Not My Blood

CHAPTER 16

“Miss Joliffe! I lent you a pair of my twins last year, I believe?” Mr. Farman had placed Dorcas on his left and Joe on his right at the top table for lunch. His comment silenced Joe and the other diners but appeared not to disconcert Dorcas.

“That’s quite right, headmaster. I wondered if you’d remember the name. We’ve not met before but I did send you a letter of thanks, following on my research program at St. Raphael.”

“I hope the brothers Simpson were of some use?” His tone was jovial, expansive, and Dorcas replied with equal warmth.

“Oh, invaluable, sir! Twins-I speak of identical twins-are very hard to come by. One birth in two hundred and fifty at best, I understand, and they’re not always easy to track down.”

“And even rarer, I should have thought, in the ranks of the upper classes,” Farman commented, nodding sagely.

“I’m wondering, can it be your observation or your research, sir, that leads you to say that?” Dorcas asked innocently.

“Observation. My interest in genetics is not such that I should want to delve any deeper than I needed to into the subject. No, I see for myself, and perhaps others would agree”-he smiled questioningly around the company, gathering support-“that multiple births-litters, one might say-proliferate amongst the lower social orders. I’m sure that if you were to trawl the streets of Seven Dials you would find vastly more sets of matching faces. Once you had scrubbed off the dirt sufficiently to investigate. I can understand that the material extracted might not be of much use to you from a scientific perspective-the children might have difficulty in communicating. The majority-an alarmingly large majority-of children born in the capital, I understand, do not speak English and certainly do not read and write it.”

Joe wondered whether he should snatch the knife from Dorcas’s hand as a preventative measure. The idiot Farman had no idea that the girl he was talking to had, herself, gone barefoot and largely uneducated for the first years of her life, excluded by society. She had grown up believing what her grandmother and the village told her: that she was the illegitimate offspring of a gypsy. As the oldest daughter of a loving and charming but feckless father, Dorcas had gallantly helped with the rearing of the children that followed. A tribe in themselves, these included two younger half brothers. Twins. Their mother had wearied of the constant hounding by grandmama and, succumbing to bribes and threats, had gone off in the night with her boys, back to her own people. Dorcas’s “stepmothers” always ran away. It would be difficult to imagine a more provoking conversational gambit, Joe thought, and he tensed, awaiting the response.

“We take them where we find them, headmaster.” Her voice was level, her knife engaged in cutting the hard crust of the meat pie. “Dr. Barnardo’s excellent institutions have been very helpful to our department. They rescue hundreds of children from death or exploitation on the streets and allow us access occasionally with our clipboards and our lollipops to question and test them.”

“Ah, yes. Sir James was telling me that he takes a certain interest in such establishments.” He looked about him to be sure that everyone had noted his intimacy with Sir James. Joe wondered where he had acquired it.

“He contributes financially to their welfare and offers his personal encouragement and support. He’s even been observed to lose to some of the boys at table tennis.”

“Sports-as good a way as any to overcome the communication problems.”

“And the less fortunate have much to communicate, Mr. Farman. Whatever their language, East End children tell me the same story: that bad diet, infected water, foul air and poverty are wrecking the health of the nation’s children.”

Looks were exchanged around the table. Eyebrows were raised. Sneers tugged gently at the corners of thin mouths.

Heavy talk for a lunch party. In her inexperience, Dorcas was allowing herself to be led into a serious discussion that could only end in embarrassment. He sensed that with her last comment, the girl had put herself into the open: a fox sighted a field away, a legitimate quarry for the pack, and could now expect a ritual pursuit to the rallying cries of “Bolshy … Lefty … Red.…” And, most unforgiveable by her lights: “Feminist!”

Joe decided to stop the hunt short. “Gentlemen, may I offer you the solution? I’m prescribing second helpings of Sussex steak and kidney pie and weekends of bracing Sussex air for every child born east of Bow Church,” he announced.

Surprisingly, murmurs of approval were burbled around the table. “Quite right! Establish a Utopia-on-Sea!”

“The commissioner speaks in jest but-yes! Something must be done to feed the multitude!” an elderly voice said firmly. “How else are we going to get the ranks up to scratch in time for the next war? Eh? Because it’s coming, you know! It’s coming.”

