A Javelin for Jonah

chapter

5

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Well,” said Henry on the following morning, “there seems to be nobody in the stoke-hole, or anywhere else we thought of. If Jones doesn’t turn up at lunch I shall speak to Gassie and get him to utter threats.”

“What sort of threats?” asked Hamish.

“That is up to him. Expulsion of ringleaders, I suppose, although I do hope it won’t really come to that. The threat may be sufficient to bring them to their senses.”

“Who are the ringleaders?”

“One can do no more than guess, at this juncture. After all, there are those among us who have grievances, are there not?”

“Yes, but the chief sufferers from Jones’s machinations are still in hospital.”

“How do we know they’re the chief ones? There may be others. In fact, we know there are.”

“Good Lord! You don’t suppose Barry or Lesley would be a party to a student rag, do you?”

“No, of course not. Anyway, we’ll hope to goodness Jones shows up at lunch, that’s all.”

Jones was not at lunch. Henry, looking worried, left his seat at the high table, got out his car and drove to the village to make certain that the missing man had not decided upon a snack and a drink at the public-house which was his frequent haven. He drew blank, as he had expected to do, returned to College and caught up, as best he could, with his meal.

The students were unusually quiet. Such talk as went on was in undertones. There was an air of conspiracy about the place.

“Have you been to see Gassie? Does he know that Jonah is still missing?” Hamish asked when Henry had re-seated himself at the high table.

“I’m going to see him directly after lunch. I’m beginning to hope that the students will have freed Jones and that he’s decided to sling his hook, after all. There was that rumour, you know, that he had resigned.”

“I thought it had been scotched, and by Medlar himself.”

“I know. And, of course, Gassie, I feel certain, would be loth to ask Jonah to go. I have an idea that, apart from being his brother-in-law, Jones has some special reason for having earned Gassie’s gratitude. What it is I don’t know and should never attempt to find out, but, shortly before you came, Miss Yale and I made representations to him to get rid of the mischievous, unpleasant fellow. Some of the women students had tackled us about his little ways, you know. It was then that Gassie told me privately that he owed Jones a living and could never sufficiently indulge him for something he had done for him in the past. Personally, I cannot visualize Jones’s doing anything for anybody unless he had to, but one never knows, of course, and therefore one should not judge, I suppose.”

He was about to rise from the table to pronounce the customary Latin grace when Richard, flushed and sweating, came up to the high table and said,

“Would you make an announcement, Harry boy?‘

“Now?” asked Henry.

“Well, everybody seems to be here except Gassie.”

“And Jonah,” said Henry, glancing towards Jones’s vacant chair.

“Well, that’s it,” said Richard. “They shoved Jonah down the stoke-hole. We’ve just been along to get him out. He isn’t there. They didn’t leave him any more grub after yesterday, so you might ask the chaps who’ve moved him whether they’ve fed him or not. Nobody wants the poor poop to starve to death.”

“I think you’d better speak to Mr. Medlar,” said Henry formally, “but, as he isn’t at lunch, I’ll make an announcement if you like.” He rose and tapped on the table. “Look,” he said to the students, “a joke’s all right, but it might be as well to produce Jonah and let him eat. No questions will be asked, provided he makes his reappearance immediately this meal is over. Benedicam dominum. Amen.”

There was a stir among the students and a girl called out, “Nobody here knows where Jonah is. There were six of us in it. We’re prepared to give you our names. Nobody else is involved. We intended to let him out last night after dinner, but when we went along he wasn’t there.”

“He was there up to tea-time yesterday,” said a boy, leaving his place and walking round to stand beside the girl. “I spoke to him and told him all the reasons why we’d dealt with him, and I let him know when he’d be released. He couldn’t possibly have freed himself. He cursed me pretty much, but he was perfectly all right, I’m sure of that. And none of us knows what happened to him.”

“The people concerned must come to my room,” said Henry.“ Come now, at once, please, before you go on to the field.”

The six students who entered Henry’s lecture-room consisted of the youth and the girl who had spoken in hall and four other young men. Henry civilly requested them to be seated and they took the three desks in front of his dais and the three immediately behind these.

“Well, now,” he said, “who wants to speak first?”

