Johnny gazed at him coldly. “I don’t think any of us is, Bill. We’d be able to tell, wouldn’t we?”
“I suppose.”
I took a sip of wine, then cleared my throat—bringing the meeting to order, so to speak.
Once all the fingertips were back on the planchette, I said, “What message have you got for us?”
The little platform paused for a moment and then moved with far greater speed than before. This time Heather didn’t bother reading out the letters individually, just said the result at the end.
“Alexander Midgeby.”
“Who’s Alexander Midgeby?” said Greta and I, almost in unison.
Johnny’s face had become even more ashen than when the planchette had first started twitching. David and Heather weren’t looking too good either. Bill was staring at the planchette with an intent frown, as if expecting it to whisper a secret tipoff to him.
“Sandy Midgeby,” he said quietly. “Now there’s a name I never expected to hear again.”
“Yes, but who is he, dear?” said Greta, grabbing his elbow.
“Was,” said Johnny, before Bill could answer. There was a dull edge of despair in his voice. He looked down at his hands, knotted in his lap. “Maybe still is. Someone we all knew a long time ago.”
“Not all of us,” Heather corrected. “Just the four who were at Oxford. Bill, David, and Johnny at St. Loys. Plus me at Humboldt. The three boys were all on the same corridor. I was Bill’s girlfriend, back then, so I was on the corridor quite a lot too.” She looked at Greta. “I assume he’s told you?”
Greta nodded with a weak smile. “Water under the bridge.”
Johnny was clearly oblivious to this interchange.
“That thing with Sandy Midgeby,” he mumbled, more to his hands than to the rest of us, “that was the rottenest thing I was ever involved in. I wish I could forget it ever happened, but I can’t.”
“It was a long time ago,” Bill protested, half-rising to his feet. “Leave it alone. Like Greta said, water under the bridge.”
Johnny shot him a dirty look. “I’ve told the story to three different shrinks and they’ve said that having faced up to it, I’d feel better. Only I didn’t feel better. Well, I’ve had enough wine tonight, or soon will have, to see if telling it to real people, not medical professionals”—he spoke the words fastidiously—“will do the trick.”
“It’s not of interest, Johnny,” said Bill, jabbing at him in the air with a finger. “Nobody cares any longer. Nobody but you.”
“I care too.” Heather spoke quietly. “We should get all this out in the open between us. We’ve all bottled it up for too many years.”
I looked from one face to another. “Please, explain it to this poor unenlightened Yank.”
Johnny told most of it, refueling his determination from time to time with Cabernet. Heather told parts of the story, with David reluctantly chipping in from time to time. Bill, aside from the occasional grunt of anger, maintained an intimidating silence.
“Back in the day,” Johnny began.
Back in the day, St. Loys—St. Aloysius de Gonzaga College, to give it its full name—was the snootiest of the Oxford colleges. Not that it had the academic record to back that up, or even the best port. But somehow into the tapestry of its tradition had been woven the conceit that it was a cut above the others. All the best families wanted to send their sons there. The heads of government departments tended to look kindly on CVs that featured the name of St. Loys, even if the applicant had managed only an Upper Third. At any one time, the cabinet had at least a couple of St. Loys alumni, and they had a disproportionate presence in the Lords. As people were fond of saying, you didn’t go to St. Loys to swot, you went there to swank.
There were a few exceptions. One of those was Sandy Midgeby.
Sandy Midgeby was the son of a children’s librarian, Alice Midgeby, who’d borne him after throwing her boyfriend out of her life on discovering he was securely married and had no intentions of becoming otherwise. She’d raised Sandy on her own, with the help of her mother as a constantly-on-tap babysitter, Dad having died some years before. On the days when Mum couldn’t manage the child, Alice brought him with her to the library. As a result, young Sandy could read by the time he got to kindergarten, and the advantage never deserted him: all through his school years, he was educationally a year or more ahead of his classmates. He got As in four of the five A-levels he sat and a B in the fifth, which was history. St. Loys was the winner in a university contest to give the boy a scholarship.
