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right.’
    â€˜And you were both here?’
    â€˜Dad helps out running a garden club for the older pupils; Max and I came along to support him.’
    â€˜Miss Christy?’ he asked in a pained voice. ‘She’s involved as well?’
    I nodded; only a man with a heart of stone would not have felt compassion for him, although when he turned to Sergeant Abelson and said, ‘Miss Maxine Christy is an unconvicted housebreaker and serial accomplice to these two, whose various misdemeanours include obstructing the police and interference with a crime scene,’ I did have to bite down hard on a witty, withering response. He made us sound like Croydon’s three most wanted. ‘Take me through your recollections of last night, including the times you arrived and left, what you did, where you went and what, if anything, you noticed that was unusual.’
    It didn’t take long and after it, he looked no happier, no more informed. He was nearly at the end of his second cigarette and just sat staring at its lighted tip for a while when, abruptly, he said, ‘OK, come with me.’
    He stood up, and followed by Dad, then me with Sergeant Abelson bringing up the rear, we made our way out of the office, through the foyer and into the gym hall.

EIGHT
    W e knew, of course, what to expect, but I still felt a palpable nervousness – and from the look on Dad’s face, so did he – as we followed Masson across the echoing gym hall and beyond the curtains that had been drawn across.
    Things had changed, but not noticeably for the better. The body had been lowered to the floor and was now laid neatly out in a symmetrical pose, the thick rope trailing away from it. Mark Bentham was leaning over it, making notes and directing a photographer. There were three uniformed officers acting as go-betweens and four more in plain clothes who were dusting various surfaces for fingerprints, examining the floor through magnifying glasses and plucking invisible fibres from the clothing of the corpse.
    Mark did not look up as we approached and Masson did not try to disturb him. In a low voice, Masson said, ‘As you so astutely observed, the body is that of Marlene Jeffries . . .’ The pause was not hard to read; my easy identification of the battered body was potentially incriminating in his book; it was a book that began with the sentence, Anyone called Lance Elliot is at best an idiot, at worst a criminal, and always a source of dyspepsia . Having left the nasty implication of his words hanging for a while, he continued, ‘As you said, she was a PE teacher at the school, one of four. She’d been at the school for five years, according to the headmaster.’
    And someone had done something horrible to her face; from the degree of distortion, it looked as if most of her facial bones had been smashed, one eye pulped; there was a huge amount of congealed blood but not enough to hide deep gashes in her forehead and cheeks, some of which appeared to be slightly curved. Dad, who was by no means squeamish, winced and whispered, ‘Oh, dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear . . .’
    â€˜Someone didn’t like her,’ remarked Masson in his characteristically sour tone.
    Mark looked up, suddenly aware of our presence. When he saw me, his face was momentarily blank before a small smile of recognition appeared. ‘Lance?’
    â€˜Hello, Mark.’ We would have shaken hands except that he wore disposable gloves and on them was rather a lot of Marlene Jeffries’ colourful vital fluids. ‘It’s been a while.’
    Mark had fair hair and faded blue eyes bracketed by laughter lines; I remember him in the bar at St George’s singing rugby songs about ‘dickey-di-do’s’ with various things attached. It was a memory that contrasted vividly with our present situation. The smile was the same, though. ‘It certainly has.’
    â€˜I didn’t realize you were