No Winding-Sheet

13

Writers and Painters

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Mr Ronsonby has lost two boys,’ said Dame Beatrice to Laura Gavin.

‘From your tone I don’t think you mean that two of his own sons have died. It must be to do with the school.’

‘How perceptive you are! Yes, the two young boys who managed to bamboozle the caretaker into admitting them to the school after hours have disappeared. Mr Ronsonby wants us to find them.’

‘Don’t the other boys know what they are up to? Boys usually know that sort of thing about one another. Are they truanting?’

‘It appears that they bear an unblemished reputation.’

‘Then they are certain to be villains! There is no such thing as a boy with a genuinely unblemished reputation. What’s the story?’

‘The boys were present when (it is now assumed) two men, having broken into the school, began to disinter the body of Mr Pythias. It is now the beginning of the summer term and these two boys have failed to turn up at school. They are supposed to have camped out on the heath for a few days, but nothing more has been heard of them. Their parents and Mr Ronsonby are extremely worried and the police have been notified.’

‘Doesn’t sound too good, does it? If those two men were trying to dig up the body and the boys recognised them, the men might not feel safe while the boys are still alive. But what does Ronsonby think we can do about it? The police have all the facilities that we haven’t got. They will quarter the moor and search every last inch of it; they’ll drag the river and they’ll make house-to-house enquiries. We can only get the car out and help to search the moor, but less effectively than they can, and they may not appreciate our help, anyway.’

‘I think there must be some evidence at the school which perhaps we could unearth.’

‘I bet there is, but if the other boys haven’t given it to the police, they are not likely to give it to us.’

‘Mr Ronsonby says the location of the campsite which the two boys gave to their classmates is not the place where they seem to have camped. He refers to second-year boys. How old would they be?’

‘First years are eleven to twelve, so second years would be twelve to thirteen — nearer thirteen at this end of the school year. I’ll tell you what! It’s a very long shot, but from my memories of the short time I spent as a mentor and preceptor, I recollect what hell the last couple of days of the term could be. Everyone on the staff is longing for breaking-up afternoon or else for a sub-machine gun to pick off the class one by one, but you had to hang on to your sanity and in desperation you set them work to do which they and you both knew would never be looked at, let alone marked. There wouldn’t be any specialisation, either, for at least that last couple of days, so you would be stuck with your own mob from nine until four while you were trying to make out reports and lists. It was hell, as I remember it.’

‘I see what you mean, I think. I am not referring to your last remark, but to the fact that somewhere among this litter of unread and grudgingly produced exercises there may be a clue to the real holiday intentions of the missing boys.’

‘I said it was a long shot, and it certainly is.’

‘I see only one difficulty. If the teacher had no intention of reading the work, it would hardly have been done in a regular exercise book, would it?’

‘Oh, no, of course it wouldn’t. In that case it would have to be marked. In my time it was always done on odd sheets of paper torn out of old exercises books.’

‘A clear indication of the ephemeral nature of the end product. That brings me to my point. Would not all such sheets of paper have been thrown away on the last day of the term?’

‘Probably not. Most teachers would try to hoodwink the class by bunging the papers into a drawer as though for future reference.’

It was true that specialisation was discontinued during the last couple of days of term at the Sir George Etherege school, but the younger masters had their own ways of getting through the time without the loss of their own or their pupils’ lives. They made private arrangements to swap classes.

The masters most in request were the junior English master — ‘you can find ’em something to read, can’t you? — or you can read aloud to them or something?’; Mr Pybus, the art master — ‘kids are always happy splashing paint about, so do us a favour, Pybie’; and the music master, Mr Phillips, who, although he ranked as senior staff, was always willing to get rid of his own boys and hold gramophone sessions for the boys of others’. The other member of the syndicate was the master who took PE and games. Having no classroom resources, he was an enthusiast for the swap-classes method of getting through the dreaded end of term.

Mr Ronsonby was well aware that these transactions and plottings went on and he had no objection to closing a blind eye to them. In any case, the swap-shop could flourish only on a limited basis and among only a few of his staff. In fact, it was better, he thought, to wink at these unofficial exchanges rather than to put up with the anarchy which he knew would prevail in certain classrooms if a weak teacher was left for several hours in charge of the same set of boys. If this happened, he knew that it would result in boys being sent down to him for punishment just when he was at his busiest and least anxious to be disturbed.

