Naturally I got on top of this fairly quickly. But I had another impediment to contend with: an obsessively wandering mind. When I ought to have been considering the next fork before me, I was thinking about my recent bad conduct, or about Robin’s watch. About this latter anxiety there was almost something precognitive. In an obscure sense, I was prepared.
When at length I reached Hutton Green, it was past one o’clock in the morning, and freezing fast. It was reasonable to suppose that Marchmont would have given me up. The place was in darkness. It wasn’t the sort of prison in which electricity blazes down on a perimeter all night. The inmates, I told myself sardonically, had long since had their nice cup of something to ward off nocturnal starvation, and were tucked up beneath their eiderdowns. Such a fantasy wasn’t amusing. I was ashamed of it. I rang a bell.
The door was opened by a turnkey (an expressive word, which appears to have fallen into disuse) not previously known to me. He was probably one of those whose employment was to prowl the place at night, occasionally peering through little shuttered spy-holes at slumbering men. This was a dismal thought, and he was dismal himself – and I felt, moreover, that there was something sinister in the glance he cast on me. All Hutton Green, or all of it that was not sound asleep, probably knew by this time how badly the Governor’s guest had behaved. Or so I was convinced. A minute later I was further discomfited by discovering that Marchmont was no longer alone and no longer in his pleasant living-room. He was back in his office, and his companion was introduced to me as Mr Ogilvy, a Deputy Assistant Commissioner of Metropolitan Police. A Deputy Assistant anything sounded to me initially as pretty small beer, but then I reflected that a Commissioner is somebody so exalted that this was probably not so. And Mr Ogilvy seemed to feel that it would be courteous to explain himself.
‘I’ve been apologising to Marchmont,’ he said, ‘for barging in – and uncommonly rapidly at that. On invitation, of course.’
I gave this a nod, judging it to be a matter of punctilio on which comment was not required.
‘Of course Sir Henry Daviot lives within our District,’ he went on, ‘and that’s a factor in the thing. But there’s also the nature of what seems to be happening. It’s only three years ago that we had the first ever recorded instance of it in England. A clumsy amateur affair, and the villains are in prison now. But – as you no doubt recall, Mr Syson – the victim on that occasion died.’ (‘Three years’ before the events I am describing means, of course, something more than a decade ago, since I am looking back on and recording these from my position as a retired man.)
I stared blankly at Ogilvy, having no idea what he was talking about. It was only clear to me that he was out to alarm. Marchmont, quite aware of this, felt that he must put in a word.
‘You’ll understand, Robert, that I’ve had to tell Mr Ogilvy about what happened at the Hutton Arms a few hours ago. He has brought me news making it quite essential that all cards should be put on the table, so to speak. But at least we can be orderly about it. And the first fact is simply this: Hayes lost no time in clearing out of that pub. He wasn’t being quite honest, I’m afraid, when he suggested to you that he had a sense of comfortable leisure before him.’
At least I wasn’t so guileless as not to have expected this.
‘Oh, dear!’ I said. ‘I’m frightfully sorry.’
There was a moment’s silence, and the helplessness of my reaction appeared to exercise a mollifying effect upon the Deputy Assistant Commissioner, so that I wondered – inconsequently – whether here was another Harrovian.
‘It’s regrettable, Mr Syson, I’m bound to say. But of course you could have no notion of the gravity of the issues involved. I do understand the thing. Speaking on a purely personal level, I’d like to say that. But, you see, so far as Hayes is concerned, we just don’t know where we are. What was he up to from that extremely ingenious hiding-place? We have to face it. He may have been master-minding the whole thing.’
I began to think that I was hearing the word ‘thing’ rather too often.
‘If I’m to be told of a very grave happening,’ I said with some return of spirit, ‘I’d like it to be now. But I have myself something to say at once. The idea of this man Hayes masterminding anything seems extremely far-fetched to me. I know that Sir Henry Daviot has something of the sort in his head. He believes – or at times he believes – that Hayes and Hayes’s son are fabricating some vengeful conspiracy against him. When he is asserting anything of the kind, it’s possible to judge him not quite right in the head.’