“Most of the 1914 intake were well under 5′4″ and dreadfully undernourished,” another voice came in, in support. “I remember my batman when he first joined me. Skin and bone. No notion of hygiene.”

“ ‘Lord, Thou feedest them with the bread of tears.’ Psalms 80. May I remind my colleagues that the Lord will provide?”

Farman leaned to Joe and muttered superfluously, “Doctor Sheale, Divinity.”

“Whatever they’re fed on, I do note the masses always seem to have the strength to march and riot whenever the fancy takes them” was the lofty contribution of a bluff young man (“Hawkins, History”). “Let’s not forget ’26! Now there was a damn close-run thing! Wellington would have known what to do about it. Or Napoleon. Gladstone, perhaps. Disraeli even.” He sighed. “What has become of our heroes?”

“Nearly all our best men are dead! Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning, George Eliot-and I’m not feeling very well myself.” The speaker shook his head and directed an apologetic smile at Dorcas. “Punch ’93,” he added in a disarming stage whisper.

Inevitably: “Langhorne, English Lit” followed.

Joe didn’t conceal his amusement. He laughed out loud. Intrigued by the calculated frivolity of the remark, he noted the name, Langhorne, and looked forwards to an exchange of views with this joker. A man with the smooth, dark looks of an ageing gigolo, enlivened by a splash of intelligence and a twist of irony, he presented an intriguing cocktail, Joe thought fancifully. Not a man you’d share a pint at the pub with. He caught himself searching for a polite formula for asking Langhorne, English Lit, what on earth had propelled a man of his nature into his chosen profession and then remembered that he had a large source to draw on since he’d been asked the same thing himself in a hundred different ways. He caught Dorcas’s eye, inviting a smile. When it came, it had the glinting edge of a stiletto.

She’d been escorted to the dining room at the last moment and promptly abandoned by Matron, so Joe had had no opportunity to murmur his usual “Now behave yourself, Dorcas!” Indeed, he didn’t think he would have had the nerve to deliver the warning to this composed and superficially congenial young woman. Being the only female in the room, she was the centre of all attention but appeared not to notice it. Sitting amongst the black robes and dusty suits, she glowed in her dark-red woollen two-piece. Joe’s were not the only eyes on her; her pretty face and graceful gestures constantly drew sentimental glances from the rows of boys tucking into their pie and mashed potatoes, each remembering a mother or a sister.

The food was unpalatable, the company worse, but at least they didn’t dawdle over their plates. These were whisked away by two young men and a pretty girl he assumed to be Betty Bellefoy. The pupils at the long refectory tables had their own routine of scraping and passing down the plates, and the monitors at the ends of the rows staggered to the hatch with the piles. Dr. Sheale said grace, lingeringly, and the high-table party processed out to the common room for coffee.

Mr. Langhorne was instantly at Dorcas’s side to lead her in, hand her a cup, and make her laugh. Joe found himself being plucked from the queue for the urn by Farman.

“We just have time for a recuperative cup while the boys have a quarter of an hour’s break, and then we’re into afternoon school. Now, Sandilands, it will be growing dark in two hours’ time. If you’re to make the trip back to-Godalming, was it? — you must go to the head of the queue. Come along!”

This was the moment.

“Sir,” Joe spoke briskly. “Don’t concern yourself. No hurry whatsoever. I shall be staying until the end of the day-and beyond. Arrangements have been made for accommodation in the town. Miss Joliffe and I will return tomorrow morning before start of school. As for young Drummond, you would oblige me by arranging for him to spend the afternoon with Miss Joliffe-and a few chums perhaps-in a secure place on the first floor of the main building. An impromptu drawing class suggests itself. Amongst her many talents, Miss Joliffe, you’ll find, is an art enthusiast and perfectly accustomed to teaching young boys. At the end of the day, I shall have a private conversation with my nephew, as a result of which he will either join us down at the inn or stay in school and pick up his normal school timetable.”

Farman’s face fell and he began to bluster objections. Joe smiled benignly and took no notice. “I should be further obliged if you would fix things so that your Mr. Gosling is available to me in the capacity of aide-de-camp. We will set up headquarters in Mr. Rapson’s old study. There’s something rotten at the heart of St. Magnus, sir, and I intend to locate and cut out the worm I find wriggling at its core.”