Dame Beatrice’s telephone call found him in conference with Mr Burke and Margaret Wirrell. They were going over the lists of primary-school children who were expecting transference to the Sir George Etherege building at the beginning of the autumn term.

Just before Dame Beatrice’s telephone call came through, Margaret had made coffee for Mr Ronsonby, Mr Burke and herself and Mr Ronsonby had been retailing an amusing anecdote concerning a Catholic junior school which sent a consignment of eleven- to twelve-year-olds to him each September, there being no senior school of their own persuasion in the neighbourhood.

‘You know that our custom is to ask the junior-school heads to come up and see me?’ he said. ‘Of course, when the little boys arrive at the beginning of term they are set an English and a maths test so that we can grade them according to our own ideas and standards, but as a matter of courtesy I always ask the head teacher to place the boys in what the junior school considers to be their order of merit.

‘Well, the head of St Saviour’s happens to be a nun, so when I handed her the list she had sent in to us and asked her to ignore the fact that the names were in alphabetical order and to assess the children she was sending, she refused to look at it. “Oh, Mr Ronsonby,” she said, “nobody but the good Lord could place these children in order of merit.” ’

Mr Burke, who had already heard the story, laughed dutifully.

‘Oh, well, the junior-school assessments often don’t agree with ours,’ he said, ‘so she was probably on a non-collision course there.’

It was at this point that Margaret took Dame Beatrice’s call.

‘Dame Beatrice wants to know whether the second-year boys wrote essays at the end of the term,’ she said, ‘and especially whether Maycock and Travis did any work on paper.’

‘Sure to have done,’ said Mr Burke. ‘Moreover, from staffroom gossip, I happen to know that Waite, who takes the second years for English, set the essays and Pybus got the boys to illustrate them, and that both the compositions and the pictures were then handed over to Scaife as the form master, so, unless he has thrown them away, they are still in his cupboard.’

‘Pybus, eh? What a good-natured man he is, to help the younger fellows!’ said Mr Ronsonby, who knew full well that, far from being good-natured enough to help the junior masters, Mr Pybus was concerned only to get shot of his own form, who neither liked nor respected him and called him, almost to his face, Old Piebald, a slighting reference to his receding hair. The school’s nickname for Mr Pythias had been the Old Python, but this was a tribute, in its way, to a strong disciplinarian of whom it was as well to be wary.

The result of the telephone conversation was that Margaret Wirrell was sent up to Mr Scaife’s room. Here she found him in argument with a boy about the desirability of having to prove that a triangle having the same base and height as a rectangle must of necessity have an area half that of the rectangle in question.

‘It’s obvious to the naked eye, sir,’ said the boy, ‘so why do we have to waste time proving it?’

The form, as always, had risen when Margaret came in. (‘And I hope you do the same at home when your mother, aunt or any other lady comes into a room,’ was Mr Ronsonby’s admonition when he addressed a class of boys new to his school.)

‘Good morning, Mr Scaife. Good morning, 2A,’ said Margaret. ‘We’ve just had a tinkle from Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley,’ she told Mr Scaife, ‘and —’

‘Keep your flapping ears close to your head, Preston! Nothing to do with you what is being said,’ rapped out Mr Scaife to a small boy in the front row.

‘— and she wants to know whether you set any work to be done on paper or in their rough-work books at the end of last term. Not exercise-book things, but, well, you know, end-of-term work.’

‘Mr Waite and Mr Pybus did, sir, and they gave you our paintings and essays,’ said the listener.

‘Really, Preston, how interesting! But really I have no need of your good offices,’ snapped Mr Scaife.

‘They’re in the left-hand drawer of your table, sir.’

‘Preston! Shut up!’

‘Only trying to be helpful, sir.’

‘Forget it!’ Mr Scaife wrenched open the left-hand drawer of the teacher’s table, abstracted bundles of exercise-book paper and half-sheets of drawing paper, ignored a sotto voce ‘I told you, didn’t I?’ from the windmill-eared Preston, and handed the bundles to Margaret. A boy opened the door for her, the form stood up again, and Margaret went back to Mr Ronsonby and Mr Burke, leaving Mr Scaife (judging from the noise which followed her departure) facing a den of lions.