Which was why he ended up on a corridor with Bill and Johnny and David.
All of whom despised him soundly because he wasn’t of the proper stock and came from Scunthorpe.
Well, those were the reasons they admitted to, anyway. The other was that, academically, they were lucky if they were even in his slipstream. The subject he’d elected to read was maths, and his tutors reckoned that somewhere down the road there was likely to be a Fields Medal—the Nobel of maths, as it’s often called. The blueblood trio regarded maths as a subject suited to mechanics and accountants, which made them revile Sandy all the more.
Come finals week, the three decided the hour was long overdue for them to exact their revenge upon the upstart. The expectation was that Sandy would sail through the exams and be snapped up for postgraduate work at somewhere prestigious like MIT. That wasn’t the sort of fact that Bill and David and Johnny enjoyed facing. They themselves were aspiring to Lower Seconds, if they were lucky, and then to relying on family influence.
There were dungeons beneath St. Loys—as apparently there are under a couple of the other Oxford colleges, relics of an earlier era, when the university authorities could resort to sterner means of disciplining their recalcitrant charges. This was a fact known to the cleaning staff and the dons, but to few of the students.
One of the few was Bill Davisson.
With his two cronies, he hatched a plot to destroy the future of the commoner they all loathed.
The night before finals week began, Johnny Cuthberts ran into Sandy Midgeby, as if by chance, in Broad Street. Johnny had been, on the surface, the only one of the three who offered any measure of friendship to the outsider.
“Ho there, Midgeby.”
Sandy smiled politely. “Hello to yourself, Cuthberts.”
“Where’re you off to?”
“Back to college. To swot.”
“On a fine afternoon like this?”
“When better? Tomorrow’s the big day.” Sandy Midgeby grinned.
“You should take an hour or two off,” Johnny told him. “Give the old brain a bit of a rest.”
Sandy looked as if he were about to ridicule this idea, then paused. Maybe Johnny wasn’t so far off the mark. After all, Sandy probably already knew all there was to know about four-dimensional functional analysis—more than his tutors, if anything. Perhaps he could indeed do with a little R&R.
“What do you suggest?” he said.
So Johnny told him about the dungeons in the bowels of St. Loys, and about how he and David and Bill were planning an expedition there this very night. Would Sandy like to come along?
Yes, indeed, Sandy would.
That night the four of them, flashlights in hand, crept down to the college’s basement. Although the area wasn’t officially out of bounds, they sensed that officialdom would disapprove of their being there, so they didn’t talk much. Sandy, as the only one of the four who hadn’t been down here before, kept looking around him inquisitively, as if each fresh turn in the corridors might have a new secret to reveal. Johnny wore a mask of apprehension: breaking the rules went against the grain for Johnny, Sandy reflected, or perhaps he was just in a funk. The other two were cheery enough, prattling in soft voices as they led the way.
Most of the doors to either side of them were locked and covere
d with the grime of the ages. Sandy paused to shine his flashlight through a couple of the small, square barred windows set into the doors, but couldn’t see much. No skeletons of long-ago skirkers, no thumbscrews or iron maidens or chains dangling from the walls.
In the flickering illumination from their flashlights the four students walked on, turning this way and that as the corridors took them. There was a musty smell in the air that reminded Sandy of cinnamon in the way that it made his nostrils tingle.
They must have been exploring for half an hour or more when they came to a door that was different from the others. Situated at the end of a narrow passage, it had the same heaviness in its frame as the rest, but its solid wooden panels had been wiped clean of the grey-green filth of time and a new steel hasp had been fitted just above the metal handle. From the latch dangled a shiny padlock.
“Looks like there’ve been other people down here recently,” said Bill lightly.
“Maybe an international gang of crooks has been using the place to store contraband,” said David in the same breezy tone.
