Authors: Barbara Cleverly
“Right, let’s take a look at the fire-raiser. Set fire to the pig sties. Why? Bit young, these lads for enjoying an illicit cigarette, I’d have thought? Oh, my! Thick file. The arson was just the last of his little escapades. Bullying … torturing the school cat … rudeness … swearing at Matron. The lad seems to have been completely out of control and pretty thick with it. His scores on his monthly tests are abnormally low. Letter from the school asking his parents to remove him. No reply filed, but the very next week, he’s gone. Just gone.” Joe sighed. “I expect his parents took him away and had him locked up somewhere. Fire-raising? That can earn you a place in a mental institution any day. The boy sounds like a walking disaster to me.”
They ploughed on in companionable silence, flicking cards, occasionally comparing dates.
Gosling ran a finger along a row of figures. “Got it!”
“I’m glad you’ve got something; nothing else here is making much sense. Not much
sinister
sense, I’d say. Boys leave because they’re ill or naughty or obviously in need of a more rigourous regime than St. Magnus can provide. Nothing wrong with that. No mystery. Apart from young Peterkin. Fit as a flea, bright as a button, good as gold, you’d say. He rather breaks the pattern. Are we going to have to apologise to the school and beat a hasty retreat, Gosling?”
“Hold your horses! Oh, sorry sir! Take a look at these entries in the accounts. Large sums of money—a thousand pounds or more, not the same each time—have been paid into the school’s bank account and promptly paid out into a second account I
haven’t got the sheets for here. Quite often a large building operation follows, with sums drawn back and re-spent.”
“These payments, do they correspond with any of our dates of interest?” Joe asked carefully.
“No, they don’t. They’re all off target. Hang on.… They turn up two, three and five weeks later. Ah, I have an exception … two exceptions. One’s the fire-raiser. His father paid over a large amount the very day the boy went missing.”
“For how much?”
“One thousand, five hundred pounds.”
“How much does it cost to rebuild a pig sty?”
“I can tell you exactly. It’s in the following month’s accounts. Work done in fast time by Mr. Green the local builder for … one hundred three pounds, ten pence.”
“Leaving a generous tip in the offertory box for St. Magnus. Remind me who he was, this Magnus chap—Patron Saint of the Sticky Fingers? ‘For your trouble, headmaster’? Hush money? Further information required, I think. And the other?”
“Peterkin, sir. I could have this wrong but—there’s an anonymous payment into the school, the week
before
he went missing. Again, it’s for a large sum: one thousand pounds.”
Joe grew tense. “So, what are you saying?”
“That, at first look, all these disappearances are accompanied within certain loose time limits by considerable payments to the school.”
“Through the reigns of three headmasters? Can they have been aware?”
“No way they can’t have been aware, sir. They must all have thought it above board.”
“So the three heads were all happy to accept the donations—were comfortable enough with them to put them straight into the school accounts, which I see are lodged with perhaps the most prestigious bank in London. Do we interpret them as kind
gestures? Some of these fathers may well have been—usually are—alumni of the school themselves. And, wealthy men that they are, they show their gratitude or assuage their embarrassment by making a hefty donation. Some schools couldn’t continue in business without such support.”
“You’re right, sir. My own father made a similar if more modest gesture when I left my prep school, and I never set anything alight.” He sighed and sat back on his heels. “Worth going on with this trawl, then, sir?”
“Oh, I think so. Check all the dates we have suspicions of. Just in case.”
Gosling continued to rustle his way halfheartedly through the sheets, collating the dates in the black book and ticking off names on a pad he kept close by him.
Narrowing his eyes, Joe went to look over his shoulder. “You’ve missed one. What’s this?” he asked, pointing. “This large sum coming in. Two thousand pounds. Can you trace it to source?”
“No. None of them. You’ll need a warrant to get a sight of the bank’s details, sir, to get hold of any names. You’ll have to go back to London for that. Um, this one did catch my eye but, look, it’s outside the dates we’ve been looking into. It’s larger than the others. The kind of sum a rich old codger might leave as a legacy. It can’t be connected.”
“Everything’s connected. What’s the date of the entry?” Joe persisted.
“It’s very recent. Just a week before Rapson died.” Gosling turned a concerned face to Joe. “Now, would someone be paying good money to have Rapson topped, I wonder?”
