An Open Prison

by J. I. M. Stewart

  There was nobody in England whom, at that moment, I less wanted to see. This man’s freakish folly – or worse – had surely been at the root of the entire calamity confronting us. He had money – clearly he had no end of money – and he had scattered a lot of it in the interest of what was certainly meant to be mischief and had in fact been disaster. He had given his nephew a thousand pounds and thus encouraged him to behaviour resulting, however obscurely, in hideous misadventure – and had further thrown the boy off balance, I didn’t doubt, by having already provided Mr Hayes with the means to effect his foolish escape from Hutton Green.

  Whether these censorious thoughts were going through my head as I recognised Tandem on my doorstep I don’t know. Quite probably not. I was certainly telling myself that there would be no point in preaching at the man.

  ‘Ah, Syson!’ he said – apparently in surprise that I should myself have to answer my doorbell. ‘I hope this is a convenient time for a call?’

  I looked at my watch (which wasn’t exactly polished behaviour) and saw that it was a quarter to one. There was no escaping the implication of this.

  ‘Not at all,’ I said (thoroughly weakly). ‘You won’t have lunched? I’m alone, and was just about to find myself something. Will you join me?’

  Predictably, Tandem said that he would, and I went through the proper rituals of taking his coat, asking him if he’d care to wash after his drive, finding him a glass of sherry, and then going in search of a meal that turned out to be chiefly a cold ham. What was thus created was a first-class false situation. Once the man had a knife and fork in his hands I was obliged to see the thing civilly through.

  ‘A bad situation, this,’ Robin’s uncle said comfortably – or rather, perhaps, with an affectation of that, since I felt that actually he was in a condition of considerable alarm. ‘My brother-in-law, for a start. I can’t imagine what has prompted him to such folly. I visited him, my dear Syson, only the day before he bolted, and at least he didn’t seem wrong in his head.’

  I believe I resented ‘My dear Syson’ even more than the impudence of the whole statement. He couldn’t of course be aware that I had been to both Uptoncester and Hutton Green and knew all about that bunch of grapes. What he did know – as immediately appeared – was the raw fact of the kidnap.

  ‘And now the two boys,’ he said. ‘A fellow from Scotland Yard came to see me yesterday, and told me what you, no doubt, know already. He told me he was making routine enquiries upon the instructions of some big wig in the police. They’d gathered I’d been to see my nephew here just before he went off with the other lad. So they thought I might be able to throw some light on the matter. I had to say I was only too sorry that I could not. A kidnapping! It’s too dreadful. My poor sister!’

  I didn’t trust myself to speak.

  ‘I doubt,’ Tandem said, ‘whether that old fellow Daviot has a penny – or not the sort of penny that is relevant in an affair like this. I felt I had to go carefully – very carefully, indeed.’

  Again I said nothing. For a moment, even, the man’s train of thought was obscure to me.

  ‘It’s a form of criminal activity,’ Tandem went on, ‘that has been developing abroad. I hear about such things.’ He hesitated upon this, almost as if he had made some injudicious statement. ‘In Italy, for example. The Mafia go in for it. And the key point, Syson, is this: situations develop in which the interests of a family either differ from those of the police or there has to be a pretence that they do so. Of course, it isn’t always people that are abducted. Works of art are just as good. Better, in some ways. They don’t, after a fashion, have to be fed. And they’re easier to keep an eye on.’

  ‘And don’t suffer,’ I said. ‘There’s a point there.’

  ‘Perfectly true – not that I’d thought of it. Have you noticed, in reading about such things, how often stolen works of art just turn up unharmed in an inconsequent way in a barn or a left-luggage place or a public lavatory? With the police, as likely as not, taking great credit for their recovery. There’s not much difficulty there, since the ransom money comes in a quiet way from an insurance company or even from a Ministry of Fine Arts, or the like. With people – a couple of boys, say, as in the present instance – it’s rather different. A schoolboy isn’t as important as a Rembrandt or a Titian. So there’s no public money ever so privately available.’

