Mr Wilmott Gets Old School Page 12

  “Thank you,” Crystal said, abandoning Emily on the couch in order to make herself a cup of coffee.

  With her bantering companion absent, Emily stared down at the carpet for a minute, then glanced at Maui with an awkward smile.

  He returned it with one of his own. “You want to know about Oakhaven School, is that right?”

  She nodded, clearing her throat as a test before speaking. “The police found the body of Frederick Wilmott buried on the grounds, and we wondered if you remember him from school.”

  “You’re not with the police.” Maui’s voice was flat, a statement not a question.

  Emily shook her head.

  “No offence, but why’re you here instead of them?”

  Crystal came back and sat down. When Emily shot her a pleading glance, she just buried her nose in the coffee cup.

  Why are we here?

  The ghost stood in the corner of the room. No, that wasn’t right. He skulked there. He lurked. He hunkered down and laid in wait.

  “A woman at the old people’s home circled your name in a school roll, along with a few others. I thought it might have bearing on the circumstances. I’ve just helped a friend of mine move into a room that looks straight out over the burial spot.”

  Maui sucked in his breath and shook his head. “No wonder you want it sorted. I can’t imagine having that as a view.” He pointed to his own window. “Looking out on that marker is bad enough.”

  Emily followed his finger and saw a small white cross set up on the opposite side of the road, a small bunch of plastic flowers beneath it. Roads the length of the country were dotted with similar adornments. The sign of a life lost to the road toll.

  “Who was it?”

  For a second, Emily thought the man was asking who the marker outside his window was for, then realised her mistake. “The woman’s name is Gladys Angel.”

  Maui chewed on the side of his bottom lip. “I remember Gladys. She used to hang around with another girl, Trish or Tricia, something like that.”

  “Were there many girls at the school?”

  “Half and half.” At Emily’s expression, he laughed. “I know it’s not meant to be that way, but back then there were just as many girls getting into trouble as boys were.” He shrugged and pulled his mouth down. “Not that the things we were doing would be considered abnormal now. I swore at a teacher and that was enough to have me packed up and shipped out. It’s not much of a distance now between here and Pinetar, but back then my parents didn’t have a car and buses were expensive. I didn’t see my family more than once or twice a year.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Emily scratched the back of her right hand where her skin crawled. “It must’ve been awful.”

  “I joked for a long time it was no different to those fancy Englishmen who send their kiddies off to boarding school as soon as they can read and write. It hurt, though.” Maui sat back in his chair, rubbing beneath his right eye. “For ages, I thought the reason my family didn’t visit was because they hated me for what I’d done.”

  “I’m sure that isn’t true,” Crystal said.

  “Nobody visited anyone much at the school.” Maui shifted on the seat, gripping the armrests tightly. “Anyway, the girls were there for different reasons. Flirting with boys, kissing behind the bike sheds, that sort of stuff. For the boys involved, they’d get a wink or a pat on the back, but the girls would be sent to Oakhaven, or worse.”

  Emily stared across at the ghost who glowered. “Who else do you remember from that time?”

  Maui stared out the window again, for so long Emily was on the verge of prompting him when he finally answered. “I hung around with Freddie, Billy, Aaron, and Tim. Sometimes there’d be other lads join in a game if we were playing bull rush or rugby, but for the most part, it was just us five.”

  He turned his attention back to Emily and Crystal. “They were the same age as me. Considering some lads were a lot older, we needed to club together if we wanted to avoid a beating.”

  “Were the other lads rough?” Emily wanted to hold her hands over her ears, squeamishness abounding, but she forced her fingers to stay clasped in her lap.

  “We were all rough.” Maui laughed and tapped his forehead. “The lot of us were young and angry and hurt. If somebody said the wrong thing at the wrong time, we could all go off. A school full of powder kegs, it was.”

  Crystal pursed her lips. “Did you hang around with Astrid and Gladys as well?”

  “I didn’t. At that age, I didn’t really understand what girls were for, not really. Freddie spent a lot of time with Astrid. They were probably the closest thing the school had to a couple, at the time.”

