No Winding-Sheet

1

Unexplained Absence

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At the end of the Christmas vacation the Sir George Etherege school re-assembled on a Thursday and each form master kept his own class so that textbooks and stationery could be distributed, dinner money collected, timetables dictated and nametapes on shorts and gym shoes inspected. The Sir George Etherege was a well-run school, but, even so, the staff were glad enough of a weekend respite when the first two days of the term were behind them and normal working could be resumed.

Every Monday morning, however, was still a detested beginning to the week, for, until the mid-morning break, each master again had to keep his own class instead of teaching his specialised subject. There were reasons for this. On Mondays after assembly, the dinner money for the week was collected by the dinner monitors, who then took it to the school secretary’s office. With any luck they could contrive that this coveted chore kept them out of lessons for up to twenty minutes if she was on the telephone or in consultation with the headmaster. Even three-quarters of an hour was not entirely unheard of.

Then there were the winter swimmers. During the summer term swimming was a compulsory subject and was part of the physical education course, but in the Easter term only those boys were taken to the municipal baths whose parents were prepared to pay the fee.

There were also the Catholics, a small minority but one which had permission to be out of school for an hour from nine-thirty on Mondays so that they could receive instruction in their faith from the parish priest.

‘If only the Church had stuck to Latin,’ said a junior master, ‘the priest might teach them enough of that logically constructed language to improve their written English. As it is, the whole system is wrong and ought to be scrapped.’

‘What we need,’ said someone else, ‘is to extend the system, not do away with it.’

‘As how?’ asked another young man.

‘Well, we get rid of the swimmers and the priest’s lot, so why not the C. of E’s, the Free Church adherents and the Sally Anns? We have one or two Jewish boys also. If we could get shot of the lot of them on Monday mornings, we could all have a free period until break or even not come in at all until about eleven. How about that?’

‘Might work if all the parents were worshippers,’ said Pybus, the art master, ‘but with seventy per cent of them never going anywhere near a church of any sort, you might find yourself worse off if you put your idea into practice. You might have to keep your own class until Monday dinner-time. Ten to one you wouldn’t persuade the various denominations to stick to the nine-thirty to ten-thirty schedule that the priest accepts.’

At this point, on this particular Monday morning, the deputy head (still known to most of the profession as the head assistant) came into the staffroom, looked around at the assembled company and said, ‘Oh, Pythias not in again? I expect there will be a medical certificate this morning. Oh, well, we’ve all got our own boys until break, so I can leave the sixth to get on with private study and double up for him when I’ve seen my lot settled. At break I’ll let you know who’s got to lose free periods for the rest of the day.’

‘Well, count me out,’ said the history master. ‘I did two stints for Pythias last week.’

‘Didn’t we all?’ said another voice.

‘There’s the bell,’ said the deputy head. ‘I’ll let you know at break, then, who’s drawn the short straw.’ When assembly was over, he went to the headmaster to report.

‘Everybody in except Pythias,’ he said.

‘What, again?’

‘Yes. I suppose he’ll have sent in a medical certificate this morning.’

The headmaster opened his door and said to the prefect who was doing private study in the vestibule and keeping an eye on the queue of boys waiting to hand over dinner money to the secretary, ‘Ask Mrs Wirrell to spare me a moment, Pitts. Ah, Margaret,’ he went on, when she entered his office, ‘has the post come?’

‘Yes, mostly educational publishers’ catalogues. I was going to bring them in when I’d checked the dinner money.’

‘Nothing from Mr Pythias?’

‘No. Isn’t he in?’

‘He is not in and this is his third day. No telephone message, either? He really ought to have found some way of letting us know by now. See to the dinner money and then get his lodgings on the telephone, will you? Ask whether his landlady can account for his absence and tell her a medical certificate is needed. If he is ill, he must have seen a doctor.’

The secretary (Mr Ronsonby sometimes told his wife that he would sooner lose any member of his staff, even Burke, the deputy head, rather than let Margaret Wirrell go) returned to her office and rang up Mr Pythias’s landlady.

‘George Etherege school here. Can you give us any news of Mr Pythias? He hasn’t been in since the holiday and we’ve had no medical certificate… No, he hasn’t shown up this morning, either… You haven’t seen him since the school broke up?… Oh, I see… You think he has been staying with friends over Christmas? Yes, I see. Very well, I’ll tell the headmaster. Thank you.’ She rang off and went back to make her negative report.

‘No luck about Mr Pythias. He isn’t at his lodgings. The landlady says he went away for Christmas, and she hasn’t seen him since the Friday we broke up. He seems to have walked out on her without giving notice.’

