No Winding Sheet (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  Mr. Pybus, however, did not come their way. They gave him three minutes by Travis’s watch and then Travis said he thought it was safe enough to follow him.

  “Follow him?” said Maycock.

  “Stalk him. He’s going towards the station. Let’s make sure he’s going to take a train. I expect he is, because he’ll have to be back in school tomorrow.”

  They had to pass the shop window into which the art master had been gazing. They paused there for a moment. In the centre of the window was a painting of fishing boats in harbour, a delicate and distinctive bit of work, discreetly framed. Beside it was a placard which read: Boats at Cos. Exhibition of paintings by Marcus Pybus in gallery at rear. Inspection invited.

  The boys walked on, quickening their pace until their quarry was in sight. Then they followed more slowly, retaining sufficient distance between themselves and Mr. Pybus. He approached the station and entered it. Cautiously they followed. There was a queue at the ticket office. They joined it, making sure that there was always a fair number of passengers between them and the art master. When they had heard Mr. Pybus ask for a ticket to their hometown, they slipped away.

  “Let’s eat,” said Maycock.

  “I thought you were going home.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind so much now he’s gone.”

  “I thought you might like to share a compartment with him.”

  “Oh, stop being funny.”

  On other occasions these exchanges would have resulted in a friendly scuffle, but, mindful of where they were, the boys did not indulge in this, but made their way to the station buffet, where the girl who took their money said, “Not you two again! Do you live here or something?”

  “Train spotters,” said the resourceful Travis.

  “I thought that was old hat.”

  “Not while I do it.”

  “Oh, well, be seeing you again, then, I suppose.”

  “If you’re lucky.” They took the sandwiches and tea to a table and wondered what to do with the rest of the day.

  “Fancy Old Piebald being a real artist!” said Maycock.

  “Well, of course he is. He’s hot stuff, too. Once I sloshed a whole lot of different blues on my painting just for a rag and he came along and licked a brush and picked out a crescent moon and a lot of moonlight and it turned out to be a jolly good picture.”

  “Fancy him having pictures on show, though.”

  “It’s only a shop, not a proper exhibition.”

  “A beastly important shop, though.” They finished their meal and meandered out of the station. “Tell you what,” Maycock continued. “Tomorrow let’s go to the shop and take a dekko at his pictures.”

  “They wouldn’t let us in. Besides, as soon as I’ve got my money from the post office we ought to be getting aboard that boat to the Isle of Wight.”

  The rest of Sunday hung heavily. They found their way down to the docks and looked at the ships which were in and then had a meal at the refreshment room at the terminus station. By this time they both had run out of ready money. They returned to the central station waiting room in the evening and chanced their luck in spending the night in the waiting room again. There were plenty of people in and out of it and nobody questioned their presence there. They left, dishevelled and hungry, early in the morning and went down to the pier to find out at what time the ferry left. They discovered they had plenty of time so, having found a post office, Travis took out some money and they went into a café and had bacon and egg, a roll and butter, and a pot of tea before they went down again to the pier.

  The crossing down the Solent to Cowes took an hour. It was cold on deck, but they enjoyed themselves. When they landed they explored the old part of the town, bought cakes and soft drinks, and then went on to the esplanade and walked as far as Gurnard Bay. Here they had a fright. A man stopped them and said in an official voice, “Why aren’t you two in school?”

  Travis, as usual, was equal to the occasion. “Our Dad’s got his holiday,” he said, “so we’ve got a fortnight off school.”

  As this was admissible it was received without further query, but the lads had had a scare.

  “So the Isle of Wight doesn’t have different laws,” said Maycock. “I still want to go home and my heel is sorer than ever. The murderers can’t still be looking for us after all this time, can they? Anyway, I reckon we’d be a lot safer at home than we are here. There’s your dad and mum and your aunt and Mr. Ronsonby at school. They’d look after us. What are we going to do when your money’s gone? I haven’t got any left.”