‘Do you want me to take these to the Stone House?’ she asked the headmaster, indicating her haul.

‘Not until we have rung to tell Dame Beatrice that we think we have found what she asked for.’

Upon receipt of this news, Dame Beatrice said that Mrs Gavin would call and collect the papers during the course of the afternoon, and this Laura did and needed to waste none of Mr Ronsonby’s time because Margaret way-laid her in the vestibule and handed over the papers which were now in two carrier bags.

After tea, Dame Beatrice and Laura went through the papers and laid aside the essays and paintings signed by Travis and Maycock. These would receive special attention, but the rest of the collection could not be ignored in case it should reveal any clue to the whereabouts of the missing campers.

The essays ranged from the anticipatory to the disillusioned. Some were lively, some dull, some badly written, some badly spelt. A few were factual and, having described, either joyously or the reverse, Easter holidays of the past, had concluded that ‘It will be much the same this year, I expect, but I like Christmas better because an Easter egg is not so good as a model railway or a bike, though hot cross buns are all right’.

In the majority of cases it was clear that the writer did not expect that the eye of authority would ever peruse his script. One boy had written, ‘I do not expect to have much of a holiday because I never do have much of a holiday. I live with my aunt who is always having babys I hate babys my aunt says babys are a blessing if they are so is having a sore bum when youve been tanned or leprosy or a broken leg or something so I do not have much to tell you about my holiday so I will pertend and tell you I am a clergyman and tell you about all the people I have buried one was buried alive but I did not know till the relations told me and all the babys I have cristend and the baby I dropped in the font the water was rather deep and I dropped him he was my aunts baby I did not mean to do it he just slipped through my fingers all I shall really do in the holidays is take him out in his pram perhaps it will tip over when I get to the river but I will be talking to Empty and pretend not to notice I like to think of dead people including lots of babys I hate babys.’

‘A bright lad,’ said Laura.

‘Yes, one with a future in the writing of horror films,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Let us follow still further the workings of the Herodian mind of this Master Alan Prouding.’

‘I wonder who Empty is?’ said Laura.

‘In due course we may be able to find out. I deduce that he has a classmate whose initials are M and TV.

‘As simple as that?’

‘The minds of villains are often much simpler than we think. They learn as soon as they can walk that the shortest distance between two points lies along a straight line.’ The essay they were reading went on:

‘If its wet in the hols I shall write some annimos letters these are good fun and stir people up no end because everybody has got a skeleton of some sort in their cubbard which they would not like anybody else to know about and people who are always bumming about seeing the school murderer are just asking for it.’

‘Empty? M and T,’ said Laura. ‘Two boys, not one. Maycock and Travis, don’t you think? And this young beauty did write them an anonymous letter purporting (if my instinct for spotting youthful depravity has not deserted me) to come from the murderers of Mr Pythias. It looks as though Prouding waited until the two boys were going off to their camp before he posted or otherwise delivered the letter. I think Maycock and Travis have taken fright at the anonymous letter and scarpered, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I do. I think we must ask the headmaster to allow us to have a word with Master Prouding. He appears to be a practical joker of some magnitude,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘It looks as though this essay may disperse any fears that the two boys have been kidnapped or murdered. All the police have to do now is to find out where they have gone. If they have run away, where would boys of that age be most likely to make for?’

‘Oh, the docks at Southampton. I expect they would prefer to make it an airport and smuggle themselves on to a plane, but they would be old enough to realise that to get on board a ship would be much easier.’

‘Is there a painting to accompany Master Prouding’s essay?’

‘Yes,’ said Laura, turning it up, ‘but it’s only a skeleton with a balloon coming out of its mouth saying, “Dead men do tell tales”. Rather a disappointment after Prouding’s fascinating book of words.’

‘Well, we had better look at the work of Maycock and Travis before we go to the headmaster. I expect little help from their essays, for words are often but the wrapping papers of truth. Art is a window to the soul.’

‘Through a glass darkly,’ said Laura.

