Appleby, back at the window, was watching a line of lighters dropping down river. ‘Well, yes. Only–’ He broke off impatiently. ‘But bother Miles! He’s only the stand-in, after all; and we’re allowing him to become a blasted red herring. I rather wish I’d let him alone. And I bet you do.’
Clandon rumbled amiably. ‘I can take it, my dear fellow. Incidentally, I suppose I’d better be getting back. I’m principal stage-manager, after all.’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘You’ve thought of straightforward abduction – plain violence? We live amid so much blessed law and order that perhaps we tend–’
‘Yes, indeed.’ Appleby interrupted at once impatiently and with perfect good humour. ‘If morbid psychology is being kept well in view, it isn’t to the exclusion of simple melodrama. In fact, at the moment, it’s on melodrama that I’d put my money.’
But after all – Appleby said to himself when Clandon had gone – need my money be on melodrama either? It’s a possibility, it’s a definite field I have a dozen men working on now – but am I missing the likeliest explanation of the lot? And just because I’ve been stampeded into taking the sensational view? The PM perturbed and informing the Cabinet. My own Minister wanting to guard the reservoirs. The genuinely alarming thought of how the public might react to a bit of scare reporting.
Bacillus botulinus
has already been making some headway in people’s imaginations. Suppose the populace at large got the idea that any wandering stranger of intellectual appearance was likely to be the mad scientist, intent on dropping the small fatal dose straight into the national teapot? It is a prospect almost equally ugly whether false or true.
And – just conceivably – it
is
true, more or less. But it is far more probably false. So, too, are all the other more sensational readings of the affair. Isn’t it likely, in fact, to be on a par with two or three other cases with which I’ve been concerned in the last half-dozen years?
Marchbanks, for instance – remember him. He hadn’t been kidnapped. He hadn’t gone mad. He hadn’t even bolted with somebody else’s wife. He had simply packed a bag and gone off trout-fishing in Scotland. And, although Marchbanks’ disappearance was public property from the first, with a national hue and cry whipped up by twopenny papers, nobody came within a mile of spotting him for a month. Marchbanks himself had read
The Scotsman
every day over his tea, and without himself turning a hair. He was just being damned to them – which was an expression, come to think of it, that the Junipers seemed to be fond of as a family. Marchbanks – so far as Appleby could make out afterwards – hadn’t as much as seen the thing as an enormous joke. His absence had cost no end of public money; heaven knew what complicated experiment had gone to pot because of it; but the simple fact was that he had decided it was about time for a holiday.
And wasn’t Howard Juniper – Professor Howard Juniper – out of the same stable: a don, seconded to this national work, who had grown up in an ancient university as a sweet law unto himself? Appleby would never forget the mild surprise with which Marchbanks, run to earth – or rather run to burn – in Morayshire, had received the suggestion that there might be people who were displeased with him. He’d had more useful ideas, he’d said, while flogging this very decent bit of water, than he’d had for years in their ineptly pretentious laboratories. He’d even brought off the really crucial experiment at last – with a length of gut, Mrs Macnabb’s porridge pan, and a really superb spring-trap that old Macnabb had invented in pursuance of his profession as a poacher. So what the hell?
Appleby smiled at the memory. There was decidedly a lesson in Marchbanks. Entirely sane, Marchbanks had been, even if by some standards irresponsible.
Irresponsible… The word moved uneasily in Appleby’s mind. It was something that Miles Juniper had said. It was something in the tone, the mere inflexion, of something he had said… Appleby paused on this, aware that he was on curiously obscure ground. For this hadn’t been the only moment of its kind during that interview at Splaine Croft. There had been something else of the sort too: something that had just hung for a moment on the ear – and something that Appleby, try as he might, just couldn’t pinpoint or bring back to consciousness. But
this
was clear enough. Miles had expressed his certainty that his brother Howard was up to nothing irresponsible. But there had been just the faintest hesitation or reservation in the way he had said it.
And there was that freakish past – common, indeed to both brothers. Wasn’t it conceivable that Howard Juniper had simply behaved in some fashion that would indeed be merely freakish in an unimportant young man, but that did rather more than verge upon irresponsibility in a famous one?
