‘A sherry?’
‘From the head’s sitting-room. Oh—it was all right. Old . . . Mr Crumwallis had said earlier on that he might. So Hilary said.’
‘So he was going to have a drink with you and help you get yours down, was that the idea?’
‘Yes. Anyway, he was gone a few minutes, and he came back smelling—you know. My mum likes sherry, so I know the smell. Awful when she kisses you.’
‘So he’d had one already.’
‘Yes. But he said old Crumwallis would never notice. So then he got my medicine from outside—’
‘Outside?’
‘Yes. It was standing just outside in the corridor.’ A trace of Pickerage’s natural urchin grin wafted over his face. ‘I suppose Mrs C. thought I’d be swilling it down like an alcoholic if she left it in the room. Anyway, Hilary brought it in, and put two tablespoonsful in a glass. Then we had a sort of toast . . .’
‘Ah, yes. What was that?’
‘ “Good health,” ’ lied Pickerage. ‘And then we drank. And then he rushed off to the bathroom and started throwing up.’ His eyes filled with tears. ‘It was horrible. And he came out into the corridor. I think he was trying to call for help. And Broughton came. And then all the others. And I went out, and Hilary was crying out, you know, and . . .’
Two enormous tears welled out of Pickerage’s eyes and ran rapidly down his cheeks, followed by others. He looked down miserably, and then wiped them away.
‘Well,’ said Pumfrey briskly, ‘we can hear about the rest of it from Broughton, can’t we? That’s all been very helpful. One little thing: where did Hilary get the glass for his sherry? From down here?’
‘No. He took one from the cupboard in the sick bay. She doesn’t leave medicines there, but she leaves a lot of dirty old glasses and bowls and thermometers and things. He could have got one from the kitchen, but I expect he’d locked up after he’d brought the supper up.’
‘Ah—there’d been supper. Had you had any?’
‘No. I didn’t feel like it.’
‘I see. Right, well, is there anything else you can think of?’
Pickerage sat huddled miserably in his chair. He swallowed hard once or twice. His face was drooping into his chest, but Pumfrey saw him half look up at him, then duck sharply down again. Finally he muttered:
‘Hilary was my friend.’
‘Yes . . .’
‘I don’t want to stay in this place now he’s . . . dead.’
‘Oh, come on. I’m sure you’ve got other friends. You may feel like that now . . .”
Suddenly Pickerage looked up and spoke very loudly.
‘I don’t want to stay in this school at all. I’m afraid. I want to go away. Go away somewhere else.’ His voice was rising into hysteria, and suddenly he burst voluptuously into tears. ‘I don’t want to sleep in the dorm. Somebody might try to kill me. I’m afraid. I’m so . . . afraid.’
Then Pumfrey did try to comfort him, as he would have done one of his own. After a little Pickerage calmed down, but only with a palpable effort. Pumfrey took him upstairs and, after consultation with Toby, they put him to bed in Toby’s room, and locked the door. He gulped a little, but the notion of locking the door certainly seemed to make him feel happier. As he went down again, and traversed the headmaster’s hall on his way to the study, Pumfrey thought he caught a glimpse of the head’s pallid face through the crack of an open door. He gave no sign of having seen.
‘What did you make of him?’ Pumfrey asked Fenniway.
‘Lively kid. Lively normally, I mean. Horrible thing to happen when you’re that age.’
‘Yes . . . I think he was hiding something, you know. Or keeping something back.’
‘Like what?’
Pumfrey shrugged. ‘Hard to guess. Could have been just nothing—some little schoolboy sin. Could have been vital.’
‘ “Hilary was my friend,” ’ quoted Fenniway. ‘There may have been something there.’
‘Quite likely. He blushed now and then. But I thought there was something else . . . I wouldn’t want to have that woman treating one of my kids if he was sick, would you? . . . You notice how he said “I want to go somewhere else”? Not “home”. Poor bloody kid . . . The boy upstairs seems to do a good job . . . It would be a pretty terrible place, this boarding section, if there was just the headmaster and his wife.’
Beautifully on cue, there was a knock at the door. Pumfrey lifted his eyebrows at Fenniway, and shouted: ‘Come in.’
