A Javelin for Jonah

chapter

12

Richard takes over the Baton

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Dame Beatrice leered benevolently.

“You have nothing to fear from me, unless you killed Mr. Jones,” she said.

“If that little devil Lesley has ratted on me, you’d better hear the whole truth,” said Miss Yale.

“No, I beg of you, not at this moment. And Miss Lesley has not so much as mentioned your name to me. Besides, would it not be a case of the pot and the kettle? I am guessing, of course, and at the moment it does not matter whether I am right or wrong. I am glad to have had a talk with you, although all I wanted to know was whether the students ever have unsupervised access to the javelin cupboard.”

“Well, they most certainly have not.”

“Thank you for the extra reassurance. Well,” Dame Beatrice glanced at her wrist-watch, “it is time I went into the village.”

She left Miss Yale and went back to her quarters, but she did not get to the village as soon as she had planned to do. She had changed her shoes and sent a message to her chauffeur and was crossing Gascoigne’s garden towards a wicket-gate which gave a short cut to the lock-up where she kept her car, when she was waylaid by Richard, who appeared to be making for the mansion.

“Good afternoon,” he said. “I say, I think I ought to see Gassie. You wouldn’t come with me, would you?”

“Are you to be carpeted?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that.”

“So you are not in need of protection?”

The enormous student grinned. He said, “You’re in on the ground floor about this Jonah business. Well, young Kirk has been shouting his rat’s mouth off about having inside information about it, and now he’s disappeared. Of course, he may only have run home, but, now we all know Jones was murdered, it seems a bit fishy about Kirk.”

“Indeed it does,” said Dame Beatrice. “I will wait here while you run to the lock-ups and ask my chauffeur to stand by, as I shall not need him quite as soon as I said.”

Richard went on this errand, and returned shortly.

“Kirk has disappeared?” said Gascoigne, when they had gained his office. “Dear me! I think, Dick, you had better go on to the field and find Henry. I should like him to hear what you have to say. Give Dame Beatrice a chair and then be as quick as you can. I find your news perturbing.”

“Did you ever interview Mr. Kirk?” asked Dame Beatrice, when the young man had gone.

“Interview him? Oh, interview him! Good gracious me! I remember now. I sent for him, did I not, and was told that he was at swimming. Something else cropped up and I’m afraid I forgot all about him.

“All I remember saying is that he could wait until I came back. And I didn’t go back. Well, well! How very remiss of me! I never gave the boy another thought. I suppose he came when he was dressed, found that I was not available and waited for me to summon him again, which, quite forgetfully, I did not do.”

Dame Beatrice said nothing and Gascoigne appeared to have no more to add, so they sat in silence to wait for Henry, except that Gascoigne drummed with his fingers on his writing-table and Dame Beatrice took a small notebook out of her handbag and turned over the pages.

Henry did not keep them waiting very long. He came back with Richard, both of them looking as though they had run all the way, as, indeed, they had. Henry took the chair Gascoigne offered him, but said nothing.

“Now, Dick,” said Gascoigne.

Richard stood in front of the writing-table and said, “Kirk hasn’t been to bed and nobody knows where he is.”

“He hasn’t been in Hall, either,” said Henry. “I took it that he’d had a box of tuck from home and was making do with that while the rest of you were having your meals.”

Richard had turned towards him at the sound of his voice.

“Yes, Kirkie doesn’t believe in issuing many invitations when he gets a parcel,” he said. “Did you know the parcels don’t always come from his home?”

“What do you mean?” asked Gascoigne. “There is no reason why they should. Kirk may have other friends.”

“He did,” said Richard, “have other friends. As to reasons, well, it depends what’s in the parcels, doesn’t it? One more thing, just to keep you interested: one of Kirk’s closest friends, in a manner of speaking, was Jonah, and it was Jonah who brought him the parcels I was mentioning just now.”

He faced about and was gone before anything more could be said to him.

