‘Iain,’ I said, ‘two things. First, this small catastrophe makes you acting Head of House. Second, Daviot’s grandfather is here in Mr Taplow’s study. He’d be grateful if you’d come and talk to him.’
‘Isn’t he a judge or something?’ My new Head of House was properly wary.
‘Yes, and distinctly judicial as well. But he is the brat’s stand-in for a father, and we have to go along with his efforts to sort things out. So I’d be grateful if you’d come and lend a hand.’
‘A hand—yes. But I don’t know about a head as well.’ Macleod had set out with me at once. ‘I’m a bit bewildered, I mean, about the whole thing. What does this judge-person think is happening to his grandson? Suffering a fate worse than death?’
‘I imagine so. What do you think? I have to ask you, because I suspect he will.’
‘I don’t think it will have been what was in Robin’s mind.’
‘I agree.’ It seemed to me that Macleod had produced a notably well-judged reply. ‘Mr Johncock is making a silly if harmless joke about an elopement, and other people may see it that way, too. But Robin at least wasn’t positively planning a seduction. We can express our conviction as to that.’
Macleod nodded, but said nothing. He was clearly turning over in his mind the problem of giving some sort of testimony about his friend. We walked on in silence, and had reached the gate of School House when I became aware of Miss Sparrow advancing towards us on the footpath with a businesslike shopping-basket on her arm. A sudden inspiration came to me.
‘Hallo,’ I said. ‘Iain and I are going in here to talk to the grandfather of the Daviot boy in Tim’s study. Come with us.’
‘Would you say that Mr Taplow is inviting me?’ Halted at the garden gate, Miss Sparrow was amused.
‘Don’t dither. It is a mess, and we all have to pile in. And on anything connected with Heynoe House you are an impeccable expert witness.’
So Miss Sparrow joined us. I was pleased about this. There were aspects of the boys’ life in Heynoe which she knew more about than I did. And it was in my mind that the presence of a lady might deter Sir Henry Daviot from expatiating on that worse-than-death conjecture.
He did at least express himself as gratified by Miss Sparrow’s accession to our numbers, although what he really thought about it, I don’t know. Certainly his interest was immediately centred on Iain.
‘Mr Macleod,’ he said, ‘I hope you don’t mind my having suggested to your housemaster that we have a talk?’
‘No, sir.’
‘I understand that Robin Hayes and you are friends and enjoy a good deal of one another’s confidence – as one might expect from the joint responsibility you hold in Heynoe.’ Sir Henry paused on this. He was being very much the old public school boy himself. ‘Now, Macleod, it may very well be that in discussing his affairs with you Hayes touched on matters which you don’t feel at liberty to repeat.’
‘No. I don’t know that he did.’
‘I must of course respect any reticence that you may feel proper.’
‘I don’t think, sir, I have any occasion to be reticent. And I’ve just said so.’
‘Very well.’ The judge gave every appearance of approving this stiff reply – even greeting it with one of his grave bows. ‘And of course we must be quite clear that your friend’s departing from Helmingham is in itself his own affair. He has come of age and is his own master. Just as you yourself are.’
‘Yes.’
‘But he has taken my grandson away with him: a boy who had his fourteenth birthday a few weeks ago. You will see that there is a difficulty there.’
‘It can be called that, I suppose.’
‘Naturally I am very much concerned, and feel it urgently necessary to discover where Robin and David have betaken themselves. You understand that?’
‘Of course I do. And I want to know myself.’
‘You have no idea where they have gone to? Nothing that Robin has said . . .?’
‘No—nothing. He didn’t say a thing. Even when he was blind drunk he didn’t. It has been as ugly a surprise to me as to you.’
‘I see.’ Robin’s blind drunkenness must have been a fresh increment of information for the judge, but he gave no sign of taking account of it. ‘Then what about a guess, Macleod?’ The judge brought this forward whimsically. ‘Where would you say, quite at a venture, that Hayes and my grandson are heading for now?’
‘Morocco, perhaps. Or California.’
‘Dear me! But isn’t getting to such places a matter of considerable expense?’
