No Winding-Sheet

2

In Retrospect

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Mr Ronsonby had more things on his mind than the mystery of Mr Pythias’s absence from his duties, worrying, inconvenient and puzzling though that was.

Although the Sir George Etherege school had been operating for some time, the buildings were still being completed. They had been planned and the foundations laid when the 1939 war put an end to the project for years. Boys continued to attend what had become known as the Old School, about a mile away from the present building. Expanding numbers, however, and early murmurs of comprehensive education, had persuaded the education committee to reconsider the plan to build the new school on even more extensive lines than the original blueprint allowed for.

The consequence was that hordes of young workmen — to Mr Ronsonby and the staff their number appeared to be legion — sang, whistled and shouted their way through their own and the school’s working day. They kicked footballs against classroom outside-walls during their tea breaks and drove the beleaguered garrison of earnest schoolmasters almost crazy when they operated a concrete mixer which, as one of the junior masters put it, ‘made a row like the devil lambasting the legions of hell’. At any rate, while it was in action, it made any oral teaching impossible. Even the caretaker, an ex-policeman and unflappable in the ordinary course of events, began to feel the strain, but then, unlike the staff, he had to bear with the workmen and their noise during school holidays as well as after school hours and during Saturday overtime working.

The caretaker was named Sparshott. He had two children who were old enough to have left home, so, with his wife, his younger son and his dog, he lived in the cottage which had been built for him in the school grounds.

He disliked most of the schoolboys and he bitterly detested the young workmen, although he had made friends with their foreman, a man of his own age. Shortly before Christmas, he had said once or twice to him, ‘Can’t your lads clear up as they go along? The asphalt’s a shambles and the quad is worse. That hole they’ve sunk in the middle of the quad is big enough to bury an articulated lorry. Can’t they fill it in before the end of the Christmas holiday? It’s a bloody eyesore left like that.’

‘I know, Mr Sparshott, I know. The thing is, you see, as it’s there so’s they can bury the rubbish as it comes along.’

‘Then why can’t they go ahead and bury it? It’s an eyesore, I tell you. The headmaster was complaining about it after he took the morning assembly at the end of last term. From the platform, him and the staff have to look straight out of them big winders in the hall on to what looks like sommat as was left over from the blitz.’

‘I know, Mr Sparshott, but till they’ve done with making a mess there’s not much point in clearing of it up. They’re all union men, and if I was to order ’em to bury all that rubbish and fill in the hole, I’d have big trouble on my hands. There’s bound to be more rubbish before we’ve done, you see, and that ’ud mean digging another hole. They simply wouldn’t do it, Mr Sparshott, not nohow.’

‘There’s another thing the headmaster wants to know. When is that back entrance going to be finished? Till them back doors is on and I can lock the school up secure come the night, nothing ain’t safe from looters. As it is, youngsters gets in over the fence that’s round the field and plays merry hell. They let all the school chickens out over Christmas, blast ’em!’

Although in his uniformed days he had had only a modest function in a village some thirty miles out of the town in which the new school was being built, Sparshott was a conscientious man trained to accept responsibility. He was keenly aware that the school building housed a large quantity of valuable material, and the fact that he could not lock the back doors worried him.

Evening classes used the school on three nights a week, so there were twenty brand-new typewriters in the commercial room. The school also possessed radio and television sets, and there were expensive tools in the woodwork centre and all kinds of sports equipment in the large cupboard in the gym. There was another cupboard in the library where the school orchestra usually kept its brass instruments, its strings, its woodwind and the tympani whose clangings, reverberations and boomings were so dear to their operators’ hearts.

When Sparshott pressed his point, he was fobbed off again.

‘Well, you see,’ said the foreman, ‘until we’ve finished with that there end of the building, there ain’t no point in putting in them doors. Only be a hindrance to us, like, till we get that ten-foot drop from the library floor cased in. Nobody excepting my lads don’t know as that end of the school is open all the time, and I can trust my lads. They won’t come back after hours nor touch anything as don’t belong to ’em.’

