The Journeying Boy

by Michael Innes

  But more haste, less speed. He stood on the kerb, waiting patiently. And presently an obvious calculation fulfilled itself. A taxi drew up and there emerged from it an angry and bewildered young man. Cadover took his place and was driven to Scotland Yard.

  9

  The clock stood at eight-twenty when Cadover’s call came through. ‘Information about physicists in London?’ said the voice at the other end. ‘Oh, certainly – no objection at all.’

  ‘Nuclear physics,’ said Cadover. ‘At least, I think that’s the term. Atoms, and so on. The matter is highly confidential.’

  ‘It always is.’ The voice was politely exasperated. ‘Let people of your sort begin talking about atoms and we are sure to be told how confidential it is. That’s all nonsense, you know. Only you can’t see it.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Cadover. For to this voice it would be discreet to listen with deference.

  ‘Science has grown up talkative and is bound to remain so. Stop the talkativeness and you stop the science. Whether that would be good or bad is quite speculative. But the fact is undoubted. You see?’ The voice rose with the hopeful inflexion of one discoursing to a small group of advanced students. ‘Or don’t you see?’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘But, of course, if it pleases the police to hold what they consider confidential conversations over a telephone line I am quite willing to join in. Please go ahead.’

  Cadover scowled at his scribbling-pad. ‘Time is an important factor, sir, or I would have called. And the inquiry is this. I am looking for a physicist, probably resident in London, who has at least one son somewhere round about the age of fifteen.’

  ‘I see. Well, sixteen years ago numerous scientists were continuing to beget children. In fact, they do it still. So it would appear that they are no wiser than other folk. And indeed there are other grounds for supposing the same thing.’

  ‘Quite so, sir.’ This time Cadover spoke with conviction.

  ‘So unless you can tell me something more about this physicist–’

  ‘I have a letter in which he is described as a terrible scientific swell.’ And Cadover glanced at the note he had obtained from Miss Joyce Vane. ‘He has a laboratory in which he cracks atoms much as you and I might crack nuts when lucky enough to be having one of our jolly dinners together.’

  ‘My dear sir, I don’t recall that I ever had the pleasure–’

  ‘I’m only quoting the letter.’ Cadover made vicious jabs at the scribbling-pad with his pencil. ‘And it says no more than that. My problem is to identify the scientist quickly.’

  ‘Very well.’ The voice became brisk. ‘You know, of course, that the writer of your letter is either remarkably ignorant or speaking with conscious extravagance. Scientific swells, however terrible, do not own laboratories in which atoms are cracked like nuts. Unfortunately, the laboratories own them. You see?’ The voice was not very hopeful this time. ‘Or don’t you see?’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Well, now, your problem is really this. First, how many scientists live in London who are what would popularly be termed “high up” in atomic research. Second, how many of these have a son or sons round about fifteen years old. I can give you a list of the likeliest men. And for their progeny you can turn to Who’s Who. It generally tells about people’s children – though I can’t think why.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’

  ‘First, of course, comes Sir Bernard Paxton. You will have heard of him.’

  The emphasis in this last sentence was not very flattering. But Cadover scribbled impassively. ‘Sir Bernard Paxton,’ he repeated. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And as a matter of fact, I happen to know that he has a son. I recall going to luncheon with Paxton, and this boy being present. A very well-mannered boy. I never quite understood why he threw the cream-jug.’

  ‘Why he what?’

  ‘Threw the cream-jug at Lord Buffery. An unusual experience for a President of the Royal Society. Buffery had been talking about poetry – surely not a subject to rouse strong emotions in anyone.’

  Cadover glanced again at his letter. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘that that sounds very hopeful? The boy I’m looking for is described as a bit of a handful all round. But, of course, I’d better have your other names as well.’