‘Quite so, Mr Syson, quite so. Between ourselves, that is, quite so.’ Ogilvy was unperturbed by the injudicious vehemence of what I had said. ‘Only, you know, everything at the moment can be seen two ways on. Take Hayes’s son, who I understand to be your pupil. And take his wrist-watch.’
‘His wrist-watch!’ I exclaimed – I believe in some dismay.
‘Of course I’ve told Ogilvy about that,’ Marchmont struck in. ‘And, Robert, there’s something I’d like to ask you about it. When those two women opened the packet and found it, were they frightened in any degree?’
‘I don’t think so. Puzzled, and looking for some explanation. But not frightened.’
‘What about yourself?’
‘I thought very little about it. At first, that is. But somehow it has come back to me since in what I can only call an obscurely sinister way. A kind of growing worry.’
‘Exactly!’ Ogilvy said – and in a tone of satisfaction I didn’t care for. ‘The cleverness lies there. And it has the interest of something new to me. It hasn’t been uncommon on the continent and in America. But I imagine there has been only a handful of cases over here. But, Mr Syson, please consider this. Your pupil may be a free agent –but in a sense his father’s agent – pretending to be in a very different situation. It’s the implication of that state of affairs that you judge to be highly implausible. Alternatively, your pupil may actually be in that same situation. Is the wrist-watch – taken along with something to which I shall presently come – a kind of bluff? We have to ask ourselves that.’
‘We also have to ask ourselves,’ Marchmont said, ‘whether what has now so upset Sir Henry is what it claims to be, or is a hoax, or is a kind of impromptu cashing-in on the part of some casual crook.’
When I say that I remained completely bewildered by all this, I shall certainly strike the reader as decidedly slow in the uptake. The impression is again a matter of that decade. My companions, who might both be described as professional criminologists, were themselves pioneering novel ground. But at least I wasn’t to remain groping much longer. Ogilvy, I judge, wanted to bewilder me. He had probably been by no means assured that I was not, in some obscure fashion, a villain myself. In a sense, he was trying me out. But now he had made up his mind about that, and when I exclaimed with mounting irritation, ‘What the devil are the two of you talking about?’ he answered briskly and with a single word.
‘Kidnapping.’
‘Kidnapping?’ I could only repeat the word. It merely suggested to me, in the first place, a romance by Robert Louis Stevenson; and, in the second, what a dictionary tells one about the origin of the term as an act of carrying off by force a person or persons likely to be useful in a servile station.
‘Kidnapping, or a pretence of it,’ Marchmont amplified helpfully.
‘Seizing and holding to ransom.’ Ogilvy was being more helpful still. ‘You might call it a modern variant of a habit well-established among the knightly classes in medieval times. And now I’ll tell you, Mr Syson, just why I’m here at Hutton Green. It’s the last known address, so to speak, of this man Hayes. And I’m demonstrating to Sir Henry Daviot how quick we are to leave no stone unturned. I’ve conferred with the local police – and now here I am, at this unholy hour, conferring with Marchmont. And, as it happens, with yourself. Whether it’s a useful exercise remains to be seen. Daviot, who is an old man although still a formidable one, has had the hell of a shock �
� and one that might appear to vindicate some of those notions that have been wandering through his head. We must show him, as I say, that we are doing everything we possibly can.’
I believe I saw at once one way in which this was being done. A Deputy Assistant Commissioner would not normally be the person to go chasing round in such a situation. One would have expected an officer styled ‘Detective Superintendent’ or the like to be engaged in this bloodhound exercise. Once more it was necessary to recall that a Judge of the High Court is a very important man.
‘Just what has been the shock?’ I asked. For what the point is worth, I was ceasing to be fussed, and my mind was now working clearly enough.
