A Bit on the Side Read Online Free Page A

stood in for one of the others, not even wanting to be paid back.
    She rose this morning at half past ten, her usual Wednesday time. She read a colour supplement while the kettle boiled. She opened the back door and stood there in her nightdress, shooing away the cat that was a nuisance. Stacpoole used to come to her on Wednesday mornings, the only one who ever had, the only one who in all the years had ever managed to have a free period then, eleven to a quarter to twelve. She remembered Stacpoole returning to the school long afterwards with a woman they said would be his wife, pointing out to her this place or that. She remembered wondering if she’d been pointed out herself.
    She stood a little longer, relishing the soft, fresh air. Then the smell of toast drew her back into her kitchen.
    *
    They made coffee in the quarry and drank it out of jampots. They drank it very sweet but without milk because milk was a nuisance. Then, lying on their backs in the sun, they smoked.
    Leggett, meanwhile, crept back to his House, simulating lameness for as long as he estimated he could be seen. He thought he had a cracked rib but Forrogale, claiming medical knowledge, had said no, having poked it with his fingers. ‘Definitely not,’ Forrogale had said, but Leggett was not sure about that. They’d picked on him because he was underhand: they’d said so, and Leggett knew he was. None the less, he was innocent. He wouldn’t have touched one of their hideous jackdaws, much less taken in his hand a head with a beak that could snap at you.
    ‘He didn’t do it,’ Accrington said, breaking a long silence, and one at a time the others agreed. Not that duffing up Leggett was in the least to be regretted.
    ‘Who?’ Napier asked, and Olivier didn’t say the girl.
    ‘Unless it was Dynes,’ Macluse said.
    They all thought about that except Olivier. Dynes was outside the order of things; they could not duff him up or in any way harass him; they could not so much as speak to him about the matter, for although the handyman was aware that jackdaws were kept he would most likely counter the accusation by revealing what he had previously been silent about. He was a touchy man.
    ‘I doubt in any case it was Dynes,’ Accrington said. ‘This doesn’t have Dynes’s fingerprints.’
    Some years ago a boy had hanged himself but had not succeeded in taking his life. It was established afterwards that he had not intended to, since the noose he had prepared had never tightened, one foot pressed into a hollow in the tree he’d chosen taking all the weight. The boy had not, though, remained at the school but had been sent home, considered unbalanced. This was spoken of now, since it was surely some similar individual who had killed the birds. The names of the unstable were bandied about, recent behaviour of new suspects discussed. Olivier remained silent. He was the smallest of the boys though not the youngest, his dark hair in a fringe above a sallow complexion. His looks stood out among those of his companions, a delicacy about him that the others could not claim. There was – or so it seemed when Olivier was there as an example of how it might be better done – a carelessness in how the others had been made. Adolescence was marked in them by jacket sleeves too short, unruly hair and coarsened voices, blemished skin beneath beginners’ stubble. Yet none particularly noticed that Olivier had escaped this prelude to man’s estate, the gangling awkwardness that his friends accepted without regret for what was left behind.
    The last of the coffee was drunk, cigarette butts thrown into the embers of the fire before the charred remains of sticks were scattered. In a body, the boys returned to the school, then to the barn that had been their jackdaws’ home. Hambrose, who knew the conventions of the school’s farm through assisting in the work there, made a detour to collect a spade and advised on where it was best to dig a common grave. One by