“I’ve done the audit, sir. It’s all in there. Everything we want and more. It’s even clearly labeled and in date order. Alphabetically ordered subsections. I told you Rapson was meticulous.” Gosling emerged with cobwebbed hair from the cupboard eager to get on. “What I’d have given to get my hands on this cache! But Rapson guarded his territory like a jealous dragon. I’d no idea that this was here!”

“Did you not? Look, Gosling, I hope you don’t mind my commandeering your services like this? I really would prefer to have a sharp lad like you on hand until I’ve got to the bottom of this.”

“Glad to have something useful to do, sir. The charade I’ve been involved with was getting very tiresome. I’ve been thinking of doing a bunk myself.”

Joe was delighted to channel his energy. “Boring, routine stuff first, Gosling. Worth getting it out of the way. The finances! It strikes me that this place bears all the hallmarks of a well-funded establishment. No tile off the roof, repainted last year, no money spared except in the matter perhaps of school dinners. Are the records-”

“Got them, sir.”

“Pull them out and work on them … over there on the rug, will you? You may need to spread the sheets out.” He pointed to a flat piece of choice Persian rugwork laid out over solid polished floorboards.

“What am I looking for?”

“Sounds obvious, but I think you’ll know it when you see it. Unusual amounts of cash in-or out. Don’t forget that Rapson could have been paying out blackmail money. The school may have something to hide, too. In fact, I’m pretty certain it has.”

“Right-o, sir.”

Joe noted with satisfaction that Gosling picked up the black book and set it beside him as he crouched on the floor and began to turn pages. There followed the occasional low whistle and hiss and “Crikey! Can the fives court possibly have cost as much as that?”

Seeing the boy was well settled into his task, Joe picked up the telephone and made a connection with Alfred Jenkins back in Chelsea.

“Alfred? Sandilands here. Just a quick call to tell you-you got him! My men trailed him, managed to arrest him and wring the truth out of him with surprising ease. A charmer by the name of Chisholm. Now-anything to confess, Inspector?”

There was a chortle at the other end that was audible in the room. Gosling had stilled his page scanning activities at the mention of the name, Joe noticed.

Inspector Jenkins stopped laughing and replied concisely and soberly. “Easy enough to arrest. They had grounds after all. I’d expect they found a certain item of lost property in the young gentleman’s left coat pocket. An old watch of my father’s went missing while Mr. Chisholm was making his delivery. I reported it of course. It had been on top of the chiffonier by the door when he came in to take a look at the railway. Wondered if it was him had made off with it. Well I never! Have they charged him?”

“No. Slippery customer. If he’s who I think he is, he’s got a rather influential and equally slippery organisation behind him. They call themselves MI5, and they’re all over the place. Mainly under my feet.” Joe flashed a warm smile down at Gosling. “Or at my feet. Still, well done, old man! I think he was after not the boy but something Jackie had unawares in his Afghan bag. That’s safely here with me too. We’ll have a pint in the Dick Turpin when I get back.”

Joe replaced the receiver and spoke confidingly to Gosling. “Chisholm? A colleague? If you thought you were the only officer involved with this, it seems you were mistaken.” He explained the old inspector’s part in the lift-incarceration at the Chelsea apartment.

The account seemed to give the young man a certain satisfaction, Joe thought.

“If he’s the chap I’m thinking of, he’s not exactly a colleague. Yes, he’s one of ours. Employed occasionally in the executive division. A thug. If Drummond was his target, this affair would appear to have escalated in importance.” Gosling shuddered. “I’d like to say we wouldn’t stoop to such measures, but the dirty washing does get handed over to others sometimes. Out of sight, out of mind. Deniable.” He bit his lip, hinting at knowledge that Joe did not have and knew better than to demand.

“I can imagine. Right, carry on, Gosling. I’m going to look through those box files of individual school records. Checking first the ‘lost boys,’ headed by Peterkin. If you want to unravel something, you tug on the end that’s sticking out first. Surprising how often that works.”

He extracted the seven envelopes belonging to the identified boys and began to leaf through them. “Mind if I talk aloud?”