“Mmm. He was up to no good—I think he was paying out regular sums of his own as blackmail. Could this be linked in some way? But it’s all the wrong way round and a sum like that, it’s out of the league of bookies, local casino sharks and thugs of that nature. You can hire a top hit man from London to attend to your
needs for fifty quid. What kind of service will cost you two thousand? Total massacre of the royal family? What’s he been meddling with that earned him a knife in the ribs?”
“And why pay the school? I can’t see Farman banking his cheque and rushing out with a freshly sharpened steak knife to earn his fee and then spend it on Persian carpets for the combination room.”
Gosling got up and came to look once more at the nine cutout faces. “I’m not entirely sure why Rapson got his scissors out and did this, sir. This little gallery.”
“Aide mémoire?”
“A list would have sufficed. He didn’t need to keep their poor little faces close. He was no sentimentalist. He’d caught onto something shady in the disappearances, we’re agreed on that much. Could he have been doing a little blackmailing on his own account, do you suppose?”
“Slapping these down on someone’s desk and snarling, ‘I know your secret, Mr. X!’ ”
Gosling jumped and looked up sharply. “That would work with me but, sir! I’ll tell you something that would really scare the shit out of me if I had something to hide!”
Alarmed by his lieutenant’s anxious face, Joe asked quietly, “Tell me.”
“These are cut out of large, stiff prints. Can you picture the remaining photograph after Rapson had done his bit of scissor-work? You’d have a normal-looking piece of card portraying twenty or so little boys, and then your eye would light on the gaping hole where a face should be?”
“Good Lord! Imagine getting one of those through the post!
Did
he post them? Where are the outside bits, Gosling?”
“Give me a minute to root about in the store. Bound to be copies in there.”
Gosling shot off, and Joe heard him moving boxes about.
Finally he emerged, grinning. “Got ’em!”
They fell on the brown envelopes encasing the series of photographs.
“They seem to have kept two copies of each class each year,” Joe commented. “So, as a test year, 1921—Peterkin’s year—will contain … here we are. One copy!”
Gosling had moved on to the back of the file and pulled out a slimmer envelope. And, triumphantly: “Where do you hide a stolen sheep? In with the herd! Here they are—the doctored copies. He hadn’t got around to sending them off in the post, apparently.”
He pulled out the top one. “Oh, my!”
The sight of the photograph with its calligraphed “St. Magnus Preparatory School” followed by a helpful date was, at first glimpse, prim and ordinary. Then the eye was drawn to the gap in the middle of the second row of boys, the black hole into which a child had sunk. The effect was sinister in the extreme.
“I think I’d get the message, wouldn’t you, sir, if I opened this at the breakfast table.”
Gosling pulled out all the sheets and riffled through them. “Yes, the dates correspond with the gallery.” He began to slide them away.
“A moment! Hand them over!”
Joe took them from him and looked at them more carefully, checking the backs of each for scribbled notes or names and finding none. As he got to the end he looked up. “Gosling! Tell me again—how many faces? Nine? It’s nine, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Why?”
Joe counted the sheets. “Because there are
ten
sheets here. Ten.”
He came around the desk and joined Gosling on his knees, laying down the pile of stiff pieces of card between them. He turned them over until the surface of the last one showed itself.
This was intact. Untouched. No gap signifying disappearance. They stared at the rows of shining faces, unable to speak.
Gosling finally broke the silence. “Sir. You recognise this class, I think?”
“It’s year 1932. The current year. Taken last September.” Joe pointed with a shaking finger to the familiar fair hair and bright expression in the centre of the back row. “And this is my nephew’s class. That’s Jack Drummond.”
T
he two men got to their feet.
“Steady on, sir!”
Gosling turned to him and Joe felt his elbow gripped by a large hand.
“He’s all right! He’s with Miss Joliffe. They’re right next door in the old morning room. Remember? You were quite happy to leave him in her care.” And, feeling Joe’s muscles tense: “I say, would you like me to go and check on Drummond? Sir!”
