Skeleton Island (Mrs. Bradley) Page 9

  “Good morning, School.”

  “Good morning, sir.”

  “Hymn number twenty-five, part three, omitting the second stanza. Glory to thee, who safe hast kept and hast refreshed me while I slept. Thank you, Mr. Grange.”

  For some reason, Mr. Grange always played the hymn, although Mr. Robson was the music master. Perhaps Robson had a soul above hymns, Laura thought, as she joined in the singing. She enjoyed the Assembly hymns. Her own contralto voice, the headmaster’s and Mr. Skelton’s bass, Mr. Robson’s, Colin’s, and Mr. Heathers’ tenor, and the robust, untrained but powerful baritone of Mr. Pocock, easily contained the boys’ immature, light, and airy trebles. Mrs. Eastleigh did not attend Assembly, and Ferrars, when he was present, mouthed the words (for the look of the thing) but did not sing, as he was tone-deaf.

  Prayers were restricted to one read by the headmaster, the Lord’s prayer recited in unison, then the headmaster’s Latin benediction. After that, the school raised its head and waited with receptive ears for the notices. The one thing Mr. Eastleigh had always set his face against was any admonishing of the school or of individual boys at Assembly. He held that such use of the occasion, however convenient it might be in some respects, cancelled out any aesthetic or moral good the short service might have done. The notices were a different matter.

  On this particular morning there could be no doubt that his hearers were ready, even breathlessly anxious, to hear what their headmaster had to say.

  “Amen,” said Mr. Eastleigh. “Be seated. No doubt most of you know already what I am going to tell you. A boy in the Nines, Manoel de Roseda y Lambre, is missing from school. I wish to see the boys who share his dormitory. Any other boy who thinks he has something useful to impart will wait in the entrance vestibule immediately after this Assembly. The head boy will take down names and forms, and see that the masters concerned are apprised of the fact that these informants may be a little late in coming to class. Thank you, Mr. Grange.” He retired, followed by the Staff, and reassembled them outside the door. “Set your classes some written work,” he said, “and come to my study when I send. I will see whether the boys can tell me anything, and then I must have a word with you all. Mr. Heathers, who has the first period free, will look after Mrs. Gavin’s boys. I want you to go to my room, Mrs. Gavin, if you will be so good. I believe you write shorthand. I shall need a verbatim account of what is said, to pass on to the police. Of course, they will probably want to do their own questioning as well, but I should prefer to have something ready for them.”

  The masters dispersed to collect their books from the common-room, Laura went to the headmaster’s study (once the writing-room and library of the hotel), and the boys, dismissed, form by form, by Mr. Grange, assisted by the prefects, came out into the entrance hall talking and buzzing excitedly. When the tumult and the shouting had died, Mr. Eastleigh, who had been called to the telephone, reappeared to find some thirty small boys collected in the entrance vestibule.

  “The dormitory boys first,” he said. “And,” he added, looking at the assembled herd, “I trust, for his own sake, that no boy is here to waste his own and my time.” Accepting this plain hint, a dozen boys who had been hoping to get out of first lesson melted unobtrusively away. The boys who had shared a dormitory with the missing child followed the headmaster to his study.

  Where they found me (wrote Laura) looking all businesslike with notebook and ball-point. I was wishing my shorthand was as good as old Kitty’s, but I reflected that one can’t have everything, and that Mr. Eastleigh was lucky to have anybody on the Staff who could write in shorthand at all.

  We have eighty boys here. Twenty of them are the seven- and eight-year-olds and they are bedded down in rooms for four. The rest of the school, being bigger chaps, are in threes, so the whole school occupies twenty-five of the forty doubles, the rest having been turned into classrooms, day-rooms, the masters’ library, our own bedrooms, and so forth. What I mean is that, as the kid who’s missing is all of nine years old, he was in a three-room, so there were only two room-mates for the Man to question.

