Night of the Twelfth

by Michael Gilbert

  This young man had circled the school building, and coming in from the rear had been attracted by the sound of laughter from the gym. Pushing open the side door and peering in he thought he saw a face he recognized. ‘Surely,’ he said, ‘it’s Constance Latrobe? Wasn’t it you who put on that excellent performance of the Shrew? Two – or was it three years ago?’

  ‘Three and a half, actually,’ said Latrobe. In the handsome robes of the Duke Orsino he was a more assured and impressive figure than in the classroom. ‘Who might you be?’

  ‘Dramatic critic of the Record,’ said the young man, improvising readily. ‘We heard that you were putting on a play down here. Twelfth Night, isn’t it?’ This was a tribute to his eyesight rather than his deductive powers. He had spotted a copy of the play on the table as he came in. ‘Your school being rather in the public eye at the moment, we thought it might be of interest to our readers if we gave them a preview of it. Could you introduce the cast, do you think?’

  Nothing could have pleased Latrobe more.

  It was a first-class set of costumes which he had got hold of through a friend at the Stratford Memorial Theatre. The men’s clothes had needed a good deal of shortening and taking in, but the girls dresses fitted Jared, Peter and Billy with a minimum of padding and the boys wore them with an air of unselfconscious coquetry which would have ravished the hearts of an Elizabethan audience.

  ‘You must be Ben Sacher’s son?’

  ‘If I must be, I must be,’ said Jared gravely.

  ‘That was a nasty experience you had the other night.’

  ‘I don’t think–’ said Latrobe.

  ‘Quite right. Not something you’ll care to remember. Who’s this? Billy Warlock, of course. You’re Peter Warlock’s son. Your father’s playing at Chichester now, isn’t he?’

  ‘He’s in two of the plays,’ said Billy, who was used to talking to the press, and knew that they liked plenty of detail. ‘He’s in the Anouilh; and the Shaw, but not in the Pinero.’

  ‘I expect you see a good deal of him?’

  ‘Usually only on Sundays. But he’s giving a party tonight and we’re going to it.’

  ‘A party?’

  ‘It’s for Peggy Lynch. She’s been playing with him in both plays. She’s off to America tomorrow.’

  ‘An evening party,’ said the reporter. ‘Aren’t you a bit young for that?’

  Billy gave him the sort of look which thirteen-year-old boys give people who make remarks of that sort and said bleakly, ‘I expect we shall survive.’

  ‘Do you think I might have a photograph? If you stood together on the stage I could get you all in nicely. That’s fine. You’ll have to close up a little on the right. Perhaps you could put your arm round young Sacher, Mr Latrobe? I seem to remember that she’s your girlfriend in the play. Lovely.’

  Commander Gaze put his head round the door at this moment and said, sourly, ‘I hope I’m not interrupting anything. The Head wants all staff in his study.’

  ‘Some of the boys,’ said Mr Fairfax, ‘seem to have written home highly imaginative accounts of what happened when those two men broke into the school. I’ve been inundated with telephone calls, and have already had reporters round here. I just wanted to say that I rely on all of you to keep this thing at the lowest possible temperature. Naturally you won’t talk to the press yourselves–’ the Commander looked at Latrobe who had the grace to blush. ‘–Or if you are forced to talk to them, I suggest you employ that useful formula, “No Comment”. We have only ten days of term to go, and I sincerely hope we can get through it without any further disturbance.’

  ‘In a school I was at near Broadstairs,’ said Mr Diplock, ‘we had the son of the famous racing motorist. When his father broke the world land speed record a journalist tried to interview the boy–’ Mr Diplock snuffled happily at the memory. ‘The Headmaster chased him down the drive with a riding crop.’

  Mr Fairfax smiled, and said, ‘I hope I shan’t be driven to do anything like that.’

  ‘Standing there,’ said the Commander, ‘with his arm round the boy. That’ll make a nice picture, won’t it? I should think the Head will have a fit when he sees it.’

  ‘Publicity for the school,’ said Manifold.