  ‘Lord Buffery himself,’ said the voice. ‘Sir Adrian Ramm, Professor Musket, Dr Marriage, Sir Ferdinand Gotlop…’

  Cadover sighed as he noted down the long list of names. It looked like being a full night’s work. And how would these eminent persons react when hauled out of bed to testify to their having, or not having, a son who was a bit of a handful all round? But at least Who’s Who might eliminate some. He put down the receiver and reached for the volume. Fifteen minutes later he returned it to the shelf and gloomily picked up his bowler hat. Between atomic physics and schoolboy sons there appeared to exist what his recent informant might have called a high positive correlation. Still, he must tackle it – and tackle it himself. To set a little squad of men seeking information from these eminent persons might have the appearance of saving time. But in general Cadover believed that the solution of a crime ought to be a one-man job. One man trudging from point to point was slow and laborious, but he carried round with him a single probing, pouncing, arguing brain. Set A, B, and C to work and, as likely as not, some vital fact would slip through the mesh of the resulting reports. A, the man in charge, would fail amid all the material unloaded on him to relate B’s x to C’s y. But if both x and y formed part of A’s direct and unmediated experience, then his chance of hitting upon their significant relationship was considerably higher…

  In arguing with himself thus, Cadover was no doubt only rationalizing an instinct to go about things in an old-fashioned way. Being not without a sort of dogged ingenuity, he could probably have found colourable reasons for continuing to wear the 1912 species of bowler which he was now lodging firmly on the tips of his ears. Thus habited, he strode from the building, climbed into a waiting car, and gave the driver Sir Bernard Paxton’s address.

  It was a quarter to nine and London was still incongruously bathed in the neutral light of early evening. The armed, arrogant, and amorous lady of Plutonium Blonde was everywhere in evidence upon the hoardings. It struck Cadover that her expression had subtly changed; in addition to animal provocation, it now held a hint of mockery. He felt the stirrings of a sort of personal relationship to this sprawling figure – a sort of confused antagonism which was doubtless, he gloomily reflected, disreputably erotic in origin. Was it desirable, he wondered, that he should see the film? Apart from the fact that the loud noise of the exploding bomb had made the murder in the cinema easy, could there be any relationship between the film and what had actually occurred? The speculation, he saw, was singularly barren; he had no conceivable means of proceeding with it.

  The car came smoothly to a halt and Cadover peered out. ‘Are you sure this is right?’ he asked. For the mansion before him was exceedingly imposing and did not at at all answer to his notion of a scientist’s abode.

  ‘This is it, all right.’ The plain-clothes constable at the wheel peered out in his turn. ‘Crime’s becoming quite the thing among the upper classes, isn’t it? Currency case, I suppose – nobs making the dibs fly on the dear old Riviera?’

  Cadover made no reply to these over-familiar observations, but jumped from the car and made his way up a broad flight of steps to Sir Bernard Paxton’s front door. He rang the bell and then glanced back over his shoulder at the august square in which the house stood. It was all extremely solid; unlike most of post-war London it was all very adequately painted, glazed, and polished. Money still commanded services and materials here. But whereas the folk who had built this square lived comfortably on their income, those who now inhabited it were living – almost equally comfortably – on their capital. Towards the end of the century it would give out, and the reality of social revolution would then become apparent… Cadover became aware that the door had opened and tha
t he was being studied by an unprepossessing but wholly correct manservant. ‘Is Sir Bernard Paxton at home?’ he inquired.

  The man was eyeing his bowler hat – and even noting, it might be felt, its propinquity to Cadover’s ears. Then his glance travelled down to Cadover’s boots, and from thence to the car waiting in the square below. ‘Sir Bernard,’ he said impassively, ‘is not at home.’

  ‘Can you tell me when he will be in?’

  ‘Sir Bernard will not be at home tonight.’

  ‘You mean he’s not sleeping here?’

  The man slightly raised his eyebrows, as if to indicate his surprise that even one so uncouth as this caller should be ignorant of the conventions of admittance and exclusion. ‘Sir Bernard,’ he said, ‘is not at present in the house. And he will be unable to receive callers later tonight.’

  Cadover produced a card. ‘I am a detective-inspector from Scotland Yard,’ he said.

  ‘Indeed, sir.’ Ever so faintly, the tone contrived to imply that some such melancholy fact had already been only too apparent. ‘I shall not fail to inform Sir Bernard of your call.’