  He had them up in front of his table as though they were defaulters on parade and asked them why they hadn’t gone to him the night before, instead of waiting until the morning to tell him that Manoel was missing. The explanation was simple enough and, with small boys, entirely credible. It seems they’d been playing hide-and-seek with Colin for about three-quarters of an hour between tea and prep., and that Pocock, who is a bit of a martinet, had found them unsettled and noisy at the beginning of prep, and had forbidden any boy to utter so much as a single word.

  They said they had tried to tell him that Manoel was not in the room, but were threatened with annihilation if they did more than actually breathe, so, of course, they gave it up. After prep., came milk and biscuits and, naturally, they couldn’t be expected to pass up on those. Then it was time for bed, and the two corridor prefects had come along to switch the lights off and had asked where the Spanish kid was, and they had tried to explain, but the prefects had told them to dry up, and heaven help the Spanish kid if he wasn’t back in five minutes, because Mr. Pocock was on duty and in a beastly bad temper at that, and was threatening chastisement to anybody found out of bed.

  So there (concluded Laura) the defence rested its case. The Man was a bit terse with the kids, but admitted to me, after he had thrown them out, that they could hardly have been expected, in the face of the opposition they had received, to do more than they had done. One trouble is that little Manoel isn’t all that popular, so nobody, not even his room-mates, I suppose, were prepared to risk being smacked by Mr. Pocock if he caught them snooping round the house after lights-out.

  Well, the rest of the kids could add nothing helpful. All we got was the dope about the game of hide-and-seek. The two corridor prefects admitted that Gateson and Comrie had told them that the Spanish boy was missing, but they “hadn’t really listened, sir, because, the Spanish boy being a foreigner, they didn’t think Mr. Pocock would be down on him, sir, if he found him roaming about, and we had nine other dorms. to do along our corridor, sir.” They were very sorry if they’d done the wrong thing. Well, that’s all there was to be obtained from them, so the Man sent them round the school to tell the Staff there would be a common-room meeting in twenty minutes’ time and to ask Mr. Spalding to be good enough to repair to the headmaster’s study forthwith.

  Colin arrived, looking scared, and immediately began to express himself to the effect that Manoel had certainly been present during the game of hide-and-seek, because he had noticed particularly how excited the boy had seemed.

  “Just one moment, Mr. Spalding,” said the Man. “I think we shall get on faster, and also obtain a clearer picture, if I do the questioning and you confine yourself to answering me. I am expecting the police at any moment, but I should like to hear your story before they come.”

  “But I haven’t got a story,” says Colin, appalled. “All I know is…”

  “Yes. Now, tell me, what gave rise to this game of hide-and-seek? What made you think of it?”

  “I’d been telling my table at tea about the smugglers who used this island as a base, sir, and it all arose from that. They divided into two groups, smugglers and excise officers, and the thing turned into a form of hide-and-seek, with the excise men trying to find the smugglers, that’s all.”

  “And how long did the game go on?”

  “I couldn’t say. Not more than about half an hour, I imagine. It took a little time to get it organised, and I know that the bell went for prep. before all the smugglers were rounded up, so we couldn’t have gone on all that long.”

  “And de Roseda was one of those who joined in the game, I take it?”

  “Yes, he was. It was understood and agreed that nobody was to leave the house, of course.”

  “I wonder whether he understood that?”

  “His English is quite good. I don’t see why he shouldn’t have understood.”

  �
�Oh, well, thank you, Mr. Spalding. You might ask Mr. Pocock to spare me a minute.” When Colin had gone, the Man told me that he was going to ask Mr. Pocock how it had come about that he hadn’t noticed Manoel was not present at prep., so it might be as well if I made myself scarce and went and sat in the common-room ready for the meeting. As Pocock is one of the senior masters, I could well understand that Mr. Eastleigh wouldn’t want to bawl him out in front of me, so I retired as requested and have no idea of the actual words which passed between them.