Very well. Go back to Marchbanks. He had in the end found Marchbanks – and had put a good deal of ingenuity into the task. But wouldn’t he have done it quicker if he had kept one fact more clearly in focus from the start? When a man bolts from his job it is probably because he is fed up with it. And the natural thing to do, when one is fed up with one’s job, is to turn to one’s hobbies. Dry-fly fishing had been Marchbanks’ hobby. What about Howard Juniper’s? Drop for the moment – Appleby said to himself – all the more sinister pictures this business has conjured up. See if you can get anywhere with the simple notion of a chap bolting to have a go at something he is known to like.
He reached for one among the several neat files that the Juniper affair was bringing to his desk every day. It was the one that began with Howard Juniper’s entry in
Who’s Who
and went on to as complete a biographical outline as could be built up. When he reread it carefully he pressed a bell on his desk.
‘You see
that
?’ he said to the secretary who answered it – and pointed to a place on the page. ‘What do you think of the possibility of our missing friend’s having gone harking back to something of the sort?’
‘Not much,’ the secretary said promptly.
‘Nor I. Would you say it would be a good time of year for it?’
‘Nice weather, and all that, sir. But I really haven’t a clue. Get an expert view, of course, in ten minutes.’
Appleby nodded. ‘Go ahead. It’s another of those tiresome stones.’
‘Not to be left unturned, sir? Quite so.’ The secretary, who was young and alert, nodded cheerfully.
‘And find out about the most likely place where this sort of interest’ – Appleby tapped his file again – ‘may be – um – prosecuted.’
‘Certainly, sir. Anything else?’
‘Yes, Charles. Just see if you can get me Judith on the telephone.’
Two minutes later the instrument purred on the desk. ‘Lady Appleby on the line, sir,’ a voice said.
‘Judith – is that you?’
‘Of course it’s me. Aren’t you coming home to lunch?’
‘No, I’m not. And I want you to make yours a sandwich in the car. Do you think that you could – entirely unobtrusively – do a job that normally requires quite a large squad of police?’
‘I imagine so.’ Judith Appleby sounded entirely unsurprised. ‘But just what’s the idea? A tardy thought at Scotland Yard about saving the taxpayer’s money?’
Appleby laughed. ‘There’s that aspect to it, no doubt. But it’s not precisely what’s in my mind. Listen.’
‘Go ahead,’ Judith said.
Judith Appleby, as it happened, had heard of Splaine Croft. Two of her friends had sent sons there, and had reported with satisfaction that it seemed a fairly civilized sort of place. It was funny how, as civilization seeped away, the idea of civilization became all the go. She rather distrusted it. People now said ‘a civilized chap’ where she herself would have been prompted to say ‘rather a smooth type’. Certainly to go looking for civilized boarding-schools for one’s young was dangerous, even if laudable. If what you insisted on were the old-fashioned desiderata: gravel soil, southern exposure, all-Oxford staff, toughening them up, licking them into shape, rubbing off the awkward corners – if you were after these and similar prescriptive futilities and iniquities, you were at least pretty sure of getting what you looked for; and, if you were eccentric enough to want something else, you kept the kids at home. But if you went round looking for civilization, you were only too likely to get heaven knew what…
Still, reasonable friends had praised Splaine Croft. Judith therefore drove up to it in a mood of only modified prejudice. She was acquiescing in more or less orthodox education for her own young; and it couldn’t be said that they showed any marked ill-effects so far. But having herself been brought up at home, in a large house full of assorted relations who were mostly mad, and having found this interesting and entirely satisfactory, she was always ready to take a poor view of what she called institutions.
