Dingle considered him dispassionately, "Scars," he murmured. "Scars—and the past tense. Every time you refer to him you use the past tense. So he is dead ... or rather someone is dead—that is more logical
—someone is dead, and you have reason to believe that it is Smith, our Smith of Eden Hall. Is that it?"
Butler took refuge behind his most wooden face. It was at such moments as this that he missed his uniform. In a uniform a man could be stolid, even stupid, with a suggestion of irrascibility, and civilians accepted it as the natural order of things, not a defense. A uniform meant orders from above and blind obedience, too, and British civilians of the middle and upper classes found this comforting because they took the supremacy of the civil power over the military for granted. It was a long time since Cromwell and his major-generals after all!
But better so, he reflected, mourning the mothballed khaki —doubly better so. Better that civilians should patronise the uniform—despise it if they chose to—than worship it or fear it as they did in less fortunate lands over the water. If this was the very last service the British Army did for its country, it would be a mighty victory.
He squared his shoulders at the thought.
"Don't equivocate with me, Major Butler," said Dingle severely. "Is Smith dead?"
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Butler gave a military-sounding grunt. A few moments before the old man had been almost on his side, but he was slipping out of reach again now. The wrong word would ruin everything.
He gestured to the photographs on the table. "You are forgetting your own experience, sir—"
"I'm an old man now, Butler. To forget some things is one of the privileges of old age. And I'm remembering that I have a responsibility to my old pupils. Before I remember any more about Smith you must set my mind at rest."
"I can't do that for you, sir," Butler shook his head.
"Can't—or won't?"
"Can't." Butler's eyes settled on the big leather Bible on the shelf beside Dingle's left hand. "Remember the centurion in St Matthew—'I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me; and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth'."
"Under whose authority are you, Major?"
"Under Her Majesty's Government, Mr Dingle, as we all are. But you miss my point. I'm not the centurion—I'm just the soldier he gave the order to."
Dingle's lips, the double line of skin which served for lips, compressed primly and then relaxed. "Very well, Major. But there's little I can tell you about him. What I can do is to tell you where to look."
III
EXCEPT FOR A pedestrian fifty yards ahead of him and an empty van parked at the far end of it, the road was empty. Butler counted off the lamp-posts until he came to the fourth, dawdled for a moment or two playing with his shoelace to let the fellow turn the corner, and then ducked smartly into the evergreen shrubbery.
Beyond the outer wall of leaves he stopped to take his bearings. It was quiet and gloomy, and the light was green-filtered through the canopy above him, but it was the right place beyond doubt—he could see the path beaten in the leaf-mould at his feet. He followed it noiselessly, twisting and turning through the thicket of almost naked branches, until he saw the garden wall ahead of him.
It was, as Dingle had said, an incomparable piece of bricklaying: a craftsman's wall, as straight and solid as the day it had been built out of the fortune old Admiral Eden had picked up in prize money back in Nelson's time.
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"... to keep the locals out—Eden never trusted the lower orders after the Spithead mutiny. And that was what attracted the first headmaster when the house became a school back in '28; only he was more concerned with keeping boys in of course ..."
Butler ran his eye along the wall. It was all of ten feet high and crowned with a line of vicious iron spikes which reminded Butler of the chevaux de frise barricades of spiked wood he had seen round the government villages in Vietnam four years before. Again, Dingle had been quite right: it seemed unclimbable without artificial aids.
"... Except such a barrier only serves as a challenge to a particular sub-species of boy. It only looks unclimbable: in reality I believe there are three recognised points of egress and at least two well-used entrances ..."
He followed the track along the foot of the wall until he reached the rhododendron tangle.
". . . Young Wrightson's favourite place—I beat him for using it too obviously back in '35—the boy was a compulsive escaper. I believe the Germans found that out too. I've no doubt the branches there will be strong enough now to bear your weight..."
Like the pathway, the rhododendron limbs bore the evidence of regular use—the appropriate footholds were scarred and muddy—but the top of the wall was lost in the luxuriant foliage of a clump of Lawson cypresses growing on the other side of it.
Butler wedged himself securely in the rhododendron and gingerly felt for the hidden spikes in the cypress.
Once again the old man's intelligence was accurate: one spike was missing and others were safely bent to either side or downwards, presenting no crossing problems. And on the garden side the cypress offered both cover and a convenient natural ladder to the ground.
It was all very neat, ridiculously easy, thought Butler as he skirted the evergreens on the neatly-weeded path which led towards the school buildings. True, if the lodge-keeper had been prepared to let him into the school in the first place, in the headmaster's absence, it would not have been necessary at all. But then he would never have known where the old school records were kept, and that in itself justified the encounter with Dingle.
Except that the whole business smacked of the ridiculous : to be required at his age and seniority illegally to break into a boys' preparatory school like some petty burglar in order to trace the childish ailments and academic progress of one of its old pupils! It might be necessary. His instruction indicated that it might even be urgent. But it was not exactly dignified.
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He sighed and squinted up at the tiny attic windows, each in its miniature dormer. At least he. knew where he was going.
And at least, thanks to Dingle, he would be entering rather than crudely breaking in. Here was the wood-shed beside the changing room; and here, reposing innocently on the rafters, was the stout bamboo pole with the metal loop on the end which generations of late-returning masters (and possibly boys too) had used to gain entry.
He pushed open the tiny window: sure enough, it was possible to see the bolt on the back door six feet away. He eased the pole through and captured the knob of the bolt with the wire loop.
The changing room contained an encyclopedia of smells: sweaty feet and dirty clothes, dubbined leather and linseed oil and linament—the matured smell of compulsory games on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
Through the changing room into the passage. The smell was subtly altering now, from athletic boy to scholastic boy: chalk and ink and books and God only knew what—floor polish maybe, and feet still (or perhaps the feet smell was the characteristic boy smell). It was a combined odour Butler remembered well, but with elements he could not recall nevertheless. Obviously there would be ingredients in a private boarding school, which opened its doors when money knocked, different from those in his old state grammar school. David Audley and young Roskill would know this smell better— perhaps that was why they had wanted to put Roskill on this scent.
Butler shook his head angrily and cleared his thoughts. Turn right, away from the classrooms, Dingle had said.
Abruptly he passed from an arched passageway into a lofty hall, with a sweeping staircase on his left.