‘Of course it is. But there was that cheque from his uncle. Robin said nothing. But he did show it to me. Or flip it at me, rather – just as he flipped it at Mr Syson. And I happened to see the amount. It was for a thousand pounds.’
This produced a second’s silence. We were conferring, it must be remembered, a number of years ago, when a thousand pounds still seemed a very large sum of money. Then Tim Taplow spoke.
‘Is this the wicked uncle again?’ he asked. ‘Jasper Hayes?’
‘Not a Hayes,’ I said. ‘I’ve told you. Tandem. He’s on the mother’s side. Jasper Tandem.’
My words had – at least for a perceptible moment – a startling effect. For the second time during this unusual conference a species of rigor appeared to have afflicted Sir Henry Daviot. He had stiffened as he sat. On the first occasion both these names had been uttered, but it had been that of Hayes that had produced this odd phenomenon. This time it had been the name of poor Mr Hayes’s bad-hat brother-in-law. What to make of such behaviour, I didn’t at all know. But, just as before, Sir Henry was quickly at ease again. For some seconds, indeed, he said nothing – but his silence was of the forensic sort that suggests that the form of some particularly penetrating questions is being carefully thought out.
‘Macleod,’ he asked, ‘would you say that Robin is an impulsive lad, prone sometimes to act rashly and upon insufficient consideration of the consequences of what he is about?’
‘He is impulsive, yes.’
‘What happens when he sees he’s on a wrong tack? Does he turn right-about and return to base again?’
‘No. Typically or characteristically, that is, he’s somebody who still drives ahead.’
‘A stiff-necked boy?’
‘I don’t know about that. I think the expression is a disagreeable one.’ Macleod delivered himself of this rebuke quite calmly. ‘I’d say that Robin is a rebel. I wish I was.’
‘Do you, indeed?’
‘This is a very good school. But in a way any such place is a kind of forcing house for conformities. And his instinct is against that.’
‘I see. Well, making off with a young companion to California is certainly not conforming behaviour. And you think that, having once bought the tickets, Robin would see to it that they both went on board?’
‘I do think that.’
A brief silence followed upon these exchanges, and I told myself that Macleod was not without a certain romantic admiration for his friend. The person who next spoke was Miss Sparrow.
‘I don’t think I agree with Iain,’ she said. ‘What he says about Robin’s character is true in a way. Only it doesn’t allow for a considerable amount of simple common sense in the boy’s make up.’
‘This is extremely interesting, Miss Sparrow.’ The judge was at his most courteous. ‘Would you be inclined to assert that there has been a considerable amount of common sense in the boy’s decamping with my grandson?’
‘Most certainly.’
‘Can you expand on that? It would be of great assistance to me.’
‘It doesn’t need much expanding, Sir Henry. Robin believed, rightly or wrongly, that David was having a very unhappy time in this House. So he took him away from it. I don’t say that a good deal of excitement and romantic feeling wasn’t generated by the situation – and possibly fuelled by that most injudicious thousand pounds. But I believe that, almost at once, common sense would win the day.
’
‘And with what result, Miss Sparrow?’
‘Robin would simply take David straight home, and perhaps hope to discuss the situation, Sir Henry, with yourself.’
‘It is a comfortable view.’ The judge contrived to offer this at once politely and grimly. ‘But if David had been brought straight home I shouldn’t be here now.’
And now Sir Henry Daviot was on his feet. With both hands he made the slightest of quasi-papal gestures – the action of a man accustomed to having the most slender indications of his pleasure obeyed. Our conference was over, and he was inviting us to disperse.
‘I am most grateful to you, all four,’ he said. ‘We have had a most useful discussion, and now I must keep an appointment with the Head Master.’ He then shook hands with us, beginning with Miss Sparrow, and without the assistance of Jubb departed from School House.
I went back to Heynoe and endeavoured to apply my mind to correcting Greek unseens. At the end of an hour the telephone rang.
‘Stafford,’ said John Stafford’s voice.
‘Yes, Head Master.’
‘You’ve had that old man Daviot with you?’