Splaine Croft – she noted contentedly as she drew up the car – looked unappealing on a day of warm thundery summer rain. John had reported liking the place – but John was capable of liking anything that was really efficiently run. And no doubt Splaine Croft was that. The windows were clean; they were also blank and uncurtained and thus doubtless let in more light. There was a garden to one side, crammed with roses – but probably only the headmaster was allowed into it. Straight in front of the main entrance stood a flagstaff. Clearly the boys were paraded round it on appropriate occasions for the purpose of singing
God Save the Queen
. Hanging in the hall there would be a certificate praising the drains. And the headmaster’s study would be protected by a supernumerary green-baize door, to muffle the howling when the headmaster’s pupils were being caned. Upstairs in the dormitories the most prominent furnishing would be a profusion of rope-ladders designed to assuage the anxieties of prospective parents apprehensive of fire. But in term-time these would be firmly padlocked to the wall, since what the headmaster himself was apprehensive of was any too ready means to suicide. Yes – Judith said to herself firmly – I have been here before. I can smell the disinfectant. I can slip on the tiles. I can extract, from the pitch-pine panelling of the interior, small gouts of resinous substance that can be satisfactorily rolled between finger and thumb. And that is sometimes the only resource through long weary hours.
‘Can I help you to find anybody?’
A small boy in a blue windcheater, running past in the rain, had wheeled and come politely to a halt by the open window of Judith’s car.
One of the extra-unfortunates, Judith thought, who have to stay through the holidays as well. A dozen or so boys altogether, John said. Afterwards, I wonder, could I offer to take them all out to tea? Aloud she said – thereby beginning the course of duplicity she was much looking forward to – ‘Can you tell me if Mr Juniper is about?’
‘The Head’s had to go away to a funeral. Isn’t it a bore?’
‘Well, yes – I don’t suppose he finds it invigorating.’
The small boy smiled charmingly at being trusted to understand this long word. ‘No, I don’t mean that. A bore that he isn’t here I mean. Of course, Pooh and Piglet are all right–’
‘Pooh and Piglet?’ The unfortunate waifs, Judith supposed, got through their weary days partly by a relapse upon nursery fantasy.
‘Oh, just a couple of undergraduates we have to cope with. They’re very decent really. Last night we absolutely soaked them with our water jugs, and they gave us a wonderful scragging afterwards. But, of course, doing nothing but larking around is rather a waste of time. The point about the Head – I expect you’ve heard – is his leg break. You see,
he can teach it
. He really can. If you’re prepared to work hard at it, that’s to say. And I think I really was getting it, and so were Alabaster Two and U-Tin, and now the Head’s gone off to this funeral, and it’s going to absorb him for days.’
‘That seems too bad.’
‘And, you see, all three of us are going to different public schools. U-Tin is going to Eton – everybody with a name like that does, you know – and I’m going to Radley, and Alabaster Two is going to Downside because he’s a Jew.’
‘A Jew?’ Judith asked doubtfully.
‘Or is it a Catholic? Anyway, the point is that we can all take the same leg break to different schools. You see? But I’m being a frightful bore. Can I find you somebody else? Pooh or Piglet? Piglet’s less shy, I’d say. Or there’s Miss Grimstone, the secretary. She’s not shy at all.’
‘I think Miss Grimstone will be best. You see’ – Judith looked with limpid candour at the small boy – ‘I’m thinking of sending my sons here. Kevin and Jerry.’
‘Can they swim?’
‘Yes, they swim quite well. For people’ – Judith added with proper humility – ‘still at baby school, that’s to say.’
‘Well, it’s really not bad.’ The small boy offered this as one who considers a large complexity of balanced factors. ‘Only get some of their friends – small boys they know quite well, and who won’t frighten them – to toss them in a blanket a bit before you send them. It makes the first night easier. All the chaps whose families are in the know about Splaine arrange for that.’
‘Thank you,’ Judith said. She was much encouraged by this glimpse of savagery. ‘And is your headmaster a really nice man?’
The small boy frowned. He probably doubted this question’s being quite good form. Nevertheless he answered with continued frankness. ‘He’s terribly decent, really. Of course, he does seem a disappointed man. It makes him restless. We think he must have been frightfully ambitious. And, of course, it didn’t come off.’
‘Ambitious?’ Judith found this interesting.
‘He was a Rugger Cap, you know, which ought to satisfy any man. But, at the same time, he had this natural leg break. So he hoped to play for England as a cricketer too. It would have been unique, almost. But he just didn’t bring it off.’ Judith’s informant shook his head seriously. ‘We think that’s what messed him up.’
‘Messed–’ Judith checked herself as she saw the boy, for the first time, shift rather uneasily from one foot to the other. ‘But look, you’re getting frightfully wet. Do just take me in to Miss Grimstone.’