An Open Prison

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘Iain Macleod.’

  ‘Yes. When he spoke of Morocco or California it turns out that he was mistaken, so far as Robin Hayes’s succeeding conduct was concerned. But it was a good suggestion, all the same. A thousand pounds would serve as a strong prompting to travel far afield. But the escapade, if undertaken, would not get far. The boys would be trapped by the kidnappers upon some early opportunity their folly had created. But that the trap originated with Tandem, one need not believe. He was an agent merely – and perhaps a not wholly willing one at that. Mr Syson, what is your general impression of the man’s character?’

  ‘I have been thinking of him in terms of mischief or malice, rather than as one involved in some conspiracy. Anything simply malicious seems to appeal to him. Witness his tempting his brother-in-law to that idiotic breaking out of prison. But I’ve had no more than a couple of encounters with Tandem. I gather that as a boy he was expelled from his school, and I feel that his attitude to public schools in general has remained mixed ever since. On the one hand nostalgia taking rather tiresome and even unwholesome forms, and on the other resentment and an impulse to make trouble if he can.’

  ‘He may have been forced into making more trouble than he had the stomach for. When did you last see him?’

  ‘It was only yesterday. He paid me a visit at Helmingham that puzzled me a good deal.’

  ‘Just why, Mr Syson?’

  ‘I had an odd feeling that he felt himself to be on the fringe of something dangerous. I told Mr Ogilvy about it on the telephone. He seemed interested.’

  ‘As well he might. Can you be more precise about this impression you received?’

  ‘I don’t know that I can, Sir Henry. Tandem was very insistent that he hasn’t any money to speak of. It was as if nothing but a sum that might have to be raised was in his head. And I had an unaccountable feeling – again I told Ogilvy about it – that the anxiety he exhibited was in some way spurious.’

  ‘It may well have been, if he was playing a double game.’ The judge was suddenly grim. ‘A worthless fellow.’

  ‘Then why should he turn up on me?’

  ‘Why, indeed? If I may say so, Mr Syson, it is an acute question. And now we had better go and see the police. A good many of them are involved, and the convenient thing will be that we should go to them, rather than the other way round. If you are agreeable.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ I felt that in this last consideration Sir Henry was in a routine way consulting his own dignity. His distress and anxiety were emphasised rather than masked by the stiff control he was exercising over himself.

  So we went out to his now-waiting car: a chauffeur-driven affair. The policeman saluted – and then, rather as an afterthought, stepped down and opened the door of the vehicle. The slushy pavements were quite deserted, except for a single figure on the other side of the road. He was peering up at the house-numbers, and had the air of a man trying to find his way about. My glimpse of this struck an odd chord for a moment in my mind. But I gave no further thought to it.

  Dusk had been falling during my interview with David Daviot’s grandfather. By the time of our arrival at New Scotland Yard what passes for darkness in the heart of London was all around us. We were expeditiously received. I seemed just to glimpse the odd little revolving advertisement in which the place indulges, a large hall, a small memorial to something or other, when I found myself in a lift with Sir Henry and several silent men who appeared to have nothing to do with one another. The lift halted – although without permitting gravity to give us any notice of the fact – and we were shown into a room in which a further half-dozen men were sitting round a table. They stood up to receive us – or rather to receive the judge – but were already seated again and fingering papers before chairs had been found for us. No time was being wasted. And Ogilvy, who was at the head of the table, spoke at once.

  ‘Reports,’ he said. ‘Detective Superintendent Jefferson.’

  Jefferson revealed himself by clearing his throat. He was a florid man whose principal endowment appeared to me to be a pair of unnaturally piercing light blue eyes. These, I thought, might well have taken him all the way from the beat to his present elevated position in the Metropolitan Police. A single glance from them would surely unnerve the most hardened malefactor.

  ‘Taking things in order, then,’ Jefferson said. ‘The first event we hear of is the prisoner Hayes escaping from Hutton Green. If escaping it can be called. Some might be in two minds about that.’

