Colonel Butler's Wolf

by Anthony Price

  To soothe his own irritation Butler allowed his eyes to leave Dingle’s face and range for a moment over the room: there might be more to be discerned about the man there.

  The bookshelves were as he would have expected: seried ranks of Loeb Latin and Greek library classics and the chaste dark spines of Oxford and Cambridge University Press volumes. On the mantlepiece, of course, the well-stocked pipe-rack and tobacco jar, and one silver-framed photograph in pride of place.

  “Good lord,” Butler murmured. “Isn’t that Frank Woolley?”

  He stood up to look closer, although he knew immediately that his identification was correct: no mistaking the tall lefthander playing forward—making mincemeat of a short, fast ball. A legend caught for posterity.

  On the bottom of the photo was written carelessly: “Best wishes from Frank Woolley to Josh Dingle, who clean bowled him.” There was a date, but it was lost under the edge of the frame.

  “Bowled him!” Butler repeated in awe. “That would be something to remember, by God!”

  “Surely you are too young to remember Frank Woolley, Major?” exclaimed Dingle. “He retired well over thirty years ago—before the war—and he was no chicken then.”

  “1938 he retired,” said Butler. “My Dad took me to see him every time he came anywhere near us—he was past his prime then, but he was still great—Dad always called him ‘Stalky’.”

  “You’re Lancashire, then? That was their name for him wasn’t it? I thought I recognised it in your voice.”

  “Aye.”

  For one sybaritic half-second Butler was far from the isle of Thanet, out of Frank Woolley’s own Kent, and away to the north, sitting beside his father on the edge of the ground at Trent Bridge on a hot summer’s afternoon, knowing that he had twopence in his pocket for a big strawberry ice …

  “He played his first innings for Kent against Lancashire, Frank did—in 1906. Or maybe 1907,” said Dingle reflectively. But he could be that old, thought Butler. “Johnny Tyldesley flogged him all over the ground.”

  Johnny Tyldesley! It was like hearing someone casually remember the Duke of Wellington—or King Arthur!

  “Lancashire scored over 500 in five hours. Frank missed him twice—and then scored a duck.” Dingle’s face suddenly cracked in an unmistakable smile. “That was the first innings though. In the second Frank flogged Walter Brearley just the way J.T. had flogged him—64 in 60 minutes. That was the start of it.”

  Dingle nodded at him happily, and Butler realised that he had allowed his own mouth to drop wide open.

  “And just what was it that you desire to know about Smith?” said Dingle. “A dark-haired boy, rather stocky. I wouldn’t have said he was quite as clever as you have suggested—if I have the right Smith. In the top ten per cent, perhaps—beta double plus rather than alpha. What has he done to offend the Ministry of Defense ?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that, sir.”

  “Hmm … I rather expected that. But if he’s become one of these student revolutionaries I must tell you that I don’t approve Government action against them. It’s the Government and the Press and television that has made them what they are, or what they think they are. Publicity is like power, Major Butler—it’s a rare man who isn’t corrupted by it. Better to leave them alone.”

  “What makes you think he’s a student revolutionary? Have you met him recently?”

  “Not since he left Eden Hall. That would be ten years ago this July. But we like to keep in touch with our old boys, particularly the ones who do us credit later on. Their names are inscribed on the honours boards. Your Neil Smith—that would be Smith N. H. ?”

  “Neil Haig Smith.”

  “That would be he. In his time at Eden Hall he was known to his fellows as ‘Boozy’ because of that ‘Haig’, though I’m sure he had never drunk any whiskey in his life then. But he subsequently won an exhibition to the King’s College, Oxford—in English. I recall being somewhat surprised by the news. It was not his strongest subject when I taught him. He should have graduated by now though. Did he fulfill his promise?”

  Butler was conscious that the crafty old devil was attempting to approach his earlier question from a different direction. But now he had thawed out it might be unwise to call a halt too abruptly. In any case there was nothing of value to let slip—nothing known to Butler, anyway.