“Ladies first,” said one of the men.

“Kathleen, isn’t it?” said Henry. “Right. Fire away.”

“Well, we’re the committee,” she said. “We had a mass meeting after Colin got hurt. There was a lot of feeling about it.”

“A vote was taken,” said one of the boys, “and it was decided that something must be done about Jonah.”

“So various people got up and made suggestions,” put in another youth, “and the one that got the most votes was this belly-of-the-whale thing because it seemed appropriate and it sort of appealed to people.” He turned to a young man behind him. “Go on. Your turn. We’re all in on this.”

“Right, then. Well, it seemed a committee—an action committee—was called for, and the six of us were voted on to it. We only wanted one girl because of the rough stuff, Jonah being a gorilla when forced to defend himself.”

“It was a free vote,” said another boy in the second row, “but volunteers were called for who would be willing to serve, and there was a big response from the men.”

“Less from the girls, of course,” said the last to speak, “but that’s only natural. So everybody voted and the six of us were in. It was thought better not to have more than five men, because otherwise we’d only get in each other’s way.”

“And the lady? What was her part to be?” asked Henry. Hamish, who had accompanied him with some idea of helping him if the students got out of hand, admired his attitude of grave and non-committal interest.

“Well, rather important,” said the girl. “Somebody had to get the key out of Jackson’s cottage, so while Bill, John and Julian got Jackson out of the way by asking him to come and hold the stop-watch while they did a five thousand metres run…”

“Nearly killed us, incidentally,” put in Bill, “but we knew we’d better allow Kath a quarter of an hour to do her stuff, and even more if we could manage it…”

“So we strolled over to the track with Jackson. He’ll always hold the watch if he’s off duty and there’s no coach or one of the chaps or girls available,” said John. “And we took our time about changing down, and putting our spikes on, and warming up, and all that…”

“You shouldn’t have changed down until you’d warmed up in your track suits and were ready to begin the race,” said Henry. “You know that.”

“Oh, that’s all right, Harry boy,” said Julian. “We’ll remember. Well, then we stationed Jackson and started off, telling him to watch the lap times. That was just to give him something to think about, because his cottage, although a long way off, stands in the open and is visible from the running-track, and we didn’t want him to notice what Kath was up to.”

“It was my job to get busy on Mrs Jackson and get her out of the cottage, too, while Benjy and Shaun sneaked the stoke-hole key,” put in Kathleen, “that was the tricky bit. She’s a simple soul, like Jackson himself, though, so I asked her whether she’d counted her chickens that morning, because I was pretty certain I’d heard a fox bark in the night.”

“She fell for it all right,” said Benjy, “and the key, with its label, was hanging just inside the back-door next to the roller towel. We’d prepared a substitute key, of course—my Jewish intelligence thought of that; it was the key to my cupboard in the changing room, as a matter of fact, so I knew it wouldn’t be missed—we’re always losing them—and there we were.”

“Your film, Harry boy, was a godsend,” said Julian. “As soon as you announced when it was to be, we put Exercise Key in motion and the five of us waited to find out whether Jonah was going in to see the film, although we guessed rightly that he’d take the time off; so when he went round to the staff garages for his car, we collected him and took him along to the stoke-hole and bunged him in.”

“You’ve forgotten one thing, haven’t you?” asked Henry. The five men looked stolidly at him. The girl caught her breath and said, “No, I don’t think so. That’s the way it went, but now…”

“Now you can’t find him. Did you ever return the key to Jackson?”

“Of course not. We needed to hang on to it because we knew we were going to let Jonah out last night, as I told you in hall,” said Kathleen, “but when we went along, he wasn’t there.”

“I don’t see why you feel so worried. Somebody else must have let him out,” said Henry.

“How could they, when we’ve got the only key?” demanded Bill.

“How do you know you’ve got the only key? It is most unlikely that there would be only one key to such an important place as the stoke-hole, as you fellows call it. A nice pass we should all come to during the winter, if the one and only key happened to get lost. Of course there are other keys. There must be.”

“Well, supposing there are, and somebody got hold of one, what happened to Jonah? That’s what we’re worried about,” said Kathleen. “You see, he doesn’t seem to be anywhere about the place and yet his car is still here.”