Sparshott would like to have mentioned the complaints he had had from masters whose form rooms were at the back of the building, so that unceasing vigilance had to be exercised to make sure that venturesome boys did not fall down the ten-foot drop, but he realised that complaints would be useless. Neither was there any way of stopping young workmen from singing, whistling, shouting to one another and, worse than this, using their concrete mixer during school hours. He had contrived, with the assistance of the headmaster and the PE specialist, to stop the kicking of footballs against classroom walls during the workmen’s tea breaks, but that was his only victory.

Fortunately for the headmaster and his secretary, their offices were at the front of the building and this had been finished for some time. So far as the ten-foot drop was concerned, there had been no casualties so far, although the headmaster had lost hours of sleep brooding upon the dangers, boys being what they are.

The caretaker had not reported the incident of the chickens, deeming it the work of naughty little junior-school boys and not worthy of Mr Ronsonby’s attention, but there had been another matter which Sparshott felt did call for official notice. On the Friday when the school had broken up for the Christmas vacation he had gone on his rounds as usual to make sure that the cleaners were doing their job and that all the masters were off the premises. He was somewhat surprised to find Mr Pythias still in the staffroom.

‘Sorry, sir,’ he said. ‘I thought as everybody had gone.’

‘Got one or two things to finish off. Shan’t be long,’ said Mr Pythias. ‘Thank goodness for these dark December evenings! At least the workmen have to give up early. Only time one can get a bit of peace in this place.’

Sparshott made another round of the school half an hour later, ascertained that the staffroom was now empty, and turned off one or two lights which had been left on in the corridors. He then paid the cleaners their weekly wage, saw them off the premises and locked the double gates at the end of the drive and the two side-gates by which pedestrians came in. This done, he went back to his cottage to have his tea.

As Mr Pythias had indicated, the workmen had left, that evening, as soon as it was too dark for outside work to be carried on, so all that the caretaker planned to do was to make his final round as soon as he had heard the nine o’clock news. After that it was to be supper and bed.

Sparshott liked Friday nights. There were no evening classes, so he knew that he could ‘shut shop’ as soon as the last of the staff (usually the school secretary) had gone and then, apart from making his rounds accompanied by his dog, and except for unlocking the gates for the Saturday morning overtime workmen and the football team if the boys had a home match, the weekend was a period of blessed peace and quiet. On this particular Friday which ended the term, there were not even the school clubs to consider.

There was only one snag. During the summer evenings and on Saturday afternoons, he had to be on the alert to chase away small boys from the local primary school who climbed the fence round the playing field and came to play unlawful cricket or football on the school grass. The great gates and their side gates looked impressive and could not easily be scaled. In any case, they were in full view of the street. The field, however, was bordered on two sides by the back gardens of houses, and these gardens had back alleys which were a free-for-all and a passport to the school fence which any active youngster could scramble over with the help of his mates.

Young Sparshott, who was just sixteen years old and in the fifth form, said to his father after one of the caretaker’s skirmishes with these infant trespassers, ‘What harm do they do, dad? They’ve got nothing but a bit of asphalt playground at their school. They can’t hurt the field just kicking a ball about, can they?’

‘They don’t stop at just kicking a ball about, son. Before the front of the school was finished and a proper coal shoot made, we used to have a whole mountain of coke shot on to the ground where the gym was to be built, and these little scaramouches used to run up and down it and reduce a lot of it to powder. Then there’s all the stuff the builders leave about. I got a responsibility for that. The kids can have all they want of the field when they’re old enough to be transferred to school here, same as you was. Until then, I reckon I’ve got to keep on the kee veevee and look after the school’s interests.’

‘Well, everything will be quiet enough while we’re away over Christmas,’ said his wife on that particular Friday evening while she was giving him his tea.

‘Christmas don’t last all that long and the builder’s men will be in again after Boxing Day,’ said Sparshott. ‘There’s no peace for the wicked, meaning me, love.’

‘We’ve got to be thankful for small mercies. We’re living rent-free and your money is good. Once the workmen clear off, we shan’t know ourselves.’

‘They don’t seem in any hurry to get finished. There’s still plenty to do out the back and the quad’s a shambles. There used to be some sort of stone-built shack there before the school got the property, and all the builder has done is to pull the shack down and leave all the mess.’

‘But it will all be cleared up eventually, and you can forget about it over Christmas. What an expensive time Christmas is, though, with all the presents to buy.’