Sandy led the way to the door, his pace slowing as he advanced. David was right. Maybe they’d stumbled across something criminal. The wisest thing they could do was beat a hasty retreat and tell a porter, or even the police, what they’d seen. Even so, it’d be a pity not to find out first. Besides, there could be a perfectly innocent explanation, and they’d look like fools if they raised a hullabaloo for nothing.
He pushed the door cautiously, and it creaked open.
There was nothing to see inside except an empty, stone-walled cell. The floor had been swept clean sometime recently, and there was a bucket in the corner.
Sandy took a couple of steps forward and shone his light around, then turned back toward the doorway.
“Hey, you guys—” he began, but stopped as he saw the door closing firmly. Outside he could hear the rattling of the padlock, then some soft sniggering.
“So long, sucker,” came Bill Davisson’s sneering voice at the little barred window. “I’m guessing they’re going to have to have finals week without you.”
And then they were gone.
Sandy Midgeby looked around him. He supposed he should be grateful they’d thought to leave him the bucket. There was no use in shouting for help, because there was no one who’d be able to hear him. He wondered how long the battery in his flashlight would last and, as if in reply, the light flickered and yellowed a little.
He sat down in the corner opposite the bucket, leaned his back against the wall, switched off his flashlight, and shut his eyes.
There was no sense in raging or panicking. That would just make his plight worse—he’d be out of his wits by the morning.
The morning.
He assumed his tormentors would let him out then, if not before.
A little eddy of concern crossed Sandy Midgeby’s mind that his three false friends might simply put him out of sight, out of mind—that he might be here all week before it finally occurred to one of them to come down into the dungeons to set him free. He knew they despised him, for reasons he found unfathomable, and he knew they had the cruelty of the privileged. But did they perhaps hate him enough to want him gone for good?
Don’t panic, he told himself again, shifting his behind on the hard, unforgiving floor. Just force yourself to stay calm. This ordeal will be over soon.
I hope.
“God help me,” said Johnny, clutching the stem of his wine glass so fiercely I was worried he might break it. He was staring down into the red liquid with all the intensity of a scryer expecting to see some vision of eternity. “God help me, but that was perhaps the shittiest thing I’ve been a part of in my life.”
He shot a furious glare at Bill, then drained his glass.
“It was not,” admitted Bill, “our finest hour.”
“Maybe you’ve done so many shitty things that this one doesn’t stand out particularly,” Johnny told him. “But I haven’t.”
Bill chuckled and made a little movement with his hand as if waving away an inconveniently attentive insect. “Just youthful hijinks.”
Johnny appeared not to have heard him, but now looked instead at me like I were some kind of father confessor…or one of his shrinks. “There was worse to follow, you see.”
The next morning Johnny clambered early out of his hard college bed. He had a slight hangover, something distinctly not recommended at the outset of finals week, but it was nothing he couldn’t cope with. What had roused him so early was guilt about what he and David and Bill had done to that poor little pleb Sandy Midgely the night before. Lord knows but Midgely was a rebarbative little sod, with his shifty hesitancy and his constant look of someone who’d accidentally put on the clothing of someone just a little bigger than himself, and, worst of all, that frightful accent of his. But, even so, he didn’t deserve to have his whole future destroyed by a sadistic student prank.
As Johnny hurriedly threw on clothes, brushed his teeth, and ran his fingers through his hair, he reflected that at least Midgeby had his intelligence to bail him out. He’d probably still sail through with First Class Honours despite a sleepless night.
Johnny stumbled down the corridor and hammered on Bill’s door.
After a few moments, it opened a crack, and Bill peered out. He looked as dishevelled as Bill felt.
“We’ve got to let him out,” blustered Johnny.
“You mean the squirt?”
“Midgeby, yes.”
“Oh, he’ll be all right where he is for a few hours longer.”