  ‘I hope,’ Ogilvy said, ‘that none of us are presently going to be in two minds over more important matters. Continue.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Next, there’s what he does. Crosses the road, as you may say, and puts up in the local pub – a comfortable one, by all accounts. You have to admire that, in a manner of speaking. But you have to learn from it as well.’

  ‘Good,’ Ogilvy said.

  ‘Thank you, sir. It’s a matter of the cast of mind revealed, isn’t it? An eye for the uses of the invisible because sublimely obvious thing.’ Jefferson paused on this, and I had leisure to recall Edgar Allan Poe. The Detective Superintendent’s criminological studies had perhaps extended to that story of a purloined letter. ‘Hayes,’ Jefferson continued, ‘is flushed out of that pub in a manner that hasn’t quite been made clear to me. So where does he go? Home. The obvious answer is Home. Of course it’s no more than a notion. Or was no more than a notion. But worth investigating.’

  ‘Eminently,’ Ogilvy said.

  ‘Thank you, sir. Of course we’ve had that house in Uptoncester fairly closely watched from the first. It has been very cold, it seems, down there. Colder by a long way than here in London. So people have been going about huddled up.’ Jefferson paused on this. ‘Huddled up,’ he repeated with an air of muted drama – and directed those intimidating eyes in a baleful manner upon an officer sitting across the table from him. ‘Of course it was local men who were keeping Hayes’s house under observation. And what one of them saw was a huddled-up figure coming down the road carrying what you might call a bill-board or scratch-pad. Stopping and ringing the bells at every house, and going into some of them. Reading the meters, he might have been, or working for one of those opinion polls. And this local Vidocq wasn’t much interested in him. Isn’t even sure whether he entered Hayes’s house. Or, for that matter, came out again. Only some dim thought about it came to him later on.’

  ‘I’ve always regarded him as a very responsible officer,’ the man who had been glared at said gruffly. ‘Of course I’ve had the surveillance tightened up, and nobody will now come out without being questioned. I’ve had instructions to be very chary about seeming to harass the ladies of the house. Mr Ogilvy, I hope you will corroborate that.’

  ‘Certainly,’ Ogilvy said. ‘So there Hayes Senior may be – and out of the way of further mischief. And there, for the moment, we can leave him. I doubt whether he’s very near the hard core of the affair. So carry on, Mr Jefferson, to your next performer.’

  At this moment a uniformed man entered the room and handed Ogilvy a note. Raising a delaying hand, Ogilvy read it with what I judged to be increasingly studied composure. He then wrote a note himself, with which the uniformed man left the room. ‘Yes, Jefferson?’ Ogilvy said.

  ‘The next man, sir, would be Tandem. Hayes’s brother-in-law, that is.’

  ‘Ah, yes – Tandem.’ Ogilvy appeared to come to a decision. ‘One interesting thing about Tandem most of you haven’t yet heard about. He has been declaring himself as very apprehensive that a demand for ransom money may arrive on his doorstep, since it will be believed that he is the wealthy member of the family. Well, I’ve just heard—’ and Ogilvy tapped the note still in front of him—’what may relieve him of that anxiety. The kidnappers have moved again – and we can account ourselves lucky that they now feel in such a devil of a hurry. They’ve made their demand, but not to Mr Tandem. They’ve made it to the Lord Chancellor – or to his office, to be more exact.’

  �
�The Lord Chancellor!’ It was now for the first time that Sir Henry Daviot spoke. He sounded less dumbfounded than scandalised. ‘In heaven’s name what has Lord Hailsham to do with the abduction of my grandson and his companion?’

  ‘What, indeed. But, Sir Henry, may I put a question to you?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Does the name Kilroy convey anything to you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or Kissack, or Hudson?’

  ‘I think not. But names come and go.’

  ‘Precisely. And the owners of these three have two things in common. They are all now in gaol. And it was you who sent them down.’

  ‘And the demand?’

  ‘Yes, Sir Henry. It’s not for money. It’s for men.’

