Here Comes a Chopper

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘Oh, don’t be an owl,’ responded Kingsford. ‘What have the Normans got to do with it? I bet the Battle of Waterloo was far more important, anyway.’

  ‘That’s not the point, you ass! In any case, they were important in different ways. Don’t look now, but here’s the keeper.’

  The thirty were at last divorced from the lower floor with all its attractions, and were persuaded to go across to the staircase (which, fortunately, they had not had time to discover for themselves) and ascend to the little Norman chapel. It was after they had descended a long staircase to the well, and, having been wrested thence, were once more in the open air, that it occurred to Parkinson to count heads. Twenty-eight boys were present.

  ‘Oh, damn!’ said Parkinson. ‘Who’s missing?’

  ‘I’ll go and round them up,’ said Roger. ‘It’s Kirby and Healy-Lunn, isn’t it?’ He returned to the White Tower and searched it faithfully. There was no sign of the truants. The truth dawned on him as he disgustedly rejoined the party. ‘I bet they cut their stick at the entrance as soon as we’d counted up and taken the tickets,’ he said. ‘Goodness knows where they are now! They may be anywhere.’

  He applied to the custodian at the gate, but received no comfort. Several schools were visiting the Tower that day, and the attendants had been kept extremely busy. Roger took a feverish walk round, but, apart from an abortive chase of two school caps which proved to be different from those of his own boys, as he perceived as soon as he got nearer them, he had no encouragement in his search. He returned to Parkinson.

  ‘I think they must be outside somewhere,’ he said. ‘Probably thought they’d be bored. They came last year, I believe. At least, Kirby did. I suppose they’ve gone off on a toot.’

  ‘Better give chase, I suppose, then,’ said Parkinson gloomily.

  ‘O—oh, sir!’ said twenty-eight reproachful voices.

  ‘Aren’t we going to see where the Princes in the Tower were murdered?’ demanded Kingsford.

  ‘And where Sir Walter Raleigh’s ghost walks?’ enquired Mapping. ‘I think I’m psychic, sir.’

  A babel broke out, during which Anne Boleyn’s head and Colonel Blood were mentioned by the disappointed boys. Roger, receiving a resigned and acquiescent nod from Parkinson, strode away back to the gate, and the others went onwards towards the Bloody and Beauchamp Towers.

  Once outside the Tower precincts it dawned upon Roger that Kirby and Healy-Lunn were not entirely the perishing little nuisances he had supposed them. The sun was shining, the Thames, so near Tower Bridge and Saint Catherine’s Dock, was full of life, and he was freed for a time from his little charges and their incessant questions and chatter. Keeping their fingers off the polished armour, too, had been more than one man’s work, and he felt fatigued. To be alone, even for five minutes, while he hunted the two stragglers, would be restful and refreshing, he decided.

  His own tastes urged him to the river. He argued, too, that this was the way the boys would have taken. There was a river steamer about to leave the small pier. She was just casting off. Roger stood a moment to watch, and then began to run. On her deck, leaning over the rail to watch operations, were Kirby and Healy-Lunn.

  He was almost thrown on board by willing hands, and told to get his ticket from the master. The screw began to revolve, the pier to back away, and the steamer set her nose eastward, reversed her engines and began to gather speed for her trip.

  Roger was no sooner aware of all these facts than he began to think he had done a foolish thing.

  ‘Where do we stop?’ he enquired of a woman with three children and some bundles.

  ‘Sarfend, dearie. Least, that’s where I’m agoing.’

  Roger sighed with relief. The steamer would call, then, at Greenwich. Bad enough, but not nearly as bad as it might have been. The two boys were safely tied up. He would have half an hour to himself and then give them the shock of their lives.

  It was just eleven o’clock. He went into the small saloon and had some beer. He did not know the rate at which the river steamers usually travelled, but he reflected comfortably that Greenwich was only about five miles from Tower Pier by river and that the steamer seemed to be making good time. From Greenwich a bus, or, at most, a couple of buses, would bring him, he supposed, to Tower Bridge. As Parkinson and his boys would spend about three-quarters of an hour over lunch and in examining the old guns which were parked along the esplanade opposite the watergate of the Tower, the contretemps of Kirby’s and Healy-Lunn’s truancy would not have wasted very much time.

  Roger had a second beer and a cheese sandwich. He filled and lighted his pipe. It was chilly on deck. He might just as well, he decided, remain in the stuffy but snug and cosy atmosphere of the saloon. Besides, the longer he could remain out of sight of the boys, the more pronounced would be the shock with which the sight of him would be greeted, and he was young enough to appreciate this fact.