  Again, he shifted position in his chair, this time straightening up and perching on the forward edge. “There wasn’t that much opportunity for anything like that. The teachers kept an eye on us all the time, and when we finished class, the monitors took over. One step out of line, and you’d end up in the box.”

  Emily didn’t want to ask. Didn’t need to know. She was appalled when she heard her own voice enquire, “What was that?”

  “Exactly what it sounds like. The school could discipline us physically, but a lot of the lads were just as big as the teachers. The headmaster devised a cooling-off system. We were locked into a small cupboard until he felt we were apologetic enough.”

  Crystal jumped up and walked to the window, her elbow edging straight into the ghost, who didn’t bother to move. “I can’t imagine,” she said, clearly picturing it in her mind.

  “Those names you mentioned,” Emily said, wanting desperately to move the conversation along so she could return home. Hopefully, still able to sleep at night. “Gladys circled them on the school roll as well. Do you know what happened to them?”

  Maui’s face turned ashen. “It was a very long time ago.” With a grunt, he pulled himself up out of his seat and strode towards the kitchen. “I might fetch myself a coffee after all. This talk is making me drowsy.”

  “Making him jittery, more like,” Crystal whispered, crossing back to her seat. “Did you see the way his legs were trembling?”

  “I guess I should back off a little.”

  “Or charge ahead.” Crystal pursed her lips squinted in thought. “If the talk upsets him, he’ll become more entrenched in avoiding those parts of the conversation the longer we leave him. Repeat your question when he comes back and press him for an answer.”

  But when Maui came back into the room, he held a box of photographs along with his coffee. “I keep these in the top cupboard and haven’t brought them down for ages,” he said as he settled back in his chair. “There’s a good one of Gladys if I remember rightly.”

  Maui’s memory was spot on. He handed across a picture, the yellow tones overdeveloped to give it a golden sheen. “That was her, just before she graduated and headed off to work. The headmaster found her a spot in the local butcher’s shop.”

  Everything about the young woman in the picture was thin and sharp. Pointed elbows, angled shoulders, and a chin like a blade. If her eyes hadn’t been narrowed with suspicion, she’d have been strikingly pretty. The expression took her one notch past that point, turning her vulpine.

  “How old was she?” Emily handed the photograph across to Crystal who gave a faint gasp of recognition. “Sixteen, seventeen?”

  “Sixteen, I’d guess. At that age, we could get a job, but the shops still paid out at the youth rates, so we were cheap labour. Before most pay equality laws as well, so Gladys would’ve been on a slim wicket.”

  “Could she have stayed on at Oakhaven longer, if she’d wanted?”

  Maui snorted. “Nobody ever wanted to, so I doubt anybody ever asked.” He frowned at the next photograph. “This is the lads, all together.” He turned it over and nodded. “The names are written on the back.”

  The picture looked similar to the one in Gladys’s room, but this one missed out the girls. Either they’d already left the frame or were waiting to join. Emily sho
wed the scribbles to Crystal.

  “Freddie Wilmott, Maui Hilliburton, Billy Gibbons, Aaron Matterway, Tim Burt.”

  “That’s us. My group.”

  He shuffled through a few more photographs, setting those aside. “Here’s another one. This time we’ve got the girls in there, too.”

  “Astrid Wallheimer, Gladys Angel, Trish Harper.”

  Maui nodded. “That one must’ve been before Astrid started working in the dairy after school. The headmaster Samuel lectured us all about how lazy we were in comparison.” He puffed out his lips. “As if they’d let a Maori boy from the bad school work in their precious shop. I couldn’t go in there to spend money without them making me turn out my pockets.”

  “Did she change her hair or something?”

  The man stared back at Emily blankly and she blushed.

  “You said it must be before she started work there. How can you tell that just by looking?”

  “Oh,” Maui nodded, a nostalgic smile returning to his lips. “She got fat after. Too many sweets while the store owner wasn’t watching. We would’ve given her more stick for it, but she snuck some out for us as well.”