‘The Old Python will be worth robbing,’ said Sparshott junior, voicing a thought brought by his mother’s remarks. ‘He must have collected a mountain of lolly when everybody finished paying up for the school journey to Greece.’

‘Mr Pythias to you,’ said his father sternly.

‘OK, dad. All I meant was that today was his deadline for paying up for the Greek trip, so I reckon his briefcase is just about bursting at the seams with the money.’

‘He will have banked the money at midday.’

‘Not much he didn’t. He was on first dinner duty and after that he had to get his own nosh, and I know he did, because I was on second dinner and there he was at the staff table shovelling down chops and chips with shredded white cabbage on the side. Wish they served chops and chips to us!’

‘Mr Pythias was last off the premises tonight. Found him in the staffroom when everybody else had gone,’ said Sparshott to his wife.

‘I reckon he was killing time till his girlfriend got home,’ said his son. ‘Not as we’ve ever seen her, but —’

‘What on earth are you talking about? Haven’t you got any respect?’ said his mother.

‘Everybody’s got a bit of homework,’ said her son.

‘Don’t talk so coarse!’ said Mrs Sparshott.

‘You can’t expect him not to know the facts of life at his age,’ said Sparshott senior. ‘Another cup of tea, love, please.’

‘Can I do the rounds with you and Fangs tonight, dad?’ asked young Sparshott.

‘Yes, you generally do of a Friday. You can have a bit of a lie-in on Saturday morning so long as you gets your homework done.’

‘Only the set books to read during the holidays.’

The caretaker’s last round followed a fixed routine. First he visited and tested the front gates. When he walked back towards the school along the drive, he was facing the front entrance with the secretary’s office to the right and the headmaster’s sanctum to the left. He then turned and passed the headmaster’s windows, the window of the main stockroom and the long stretch of the boys’ cloakrooms and washrooms before he came to the end of the school frontage.

This brought him to an angle of the buildings and ultimately to where the back doors would be when they were fixed. Beyond this, another corner brought him round past the school canteen (a separate building which, strangely enough, was not under the headmaster’s jurisdiction but was administered directly from the education department of the local council) and so to the front of the school again, to where he had left his son to keep an eye on the front doors.

Everything was quiet. The dog on the lead remained tranquil and, except for cars and an occasional bus passing along the main road outside the big gates, there was nothing stirring except the man, his son and his dog. They returned to the cottage, had supper and were soon in bed.

It was round about midnight when Mrs Sparshott woke. She, unlike her husband, was a light sleeper, but Sparshott, because of his police training, was wide awake once his eyes were open.

‘What is it?’ he said, in response to a wifely prodding.

‘I don’t know, but I think there’s somebody about.’

‘Oh, dammit! Are you sure?’

‘I heard something.’

‘Suppose I’d better take a look round, then. Boys up to something because of the holidays, that’s all, I expect.’

‘Take Ron with you.’

‘No need to spoil the lad’s sleep. Fangs will frighten them away if there’s anybody about.’

‘It’s a bit late for skylarking boys. More like some of them young workmen after one of the school TV sets or something of that. You’ll be careful, won’t you? There’ll likely be more than one young fellow and they’re tough.’

The night was very dark indeed. On his evening rounds the caretaker always carried a powerful electric torch for, although he knew his way blindfold, the builder’s men sometimes left heaps of bricks, sand, gravel, planks and other unexpected obstacles in the most unlikely places. Sparshott picked up his torch, roused his dog which, in winter, slept in the warmth of the kitchen, put the dog on a short lead and sallied forth.

What his wife thought she had heard he did not know, but there was no doubt about the accuracy of her statement that she had heard something. Conditioned by habit, Sparshott walked along the front of the bicycle shed towards the drive and saw immediately that there was a light showing from inside the building.

The caretaker, with his dog’s muzzle almost touching his left knee, went round to the back entrance. He pushed the heavy tarpaulin aside, inserted himself, slipped the lead from the dog’s collar and put a warning hand on Fangs’s head. Together they walked silently down the long corridor which separated one side of the quad from the classrooms on the other side of the passage.

When they reached the hall, electric lights illuminated the quad, for the hall on that side consisted of one long range of tall windows. Sparshott peered out, but could see nothing in the quad except that, here and there, were chunks of rubbish from the demolished farm building which had once occupied the site.