  The steamer threshed on through the Lower Pool and past the entrance of the Regent’s Canal. It semi-circumscribed the Commercial Docks and passed the West India Docks and the Isle of Dogs. It passed the Millwall Docks and rounded into dirty, historic Deptford. Along Limehouse Reach it ran, and past the mouth of the Deptford Canal. Then Roger went out on deck.

  There lay Greenwich, with the Royal Naval College well in view, but the steamer took no account of this. To Roger’s almost open-mouthed horror, she ran on past Greenwich pier and the training ship drawn in under the starboard bank, and swung into Blackwall Reach on her way to Gravesend.

  Roger sought the bar-tender.

  ‘Where do we stop?’ he enquired.

  ‘Gravesend, Southend, Clacton-on-Sea,’ replied the man. Roger ordered a gin and another beer, and then seated himself on a plush-covered bench and leaned back, closing his eyes.

  ‘I say, sir,’ said the hateful voice of Master Kirby in the middle of a day-dream—or, rather, a waking nightmare in which Roger imagined himself being dismissed by the headmaster with opprobrium and without a character, ‘why don’t you come up on deck, sir? Healy-Lunn and I saw you come aboard, sir, and we couldn’t think where you’d got to. We wondered whether you were sea-sick. I have an aunt, sir, who is always sea-sick on the Thames. I say, sir, do you think I could ask for a ginger-beer, sir? Or is it like a public house in here? I’m awfully thirsty, sir.’

  ‘Oh, Lord!’ groaned Roger, fishing in his pocket for a shilling. ‘Here you are. I wish you’d both drop overboard and get drowned!’

  ‘Oh, thanks awfully, sir,’ said Master Kirby; but whether he was gratified by the gift or the pious wish Roger did not enquire.

  He drank his gin and beer, and finished his cheese sandwiches, and then thought longingly of the food he had left in the care of one Munnings, who had offered to carry it for him and no doubt still had it in safe keeping. He dared not order more food or drink until he knew what the price of the tickets on the steamer would be, and the three return fares to Tower Bridge. He cursed himself that he had spent so much already. And what on earth had induced him to part with a precious bob to that little swine Kirby, he wondered—Kirby, who, together with Healy-Lunn, was the cause of all this trouble and loss of time.

  Kirby and Healy-Lunn came up to him.

  ‘Please, sir, we’ve got our tickets. The steward or someone came round. We took them to Gravesend, sir. Shall I go and get yours? And, sir, we’ve just passed a dredger. Did you see it? And there’s a tanker coming up, sir. Do come up on deck and see her!’

  The steamer passed Blackwall Tunnel and slanted round Bugsby’s Reach. The Victoria Docks were far away to port. Woolwich Dockyard approached, and Woolwich Reach. The river mouth turned northward, buoyed all along the northern bank between George V Dock and the Northern Outfall bordering Barking Reach. Barking Creek went by, and the eighteen-foot sounding line remained obstinately along the northern shore.

  Halfway Reach and Dagenham Breach—it was like a madman’s poetry, thought Roger. Jenningtree Point and Erith Marshes, Erith Reac
h and Erith Rands, Crayfordness and Dartford Creek, Purfleet, Long Reach, even Clement’s Reach—he knew them all from the chart and the log of his little motor cruiser Sunfleet—the semi-circular curve past Blackshelf and the training ships Exmouth and Warspite, the southern slant down to Northfleet on Northfleet Hope, and so to Tilbury Docks and the Tidal Basin.

  Tilbury Fort, and, opposite, Gravesend at last! The steamer rang bells and edged in. There was a crowd of people at the gangway to go ashore, and some were pushing. Roger thrust himself in front of his charges, who remained cheerfully prattling up to the very moment of disembarkation, and began making tracks for the gangway. Suddenly he heard behind him a shout in a childish voice, then a gasping snarl, then he got hopelessly jammed in the wedge at the gangway railing.

  ‘Oh, sir! Please, sir!’ cried Master Kirby, as soon as they were ashore and Roger, having demanded of a policeman the way to the railway station, had dragged them away from the dock past a church and along two streets. ‘Did you see the man with the knife, sir?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Roger, uncomfortably reminded by this question of his previous escapes from injury.

  ‘A man with a knife, sir. Lunn bit him.’

  ‘Bit whom? What the devil are you talking about?’