  Unlike Gladys, Astrid was a sturdier and more rounded build. Emily could easily imagine the pounds piling onto her, turning the girl into a stocky woman, ready to work the fields and bear children.

  “Who took the photos?” Crystal glanced over to Maui with her usual easy smile. Emily had been around her long enough to know it hid a mind like a steel trap. “If all your friends are in them?”

  “It would’ve been matron. She could tell you off until your ears bled if you didn’t tuck the corners of your bed right in the morning, but she was a good stick.” He held his hand out, and Crystal handed back the precious images with some reluctance. “She must’ve got them developed at the same time as some official ones. They were always getting up to line up in our best clothes, to make out the school was transforming us into little angels.”

  Maui stared hard at each photograph as he replaced them all in the box, lining them up so they lay flat. When he put the lid on, he brushed it with one hand, giving it a pat before he placed it on the table.

  His face collapsed into sadness as he turned back to the women, tears gleaming in his eyes. “You’re not here about Freddie, are you?” He gave a long sigh, his chest deflating. “I guess the police found the bodies of my mates, then.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  After their answer, Maui fell silent for a few minutes. Emily glanced over to the ghost, still standing in the corner, silent and dreary. Crystal shifted on her seat, fidgeting and clicking a fingernail against her teeth.

  “What happened?” Emily asked when the silence grew louder than she could stand. “Who hurt those boys?”

  “They hurt themselves,” Maui said. He wiped a hand over his forehead, his cuff absorbing the thin layer of sweat. With a grunt, he shifted his weight over to his left side and lifted the shirt up on his right.

  A scar mottled the skin under his ribcage, drawing a jagged line towards his belly button, then fading away.

  “I got that in the same incident where the boys died,” Maui said, his voice catching. He let the shirt drop back into place, turning his face away from the women. “We all should’ve known better, but we were trying to do something nice.”

  “The oak tree?” Emily thought of Gladys’s panicked voice, cut it down. Fetch the axe. Chop the tree down.

  “Yeah, that’s the one. It gave the school its name.” With a wipe over his eyes, Maui turned back to them, giving an awkward laugh. “Well, it didn’t but the pretentious git who ran the place took the name from there.”

  “I saw some old cut marks in the trunk,” Emily said, frowning as she brought the picture up in her mind's eye. “But it didn’t go all the way through.”

  “No. It never came close to coming down. I don’t know how much bigger it’s grown over the years, but it was a serious size even way back then. One of our tasks on a Saturday during the autumn was to pick up all the acorns so they wouldn’t dull the lawnmower blade when the gardener got to work.”

  “Like squirrels,” Crystal said, wrinkling her nose. “I used to try to eat acorns just to see why they bothered to store them in all the children’s books I read.”

  “The New Zealand squirrel.” Maui shook his head. “I can tell you it’s a thankless job. Even as a teen, my back would ache after an hour, bending over to pick them up from the grass. The thought of doing it now…” He trailed off, ending the words with a shudder.

  Emily cleared her throat. “Who took an axe to it? Was it the gardener?”

  “No. That man had more sense than the one who ran the place.” Maui shook his head and took his and Crystal’s cups back into the kitchen. When he returned to the drawing room, he had a box of tissues in his hand. “Just in case.”

  “Were you picking up acorns on the day…?” Emily didn’t know enough about the incident to fill in the blanks. After a minute with no response, she tried, “On the day it happened?”

  “No. It was well into winter by then. We’d stopped getting the frosts in the mornings, but the weather was bitterly cold. We had grey cloud every day for a week, so the sun didn’t stand a chance.”

  Maui shifted in his chair again, leaning his head back and closing his eyes. “It was a Thursday—a few hours after classes ended—and we climbed up the tree to cause a distraction. Worked a treat as well since the head’s office looked straight out over the grounds. We swung onto the biggest branch, probably a good six to eight feet off the ground and sat in a line.”

  Emily was about to ask what they were causing a distraction from, then thought better of it. Maui seemed lost in a reverie and she didn’t want to break the spell. It might be the one chance she had to hear the story.

