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once again he thought there’d been a change: either they’d been very small or these fellows were very big; they’d been smooth-cheeked and innocent and this lot had full grown beards, adult muscles and over-confident stares. Perhaps it was true that they were only interested in getting laid; so what? It was their prime time. At the age of fifteen had they ever worried much about anything else? Perhaps they hadn’t, for in those same lavatories, above the first sink, a famous piece of graffiti had captured the irrepressible desire of a sixteen-year-old: I WANT
TO DIE DOING IT: DOING IT, EVEN UP AN ARSE. That legend had declared its basic erotic philosophy, now covered by paint, alongside generations of more intellectual graffiti like the one the Count now read: DO COCKS HAVE IDEOLOGIES? He decided to put a question to them when he’d put his packet of cigarettes away: “Were any of you Lissette’s pupils?”
    Suspicion returned to the faces of the smokers who’d stayed in the lavatories, momentarily placated by the offer of a ciggie. They stared at the Count as he knew they would, and some of them exchanged glances, as if to say, “Watch out, this guy’s got to be police.”
    â€œYes, I’m a policeman. I’ve been ordered to investigate the teacher’s death.”
    â€œI was,” spoke up a pale, skinny youth, one of the few who’d kept smoking when the Count violated the collective privacy of the lavatories. He took a drag on his minimal fag end before taking a step towards the policeman.
    â€œThis year?”
    â€œNo, last year.”
    â€œAnd what was she like? As a teacher, I mean.”
    â€œAnd if I say not much good, what will happen?” probed the student and the Count thought he’d met up with Skinny Carlos’s alter ego : far too suspicious and sarcastic for his age.
    â€œNothing whatsoever. I told you I’m not from the
Ministry of Education. I want to find out what happened to her. Whatever help you can give me . . .”
    The skinny lad held out a hand to ask a friend for a cigarette.
    â€œNo, she was really nice-natured. She was good to us. She helped those who were in trouble.”
    â€œThey say she was a friend to her pupils.”
    â€œYeah, she wasn’t like the old fogeys who’re on a different wavelength.”
    â€œAnd what was her wavelength?”
    Skinny looked at his smoking-den mates, expecting a helping hand that never came.
    â€œI don’t know. She went to parties, things like that. You get me?”
    The Count nodded, as if he got him.
    â€œWhat’s your name by the way?”
    The skinny fellow smiled and nodded. As if to say: I knew it . . .
    â€œJosé Luis Ferrer.”
    â€œThanks, José Luis,” said the Count, shaking his hand. Then he looked at the group. “And please, if somebody knows anything that might help, tell the headmaster to ring me. If the teacher was really that nice, I think she deserves that much. See you,” and he went out into the passage, after crushing his cigarette in the sink and reflecting for a second on the ideological conundrum etched on the wall.

    Manolo and the headmaster were waiting in the playground.
    â€œI was a pupil here, you know,” he announced, without looking at their host.
    â€œYou don’t say. And you’ve not been back for some time?”
    The Count nodded and paused before answering.
    â€œQuite a number of years, in fact . . . I spent two years in that classroom,” and he pointed to the corner of the second floor, on the same wing as the lavatories he’d just visited. “I don’t know if we were very different to the boys you have now, but we hated our headmaster.”
    â€œHeadmasters do change from time to time,” he replied, slipping his hands into the pockets of his guayabera . He seemed about to launch into another harangue, to demonstrate his insights and skilled control