  On the Tuesday morning they took a ferry back to Southampton and, in the evening, began the long trek home. This time there was no friendly, fatherly lorry driver and no coach. They slipped into a church after the first few miles and slept in a pew. In the morning they were on their way again.

  They were so tired and unhappy and Maycock, who had remained fairly stoical so far, was limping so badly that they did not exchange a single word as they slogged their way homeward. They made frequent stops when they reached the New Forest and, there being no other shelter, they slept under the trees, too worn out and disillusioned to worry too much about the chilly April night.

  At dawn they staggered on again and covered another few miles, stopping often to rest. At about teatime they were stopped by a vicar driving a small car. He pulled up and got out.

  “My word!” he said. “You look as though you’ve had about enough of it. What’s the trouble? Get in. You can tell me as we go. Did you get yourselves lost? Tumble in, tumble in.”

  Thankfully they obeyed him. He took them to his vicarage. Here he gave them a meal, tended Maycock’s heel, and put them to bed. Then he investigated the contents of their rucksacks and next morning he telephoned the police.

  16

  The Official Opening

  “I am not so sure,” said Mr. Ronsonby, “that the water-lily pond would have been quite such a good idea, after all.”

  “The pond would have been overlooked from three corridors and the library,” said Mr. Burke. “It could have been made a repository for rubbish thrown out of windows, I suppose. We have encouraged the school to embrace democracy. The boys could have thought it strange and unfair that access to the pond should have been denied them.”

  “Oxford and Cambridge have rules about quadrangles, do they not?”

  “I know. But tradition must be honoured and our own traditions have yet to be established. To deny the boys access to a pond containing goldfish might seem to savour of Us and Them.”

  “There must be a line drawn somewhere, though. The boys themselves expect it. There is no feeling of security where there is no exercise of authority. I have always been opposed to this modern trend of boys calling their teachers by Christian names and of young masters dressing sloppily so as to be ‘with it,’ as the modern idiom puts the thing. It sets a very bad example, as I have had occasion to point out to Scaife. Anyway, the lily pond has been scrapped and we now have a handsome sum to spend on prizes. Regrettable, but the governors are adamant. I cannot argue with them over the nature of their gifts to the school.”

  “It will have to be books, I suppose.”

  “There must be some books, yes, but the governors also suggest wristwatches and cameras, lightning calculators, tool sets, and, of all things, conjurors’ outfits. Then they want to give new shirts to the rugby first fifteen and special blazers for the cricketing first eleven.”

  “Thus returning most of the money to its sources of origin. Well have we been described as a nation of shopkeepers,” said Mr. Burke in cynical reference to the way many of the governing body made a living.

  “Exactly. One can hardly blame them and no doubt a boy would be better pleased with a watch or a camera than with a copy of the works of Shakespeare or a set of Jane Austen’s novels. Take young Scaife with you and see what you can do. You know which emporia are kept by members of the governing body. Oh, and don’t forget gramophone records. Scaife will know what ap
peals to boys. He has his occasional uses. I wish his discipline was firmer, though.”

  “How about Phillips? Aren’t gramophone records more in his line? Won’t he expect to choose them?”

  “He would choose classical music. No, take Scaife. You can leave the sixth to work in the library and I will keep an eye on Scaife’s little boys while he is gone. I’m glad he’s got his runaways back. They and the literary-minded Prouding are now spending each break and games period in copying out for me the whole of A Comedy of Errors.”

  This, as it turned out, was almost the only punishment meted out to Travis and Maycock, for Mr. Travis’s bark turned out to be far worse than his bite, so, apart from stopping Donald’s pocket money until enough had accumulated to replace the sum he had drawn out at the post office in Southampton, Mr. Travis had imposed no other penalty and was happy enough to have his son safely back at home.

  “You guffin!” he said. “If you were scared by that letter, why didn’t you show it to your mother and me?”

  Maycock, in a way, was less lucky, for his mother turned tearful on him and reiterated through her sobbing, “Oh, how could you go off like that without a word? How could you go off and leave me all alone?”