  “You know how some days, even the gentlest breeze feels like it’s full of sharp knives, cutting you straight to the bone? The afternoon was like that. While I was sitting in the tree, all I kept thinking about was Matron stoking the fire in the common room and how great it would be to sit in front of it.”

  The old man cracked open one eye and fixed it on Emily. “I used to shove my butt as close to the fire guard as I could, sometimes pressing right against it. There’s a scar somewhere I’m not going to show you, with a crisscross from the iron. It got so hot after hours pressing against it, my shorts burned clean through.”

  He laughed and shifted position again, now staring up at the stucco ceiling. “I was more scared of what matron would do than I was worried about the pain. If I’d gone to her, she might’ve dunked me in some cold water before the burn set. Instead, I hid in my room and swapped out my woollen pants with my summer shorts and hoped no one would ever see it.”

  Crystal winced. “I’m enough of a baby when I get steam on my fingers.”

  “Yeah, it wasn’t pleasant. Especially when it blistered. That shows you how scared I was of the rough side of Matron’s tongue.”

  As Maui fell into silence again, Emily exchanged a glance with Crystal. The medium raised her eyebrows, jerking her head toward the man. Emily shrugged her shoulders and tilted her head.

  “What happened in the tree?” Crystal finally asked, losing the battle of wills. “You said, you were all perched on a branch.”

  “We jeered at the headmaster. Samuel didn’t like us at the best of times, and we thought having a line-up of boys sticking their tongues out and mugging him would drive him crazy. Instead, he closed the blinds to his office window so we couldn’t see inside. For a long time, we thought he was just ignoring us.”

  Again, Crystal did the prompting. “He wasn’t?”

  “While we were staring at his shuttered window, he went out to the gardener’s shed down the back of the schoolyard and grabbed an axe. When we nudged each other, about to clamber down—it really was freezing up there and the school-issued uniform didn’t come with heavy jackets—he came running. We thought he’d completely flipped his lid when he attacked the bas
e of the tree.”

  “He cut it while you were still up there?” Emily’s mouth gaped in horror.

  “Yeah. We were far enough off the ground that we didn’t want to jump, and even if we’d been low enough, who wanted to drop down and face that madman? We clung to each other and the branch. It shook with every blow of the axe.”

  A tear trickled down his cheek, but Maui didn’t raise a hand to wipe it away. His eyes may have been fixed on the ceiling, but he appeared to be looking at something much older, happening further away.

  “When the axe didn’t work fast enough, Samuel jumped up and swung at our legs. Not seriously, I don’t think. Looking back on it, he probably just wanted to scare us to teach us a lesson. It’s hard to teach someone a lesson when you’re locked up for cutting their legs off.”

  Emily’s throat was so tight it didn’t want to let her question out, but she forced it. “Did he hit any of you?”

  “No. He might’ve nicked the sole of our shoes, but that was all.” Maui’s eyelid twitched, jumping in time with the pulse in his neck. “We weren’t thinking clearly by that stage. We just wanted to get away. When we moved too far along the branch, it cracked at the trunk. We all fell to the ground.”

  Crystal gasped, though Emily felt sure she must have known which way the story was headed. “Were you hurt?”

  Both Emily and Maui turned curious gazes towards the medium. After a second, she blushed and nodded. “Sorry, I got caught up and forgot.”

  “I was lucky,” Maui continued. “Didn’t even break a bone. I think I landed on top of Billy, but I’m not sure. He was next to me so if I did, he probably saved my life by breaking my fall. The ground was frozen solid. Harder than concrete.”

  A headache thumped at Emily’s temples, a jagged line pulsing across her vision. “And the other’s died?”

  Maui’s response was so quiet, she had to strain to pick it up. Even though the truth was obvious, she still wanted to have it confirmed.

  “Why didn’t you call the police?”

  The man laughed, his tears now flowing freely. “I was a teenager in an institution. Do you really believe they let me have access to the phone?” He turned a pitying gaze towards her, and Emily put the pieces together.