  This was a bombshell. It was rather as if an actual bomb had gone off in the big hall many floors below us. Or, more exactly, it was as if news had been received of rabies having crossed the English Channel. This was something which, commonly in a political context, was already happening in distant countries of which we knew little. Here, it was, I imagine, virtually a ‘first’. Robin Hayes and David Daviot were to be released from bondage if three common criminals were let out of gaol.

  My own heart sank as the implications of this came home to me. Recently at the back of my head had been the possibility that, in a last resort, the law might turn a blind eye to some actual ransom being unobtrusively arranged. But now the kidnappers were revealed as having acted in ghastly ignorance, making a demand to which, surely, no English government would submit. I wondered confusedly whether I was right about this. I glanced at Daviot and imagined that I saw my conviction mirrored on his face. And then I heard Ogilvy speaking again.

  ‘So here is progress, gentlemen. Let us be clear about that. An hour ago we had nothing, or almost nothing, although we weren’t saying so even among ourselves. Now we have the names of these three men in gaol; and somewhere is a group of their associates who are mounting this caper. They must be close associates, and with loyalty enough to venture such a desperate game. The criminal records of those three – Kilroy, Kissack, Hudson – are certain to yield a lead on some of them. The files are being sifted through now.’

  ‘They must be reckoning on that,’ somebody said. ‘The villains must. That naming those names gives us some sort of line on them. They’ll have taken precautions accordingly.’

  ‘Perfectly true. Here’s our chance, all the same.’

  With this, the meeting broke up – the affair having moved, as it were, into another gear. I wondered whether Ogilvy was putting a bold face on a desperate situation. Supposing a real trail were established, and the kidnappers knew the hunt was hot behind them: what would they then do with the two boys? Would they free them, and themselves simply make a run for it? Or would some more evil and vengeful course attract them? I thought – stupidly, no doubt, and in a fashion which liberal-minded persons will at once condemn – that it was a pity no image of a gallows could influence their deliberations.

  Sir Henry Daviot invited me home for the night, but I distrusted our present ability to be of any support to one another. I went instead to a married sister in Kensington, who took entirely in her stride my unheralded arrival without so much as a toothbrush. In the course of perhaps an hour’s sleep I had a dream characterised by acute anxiety. This was unsurprising. But in it I found myself to be one of the companions of Hernando Cortes during his dreadful march from Mexico to Honduras in 1524, an episode about which I must have read in Prescott’s book when an undergraduate. This is of no significance for my narrative – unless, indeed, the useless behaviour of my mind in sleep prompted me to seek something to be useful about when awake. I ate a hasty breakfast, thanked my sister and brother-in-law for their hospitality, and caught an early train to Uptoncester.

  XIV

  Glancing back over these pages, I find that I have accorded too much space to what was passing through my own head as the various events transacted themselves. Nevertheless, I make one final pause in the same interest now. Ogilvy and his team had impressed me, although I doubt whether I have managed to make them seem particularly impressive. The mere discovery that it appeared to have been for Robin’s home that the ill-fated boys had set out was no great achievement in itself. That rapid research into the activities and associations of three men named Kilroy, Kissack and Hudson would turn the tables on the kidnappers was a persuasion that remained to be proved. But I understood something of the excitement of the chase, and was even a little resentful that I had no part in it. My presence at the conference in Scotland Yard had been due merely to a whim on the judge’s part, and I had been accommodated at it with civility. But my active role in the story had been small and was now over, securely docketed in appropriate police notebooks. So what of any relevance could I find to do?

  The answer to this question had come to me in the form of a fairly vivid sense of the state of affairs now obtaining in the Hayes household. Mr Hayes, that surprisingly resourceful if thoroughly tiresome character, had contrived to return to its shelter – and no doubt believed that he had done so undetected. The police for the moment were uninterested in him: a minor figure usefully out of the way, to be picked up with a considerate unobtrusiveness later. But what, meanwhile, was the state of mind of his wife and daughter? They must both be conscious of the escaped man’s folly – and his wife was probably very cross about it. Neither, it seemed, had cleared her mind and hardened her heart to the extent of communicating with the local police.

