‘For instance, that old Gullible makes you drop your pants for a licking,’ Walcot amplified. ‘You couldn’t tell your mother a thing like that. She might think you wanted to know whether it happened that way in girls’ schools too. Which would be absolutely frightful.’
‘Yes,’ Bobby said – and dimly recalled much speculation of this order. ‘But do you mean that the house-mothers get you out of bed in the morning – that sort of thing?’
‘They always do that.’ Beadon, who appeared to have a cautious streak, was carefully burying the end of his cigarette. ‘One oughtn’t to complain, I suppose. There may be worse ahead. A prefect with a dog-whip or something.’
‘It mayn’t quite come to that.’ Bobby in his time had been ruthlessly fed with horror-stories by his elder brothers. ‘Have you one particular house-mother?’
‘Walcot and I have Miss Danbury. She makes us call her Susan. I don’t suppose you’ve seen her, because she wasn’t at lunch. She’s not altogether bad-looking, as a matter of fact.’
‘But what will she be like,’ Walcot asked, ‘when she’s been on the job twenty years? All that asking you about your bowels! It’s bound to have a coarsening effect.’
‘She may get married,’ Bobby said. And he added quickly, ‘To one of the masters, for instance.’
‘Better dead.’ Walcot, for some reason, crossed himself piously. ‘You’ve seen them, haven’t you? Gullible gets them cheap.’
‘How do you think he manages that? I think there’s a regular rate for the job in school-mastering nowadays.’
‘Probably not if you’ve been in gaol,’ Beadon said. He spoke without any apparent attempt at producing a witticism. ‘And we think that most of them must have been in gaol. It seems to account for things. Overcombe, you know, is rather an odd place. Walcot and I are both struck by it. We talk about it quite a lot.’
‘That’s very interesting.’ Bobby was amused by this extraordinary fantasy. ‘Of course I agree that house-mother’s job must be rather monotonous. Getting you out of bed every blessed morning, and so forth. But don’t they ever have a day off? For instance, did Susan get you up on Tuesday morning?’
Even as he uttered this question, Bobby realised it to be fatally deficient in that craft which he had been proposing to summon to his aid. He had meant it to sound so casual that it would receive an answer without remark, and the conversation at once pass on to something else. But it was quite plain that its utter inconsequence had been marked by these sage children at once. And Beadon, at least, had tumbled to the fact that it must hold some ulterior significance. For he was looking very hard at Bobby.
‘I don’t know, at all,’ Beadon said coldly. ‘A chap doesn’t remember every little thing.’
This was very dreadful. Dishonest fishing after a kind of low-down on Susan was bad enough in itself – but now these boys had detected him in the act. They were realizing that this whole encounter had been contrived, and that Old Boy Robert Appleby (scrum-half for England a long time ago) had been chatting them up for some covert purpose of his own. And, of course, their intermingling of sophistication and ignorance was such that they could believe (and presently broadcast) almost anything. They probably knew vaguely about the divorce courts, and about inquiry-agents who went sniffing about to discover who had been in bed with whom when. They might suppose Susan was implicated in something like that.
It was in the moment of this disaster that there started up in Bobby’s mind a notion which (although completely haywire) could conceivably be credited with a certain imaginative audacity. It wasn’t possible to tell Beadon and Walcot about the body in the bunker, and about Susan Danbury (not altogether bad-looking) standing (or her double standing?) beside Bobby as he surveyed it. Discretion made this impossible; within half-an-hour the yarn might become the property of the whole school. And some propriety which might equally be called moral or aesthetic made it impossible too. It simply was not conceivable that he should start telling these nice (if variously insufferable) children about a real man found with much of his head shot off in a real bunker on a real golf-course at a real (if obscure) place called Linger. To tell them about this, and to add that their Miss Danbury (whether not altogether bad looking or not) stood in some ambiguous relationship to plain murder, was a procedure which, quite desperately, was simply not on. And Beadon was now carefully thrusting two or three match-sticks – tokens of the late orgy – into the turf. It was an indication that this unfortunate encounter was over. The rashness of Bobby’s eruptive notion can be fairly judged only against the background of this crisis.
‘Do you know anything about espionage?’ Bobby asked.
‘Espionage?’ Beadon had repeated the mere sounds phonetically. ‘What’s that?’