“Oh?” said Henry, who had not thought of this. “Sure it’s his car? Oh, well, yes, you’d know, I suppose, although I don’t know how you expected to acquire access to any of the staff lock-ups.”

“Easy,” said John. “We followed Jonah, on the day of the film, round to the garages and when we’d got him impounded, we frisked him and pinched the key to his lock-up. That’s where we first thought of putting him, only we thought he’d make enough row for someone to hear him.”

“Well, you’d better give me the key.”

John walked up to the dais and handed the little key to Henry, remarking as he did so, “You needn’t worry, Harry boy. We couldn’t have gone joy-riding or anything. There’s only enough petrol in the car to get as far as the village. He hadn’t tanked up.”

“Probably intended to do that at the pub,” said Julian. “Here’s the key to the stoke-hole. You’d better have that as well.”

“Well, I’ll look into the matter with Gassie,” said Henry.

“No names, no pack-drill, of course. That’s understood.”

“What’s really worrying them?” asked Hamish, when the students had departed.

“My guess would be that the grape-vine has failed them. They honestly don’t know where Jonah is. That’s what’s the trouble, I fancy. This particular half-dozen have nothing more against him than lots of the others. I think they’re dead scared that someone has really laid for him, you know. What’s more, I think they must have something to go on. That’s why they’re in such a panic.”

“You don’t really think some misguided person has gone too far, do you?” asked Hamish. “Or could it be—yes, it would have to be—more than one? Jones, I mean—”

“Yes, I see what you mean,” said Henry, looking anxious. “It’s true that Jones is a powerful fellow. He’d have gone berserk when they let him out, so they may have—”

“Richard is the heftiest chap in the place, but I don’t think he had anything to do with it,” said Hamish. “He’s a guileless soul and I’m sure would have given himself away long before this if he’d had a hand in any lethal kind of rough stuff. Besides, he’s never had any particular cause to dislike Jones, has he?”

“No, but he’s a chivalrous sort of young thug, and might well take up the cudgels on behalf of somebody else,” Henry argued. “I happen to know, for example, that he has a great admiration for Lesley. If he considered her wronged, he might go to all lengths on her behalf, and we know that he came to Joynings with a reputation for violence. Still, as you say, he is a transparent person and would easily have been detected by those six we saw just now if he had released their prisoner and spirited him away—or something worse.”

“That’s the rub, isn’t it?”

“The fact that Jones has disappeared again? Yes, indeed it is.”

“When are you going to speak to Medlar?”

“I wondered whether we ought to institute another search before I do that. Jones—or his body—must be somewhere about. I think I will organize parties to comb the woods.”

“Well, I’ve at least an hour to spare before I need go to the pool. My squad can’t swim until they’ve digested their lunch. And that’s another thing. Don’t you think we ought to put our best athletes on some sort of a diet? My lot eat the same sort of food as everybody else. I’d like to see more steak and fewer fatteners.”

“I’ll look into it, but I’m not sure whether it would be popular to segregate the stars from the also-rans in that sort of way. Both sides might envy the other, don’t you think? I know Gassie is the pot-hunter of all pot-hunters, but I’d rather keep the lid on the pot—no awkward pun intended—than have it boil over on a question of food. Still, I’ll certainly bear it in mind, if you think it’s a good idea.”

“So, about this business of combing the woods; how do we get it organized?”

“If you’ll get Miss Yale to find out whether the women want to take part, I’ll go round the halls and collect a couple of dozen volunteers from among the men.”

“Suppose the first to volunteer are the chaps who actually know where Jones is?”

“I think we must chance that. They themselves may be relieved to have him found. The rag, if that’s all it is, has gone much too far by this time, and even the most vindictive must have realized it. If you are willing to help…”

“I’m sure Martin and Jerry will come, too.”

“Oh, good. Get hold of them, then, before you go to Miss Yale.”

Hamish found Miss Yale, Lesley, and a couple of women students still at after-lunch coffee in Miss Yale’s quarters. She refused point-blank to organize a band of searchers from among the women students. “The woods are out of bounds for them,” she said significantly.