  Tandem was speaking confidently now: very much the man who knows. I had to sit and watch him eating my ham and drinking my claret.

  ‘Where does this take us?’ I asked.

  ‘It takes us to a position in which a victim’s relatives and friends want to pay up, and the whole legal establishment – in this country it would be the police and the law officers of the Crown – are dead against that sort of giving in. Or the authorities try to exploit the appearance of giving in to set a trap for the kidnappers. There can be a real conflict of interests.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said – thus offering anything like acquiescence for the first time. I could see that Jasper Tandem, nasty as I obstinately thought him, did know what he was talking about. ‘So what happens?’

  ‘Sometimes the family or friends get the money through in spite of any resistance that is put up. They may achieve their bargain. On the other hand, the kidnapped person may have been a corpse for weeks.’

  ‘I can see the risk.’

  ‘Well, these chaps are after money – big money.’ Tandem paused on this, and to an effect of considerable emphasis. ‘Not a doubt of it. And it’s almost impossible, as I’ve said, that Daviot has a penny. So you see how it may be Robin who is at the centre of the picture, after all. My sister, needless to say, hasn’t a bean either. But I’m the boy’s uncle, and it’s the common belief that I have. So I thought I must explain something to you, Syson. Knowing you have been such a good friend to the lad.’

  ‘I don’t think I quite understand you, Mr Tandem,’ I said – probably the more stonily because it wasn’t quite true. I had a fair notion of what was coming.

  ‘The fact is – and I hope you’ll regard it as very much in confidence . . .’

  ‘Mr Tandem, I cannot agree to accept confidences. The situation makes anything of the kind wholly inappropriate. Whatever you tell me I will consider myself as at liberty to communicate, should I judge it desirable, to the police. And I am already in contact with them.’

  This brought the man momentarily to a halt. But then he nodded with impressive decision.

  ‘Quite right,’ he said. ‘I withdraw the condition, and only ask you to be discreet. And now for the plain fact. Anxious though I might be to put up the money in a quiet way, it simply would not be possible. Like Dogberry in the play’ – and Tandem produced an unattractive smile at this elegant Shakespearian allusion – ‘I have had losses. My affairs are very seriously embarrassed.’

  ‘I find it the more surprising, then, that you should have wantonly given your nephew that very large sum of money.’

  This shook the man, and I suddenly saw that my notion of his being a guest and not to be upbraided was a piece of antique nonsense.

  ‘Robin told you about it?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing of the kind. The amount on the cheque happened to be observed – no doubt as being in a bold hand. I can’t say more than that. But it was grossly irresponsible. It was encouraging the boy to behave in a foolish way at a time when he happened to be much upset. It was contemptible, just as is your anxiety to avoid involvement in the wretched situation you envisage. And now you will no doubt wish to leave my house.’

  ‘Just one moment.’ Understandably, Jasper Tandem had turned pale. ‘It was perhaps injudicious, particularly as I could ill afford the money. I just wanted the boy to have a good time during his half-term break.’

  ‘And I suppose you wanted your brother-in-law to have that when you smuggled more money into Hutton Green. Incidentally, that was a criminal offence.’

  Blessedly, the man was now on his feet. (He had finished both claret and h
am.) I took some satisfaction in the thought that I was about to turn him out into the snow. A glance through the window revealed that a blizzard was developing. Another couple of hours, it struck me, and Heynoe and all Helmingham might be snowed up. It was true that the school owned a snow-plough which had once cleared a whole hockey-field amid tremendous applause – promptly dashed when the ground was declared too hard for safe play. It seems unlikely that the reminiscence came to me at just that moment. What did come to me was the appalling thought that, with a little ill luck, I might have been landed with a stranded Jasper Tandem for hours or even days.