  ‘I am afraid the matter is more urgent than that. Is he dining out – or at his club?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know, sir.’

  ‘Well, what are his clubs? I think I’ll try them.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ For the first time the man hesitated. ‘As a matter of fact, I am fairly confident that Sir Bernard will be home in about an hour’s time. Perhaps you would care to wait?’

  ‘I’ll come back.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. I would not leave it much later than the hour. It is conceivable that Sir Bernard may be going out again.’

  ‘Very well.’ Cadover nodded and returned to his car – an inexplicable shadow of misgiving at the back of his mind. ‘Next address,’ he snapped.

  ‘That’s Lord Buffery’s.’ The car slid from the kerb and the driver spoke over his shoulder. ‘Blackmail, is it? I rather thought as much.’

  Cadover frowned. ‘You appear,’ he said acidly, ‘to be a young man remarkably well furnished with hypotheses. But the fact that this is a wealthy part of London is scarcely a sufficient ground upon which to base such an inference. So far as I know, it is not blackmail.’

  ‘You’ve got me wrong, sir.’ The driver was aggrieved. ‘I wasn’t just judging by the fact that we’re among the nobs. I was judging by Soapy Clodd. He was lounging at the corner there as we drove up.’

  ‘The devil he was!’

  ‘Nasty bit of work, isn’t he? Now, if we were getting him a stretch we could go to bed feeling we had done something useful. Think of all them kids he makes miserable! And naturally I thought it was something to do with him.’

  Cadover shook his head. ‘Nothing of the sort. And I only know him by name. Never been my line.’

  ‘Specializes in blackmailing adolescents, Clodd does. Wealthy people’s kids who can raise five pounds now and then to keep his mouth shut. Plays on the queer sense of sin kids have. Have you been petting a girl in the park? Were you coaxed into paying five bob to see something you’ve always been a bit curious about? I’ll tell your mother and she’ll be heartbroken for life. That sort of thing. If Soapy had been a bit nearer the kerb I’d have felt like a little hit and run.’

  ‘That is a most improper thing to say, even as a joke.’ Cadover relented. ‘I rather agree with you, all the same. But Clodd’s affairs have nothing to do with us at the moment.’

  Cadover sank into a reverie which lasted until he was shown into the presence of Lord Buffery. The eminent scientist was playing with an electric train arranged round the circumference of a billiard-room, and he showed no disposition to abrupt this activity when Cadover was announced. ‘Police?’ he said, raising his voice above the rattle of a goods train which was clattering across a viaduct. ‘Well, what d’you want?… Son? Of course I’ve got a son.’ He flicked a lever and an express emerged precipitately from a tunnel. ‘Going away with a tutor? Naturally he is. What else should I do with him in these absurd summer holidays?… Peter? Certainly not. Going with a Frenchman to somewhere near Grenoble… Interested in model railways?’

  A second goods train had now come into operation and was avoiding the first at sundry crossings in a hair’s breadth way reminiscent of an antique comic film. The refrigerated vans appeared to be particularly noisy. Lord Buffery pressed a button on a switchboard beside him and the express engine instantly emitted a series of realistic and penetrating whistles. And now a great deal of shunting appeared to be taking place in the obscure and extensive area beneath the billiard-table. The uproar grew. Cadover took a pace forward by way of indicating polite attention to these phenomena, and was at once made aware that the floor was an ordered litter of porters, passengers, cars, taxis, Bren-gun carriers, ambulances, motor-cyclists, hay-wagons, and other miscellaneous paraphernalia of locomotion all of an appropriate scale. Lord Buffery looked with some apprehensiveness at the size of Cadover’s boots, and then at a collection of navvies complete with tools, brazier, and night-watchman’s hut which was dangerously in their proximity. ‘Deuced hard to replace, these,’ he said apprehensively. ‘Just mind the steam-roller.’

  Cadover, minding the steam-roller, resolutely returned to business. ‘Your son,’ he asked, ‘doesn’t happen to be a bit of a handful all round?’

