The Headmaster's Wife(126)

“It won’t be,” Mark said. “There’s way too much money behind it. Just watch.”

“I will. Do me a favor and answer a few questions for me since you think you’re feeling so much better.”

“Shoot. It’s got to be better than sitting here waiting to see if they declare Windsor a war zone and send in Christiane Amanpour.”

Gregor stood up and went to the window. He was, Mark realized, very tense. He just hid it well so that it showed up only in the stiffness of his back. Mark began to feel a little uncomfortable. He wasn’t as irrepressible as he was trying to appear. He was scared to death on about seven levels. He just didn’t want to live his life that way. Fear caught up to you eventually, if you let it get to you at all. He’d seen that more times than he could count.

“Tell me again about the night Michael Feyre died,” Gregor said. “You were in the library, in the same nook where Edith Braxner was last night. You were doing what again—reading something.”

“Reading a medical encyclopedia,” Mark said. “Yeah. Well, you know, I didn’t know I was being poisoned; I thought I was sick.”

“And you were sick, that’s right, isn’t it? You weren’t feeling well, and you weren’t thinking well.”

“Right,” Mark said. “That’s why I thought what I saw could have been a hallucination. I mean, I’d never had a hallucination before, but with everything else that had been happening to me, I thought it was perfectly possible. And I didn’t know the half of it. It’s only in the last twenty-four hours that I’ve realized just how odd I had been. People around here must think I’m a real idiot.”

“We’ll deal with that later,” Gregor said. “You saw this figure on the ground, dressed in black. You went out to see who it was. You found nothing. Who did you tell about it?”

“Philip Candor, like I said,” Mark said. “I ran into him going back to Hayes House. And then I got confused, like Isaid. I was sort of wandering around, and I’d forget where I was going. And I went back again. I think I talked to half a dozen other people.”

“Edith Braxner?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Who else?”

“Well, I talked to Cherie when I got back to the dorm, right before I went up to my room. That’s because Sheldon was screaming at me again. I was back late or not acting the way I was supposed to act or something. I didn’t go into a lot of detail, or anything, I just sort of mentioned that I thought I’d seen somebody passed out in the snow because otherwise I just looked like an irresponsible jerk. You know. So I said I’d seen somebody and gone to look, and I didn’t think I was bad. And then, you know.”

“You went upstairs and found the body.”

“Right. I think of a body as something on a slab, you know. But I guess that’s what it was—Michael’s body.”

“Do you know what autoasphyxiation erotica is?”

“That thing where guys hang themselves so they can jerk off?” Mark said. “Yeah, I know what that is, and don’t ask. Yeah, I think Michael did that, sort of. But only sort of. According to him, masturbation was for losers.”

“Masturbation was for losers, but he practiced autoasphyxiation?”

“Not exactly. He got girls to do things for him. While he was, you know. This is according to what he said, though, and you can’t trust that. I mean, let’s face it, guys lie all the time, especially about sex. Michael said he’d get girls to tie him up like that and then blow him, you know. So it wasn’t just him himself. He’d blackmail them into it.”

“Blackmail them how?”

“Well,” Mark said, “he sold drugs to people, right? At least he said he did, and other people said they bought them from him, so I guess we can believe that. He’d threaten them and tell them he’d tell the administration and they’d get expelled or something, you know. And not just the drugs. He had dirt on just about everybody. But it can’t be that autoasphyxiation thing anyway, can it? Not even if he was doing it to himself.”

“Why not?” Gregor asked.

“Well,” Mark said, thinking that if Gregor was the great detective he was supposed to be, he should already know, “if there had been, there would have been semen, wouldn’t there? And his dick would have been hanging out Excuse my language. But his dick wasn’t hanging out when I found him. If it had been, I’d have noticed it. And I haven’t heard anything about there being semen.”

Gregor looked impressed. “Very good. There was no semen mentioned in the medical report, no. As for his, uh, penis being exposed, if he was engaged in the act with another person, that person could have—”