“No, sir.” Gosling seemed surprised to be asked.

“Again, nothing much in common. One or two had health problems. Visits by the local doctor in the night recorded, very properly. A Dr. Carter attended.” Joe scratched a note to himself on his pad. “Occasional trip to hospital in Brighton for the more serious cases. Here’s a case of blood poisoning from an undeclared wound.… Ah! Here are symptoms that are clearly those of tuberculosis, according to Matron’s carefully worded note. Not a disease you want to see ripping through a dormitory.

“Right, let’s take a look at the fire-raiser. Set fire to the pig sties. Why? Bit young, these lads for enjoying an illicit cigarette, I’d have thought? Oh, my! Thick file. The arson was just the last of his little escapades. Bullying … torturing the school cat … rudeness … swearing at Matron. The lad seems to have been completely out of control and pretty thick with it. His scores on his monthly tests are abnormally low. Letter from the school asking his parents to remove him. No reply filed, but the very next week, he’s gone. Just gone.” Joe sighed. “I expect his parents took him away and had him locked up somewhere. Fire-raising? That can earn you a place in a mental institution any day. The boy sounds like a walking disaster to me.”

They ploughed on in companionable silence, flicking cards, occasionally comparing dates.

Gosling ran a finger along a row of figures. “Got it!”

“I’m glad you’ve got something; nothing else here is making much sense. Not much sinister sense, I’d say. Boys leave because they’re ill or naughty or obviously in need of a more rigourous regime than St. Magnus can provide. Nothing wrong with that. No mystery. Apart from young Peterkin. Fit as a flea, bright as a button, good as gold, you’d say. He rather breaks the pattern. Are we going to have to apologise to the school and beat a hasty retreat, Gosling?”

“Hold your horses! Oh, sorry sir! Take a look at these entries in the accounts. Large sums of money-a thousand pounds or more, not the same each time-have been paid into the school’s bank account and promptly paid out into a second account I haven’t got the sheets for here. Quite often a large building operation follows, with sums drawn back and re-spent.”

“These payments, do they correspond with any of our dates of interest?” Joe asked carefully.

“No, they don’t. They’re all off target. Hang on.… They turn up two, three and five weeks later. Ah, I have an exception … two exceptions. One’s the fire-raiser. His father paid over a large amount the very day the boy went missing.”

“For how much?”

“One thousand, five hundred pounds.”

“How much does it cost to rebuild a pig sty?”

“I can tell you exactly. It’s in the following month’s accounts. Work done in fast time by Mr. Green the local builder for … one hundred three pounds, ten pence.”

“Leaving a generous tip in the offertory box for St. Magnus. Remind me who he was, this Magnus chap-Patron Saint of the Sticky Fingers? ‘For your trouble, headmaster’? Hush money? Further information required, I think. And the other?”

“Peterkin, sir. I could have this wrong but-there’s an anonymous payment into the school, the week before he went missing. Again, it’s for a large sum: one thousand pounds.”

Joe grew tense. “So, what are you saying?”

“That, at first look, all these disappearances are accompanied within certain loose time limits by considerable payments to the school.”

“Through the reigns of three headmasters? Can they have been aware?”

“No way they can’t have been aware, sir. They must all have thought it above board.”

“So the three heads were all happy to accept the donations-were comfortable enough with them to put them straight into the school accounts, which I see are lodged with perhaps the most prestigious bank in London. Do we interpret them as kind gestures? Some of these fathers may well have been-usually are-alumni of the school themselves. And, wealthy men that they are, they show their gratitude or assuage their embarrassment by making a hefty donation. Some schools couldn’t continue in business without such support.”

“You’re right, sir. My own father made a similar if more modest gesture when I left my prep school, and I never set anything alight.” He sighed and sat back on his heels. “Worth going on with this trawl, then, sir?”

“Oh, I think so. Check all the dates we have suspicions of. Just in case.”

Gosling continued to rustle his way halfheartedly through the sheets, collating the dates in the black book and ticking off names on a pad he kept close by him.

Narrowing his eyes, Joe went to look over his shoulder. “You’ve missed one. What’s this?” he asked, pointing. “This large sum coming in. Two thousand pounds. Can you trace it to source?”