Bill began to close the door, but Johnny put his foot in it. “Don’t be such a bastard, Davisson!”
“What time is it, anyway?”
“Quarter past eight,” sang out Heather’s voice from within. As she so often did, she’d spent the night here in St. Loys. “Johnny’s right, Bill. You’ve got to let the guy out. It wasn’t a very funny joke to begin with, and it’s getting less funny by the minute.”
For a moment Bill looked as if he were prepared to argue the toss with them both, but then he relented. “Just wait ’til I get some togs on.”
He turned away, leaving Johnny fuming in the corridor.
Twenty minutes later, with Heather in tow, Bill and Johnny were once more down in the college cellars. It didn’t take them long to reach the door Bill had equipped with the new hasp and padlock he’d bought along with the metal bucket earlier in the week from the big B&Q in Abingdon.
“Wakey wakey, rise and shine, happy campers!” shouted Bill sardonically as he strode toward it. “Time to face the world, Mr. Mathematics!”
There was no response. It was then that Johnny began to get really worried.
Bill pulled the glittering little key out of his pocket and undid the padlock. He pushed the ponderous door open.
“Okay, Midgeby, you’ve had your—”
His voice tailed off as he looked around him in disbelief.
The little chamber was empty. Instinctively Johnny went over and looked into the bucket. It hadn’t been used. Could there somehow have been two cells prepared like this? It didn’t seem possible, but then neither did the fact that Midgeby had managed to escape from a securely locked room in the middle of the night.
“You’re not pulling my leg, are you?” said Johnny, turning angrily to Bill. But Bill appeared to be every bit as dumbfounded as Johnny himself was.
“There’s only one key, and it’s been in my trouser pocket all night long.”
Johnny stuck out his jaw. “You didn’t have second thoughts and come down here in the middle of the night and let him out?”
“I slept like a babe until you came battering on my door this morning to wake me up. Ask Heather.”
Heather, clinging to the door frame behind Bill, her dark hair framing her face, nodded agreement. She was gazing around the room with a l
ook of anxiety. “Where the hell can he have got to?” she said.
A very nasty thought came to Johnny. Assuming there was no magic going on—and Johnny, for all his follies, didn’t believe in magic—Midgeby had somehow contrived to free himself from his prison. Johnny didn’t like Midgeby, but he was a clever little sod, and Johnny wouldn’t have put it past him to devise some Houdini-like means of escape. Suppose he’d done that, then. What would he do next?
Well, one of the things he might do was go straight to the college authorities and tell them what had happened. He could even go to the police, if he felt so inclined—what his three corridor-mates had done to him was, after all, a crime in anyone’s books. If Midgeby did either of those things, Johnny and David and Bill—and, right now, Johnny didn’t give much of a monkey’s about David and Bill—wouldn’t be spending this week doing Finals. If they were lucky they’d be packing up their belongings and going home to try to explain to their parents why St. Loys had chucked them out on their ears. So much for those hoped-for Lower Seconds.
Johnny felt as if his whole world were falling to pieces around him. His palms were sweating. He glanced sidelong at the bucket in the corner and wondered if he should go puke in it.
“First thing first.” Bill’s voice had adopted a decisive tone. “We have to get out of here. Yes, it’s a mystery where the little bugger’s gone to, but we’re not going to solve it by standing around with our thumbs up our rears. So far as the world is concerned, we were never down here, haven’t seen Midgeby since dinner last night, don’t know anything about nuffink—understood?”
Bill stared challengingly at Johnny and Heather in turn. “We have to go and eat our breakfasts and then head for the exam halls as if there was nothing different about this morning than any other. Midgeby will turn up, you’ll see, and the little turd will have fun lording it over us tonight as he tells us how he did it, how he put the shits up us.”
“But if—?” started Heather.
“No ifs. Grab the bucket, Johnny—we’ll find somewhere to dump it. Let’s get moving.”
The Return of Sherlock Holmes Page 10
