An Open Prison

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘An inclement evening,’ he said, ‘but with some pleasant sunshine earlier in the day.’ I concurred in this view. ‘Mr Syson, is it not?’ the stranger added with mild interest. And I realised that I was in the presence of Robin Hayes’s father.

  It was a considerable shock, and some interest must attach to the fact that I immediately accounted for Mr Hayes’s appearance in an ingeniously reasonable way. Owen Marchmont, who was clearly a much occupied man, had been under some misapprehension as to the circumstances in which Mr Hayes had departed from his establishment. Mr Hayes was simply on parole, and had put up in the nearest agreeable lodging. I had even said feebly, ‘I’m glad to see you’, before acknowledging to myself that this was not a reasonable idea at all. And Mr Hayes was amused.

  ‘Did you ever,’ he asked, ‘read a story by Edgar Allan Poe called “The Purloined Letter”?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It turns upon the invisibility of the glaringly obvious. If one were inclined to take a little break from that amiable Harrovian’s set-up over the way, where would it be most natural to go? Obviously to the nearest comfortable pub.’ Mr Hayes chuckled. ‘I don’t doubt that they’re hunting for me, you know, through the length and breadth of the land. But it hasn’t occurred to them to look in here. The cuisine isn’t half bad.’

  I was silent for a moment, recalling my sense that there was some odd potentiality hidden in this petty embezzler. But I didn’t know what to do, and took refuge in a wholly inappropriate lightness of tone.

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ I said. ‘But don’t you find it comes a shade expensive?’

  ‘Ah, you forget my brother-in-law. I believe you’ve met him. Jasper Tandem. Do you know, I’ve never succeeded in touching him for more than a penny or two before? But he came down handsomely with quite a wodge of the stuff.’

  ‘Under a bunch of grapes?’

  ‘Just that.’ Mr Hayes seemed slightly surprised. ‘And with various other convenient dispositions as well.’

  ‘I see.’

  In fact I believed myself to see quite a lot. Tandem’s conduct towards his brother-in-law almost duplicated his conduct towards his nephew. In both instances there had been a big hand-out of money in the interest of pure mischief of a more or less malign order. Tandem’s character was that of the Vice in the Old Play. It wasn’t to be supposed that he at all cared for Mr Hayes (or for Robin either). Uncomfortable consequences for the escaped man were almost bound eventually to attend his freakish escapade. But at least one reassuring fact seemed to me to be evident. Mr Hayes had certainly not left Hutton Green in order to prosecute some hideous vengeance against Sir Henry Daviot and his grandson. So Robin’s departure from Helmingham, even if in some way connected with his father’s behaviour, was equally innocent so far as anything of the kind was concerned. Of course I had known this. The notion that Robin had carried off David as part of a hideous conspiracy could not have any existence outside the mind of that aged judge in one of his unnervingly unbalanced moments. And now Mr Hayes’s relaxed holiday attitude made this so clear that for a moment I felt a positive affection for the man.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ I said, ‘there isn’t particularly good news of Robin. I don’t know whether you’ve heard.’

  ‘At the moment, Mr Syson, as you can imagine, I don’t hear much not judged worthy of record in newspapers of the more sober sort.’ Mr Hayes tapped The Times. ‘Is the boy in trouble again?’

  ‘I’m not aware that he has been in anything that could be called trouble before. What has happened now is simply that he has left Helmingham in a somewhat irregular fashion.’

  ‘I’m delighted to hear it – irregular or not. As his affairs now stand – Oxford, and so on – he’s only wasting money and time. Has he got himself a job?’

  ‘I can’t say as to that, but I think it improbable. He has left me, taking with him a younger boy from another house.’ I paused on this. ‘A boy called Daviot.’

  ‘Dear me! I know the name.’

  ‘Quite so.’

  ‘And Daviot is rather old, surely, to have a son in his early teens. If it’s a son of the judge that you’re talking about.’

  ‘David Daviot is the judge’s grandson. Where the two boys have made off to, we don’t know. But their departure followed immediately upon its becoming known at Helmingham that you have – well, taken the course you are now embarked upon. And I think it fair to tell you that the coincidence has put some disturbing ideas in Sir Henry Daviot’s head.’