‘An old-fashioned word for something that isn’t a bit old-fashioned itself.’ Bobby managed a short portentous pause. ‘I’ve got to take a risk,’ he said. ‘You’ve spotted that there’s something funny about me, and I’d better come clean.’ He smiled an enigmatic smile. ‘By the way, will you both call me Bobby? Or, if you want to be a bit more formal, call me 008.’
‘008!’ This time, Beadon wasn’t at all at sea.
‘But don’t think I’m a total fraud. I was at Overcombe. That’s why I’ve been given this mission.’
‘Mission!’ Walcot said. Here was something else that rang a bell.
‘By M.’
‘M?’ Walcot’s tone told Bobby at once that this last stroke of fantasy had been a little too light-hearted. ‘M’s in a book,’ Walcot said.
‘He certainly is.’ Bobby managed a chuckle. ‘That’s why we call M M. After M in the stories. It amuses him. And he needs what amusement he can get. His is a pretty tough job.’
‘Do you mean,’ Beadon asked slowly, ‘that you’re talking about the top man in the Secret Service?’
‘Good Lord, no!’ By this time, Bobby had managed to suppress a twinge of compunction at thus practising upon the innocence of these infants. ‘M is number two. It’s probable that only M and K know who the top man is. K is number three.’
‘I see.’ Beadon was giving Bobby one of his alarmingly straight looks. ‘What you tell us, 008, is extremely surprising.’
‘It is, indeed.’ Bobby realized that he was never quite going to know about Beadon. But there was now nothing for it but to press on with the extravagant fabrication he had so rashly embarked upon. ‘Of course, Overcombe is rather a surprising place, isn’t it? You and Walcot have been clever enough to notice it, although perhaps nobody else has. You’ve talked to each other about it. Which is why I’m talking to you. You’re the only two men who can help. And it’s fair to warn you that the going may be pretty sticky.’ Bobby waited. It was at least odds on, he told himself, that this heady stuff would carry the day. He was right.
‘Go on,’ Walcot said in a low voice.
‘Wait!’ Beadon was suddenly commanding. ‘I’m going to make sure we’re not being trailed. You can’t be too careful. Not at this game.’ And Beadon, with a surprising speed, contrived an exit on his stomach from the small hollow in which this remarkable conference had been taking place. Bobby was left wondering just what had brought the word ‘game’ to his lips. There was, of course, Kim, which it was inconceivable that Beadon hadn’t read. Kim was the archetype of all Boy Spies. And what Kim had played (against Russian emissaries from across the North-West Frontier) was the Great Game. That must be it.
There was silence for a moment, and then Walcot spoke.
‘Tailed,’ Walcot said.
‘What’s that?’
‘Beadon should have said “tailed”, not “trailed”. He hasn’t got the vocab right.’
‘I suppose not.’ Bobby now wondered about the word ‘vocab’. Did it, by some faint irony, convey Walcot’s knowledge that he was being invited into a world of make-believe? It seemed not poss
ible to tell. In three years’ time Messrs Walcot and Beadon, being quite clever, would have entered the No Man’s Land of a Lower Sixth. They would be winding up (unless they turned out to be artists of one sort or another – which was unlikely) the life of the imagination, or at least they would be getting it disentangled from that real world in which one progresses to the condition of a Queen’s Counsel or Regius Professor or Private Secretary or even Minister of the Crown. But at present – Bobby broke off this useless speculation. Beadon had returned, still on his stomach.
‘OK,’ Beadon said crisply.
‘We’ll get back to the girl, if you please.’ Bobby wasted no time. He had – or he thought he had – lured these boys into a momentary world of make-believe, and he must get such information as he could from them while the illusion held. ‘And to Tuesday morning. Was she around?’ Bobby felt his own heart-beat foolishly accelerating as he asked this.
‘But,’ Beadon said, ‘just why do you–’
‘No questions quite yet, please.’ Bobby was very firmly the man close to M himself. ‘And it’s vital there should be no mistake. Was Susan Danbury around?’
‘Num,’ Walcot said. ‘She wasn’t around, was she?’
‘Or nonne.’ Beadon chimed in. ‘She was around, wasn’t she?’
‘I learnt all that once – and from somebody who taught Latin rather well.’ Bobby, if impatient, was also amused. ‘But I’m not saying which answer I want or expect. Just answer this: Was Susan at Overcombe fairly early on Tuesday morning?’
