So far as the senior master in a boys’ school can be popular, Mr. Burke was well liked and his remark about “the moth’s tooth and Old Father Time” had gone down well—a little too well, in fact, for the comfort of Mr. Scaife and other inexperienced masters.
“Sir, do moths have teeth, sir?”
“How could they eat, you ass, if they didn’t have teeth? They couldn’t, could they, sir?”
“Tortoises don’t have teeth. I’ve got one, so I know.”
“Sir, if a moth got into Old Father Time’s beard, would it nest there, sir?”
“Do spiders eat moths, sir, as well as flies?”
“No, you ass! Spiders eat their mates.”
“Sir, are spiders cannibals, then? Cor! Suppose my mum ate my dad!”
“Do cannibals eat their own family, sir, or only their friends and enemies?”
“Pity someone doesn’t eat you!”
“Sir, why did Mr. Burke talk about midshipmen, sir?”
“Snotties, you fool. Don’t you know any history? I bet you haven’t even got a clean handkerchief!”
This humming from the hornets’ nest came to an end with the entrance of Margaret Wirrell with a message from the headmaster for Mr. Scaife. Would Mr. Scaife please set his form to work and go down to Mr. Ronsonby’s office.
Mr. Scaife gladly complied, leaving his form captain in charge of the class, but his relief at being able to leave his devil’s brood behind him was short-lived.
“What does he want me for?” he asked, when he and Margaret were in the corridor. Her answer was hardly reassuring.
“Parent.”
“Oh, Lord! Irate?”
“I expect so. They don’t come up for much else.”
“This is Mr. Scaife,” said the headmaster. “Scaife, this is Mr. Travis.”
Mr. Travis, full of bluster, as nervous parents often are when they come to a school with a complaint, burst out, “Why wasn’t I told my boy was not at school? He’s playing hooky, I suppose.”
“I have no idea,” said Mr. Scaife. “I do my job, which is to mark a boy absent and wait for a note from his parents. Travis was not present on Monday and has failed to turn up again this morning. I was about to report to Mr. Ronsonby that I had received no note from you when I was asked to come down to his room.”
“You must have guessed Donald was truanting. Why wasn’t I notified?”
“My dear Mr. Travis,” said Mr. Ronsonby, “it is no part of Mr. Scaife’s duties to report absentees to their parents unless the circumstances are special or suspicious. Your son is not a troublesome boy. There was no reason for us to assume that you were not aware of his absence from school.”
“Young monkey left me a note to say he was going camping for a few days and spending Sunday night at his aunt’s place, and that he would come straight to school from there on Monday morning.”
“He probably did stay with his aunt,” said Mr. Scaife. “Why don’t you ask her?”
“Of course I’ve asked her. Well, I’ll tell you one thing. You had better know that I’ve been to the police, that’s what I’ve done. His mother’s nearly off her head with worry and I’ve lost a morning’s work coming here.”
“Been to the police?” said Mr. Ronsonby, who hoped he had seen the last of them at least until the adjourned inquest on Mr. Pythias had taken place.
“When Donald didn’t come home from school last night I came up here at seven, but I couldn’t get in, so I rang, but there was no answer.”
“The caretaker’s cottage really ought to be on the telephone,” said Mr. Ronsonby, “but the charges are extremely high and the education committee were not satisfied that a caretaker’s telephone would be used solely for school business. There is nobody at the school office after about five o’clock on a Monday.”
“How do I know what’s happened to my boy if nobody notifies me he isn’t at school? It’s disgraceful, that’s what it is! In school time my boy is your responsibility.”
“Look, Mr. Travis,” said Scaife, “I’m very sorry you’re so worried, but I really don’t think you can blame us if Donald is playing truant.”
“Had a murder here already, haven’t you? How do I know my boy is still safe?”
“Well, for one thing—” Mr. Scaife hesitated, not at all sure that he was on safe ground.