  The position of Mrs Hayes – impossible woman though she was – struck me as particularly difficult. A person in the Queen’s commission, she was actually harbouring a fugitive from one of Her Majesty’s prisons. It seemed to me that the ladies ought to have some masculine support in their predicament, and that this I might myself afford them. My first visit had not been a great success, but I might do better on a second.

  Looking back now, I can see the notion as an absurdity. Yet it was powerful with me at the time, and had put me on the train for Uptoncester.

  Failing to find much of interest in a newspaper, I spent most of the journey looking out of the window. It was at a countryside now deeply blanketed in snow, and with villages, farms, stations, big roads, little roads alike appearing curiously dispeopled. It was as if under the sudden assault of winter the entire human race had lost its nerve and dodged under blankets of a more comfortable sort while thinking out a strategy for survival through freezing weeks ahead. We were clearly in for one of those frequently recurring winters the like of which we are told has not been seen for many years.

  In Uptoncester itself the effect was very similar. A white leprosy or Black Death might have annihilated its inhabitants. In the station yard, never exactly a bustling place, I looked in vain for a taxi – or even (what still existed in such places) a horse-drawn cab. Turning up the collar of my overcoat, I went ahead on foot and with considerable caution. Some stretches of pavement had been cleared of snow, and some had not. But whether exposed or treacherously lurking beneath the slush, there appeared to be everywhere a film of ice. A little snow was actually falling – and no sooner had I observed this than the few flakes turned into a blizzard. There was not, indeed, much wind to blow this about. So the stuff came straight down as if in an altogether inordinate hurry to join the great carpeting of it below. I have already had to record one instance of my rapidly losing all sense of direction under similarly adverse weather, and the same thing happened to me now. What I could see of Uptoncester’s landmarks perplexingly shifted ground even as I uncertainly glimpsed them. I came to a crossroads and hadn’t a clue as to whether to turn to my right or my left.

  But I wasn’t, it seemed, the only person at a loss, since even as I hesitated a vehicle drew to a halt beside me. I had an impression of the sort of post-office van which has been turned over to private ownership, and then a man was leaning out of its open window and waving a piece of paper at me.

  ‘Excuse me, mate,’ he called out
. ‘Can you tell me where I’ll find . . .?’

  And this was all I either heard or saw. For suddenly the universe appeared to crash down on my head. I don’t think that, for the moment, I felt any pain at all. I had been knocked senseless on the instant – there in the deserted heart of the quiet cathedral town.

  When I regained consciousness it was my first hazy conviction that I was being trundled through darkness on a wheelbarrow. The process was uncomfortably bumpy. I rolled over awkwardly, and my head – which was painful anyway – knocked painfully against metal. I put out an arm to steady myself. Or rather I tried to do this and failed. The arm wouldn’t move. The horrifying thought came to me that I had slipped on that treacherous ice and come down so heavily as to paralyse one of my limbs – or all of them. It was all of them. I was helpless. But I was helpless because I was tied up.

  ‘Not so cocky now, mate?’ My attempt at movement had been detected, and a voice spoke from the front of the van. For it was a van. I now remembered the van. And the van wasn’t after all entirely dark. There was a little grid through which light filtered, and through which the voice had come. ‘Incompetent, all you fuzz,’ the voice went on tolerantly. ‘Thought we hadn’t spotted you snooping around where you had no call to be t’other day? And again with that judge yesterday? And here you are today too? Shit! On leave you are now, mate. Furlough, as they say. The longest holiday you’re like to have for a long time. And don’t try hollering, or you’ll get quite a surprise. And you know where. Put it in often enough yourself, I’ll be bound. Bloody Pig.’

  I realised, without amusement, that I was believed to be a policeman, and that I was a captive in the same hands as were Robin Hayes and David Daviot. I made no attempt to holler. There might well be two men in front, and one might come into the back and pleasantly deal with me while the other simply drove on. There was nothing for it. I was booked for prison – and not an open one, either.