‘Not exactly that. I was with Taplow in School House, and Daviot was shown in on us. Later, there were Miss Sparrow and my second prefect as well. We had an odd sort of discussion about this thing.’
‘An odd sort of discussion. Was Daviot odd too?’
‘Odd?’ This disconcerted me a little. ‘Once or twice he made me slightly uneasy. I don’t quite know why.’
‘You didn’t feel he ought to be locked up?’
‘Good heavens, no!’
‘Then the man contrived to go completely off his head between Taplow’s house and mine. About a hundred and fifty yards, Syson. Just who is going mad next? How do you feel yourself?’
This was the awkward and uncharacteristic gamesomeness into which I recalled Stafford as sometimes dropping when he was upset.
‘Tolerably normal,’ I said. ‘Just what happened?’
‘It was all quite in order at the start. I even told myself he wasn’t as bothered as I’d have expected, considering this alarming carrying off of his grandson.’
‘Perhaps, Head Master, we ought to avoid describing it just like that. There’s no evidence at all that David Daviot has departed from school unwillingly. Indeed, the initiative may conceivably have been his.’
‘A valid point, Syson. Well, as I say, the man was perfectly sensible until we got on the business of the senior Hayes having bolted from quod – and then this other bolt immediately following at Helmingham. That seemed to touch something off, and he suddenly declared that it had been a concerted move; that father and son had been in collusion.’
‘But I’ve debated that myself. Surely it’s a tenable view, although an unlikely one.’
‘Quite so. It’s much more probable that the father’s flight simply further upset the son and put the same notion of making a bolt of it into his head. But Daviot asserted his conviction in a most intemperate fashion. And then there was that disagreeable fellow Tandem, and his precious cheque. Daviot positively gibbered at the mention of him – I can’t think why. Finally, he came back to your Robin Hayes and produced what I take to be a stroke of straight dottiness. He said, “I punished his father, didn’t I? Now he and his father between them are out to punish my grandson”. And I rather think he muttered something to the effect that Uncle Tandem was in on the plot as well. It’s nonsense, isn’t it?’
‘I doubt whether we can be quite certain of that, Head Master. There’s something malicious about Tandem – and I don’t at all know what else there mayn’t be as well. But there could be a paranoiac streak in that elderly judge.’
‘That’s the word I’ve been putting to it in my own head, Syson. And the thing was only the more alarming because it went as suddenly as it had arrived. Daviot took his leave of me in an entirely composed way, and with some sensible remarks on tracing the truants. It was almost as if his weird turn had been a product of dissociation, if that’s what it’s called. The long and the short of it is that this eminent judge is in an unstable state, to say the least, and may go over the top with stuff discrediting the school. So the sooner we get the affair cleared up, the better.’
I concurred in this sentiment, and John Stafford rang off. What I didn’t quite go along with was the implication – which I thought I had detected in his tone – that the clearing up was entirely my responsibility.
VIII
With half-term came a week’s freedom from both school routine and the always slightly more harassing affairs of Heynoe House. But as I watched my boys pile into their coaches or family cars I felt almost reluctant to part with them, since the problem they left me with became only the more oppressive.
Alarmingly by this time, nothing had been heard of our two absentees. Less alarmingly, perhaps, but even more unaccountably, nothing had been heard of the runaway Mr Hayes either. Owen Marchmont had again rung me up about his vanished guest, seemingly out of a not very rational persuasion that the man was likely to turn up at Helmingham at any moment in quest of his son. Not that Marchmont wasn’t entirely rational about the general state of play. The failure to recapture Mr Hayes was something totally against expectation. Professional criminals, once they were over a prison wall, not infrequently eluded discovery for weeks, months, sometimes even years. But that was because a whole highly-organised underworld was waiting to receive them – quick, indeed, to make it a point of honour to take considerable risks to protect a man on the run. An outsider like poor Mr Hayes, strayed into prison with no credentials in the way of habitual wrong-doing, hadn’t on any reasonable reckoning the ghost of a chance of spending so much as a single night at liberty. Marchmont seemed to think that he was probably dead; that he had fallen off a cliff into the sea or been swallowed by a quicksand. Alternatively, he might have ineptly slithered down a derelict mine shaft or clambered up a hopelessly decayed ladder into an abandoned silo, and be by now slowly perishing of thirst and hunger. Marchmont was really upset by these speculations.
