No Winding-Sheet

16

The Official Opening

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I am not so sure,’ said Mr Ronsonby, ‘that the water-lily pond would have been quite such a good idea, after all.’

‘The pond would have been overlooked from three corridors and the library,’ said Mr Burke. ‘It could have been made a repository for rubbish thrown out of windows, I suppose. We have encouraged the school to embrace democracy. The boys could have thought it strange and unfair that access to the pond should have been denied them.’

‘Oxford and Cambridge have rules about quadrangles, do they not?’

‘I know. But tradition must be honoured and our own traditions have yet to be established. To deny the boys access to a pond containing goldfish might seem to savour of Us and Them.’

‘There must be a line drawn somewhere, though. The boys themselves expect it. There is no feeling of security where there is no exercise of authority. I have always been opposed to this modern trend of boys calling their teachers by Christian names and of young masters dressing sloppily so as to be “with it”, as the modern idiom puts the thing. It sets a very bad example, as I have had occasion to point out to Scaife. Anyway, the lily pond has been scrapped and we now have a handsome sum to spend on prizes. Regrettable, but the governors are adamant. I cannot argue with them over the nature of their gifts to the school.’

‘It will have to be books, I suppose.’

‘There must be some books, yes, but the governors also suggest wristwatches and cameras, lightning calculators, tool sets and, of all things, conjurors’ outfits. Then they want to give new shirts to the rugby first fifteen and special blazers for the cricketing first eleven.’

‘Thus returning most of the money to its sources of origin. Well have we been described as a nation of shopkeepers,’ said Mr Burke in cynical reference to the way many of the governing body made a living.

‘Exactly. One can hardly blame them and no doubt a boy would be better pleased with a watch or a camera than with a copy of the works of Shakespeare or a set of Jane Austen’s novels. Take young Scaife with you and see what you can do. You know which emporia are kept by members of the governing body. Oh, and don’t forget gramophone records. Scaife will know what appeals to boys. He has his occasional uses. I wish his discipline was firmer, though.’

‘How about Phillips? Aren’t gramophone records more in his line? Won’t he expect to choose them?’

‘He would choose classical music. No, take Scaife. You can leave the sixth to work in the library and I will keep an eye on Scaife’s little boys while he is gone. I’m glad he’s got his runaways back. They and the literary-minded Prouding are now spending each break and games period in copying out for me the whole of A Comedy of Errors.’

This, as it turned out, was almost the only punishment meted out to Travis and Maycock, for Mr Travis’s bark turned out to be far worse than his bite, so, apart from stopping Donald’s pocket money until enough had accumulated to replace the sum he had drawn out at the post office in Southampton, Mr Travis had imposed no other penalty and was happy enough to have his son safely back at home.

‘You guffin!’ he said. ‘If you were scared by that letter, why didn’t you show it to your mother and me?’

Maycock, in a way, was less lucky, for his mother turned tearful on him and reiterated through her sobbing, ‘Oh, how could you go off like that without a word? How could you go off and leave me all alone?’

Meanwhile, having been relegated to playing a minor role in the hunt for the murderer, Routh was following his own line of enquiry, but was fully prepared, if his chance discovery of the exhibition of paintings turned out to have any significance, to share his knowledge with his superiors a little later on.

In one respect he was lucky. Mr Ronsonby telephoned him and said that at the official opening of the school there would be on display a number of prizes of a kind tempting enough to attract a thief. The headmaster wanted a policeman in plain clothes on duty at the school until the gifts had been distributed, and he asked for the Detective-Inspector’s co-operation.

‘There is more than five hundred pounds’ worth of the stuff,’ said Mr Ronsonby, ‘more than enough to tempt a petty criminal. Moreover, much of it is readily portable.’

‘I’ll come myself,’ said Routh, who had been wondering how to obtain a seemingly unofficial interview with Mr Pybus without arousing the art master’s or anybody else’s suspicions that his questions were other than innocuous. ‘I’ll have a Detective-Constable on duty as well, but I know all the local sneak-thieves and they know me, so don’t worry about your prizes, sir. I expect they’re insured, anyway.’

‘Well, thanks to the Church of England, those boys have been rounded up,’ said Laura, ‘so we need not bother about them when we get to Southampton. Do you think there is anything in this idea that Pybus had pinched Pythias’s pictures and is exhibiting and, I suppose, selling them as his own work? If so, he’d be a lot safer doing it in London. Southampton isn’t far enough away from the school to be a safe place to pull off a fiddle like that.’