‘Well, we ought to have heard from him by now. It sounds as though there must have been a disagreement.’

‘She said nothing about anything like that.’

‘Whatever can have happened to the man? Look, Margaret, you’ve got to go out this morning to bank the dinner money. Could you call and have a word with the woman? Before Christmas? And she hasn’t heard from him?’

‘So she says.’

‘That seems strange and I shall be glad of an explanation. I need not tell you to be tactful with her, but, really, I do think she ought to have let us know that he had not shown up. Here we have been waiting since Thursday and have had no news of him at all.’

‘I’ll ring her again and find out when she will be in. Any time before lunch will do for banking the dinner money.’

‘Yes,’ said the headmaster, ‘and that reminds me. I wonder whether Pythias has banked the journey money? One cannot be too meticulous where school funds are concerned.’

‘I told him you had suggested that I took charge of the cash as it had to be banked in a separate account, but he said he had seen you about it.’

‘Yes, he did see me. He was anxious to keep the matter in his own hands and, as he had made all the arrangements and had organised the whole thing, I thought it right to allow him to do it his way. After all, he is the senior geography master and has travelled in Greece, of which he is a native, and has given up much of his own time to working out all the details of this journey to Athens.’

‘The staff are usually only too glad to push school money matters on to me, so I was quite glad to let him carry on on his own.’

‘Money collected from the parents in such large amounts is always a responsibility, of course. I wish now that we had not waited so long before chasing him up, but Pythias has been on the staff for some time and one dislikes the idea of chivvying and harassing a sick man. When you see the landlady, do not give the impression that we are worried in any way, but point out that the situation has taken on an air of slight mystery which is rather disturbing. Anyway, see what she has to say. She may be able to clarify the situation in a more satisfactory way than she was willing to do over the telephone.’

‘It didn’t sound much like it just now,’ said the secretary.

It sounded even less like it when she encountered the landlady face to face. The house was a large Victorian residence built at a time when the children of middle-class families were numerous, but now the rooms were let as bedsitters. Apart from the landlady and her husband, there were now five tenants, the woman told Margaret.

‘I don’t take marrieds,’ she said, when she and Margaret had summed one another up, ‘or any other kind of couples. Never know who you might get, do you? Single gentlemen such as Mr Pythias are what I cater for, and no visitors allowed. Like I told you over the phone, the last day I sees him he come back as usual — well, a bit later, actually, because he had had some paperwork to do in connection with the school journey this next summer, he said, kind of apologising for being a bit late for his tea.’

‘Oh, you knew about the journey.’

‘My sister’s boy is going.’

‘Oh, yes? He’s at the school, then, is he?’

‘Wilbey, his name is, Chad Wilbey.’

‘Oh, yes, I know Wilbey. He is in 5A, isn’t he?’

‘That’s right. You must have a wonderful memory for names.’

Margaret, who, as the headmaster could have testified, had a wonderful memory for more important things than the names of the boys who had been in the school longest, said: ‘Mr Pythias has arranged the whole journey, as, of course, he has lived in Greece and knows it well. Did he seem quite like his usual self when you saw him last?’

‘Yes and no.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘He was all of a fidget, so I guessed what he’d got in his briefcase. You see, I knew the deadline for paying in the money for that trip to Greece because some of it was mine, me helping my sister out so her boy could go. Well, nobody pays away good money before they’ve got to, do they? I mean the electricity and the gas and the telephone and the rates and the income tax. You don’t part up until the last minute — well, most people don’t, do they?’

‘No, I suppose that’s true.’

‘So I says — kind of joking, like, not wishing to give offence to a good tenant — as I suppose he’s worth robbing, at which he looks at me very straight and asks what I think I’m talking about, so I looks at him just as straight and says, if his briefcase is crammed with what I think it’s crammed with, I’m not having it under my roof for Friday night, Saturday and Sunday, as it should have been banked Friday dinner-time. “It’s asking for trouble,” I says, “in these wicked, unlawful times,” I says, “when you don’t know who your friends are and all this crime about,” I says. “You should have got that money in earlier,” I says, “and banked it in your dinner-time,” I says, “and not brought it into a respectable house to be a temptation to goodness knows who.”

‘Well, he turned very huffy and said as he had no intention to burden me or himself with any responsibility and as soon as he’d had his tea the money would be put in a safe place — “and not in this house,” he said nasty-like. So I give him his tea — a nice bit of cured haddock off the thick end and a poached egg on top — and then he tells me as he is going off by train that very evening to spend Christmas with his friend.

‘ “I thought as you was going on Monday,” I says. “I’ve changed my mind,” he says, “and my friend will be expecting me.” So off he goes with his briefcase, and that’s the last I seen of him.’