“Go on, Scaife,” said the headmaster. “Tell us anything which may help.”
“Well, Headmaster, I think Travis is safe enough so long as he had a companion with him. Young Maycock—”
“Of course he did! We know all that, and Mrs. Maycock is with my wife now. Mrs. Maycock is a one-parent family. She and my wife are both out of their minds with worry. I have been in touch with Donald’s aunt. She knows nothing, either, as I told you.”
“Well, if the matter is in the hands of the police there will soon be some news,” said Mr. Ronsonby.
“Has anybody been to the place where the boys were thought to be camping?” asked Mr. Scaife.
“Of course they have. I took the police there first thing this morning. Nothing to be seen, not even the ashes of a campfire. Nothing! If I find my boy has been lying to me and they camped somewhere else, I’ll kill him when I get hold of him. He never asked me for permission to go camping. Just left a note. Look here, I want to question the other boys in Donald’s class. Some of them must be in the know and can tell me what he’s been up to.”
“Any questioning will be done by myself, Mr. Scaife, and the police. I cannot possibly allow you to go into a form room during school hours and question the boys,” said Mr. Ronsonby. “It is against all school rules.”
“We’ll see about that!”
“What I am prepared to do,” continued Mr. Ronsonby, “is to send for the form captain and let you speak to him down here.” He spoke to Margaret Wirrell and in a few moments there was a tap on the headmaster’s door. “Well, Spens,” said Mr. Ronsonby, “don’t look alarmed, boy. There is nothing to be afraid of. I expect that in Mr. Scaife’s temporary absence from the form room, information, speculation, and a good deal of ribaldry have been flying around. What have you to tell us about the absence of Travis and Maycock? This is Travis’s father. Apparently Travis did not return home after his camping holiday with Maycock and naturally we are all wondering where the two boys can be.”
The boy turned to Scaife. “That was all rot about the union, sir. Everybody expected Travis and Maycock back yesterday with the rest of us, sir. Potter was only having his bit of fun with you when he mentioned the union, sir.”
“I’ll have my bit of fun with him later on,” said Mr. Scaife grimly. “Where were Travis and Maycock camping? Do you know?”
“Stemlees Bottom on the moor, sir—or so we thought. But some of the chaps—the other boys, sir—went along there on Saturday and there wasn’t any sign of them or any other of our form.”
“So Donald was lying!” said Mr. Travis. “I’ll skin him alive!”
The boy appeared to be about to say something more, but Margaret Wirrell tapped and came in at this point to state that Detective-Inspector Routh had arrived.
“Ask him to come in,” said Mr. Ronsonby.
Routh was shown in and, kindly but ruthlessly, made short work of Mr. Travis. “Now just you go home and take it easy,” he said. “We’ve got everything in hand. You go home and tell your wife not to worry. We’ll soon have your boy back with you. He and his mate are only playing hooky, you’ll find.”
“There’s been murder done here already,” said Travis, looking suddenly strained instead of angry. “How do I know my boy is safe? He’s never truanted in his life and, so far as I know, he has never lied to me before, no, nor has he ever gone off without permission. It isn’t like him.”
“There’s a first time for everything, especially with adolescent boys, Mr. Travis. You go home. Your wife can do with you and we can do everything that’s necessary. As for the death of Mr. Pythias, there was a reason, as you’ll have read in the papers. The
unfortunate gentleman was carrying a large sum of money and was mugged and killed for it. Your son is just being a naughty lad and kicking over the traces a bit, that’s all. You skelp him when we bring him home and then you can forget all about it.”
“I don’t like it,” said Mr. Ronsonby when Travis, muttering and shaking his head, had been ushered out and Scaife and his form captain had gone back to a mysteriously quiet classroom. “Travis and Maycock are the boys who bluffed Sparshott into unlocking the school that last time we had intruders. Suppose they recognised those men? They could be in deadly danger.”