‘Round about the time of that parcel’s being delivered to the ladies in Uptoncester, Sir Henry received a telephone call. And what was said to him, he wrote down at once. That sort of ability comes, I suppose, of long sitting on the bench.’ Ogilvy produced this on a note of some admiration, and I have no doubt he was right. ‘What he heard was this: “We’ve got those two boys, Daviot, and if you want them back alive, our conditions must be met. You’ll be hearing from us again when we think fit”. And at that the caller rang off.’
‘Marchmont said something about a hoax,’ I said. I had to say something, although anything adequate in face of this staggering information was utterly beyond me.
‘Well, yes. I don’t suppose that two boys decamping from your school has exactly made national news. But I do suppose that it has got around a little, their names included. So anybody with a grudge against the judge – or perhaps merely looking idly around for a joke – may have made that telephone call to him.’
‘That kind of thing happens?’
‘Certainly it does. There are nutters who regularly look out for people revealed as in some distress, and who then get on the telephone to them. But not often, I think, to this sort of effect. Usually it’s just obscenities.’
‘And Marchmont also said something about a casual crook cashing in.’
‘You can see the idea there. Swift enterprise. Your villain hears of a presumably well-heeled old gent in anxiety about the disappearance of a child. The villain knows nothing about it. But he reckons he can conceivably shock a quick hand-out from the old chap by talking in a blood-curdling way.’
‘But I’ve never heard of it actually happening,’ Marchmont thought to interject. ‘It’s just a notion.’
‘Surely,’ I said, ‘both these notions are knocked out of court by the wrist-watch?’
‘Exactly.’ Ogilvy was good enough to nod approval. ‘And meant to be. Theoretically, it’s conceivable that the boy sent the watch willingly to his mother and sister. That he is, in fact, part of a plot. Sir Henry could possibly manage to believe that, so we must show him it’s in our heads. I can’t say it’s honestly in mine. And as for you, Mr Syson, I almost feel I have to apologise to you for mentioning it.’
‘Not at all.’ I can’t think how dully I said this. ‘It’s your job to test out everything. But suppose we agree on the probability that a criminal abduction has taken place, and with the intention of extorting money by menaces. What happens next?’
‘Perhaps nothing for quite some time. It was like that in the 1969 affair. Several longish silences. It’s my view that they were occasioned by mere incompetence. The villains, as I mentioned, were amateurs, and found themselves puzzled about how to go ahead. But it certainly increased tension. And in other parts of the world, where this kind of thing has been happening quite a bit, long silences have been deployed precisely with that aim in view.’
For some time we were ourselves silent after this. I needn’t expatiate on how I myself felt. It was all rather new to me. I’d led a sheltered life.
‘Of course,’ Marchmont was pursuing easily, ‘it must be occurring to you that they could well have had a shot at nobbling this David on an earlier occasion. If they held their hand, it was perhaps from a feeling that coincidence was bringing such a lot their way. We needn’t regard them as intelligent, you see. Outside the story-books, villains very seldom are. Their common card is cunning – which has its limitations, praise the Lord. It sometimes leads to complex capers when something much simpler would be the effective thing. You get what I mean?’
‘Yes, indeed,’ I said – perhaps not with great conviction.
‘And there’s another point about them. They’re patchy. One moment you feel up against something wholly formidable, and the next you’ve come on a soft spot that smashes them. It’s partly, no doubt, that the beggars’ – and here Marchmont favoured me with a brief ironic glance – ‘probably haven’t enjoyed much of the benefits of education.’
‘No Double Firsts,’ I said, rather feebly.
‘Definitely not. But to come back to the cunning. It may well be that the calculating brand of silence is in operation, and that there will be more of it. Although first – do you know? – I’d rather expect a stepping-up of the wrist-watch effect.’
XI
Driving back to Helmingham next morning, I felt like a man who has left behind him in a railway carriage a half-finished detective story. The puzzle remained, but I was deprived of the means of pursuing it. Any effort of my own would be entirely amateurish, and the two professionals with whom it had pleased the Deputy Assistant Commissioner to say I had been ‘conferring’ were going their own way about the matter. Moreover I hadn’t been as useful as I might have been. There was at least one point I ought to have made that I had forgotten all about. Not long before the disappearance of the boys, a suspicious character or characters had been in contact with David Daviot. There was the incident in an unfrequented part of the school grounds reported to me by Father Edwards, and there had been David’s own story of an approach made to him in a public park. The notion of an authentic talent-scout from the theatrical world was absurd, but a crook nosing around to spy out the boy’s habits and ideas and particular friendships was another matter. I ought to have reported on that.
