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  ‘He never volunteered no address and it wasn’t no business of mine who he went and stayed with. It might have been a lady. You never know, with them quiet ones, what they gets up to on the sly, but I believes in minding my own business so long as my lodgers keeps my rules.’

  ‘Did he have regular letters from anybody?’

  ‘I couldn’t say. The girl puts out the post on the little table in the hall and the tenants picks up their letters either, before they go to work or when they come in, the post not arriving at exactly the same time each morning. Here!’ She eyed Margaret and spoke excitedly. ‘You don’t think he’s gone and scarpered with all that money, do you?’

  ‘Good gracious, no!’ But it was a thought which had been in Margaret’s mind ever since she had left the headmaster’s study. ‘Teachers don’t do that sort of thing.’

  ‘Only some of the parents have had a job to scrape the money together, you know. It isn’t all that easy, when you’ve got a family, to find eighty pounds.’

  ‘The school would make everything good, but there’s no question of Mr Pythias doing anything wrong. If you want to know what I think, I think Mr Pythias has met with an accident which hasn’t injured him enough for him to be taken to hospital but has given him a shock and caused him to lose his memory for a time. He may be wandering about, not knowing who he is or where he ought to be. He must be found, for his own sake.’

  ‘I don’t want to get mixed up with the police!’

  ‘Neither does the school, but he’ll have to be accounted for, won’t he? I mean, if he had decided to give notice to you, he would have done it before this. Besides, he would have turned up at school, no matter where he spent the Christmas holidays, unless he was ill. This really must be looked into.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t really think he was the sort to just walk out without giving me his notice, I’ll allow that. Besides, his clothes, most of them, are still here. Naturally I’ve been to his room to check. Perhaps it is a bit worrying, like you say.’

  ‘I wish you had let us know that he had left here.’

  ‘Well,’ said the landlady, ‘all I could have told you is that he isn’t here now. I couldn’t tell you where he had gone, so you’d have been no better off as to that, would you? I don’t reckon it was any of my business to let the school know.’

  The news with which Margaret Wirrell returned to the school perturbed Mr Ronsonby deeply. He sent the secretary for the deputy head and, when Burke came in, he said, ‘Pythias has not returned to his lodgings. He had all that money with him when we broke up for Christmas and then had an argument, it seems, with his landlady. Because of this, he went off earlier than expected, carrying the money with him, and I have a most uneasy feeling that he may have been set upon and robbed.’

  ‘I suppose that’s possible,’ said Burke. ‘A good many people knew about the journey to Greece. Quite a number of parents had opted to join the party and any number of others must have heard about it and knew the date by which payments had to be in, but how do we know he didn’t go back to his lodgings?’

  ‘Margaret has just returned from a visit to Pythias’s landlady. The woman knows nothing about him since the Friday on which we broke up. If the money has gone, it will have to be replaced, of course. I am deeply concerned for Pythias. I’m afraid it means calling in the police and that will involve the school in the last kind of publicity we want.’

  ‘There’s the time lag, too,’ said Burke. ‘It’s more than three weeks since we broke up. I suppose — ’ He hesitated and Ronsonby finished the sentence for him.

  ‘The unthinkable can’t possibly have happened,’ he said. ‘Pythias cannot have absconded with the money. I will never believe that of a member of my staff.’

  2

  In Retrospect

  « ^ »

  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 pres
sed 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 broug
ht 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.