The White Devil (5 page)

This was not Andrew’s first time in the acrid presence of death. It had brushed him once. He had peered into its fog and shuddered. That time it had been a disaster. That time it had ruined everything.

You cannot tell about the white-haired boy.

He drew up onto the bed. He curled into a ball. He stared at the blue wallpaper striped with brown.

HE IS IN
another dormitory room in country Connecticut, where the roads spin and dip and each village boasts its own whitewashed Puritan church. Where Frederick Williams Academy keeps you safe with its black iron gates and attenuated brick dormitories and groomed grounds and acres of trees and playing fields. Andrew is sitting on the floor, his legs splayed. There is a small glassine bag beside him with a ridged top. The word
FLATLINE
is stenciled on it, a kind of perverse brand name. Across from him is Daniel Schwartz. Daniel sags. Andrew struggles with himself, trying to stir,
wait
, he is saying,
wait
, then shaking his friend, because this doesn’t look right, but his friend is no longer there, his friend is turning blue, his mind has been kidnapped, carried off on a gypsy adventure on sunlit hills while Andrew is fighting struggles of his own against the drug
fuck how much did I do this must be lots more potent than the last bag we tried
because Daniel seems to be left alone there on the ground while he, Andrew, rises aloft, he is standing in the giant wicker sun-warmed basket of a hot air balloon, and up here, God is talking to him in great silent lightning flashes, showing him he has wasted everything, showing him his life is an empty lunchbox. Andrew vomits, vomits from the self-disgust and the loss, from the dead serious fear
Daniel looks really fucking BLUE
and he takes his cell phone from his jeans pocket. Andrew punches the three numbers and then
SEND
and lies back gazing at Daniel and idly wondering what the paramedics will think when they see him with an overdosed teenager at his feet and vomit on his legs.

WHEN HE HEARD
months later, he was comparatively calm. He was in his room, at home, in Killingworth. There was a lawn mower buzzing nearby. And it was just a phone call. No one implicated him. He was just . . . informed. He was able to hang up the phone quite calmly, roll over in bed, and begin, in private, the long, slow process of feeling his own guts corrode.

“ARE YOU ALL
right, man?”

Andrew turned his head. Roddy recoiled. He was standing in the doorway, holding a long black umbrella.

“You gave me the shivers. You look like a dead thing lying there. You coming?”

“Coming where?”

“To dinner! God, you don’t look well.” Roddy shook his head. “Come on. I’ll wait for you.”

ANDREW RECOVERED SUFFICIENTLY
to pad behind Roddy to the dining hall and he stood in a half stupor in line. As he made his way through the tables, he caught the first wave of sidelong glances, the whispers behind hands. Boys’ faces lifted and stared. The younger ones openly curious; the middle forms furtive; the Sixth Formers awkward, as if Andrew were the bereaved. Andrew attached himself, with Roddy, to the least objectionable group, the house squares, Henry and Oliver and Rhys. Conversation stopped when he sat down at the table. Henry defensively admitted, “We were talking about
Theo
.” When dinner was over Andrew trailed behind them to the house, passive, listening with detachment as they tried, alternately, to process the death and distract themselves with their ordinary chatter.

FOR THE DAYS
following, the rain continued, dull, pounding, remorseless as a headache. The Hill came to resemble not so much a proud crest, the highest point south of the Urals, but a set of shoulders hunched against the downpour and the winds. Black umbrellas appeared in profusion; skinny-legged boys clutched them earnestly while balancing books and trying to keep hats on their heads; laughter vanished from the High Street, replaced by coughing. Temperatures dropped; chills invaded. As if in sympathy with their dead friend, boys became sick, dry-coughed or wet-coughed through the night, sprouted fevers. Older boys grumbled as rugger practices were canceled.
It’s like there’s nothing to do but sit and think of Theo
, griped Roddy, voicing the sentiments of many:
forced bloody mourning
. On the day of the memorial service for Theo—presided over by Father Peter in the chapel, and thronged with Lottites—it was the blackest day of all, cloud cover like a steel ceiling and gushing, pouring rain, an absurdly tragic scene; alleviated, momentarily, by the bright rhetoric and charm of the many speakers, but ruined again by the wet sobs of the smaller boys, the vindictive downpour awaiting them outside, their need to puddle-hop, without dignity, to dining hall after. And in the Lot, even the boy with the plummiest accent, a Fifth Former named Clegg-Bowra (who, it was known, personally owned a share in a Formula One team and took nothing, not lessons, not sport, seriously), began holding court in the snooker room and gossiping like a charwoman.
There’s a curse on the school,
he drawled nasally.
It’s never rained like this in the history of Harrow. At this rate it will still be raining by Speech Day, and we’ll all be here with our parents, sneezing. People are getting sick. Theo Ryder was just the first victim. I think they should close the school, personally,
he continued.
And where’s the communication? No one’s saying what killed Theo. For all we know it was a murder and some psychopath up in the church graveyard is lying in wait to throttle more Harrovians. They hate us, you know, the Kevins
, he said, using the school lingo—an Irish slur—for local, townie. Due to the chill, the heat was turned on, unseasonally; the pipes clanked and hissed. No one could get the damp out of their shoes. The felt in the snooker tables buckled.

