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Автор Колин Декстер

, vey or appeanng ocrore me courts or c k t oned (again b '. . au ·) y the pohce or being Interviewed by proba tion officers, social workers, or psychiatrists. Only rarely was his conduct less than positively disruptive; and that when some OVernight dissipation had sapped his wonted en thusiasm for selective subversion.

Always he sat in the front row, immediately to the right of the central gangway. This for three reasons. First, be-cause he was thus enabled to mm around and thereby the more easily to orchestrate whatever disruption he had in mind. Second, because (without ever admitting it) he was slightly deaf; and although he had little wish to listen to his teachers' lessons, his talent for verbal repartee was always going to be diminished by any slight mis-hearing. Third, because Eloise Dring, the sexiest girl in the Fifth Year, was so very short-sighted that she was compelled (refusing spectacles) to take a ring-side view of each day's proceedings. And Kevin wanted to sit next to Eloise Dring.

So there he sat, his long legs sticking way out beneath his undersized desk; his feet shod in a scuffed, cracked, de-crepit pair of winkle-pickers, two pairs of which had been bequeathed by some erstwhile lover to his mother--the lat-ter a blowsy, frowsy single parent who had casually con-ceived her only son (as far as she could recall the occasion) in a lay-by just off the Cowley Ring Road, and who now lived in one of a string of council properties known to the largely unsympathetic locals as Prostitutes Row.

Kevin was a lankily built, gangly-boned youth, with long, dark, unwashed hair, and a less than virile sprouting on upper lip and chin, dressed that day in a gaudily floral T-shirt and tattered jeans. His sullen, dolichocephalic face could have been designed by some dyspeptic E1 Greco, and on his left forearm--covered this slightly chilly day by the sleeve of an off-white sweatshirt--was a tattoo. This tattoo was known to everyone of any status in the school, including the Head; and indeed the latter, in a rare moment of comparative courage, had called Costyn into his study the previous term and demanded to know exactly what the ep-idermal epigram might signify. And Kevin had been happy to tell him: to tell him how the fairly unequivocal slogan ("Fuck 'em All") would normally be interpreted by anyone; even by someone with the benefit of a university education.

Anyway, that was how Kevin reported the interview.

Whatever the u'uth of the matter though, his reputation was now approaching its apogee. And with two sentences in a young offenders' unit behind him, how could it have been otherwise? At the same time, his influence, both within the circle of his immediate contemporaries and within the wider confines of the whole school, was significantly increased by two further factors. First, he even managed in some curious manner to exude a crude yet apparently irresistible sexuality, which drew many a girl into his magnetic field. Second, he was--had been since the age of twelve--a devotee of the Martial Arts; and under the tutelage of a diminutive China-man who (minor had it) had once singlehandedly left a gang of street-muggers lying pleading for mercy on the pavement, Kevin could appear, often did appear, an intimidating figure.