The caretaker retraced his steps. The corridor led to the entrance vestibule of the school and to another corridor between the hall and, at the vestibule end, the secretary’s office, where the telephone was. As the man and his dog reached the corner where the two corridors met at right angles to one another, the dog growled.

Light was now streaming out from the hall, for the swing doors were open. Sparshott halted and called out, ‘Show yourselves, whoever you are! Come on out of that! The dog’s loose!’

At this, somebody snapped off the hall lights, Sparshott was hurled out of the way with considerable violence, the dog yelped as his paw was trodden on, and the next sounds were those of feet pounding down the corridor towards the back entrance. The dog, receiving no orders, remained where he was.

Only one thing consoled the battered caretaker. Flying arms as well as flying feet had convinced him that when the men — there were two of them for sure — had thrust him out of their way, they were carrying nothing. He collected himself, gripped his torch more firmly and went into the hall, as that — strangely he thought — appeared to have been the centre of the intruders’ operations.

The push-bar doors on the quad side of the great hall were open. He could feel the cold air blowing in and, as well as that, there was the information which his torch disclosed. He went across to close the doors, but then decided to do as the trespassers appeared to have done. This was to switch on the hall lights again to give better illumination to the quad than the beam of his torch could do.

Having pressed the two sets of switches, each set just inside one of the two swing doors which led from the secretary’s corridor into the hall, he crossed the hall again and stepped out into the quad.

So far as he could see, nothing in it had been altered. While construction work was still going on, it remained a large rectangle of rough earth with the heaps of debris from the demolished farm building still rendering it the eyesore of which the headmaster had complained, and still in the middle of it was the hole in which, presumably, the debris would one day be buried. At one side of the hole there was the heap of dirt and gravel which had been excavated.

Picking his way, the caretaker went over to the hole. It was a gaping, untidy affair with slightly sloping sides down which the winter rain had seeped to leave a messy little quagmire at the bottom.

Sparshott switched on his powerful torch and peered down into the hole. A few bits of brick and concrete appeared to have been thrown in, but whether by the workmen or by the recent intruders it was not possible to say. Otherwise, nothing seemed to have been touched. Sparshott wondered whether his appearance on the scene had interrupted nefarious doings, but, short of the visitors having intended to heave chunks of brick at the library, the hall or the corridor windows, it was difficult to determine any possible reason they could have had for choosing to invade the quad.

Puzzled and somewhat worried, Sparshott returned to the hall, closed the doors which opened on to the quad, crossed the floor, switched off the lights and closed the swing doors to the corridor. Here he switched on his torch again, tested the lock on the secretary’s office, crossed the vestibule and tested the headmaster’s door, tried the big stockroom in which the television sets were kept when they were not in use, but found nothing either puzzling or disturbing. That the intruders had been up to some kind of mischief seemed clear enough, but whatever had been intended did not appear to have been carried out.

Sparshott had made representations more than once to the headmaster (and the headmaster, he knew, had passed them on to the education committee) that, while the building was so vulnerable, a nightwatchman ought to be employed ‘on account I can’t be about all days and all night, sir’. Now, it seemed, he had been right to make the request.

As he and the limping dog traversed the long corridor which led to the open back of the building, he half wondered whether the two men would be lying in wait for him. He gripped his torch more firmly. They had not been carrying anything, but, then, there was nothing in the hall or the quad worth stealing. He wondered whether they could have been two of the young workmen up to some sort of lark, or even two of the biggest schoolboys — there were some hefty young fellows in the football team — working off a dare.

Nobody interfered with his egress from the building, but, all the same, he was upset and he said as much when he returned to his wife. She, admirable woman, had come downstairs and was making a cup of tea.

‘There was two of them,’ he said. ‘Up to some sort of mischief, I reckon, and I don’t like it much. It’s too easy for people to get in while there’s no back doors. Mr Ronsonby was going away for Christmas this evening, but I’ve got Mr Burke’s phone number, so I’ll try to get him first thing in the morning and make my report. It’s the first time we’ve had interlopers, so far as I know, but it only needs somebody to start this sort of thing and we’ll be in trouble. I can’t be on guard twenty-four hours a day. I’ve told Mr Ronsonby I reckon we need a nightwatchman as well as me, and he quite agrees, but, so far, he says the committee won’t stand for the extra expense. Once a couple of TV sets and half a dozen of them new typewriters have been whipped, maybe they’ll think again.’