“Well, really!” said Gascoigne. “Do you think you should go after him, Henry?”

“As you wish,” Henry replied. “My own idea is that he’s said all he’s going to say. It’s up to us now. I think we should institute a search for Kirk. I feel very uneasy about him. Richard’s a lout, but he’s decent.”

“I ought to contact the parents if Kirk has absconded,” said Gascoigne.

“I think Richard was suggesting that he had not absconded,” said Dame Beatrice. “I did not care for the abstruse reference to Mr. Jones.”

“Neither did I,” said Henry. “Perhaps, while we’re searching for Kirk, you could have a go at Richard, Dame Beatrice. We shan’t get any more out of him, but you might. And, Gassie, I think the staff, not the students, should do the searching.”

“Very well, Henry, you know best. You don’t really think anything has happened to the boy, do you? Anyway, could you organize a film show to keep the students occupied while we search?”

“Unnecessary. It’s tea-time. They’ll be occupied all right. It won’t take us long to look for Kirk if we all join in the search. If he isn’t on the premises or in the woods, then you could let his people know. If he hasn’t gone home, and we don’t find him, you will put the police on to it, I suppose.”

“Yes, yes. How vexing and worrying it all is!”

“Laura and my manservant will be glad to help in the search, if you could do with two extra people,” said Dame Beatrice. “Meanwhile, perhaps you will send over to Mr. Richard’s hall of residence and ask him to come and see me as soon as he has finished his tea. It is fortunate that Mr. Jones had a sitting-room of his own. It is ideal for my purpose. I hope Richard will not object to being sent for?”

Richard took his time about coming over, but come he did, just as Dame Beatrice was finishing her second cup of tea.

“Look,” he said, “I’ve said all I can about Kirkie. I didn’t like the little runt, but I sort of keep an eye on things here. Done a lot for me, this place has. But, look, I’ve got things to do. I can’t waste time nattering here. I haven’t got one other thing I can tell you, so that’s that.”

“It is good of you to spare your time, Mr. Richard,” said Dame Beatrice, not at all put out by his truculent attitude. “Won’t you sit down?”

“Can’t stay, I tell you,” said Richard, an armchair creaking in protest as he flung his heavy body into it.

“Don’t tell me you have to see a man about a dog!”

Richard shrugged his broad shoulders. “It was the dogs uncovered old Jonah,” he said.

“Yes, indeed. Tell me what you know about it, will you?”

“I daresay you know as much as I do. Some fellows hid him in the stoke-hole, then somebody—not one of our lot, though—finished him off and our chaps buried him.”

“Let us take your statements in order. Some fellows hid him.”

“Five chaps and a girl. They owned up all right. Henry has their names, if you want them.”

“But, although they incarcerated him, they did not kill him. So far, you and I are in agreement. But tell me something more. Who, apart from those six, knew where he had been imprisoned?”

“I reckon most of us knew. The chaps did, anyway. I don’t know about the girls.”

“Was Mr. Jones generally feared, would you say?”

“By a few, I suppose, but they’d be the girls. Most of us thought he was dirt.”

“Why?”

“Didn’t do his job. Got drunk. Tried it on with women.”

“Could a woman have killed him?”

Richard grinned.

“Ma Yale might have had a go,” he said. “She’s tough enough. She’s used to javelins, too.”

“Nobody else?”

“Shouldn’t think so. Girls don’t go in for pig-sticking.”

“But Miss Yale had no particular quarrel with Mr. Jones, had she?”

“She’s like an old hen with her chicks where our girls are concerned. If she thought Jonah was fooling about with any one of them…”

“But was he?”

“Hard to say. I reckon, though, he had found other fish to fry.”

“You refer to the episode of the maidservant Bertha, no doubt.”