  ‘He’s still got blood on his teeth, sir. Show Mr Hoskyn, Lousy. Perhaps you’d better spit. It might be poisonous.’

  Master Healy-Lunn spat vigorously on to a passing cat. Roger glanced behind him. He had a suspicion, founded on past experience, that it was not unlikely that they were still being followed.

  ‘Much obliged, Lunn,’ he said lightly. ‘And now, perhaps, Kirby, you’ll explain what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Well, sir, you know that squash getting off? Well, sir, you know we were just behind you? Well, sir, I don’t think the man understood that you were with us. He shoved us aside and then we saw the knife. Like a sailor’s knife, sir. Keary has one. The headmaster doesn’t like it, sir. He told Keary to put it away. Keary is a Rover Scout, sir. At least, he will be one as soon as——’

  ‘For heaven’s sake keep to the point!’ said Roger. ‘And hurry! I don’t want to miss a train!’

  ‘The odds against our catching a train, sir, without knowing the time-table,’ said Master Kirby, ‘are about one hundred thousand million to one, sir. My father worked it out. It is quite mystical—er—mythical to think, sir——’

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ shouted Roger. ‘And get a move on!’

  The conversation was not resumed until they were all in the train. Then Roger turned to Healy-Lunn.

  ‘Well, sir,’ said Healy-Lunn modestly, ‘it seemed as if the man was going to put the knife in your back, sir. And as I wasn’t sure whether he was going to or not, I bit his hand, and he dropped the knife. I bit rather hard, sir.’

  ‘He’s the champion biter of the Sixth, sir,’ interpolated Master Kirby, who disliked the role of passive listener. ‘Last term he bit the end off a riding-crop, sir. You know the little loop that——’

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ said Roger. ‘Go on, Lunn.’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s all, sir.’

  ‘You bit his hand really hard? Which hand? Would you happen to know?’

  ‘Oh, yes. His right hand, sir. I bit him on the Mount of Venus, sir.’

  ‘Where on earth is the Mount of Venus?’

  ‘Oh, sir!’ said Master Kirby. ‘Don’t you know that? It’s hand-reading, sir. I have an aunt who can do it. I know all the mounts, sir. Venus——’

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ yelled Roger. ‘Go on, Lunn.’

  ‘The Mount of Venus is at the base of the thumb, sir. It is fairly fleshy.’

  ‘You mean you may have left a scar?’

  ‘I hope not, sir, but I think so. Do you think I shall have trouble with the police, sir?’

  ‘No, I know you won’t have trouble with the police, Lunn. In fact——’ He paused, and then added impressively, ‘You won’t even have trouble with the headmaster over this little jaunt of yours if you can contrive to keep your mouth shut.’

  ‘And Kirby, sir?’

  ‘Oh, blast Kirby!’ said Roger pardonably. ‘All right, all right. But, mind, Kirby, if you breathe a single solitary word——’

  ‘Oh, I won’t, sir! Not a sound! Oh, thank you, sir! Oh, sir, you are very, very good to us, sir! I would like you to know——’

  ‘I would like you to know that I’ll twist your neck if you don’t shut up!’ said Roger.

  ‘So you see,’ wrote Roger to Mrs Bradley, ‘there seems good reason to suspect that somebody—I suppose the murderer, and it looks very much like Sim—must think I know something against him, although I’m quite sure I don’t. Anyway, I am remaining in my digs, after dark every night, just in case, and am not going to the cinema at present. How is Dorothy? And what are the chances of Mrs Denbies’ being released without a trial if the police are fat-headed enough to arrest her? And anything might happen after that lunatic inquest!’

  He wrote in a letter to Dorothy:

  ‘Mr Clinton wants me to go into residence for the rest of this term. It’s a frightful fag, but I suppose I’ll have to do it. It means I won’t be as free at week-ends, but that can’t be helped, and as I’m staying in, anyway, during the evenings, it won’t make all that difference. You might write as often as you can.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘Why should men love

  A wolf, more than a lamb or dove?

  Or choose hell-fire and brimstone streams,

  Before bright stars and God’s own beams?’

  HENRY VAUGHAN, Silurist—Childhood

  AT THE OPENING of the school term Mrs Bradley would have been grateful for the decision of the Reverend Ashton Clinton to make Roger a resident master for a time, but now that Claudia Denbies had been arrested and had been sent to prison by the magistrates, whilst Mrs Bradley and the police continued, along vastly different lines, to build up proof, acceptable to a jury, against the murderer, there seemed less need for caution on Roger’s behalf. At least, that was her reading of the facts.