‘I wondered,’ said the voice of the headmaster, piping insecurely as he insinuated himself round the door, ‘if Mrs Crumwallis could get you something. Tea? Coffee?’
‘No,’ said Pumfrey. ‘No.’
‘Ah . . . I see you’ve talked to Pickerage,’ said Mr Crumwallis, his long, bony body now fully inside and draped up against the doorpost, his head poked forward, the whole effect being to make him look like a bereaved ostrich. ‘Poor little boy,’ he went on, with a conspicuous inability to express feeling. ‘What a terrible experience for him. Did you . . . did you find out exactly how it happened?’
‘Not exactly. We certainly found out when it happened. Tell me, Headmaster: I gather you spoke to the boy earlier on.’
‘Pickerage? Not so far as I recollect.’
‘The boy who died. Hilary Frome.’
‘Ah yes. Hard to think of him as a boy. So mature. So responsible.’ The headmaster emitted what sounded like a perfectly genuine sigh. ‘This is a bitter blow, Superintendent. A bitter, bitter blow. To myself—and to the School. All the hopes I had . . . How am I going to face his father? What can I tell the other parents?’
‘That I can’t help you with,’ said Pumfrey, his characteristic briskness now almost contemptuous. ‘But you say you did speak to Hilary Frome earlier tonight?’
‘Yes. Yes, indeed. Oh dear—a melancholy thought. I told him how much pleasure it gave me to think of him in charge of the school next year. As head boy, you know. Who is to take his place I cannot think. Broughton is hardly—’
‘Yes, yes,’ interrupted Pumfrey impatiently. ‘What else did you say to him?’
Mr Crumwallis looked at him in dyspeptic reproof, unused as he was to having his magisterial ramblings interrupted.
‘I really . . . don’t rememb . . . wait. I think I said how it would please me if one day he were to be elected to the Cullbridge Athenaeum. Alas, that will now never be.’
‘Did you offer him a drink? Suggest he might like one later?’
‘Yes, I did. I . . .’
Suddenly Mr Crumwallis stopped, his eyes popping, fixed in consternation on the Superintendent.
‘I suggested he might like a . . . sherry. Oh dear God, Superintendent: don’t tell me it was the sherry.’
He gazed from the one of them to the other in anguish. And, gazing back, Pumfrey tried to interpret, from his expression, the implications of that last remark. Was it the equivalent of Lady Macbeth’s ‘What, in our house?’ Was he saying ‘What, with my sherry?’ Or was it to be understood as the horrified realization that, in the words of Hercule Poirot, ‘It might have been ME.’
Pumfrey would have given a great deal to know.
CHAPTER 9
MASTER AND SLAVE
‘Well,’ said Mike Pumfrey, reluctantly dragging his eyes from the spectacle of the headmaster’s face. ‘I think we’d better look into this a little more closely, don’t you? Where do you keep this sherry?’
The headmaster continued gawping dumbly for a second, then without a word he turned on his heel and led the way across the hall. When he opened the door of his sitting-room, Mike Pumfrey saw Mrs Crumwallis, seated bony and straight-backed on a sofa, peering concentratedly at them through her pebble glasses. Pumfrey nodded brusquely in her direction, but there was no response.
‘There,’ said the headmaster, gesturing uncertainly in the direction of the bottles on the sideboard. ‘There they are.’
Pumfrey and Fenniway gazed at them without touching.
‘How much is gone, do you know?’
‘Really, I can’t—’
‘Quite two glasses full,’ said Mrs Crumwallis from the sofa.
‘You haven’t touched the bottles since you came home? Had a glass yourselves?’
‘No,’ said Mr Crumwallis. ‘Thank the Lord. I drink socially if that is necessary, but not otherwise. My wife and I were both brought up Methodists.’
He produced this piece of information with a certain dim self-satisfaction, as if it were a sort of moral American Express card.
‘I see,’ said Pumfrey. ‘Then, supposing the sherry was poisoned, and supposing it was aimed at you, then it could only have been put there by someone who didn’t know your habits?’
The headmaster blinked at him owlishly, and then nodded. A thought struck Mike Pumfrey.
‘Where were you when you invited Frome to . . . partake?’