“The sooner we find them the better, sir, I agree. Of course there’s nothing to show that those men were the murderers, but there’s no doubt they broke into the school and the evidence we have is that their purpose could have been to dig up the body and transfer it to a safer place when they heard a fishpond was going to be put there.”
“What puzzles me, if that is so, is how they came to know that a pond was to be sunk in the quad. Nobody was aware of it at that stage except myself and my staff. The boys did not know. Even Sparshott did not know.”
“The governors of the school, sir? One of them may have broadcast the plan.”
“I am sure they would have wanted to keep the nature of their gift a secret until it was a fait accompli.”
“I wonder whether I might have a word with Sparshott’s son? I believe he is one of your scholars, sir, and he was present when his father was told of the last breakin.”
Young Sparshott, a fine, tall lad with the first faint indications of a moustache which he hoped, but did not expect, that the headmaster would allow him to cultivate during this, his last term at school, stood to attention and said, “Sir?” in the firm voice he was practising for when he joined the police cadets later on.
“Give your attention to Detective-Inspector Routh, if you please, Sparshott.”
“Well, Ron,” said Routh, “I’m hoping you can help me. You remember two of the younger boys coming to your home some little time back with a story that there were intruders in the school?”
“Yes. They turned out to be right.”
“You went with your father to investigate.”
“Yes, but I had orders to stay on the front steps while he went in with the dog.”
“The two men made their escape by way of the open front door. They must have passed you. Did you recognise either of them?”
“I didn’t have a chance. They rushed past me and knocked me flying.”
“You have no idea who they were?”
“Not a clue, I’m afraid.”
“Thank you, Ron. That’s all,” said Routh. He added to Mr. Ronsonby when the boy had gone, “I don’t think there’s much cause for anxiety, sir. If a lad of that age and on the qui vive didn’t have a chance to spot those men, it isn’t likely that two younger boys had any chance to recognise anybody.”
“I hope you are right. The thing is that this unexplained absence is so unlike these particular boys. Both have good homes and caring parents and neither, so far as I know, has posed any problems here at school. No, I don’t like it. I refused permission to Mr. Travis to question Mr. Scaife’s form, but a police investigation is a different matter and I am willing, nay, anxious, that you shall obtain any information from the second-year boys which they may be able to impart, if it will help you.”
“Worth a try, sir.”
It may or may not have been worth a try, but the fact remained that it produced no results. Routh reported to the headmaster that his questions had got him nowhere.
“Then I think you may take it that the boys have no information to give you,” said Mr. Ronsonby. “However, I shall know more about that when I have questioned them myself. They all know about the discovery of Pythias’s murdered body. It was impossible to keep such knowledge from them. Not only were the facts reported in two local and most of the daily papers, but they must have been the subject of discussion and speculation in every household in the town. Boys, on the whole, are callous, cruel, brutal, and thoughtless creatures, and I do not suppose that, hard as we try to inculcate some semblance of civilised behaviour, my boys are very different from the norm. However, because of the murder and the consequent horror it has brought—you might not be surprised to hear that I have had a number of parents up to see me on the score of removing their boys from my school—there is a very uneasy spirit abroad among parents, pupils and masters and—”
“You mean that, if these second-year boys knew anything of the whereabouts of Travis and Maycock, they would have come across with it p.d.q., if you’ll pardon the expression, sir. I agree with you.”
“Quite. Under ordinary circumstances boys are past-masters at becoming as dumb as oysters when they are called upon to betray one another’s secrets, but we find ourselves in any but ordinary circumstances and I must admit that I share fully in Mr. Travis’s anxiety.”
To emphasise the gravity of the occasion, he put on his BA gown with the hood lined with peacock blue, a garment he reserved ordinarily for speech days and the opening and closing assemblies of each school term. However, neither his majestic trappings nor his authoritative questions produced anything helpful except a diffident hand held up by a thin, pale, straw-haired boy in the second row.
“Yes, Carter?”