  Lord Buffery deftly brought another express into action and simultaneously indicated that he had not quite caught the question. Cadover bellowed it anew. Lord Buffery’s features assumed an expression of sudden exasperation; he stretched out his hand and the whole various uproar died away on the tracks; he stood up and moved gingerly towards the door. ‘This way,’ he said. His voice had sunk into a sudden gloom.

  Cadover followed him through a long corridor and saw a door thrown open before him. Inside was a great stillness and clear white light – this and the faint smell which electricity seems to generate when being used in oblique and ingenious ways. The place was some sort of advanced laboratory. And its sole occupant was a small, weedy boy with a bumpy forehead, large glasses, and prominent teeth. For a moment he looked up from the complicated system of retorts and test-tubes over which he was bending, contemplating Cadover without curiosity and Lord Buffery with disapproval tempered with tolerance. And then he returned to his affairs.

  Lord Buffery murmured an apology and closed the door. ‘Harold,’ he said resignedly, ‘is entirely given over to study. I call it a damned dull life. Now, if you want to see a boy who is a bit of a handful, I advise you to go round to Paxton. Not long ago his lad threw a cream-jug at me.’ Lord Buffery paused admiringly. ‘Deuced expensive one too, I should think. Great connoisseur is Paxton – ceramics, pictures – all that sort of thing… But it would be a long time before Harold would throw so much as a calorimeter at you. Would you care to come upstairs and see my workshop? I’m just finishing rather a good model of the Forth Bridge… No? Well, good evening to you.’

  At least, Cadover thought as he made his way to the car, Lord Buffery appeared untroubled by the larger issues involved in the exploitation of atomic power. ‘Sir Adrian Ramm,’ he said to the driver, and once more sank back into reverie.

  But Sir Adrian Ramm’s only son was in a nursing home with appendicitis; he was a reasonably well-conducted child; and there was no proposal that he should go anywhere with a tutor. Sir Adrian could not afford a tutor and would not employ one if he could. As a class of men, he regarded their morals as bad.

  But now it was time to return to the Paxton mansion. Cadover realized that his hopes were substantially set in this quarter. For this he had perhaps small logical justification. Indeed, he found that he was attaching obscure significance to the lurking presence of Soapy Clodd, although this petty scoundrel was almost certainly no more than an accidental intrusion upon the picture. All he really had to go upon was this: that the dead man’s pupil had been unruly, and that young Paxton had thrown a cream-jug at the President of the Royal Society. Nevertheless, he knew that h
e would be disconcerted were the Paxton trail to prove a dead end.

  The same manservant admitted him – and in what he felt was a sinister quiet. Had some horrid revelation burst upon the household and prostrated it with gloom? Cadover hoped so – and followed the soft-footed butler into a sombre library. A tall, pale man with a high forehead sat writing at a dark, heavily-carved table which served as a desk. He rose as Cadover was announced and advanced across the dimly-lit room. ‘I understand that you are a police officer?’ The voice was low and precisely cultivated. ‘What is your business with me?’

  ‘I apologize for intruding upon you, Sir Bernard. But the matter is of some urgency.’ Paxton, Cadover knew, was a person of much consequence in the world – of much more consequence than Lord Buffery. And he found himself treating the great man with a more than usually wary respect – and explaining the reason of his call without at all resenting the fact that he was not invited to sit down.

  The tall figure listened in silence. Then he shook his head. ‘I can be of no help to you. There is no proposal that my son should go away with a tutor.’

  ‘The boy is at home now?’

  ‘He is on a short visit to an aunt in another part of London. As it happens, I called upon her and saw them both less than an hour ago.’

  ‘Has your son been in any way out of hand recently?’

  The tall man could just be discerned in the subdued light as raising his eyebrows. ‘As my son can demonstrably have no connexion with the person who has died in the cinema,’ he said stiffly, ‘the question does not arise.’ Then he suddenly smiled faintly, as if charitably willing to relieve his obscure caller’s embarrassment under this rebuke. ‘As a matter of fact, the boy is sometimes the very devil. Not very long ago he threw a cream-jug at Lord Buffery.’