Over the Easter weekend there was another unsightly heap of soil and gravel in the middle of the quad, and at the instigation of Sir Wilfred, who was not only the chairman of governors but a personal friend of the Chief Constable, a policeman had been detailed to patrol the alley which ran along the end of the back gardens of those houses which bordered two sides of the school field. This patrolling, paid for by the governors, was to continue until the pond was completed, although what precautions were to be taken to guard it after that, nobody knew.
Guided by hindsight, Mr Ronsonby felt that he had guessed all along what would happen when the excavations began, but at the time he was as surprised, horrified and incredulous as everybody else. The first notification he received of the terrible news came in the form of a telegram from Mr Burke, sent to his holiday hotel in Cornwall.
Remembering that precious time had gone by during the Christmas holidays before it was realised that Pythias was missing, Mr Ronsonby had left his holiday address with Mr Burke, and Mr Burke, since he was not going away for Easter, had checked, as usual, that Sparshott had his telephone number in case of any emergency which affected the school.
The news, therefore, had to go from the contractors to Sparshott and from him by telephone to Mr Burke before it reached Mr Ronsonby by telegram. The men digging out the foundations for the pond had called at the caretaker’s cottage on the Tuesday after Easter Monday and had brought him the news.
‘Something nasty turned up, mate. Better come and have a dekko for yourself. It’s a police matter, us reckons.’
Like Mr Ronsonby, Sparshott felt that he also had always known what was to be brought to light. He walked across to school with the man who had brought the message and they went into the quad. Here a little gang of workmen were standing round the hole they had dug. They were leaning on picks and shovels, but otherwise they might have passed for a group of mourners standing around an open grave. The comparison with an open grave was fair enough. At one end of the hole and on top of the rubbish which, mistakenly, it had been taken for granted that Mr Filkins’s gardening club had tidied away, was a very dead man.
During his time in the police force Sparshott had seen a number of dead bodies. Only one of them had been caused neither by accident nor suicide. It was that of a woman who had been struck down by a drunken husband and had caught her head on the angle of the stone surround of a fireplace. She was battered but recognisable enough, and the hysterical husband had gone straight to the police station to report what had happened.
Sparshott had also seen the bodies of suicides, one of whom had taken an overdose, another who had thrown herself into the little local river, and there had been a man who, with no consideration whatever for the squeamish person who had found his body, had decided to cut his own throat — but, again, each corpse was recognisable. The body in the quad was not recognisable. It had been in the ground too long. Sparshott turned away and said, as unemotionally as he could, ‘I reckon that must be poor Mr Pythias.’
‘You’ll need the police,’ reiterated the workman who had called at the cottage to give him the news.
‘I’m going to ring ’em straight away. You don’t need to advise me. I’m ex-police myself,’ said Sparshott.
‘We’re knocking off for today. Can’t go on while
‘I reckon we’ll be knocking off for a good long time to come,’ said another of the men. ‘Once the police gets on to this, no knowing when they’ll let us come back. Want us to shovel some earth back on to the poor bugger, mate, just to show a bit of respect, like?’
‘No, certainly not. I been a copper, I tell you, so I knows the ropes. They’ll want to see things exactly as they are,’ replied Sparshott firmly.
The men collected their jackets and put them on. They loaded their implements and themselves into the truck which had brought them to the school and drove away through the front gates which Sparshott had opened for the truck when it arrived. No farewells were said. The truck could have been a funeral car. Sparshott unlocked Margaret Wirrell’s office and went to the telephone. ‘We reckon we’ve found poor Mr Pythias, sir,’ he said. ‘Could you make it convenient to come along, seeing as Mr Ronsonby ain’t available?’
9
Self-Appointed Sleuth
« ^ »
Apart from the medical and pathological evidence which came out at the inquest, there was plenty to confirm that the body was indeed that of Mr Pythias. For one thing, his empty briefcase, found beside the body, was identified by three members of the staff separately and there was enough unrotted material which was clothing the corpse for it to be recognised as part of the suit which Pythias had been wearing on what had proved to be his last day as a schoolmaster.
The Chief Constable and the Detective-Superintendent now superseded Routh in the enquiry, and the Detective-Inspector was obliged to place himself under their orders. As he had some knowledge of her household, his first assignment was to question Mrs Buxton and take her yet again through her story, including her description of the two visitors who had collected Pythias’s property.
‘Look, do you want me to have a breakdown?’ she demanded tearfully. ‘How can I help what wicked men do?’
‘You can’t, but you can help
At this she rallied, sniffed, dried her tears and said, ‘I’ve told you all about ’em I can, haven’t I? Come to think of it, though, my nevvy, him on the top floor, he see ’em, too, and, being an artist and them being togged up like they were, he made a sketch of ’em and give it to me. I can show it you if you like.’
‘I don’t know why you haven’t shown it to me before,’ said Routh. ‘It could be valuable corroborative evidence.’
‘What of?’
‘That these people really did call here, of course.’
‘Did you doubt my word on it, then? Oh, well, who supposes the police to be gentlemen?’