  “He was awarded a First.”

  “Indeed!” Dingle’s creased forehead crinkled even more “I would have judged him a safe Second, and there’s nothing further from a First than that. One must assume that he was a late developer!”

  He nodded to himself doubtfully, then glanced up at Butler. “And you say he was involved in student protest of some sort?”

  “I really don’t know, sir,” said Butler—the words came out more sharply than he had intended. Perhaps if Roskill had been well enough to take this job they would have told him somewhat more, but as it was it was the exact and humiliating truth.

  “But you do know enough to know what it is you want to know?”

  “We wish to know everything you can remember about Neil Smith, sir. What he did, what he said. What foot he kicked with. Which hand he bowled with. What he liked to eat and what he didn’t like. If he had any illnesses, any scars. Everything, sir. No matter how trivial.”

  Dingle considered him dispassionately, “Scars,” he murmured. “Scars—and the past tense. Every time you refer to him you use the past tense. So he is dead … or rather someone is dead—that is more logical—someone is dead, and you have reason to believe that it is Smith, our Smith of Eden Hall. Is that it?”

  Butler took refuge behind his most wooden face. It was at such moments as this that he missed his uniform. In a uniform a man could be stolid, even stupid, with a suggestion of irrascibility, and civilians accepted it as the natural order of things, not a defense. A uniform meant orders from above and blind obedience, too, and British civilians of the middle and upper classes found this comforting because they took the supremacy of the civil power over the military for granted. It was a long time since Cromwell and his major-generals after all!

  But better so, he reflected, mourning the mothballed khaki —doubly better so. Better that civilians should patronise the uniform—despise it if they chose to—than worship it or fear it as they did in less fortunate lands over the water. If this was the very last service the British Army did for its country, it would be a mighty victory.

  He squared his shoulders at the thought.

  “Don’t equivocate with me, Major Butler,” said Dingle severely. “Is Smith dead?”

  Butler gave a military-sounding grunt. A few moments before the old man had been almost on his side, but he was slipping out of reach again now. The wrong word would ruin everything.

  He gestured to the photographs on the table. “You are forgetting your own experience, sir—“

  “I’m an old man now, Butler. To forget some things is one of the privileges of old age. And I’m remembering that I have a responsibility to my old pupils. Before I remember any more about Smith you must set my mind at rest.”

  “I can’t do that for you, sir,” Butler shook his head.

  “Can’t—or won’t?”

  “Can’t.” Butler’s eyes settled on the big leather Bible on the shelf beside Dingle’s left hand. “Remember the centurion in St Matthew—‘I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me; and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth’.”

  “Under whose authority are you, Major?”

  “Under Her Majesty’s Government, Mr Dingle, as we all are. But you miss my point. I’m not the centurion—I’m just the soldier he gave the order to.”

  Dingle’s lips, the double line of skin which served for lips, compressed primly and then relaxed. “Very well, Major. But there’s little I can tell you about him. What I can do is to tell you where to look.”

  III

  EXCEPT FOR A pedestrian fifty yards ahead of him and an empty van parked at the far end
of it, the road was empty. Butler counted off the lamp-posts until he came to the fourth, dawdled for a moment or two playing with his shoelace to let the fellow turn the corner, and then ducked smartly into the evergreen shrubbery.

  Beyond the outer wall of leaves he stopped to take his bearings. It was quiet and gloomy, and the light was green-filtered through the canopy above him, but it was the right place beyond doubt—he could see the path beaten in the leaf-mould at his feet. He followed it noiselessly, twisting and turning through the thicket of almost naked branches, until he saw the garden wall ahead of him.

  It was, as Dingle had said, an incomparable piece of bricklaying: a craftsman’s wall, as straight and solid as the day it had been built out of the fortune old Admiral Eden had picked up in prize money back in Nelson’s time.