Hamish was on his way back to the tennis courts, which had been chosen as the meeting-place for the volunteer searchers while they got their briefing, when he was waylaid by one of the servants.

“If you’re not busy at the moment, sir, the Warden would like you to see him.”

“Oh, in that case, go out to the tennis courts, Maisie, and, when Mr. Henry turns up, tell him I’ve got to see the Warden and will join him as soon as I can, but not to wait for me.” He could not think of any reason why Medlar should want to see him, but, accustomed and schooled to polite and instant obedience to authority, he climbed the magnificent staircase and passed along the balustraded gallery to the Warden’s study.

“Oh, James, my dear fellow,” said Gascoigne, when the young man presented himself, “did you ever get that cataloguing done?”

“Certainly, sir. The book is hanging in its case from a hook in the ante-room. There were several items which had not been listed in the previous catalogue, so I added them in what appeared to be the appropriate places. I hope that accords with your wishes?”

“Thank you, my dear fellow, thank you. Well, if you are sure that you have listed everything, I wonder whether we might check the items against your catalogue? Not that I think you will have missed anything, but just as—well, just as a check, so to speak.”

“There is a good hour before I am due at the pool, sir. The swimming squad have to digest their lunch, so, if it would be convenient for you, I could check with you at once.” (It would take a quarter of an hour, he thought, for Henry to collect volunteers.)

“That is extremely good of you, James. Let us begin, then. I cannot think it will take us very long. It is very kind of you to give up your time to my hobby.”

Hamish had noticed, as the term went on, a growing cordiality in the Warden’s manner towards him. He was not conscious of having done anything special to win Gascoigne’s approval and could only conclude that the man must have got wind of his close association, through his mother, with Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley. However, he murmured a polite and modest disclaimer that he was showing kindness to the Warden and followed him into the ante-room, where Gascoigne switched on the light and picked up the new catalogue which Hamish had written in Italianate script picked out with suitable, picturesque rubrics.

“Charming! Charming! Really, my dear James, you must have spent a great deal of your leisure-time on this extremely beautiful manuscript,” said Gascoigne.

“A pleasure, sir, I assure you. If you will read aloud, I will identify the objects as we come to them. I think I can remember where I placed each one.”

“Methodical in the extreme, James. By all means let us begin.”

One item, and one only, was missing from the tally.

“Strange,” said Hamish. “I know the javelin was here when I made my list. I remember noticing it particularly. I even remember exactly where I placed it.”

“Strange,” said the Warden. “Even the maid who dusts and polishes is only allowed in here under my own direct supervision. I suppose you have never inadvertently left the key in the lock when you vacated this room?”

“I have only been in the room twice, except for the time when you yourself introduced me to your museum at the beginning of term, sir, and you will remember that I handed you back the key each evening after I had made my list. I can assure you that the key was never otherwise out of my possession.”

“Of course not. Well, no doubt we have students here who are quite capable of picking a lock. Whoever it was must have had hopes of getting his hands on something of intrinsic value, I suppose. There are solid silver cups among the collection. In his disappointment at finding that everything valuable (in that sense) had been placed in the safe, I suppose he impounded the javelin as an act of defiance. A strange item to choose, but some of the people here are not very well-balanced, I’m afraid. If they were, the chances are that they would not be here, of course. Oh, well, I must look into the matter, I suppose. What a nuisance it all is!”

“Have I your permission to go, sir? I am due down at the pool fairly shortly.”

“Oh, by all means, my dear fellow. I may say, James, that I am delighted with the way you have taken to your duties here.”

“Thank you, sir. They are very pleasant ones.”

“You would not think of changing your plans and joining us on a permanent basis, I suppose?”

“You are very kind, sir, but I fear my mamma would oppose the scheme. She has set her heart on the diplomatic service for me, and I should not wish—in fact, between ourselves, I should not dare—to thwart her.” (When she read this preposterous statement later on in a letter which her son wrote to her, Laura Gavin laughed sardonically).

From outside the Warden’s office Hamish dashed downstairs and out on to the field. He was more than anxious to find out what had happened to Jones. The fact that the Warden’s javelin was missing disquieted him more than a little, although he could hardly imagine that it was dangerous enough to become a lethal weapon.