‘Here. In this room. I called him in from the garden.’ The headmaster gestured towards the window, still uncurtained, but giving out on to pitch blackness. ‘He had been doing some cricket practice with the younger boarders. Most stylish, a handsome sight . . .’ He sighed. ‘I called him in, expressed my gratitude at his willingness to hold the fort in the boarding annexe, and then . . . offered him a sherry, if he should feel like it, later on.’
Mrs Crumwallis sniffed.
‘Time?’ asked Pumfrey.
‘Around six-thirty or so, I suppose.
‘I see. Were the windows open at the time? Or the door to the hall?’
Oh—ah—the windows were, yes. The evening was not cold. I believe the door was shut. It usually is.’
‘I see. The lower window was open? Yes . . . well, perhaps we could go back to the study. I’ll send the prints men down for these.’
He nodded in the direction of the sherry bottles. He could have sworn Mrs Crumwallis had to bite back a demand for the equivalent in money.
Back in the study Edward Crumwallis collapsed into the chair usually reserved for boys whom he was hauling over the coals. The irony did not seem to strike him. In fact, nothing seemed to get through to him at all. He just sat there, gazing at the desk through bleared eyes, but seeming to see nothing. There was no Manner at all to be seen now. He looked a crumbling shell of a man.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said after a time, struggling to get himself upright in his chair. ‘This has struck me very hard . . . Very hard.’ In spite of his efforts he seemed to be able to do no more than mumble. ‘Who would have thought . . . ?’
‘You were fond of the boy?’ asked Pumfrey.
‘Fond?’ said Mr Crumwallis, his forehead crinkling. ‘Fond? I had a great respect for him. I had great hopes for him, and for the school under his leadership. Shattered! Dust and ashes! He would have done us such credit. Now . . .’
‘I suppose it was because you had such respect for him that you felt you could leave him in charge of the boarders tonight?’
‘Quite. Quite. He’d been a boarder himself—last year when his parents went to the States on three months’ sabbatical. I knew I could trust him implicitly. A boy of great rectitude. Of old-fashioned standards.’
‘Normally this other young man—Freely, was that the name?—would have been in charge?’
‘Under me. Yes. In charge under me.’
‘But tonight he was—?’
‘He was accompanying the swimmers. To the All Swessex Schools Championships.’ Mike Pumfrey nodded. He had a daughter competing. If he hadn’t been on duty he would have been there.
‘Is young Freely a swimmer?’
‘No, no. Not so far as I know. Our usual man, Muggeridge—’ there was a sharp intake of breath, like a suction rubber trying to clear a sink—‘an ex-Colchester United player . . . he was unable to accompany them. Family reasons.’
‘I see. Yet I gather that Mr Muggeridge was around the school in the grounds tonight.’
The headmaster looked bewildered.
‘Really? I’m afraid I don’t know anything about that.’
‘He would have a key to the school, would he?’
‘Oh, certainly.’
‘And he could have got into the other parts? Into your quarters? The boarding annexe?’
‘Yes. With his keys he could have got into any part.’
‘And the other teachers?’
‘Oh yes. All of them had keys. In case they had to come back for anything they’d forgotten.’
‘But not the boys?’
‘Oh no. Not the boys. They couldn’t have got into the main part of the school. But they could have got into the boarding annexe. The outer door is not locked until Mr Freely and the older boys go to bed.’
‘I see . . .’
‘It’s a very free and easy place, Superintendent,’ said Mr Crumwallis, in an almost pleading voice.
Just plain bloody lax, thought Mike Pumfrey. He did not detect an atmosphere of freedom or ease.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘the members of the staff. I wonder if I could have a list of them.’
‘Ah yes. I—er—I have a prospectus.’ Mr Crumwallis fussed round to the front of the desk eagerly, as if Mike Pumfrey were a prospective parent. He took a brochure from the drawer at Pumfrey’s right hand, and inspected it. The list had obviously been printed some time before. Some names had been crossed off, as teachers had died at their posts, or departed to more luxuriant scholastic pastures. At the foot of the list new names had been added in ink. Mr Crumwallis, satisfied that it was up to date, handed it to Mike Pumfrey, who inspected it in silence.