‘I think there must be a striking resemblance between the sketch on this letter — I have borrowed it for purposes of comparison — and the picture in the art dealer’s window, but we shall see. I am also wondering whether the pictures on exhibition bear a signature and, if they do, whose it is,’ said Dame Beatrice.

Routh had described the location of the shop. They had no difficulty in finding it. The picture and the notice were still in the window and it hardly needed much scrutiny of the sketch on the letter to identify the similarities between it and the painting at which they were looking. They went into the shop and to the long room at the back of it where the rest of the paintings were on display.

‘Everything is for sale, ladies,’ said the proprietor hopefully.

There were at least fifty pictures on the walls of the small gallery. Dame Beatrice took out the letter Pythias had written to Mrs Buxton, looked at the sketch of Greek fishing boats and then studied two or three paintings which she could not believe were the work of the letter writer.

They were copies of the figures and decoration on sixth-century black- and red-figured pottery. One was of a black-figure emphora depicting the decapitated Gorgon Medusa with the goddess Athena, the god Hermes and the hero Perseus standing by and holding the Gorgon’s head. By the same devoted but laboured hand was a copy of the red-figured vase by the Andokides painter, but, again, although it was a faithful copy of the original, it gave the impression of aiming at nothing more than meticulous accuracy and lacked any kind of spontaneity.

Among the other pictures were a spirited portrayal of the Lion Gate at Mycenae, an impression in sepia of the Cyclopean walls of ruined Argos and, with the narrow end-wall of the gallery all to itself, a large picture of the Acropolis at Athens, masterly in its detail and almost breathtaking in its impact on the beholder. There were also studies, by the same hand, of the theatre at Epidaurus and the harbour of Piraeus.

Dame Beatrice looked again at the letter, went back to look again at some paintings of Cyclades seascapes, and then bought the picture of fishing boats in harbour for which the drawing in the letter had been a preliminary sketch.

She always carried a small magnifying glass in her handbag, and before she had gone to the counter she had looked at the bottom corners of each picture on show and then handed the glass to Laura. Their findings were the same.

‘Well,’ said Laura, when they were outside the shop, ‘every picture has the same symbol, but no actual signature, yet they are not all the work of the same artist.’

‘And the symbol?’

‘Well, at school we always called it pi. It was useful when one was dealing with the measurements of circles. It used to remind me of one of the triolithons at Stonehenge, so I rather liked it.’

‘Pi is the letter “p” in the Greek alphabet, of course, and the choice of it by both these artists is very interesting.’

‘Come to think of it, Pythias and Pybus — yes, I see what you mean,’ said Laura. ‘Pybus wouldn’t forge Pythias’s name, but felt he was entitled to use his symbol. I suppose he is entitled to it. Well, either Pythias gave his paintings to Pybus, or Pybus stole them after Pythias was killed. Is that what you think?’

‘I am afraid your second hypothesis is the more likely, but we shall see. I am told that Mr Rattock, the tenant of the attic and, incidentally, Mrs Buxton’s nephew, was the only resident, apart from the Buxtons themselves, who ever entertained visitors. He claims to be an artist. I wonder whether Mr Pybus, the art master at the school, was one of his visitors?’

‘A bit unlikely, don’t you think? How would they have got to know one another?’

‘Possibly because Mr Rattock was a boy at the old school before the present school was built.’

‘What do we do now?’

‘Accept Mr Ronsonby’s kind invitation to attend the official opening of his school and, having made our report on the pictures to Detective-Inspector Routh, we must then wait upon events.’

‘Do you mean that Pybus murdered Pythias and stole his paintings?’

‘Or was given them by Rattock on the understanding that he would not betray him.’

Routh was gratified by Dame Beatrice’s report.

‘It does open up a vista, ma’am,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think I was mistaken about the picture in the shop window. By the way, I’ve tracked down Mr Pythias’s bag of golf-clubs. There is one club missing and forensic think it could easily be the murder weapon. They suggest that one good slosh from behind could have accounted for Mr Pythias and that the club must be hidden somewhere, probably chucked into the river. I’ve given the Super the gen and he is having the river dragged. We’ve never found the murder weapon and, from the state of the body when it was dug up, it wasn’t all that easy to determine exactly what kind of implement could have inflicted the injuries to the head, but we think we know now. Just as a matter of interest, ma’am, I wonder which of the two, Pythias or Pybus, thought of using pi as a signature? You say it appeared at the right-hand bottom corner of all the paintings.’