  Mrs Bradley had used the attacks upon Roger as a strong argument to show that the murderer was still at large, for the attacks, particularly the one threatened by the man with the knife, could not have been sponsored by Claudia. The fact, too, that the chauffeur, Sim, had disappeared without trace after his attempts to injure or murder Roger, gave the police another good reason—or so Mrs Bradley pointed out to the inspector—for ceasing to suspect Claudia although she did not want her set free.

  Roger did not see Mrs Bradley again until his half-term holiday, for, as he had stated, although he would have enjoyed a certain amount of freedom at week-ends in the ordinary course of events, as a resident master he had various duties which prevented his leisure from extending beyond the limit of more than a few hours at a time.

  Mrs Bradley had rightly detected in Roger’s decision to take up resident duty an ambition to become a housemaster with its consequent increase of salary. She mentioned this theory to Dorothy who had been mildly but unpleasantly shocked at what she concluded (from his letters) to be Roger’s puerile regard for his own skin. Dorothy accepted the alternative theory gratefully, and wrote a congratulatory note to Roger on the subject of his wisdom and foresight.

  The egregious young man thereupon proposed—off handedly and through the post—and was promptly turned down. This would have occasioned him more mental agony than it did had it not been that his attention was distracted and his safety imperilled by the extraordinary behaviour of Master Kirby and Master Healy-Lunn, who selected the fifth Sunday after Easter on which to make a determined attempt to get themselves expelled from the school and Roger arrested for murder.

  It chanced that not so very far from the school was a playhouse of amateur actors. They gave four performances during the week, and a special Sunday night show for the members of their society. The play on this particular Sunday night was by one of the members and was entitled Blood. It was,
in point of fact, a youthfully morbid study of heredity, but to Master Siggenham, of the Upper Fourth, it represented, when he saw the advertisement in the local paper, such a tantalizing mirage of excitement and gore that he felt compelled to refer to it in class, whilst the form was apparently engaged in working out a problem in arithmetic.

  His form-master imposed on him a penalty of fifty lines for talking, and, being a youth of exceptional thrift, he had most of his pocket money left from the previous week, and therefore he repaired to Master Healy-Lunn. Kirby’s silent friend’s philanthropic custom was to write up a few hundred lines which he was willing to dispose of to customers for a monetary consideration or on terms of barter. Master Siggenham, knowing this, soon purchased the necessary imposition.

  ‘What did you do?’ enquired Healy-Lunn, counting the halfpence carefully.

  ‘Nothing much, Lunn,’ replied Siggenham. ‘I merely said to Hiscock that it was a pity we couldn’t all go to see that Blood show at the Cockcrow Theatre instead of all that Shakespeare bilge next week.’

  ‘Blood show?’

  ‘Yes, Lunn.’ And Siggenham explained.

  ‘I see. All right, cut along. And, mind, if there’s any query about the lines, you’d cut your thumb and had to do them left-handed. It’s practically true, because I did them left-handed myself, and everybody’s wrong-hand writing is the same.’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course, Lunn.’

  Healy-Lunn sought out his friend.

  ‘I’d like to see this Blood show,’ he said.

  ‘We’ll go,’ said Kirby immediately.

  ‘We can’t, you ass. We’d get sacked. It’s late at night!’

  ‘How late?’

  ‘Well, half-past nine, I think. It won’t be over much before midnight. And, anyway, it’s the devil of a sweat from here. We’d have to go on our bikes if we went at all.’

  Roger usually did visiting rounds on Sunday nights. The boys were sent to bed half an hour earlier than usual on Sundays, this to their disgust. The masters, however, were grateful for the respite, and no amount of pleading or cajoling would gain for any boy so little as ten minutes of extra time. On this occasion Healy-Lunn and Kirby tried the experiment of pretending to catch lice in one another’s hair when the visiting master came round, but unfortunately they had miscalculated, for instead of the greenhorn Roger, whom they were expecting, a senior master appeared, and, confiscating the clothes brush (unfortunately long-handled) which they had provided with the laudable idea of adding local colour to the scene of carnage by smacking it down on the imaginary bugs they were collecting, he put them, one after the other, across their respective cots and used the back of the brush to enforce his view that lights out meant lights out, and that little boys who were not under the bedclothes at the proper time must expect some untoward occurrences, of which this was the first and, he hoped, for their sakes, the last. He made the point quite clear.