On the Tuesday morning they took a ferry back to Southampton and, in the evening, began the long trek home. This time there was no friendly, fatherly lorry driver and no coach. They slipped into a church after the first few miles and slept in a pew. In the morning they were on their way again.
They were so tired and unhappy and Maycock, who had remained fairly stoical so far, was limping so badly that they did not exchange a single word as they slogged their way homeward. They made frequent stops when they reached the New Forest and, there being no other shelter, they slept under the trees, too worn out and disillusioned to worry too much about the chilly April night.
At dawn they staggered on again and covered another few miles, stopping often to rest. At about teatime they were stopped by a vicar driving a small car. He pulled up and got out.
‘My word!’ he said. ‘You look as though you’ve had about enough of it. What’s the trouble? Get in. You can tell me as we go. Did you get yourselves lost? Tumble in, tumble in.’
Thankfully they obeyed him. He took them to his vicarage. Here he gave them a meal, tended Maycock’s heel and put them to bed. Then he investigated the contents of their rucksacks and next morning he telephoned the police.
16
The Official Opening
« ^ »
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.