‘Mr Pythias’s letter may supply the answer. If the symbol appears at the foot of that rough but arresting little sketch —’

‘We shall know where we stand. Yes, indeed, ma’am.’

‘Not that it has much significance in itself. There is no doubt that Pybus is selling Pythias’s paintings.’

The idea of holding a cricket match as one of the attractions on opening day had been abandoned, since not enough fathers had volunteered to form an eleven to oppose the school, and masters who, in other circumstances, might have made up the numbers, were to be far too busy to take part in a match. Instead, an athletics meeting of a sort was to be held on the school field, since there was a governors’ prize (against Mr Ronsonby’s wishes) offered to the victor ludorum. The master for physical education had backed up the headmaster’s objections, but the alliance had not prevailed against the governors’ insistence.

‘Boys specialise and are encouraged to do so,’ Mr Ronsonby had pointed out. ‘A boy who can win the hundred metres is not expected to go in for the fifteen hundred, and a good long-jumper is not necessarily a good high-jumper.’

‘Nonsense! Nothing like a good all-rounder,’ said the chairman bluffly.

Then there were the exhibitions of work inside the building. These included woodwork, art and a meritorious display of mechanical drawings. There were models of Tudor villages, layouts of Norman manors, a model in plasticene of Stonehenge and pictorial time-charts galore, each contributed by a different form. There was even an exhibition of decorated eggs to be donated by the little boys of 1C, when opening day was over, to the local hospital.

There was also Mr Pybus’s exhibition of arts and crafts. Here one of the paintings on show was of a particularly lurid sunset behind whose crimson and blood-red skyscape were streaks of apple-green, deep purple and splashes of primrose yellow. In the left-hand foreground a volcano was in very active eruption, shooting up dark crimson and bright orange flames and much thick smoke. The artist, however, had taken care that none of the smoke obscured any part of his sunset, which he cherished, it seemed, even more than his lurid volcano.

Laura drew Dame Beatrice’s attention to the crude but arresting work, although nobody could have missed seeing it.

‘I wouldn’t be surprised if I could name the man who painted that monstrosity,’ she said. ‘It’s awfully like the Téméraire picture on the wall of the bedsit Pythias used to have.’

Dame Beatrice waited her turn to speak to a beaming Mr Pybus, who appeared to be receiving compliments from gratified parents. When she had the chance, she asked the name of the painter of Vesuvius in Eruption.

‘Oh, that?’ said Mr Pybus. ‘I have really no idea. It was handed in, I believe, by an Old Boy whom I had taught when we were at the old school down the road.’

‘It is very striking.’

At this moment a bell rang and Mr Pybus said, ‘Have you a seat in the hall? I think that was the signal that the prize giving is about to take place. I must lock up this room, I’m afraid. The staff and prefects have orders to marshal the prize winners and get the audience seated.’

‘Will your exhibition be open again when the ceremony is over?’

‘Yes, oh, yes, if anybody cares to come along.’

There was another visitor who had noticed the resemblance of Vesuvius in Eruption to the Téméraire at Sunset. In the early days of his involvement in the case of the missing Mr Pythias, Routh had inspected the bedsitting room and had been extremely interested in the screaming picture which, before he had seen Mrs Buxton’s letter, he supposed that Pythias himself had painted.

Leaving his Detective-Constable on guard over the prizes which were on display in the sixth-form room, Routh had made a tour of the building and had spent more time in the art room than anywhere else. He, too, like Dame Beatrice, had made enquiries about the Vesuvius picture and had received the answer that it had been sent in, unsigned, by an Old Boy and that, although Mr Pybus thought it an exaggerated ‘and really rather childish and silly piece of work’, he had exhibited it ‘for sentimental reasons, as the fellow must still have happy memories of his art lessons or he would not have bothered to send the painting in. Besides, he may be somewhere among our visitors and, if he is, he will expect to see his picture on the wall.’

The prize giving went off as prize givings do. The choir and the orchestra gave of their best, so did the verse speakers. The head boy gave a speech written for him by Mr Burke, the headmaster read the school report, the chairman of governors made a far too long and extremely boring speech and then insisted upon closing the gathering with ‘Auld Lang Syne’ with everybody joining hands — a proceeding which Mr Ronsonby, compelled to hold the hands of his head boy and the chairman, found particularly embarrassing and distasteful, although it was a relief to know that at last the opening day was over.