  ‘Not the sort of publicity a school wants. The press are only too ready to hint’ – the Commander seemed to boggle at the word ‘you know, homosexuality and that sort of thing.’

  ‘I know,’ said Manifold gravely.

  ‘It was the same in the navy. One had to be on the look out all the time. I remember’ – the Commander seemed to rearrange his thoughts at the last moment and concluded, rather tamely – ‘one or two instances. Unpleasant for all concerned.’

  ‘I suppose it was natural enough, in a way,’ said Manifold, wishing that he had Dr Sampson’s tape recorder with him, ‘Nothing but all male company for months on end.’

  ‘That’s one reason, I agree,’ said the Commander. ‘But the real trouble is lack of self-discipline. We’re too soft with boys nowadays. You’re not as old as I am, but you must have noticed the change, even in your lifetime. Teddy bears in bed and going out with your parents every other weekend. Look at those Warlock boys.’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘They’ve been off visiting their father and all his theatrical pals almost every weekend this term.’

  Manifold refrained from pointing out that if undiluted male company was bad for a boy’s morals, it must be good for him to meet the opposite sex occasionally. He said, ‘I shouldn’t have called either of them particularly soft.’

  ‘They can play cricket,’ agreed the Commander. ‘They’re probably all right at the moment. But is it going to last? They’re off to a party again tonight. A drink party.’

  ‘I hadn’t heard about that,’ said Manifold.

  ‘It’s some sort of theatrical do their father’s giving. I think the Head’s been very weak about it. It’s symptomatic of the way we do nothing but give in, give in.’ The Commander’s naturally red face had become suffused by the force of his feelings.

  ‘It’s had one good side effect,’ said Manifold.

  ‘Oh. What’s that?’

  ‘It seems temporarily to have cured your toothache.’

  The Commander looked disconcerted for a moment, and then broke out into a gruff laugh. He said, ‘You’re quite right. And it proves my point. When you stop thinking about aches and pains they stop worrying you. Incidentally, thank you for offering to take my English class for me. Two-A. Quite a bright lot. I shall have to catch Dip and ask him to stand in for me at prep.’

  ‘You won’t be back by then?’

  ‘Not if I have to go all the way to Guildford. And this chap always keeps you waiting. I shall probably stop there and get a bite to eat afterwards.’

  ‘Always supposing you’ve got any teeth left to bite with,’ said Manifold.

  Manifold had not met Two-A before, and when he came in they stared at him round-eyed as though they expected him to produce a gun and shoot out the light bulb. They were a friendly lot and it did not take long to break the ice.

  He said. ‘What are you doing with Commander Gaze?’

  Stephen Busbridge, who seemed to be the spokesman, said, ‘We’re doing As You Like It. We’ve got to Act Four.’

  ‘And how do you do it?’

  ‘GG lets us take different parts and sort of act it.’

  ‘That seems a good idea. Who takes which part?’

  ‘We don’t always do the same parts,’ said a red-headed boy in the back row. ‘No one wants to do the girls all the time.’

  ‘Then what do you do?’

  ‘We draw for it.’

  Manifold cast an eye over Act Four. There seemed to be quite a few girls in it. Counting only one Lord and one Forester he made it eight parts, which was convenient since there were eight boys. He wrote the names on eight bits of paper, folded them up, shuffled them round, and the draw took place. The only person who seemed to be disappointe
d in the result was a very small boy who had drawn the Forester. He said, ‘It’s a swindle. Foresters never have anything to say.’

  ‘You’re in luck this time,’ said Busbridge. ‘You’ve got a song to sing.’

  ‘Have I really got to sing it?’

  ‘Of course you have. It says, “Song”. We all join in the chorus.’

  They threw themselves into their parts with gusto, and read them with intelligence, too; Busbridge being most suitably cast as the melancholy Jaques. Manifold realized that these were the bright boys, the ones who, next year, would be in One-A, taking the places of Sacher and McMurtrie and Joscelyne, and sitting for scholarships at public schools, and moving on and giving up their places, in turn, to another generation. One foot in youth and one foot in manhood. He felt, for the first time, the attraction which kept men like Mr Diplock nailed to their dead-end jobs.