  ‘It wouldn’t take much to do that.’

  I was silent for a moment following this brisk comment, and wondered whether there was much point in going on. If Mr Hayes were at all interested in his son’s untoward conduct, he gave no sign of it. But then I did continue.

  ‘Mr Hayes, would you describe yourself as feeling any particular animosity towards Sir Henry?’

  ‘Good lord, no! The old boy was very decent about the whole thing.’

  ‘You didn’t—well, shall I say cause any kind of disturbance at the conclusion of that trial? Threaten the judge from the dock – that kind of thing.’

  ‘My dear man! You must be aware that I am an Officer of the High Court. Is it likely that I should behave in a disrespectful manner?’ Mr Hayes came out with this quite magnificently, so that I positively felt rebuked. I changed the subject abruptly.

  ‘May I ask,’ I said, ‘what are your further plans? I’d imagine that after a time even the good cuisine of the Hutton Arms would pall.’

  ‘Oh, as to that, I shall simply clock in again over the way.’ Mr Hayes thus expressed his intention with perfect ease. ‘There will be a certain awkwardness, no doubt. They’ll be disappointed in me, you know. That kind of thing. On the other hand, turning up again will be a considerable virtue in me. And they won’t want too much fuss. They’d look so ridiculous – wouldn’t they? – if my little Hutton Arms ploy got into the papers.’ As this thought came to Mr Hayes he waved his copy of The Times gracefully in air.

  I rose to take my leave. Would Mr Hayes go upstairs to change for dinner – into a dinner-jacket, a dark suit? That he was enjoying himself, that his freedom was fun, I didn’t doubt. Unconcern was his key-note – and not least over whatever occasion had brought me to Hutton Green.

  I found myself shaking hands with Mr Hayes. It is an action that ought never to be of a totally faithless order. So what on earth was I to do? I was still pondering this question as I drove away from the hotel.

  X

  ‘Visitors,’ Owen Marchmont said, ‘—and outstaying their welcome, bless them. Visitors in a technical sense, that is. A Board of them. They inquire into things, you know, and are invariably gratified by how the place is going.’ Marchmont was already pouring me a drink as he spoke. ‘Thank God, no need for another word of shop tonight.’

  It was a crucial moment. I ought to have said at once, ‘I’m afraid one piece of shop there is – and it’s rather urgent’. But I didn’t. If anybody apart from myself was to blame for my silence, it was the author of a play I had seen as a boy. Perhaps it was by John Galsworthy – a writer now, I believe, not particularly well thought of. I don’t really remember. What I do seem to remember is that there is a judge in it. He is on a fishing holiday, or possibly he is shooting things. He must be on fairly unfrequented territory, since he is able to hold a long colloquy with an escaped convict. There they are together, you see, but it’s man to man and no longer judge and the prisoner he had sentenced. How the situation was resolved is another thing I don’t recall, although clearly in my head is the expensive tea-shop my aunt took me to after the matinée. I now wonder whether in the course of the action the judge unwarily shook hands with the fugitive. It seems unlikely. Of course I didn’t reflect on all this as I stood in Marchmont’s comfortable living- room. It was only some years afterwards that the analogy bobbed up in my mind. At the moment I was much too busy with the raw fact of my predicament.

  That it was a genuine predicament, I confidentl
y assert. There we were, two Harrovians of what wits like to call the old school, with the thing between us. Marchmont must have noticed something ill at ease about me, but only as behaviour he was accustomed to. A prison is an odd place in which to be asked out to dinner.

  Perhaps I told myself that, so far as I knew, Mr Hayes’s crime had occasioned no specific hurt to any individual. It had been what they call a crime against society. Of course this line of thought doesn’t really stand up. Robin had been hurt, and so had those two women in Uptoncester. But if this thought came to me, it was without effect. I just couldn’t – couldn’t for the moment – give the man away. I couldn’t sneak on him. Yet this meant that I was now my schoolfellow’s guest on false pretences. I was abusing his hospitality.