Senior English: I. O. McWhirter, B.A. (Durham); B. Litt. (Edinburgh)
Senior Classics: S. G. Coffin, M.A. (Oxon)
Mathematics: P. St. J. Makepeace, M.Sc. (Reading)
Science: C. Farraday, B.Sc. (Kent)
History, French: Miss G. Grower, B.A. (Cantab)
Junior English, History, Geography: Miss D. Gilberd.
Games and Physical Education: W. Muggeridge. and added in pen:
Junior Classics, French: Miss P. Warlock, B.A. (London)
Head of Boarders: T. Freely (Portlington School; Exhibitioner, Trinity Hall, Cambridge)
Written in days before his present broken state, that last entry seemed to bear the marks of a flourish of self-satisfaction.
‘Hmmm,’ said Pumfrey. ‘You seem to do a lot of classics.’
It was not the remark Mr Crumwallis had been expecting, but he perked up, as he frequently did in interviews with parents, when an opportunity for fraudulent self-congratulation presented itself.
‘Yes, indeed,’ he said. ‘We lay great stress on them. So sad to see their decline—their so rapid decline—in other schools, elsewhere. But if the private schools will not be custodians of the great classical tradition, who will be?’
Mike Pumfrey did not feel called upon to reply. He wondered whether, in view of the decline of classics elsewhere, classics teachers might not be in a state of glut upon the market, and therefore to be had cheap. He rather thought they might be. He looked cynically at Mr Crumwallis, swelling with spurious pride.
‘Now, this boy, Pickerage . . .’
The head’s face immediately fell, as he was brought back to the tribulations of the moment.
‘Who? Ah yes, Pickerage. A terrible experience for him. To have to watch . . . that.’
‘Particularly as I gather he and Frome were friends.’
‘Friends? Oh, I don’t think so. Hardly likely, Superintendent. Frome was one of our senior boys. We have, alas, no sixth form, but Frome would next year have been in the fifth, and he was old for his years. Pickerage is only in his second year. Oh no, I don’t think so.’
Pumfrey marvelled at the limitless naivete of some schoolteachers.
‘What sort of a boy is Pickerage?’
‘What sort of a boy?’ The question seemed to give the headmaster trouble, as if he was accustomed to regard boys en masse, not as individuals. ‘He is, perhaps, a shade mischievous. A prankster, shall we say? But w
e must remember his home background. Or lack of it. His mother—but on that subject, perhaps, the least said the better.’
‘You say mischievous. Could you give me some examples?’
‘Ah yes. I had occasion, I fear, to slipper the lad only last week. It misgives me now a little, in the circumstances.’
It was the first time Pumfrey had heard anyone use the word ‘misgives’. It misgave him no end.
‘What had the boy done?’
‘He had—I tell you this in confidence, Superintendent—he had, on the occasion of the annual parents’ night, doctored with alcohol the fruit punch intended for the boarders who helped serve the modest refreshments. It was only through my presence of mind that we were saved from a frightful scandal.’
‘I see. And you’re sure he did it? Did he own up?’
‘Not in so many words. But I was morally certain.’
That, thought Pumfrey, was so much flim-flam. Another way of saying ‘I had no evidence, but I picked on him.’ Policemen who were ‘morally certain’ someone had done something tended to start manufacturing evidence. Headmasters didn’t even have to bother with that.
He wondered whether he should ask Crumwallis to go and sit with the boarders in the dormitory, while he had a word with this young Freely. Freely looked, Pumfrey had thought, honest and sensible. Which would make a change after the headmaster. But Crumwallis in his present state did not look as if he would provide a soothing influence upstairs. Pumfrey decided against it.
‘Well, that will be all, for the moment,’ he said. ‘My men will be here for some time yet, and I’ll leave someone here on duty all night. I suggest you try and get some sleep.’
Mr Crumwallis shook his head despairingly.
‘I fear not, Superintendent. I . . . fear . . . not.’
And with that final attempt to recapture something of his former Manner, Edward Crumwallis shuffled out of the study. Mike Pumfrey looked at Fenniway and shook his head.
‘Silly old buzzard,’ he said. ‘Aggravating too. If somebody slipped a little cache of something into his plonk, they were probably irritated out of their tiny minds.’
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