‘Tough on the chap’s wife,’ he said. ‘Tiresome woman, but I’m sorry for her. Police more or less on the doorstep and among the gooseberry-bushes right round the clock. A particularly unseemly thing, I’d say, in the shadow of a cathedral. But unavoidable, you see. The blighter might bend his steps homewards at any time.’
‘I wish the boy would, Owen.’
‘The boy? Ah, yes – but that’s different. No great need to worry about him. He’s in possession of some money I suppose?’
‘Hardly a doubt of it. Perhaps something over a thousand pounds.’
‘Good lord! Well, good luck to him. He’s entitled to go where he pleases, I imagine.’
‘But not, surely, to take young Daviot, the judge’s grandson, along with him.’
‘I don’t know about that, Pog – I don’t know at all. Of course old Daviot is entitled to exercise his custody of his ward when they locate him. But meanwhile I rather doubt whether young Hayes is in any way breaking the law in accepting David – that’s his name, isn’t it? – as a travelling companion. Of course I’m interested in the boys, all the same. And there is now a police hunt for them, you know – if only because of the chance that they’ve joined up with your Robin’s dad.’
‘To come back to the mum, Owen – of course I’ve been in correspondence with her, and so has our Head Master. It must all be dreadfully worrying to her, and she is bound to feel that we have in some way failed her over her boy. But she doesn’t show up to advantage with pen and paper, poor woman, and I think I ought to drive over and see her particularly as I have a few clear days ahead of me. It seems the proper thing.’
‘Ah, yes – the proper thing.’ Marchmont, demonstrably a man much given to perpending the proper thing himself, repeated the phrase with a tiresome effect of mild amusement. But then he approved at once. ‘Sound plan,’ he said. ‘You may pick up something helpful that has eluded the local bobbies
. And, by the way, isn’t there a daughter? I’d try to contact her, if I were you, without making too much of it. It’s possible she has a line at least on the boys. A sister is sometimes closer to a lad than his parents are. Or so I’d suppose. I was an only child myself.’
‘I’ll try to do that, Owen.’ For a moment I had been inclined to resent this suggestion – rather as if it would be turning me into a police spy. But something in my schoolfellow’s tone as he spoke these last words brought it into my mind that he was a lonely man – and like myself a bachelor whose main contacts were with charges who of necessity stood rather remote from him. ‘I’ll let you hear of any impression I arrive at,’ I said. ‘You know, I did enjoy running into you so unexpectedly at your blessed Hutton Green. It was fun.’
‘So it was. And – I say! – I must be pretty well on your route to and from the formidable Mrs H. Won’t you drop in – either for a meal or a drink, as the hour suggests?’
‘Thank you. Yes, I will.’
And when I had rung off I wrote at once to Mrs Hayes, asking permission to call on her. That, too, was no doubt the proper thing.
She responded by telephone on the following morning, thus making up in promptitude for a marked lack of cordiality apparent in her tone. But this reflection struck me at once as unjust. The woman had other things to think about than suggesting herself as a gracious, let alone grateful, prospective hostess. On the telephone she more or less said as much, informing me several times that she was in a very difficult situation. I reflected that so, of course, was her husband, and very possibly her son as well. But my sense of this she no doubt took for granted.
Driving across a couple of counties next day, I found myself thinking less of any conversation with Mrs Hayes ahead of me than of a short talk with Miss Sparrow before she had departed on a few days’ holiday in what I conjectured to be naval circles. She had done little more than repeat with emphasis the opinion she had expressed at our meeting with David Daviot’s grandfather. Robin Hayes might be liable to act impulsively and under the influence of romantic feeling. But the boy possessed a great deal of common sense which would almost at once assert itself following upon any rash action. And this ought to have resulted – Miss Sparrow was insistent – in his taking David almost straight home.
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