A Perfect Spy

Life began with Lippsie, Tom, and Lippsie happened long before you came along or anyone else did, and long before Pym was what the Firm calls of marriageable age. Before Lippsie all Pym remembered was an aimless trek through different-coloured houses and a lot of shouting. After her everything seemed to flow in the one unstoppable direction and all he had to do was sit in his boat and let the current carry him. From Lippsie to Poppy, from Rick to Jack, it was all one jolly stream, however much it wriggled and divided itself along the way. And not only life but death began with her as well, for it was actually Lippsie’s dead body that got Pym going, though he never saw it. Others saw it, and Pym could have made the journey because it was in the bell yard and no one covered it for ages. But the little fellow was going through a squeamish and self-centred period at the time and had a notion that if he didn’t see it she might not be dead after all, but pretending. Or that her death was a judgment upon himself for taking part in the recent killing of a squirrel in the empty swimming-pool. The hunt had been led by a wall-eyed maths master called Corbo the Crow. When the squirrel was safely trapped, Corbo sent three boys down the pool ladder with hockey sticks, and Pym was one. “On you go, Pymmie. Give it to him!” Corbo urged. Pym had watched the crippled creature limp towards him. Scared by its pain he had caught it a great swipe, harder than he meant. He had seen it catapult to the next player and lie still. “Good man, Pymmie! Good shot.”

His other thought was that the Sefton Boyd gang had made the whole thing up to tease him, always possible. So as a stopgap Pym gave himself the desk job of gathering descriptions and forming, in that first rush before the school went silent, a mind’s picture of her that was probably as clear as anybody’s. She lay in a running position, sideways on the flagstones, her forward hand punched towards the finishing line and her rear foot pointing the wrong way. Sefton Boyd, who made the original sighting and alerted the Headmaster during school breakfast, actually thought she was running, he said, until he saw the wonky foot. He thought she was doing a special exercise on her side, a sort of kicking, bicycling exercise. And he thought the blood round her was a cape or a towel that she was lying on until he noticed how the old chestnut leaves stuck to it and wouldn’t blow away. He didn’t go close because bell yard was out of bounds, even to sixth-formers, on account of the dangerous roof above it. And he didn’t throw up, he boasted, because us Sefton Boyds own simply masses of land and I’ve done a lot of shooting with my father and I’m accustomed to seeing blood and innards all the time. But he did run up sixth-form staircase to the tower window, which the police said later was where she had fallen from; she must have been leaning out to do something. And it must have been something urgent and important she was leaning out for because she had been wearing her nightdress, having bicycled up the mile-long drive from the Overflow House in the middle of the night. Her bicycle with its tartan cover on the saddle was still leaning against the dustbin shed behind the kitchens.

Sefton Boyd’s theory, excitedly culled from his father’s life-style, was that she was drunk. Except that he didn’t call her “she” but “Shitlips,” which was his gang’s witty play on Lippschitz. But then again, as he had been suggesting for some time, Shitlips may have been a German spy who had slipped up the tower to send messages after blackout, sir. Because from tower window you can see right the way across the valley to the Brace of Partridges, so it would be a wizard place for signalling to German bombers, sir. The trouble was she had no light with her except her bike lamp, which was still securely on the handlebars. So perhaps she had hidden it in her vagina, which Sefton Boyd claimed to have seen clearly because the fall had ripped her nightdress off.