  He took his leave – but it wasn’t before having recovered aplomb. Not Mr Pecksniff himself (to switch from Shakespeare to Dickens) could have withdrawn from a discomfiting encounter to a larger effect of rational benignity and a slightly wounded consciousness of merit aspersed. As I watched the Daimler make an uncertain effort to gain traction and then depart smoothly enough down my drive, I expected to find myself indulging the luxury of extreme indignation. But this didn’t happen. Instead, I was conscious only of being increasingly puzzled. Puzzlement, of course, was now the order of my day, the Hayes/Daviot affair being mysterious in every direction – mysterious as well as horrible. But about Robin’s uncle there was something especially unaccountable. The cheque, and the banknotes under Messrs Fortnum and Mason’s grapes, I continued to find not really bewildering. Sheer delight in malicious contrivance could account for them. But supposing that he really were so despicably enslaved to his own larger financial interests as to panic at the possibility of having to pay out big ransom-money for his nephew, what could prompt him to make a journey to Helmingham to protest his penury to me – who, although in one aspect deeply involved, was only peripheral to the family’s problem? I could find no answer to this question. I was left with a groping sense that his purpose had been to put something on record, but that it was a something other than it had purported to be. I could hardly have come up with a notion more nebulous than this. It left my mind as blank and void as was the whitened, the obliterated landscape outside my windows.

  XII

  In the middle of the following morning Miss Sparrow turned up on me. The trains, she explained, were still running, although to any sort of chaotic timetable, and she had walked from the nearest railway station. There was nothing like brisk walking, she said, to keep the blood in circulation. As the station was five miles away, and walking can scarcely be brisk when it is through snow eight inches deep and drifting into the bargain, I judged this to be a stout effort on Miss Sparrow’s part. Her holiday milieu had in any case threatened boredom, she went on, and in present conditions it had occurred to her that there might be one or two things to do. The women upon whom we relied in the village might be refusing to budge if unprovided with a tractor or snow-shoes, and there were all those beds to change. It was fortunate our sixty-odd boys were snugly at home, since at Heynoe they would be an infernal nuisance if the electricity failed. This was indisputable. Heynoe was without its own generator (a circumstance over which I had known clever prospective fathers shake their heads) and when breakdowns occurred (as they were already doing in those years when the weather turned even a shade unreliable) we were at once down to oil-stoves and candles. (It was the insurance company that shook its head over this.)

  ‘And what about Hayes and Daviot?’ Miss Sparrow asked with a briskness that failed to mask her concern.

  ‘There’s very bad news,’ I said. And I told her the whole thing.

  ‘I see one small satisfaction in it,’ Miss Sparrow declared. ‘It explains the inexplicable.’

  ‘As a crumb of comfort, I think rather poorly of that.’

  ‘Well, yes—but I do like to think of Robin Hayes as essentially a sensible boy.’

  ‘I think you’ve said that before.’

  ‘No doubt. But it’s important. Bound to have second thoughts quickly. And to act on them, even if still besotted with that silly little Daviot. As it was, he was overtaken by events.’

  ‘Yes.’ I didn’t much like ‘events’. ‘And now the police have to discover where and when and how and why.’

  ‘Just that. Are they going to keep us posted?’

  ‘I suppose so. There was this man Ogilvy who is presumably in charge. He seems to regard me as fairly reliable, despite the frightful fool I made of myself in that hotel.’

  ‘Oh, that! I’d have got in just the same fix.’ Miss Sparrow took a good look at me. ‘You’d better settle down and write letters or something. I’ve got those beds.’ And she left me.

  Hard upon this my telephone rang. I had to force myself to take up the receiver. My imagination suggested to me that I was going to hear of something dire beyond conceiving: news of two dead bodies, perhaps, found in a ditch.

  ‘Ogilvy,’ a voice said. ‘Is that Syson?’

  ‘Yes—Syson.’

  ‘Do you mind having your telephone monitored? I’ve just arranged the same thing with your headmaster and your colleague Taplow.’