“Besides, our girls were dead scared of him,” Richard continued, ignoring the deplorable episode of Bertha. “Nothing puts young females off like a chap who’s had one too many. Old Jonah’s favourite hymn was, ‘When we gather at the fountain,’ and he did the fountain a bit of no good, I can tell you, once he got into the Bricklayers’ Arms.”

“So I have been informed. By the way, I believe the word is ‘river’, not ‘fountain’.”

“Tell you something else,” said Richard, ignoring this, and seeming to have shed his churlishness. “Old Jonah used to make himself a pain in the neck to Lesley. Always pestering her.”

“She is a very beautiful young woman, of course.”

“So Jimmy thinks,” said Richard. “You ought to tell that lad the facts of life, you know. Lesley isn’t the sort his mamma would want in the family if she knew as much about Lesley as we do.”

“Am I expected to listen to scandal, Mr. Richard?”

“Suit yourself. I like old Jimmy boy and I wouldn’t want to see him come a mucker. What’s he going to do when he leaves here?”

“Sooner or later he hopes to enter the diplomatic service.”

“He’s going to get me into the police. Did you know? He’s brought my boxing on, too. I wouldn’t mind being the police heavy-weight champion. Might box for England. He thinks I could make it if I sweated. But you tip him off about Lesley. Tell him she was sacked from her last job, never mind why.”

“How do you come to know anything about it?”

“Kirk told me. That rat knows something about every member of this staff, and that goes for Gassie as well. Makes a hobby of collecting the dirt.”

“I am glad we have come back to Mr. Kirk. When did you see him last?”

“I can’t remember. All I know is that he didn’t sleep in our hut last night. He’s in billets with me, you see, so, of course, one noticed.”

“Did anyone else remark on it?”

“Only to wonder—joking, you know—whether he’d pulled off his bet.”

“What bet would that be?”

“Oh, that, before he left, he’d sleep with one of the wenches.”

“One of the women students?”

“That’s right. But I knew better. Apart from the fact that the house is locked up well and truly every night, Ma Yale is always on the qui vive. Besides, those terriers of Celia’s live in the house and they’d yap the place down if anybody tried to break in.”

“Yes, I see. Mr. Kirk struck me as a singularly unprepossessing young man.”

“He was a heel. I felt bound to stick up for him when Jimmy kicked him, but I soon learnt where I got off.”

“You say that mysterious parcels came for Mr. Kirk, but not from his home. What was in them?”

“Booze. Jonah used to get it for him and smuggle it in.”

“Yes, it had to be either alcohol or drugs,” said Dame Beatrice. “Where did the money come from?”

“Kirk’s mother, I believe. He said he wouldn’t stay here otherwise, I reckon, and his stepfather didn’t want him at home.”

“Surely Mr. Medlar had no inkling of what was going on?”

“Don’t know. He wouldn’t have done anything about it, even if he had been wise to it. We all knew that Jonah had him under his thumb. I’ll tell you another thing, too. If Gassie did for Jonah, he might have done for Kirkie. Put that on your needles and knit it.”

“I have already done so, Mr. Richard, but I decided that I had dropped a stitch.”

“How do you mean?”

“Ah, that is my affair. Do you care for chocolate, by the way? I have a large slab here for which I have no personal use. I buy it for Mrs Gavin, but I can get some more next time I go into the village?”

“Oh, well, thanks! What’s this? Bribery?”

“Rather let us call it a reward for virtue. And there is nothing more you can tell me?”

“In return for the chocolate?”

“We agreed, I thought, that you are incorruptible.”

“Well, for what it’s worth—and this is the real reason I went to Gassie about Kirk—one of the shots is missing. Martin told us out on the field and asked whether we knew anything about it. I’m in his squad, you know, and, of course, the staff watch the stock like hawks since that javelin business.”

“One of the shots?”

“Yes, for shot-putting, you know. They each weigh seven point two five seven kilo, or, in plain English, very nearly sixteen pounds. Give you quite a bump on the head if anybody dropped one on you.”