No explanations were forthcoming about Theo’s death. Only a terse note, posted on the bulletin board in the Lot and signed by the assistant master, Macrae, requesting that everyone soldier on with their work while the coroner did his, and that anyone who desired to speak to a counselor should avail themselves of Mr. Macrae or Matron or Father Peter. Piers Fawkes was conspicuously missing from the list, and from sight; Matron suggested to some that he was busy with arrangements with the family, who were in South Africa, and with the police and coroner. Macrae seemed to be enjoying the spotlight, and Andrew suspected that the assistant master was using Fawkes’s absence as an opportunity to ingratiate himself with the boys, especially the older, more influential ones—St. John and Vaz and their fawning crew, with teas and bull sessions, visible through the window in Macrae’s kitchen, just to the side of the Lot in the assistant housemaster’s residence. Once Andrew passed under this window on his way to Mr. Montague’s lesson, and all the faces turned to him. Vaz, St. John, and Macrae in a tall-backed chair, with a smug but guilty look, like a duke caught trying out the king’s throne. There was a moment of mutual apprehension. Andrew suspected they were talking about him. He moved on, ducking his head against the rain.

Andrew avoided these gatherings; he avoided the common room, the dining hall; any place the whispers might arise,
there’s the American, the one who found Theo
, or the questions might resume
did you see what killed him? was there any blood
? He went straight to his room after lessons, even skipping meals, getting by on a handful of the biscuits Matron left for the boys in a wicker basket in the snooker room. He would sit cross-legged on his bed, spilling crumbs on the scratchy wool blanket. He knew that he should tell someone what he had seen, crazy as it was. Maybe information about a vanishing, skeletal, strangling figure could help the detectives. Or the family. Or someone. But he also knew the most likely outcome was that he would be branded mentally ill, or fatally damaged by the shock. So rather than speak out and add to the chaos and fear, he isolated himself. He did not call his parents. He did not check his email. He plunged into his lessons, abandoning TV and hallway chatter. His class on Roman Britain became, for him, an addictive serial; he wrote a five-sided essay on
Camulodunum, Fortress of the War God
. He read Chaucer for Mr. Montague and whiled away hours training himself to read the lilting, alliterative-inflected Middle English. From his window he watched the rain beat down on the Hill.

ONE NIGHT AT
dinner he found himself sitting across from Vaz. The table seemed tensed, poised.

“Hello,” said Vaz pointedly.

“Hey,” he replied.

Forks clinked on plates, but all eyes were on Andrew. Flickering between him and Vaz. It seemed that the house had something to say to Andrew and had appointed Vaz its unofficial spokesman.

“Everything all right?” asked Vaz, almost chummy, a little too loud.

“Not really,” said Andrew.

“It’s a tragedy,” agreed Vaz.

“Yeah, it is. Theo was an awesome guy.”

“People are saying he died of drugs,” said Vaz. “That he got from you.”

Andrew’s stomach dropped. He forced himself to swallow. The table fell quiet. “Why would anyone say that?” he asked.

“You were caught with drugs at your old school. They wouldn’t let you into university in America, so you came here.”

“What?” objected Andrew, weakly.

Vaz’s eyes narrowed. “I know Theo would never take drugs.”

“Not in a million years,” piped in St. John.

“So either it’s a lie,” continued Vaz, “or you pushed them on him.”

