A dreadful suspicion shook Thomas, a suspicion so inconceivable that he could not articulate it. Farnham was the killer, wasn’t he? Farnham was the one they arrested. Farnham was the one with the bad temper and the bloodlust. Not someone else?
“When I saw the boy outside the movie theater in New York he reminded me of my stepson a little. Or maybe not. Maybe he reminded me of somebody else. This boy in New York was performing unspeakable sex acts for money, and when I saw him, I don’t know, I just went after him. I was going to stamp out sexuality at its source—not the females, they can’t help it, but the males, the undisciplined adolescent males. I twisted his neck. And you know, I imagined that I had solved a problem for just a little while. Put on your pants.”
He threw the jeans to Thomas, who missed the catch. He was trembling, though he was not even conscious of being afraid, only of needing to flee. Maybe he could break the glass in the door and get out that way. What could he use? Everything in the locker room seemed to be bolted down. He fumbled for his trousers and felt for the knife as he pulled the jeans up over his boxers.
“Are you missing this?” said McPhee, who reached into his own hip pocket and pulled out Thomas’s knife. He flipped open the largest blade. “You have to be careful with these little pocketknives,” he said. “You can cut in only one direction. If you try to pull the blade back and forth, it will close on you.” He lunged forward and grabbed Thomas’s towel off the bench. McPhee punctured the towel with the knife and pulled the blade along for a few inches.
“It’s sharp,” he said. “That’s good.” He threw the towel onto the floor.
“Do you understand what kind of danger you are in?” he asked.
“Yes sir.” Thomas sobbed once, trying to fight off the tears. He understood all at once that he was going to be killed here by a man who he had thought was his friend.
SCENE 8
At a few minutes past 6:00 in the evening Carol Scott stood in the living room of the Homestead and told the Somervilles what they had found.
“It’s not a long tunnel,” she said, “maybe twenty feet. It probably does come out in the boiler room of the gymnasium, but I can’t get through. The other side seems to be sealed off the way yours was. We can search for the door on the gym side before we resort to breaking it down. Whoever did it must have killed him outside the tunnel and then dragged him inside. We could see where he was dragged. So it was somebody who knew that this tunnel existed.”
Benjamin Warden sat silently and listened.
“Nobody knew about it,” said Horace Somerville.
“Farnham must have,” said Carol Scott. She had on jeans and a brown sweater and looked like someone from Middleburg who might have been out for a canter. “The place was just like his apartment. Too clean and tidy. No cobwebs, no dirt balls, no bugs to speak of.”
“Maybe Angus knew,” said Horace Somerville. “He liked to keep everything in the gym clean.”
The police had telephoned a mortician in town who would take the remains of Angus Farrier away in a heavy rubber bag. They were airing out the basement of the Homestead. “He’s been dead for several days,” said Carol Scott. “I’m sure he died on the same night he disappeared. The night of the Staines boy’s death.”
Horace Somerville asked if it was another broken neck. “No,” she said. “I think Mr.Farnham strangled him.” She held up to them a clear plastic bag. Through the film of the plastic they could see a thick cord crusted with brown. At the end of the cord was the dull metallic shine of a whistle.
“Angus Farrier was garroted with this cord. Does it look familiar to you?”
It was a coach’s whistle on a thick corded loop. They could see the crust clearly. Benjamin Warden turned away.
“I’m sorry about its appearance,” said Carol Scott. “It was stuck to his neck. Do you recognize it?”
Horace said he’d never seen Angus wearing a whistle.
Whistle. Warden could remember something about a whistle, somebody speaking, somebody complaining . . .
“Patrick McPhee lost his whistle,” said Warden.
“When?”
Warden was not sure. “I heard him mention it when I went to play practice. That was the day Cynthia died.”
“That’s it, then,” said Carol Scott. “Farnham stole McPhee’s whistle and used it to kill Farrier. Maybe the old man caught him killing the boy.”
Horace Somerville liked Carol Scott but did not like her reasoning. She was typical of young people, always wanting to finish the job in a hurry.
“Carol,” he said, “I would ask you to reconsider. How could Farnham have stolen this whistle when McPhee had it around his neck almost constantly?”
No one said anything for half a minute.
“I suppose he could have misplaced his whistle,” said Kathleen.
“Patrick McPhee has been on the scene of every death on this campus,” said Somerville.
Carol Scott had interviewed McPhee. He had flown to Boston over the Thanksgiving holidays. She had seen the records. Had she seen anything about his flight back? How far was it from Boston to New York?
“He lives on this side of the gym,” she said. “Could he have