  Feebly, I assured myself that there was plenty of time. Mr Hayes was at his ease in the Hutton Arms. My turning up on him hadn’t alarmed him in the least, and it was his intention to come back to Hutton Green of his own volition when his little ‘ploy’ ceased to entertain him. I expose myself here to a charge of singularly naïve thinking. But so it was.

  We talked, as we began our meal, on wholly indifferent matters. But Marchmont’s conception of ‘shop’ didn’t extend to the entire Hayes affair, and he asked me about Robin and the young David. I told him we were still in the dark, and then gave him some account of my visit to the ladies of the Hayes family. I added – with some attempt to be amusing – the information that in Uptoncester I had been doggedly shadowed by the police. Marchmont received this with a suitable brisk laugh, but at the same time I saw that he was sceptical about it. This annoyed me (as may be imagined, I was in considerable disarray) and when Marchmont became aware of this he changed the subject at once. We went back to talk about past times, and the evening thus wore away. An observer uninformed about my situation would have judged that here simply was one of those reunions that don’t quite come off. I was unhappy about this, for in fact I had come to like Owen Marchmont.

  I was already thinking that by pleading the drive ahead of me I could soon decently take my leave, when he made an abrupt plunge into shop, after all.

  ‘Pog, have you heard that this old devil Daviot has been creating?’

  ‘Creating, Owen?’ This use of the word was new to me.

  ‘Making the deuce of a racket over the fuzz failing to pick up my unfortunate Father Hayes. A harmless old nuisance, as I think we are agreed.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ I said – I suspect with idiotic eagerness.

  ‘But old Daviot doesn’t see it like that. I gather from a chap in the Home Office that he has actually been badgering the Minister. He is convinced that Hayes père and Hayes fils are in a conspiracy against him – and are even proposing to use Daviot petit-fils as instruments of their vengeance.’

  ‘Totally absurd.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Yet—in a way—I wonder.’

  ‘Wonder what about, Owen?’

  ‘About just what is going on.’ Marchmont looked at me in detectable perplexity as he confessed to this vagueness. ‘Where the devil are those two kids? Old Hayes, you know, has a streak of the flamboyant to him. I’d not be surprised if he proved to be up to something entirely odd. Would you agree, Pog?’

  ‘Well, yes.’ It wasn’t possible for me to say less than this.

  ‘You’ll know better than I do whether that goes for his boy as well. But at least he has made a large gesture in bolting with that particular man’s grandson. So I’d expect him to contrive a further gesture or two as he goes along. But nothing. Silence.’

  This unnerved me – usefully, indeed, since it alerted me, well within the hour, to what was at the moment no more than an obscure circumstance tucked away in my mind. I can come to the occasion at once.

  My good-bye was contrived, I hope, in decent form, and I set off for Helmingham. It was pitch dark and very cold. I always drive cautiously after dining out, and now my caution was increased by apprehensions of black ice on the roads. Even so, my thought wandered at times. It flitted over this and that in the whole ghastly affair. Chiefly, for a start, I continued to chew over that evening’s luckless issue. As a law-abiding member of the public I had behaved most improperly. I ought to have told Marchmont about Mr Hayes the moment I came into his presence. Indeed, instantly upon recognising the escaped man I ought, no doubt, to have endeavoured to effect a citizen’s arrest. That, I believe, is the term. Instead of which I had obeyed some entirely dubious private code which probably had a good dash of cowardice, moral cowardice, to it. And it was all dreadfully mixed up with my feelings about Robin Hayes. I had protected his father out of an utterly muddled notion that I was thereby protecting him.

  So then I thought about the whole course of my handling of Robin in his peculiar family predicament. I went over my encounters with him. I came to the last but one of them.

  I have already hinted that this was a memory intensely painful to me, more painful even than his subsequently addressing me with incredible words. It was the moment of his flipping his uncle’s disgraceful cheque pretty well in my face. As if vividly through the darkness in front of my windscreen, I saw this again now. I saw it. It was there almost with the quality of a hallucination. I saw the cheque. I saw the hand holding it. And I saw a wrist-watch as well.