‘Didn’t he take a suitcase?’

‘Not unless he took it in the morning and left it at the station on his way to school. I never seen him actually leave, so I can’t say as to that, but my nephew says he only had his briefcase when he left.’

‘I see. But when he didn’t turn up again, didn’t you wonder what had happened to him?’

‘Well, I seen as he took umbrage when I told him he ought to have banked the money instead of bringing it into my house and I had took umbrage when he said (more or less) as there might be dishonest people here, so when he never come back I guessed he had changed his lodgings, but I did expect to get his notice which has never come, and that do surprise me, because he always acted very proper and as a gentleman should, taking his hat off to me in the street and everything.’

‘But you didn’t do anything about his leaving like that? It must have put you out.’

‘Do anything? I telephoned round all the hospitals, that’s what I done, but I couldn’t get any news. Of course, he had never told me where his friend lived, so he may be in hospital somewhere miles away. I reckon I done all I could. What more could anybody expect?’

‘Perhaps you could have telephoned the school and let us know that he hadn’t come back.’

‘Why should I do that? If a tenant walks out on me, do I want everybody to know?‘

‘You didn’t think he was the sort who would walk out on you. You’ve just said so. I wish we knew the address of this friend of his. He may have been taken ill there. We need a medical certificate to cover his absence, you see.’

‘He never volunteered no address and it wasn’t no business of mine who he went and stayed with. It might have been a lady. You never know, with them quiet ones, what they gets up to on the sly, but I believes in minding my own business so long as my lodgers keeps my rules.’

‘Did he have regular letters from anybody?’

‘I couldn’t say. The girl puts out the post on the little table in the hall and the tenants picks up their letters either, before they go to work or when they come in, the post not arriving at exactly the same time each morning. Here!’ She eyed Margaret and spoke excitedly. ‘You don’t think he’s gone and scarpered with all that money, do you?’

‘Good gracious, no!’ But it was a thought which had been in Margaret’s mind ever since she had left the headmaster’s study. ‘Teachers don’t do that sort of thing.’

‘Only some of the parents have had a job to scrape the money together, you know. It isn’t all that easy, when you’ve got a family, to find eighty pounds.’

‘The school would make everything good, but there’s no question of Mr Pythias doing anything wrong. If you want to know what I think, I think Mr Pythias has met with an accident which hasn’t injured him enough for him to be taken to hospital but has given him a shock and caused him to lose his memory for a time. He may be wandering about, not knowing who he is or where he ought to be. He must be found, for his own sake.’

‘I don’t want to get mixed up with the police!’

‘Neither does the school, but he’ll have to be accounted for, won’t he? I mean, if he had decided to give notice to you, he would have done it before this. Besides, he would have turned up at school, no matter where he spent the Christmas holidays, unless he was ill. This really must be looked into.’

‘Well, I didn’t really think he was the sort to just walk out without giving me his notice, I’ll allow that. Besides, his clothes, most of them, are still here. Naturally I’ve been to his room to check. Perhaps it is a bit worrying, like you say.’

‘I wish you had let us know that he had left here.’

‘Well,’ said the landlady, ‘all I could have told you is that he isn’t here now. I couldn’t tell you where he had gone, so you’d have been no better off as to that, would you? I don’t reckon it was any of my business to let the school know.’

The news with which Margaret Wirrell returned to the school perturbed Mr Ronsonby deeply. He sent the secretary for the deputy head and, when Burke came in, he said, ‘Pythias has not returned to his lodgings. He had all that money with him when we broke up for Christmas and then had an argument, it seems, with his landlady. Because of this, he went off earlier than expected, carrying the money with him, and I have a most uneasy feeling that he may have been set upon and robbed.’

‘I suppose that’s possible,’ said Burke. ‘A good many people knew about the journey to Greece. Quite a number of parents had opted to join the party and any number of others must have heard about it and knew the date by which payments had to be in, but how do we know he didn’t go back to his lodgings?’

‘Margaret has just returned from a visit to Pythias’s landlady. The woman knows nothing about him since the Friday on which we broke up. If the money has gone, it will have to be replaced, of course. I am deeply concerned for Pythias. I’m afraid it means calling in the police and that will involve the school in the last kind of publicity we want.’

‘There’s the time lag, too,’ said Burke. ‘It’s more than three weeks since we broke up. I suppose — ’ He hesitated and Ronsonby finished the sentence for him.

‘The unthinkable can’t possibly have happened,’ he said. ‘Pythias cannot have absconded with the money. I will never believe that of a member of my staff.’