  ‘That’s all right.’ I had only an indistinct idea of what the man was talking about.

  ‘There are circumstances in which it might save a few valuable minutes. There’s been a development.’

  ‘You’ve discovered something?’

  ‘Not exactly that. But anything’s useful. It’s nothing at all that we’d really have to worry about.’

  It took me a moment to decipher this grammatical ambiguity.

  ‘The villains are now in a hurry, Syson, and that’s in our favour. The judge has had his wrist-watch.’

  ‘His wrist-watch? In heaven’s name . . .’

  ‘His equivalent of the Hayes wrist-watch. Through the post, and in a shoe-box. Unnaturally light. Daviot, who’s decidedly shattered, kept on saying that to me. Unnaturally light. But not when you know what it contained. Locks.’

  ‘Locks? Why should locks be light?’

  ‘Not that sort. Golden locks. And curly.’

  ‘David Daviot!’

  ‘It seems so. I’ve checked with Taplow, just in case the old gentleman was imagining his grandson’s hair to be as it isn’t. Shaved, we think, rather than just clipped.’ Ogilvy didn’t pause to let me respond to this. ‘What about you? Anything to report?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. Except that yesterday I had a visit from my boy’s uncle – that fellow Tandem. I can’t think why. It seemed quite pointless.’

  ‘Pointless?’ Ogilvy’s voice had sharpened, ‘I specialise in pointlessness. It interests me. What pointless things had the man to say? Tell me.’

  It would have been easy to find this coolness of tone abrasive. But at once I did my best.

  ‘He was chiefly on about money. If there was any move to pay a big ransom for the boys, he couldn’t himself do anything about it. His affairs are embarrassed. But I had a queer feeling he hadn’t come down here to exhibit himself in such a disgusting light. Why should he? I felt he felt—’ I stumbled over the inelegance of this—’that he was lying about something quite other than his pretended impecuniosity. It was most perplexing.’

  ‘I’d call it most significant, Syson. We’ll have a little research done in that quarter. A word, by the way, about the press.’

  ‘The press, Ogilvy?’

  ‘The newspapers. We’re not giving out anything at the moment about this kidnapping having happened. But we may be forced to by the villains themselves. In fact they may drop the information of their achievement into the letter-boxes of Fleet Street at any moment. Their motive will be to start showing the police as baffled – a good journalistic word – and to stir up public anxiety. The sooner your fears become public property and generate sinister speculations and sensational headlines, the more quickly will your nerve break and leave you willing to treat. Or so I’d imagine. It’s all rather new ground, you know.

  Not many case-histories to compare it with. But even if the villains keep mum, we can’t sit on the thing, announcement-wise, for long. Perhaps another twenty-four
hours. Well, that’s it. We mustn’t be too glum. The situation’s grim, of course. But not desperate. Good-bye.’

  I ate some bread and cheese, and then took Miss Sparrow’s advice and tried to write some letters. The effort didn’t achieve much. My mind turned from one perplexity to another. Ogilvy had added to them with his information that the police were seeking to delay giving out the news of what had happened to the two boys, and it was some time before I hit on the full and sinister explanation. The sense that a hunt was up, if it caught the criminals with their dispositions only in part achieved, might rattle them and imperil the safety of their captives. It must be something like that. It wasn’t a comforting thought, and I was digesting it when my front-door bell rang. As I had done with Tandem on the previous day, I answered it myself. This time my visitor was a young man, and unknown to me.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ he said politely. ‘Mr Syson?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wonder, sir, whether I might come in and have a word with you?’

  I couldn’t very well have said, ‘Certainly not’, but I could at least have asked him his business before letting him cross my doorstep. Unfortunately I was less suspicious than I ought to have been. I think I supposed him to be some representative of a firm publishing school-books, to be listened to civilly for a few minutes and then bowed out. So I led the way into my study. Once there, the young man sat down at once.