  It was the same wrist-watch that had arrived by post in Uptoncester. Unless my memory was playing tricks with me (which was possible, although I didn’t believe it) this was the fact of the matter. I started counting days, but really I scarcely needed to do so. That there had been time to send the watch to be repaired (even if, preoccupied as he was, Robin had thought of that) and for it to have arrived back in Uptoncester as it had done, was on the face of it implausible. So here was a small mystery. Or, rather, here was nothing of the sort. Here was a mystery evoking a sense of menace in what I had no means of seeing as other than a totally unaccountable way. I was rather frightened. Without arriving, even in imagination, at any specific context in which to place the thing, I was exactly that. And then I saw one consequence with clarity. Anything I knew about any Hayes, the police ought to know.

  I was running through a village as this came to me, and into my headlights there swam a telephone kiosk in a providential fashion. I braked hard, and was inside it within seconds. Within further seconds Hutton Green was answering me, and I was put through to Marchmont straight away. He was recruiting himself with a final whisky, I imagine, after rather a boring evening.

  ‘Owen? It’s Robert.’

  ‘Robert?’

  ‘Syson. Pog, if you like. It’s about Hayes. He’s in the Hutton Arms.’

  ‘The Hutton Arms! Is this a joke?’

  ‘Nothing of the sort. I went in for a drink.’ This was dreadfully embarrassing in itself. ‘You see, I was a little too early for you.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘And there he was – as a resident guest. I somehow couldn’t bring myself to tell you.’

  ‘Hold the line.’

  I held the line, and thought I heard a call being made on another telephone. I had to put more money into the machine. Then Marchmont spoke again.

  ‘I’ve sent across my own chaps,’ he said. ‘Stretching things a little, but there’s the point that it’s quicker than contacting the local police. Time seems an element.’

  ‘He said he intends to stay on for a short time longer, and then clock in with you again.’

  ‘Did he, indeed. Now, Pog, listen. You went into that pub, and there was this chap. He was in a poor light, or reading a paper or something, so you really had no more than a glimpse. He seemed hauntingly familiar, but you didn’t think much about it. Then, as you were driving back to Helmingham, it suddenly came to you. So you got on this blower at once. Got that?’

  ‘Yes. But we had quite a talk. He’ll divulge that.’

  ‘Not after I’ve negotiated with him, he won’t. So now go home and sleep soundly. The impudence of the man! Rather jolly, really.’

  ‘But, Owen, there’s another thing.
There’s the wrist-watch.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The wrist-watch. Robin’s.’

  This produced a short silence. It must have been coming to Marchmont that I was distraught.

  ‘Ah, the wrist-watch,’ he said. ‘Is it important?’

  ‘I think so, but I can’t imagine why. It came by post in rather an odd way while I was with those women in Uptoncester. They opened the little parcel and there it was: Robin’s watch.’

  ‘Come back.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Pog, please turn round and come back to Hutton Green now. I can put you up for the night. After we’ve had a chat about that watch, of course. You have the inside of a week still clear of the school, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes – more or less.’

  ‘Then that’s fine. I’ll expect you. But don’t hurry too much. The roads may be turning not too good. Remember the wise Onslows. Festina lente.’

  With this not very learned joke, Owen Marchmont rang off.

  As it happened, there was more lente to it than festina. I turned the car round – at least I was capable of that – and then promptly, in what was becoming a damnably threatening November night, I got lost.

  It was partly because the roads abruptly turned treacherous. Once or twice the car glided beneath me in disconcerting directions. The effect was that my mind became concentrated all the time on the next hundred yards. If there were sign-posts, I didn’t notice them. Actually my car was equipped with what I took some pride in as a very cunning device: a spot-light high up on a corner of the windscreen that could be swung on an arc by manipulating a knob conveniently to hand in the interior. I can recall the salesman making much of it in his showroom among all the marvellous things I was going to get for my money. I didn’t remember to use this mini-searchlight now. In no time, just as if I was piloting a yacht or an aeroplane, I found myself hopefully studying the stars. The absurdity of this, when I realised it, produced the same sort of panic that can be occasioned by a sudden mechanical breakdown. One knows perfectly well that – after some inconvenience, no doubt – there is a drink and a bed securely in front of one. But the sudden powerlessness, literally that, renders one a poltroon for the nonce.