‘One has only to have seen her to say she was,’ Walcot said. ‘But one may not have seen her, and still be unable to say that she wasn’t. And we can only say certain things. She didn’t come into our dorm at getting-up time.’
‘I see.’ Bobby felt his fast-beating heart contract. ‘And that’s wholly unusual? Doesn’t she have days off?’
‘I don’t think anybody’s given days off at Overcombe.’ Beadon said this sombrely. ‘Still, there are mornings when she doesn’t come. And Tuesday was one.’
‘Somebody else came instead? Another house-mother?’
‘I don’t think so. No, I can remember that nobody came. You see, there’s a bell. It’s just that, if Susan doesn’t come, you have to jump to the bell, or there may be trouble with some master who’s taken it into his head to get up early. You may be sent to run round the cricket-field before breakfast, or something stupid of that kind. You remember the sort of thing.’
‘Belsen-and-water,’ Walcot said, rather surprisingly. ‘That’s what a prep school is, wouldn’t you say? Of course, a lot more water than Belsen. One has to be fair.’
‘Stick to the point, please.’ Bobby spoke with the sharpness not of 008 (or 009 or 010) but of M himself. ‘When did you see Susan on Tuesday?’
‘Not until lunch-time,’ Beadon said. ‘But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t at Overcombe. She doesn’t teach us, or anything. Other chaps may have seen her. We could ask around. Cautiously, of course.’
‘So as not,’ Walcot said, ‘to arouse a breath of suspicion. You could rely on us.’
Bobby rather doubted it – although he had a feeling that his new assistants might be entirely reliable in other ways. They seemed, for example, to have got the idea of defining precisely the bounds and limitations of their knowledge. And, so far, what he had himself collected was of a negative order. He had no evidence making it impossible that Susan could have been on the golf-course at Linger on Tuesday morning. Between her disappearance there – between the girl’s disappearance there – and lunch-time at Overcombe it would have been easily possible to drive back to the school. He suddenly realized that what he had wanted the boys to say was that Yes, Susan had appeared in their dormitory. In other words, he had been indulging something like a crazy wish himself to be proved mad. Or, if not mad, at least in the grip of a mysterious psychological aberration. Could he be hitching Susan Danbury on to a dream? Had he become a drug addict? He seemed to remember having heard of junkies who had strange fits of amnesia in which they didn’t know they were junkies. Could that be it? That very solid-seeming Sergeant Howard, for example – might he have been a purely subjective phenomenon? Alternatively, might he be in the middle of a dream now – and never have returned to Overcombe at all? Bobby looked at Beadon and Walcot, and saw that Beadon and Walcot were looking rather curiously at him. They didn’t have the appearance of an involuntary manifestation of the unconscious mind during sleep. On the contrary, they simply had the appearance of two schoolboys – and of two schoolboys plainly thinking that 008 was behaving strangely. Presumably the disturbing character of his thoughts had resulted in his ceasing to attend to them. But now Beadon was speaking, and with the air of repeating a question which has been ignored.
‘Which side is Susan on – theirs or ours? I don’t see we can help much, if you won’t even tell us that.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘Definitely not.’ Bobby had spoken rather helplessly and at random. But now he saw that, in the kind of environment he had been conjuring up, such a reply would sometimes be a perfectly valid one. ‘You see,’ he added, ‘espionage is a very funny thing. There’s Intelligence and there’s Counter Intelligence, all mixed up. There are people called double agents. I’m sure you’ve heard of them. So, quite often, one just doesn’t know where one stands. You may be tailing somebody who’s really your ally. You simply don’t know. And there are rules that don’t allow you merely to ask and find out.’
The eyes of Messrs Beadon and Walcot had rounded during these revelations, as they well might. Indeed, it struck Bobby that he had made his point rather well. Moreover, although he had simply invented this vast nonsense about espionage, there was an approximation to truth in what he had said. Cops and Robbers, Goodies and Baddies. He would be unable, upon challenge, to produce a scrap of evidence that Susan didn’t stand on the criminal side of the line. Or, for that matter, a scrap of evidence to the contrary.
‘It does all tie up,’ Beadon was saying. ‘Walcot, don’t you think?’