  His mind had been straying from As You Like It. The flippant love scenes between Orlando and the disguised Rosalind – surely a disguise which deceived no one? – was bubbling merrily along.

  ‘No, faith, die by attorney. The poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time, there was not any man died in his own person – vid – something – how do you pronounce it?’

  ‘It’s a sort of legal word,’ said Manifold cautiously. ‘It’s usually spelt “viz” nowadays. Why not say it that way.’

  ‘There was not any man died in his own person. Viz in a love cause, Troilus had his brains dashed out with a Grecian club–’

  Manifold had once seen a head broken open by a native club, and the grey brains oozing out. It had not been a pleasant sight.

  ‘But these are all lies; men have died, from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.’

  The reader paused for breath. Manifold said, ‘Well read.’ The red-haired boy said, ‘It sounds terrific, but what does it mean, sir?’

  Manifold said, ‘It means exactly what it says. People talk a lot of nonsense about love. They say they’ll do anything for it. Sacrifice their reputations. Give up their kingdoms. Die for it, even. Shakespeare says that that’s not true. People die from lots of different reasons. Cancer and coronaries and traffic accidents. But they don’t die for love.’

  The small Forester said, ‘We had a pair of budgerigars. The female one got out and the cat ate her, and the male one really did pine away and die.’

  ‘Birds are more sensitive than human beings,’ said Manifold. ‘Carry on, Orlando.’

  The rain eased up after tea, and a watery sun came out. There was not enough heat in it to make the swimming bath attractive and Manifold decided to walk down to the village. There was a line of enquiry which he had been meaning to follow for some time, and this seemed a good chance.

  Passing the front of Raybould’s shop it occurred to him that he might redeem his pledge and he went in. Mrs Raybould shook her head. ‘Poor man,’ she said, ‘he seems to attract misfortune. Like a magnet. I had an elder sister, she was just the same. We all used to say, if a thunderbolt fell, it’d fall on her head for sure.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Nothing’s happened yet. She’s living near Bognor.’

  ‘I meant Mr Merriam.’

  ‘It’s the battery. He must have dropped it. Or dropped something on it. I said I’d see if we could patch it up, but the insulation’s cracked right through.’ Mrs Raybould searched under the counter, and produced the battery. It certainly looked to be beyond repair.

  He said, ‘What on earth can have happened to it?’

  ‘You’ve got to face it,’ said Mrs Raybould. ‘He’s not responsible for his actions. Sooner or later he’ll have to be sent somewhere where he can be looked after properly. Mrs Loveday does her best, I’m sure. But she’s not a proper nurse. There might be a very nasty accident indeed, and no one would be more sorry than Miss Shaw, who looks after him as though he was her own natural father. But she’s got her work at the school.’

  Manifold, who had been examining the contents of his wallet, said, ‘How much does a new battery cost?’

  ‘It’d be one pound forty. But seeing as how it’s old Merriam–’

  ‘No. That’s all right,’ said Manifold. ‘I’ve got the money. Bit of luck on the horses. Put it on one side and I’ll pick it up on my way back. I’ve got a job to do down the other end of the village.’

  Police Constable Hannaford, the local representative of the West Sussex Constabulary, lived in a large double bungalow at the far end of the village. The left-hand side housed him, his wife and his four children. The right-hand side was his official quarters. Manifold had telephoned him before he set out, and found him in his office.

  Hannaford was a big, solid man, well-liked in the village, capable of turning a blind eye at the right moment but of putting down the heavy foot of the law when it seemed called for. He listened without surprise to what Manifold had to say.

  ‘It’s right,’ he said, ‘we did have one or two cases of that sort a year or so ago. How did you come to hear of it, might I ask?’

  ‘I heard two of the boys talking about it.’

  ‘Ah, there’s not much escapes them. Boys’d make good policemen. They keep their eyes and ears open and their wits about ’em.’

  ‘Could you give me the details? Times, places and so on.’

