resumed her narrative: ‘You see, Francis, there was one particularly unsavoury incident which involved the atrocious beating-up of a thirteen-year-old – Bobbie Timms, rather a nice kid. He and his housemaster were old enemies, and one day the boy came across a compromising photograph of Felter and another man. This he proceeded to pass among his schoolmates amidst much giggling and ribaldry. One gathers that no harm was intended other than to have a good laugh at Felter’s expense. The boys were too naïve to grasp the more serious implications of the find, and there was no question of their reporting the matter to the Head. Apparently, seeing “old Freddie with his pants down” was amusement enough. However,