There was something else that, so far as I could remember, we hadn’t touched upon. Sir Henry Daviot was an eminent person, at least in a conventional sense of the term. His judgements would often be in print; his birthday would be recorded in newspapers; that kind of thing. But was he a man of any wealth? Criminals setting up in this comparatively new field of kidnapping for profit had the pick of all England to choose from. Robin Hayes, the son of a small embezzler, would make no appeal to them at all, and it was presumably only his being David’s companion at a critical moment that had been the occasion of his abduction. But how much more attractive a prize was the judge’s grandson? Judges were not at that time (nor are they, I believe, now) strikingly well paid. As barristers they might still have accumulated a small private fortune before being elevated to the bench. But unless they were also men of inherited wealth they would scarcely be prime targets for well-informed criminals.
This last thought was a particularly disturbing one, and it led me to a reconsideration of what I had been inclined to dismiss as a fantastic persuasion on Sir Henry’s part. Perhaps, after all, revenge and not cupidity was the mainspring of the affair. The telephone message the judge had received appeared not quite to square with this – unless, indeed, a thirst for vengeance was to be assuaged by a kind of fine. But it remained a nasty possibility.
As I drove into the school grounds, with their round dozen of big bleak brick houses scattered irregularly round the perimeters of cricket fields and rugger grounds, their newer utilitarian blocks of class-rooms and labs, their centre in the incongruous Gothic chapel heaved up like a stranded whale, I became conscious of the emptiness of the place. There were no boys. There were no boys either hurrying and shouting and (a Helmingham phrase) ballyragging around, or sedately walking with an open book in the hope of rapidly making up on prep undone. The boys had all gone away, but would return on Sunday evening – all except David Daviot and Robin Hayes. I seem to recall that it was the alien character of what had happened, its remoteness from normal Helmingh
am life, that held my mind, overshadowing even the horrific threat implicit in the situation.
It had begun to snow, so heavily that during the last few miles of my run everything had been turning white as I drove. Within inches of the snug interior of the car I knew that on every side there lurked piercing cold. In Heynoe, until I turned up the central heating, it would be none too warm. My housekeeper was absent, and the two middle-aged women who formed its remaining resident staff had quarters of their own, adequately heated, in a remote corner of the building. I reflected glumly that I possessed no house, no home, in my own right. Heynoe was merely a hypertrophied tied-cottage. When the place had done with me as a housemaster I’d simply be out on my ear. It was as I drew up before the front door (the door upon which Robin had inflicted such damage) that the self-indulgent character of these musings shocked me, and I was overwhelmed by a new and dreadful question. Just what did this sudden, savage, premature winter – for it was now that – mean to the captive boys? In what sort of conditions might they be held by men who could make to Sir Henry Daviot such a telephone call as he had received? I was back with the monstrous unexpectedness of what had entered my life. It was as if I had gone to sleep securely here at Helmingham and woken up in the Chicago of Al Capone.
I suppose I was in a confused state of mind. I got out of the car and opened the boot to take out a suitcase which wasn’t there; I had forgotten that my night’s absence had been unpremeditated. I put the car away, took off my overcoat, picked up some letters from the hall table, and set about finding myself something to eat. Before I got far with this there was a ring at the front-door bell, and on returning to the hall I saw through a window a car very much grander than my own, together with some indication of a male person standing on the doorstep. I decided – I don’t know why – that here was that sort of pestilential prospective parent who turns up without notice at an inconvenient hour and expects to be shown round the entire school. But business is business, and at Heynoe it was comfortable regularly to have a longer waiting-list than I might be able to accept. So I opened the door prepared to be adequately welcoming. It was to find myself confronted by Jasper Tandem.
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