“No. None of them. You’ll need a warrant to get a sight of the bank’s details, sir, to get hold of any names. You’ll have to go back to London for that. Um, this one did catch my eye but, look, it’s outside the dates we’ve been looking into. It’s larger than the others. The kind of sum a rich old codger might leave as a legacy. It can’t be connected.”

“Everything’s connected. What’s the date of the entry?” Joe persisted.

“It’s very recent. Just a week before Rapson died.” Gosling turned a concerned face to Joe. “Now, would someone be paying good money to have Rapson topped, I wonder?”

“Mmm. He was up to no good-I think he was paying out regular sums of his own as blackmail. Could this be linked in some way? But it’s all the wrong way round and a sum like that, it’s out of the league of bookies, local casino sharks and thugs of that nature. You can hire a top hit man from London to attend to your needs for fifty quid. What kind of service will cost you two thousand? Total massacre of the royal family? What’s he been meddling with that earned him a knife in the ribs?”

“And why pay the school? I can’t see Farman banking his cheque and rushing out with a freshly sharpened steak knife to earn his fee and then spend it on Persian carpets for the combination room.”

Gosling got up and came to look once more at the nine cutout faces. “I’m not entirely sure why Rapson got his scissors out and did this, sir. This little gallery.”

“Aide mémoire?”

“A list would have sufficed. He didn’t need to keep their poor little faces close. He was no sentimentalist. He’d caught onto something shady in the disappearances, we’re agreed on that much. Could he have been doing a little blackmailing on his own account, do you suppose?”

“Slapping these down on someone’s desk and snarling, ‘I know your secret, Mr. X!’ ”

Gosling jumped and looked up sharply. “That would work with me but, sir! I’ll tell you something that would really scare the shit out of me if I had something to hide!”

Alarmed by his lieutenant’s anxious face, Joe asked quietly, “Tell me.”

“These are cut out of large, stiff prints. Can you picture the remaining photograph after Rapson had done his bit of scissor-work? You’d have a normal-looking piece of card portraying twenty or so little boys, and then your eye would light on the gaping hole where a face should be?”

“Good Lord! Imagine getting one of those through the post! Did he post them? Where are the outside bits, Gosling?”

“Give me a minute to root about in the store. Bound to be copies in there.”

Gosling shot off, and Joe heard him moving boxes about. Finally he emerged, grinning. “Got ’em!”

They fell on the brown envelopes encasing the series of photographs.

“They seem to have kept two copies of each class each year,” Joe commented. “So, as a test year, 1921-Peterkin’s year-will contain … here we are. One copy!”

Gosling had moved on to the back of the file and pulled out a slimmer envelope. And, triumphantly: “Where do you hide a stolen sheep? In with the herd! Here they are-the doctored copies. He hadn’t got around to sending them off in the post, apparently.”

He pulled out the top one. “Oh, my!”

The sight of the photograph with its calligraphed “St. Magnus Preparatory School” followed by a helpful date was, at first glimpse, prim and ordinary. Then the eye was drawn to the gap in the middle of the second row of boys, the black hole into which a child had sunk. The effect was sinister in the extreme.

“I think I’d get the message, wouldn’t you, sir, if I opened this at the breakfast table.”

Gosling pulled out all the sheets and riffled through them. “Yes, the dates correspond with the gallery.” He began to slide them away.

“A moment! Hand them over!”

Joe took them from him and looked at them more carefully, checking the backs of each for scribbled notes or names and finding none. As he got to the end he looked up. “Gosling! Tell me again-how many faces? Nine? It’s nine, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Why?”

Joe counted the sheets. “Because there are ten sheets here. Ten.”

He came around the desk and joined Gosling on his knees, laying down the pile of stiff pieces of card between them. He turned them over until the surface of the last one showed itself. This was intact. Untouched. No gap signifying disappearance. They stared at the rows of shining faces, unable to speak.

Gosling finally broke the silence. “Sir. You recognise this class, I think?”

“It’s year 1932. The current year. Taken last September.” Joe pointed with a shaking finger to the familiar fair hair and bright expression in the centre of the back row. “And this is my nephew’s class. That’s Jack Drummond.”