“Please, sir, Maycock borrowed my bike—my bicycle, sir—the Saturday before we broke up.”
“That was some weeks ago. Are you complaining that he still has it, wherever he is?”
“Please, sir, no. His own bi-bicycle—had got a puncture and he said he wanted to go to see his aunt.”
“So you got your bicycle back, then?”
“Oh, yes, sir, the same night.”
“Thank you, Carter, but how do you think this will help us?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Never mind. You were right to mention a bicycle. You have no idea of where it was that the two boys proposed to set up this camp I have heard about?”
“No, sir, except I don’t think it was at Stemlees Bottom, sir. That’s where people usually camp out.”
“We have been given that information. Unless you know something more than that, you may sit down.”
“Please, sir, my bike—bicycle—was—well, the saddlebag was soaking wet, sir, as if the bicycle had been ridden into a watersplash or something, and there isn’t anything like that between where Maycock lives and that part of the moor round Stemlees Bottom. I wondered if Maycock spent that day sort of prospecting, sir.”
“It’s a clue of a sort, even if a very slender one,” said Routh, when they had left the form room to return to the headmaster’s office. “Anyway, it’s all we’ve got, so I’ll get to work on it. A watersplash? Not very helpful. Could equally well have been a small brook or a waterlogged ditch. Mind if I go back to that room, sir, and put one more question to that lad?” Without waiting for an answer, he turned about, ran up the stairs, tapped at Mr. Scaife’s door, and entered a classroom which had emerged from the holy stillness engendered by the presence of the headmaster into a cacophony of shouting, argument, questions, and banging on desks. Mr. Scaife had been adding to the din in an effort to shout everybody else down and restore order.
As soon as Routh was noticed, the noise stopped. Boys who had been standing in the gangways the better to get their views across, sat down. Boys who had been stamping their feet gave themselves a rest. Boys who had been beating a tattoo with rulers put these down. Mr. Scaife, who had given up a hopeless struggle, took his head out of his hands to see to what he owed the restoration of peace and sanity.
“Oh,” he said, “it’s you again, Inspector.”
“Another word with Carter, if I may, sir. Now, Carter, when you got your bike back, the saddlebag—what kind of saddlebag would that be?”
“The useful kind. It hung down from the crossbar. It’s a proper touring bike and nearly new. I only had it for Christmas.”
“Maycock borrowed it, and told you he wa
s going to visit his aunt, and you don’t think he went to Stemlees Bottom. Tell me, was your bike muddy as well as wet when he returned it?”
“No, but the water hasn’t done my saddlebag any good.”
“So you don’t think he had ridden it into a ditch?”
“No. It would have been muddy all up the wheels and it wasn’t.”
“So you deduced a watersplash. Good for you. We shall need you in the Force before long.” Routh heard the noise break out again as soon as he was in the corridor. He returned to the headmaster, thanked him, and departed. He was well acquainted with the environs and he knew of two watersplashes, both well within cycling distance of the town. One was in the next village, but there was no need whatever to push or ride a bicycle through it. Cars were obliged to take to the water, but there was a handy wooden footbridge which cyclists and pedestrians could use.
The other watersplash was further off and was at what Routh called “the back of beyond.” Here again, however, there was a footbridge. In wet weather the splash could be as much as five feet deep, for it lay in a dip in a country road at the foot of a steep gradient. A packhorse bridge had been built high up at the side of it, however, a couple of centuries previously.
“I don’t think a watersplash is the answer,” Routh said to Detective-Sergeant Bennett, “but it’s the only clue we’ve got, so we’ll take a posse and some dogs and see what we can turn up. I don’t suppose there’s much to worry about. All the same, the boys were in school the night those chaps broke the washroom window and got into the quad. They might have recognised somebody even if young Sparshott didn’t, so we’ve got to find them and make sure they’re all right.”
No Winding Sheet (Mrs. Bradley) Page 14