  “ … to keep the locals out—Eden never trusted the lower orders after the Spithead mutiny. And that was what attracted the first headmaster when the house became a school back in ‘28; only he was more concerned with keeping boys in of course … “

  Butler ran his eye along the wall. It was all of ten feet high and crowned with a line of vicious iron spikes which reminded Butler of the chevaux de frise barricades of spiked wood he had seen round the government villages in Vietnam four years before. Again, Dingle had been quite right: it seemed un-climbable without artificial aids.

  “ … Except such a barrier only serves as a challenge to a particular sub-species of boy. It only looks unclimbable: in reality I believe there are three recognised points of egress and at least two well-used entrances … “

  He followed the track along the foot of the wall until he reached the rhododendron tangle.

  “ … Young Wrightson’s favourite place—I beat him for using it too obviously back in ‘35—the boy was a compulsive escaper. I believe the Germans found that out too. I’ve no doubt the branches there will be strong enough now to bear your weight … “

  Like the pathway, the rhododendron limbs bore the evidence of regular use—the appropriate footholds were scarred and muddy—but the top of the wall was lost in the luxuriant foliage of a clump of Lawson cypresses growing on the other side of it.

  Butler wedged himself securely in the rhododendron and gingerly felt for the hidden spikes in the cypress.

  Once again the old man’s intelligence was accurate: one spike was missing and others were safely bent to either side or downwards, presenting no crossing problems. And on the garden side the cypress offered both cover and a convenient natural ladder to the ground.

  It was all very neat, ridiculously easy, thought Butler as he skirted the evergreens on the neatly-weeded path which led towards the school buildings. True, if the lodge-keeper had been prepared to let him into the school in the first place, in the headmaster’s absence, it would not have been necessary at all. But then he would never have known where the old school records were kept, and that in itself justified the encounter with Dingle.

  Except that the whole business smacked of the ridiculous : to be required at his age and seniority illegally to break into a boys’ preparatory school like some petty burglar in order to trace the childish ailments and academic progress of one of its old pupils! It might be necessary. His instruction indicated that it might even be urgent. But it was not exactly dignified.

  He sighed and squinted up at the tiny attic windows, each in its miniature dormer. At least he. knew where he was going.

  And at least, thanks to Dingle, he would be entering rather than crudely breaking in. Here was the wood-shed beside the changing room; and here, reposing innocently on the rafters, was the stout bamboo pole with the metal loop on the end which generations of late-returning masters (and possibly boys too) had used to gain entry.

  He pushed open the tiny window: sure enough, it was possible to see the bolt on the back door six feet away. He eased the pole through and captured the knob of the bolt with the wire loop.

  The changing room contained an encyclopedia of smells: sweaty feet and dirty clothes, dubbined leather and linseed oil and linament—the matured smell of compulsory games on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

  Through the changing room into the passage. The smell was subtly altering now, from athletic boy to scholastic boy: chalk and ink and books and God only knew what—floor polish maybe, and feet still (or perhaps the feet smell was the characteristic boy smell). It was a combined odour Butler remembered well, but with elements he could not recall nevertheless. Obviously there would be ingredients in a private boarding school, which opened its doors when money knocked, different from those in his old state grammar school. David Audley and young Roskill would know this smell better— perhaps that was why they had wanted to put Roskill on this scent.

  Butler shook his head angrily and cleared his thoughts. Turn right, away from the classrooms, Dingle had said.

  Abruptly he passed from an arched passageway into a lofty hall, with a sweeping staircase on his left. This was the main entrance of the Hall itself—and there, where the staircase divided, was the Copley portrait of Admiral Eden himself still dominating it—the old fellow’s grandfatherly expression strangely at odds with the desperate sea battle being fought in the picture’s background. Perhaps he was attempting to compute his prize money … he was likely happier presiding over middle class schoolboys here than being gawped at in some museum by the descendants of the men he had so often flogged at the gratings.

