Майкл Ридпат - Fatal Error

A second later, Ingrid arrived at my shoulder. She looked down at the body on the pavement and screamed.

Ninetyminutes had lost its chairman.

July 1987, twelve years earlier, Dorset

I began running from the edge of the penalty area just as Guy kicked the ball, aiming for the far post. I leapt at the same time as Phil, the ’keeper. The ball drifted an inch above Phil’s outstretched fingers and struck my head, ricocheting between the posts and into the brambles guarding the ditch behind.

‘Yes! Nice one, David,’ Torsten cried. ‘Five — four. We win!’

I glanced over to Guy, who wore a quiet smile of satisfaction on his face. Guy seemed able to place a football anywhere on the pitch with perfect timing.

I trotted off to retrieve the ball from the brambles, and joined the others picking up items of discarded clothing and ambling back towards the house. It was a lovely evening. During the game, unnoticed by the players, the sky had turned to a deep blue-grey and the small puffs of cloud to inky black. Rooks kicked up a fuss in the copse running along the side of the playing field as we made our way down to Mill House, the converted watermill where forty of us boarded. The sprawling modern campus of Broadhill School itself was still visible a mile and a half over peaceful cow pastures to the east.

Evenings, which until that week had been crammed full of revision for exams, were suddenly free for pick-up games of football. Nearly all the O and A level exams had finished. I had only one maths paper left and thought my brain deserved a rest. In three weeks’ time my life at Broadhill would be over. The race from thirteen-year-old new boy to eighteen-year-old adult would be finished. At that moment, it seemed like a shame.

I caught up with Torsten and Guy. ‘Nice cross,’ I said.

Guy shrugged. ‘Your head is difficult to miss, Davo.’

We walked three abreast along the short stretch of country lane to the house.

‘I spoke to my dad earlier,’ Torsten said. Torsten Schollenberger was a tall, clean-cut German whose father owned a network of magazine publishing interests throughout Europe. ‘He wants me to work in his office over the summer. In Hamburg.’

‘What? That’s inhuman,’ said Guy. ‘After exams and everything?’

‘I know. And I’m going to college in Florida in September. I deserve a break.’

‘So, you won’t be coming to France?’

‘It doesn’t look like it.’

‘Man, that sucks. Can’t you just tell him to piss off? You’re eighteen. You’re an adult. He can’t make you do what you don’t want to do.’

‘Guy, you’ve met my father. He can do what he damn well likes.’

I walked next to them in silence. My parents were taking the caravan down to Devon again that summer. They were hoping I would come with them. I probably would. The caravan was very cramped, but I actually liked my parents and I liked Devon. I enjoyed striding over the moors with my father. He, too, had offered me a summer job working in his office, a small branch of a building society in a Northamptonshire market town. He would pay me sixty quid a week. I was planning to take it. I needed the money.

None of this, though, did I feel like mentioning to Guy and Torsten.

Broadhill was a unique school. It was one of the most expensive boarding schools in England and had superb facilities. But it also offered scholarships to a large minority of pupils, and not just for academic ability. I had an academic scholarship, but Phil, the goalkeeper, was an accomplished cellist from Swansea. I knew Guy’s father paid full whack, although Guy’s sporting skills at soccer, cricket and tennis could have secured him a sporting scholarship. Torsten probably paid double.

The result was an eclectic mix of boys and girls, from the super-rich to the quite modest, from geniuses to the almost illiterate, from international swimmers to concert pianists. There was also a fair quota of slobs, yobs, idlers and rule-breakers. Alcohol and tobacco were widespread. Other even more forbidden stimulants occasionally circulated. But for some reason, despite the presence of adolescent boys and girls together in one boarding school, there was very little sex.

I could never work out why. I made a few attempts to change this situation myself with very little success. There were, of course, school rules banning it, but it seemed to be the pupils themselves who enforced this celibacy. Eventually I developed a theory that might explain it, a sort of extension of Groucho Marx’s dictum that he didn’t want to belong to any club that would accept him as a member. There was a rigid and well-defined hierarchy of boys and girls in the school. It was beneath the dignity of an individual pupil to be seen with a member of the opposite sex at or below his or her level in the hierarchy. We all had to strive for higher. This meant a great deal of frustration for ninety-nine per cent of the school, and an embarrassment of choice for the lucky one per cent.

And who was at the top of this hierarchy? Well, Torsten was close, but right at the top of this totem pole was, of course, Guy.

He and I shared a room that year. Valentine’s Day is an embarrassment at any school, but it had been particularly humiliating for me that February. I had received one card, from a sad girl with glasses in my maths class who went on to become a top equities analyst at an investment bank. Guy received seventy-three. Most of them were probably from thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds he didn’t know, but even so. He had played the lead in an unofficial production of Grease the previous summer, and had made an impression on the female half of the school that had endured until the following February. Tall, dark and unremarkable, I knew I was no competition for Guy, but my ego, not for the first time, was crushed. What really annoyed me was that he didn’t even seem pleased. He took it as his due.

Although I shared a room with Guy, he was very discreet about his love life. I assumed that he had ‘gone all the way’, but he didn’t brag about it. His relationships did seem to form a pattern, though. He would be seen charming a gorgeous girl of sixteen or seventeen, chatting her up, making her laugh for a period of weeks, or even months, and then he would suddenly drop her. Within a couple of days he’d be chasing someone else.

His current interest lay with a girl called Mel Dean, who was also in her last year at school. She wasn’t as classically beautiful as some of his conquests, but I could see what drove him on. She wore tight clothes and a permanent soft pout that suggested availability, yet she had a reputation for chastity. ‘Fit but frigid’ as the schoolboy parlance would have it. For Guy, an irresistible combination.

I stayed up late that night, trying to fight my way through a few more pages of War and Peace . I now wonder at how foolish I was to try to read that book in the same term I was taking my A levels, but I had a self-image as an intellectual to protect.

Guy clattered into the room and got himself ready for bed. ‘Come on, Davo, I’m knackered. It’s past eleven. Can I turn the light out?’

‘Oh, all right,’ I said, in mock irritation. But in truth I had been reading the same page for ten minutes, and it was time to put it out of its misery. The book fell with a thud to the floor by my bed and I lay back on my pillow. Guy turned out the light and flopped on to his.

‘Davo?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Do you want to come to my dad’s place this summer?’

At first I didn’t think I had heard right. The idea of Guy inviting me to stay with him and his father in the South of France came as a total surprise, a shock in fact. We liked each other, even respected each other, but I had never counted myself as one of Guy’s friends. Or not that kind of friend. Guy hung around with the likes of Torsten, or Faisal, a Kuwaiti prince, or Troy Barton, son of Jeff Barton, the film star. The kind of people whose families had millions of pounds and several homes scattered around the world. Who met each other in Paris or Marbella. Not the kind who went to Devon in a caravan.