Prep schools, Bobby thought, are the most conservative of all educational institutions. Long after public schools have fallen for the modern convention of Christian names, these more juvenile establishments – mere nurseries, as they are – maintain this older and more austere manner of address.
‘Yes, it ties up, Beadon.’ Walcot glanced at his watch. ‘Gosh! Look at the time.’
‘Christ!’ The assured Beadon was of a sudden comically dismayed. He turned to Bobby. ‘I’m sorry, but we damn well have to run for it. Afternoon roll-call is absolutely Gullible’s thing. His one bastion against chaos in the day, Mr Hartsilver says.’
‘So it is,’ Bobby agreed, and stood up. ‘I don’t half remember it.’
‘And I propose to carry an inviolate anatomy through this term. But look – we could meet here again after prep.’
‘Very well.’ Bobby felt that he couldn’t decently expose to the risk of some physical discomfort the persons of Messrs Beadon and Walcot. ‘Seven o’clock, is it still? I’ll be here. Now, cut along.’ They were all three scrambling up towards the avenue. ‘But just tell me this. What sort of things tie up?’
‘No end of mysterious things.’ Beadon had vaulted a fence. ‘The Russians, for example.’
‘The Russians?’
‘Well, the two bearded men who were talking Russian. That right, Walcot?’
‘Dead right. And the midnight helicopter.’
‘And the man with the missing finger,’ Beadon said. ‘Don’t forget him.’
The boys had vanished, and Bobby – like Shakespeare’s Antony – was left alone, whistling to the air. Of the bearded Russians (but are Russians ever bearded nowadays?) and the midnight helicopter there was a simple, if mortifying, explanation. In appearing to accept Bobby as a
mysterious Secret Agent, Beadon and Walcot had merely been having him on. But what about the man with the missing finger? Even if the legend of Bloody Nauze had lingered at Overcombe in a manner which in itself was unlikely enough, what could have prompted Beadon to invoke him in the context he had?
Bobby saw no answer. He also saw that it must be his next business to find one.
6
Sir John Appleby, when made aware that any of his children were obscurely at grips with private problems of either an intellectual, a moral, or an emotional sort, had long been in the habit of recommending solitary pedestrianism. If you walk till you drop – he was accustomed to say – it is at least possible that something sensible will come into your head during the last half-mile. If you simply retire to your own room, shove your backside into an excessively sprung easy chair, and there grimly cerebrate, the chances are that you will eventually do no more than crawl into bed – to wake up six to eight hours later with an unsolved conundrum and a filthy headache.
Bobby Appleby had put in a good many years resenting and resisting Boy-Scout wisdom of this sort. So it must have been for entirely independent reasons that he had in fact taken to covering the countryside with a long stride whenever there was something to think about. He did this now. To the north of Overcombe ran a skyline of down-land intriguingly humped and nicked by human hands a very long time ago. These tumuli, barrows, vallums and the like had been, in the way of sheer trudge, a considerable challenge to the energies of small boys. But the cheerfully anarchic life of Overcombe (with, as Bobby had remembered, that late afternoon roll-call as its only effectively fixed point) had admitted excursions, licit or illicit, of quite an ambitious sort. Bobby had come to know the Ridgeway rather well.
He made for it as soon as Beadon and Walcot had scampered off. On Lark Hill he surveyed the Linchets – monuments to the laborious husbandry of goodness-knew-whom. From Bleak Barn (he remembered it had been called that on the Ordnance Survey map sent him by his mother) he contemplated anew the surprisingly indelicate Long Man. To this figure in the chalk (the erection of an ancient people, as it had been cryptically described to him by a sophisticated contemporary infant) he had owed the comforting knowledge that he was not the unique victim of some mysterious physiological malady. Into the great British camp beyond it, a kind of Olympic Stadium for the Games of a giant race, he didn’t now go, but he walked on as far as the Great Smithy before dropping down into the valley once more. The Great Smithy seemed to have been much tidied up by the Ministry of Works. Its narrow entrance, although dark as ever and threateningly flanked by the same huge sarsen stones, was now approached by a narrow brick path, and the mound of turf over the prehistoric barrow which the Smithy in fact was might have been shaved by a lawn-mower scaled up to the general proportions of the scene. But the beech-trees still shadowed it in their dark clumps. It was still a lonely and eerie place. Once it had even been frightening.
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