  Butler’s footsteps echoed sharply as he strode across the marble floor and up the staircase. On the left the battle honours of Eden Hall.. . Capt. S. H. Wrightson 1934-38— the compulsive escaper—DSO, MC … and on the right, among the academic honours … N.H. Smith 1957-62— Open Exhibition, The King’s College, Oxford. That was under the 1967 list. And there was Smith again in the 1970 names—First Class Honours in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. So Smith had changed subjects, from English to P.P.E.—a proper radical subject grouping if Dingle’s suspicions had any foundation to them .. .

  Cautiously Butler climbed higher. From marble staircase to mahogany parquet flooring; from mahogany floor to the solid oak of the second floor stairway. Next the polished oak of the dormitories—and there, on the left, the door to the attic stairs.

  This one was locked, as Dingle had said it would be. But he had also said that the door was a feeble one, secured with a cheap lock and opening inwards on to a small landing of its own. So for once brute force seemed to be the proper recipe. Butler examined the door briefly, to pinpoint the exact target area. Then he took one pace back, balanced himself on his left leg and delivered a short, powerful blow with the flat of his heel alongside the doorknob.

  Beyond the door there was another change of atmosphere, not so subtle and unrelated to the school itself: the varnished woodwork was cruder and the plaster rougher under the dust of ages. This was the entrance to the servants’ world, the night staircase by which they had answered calls from the bedrooms below. And somewhere at the other end of the house would be a second stair leading from the attics directly down to the kitchen and the other half of their life of fetching, cleaning, carrying and cooking.

  And this, thought Butler without any particular rancour, would probably have been his world in the days of Admiral Eden and his sons and grandsons—not Major John Butler, late of the 143rd Foot, but perhaps at best Butler the butler to the Edens. In his arguments with Hugh Roskill about the good old days he admired and regretted so deeply Butler had been struck by that quaint irony: Roskill, the liberal, always saw himself among the masters, while Butler, the conservative, could never imagine himself on the gentleman’s side of the green baize door leading to the servants’ quarters.

  And here (though without the green baize) were those quarters in their cobwebby reality: a rabbit warren under the eaves—though now the warren was jammed not with housemaids and footmen and pantry-boys, but with all the accumulated and discarded paraphernalia of years of prep, school life: piles of fraying cane-bottomed chairs, rolls of coconut matting, strange constru
ctions of painted wood and canvas which Butler recognised at second glance as the stage furniture of “HMS Pinafore”, or maybe “The Pirates of Penzance”.

  It was a mercy that Dingle had been precise in his directions and that the slope of the roof itself made it easy to follow them: the records should be at the very end of the warren.

  Just why they were located so far from easy access perplexed Butler to begin with, for the passageway between the objects was narrow. But perceptibly the school debris thinned and in the last room but one—he could see the light of the end window ahead—gave place finally to objects which likely dated from the Eden family era: cracked Victorian pots, an elephant’s foot stool and a pile of rusty, but still nasty-looking native spears, the relics of some colonial trophy of arms that had once graced the walls below.

  And the end room itself explained the location of the old records. The big round gable-end window, nearly a yard in diameter, let in plenty of light and two long framework shelves crammed with files ran at right angles to it. Beside the window was an old card table and one of the cane-bottomed chairs placed for the comfort of anyone who wished to consult the records. Evidently no one had desired to do that for a long time, thought Butler, running his finger through the thick dust on the table top.

  But someone had done the filing nevertheless, in big, old-fashioned box files—parents’ accounts, heating, lighting, kitchen … he ran his dusty finger across them. Visits (Educational), Visits (Foreign exchange), Masters (Assistant)—the boys’ records must be on the other side.

  BOYS (Medical)

  Butler’s eye flashed down the lines of years—Smith’s would be well down towards the end—‘54, ‘55, ‘56—‘57 was fourth from the last. Presumably the head kept the most recent decade ready to hand in his study, banishing one old year annually to this attic.