I spent quite a lot of time with the police that term. Serious, sharp-eyed police from London. When the STAGS were attacked they clearly pulled in the very best, not the bumbling country plods they’d hired to cover up Henry’s death. These guys were from the Counter-Terrorism Unit at Scotland Yard, and they meant business. Of course, as I’d been the one to evacuate the house, they’d immediately wanted to talk to me. And, by extension, Shafeen and Nel.
They didn’t like, not one little bit, that we’d burned the Monteagle Letter in the library of Cumberland Place, leaving no evidence that it ever existed, and even to me that did sound massively dodgy. For a time it seemed like the eye of suspicion would fall on us. But I was always treated well, and eventually they let me go, and I wondered if that was the work of Henry – if I was being protected by the de Warlencourts, who now regarded me as their saviour. I told the police about Bates, and the champagne that wasn’t champagne, but some nameless instinct prevented me from telling them anything about the figure in the Guy Fawkes mask who had ambushed Rollo, or the fact that I knew only one man who was that tall.
Abbot Ridley, in fact, had been positively angelic since we’d come back to school. He’d given us time off lessons, he’d kept our parents in the loop and he’d arranged extra coaching for the bits of the syllabus we’d missed while helping the cops with their enquiries. When the CTU finally drove away from the school in their unmarked cars for the last time, I watched them go from the gatehouse. The Abbot appeared at my shoulder and watched with me, his hands tucked into the sleeves of his habit in a curiously monkish posture. ‘And so, they go,’ he said. ‘And now the real work begins.’
I turned to look up at him. ‘Real work?’
‘To forgive yourself.’ He smiled down at me. ‘You shouldn’t blame yourself for what happened in Acre Wood.’
‘I know,’ I began, ‘but –’ Then I stopped. ‘Acre Wood?’ I said. ‘I never mentioned Acre Wood.’
The charming smile faltered. ‘The police –’
‘No,’ I said forcefully. ‘I never told them either. I never said a word about Acre Wood.’
He was the picture of innocence as I looked up at him. In the winter light his handsome features could have been carved out of marble, his curls backlit by the low sun. He looked like some sort of Renaissance angel out of A Room with a View. But I wasn’t buying the good-guy act this time. ‘And don’t tell me I’m mad, or crazy, or I’ve been under a lot of strain, because I’ve got to tell you, I’m pretty sick of hearing that.’
‘I would never say that to you,’ he said, seemingly with complete sincerity. ‘Whatever you may think, I am on your side.’
‘Prove it,’ I said.
‘How?’
Very clearly, so he could not mistake me or twist my words, I said: ‘Show. Me. Your. Thumb.’
I had him. He was cornered, checked like a fox corralled by the hounds. The colour drained from his face, and his hands stayed clasped determinedly within his sleeves. His reply, when it came, was entirely unexpected. Mimicking my delivery, he said, ‘Check. Your. Post. First.’
‘What?’
‘Greer,’ he said in quite a different voice, ‘we will come back to this, I promise.’ He sounded more direct, more urgent than his usual amused and laidback self. ‘But I think you should check your letters.’ He turned on his heel and stalked away, and there was nothing for me to do but head to the sixth-form Common Room to check my mail.