The food in Andrew’s mouth turned to cardboard. He glanced around the table. All the faces—Oliver, Henry, Roddy, Rhys, Nick, Leland, names he had struggled to learn—turned to him, watching for his reaction.

“I don’t do drugs anymore,” he said. “I was never that into it. Just a couple of times. I don’t see how you know this anyway.”

Vaz regarded him coolly, confidently. He definitely
knew
something. Andrew recalled that tableau: Vaz. Macrae. The others. Macrae would probably know the background of how Andrew got to Harrow. Andrew grew angry.

“If it wasn’t drugs,” sneered Vaz, “then what happened up there, with Theo? Why isn’t anyone saying?”

“If he died from drugs he got from me, you think I would still be sitting here?” Andrew countered, finding his voice.

Vaz, undaunted, shrugged. “What is it, then? You were there.”

The boys leaned in, watching Andrew.

He opened his mouth. The image of the pale face rushed at him. That baying gurgle. Andrew blanched. He pushed away from the table, infuriated and humiliated by Vaz’s ignorant, implacable fat face, those black eyes that stayed locked on him—amused. Andrew stood. He walked away from the Sixth Form table, shaking.

Psycho
he heard someone mutter.

Nothing like this happened till he came.

Don’t mind us we’ll clean up after you
called Vaz, shoving aside Andrew’s plate in a gesture of disgust.

THE SIXTH FORM
table at the Lot was not the only place where the absence of facts, and the ominous rain, led to speculation. It was a murder. A drug overdose. A murder by a drug gang. A mysterious illness.

These rumors led to calls home. Calls home produced parents’ calls to the school. These calls fed indignation—boys’ and masters’—about the unexplained situation, leading to talk of little else. In Ancient History:
Sir, was it drugs?
In Maths:
Sir, is the school hiding something?
In French:
Sir, were Kevins—sorry, the local townspeople—involved?
The masters bumbled. They hadn’t been briefed. The request to
let the family grieve privately . . .
to
honor the dead by keeping up the mission of the school . . .
just wasn’t working. Somebody must have told the headmaster it was getting absurd—nothing was getting done.

On the third day, a school meeting was called, in Speech Room.

SPEECH ROOM
WERE
words spoken with special emphasis at Harrow. They conveyed gravitas and pride. Speech Room, tucked into the hillside, was the heart of the school. The site of the main school plays, school meetings; in the summer it would be host to Speech Day, an annual event where Sixth Formers, about to matriculate, addressed students, parents, and important guests with prepared speeches, poetry, and soliloquies—a kind of valedictory-address-as-entertainment; a display of their maturity through oratory.

The day of the meeting, clumps of students pushed their way into Speech Room. Andrew entered alone. As he shuffled his way to a seat, he felt that silence descend again. Cold, inquisitive eyes bore into him. He wished he had waited for Roddy.

Speech Room was not a room, in fact, but an amphitheater, seating five hundred in tightly packed, high-backed chairs. Stairs climbed to the back walls and their stained-glass windows; slender columns rose to an ornate paneled ceiling. At the front rose a stage, and on it stood a podium. On this day, a day with a darkening sky, at eleven in the morning, the headmaster, Colin Jute, took the podium, draped in his black robes. Ramrod straight with a vigorous chin, light hair going grey swept in a side part, and a cauliflower ear (he’d been a rugby player, part of his personal legend). His jowls hung balefully. Next to him slumped Piers Fawkes, legs crossed, with several long nights written on his face. Next to Fawkes sat a thin man, just forty, with wavy brown hair and tortoiseshell glasses. He was the only person onstage not in beak’s robes, and the only one in the room not dressed in dark colors: he wore a seasonal light green sport coat and slacks. He held a thick folder. Not a detective. Too skinny and professional. A doctor? The man pivoted his head, birdlike, not masking his curiosity at the sight before him: several hundred boys, washed and unwashed, beefy, prepubescent, peach-skinned, brown, the full diversity of schoolboys despite their identical dress and narrow range of social class, fidgeting in unaccustomed silence. The great semicircular room—which usually bounced with joshing and chatter—sounded only with coughs and whispers and creaking chairs. The headmaster stepped forward to speak. The whispers faded instantly. Andrew sank into his seat. He felt sick. He closed his eyes and waited for the words.
Theo Ryder was strangled on the morning of September 9th. . . . If only someone had spotted his assailant, we might be safe today, and his killer brought to justice. . . .