His wife, attending to the dog’s paw, pointed out that it was morning already, so at half-past eight Sparshott telephoned the deputy head. Mr Burke promised to come round as soon as he had had his breakfast.

The workmen were on Saturday overtime, so Sparshott next accosted the builders’ foreman and asked him to find out whether any damage had been done to the fabric or anything belonging to his work party sabotaged in any way.

‘I reckon it was a couple of the bigger lads up to mischief,’ he said, ‘not as we gets trouble of that sort, not as a general rule. But I got Mr Burke coming in half an hour or so, and if there’s anything to report, I’d be glad to have notice of it to tell him, it being my responsibility, if you get my meaning.’

There was nothing to report except what Sparshott himself had noticed. The quad was a little tidier than it had been when the workmen had seen it last, and some of the broken stone, the litter of roof slates and the heap of damaged bricks which had resulted from the demolition of the farm outbuilding had been tossed into the hole, as Sparshott himself had already seen.

Mr Burke turned up at half-past nine. He received Sparshott’s report and then said briskly, ‘Well, I’ve got a full list of the school equipment in my room. We had better check to find out whether anything is missing.’

‘I doubt if it is, sir. Nobody that barged into me wasn’t carrying anything. By the look of the quad, sir, I reckon it was just a couple of louts getting up to their larks. Couldn’t have been a couple of our own bigger boys, could it?’

‘It doesn’t sound like anybody in the upper school to me. Any boys capable of exercising the violence you say was used on you could only have been sixth-formers or two members of the first eleven. However, let us do the rounds and see whether there is anything more we can find out. Have you contacted the police?’

‘Thinking it might be boys, no, sir.’

‘Thank goodness for that. Oh, well, I’ll get my list and then we can check and find out whether anything has been taken. The two TV sets are locked up in the big stationery cupboard near the headmaster’s room, so, unless the lock has been forced, they should be all right. Fortunately the orchestra were allowed to take their instruments home with them, so no problems there.’

‘The big stockroom seemed all right last night, sir.’

They began with the secretary’s office. It was still locked, but Sparshott had a master key. Her desk was locked, too, and they left it untouched. Next came the room where all the stationery stock was kept. It also was still locked, as Sparshott had claimed. Burke, as senior master, had the key to it. He opened up and assured himself, with the caretaker as witness, that the television sets were there and that nothing had been disturbed since he himself had supervised the stowing away of the sets the day before.

From here the two men went up by the front staircase, opened the door of the staffroom, which was on the first floor, made a brief survey of the staff lockers and then Burke led the way along the corridor to the commercial room. Here were the typewriters, each hidden under its protective dustcover.

Burke took off every cover and made certain that all the typewriters were present and undamaged. Another thought had occurred to him while he was doing this.

‘I suppose it couldn’t have been a couple of evening-school students who hustled you?’ he asked.

‘Could have been, easy enough, sir, and likelier, p’raps, than our own boys, and also I did give a thought to some o’ them young workmen.’

‘Well, everything seems to be all right, so far, but we may as well make a thorough job of it.’

Across the corridor and opposite the commercial room was the handsome library. On one side of it the windows looked down on to the quad. Three young workmen were busy there, but their efforts appeared to be confined to throwing a few more chunks of rubbish into the hole and to make a pile of the rest of it against the outer wall of the corridor below the library.

‘Can’t see what they get paid overtime for, sir,’ said Sparshott, as he accompanied the senior master to the front door, which he unbolted and unlocked to let Mr Burke out.

‘Nor I, but we are in the contractor’s hands and, well, friends at court, you know.’

‘All the same thing on these local councils, I reckon, sir, but when they’re your employers, it don’t do to say too much, do it?’

He closed, but did not lock, the great front gates behind Mr Burke’s car. There was still the builder’s truck to leave by that exit. The men knocked off at twelve, however, and when he had seen them off and made the great gates secure, he went into the school and locked and bolted the front door, then went into the hall and had another look at the quad.

There were footprints around the open hole, but there was nothing to indicate whether they were the workmen’s prints or those of the night’s intruders.