  Meanwhile, having been relegated to playing a minor role in the hunt for the murderer, Routh was following his own line of enquiry, but was fully prepared, if his chance discovery of the exhibition of paintings turned out to have any significance, to share his knowledge with his superiors a little later on.

  In one respect he was lucky. Mr. Ronsonby telephoned him and said that at the official opening of the school there would be on display a number of prizes of a kind tempting enough to attract a thief. The headmaster wanted a policeman in plain clothes on duty at the school until the gifts had been distributed, and he asked for the detective-inspector’s co-operation.

  “There is more than five hundred pounds’ worth of the stuff,” said Mr. Ronsonby, “more than enough to tempt a petty criminal. Moreover, much of it is readily portable.”

  “I’ll come myself,” said Routh, who had been wondering how to obtain a seemingly unofficial interview with Mr. Pybus without arousing the art master’s or anybody else’s suspicions that his questions were other than innocuous. “I’ll have a detective-constable on duty as well, but I know all the local sneak-thieves and they know me, so don’t worry about your prizes, sir. I expect they’re insured, anyway.”

  “Well, thanks to the Church of England, those boys have been rounded up,” said Laura, “so we need not bother about them when we get to Southampton. Do you think there is anything in this idea that Pybus had pinched Pythias’s pictures and is exhibiting and, I suppose, selling them as his own work? If so, he’d be a lot safer doing it in London. Southampton isn’t far enough away from the school to be a safe place to pull off a fiddle like that.”

  “I think there must be a striking resemblance between the sketch on this letter—I have borrowed it for purposes of comparison—and the picture in the art dealer’s window, but we shall see. I am also wondering whether the pictures on exhibition bear a signature and, if they do, whose it is,” said Dame Beatrice.

  Routh had described the location of the shop. They had no difficulty in finding it. The picture and the notice were still in the window and it hardly needed much scrutiny of the sketch on the letter to identify the similarities between it and the painting at which they were looking. They went into the shop and to the long room at the back of it where the rest of the paintings were on display.

  “Everything is for sale, ladies,” said the proprietor hopefully.

  There were at least fifty pictures on the walls of the small gallery. Dame Beatrice took out the letter Pythias had written to Mrs. Buxton, looked at the sketch of Greek fishing boats, and then studied two or three paintings which she could not believe were the work of the letter writer.

  They were copies of the figures and decoration on sixth-century black— and red-figured pottery. One was of a black-figure amphora depicting the decapitated Gorgon Medusa with the goddess Athena, the god Hermes, and the hero Perseus standing by and holding the Gorgon’s head. By the same devoted but laboured hand was a copy of the red-figured vase by the Andokides painter, but, again, although it was a faithful copy of the original, it gave the impression of aiming at nothing more than meticulous accuracy and lacked any kind of spontaneity.

  Among the other pictures were a spirited portrayal of the Lion Gate at Mycenae, an impression in sepia of the Cyclopean walls of ruined Argos, and, with the narrow end-wall of the gallery all to itself, a large picture of the Acropolis at Athens, masterly in its detail and almost breathtaking in its impact on the beholder. There were also studies, by the same hand, of the theatre at Epidaurus and the harbour of Piraeus.

  Dame Beatrice looked again at the letter, went back to look again at some paintings of Cyclades seascapes, and then bought the picture of fishing boats in harbour for which the drawing in the letter had been a preliminary sketch.

  She always carried a small magnifying glass in her handbag, and before she had gone to the counter she had looked at the bottom corners of each picture on show and then handed the glass to Laura. Their findings were the same.

  “Well,” said Laura, when they were outside the shop, “every picture has the same symbol, but no actual signature, yet they are not all the work of the same artist.”

  “And the symbol?”

  “Well, at school we always called it pi. It was useful when one was dealing with the measurements of circles. It used to remind me of one of the trilithons at Stonehenge, so I rather liked it.”

