through a hole in the floor. Doors lined both sides of the hall.
None bore locks, but all were closed.
At the third door on the left, Chas paused, knocked once, announced "Quilter," and shouldered it open a bit. He gave a quick look inside, said, "Jesus," and turned back to Lynley and Havers. His expression told them that something was wrong. He did his best to cover the momentary rupture in his facade by holding out his hand with an apologetic flourish. "Here it is.
Pretty bad. It's hard to believe four boys could...well, see for yourself."
Lynley and Havers entered. Chas remained by the door.
The room was mayhem, with magazines and books thrown here and there, papers underfoot, rubbish unemptied, unmade beds, cupboards gaping open, drawers crammed too full and overflowing, clothing strewn about in three of the four cubicles. Either a hasty search had been conducted in the room recently or the house prefect - whose job it was to see to it that the boys kept themselves in order - was not doing anything to make them toe the line.
Lynley considered the likelihood of both possibilities. As he did so, he saw Chas leave the dormitory, heard him opening and closing doors all down the hall, heard his voice murmuring in disbelief. Lynley had his answer.
"The house prefect, Sergeant. Do we have his name?"
Havers flipped back through her notebook, read, continued turning pages. "John Corntel said it was...Here. Brian Byrne. Is this his doing, sir?"
"More likely his undoing," Lynley replied. "Let's see what we have."
The dormitory was divided into cubicles, each cubicle defined by white painted pressed-wood boards which rose about five feet from the floor and provided a small degree of privacy. Contained within the cubicle's extremely limited space were a bed with two drawers built into its lower frame, a cupboard with the name of the cubicle's inhabitant fixed to it with tape, and whatever wall decoration the boy himself chose as his personal statement of ownership.
It was intriguing to see the difference between what Matthew Whateley had put upon his walls and what the other boys had chosen. In the cubicle identified as belonging to someone named Wedge hung a collection of rock and roll posters, revealing a rather eclectic taste in music. U2, the Eurythmics, Pink Floyd's The Wall, Prince, mixed with vintage photographs of the Beatles, the Byrds, as well as Peter, Paul, and Mary. In Arlens' cubicle, bathing beauties posed languidly, their bodies well-oiled and clothed in fantasy-producing swimming apparel, surrounded by sand, striding Amazon-like across the dunes, arching hard-nippled and with Freudian explicitness into the foaming brine. Smythe-Andrews, the inhabitant of the dormitory's third little niche, had devoted himself to a collection of photographs comprising a memorial to some of the more grisly scenes from the motion picture Alien. Anyone who had met a violent end was depicted in ghastly, stomach-turning detail. As was the alien himself, looking like a combination of chain saw, praying mantis, and what came out of the scientist's machine in The Fly.
The fourth cubicle, by the window, belonged to Matthew Whateley. His choice of decoration was photographs of locomotives - steam, diesel, and electric - from an assortment of countries. Lynley looked at them curiously. They were arranged neatly in rows on the wall above his bed. Across one had been written "choo-choo, little poof," a strange derogation for a young boy to leave hanging.
From the middle of the room, Havers said, "Less mature than the other boys. Everything else seems fairly typical to the normal thirteen-year-old."
"If thirteen-year-olds can ever be said to be normal," Lynley replied.
"True. What was up in your room at thirteen, Inspector?"
Lynley put on his spectacles to look at Matthew's clothing. "Reproductions of early Renaissance art," he replied absently. "I had a youthful devotion to Fra Angelico."
She laughed. "Sod you.""You doubt me, Sergeant?"
"Completely."
"Ah. Well, come and see what you make of this."
She joined him in the cramped confines of Matthew's cubicle where he had opened the cupboard. Like everything else, it was made of pressed wood, painted white, and, in keeping with the monastic atmosphere of Bredgar Chambers, it contained only two shelves and eight pegs for clothes. On the former were three clean white shirts, four pullovers in assorted colours, three jerseys, and a stack of T-shirts. On the latter hung trousers for both school and leisure wear.
On the floor were dress shoes, gym shoes, and scuffed-up casual shoes. Into a ball had been tossed his games clothes.
Havers, Lynley saw, assessed the facts