The Twist of a Knife

‘I need to describe my younger brother to you. Up to the age of nine – before he left London – he was a very quiet boy. He loved reading. He did well at school. He had plenty of friends. Harriet Throsby described him as spoilt and although it’s not a word I would have used, he was certainly indulged. This was because to all intents and purposes he was an only child. My parents always used to say he was an afterthought – although he was much loved and cherished.

‘Things changed almost as soon as he arrived at Moxham Heath. You can imagine how difficult it was for him. As I’ve explained, I was away. He’d lost all his London friends and he was having difficulty making new ones. My parents were launching Red Button in America and they were spending more and more time abroad. Stephen had a lovely nanny, an Australian girl who had moved to Wiltshire with the family, and she did the best she could. But looking back, I would be the first to admit that he was neglected. Things happened very quickly and nobody noticed until it was too late.

‘Moxham Heath Primary School had a policy of taking in boys and girls from as wide a catchment area as possible. They didn’t just want the offspring of local squires and bankers, and I’m sure this is something to be applauded. One of these boys, however, exerted a malign influence on Stephen almost from the start. His name was Wayne Howard and he lived on an estate just outside Chippenham, about eight miles away. He had no experience of village life and would probably have been much happier in a larger town. Nonetheless, he was bussed in every day and he and Stephen became friends.’

He shook his head sadly.

‘It’s hard to believe that they were just nine and ten years old when they first met. They were children! But they formed what you might call a gang of two, with Wayne very much the ringleader, and soon they were out of control, always getting into trouble with the teachers at school, the neighbours, even the police. On one occasion they were reported for shoplifting from the village store, a place called the Ginger Box. After that, my parents went into the school and demanded the two boys be separated, but it was easier said than done in a small community. Really, that was when they should have seen the writing on the wall and taken Stephen back to London. But, as I’ve said, they were preoccupied and were inclined to think that “boys will be boys”, that it was good for Stephen to have met someone of his own age and that eventually things would sort themselves out.

‘It was a decision that led, inexorably, to the death of their teacher, Major Philip Alden.

‘He was an ex-soldier, born in the village. He’d fought in the Falklands and when he left the army he trained to be a teacher and worked for a few years in Trowbridge before he applied for the job at Moxham Heath Primary School. He was the deputy head: getting on a bit, mid-sixties and eccentric, exactly the sort of character you’d expect to find in a little Wiltshire village. Very much into cricket. Ran a chess club. Kept a bust of Cicero in his study. It was a solid thing, made of marble. I believe he had inherited it from his father.

‘Philip Alden was what you might call old school. He believed in discipline – not surprising, given his army background – and he came down hard on the children who didn’t keep up with their work or who misbehaved in class. It wasn’t long before he had both Stephen and Wayne in his sights. Things came to a head during the spring term. They were accused of doing something very stupid and unpleasant. They defaced a number of books in the library – tore out pages and scribbled obscenities in the margins. They both denied it, but he punished them by making them miss out on a trip to Bath Spa. I know it all sounds very trivial, describing it to you in this way, but in the end it was anything but.

‘Wayne and Stephen decided to get their revenge by playing another trick on the major, this one the oldest in the book. It was Wayne’s idea, of course. They sneaked into his study and balanced the bust of Cicero on top of the door, leaving it ajar. God knows how they got it up there because it weighed a ton, but there were a lot of books in the room, some of them on high shelves, and Alden used a small stepladder to climb up and down, so I presume they were able to use that. Later, they both claimed that it was just a joke and they didn’t want to hurt anyone, but the long and the short of it was that Alden came into the room, the bust fell on him, fracturing his skull, and the next day he died.