Travis’s written account was dull and made no mention of the proposed camp. His painting, boldly executed, depicted a Red Indian settlement of teepees and totem poles. In the foreground were Red Indian braves flourishing their tomahawks in a war dance. They wore brilliantly coloured feathered head-dresses which reached almost to their heels and fringed shirts which somewhat ineffectively disguised the fact that the artist knew little of the technique of sketching the human body. He had also attempted to portray a chief on horseback, but with very little success. The caption appeared to be of no significance. It read, ‘Waiting for Paleface woman with papoose at Blackstone Creek’.

Maycock’s work was of no more assistance. His essay had almost ignored the set subject and concerned itself only with Maycock’s theory about the best use to be made of the atom bomb.

‘This leethal weppon,’ wrote Maycock, ‘could be used for a good cause which is to break up the polar ice at North and South Poles and get furtile land so all the Third World and anybody else who is starving can grow their rice and have something to eat it only needs waterlogged ground and you would have plenty of that at the Poles if you melted the ice and got the salt out. I shall spend most of my holiday working out this idea which nobody else seems to have thought of and might win the Nobel Prize. Of course you would have to rescue all the polar bears and seals and pengwins and things before you let off the bomb and then wait for the fumes to die down and this might take some time.’

His painting was of the blessing which was to be wrought for the benefit of the Third World. A violent explosion lit up a helicopter from whose safety-line an animal dimly recognisable as a polar bear was dangling. The caption on the reverse side of the half-sheet of drawing paper read, ‘I do not have time to paint more animals in the picture but the polar bears and seals and pengwins and things would be rescued before the bomb was let off that is only commonsense’.

‘Thank goodness for one humanitarian,’ said Laura. ‘It’s a change from young Mohawk Prouding, anyway.’

‘A young gentleman with whom, if Mr Ronsonby will permit it, we must now talk. It looks as though Travis, if not Maycock, had intended to camp on the moor and had told his classmates so.’

Laura had formed two mental pictures of young Prouding. One was of a cunning, furtive child with eyes which never met those of a questioner; the other of a cherubic, baby-faced youngster, the prototype of a fallen angel. Master Prouding resembled neither of these visions. He was a slant-eyed faun with the lascivious lips of the Sphinx in the Acropolis museum. His mouth, when he entered the headmaster’s office, wore a propitiatory half-smile, as of one who anticipates trouble and is anxious to avoid it.

‘Please, sir, you wanted me, sir?’ he said.

‘In point of fact, I can do without you very nicely,’ said Mr Ronsonby. ‘You seem to be a very silly little boy. These ladies would like to put a few questions to you concerning the non-appearance of Travis and Maycock this term.’

‘I don’t know anything about that, sir.’

Dame Beatrice produced a sheet of paper.

‘This document appears to bear your signature,’ she said.

‘Oh, please, sir!’ said Prouding, appealing to his headmaster. ‘It was only a lot of rot, sir. I never meant a word of it.’

‘Address yourself to Dame Beatrice, boy.’

‘Yes, sir. Please, madam, I don’t live with my aunt and I never have to take babies out in prams and truly I have never drowned one or buried people alive or anything.’

‘Oh, as to that, Mr Prouding, we are in sympathy with most of the views you have expressed in your essay. What we should like you to explain is the passage which reads, “I shall write some anonymous letters. People who are always bumming about seeing the school murderer are asking for it.” Please tell us what you meant by “asking for it”.’

‘I didn’t mean anything.’

‘Well, retreat into your shell if you think it best,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘but to confide in us may save a great amount of time and trouble later on.’

‘We got a bit sick of being told they’d seen the murderers when we knew jolly well they hadn’t. If they had, the murderers would have murdered them before this. Murderers always murder people they think might recognise them.’

‘So you wrote an anonymous letter purporting to come from the murderers because you were tired of the boastings of Travis and Maycock. Yes, I see.’

‘It was only a joke, honest it was.’

‘You need to minimise your sense of humour, Mr Prouding, before it gets you into trouble. I will say no more.’

‘Off you go then, Prouding,’ said Mr Ronsonby, ‘and don’t be so stupid again. I shall deal with you later.’

‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’ There was present now no follower of Pan, but only a small boy who could not escape quickly enough from the headmaster’s presence.

Mr Ronsonby asked, ‘What else can I do for you, Dame Beatrice? Thank goodness it seems more likely that the two boys have run away than that they have been kidnapped or worse.’