On the desk he found a sheet of paper and a message written in neat but boyish script. 'Dear sir, I've returned Rogue Male. It was just as good as you said. I've borrowed The Prisoner of Zenda. I hope you don't mind. Clyde-Browne.'
Slymne stared at the message and then let his eyes roam round the room. The books were all adventure stories. He ran along a shelf containing Henty and Westerman, Anthony Hope, A. E. W. Mason, all of Buchan. Everywhere he looked there were adventure stories. No wonder the beastly man had boasted that he only read decent manly stuff. Taking a book from a side table, he opened it: 'The castle hung in the woods on the spur of a mountainside, and all its walls could be seen, except that which rose to the North.'
It was enough. Slymne had found the connecting link between Glodstone's treasure of mundane letters from the Comtesse de Montcon, his Bentley and his belligerent datedness.
As evening came, and with it the sounds of cars and boys' voices, Slymne sat on in the darkness of his room letting his mind loose on a scheme that would use all Glodstone's adolescent lust for violent adventure and romance, lure him into a morass of misunderstanding and indiscretion. It was a delightful prospect.
Chapter 6
For the rest of the term, Slymne soaked himself in adventure stories. It was a thoroughly distasteful task but one that had to be done if his plan was to work. He did his reading secretly and, to maintain the illusion that his interests lay in an entirely different direction, he joined the Headmaster's Madrigal Singers, bought records of Tippett and Benjamin Britten and, ostensibly to hear Ashkenazy playing at the Festival Hall, drove down to London.
'Slimey's trying to worm his way into the Head's good graces by way of so-called music,' was Glodstone's comment, but Slymne's activities in London had nothing to do with music. Carefully avoiding more fashionable stationery shops, he found a printer in Paddington who was prepared to duplicate La Comtesse de Montcon's notepaper and crested envelopes.
'I'll have to see the original if you want it done exactly,' he told Slymne, who had produced photographs of the crest and printed address. 'And it'll cost.'
'Quite,' said Slymne, uncomfortably supposing that the man took him for a forger or blackmailer or both. The following week, he found an excuse to be in the Secretary's office when the mail came, and was able to filch Wanderby's letter from his mother. That Saturday, on the grounds that he had to visit a London dentist about his gum trouble, Slymne was back at the printer's with the envelope he had carefully steamed open. He returned to Groxbourne with a lump of cotton wool stuck uncomfortably in his mouth to suggest some dental treatment. 'I'm afraid you'll have to do without me. Dentist's orders,' he explained thickly to the Headmaster. 'Not allowed to sing for the time being.'
'Dear me, well we'll just have to do our best in your absence,' said the Headmaster, with the later comment to his wife that at least they couldn't do worse.
Next day, Wanderby's lost letter was found, rather muddied, in the flowerbed outside the Secretary's office and the postman was blamed.
By the end of term, Slymne had completed his preliminary preparations. He had collected the envelopes and notepaper and had deposited most of them in a locked tin box at his mother's house in Ramsgate for the time being. He had renewed his passport and taken out travellers' cheques. While the rest of the staff dispersed for the Easter holidays, Mr Slymne took the cross-Channel ferry to Boulogne and hired a car. From there he drove to the Belgian frontier before turning south at a small border crossing near Armentières. The place was carefully chosen. Even Slymne had memories of old men croaking 'Mademoiselle d' Armentières, parlez-vous?' in remembrance of their happy days of slaughter in the First World War, and the name would arouse just the right outdated emotions he required in Glodstone. So must the route. Slymne stopped frequently to consult his maps and the guidebooks to find some picturesque way through this industrial grimness, but finally gave up. Anyway, it would heighten the romance of the wooded roads and valleys further south and the slag-heaps and coal-mines had the advantage of lending the route a very convincing reality. If one wanted to enter France unobserved, this was the way to come. And so Slymne kept to side roads, well away from autoroutes and big towns during his daytime driving, only moving into a hotel in a city at night. All the time he made notes and made sure he was maintaining the spirit of Glodstone's reading without bringing him too closely in touch with the real world.
For that reason he avoided Rouen and crossed the Seine by a bridge further south, but indulged himself on Route 836 down the Eure before back-tracking to Ivry-la-Bataille and noting an hotel there and its telephone number. After that, another diversion by way of Houdan and Faverolles to Nogent-Le-Roi and Chartres. He was hesitant about Chartres, but one look at the Cathedral reassured him. Yes, Chartres would inspire Glodstone. And what about Château Renault just off the road to Tours? It had been four miles outside Château Renault that Mansel and Chandos had gassed Brevet in his own car. Slymne decided against it and chose the minor road to Meung-sur-Loire as being more discreetly surreptitious. He would have to impress on Glodstone the danger of crossing rivers in big towns. Slymne made a note 'Bridge bound to be watched,' in his notebook and drove on.
It took him ten days to plan the route and, to be on the safe side, he stayed clear of the countryside round the Château Carmagnac with one exception. On the tenth night he drove to the little town of Boosat and posted two letters in separate boxes. To be precise, he posted envelopes, each with a crest on the back and with his own address typed onto a self-adhesive label on the front. Then he turned north and retraced his route to Boulogne, checking each mark he had made on his maps against the comments in his notebook and adding more information.
By the time he sailed for Folkestone, Mr Slymne was proud of his work. There were some advantages to be had from a degree in geography after all. And the two envelopes were waiting for him at his mother's house. With the utmost care, he prised off the self-adhesive labels and steamed open the lightly gummed flaps. Then he set to work with an ink-pad to obliterate the date on the postmark while leaving Boosat clearly visible. For the next three days, he pored over the photograph of the Comtesse's letter to Glodstone and traced again and again her large flowing handwriting. When he returned to Groxbourne, even the Comtesse herself would have found difficulty in saying which of the letters she had written without reading their contents. Mr Slymne's skills had come into their own.
It was more than could be said for Peregrine Clyde-Browne. The discrepancy between his school report and his failure to pass any subject at O-level apart from the maths which, because it allowed of no alternatives to right and wrong, he had managed to scrape through with a grade C, had finally convinced Mr Clyde-Browne that sending his son to Groxbourne might have had the advantage of keeping the brute out of the house for most of the year, but that it certainly hadn't advanced the chances of getting him into the Army. On the other hand, he had paid the fees for three years, not to mention his contribution to the Chapel Restoration Fund, and it infuriated him to think that he had wasted the money.