  The common-room meeting itself came to nothing. Nobody had any fresh information or suggestion, either about Manoel or Ferrars, and I think Mr. Eastleigh was about to call it off when he had to answer the telephone. He came back after nearly ten minutes to say that the convict had been picked up, but had contrived to change his clothes since his escape, and that the police wanted to know whether the clothes the convict had got hold of belonged to anybody at the school. Upon this, the gentlemen ushers were sent to their rooms to give their wardrobes the once-over and report any losses, and the caretaker was told to ring the bell for an early break and Mrs. Eastleigh was requested to see that Cook sent the mid-morning coffee up to the common-room half an hour earlier than usual. When the men had gone to their rooms to carry out their inventories, the Man told me that my misguided expedition of the early morning was not to be held against me. Acting on my information, the convict had been found in a little hidey-hole at the top of that newel stair which I had not had the nerve to go up.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Dea Ex Machina

  “A full moon was beginning to rise and peered redly through the upper edges of the fog…”

  Laura, as she had informed Dame Beatrice in earlier letters, was not overworked. The only mornings when she had no free time were the Fridays, but she had all the afternoon games periods to herself, and, apart from teaching history, which occupied twelve periods each week, her sole responsibility was to take small groups of what the headmaster tactfully referred to as “the less able boys” for extra English. This, in effect, amounted to attempting to teach them to spell—an unrewarding task, since the ability to spell correctly is inborn, not taught. At least, that was Laura’s opinion and it is fair to state that the majority of “the less able” agreed with her, and exerted themselves more to please her than because they thought any other good would come of their efforts.

  “As you pointed out last week in history lesson, Mrs. Gavin,” said Chorley, a tall, handsome, serious boy in her own form, “in the fifteenth century nobody bothered about spelling. You told us that the same man might spell the same word three different ways in a single paragraph. So what does spelling matter?”

  “It’s a question of ethics,” said Laura. “You know the difference between right and wrong, don’t you?”

  “You told the Tens that it was one of the hallmarks of a gentleman to arrive punctually at lessons.”

  “To spell correctly is also ethical, as any American will tell you,” Laura responded. “I note that in your last essay, you, although living in the twentieth and not the fifteenth century, also contrived to spell the same word in three different ways in the same paragraph. ‘Weight for age’ is correct; ‘wait for age’ would be acceptable in some contexts, perhaps, but not in this one; ‘wate for age’ is just plain wrong.”

  “I thought I’d try them all, and leave you to pick the one you liked best.”

  “You should go far as a politician, Chorley.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Gavin. What ‘wait’ would it be when Mr. Eastleigh says, ‘Wait outside my door’?”

  “The middle one. Oh, dear! You haven’t got to, have you?”

  “I’m afraid so, yes.”

  “What have you done?”

  “I wrote on walls.”

  “You?”

  “Well, it’s so odd that Mr. Ferrars should be missing at the same time as that little squirt de Whatname. I didn’t write anything rude. I only wrote, Who burnt down the school and why? I don’t quite know how I was rumbled, because none of the masters saw me do it. All the Extra English boys, above the Nines, were rounded up and asked to write the sentence, and I was dropped on.”

  “How did you spell ‘burnt’?”

  “Oh, b-r-u-n-t, of course. Isn’t that right?”

  “And ‘school’?”

  “Er—let’s see—er—s-h-c-o-l-e, I think.”

  “Enough said. The headmaster sent for all the exercise books. It was a fair cop, laddie. When do you go along to receive your just reward?”

  “This afternoon, in break. I expect I’ll be kept in from games, too. The Man doesn’t care for people to write on walls. The last chap who did it was expelled, but I believe he did some—well, some drawings. They were all cleaned off before any of us had the chance to get a squint at them, so I don’t know what they were like.”

  Laura dismissed the lad and, as soon as morning school was over, she went to the headmaster’s office and said that she thought Chorley might have presented her with a valuable clue to the disappearances of Ferrars and Manoel.

  “Chorley,” said Mr. Eastleigh, “has surprised me. He is a most reputable boy. I propose to admonish him and deprive him of his afternoon’s games. I am not in favour of caning young innocent boys. All the same, I will not have them writing on walls, however innocuous their sentiments and comments. But what is this clue you speak of?”

  “I learnt some time ago that it was Mr. Ferrars who set fire to the school in Kent.”

  “Ferrars?”

  “Yes. How much do you actually know about him, Headmaster?”