  ‘To my recollection, but I’ll look in the book to make sure, we had two cases actually reported. The first was a dog. Someone had cut him open. Like it might have been one of these vivisectionists. Left him lying in the field behind Toplady’s farm. Mr Toplady was upset about that. He’d been fond of the dog. He had it put down, of course.’

  ‘Then it wasn’t dead when he found it?’

  ‘Nine parts dead, but not quite. The second one was a cat. Up in the woods behind the rectory. Strung it up and cut its paws off.’

  ‘Yes. That was the one I heard them talking about.’

  ‘It wasn’t dead, either,’ said Hannaford. He had been looking through his station log as he spoke. ‘Mr Toplady’s dog, that was nearly two years ago. It was the seventh of August. The cat was the January of the year after. January the fourth. That was the day it was found.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Manifold. A horrible vista was opening in front of him.

  ‘There could have been others. You find a rabbit, say, or a squirrel. And you think, poor little bugger, a dog’s caught him and messed him about. So you finish him off with your boot and drop him in the ditch and think no more of it. That way, we wouldn’t hear about it.’

  ‘Those were the only two that actually got reported?’

  ‘That’s right. Are the dates important?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Manifold.

  ‘You weren’t thinking of a moon murderer, perhaps?’

  ‘No. I don’t think the moon comes into this.’

  ‘At the time people thought it might be Jamie Pope. He’s a bit turned in his head. He wanders round talking to himself. There was a feeling he ought to be locked up. But there was no sort of proof he had anything to do with it.’

  ‘Tell me, were there any signs of a car having been parked in Toplady’s field, or up in the wood where they found the cat?’

  Hannaford looked at him curiously, and said, ‘Not that I remember. We didn’t look into it all that closely. Thinking it was just a local boy done it. Are you tying it up with those other cases? I mean the boy at Brading and those others.’

  It wasn’t until Hannaford said this that the sequence of events which had been slowly forming in Manifold’s mind came finally into focus. He said, ‘I’d like you to forget that we ever had this conversation. Don’t discuss it with anyone, please. Even your wife. And don’t make any record of it.’

  When he got out into the street it was a fine evening. The last of the clouds had packed away, and the sun was smiling on a world washed clean by the rain, a world of innocent people and happy thoughts.

  When a problem which has preoccupied the mind for weeks suddenly res
olves itself, mixed with the satisfaction of having arrived at the solution, there must always be an element of surprise, sometimes even of shock.

  Manifold now found himself able to identify the face which, previously, he had seen only in his dreams. He knew, beyond logical argument, who it was who had been responsible for the maiming of animals and the deaths of boys. He could even guess what had driven him to act. There was repulsion and horror enough in the answer, but his overmastering feeling was one of sadness.

  It was at six o’clock that evening, just as he was finishing his tea, that old Mr Moritz banged his cup down with a force which nearly cracked the saucer and said, ‘I got it.’

  ‘God Almighty,’ said his startled daughter. ‘What’ve you got? And whatever it is, there’s no call to break our best china.’

  ‘I’ve remembered.’

  ‘Remembered what?’

  ‘What it was I was trying to remember. When the police was asking me all those questions about that boy.’

  ‘All right. What was it?’

  It took Mr Moritz a minute to sort out his revelation and explain it to his daughter. She was not greatly impressed. She said, ‘Is that what’s been worrying you all these weeks?’

  ‘Don’t you see. It’s important.’

  ‘If you think it’s important, you’d better tell the police. We’ve got that number they gave us. I wrote it down somewhere, didn’t I?’

  The number was eventually found, written on the back of an envelope and put away on the mantel-shelf behind a photograph of the late Mrs Moritz. The next problem was to find a telephone.

  ‘You’d better give them a ring when you get down to the Horseshoes,’ said his daughter.

  Mr Moritz considered this. He wanted to watch the television. It was finals day of the women’s doubles at Wimbledon, and they had been promised a replay of the whole match. There was nothing he enjoyed more than seeing those nimble little girls in their short white skirts hopping about the court.

  He said, ‘I’ll go down when the tennis is finished.’