  “Pi is the letter ‘p’ in the Greek alphabet, of course, and the choice of it by both these artists is very interesting.”

  “Come to think of it, Pythias and Pybus—yes, I see what you mean,” said Laura. “Pybus wouldn’t forge Pythias’s name, but felt he was entitled to use his symbol. I suppose he is entitled to it. Well, either Pythias gave his paintings to Pybus, or Pybus stole them after Pythias was killed. Is that what you think?”

  “I am afraid your second hypothesis is the more likely, but we shall see. I am told that Mr. Rattock, the tenant of the attic and, incidentally, Mrs. Buxton’s nephew, was the only resident, apart from the Buxtons themselves, who ever entertained visitors. He claims to be an artist. I wonder whether Mr. Pybus, the art master at the school, was one of his visitors?”

  “A bit unlikely, don’t you think? How would they have got to know one another?”

  “Possibly because Mr. Rattock was a boy at the old school before the present school was built.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “Accept Mr. Ronsonby’s kind invitation to attend the official opening of his school and, having made our report on the pictures to Detective-Inspector Routh, we must then wait upon events.”

  “Do you mean that Pybus murdered Pythias and stole his paintings?”

  “Or was given them by Rattock on the understanding that he would not betray him.”

  Routh was gratified by Dame Beatrice’s report.

  “It does open up a vista, ma’am,” he said. “I didn’t think I was mistaken about the picture in the shop window. By the way, I’ve tracked down Mr. Pythias’s bag of golf-clubs. There is one club missing and forensic think it could easily be the murder weapon. They suggest that one good slosh from behind could have accounted for Mr. Pythias and that the club must be hidden somewhere, probably chucked into the river. I’ve given the super the gen and he is having the river dragged. We’ve never found the murder weapon and, from the state of the body when it was dug up, it wasn’t all that easy to determine exactly what kind of implement could have inflicted the injuries to the head, but we think we know now. Just as a matter of interest, ma’am, I wonder which of the two, Pythias or Pybus, thought of using pi as a signature? You say it appeared at the right-hand bottom corner of all the paintings.”

  “Mr. Pythias’s letter may supply the answer. If the symbol appears at the foot of that
rough but arresting little sketch—”

  “We shall know where we stand. Yes, indeed, ma’am.”

  “Not that it has much significance in itself. There is no doubt that Pybus is selling Pythias’s paintings.”

  The idea of holding a cricket match as one of the attractions on opening day had been abandoned, since not enough fathers had volunteered to form an eleven to oppose the school, and masters who, in other circumstances, might have made up the numbers, were to be far too busy to take part in a match. Instead, an athletics meeting of a sort was to be held on the school field, since there was a governors’ prize (against Mr. Ronsonby’s wishes) offered to the victor ludorum. The master for physical education had backed up the headmaster’s objections, but the alliance had not prevailed against the governors’ insistence.

  “Boys specialise and are encouraged to do so,” Mr. Ronsonby had pointed out. “A boy who can win the hundred metres is not expected to go in for the fifteen hundred, and a good long-jumper is not necessarily a good high-jumper.”

  “Nonsense! Nothing like a good all-rounder,” said the chairman bluffly.

  Then there were the exhibitions of work inside the building. These included woodwork, art, and a meritorious display of mechanical drawings. There were models of Tudor villages, layouts of Norman manors, a model in Plasticine of Stonehenge, and pictorial time-charts galore, each contributed by a different form. There was even an exhibition of decorated eggs to be donated by the little boys of 1C, when opening day was over, to the local hospital.

  There was also Mr. Pybus’s exhibition of arts and crafts. Here one of the paintings on show was of a particularly lurid sunset behind whose crimson and blood-red skyscape were streaks of apple-green, deep purple, and splashes of primrose yellow. In the left-hand foreground a volcano was in very active eruption, shooting up dark crimson and bright orange flames and much thick smoke. The artist, however, had taken care that none of the smoke obscured any part of his sunset, which he cherished, it seemed, even more than his lurid volcano.