  “Know about him? Why, what should I know? I was glad to get him. There are not so many science graduates who are willing to teach in preparatory schools. Most of them go into industry, I believe. He seems a capable young man and the boys like him.”

  “That’s all very fine, but consider the facts. You claim he is a science man. Wouldn’t you think he could be trusted to let off a few fireworks, then, without producing the San Francisco conflagration?”

  “You mean that Ferrars deliberately set fire to my school?”

  “Well, it looks uncommonly like it to me,” said Laura bluntly. “If so, it means he wanted to get out of the place. I can’t suggest a reason, unless, of course, he’s kidnapped Manoel, a deed which could be more easily carried out from here, with all this sea around us, than from your school in Kent. What do you say about that?”

  “But Ferrars could not have known that we would be coming to this island. Besides—Ferrars a kidnapper and an incendiarist? I can’t believe it, you know. You mean that Ferrars—but he is a Rendlesford and Cambridge man…” His voice tailed off. He ruminated. “I suppose you couldn’t peruade Dame Beatrice to cut short her holiday and come along and look into things for me, could you?” he asked at last. “This disappearance of the child de Roseda y Lambre—what sticklers the Spaniards are for the family tree!—is no good to the school at all. We have several ambassadors’ sons here, as I suppose you know, and once it becomes generally known that it is possible for them to disappear—to be kidnapped or what-have-you—I might as well sell up if I can find a purchaser. And that won’t be very easy, either. Think of the publicity! As it is, we are in the hands of the police. It is only a matter of time before the public press gets hold of the thing, and then the fat will be in the fire with a vengeance. But Ferrars—” He shook his head.

  “You must admit it’s more than coincidence that he and Manoel have disappeared at the same time,” said Laura.

  “I say, Mrs. Gavin,” said Chorley, meeting her as the boys came in from games, “it was quite all right. The Man jawed me a bit and made me promise not to write any more words on walls—he said it was only Fascists and Commies and Ban the Bombs who did that sort of thing nowadays—and then he asked me what I’d meant. I said I hadn’t really meant anything, so then he told me to tell the truth, because, with the Spanish kid and Mr. Ferrars missing, it was too serious for trying to shield people, so I t
old him about Mr. Ferrars and the fireworks, and he sent me out to games. If I hadn’t been in your form—I mean, none of the masters would have got away with it with Mr. Eastleigh—I am sure I’d have been tanned, if not expelled, so, what I mean…”

  “Oh, go and have your tea!” said Laura. Since leaving the headmaster she had spoken on the telephone to Dame Beatrice, who was spending a few days with her sister-in-law, Lady Selina Lestrange. It was a duty visit which both parties might be glad to terminate, thought Laura. She did not care for Lady Selina, who, although she sometimes asked Dame Beatrice’s advice with regard to the cadet branches of the family and their inexplicable activities—“Peregrine has joined something he calls a pop group and is growing his hair”—disapproved of Laura’s intelligent and witty employer, and was in awe of her undoubted and undisputed gifts.

  As Laura had hoped, the telephone conversation was rewarding, and when tea was over she was able to go to the headmaster and inform him that Dame Beatrice would be with them on the afternoon of the following day.

  “It is very good of her,” said Mr. Eastleigh. “I shall be most relieved to have her advice and help. As I think I may have told you, so far I have been able to keep the thing out of the newspapers, thanks largely to the fuss about the escaped prisoner, but now that he has been apprehended, the press will be hounding us at any moment. Incidentally, the police brought the clothes the man was wearing when he was captured, to see whether there was a tie-up with Ferrars.”

  “There was, I suppose.”

  “I do not know why you should suppose it.”

  “I found Ferrars’ handkerchief near where the man was captured.”

  “Ah, yes, so you did. Well, you are quite right. The criminal was dressed in some of the clothes Ferrars was wearing when he left the school. By the way, the police have returned your ashplant. You will find it in the umbrella stand in the front vestibule.”

  “Many thanks. An old friend of mine, that stick. Does that mean that Ferrars is in prison garb, then? Surely not, if he’s gone off with Manoel.”