The response came at once, fast and brutal. With a yell and a thud, Gosling crashed to the floor, knees and chin grinding into the oak floorboards under the pressure of Joe’s knee in his back. An iron grip wrenched his right arm upwards, fingers closed around his neck probing for and finding a lethal pressure point. Gasping with terror, he signalled submission, banging frantically on the floor with his free left hand. In all his bouts, this resulted in instant release from a hold, a graceful recovery and an exchange of smiling bows.
The flapping hand was instantly trapped and crushed under the assistant commissioner’s left knee, and a voice grated in his ear: “No rules here. You lose consciousness in ten seconds. Where is he?”
“Told you! Next door!”
The pressure increased, and Gosling’s forehead clunked onto the floor.
“Clown! I’m not talking about Drummond. Where’s young
Spielman
?”
J
OE FELT THE
resilient young muscles he was restraining turn to marshmallow at the name, but he retained his hold.
“Spielman! Oh my God! No! Under our noses! Let me up! Now! Five hours! He’s been gone five hours. He could be anywhere.” And, desperately: “Stop farting about, sir, and I’ll do whatever you want!”
“Sounds like a good offer to me.” The light voice came from the doorway. “I’d take it if I were you, Commissioner.”
Dorcas was standing in the doorway, Drummond in hand and a quartet of small open-mouthed boys behind her. She turned to her flock. “All’s well, you see. The gentlemen are just having a rag. And making far too much noise. I shall speak to them! Go back to your drawing, will you, boys, and I’ll join you in a tick. If I’m not back before the tea bell goes in … five minutes time … you may all go straight down to the dining hall.”
Closing the door, Dorcas eyed the two red faces as the combatants straightened ties and dusted down trousers. Her expression grew fierce. “What a sight for young eyes! What am I to tell them? No use saying you were having a practice bout. They’re not stupid. It was quite obvious the commissioner was trying to kill their schoolmaster. It’ll be all round the school in no time. You, young man! Gosling, isn’t it? What have you done to irritate Joe? Didn’t anyone warn you he fights fast and dirty?”
“I’d heard he’d learned tricks in the East,” Gosling offered hesitantly, scrambling to his feet. “India, was it?”
Dorcas gurgled. “East India Docks more like. Or The Bucket of Blood in Seven Dials. He’s a member of some pretty louche establishments where the pugilist arts are taught and the Marquess
of Queensberry has never set foot. You can count yourself lucky he’s getting on a bit and losing his edge. Now, when you’ve had a chance to get your breath back and master your palpitations, Joe, perhaps you’ll tell me what provocation gave rise to this murderous attack.”
“No bloody time!” Gosling’s cry was alarming. “For God’s sake! There’s a child out there who’s been snatched from under our noses. You saw it happen yourself, Miss Joliffe. Spielman. The little kid with the big ears. We all waved him off! He’s paid for and on his way.”
“What? Calm down, Mr. Gosling. On his way to where? The boy I saw going off happily this morning by Daimler was on his way to London. To the bosom of his family.”
“But was he? For God’s sake, Sandilands, tell her.”
Joe had never spoken more swiftly and to a more receptive audience. Before he had even finished, Dorcas was reaching for the telephone. “Only one way to find out. Give me Spielman’s home number. They won’t want to talk to a policeman. Thank you. I’ll check on him. I expect the little chap is tucking into his warm milk and custard creams.… Shush both of you! Ah, am I through to the Embassy? This is St. Magnus School here, where Master Spielman is a pupil. Matron speaking. I was wondering if I could have a word with our young man. It’s rather urgent. No?… Not yet arrived … In that case, may I have a word with one of his parents? Either Mister or Mrs. Spielman.”
They waited for an extraordinarily long time.
Finally, as Dorcas was about to give up and break the contact, a voice was heard at the other end.
“Mrs. Spielman? It’s Matron here at St. Magnus.” Dorcas listened intently to a tumbling of words the men could not distinguish, her face growing very grave. “Please, Mrs. Spielman,” she interrupted, “try to calm down. I’m not quite understanding this. Harald is
not
with you in London? Taken ill … on the
journey.… Can you tell me exactly when this happened? This morning? Four hours ago?… Hospital? Which hospital?”
The torrent recommenced and Dorcas listened intently until finally: “I’m devastated to hear your news, madam, and I apologise for disturbing you at such a time. I will inform the headmaster who will reply to you later at a less stressful moment.”