‘Oh, yes, sir, the same night.’
‘Thank you, Carter, but how do you think this will help us?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’
‘Never mind. You were right to mention a bicycle. You have no idea of where it was that the two boys proposed to set up this camp I have heard about?’
‘No, sir, except I don’t think it was at Stemlees Bottom, sir. That’s where people usually camp out.’
‘We have been given that information. Unless you know something more than that, you may sit down.’
‘Please, sir, my bike — bicycle — was — well, the saddlebag was soaking wet, sir, as if the bicycle had been ridden into a watersplash or something, and there isn’t anything like that between where Maycock lives and that part of the moor round Stemlees Bottom. I wondered if Maycock spent that day sort of prospecting, sir.’
‘It’s a clue of a sort, even if a very slender one,’ said Routh, when they had left the form room to return to the headmaster’s office. ‘Anyway, it’s all we’ve got, so I’ll get to work on it. A watersplash? Not very helpful. Could equally well have been a small brook or a waterlogged ditch. Mind if I go back to that room, sir, and put one more question to that lad?’ Without waiting for an answer, he turned about, ran up the stairs, tapped at Mr Scaife’s door and entered a classroom which had emerged from the holy stillness engendered by the presence of the headmaster into a cacophony of shouting, argument, questions and banging on desks. Mr Scaife had been adding to the din in an effort to shout everybody else down and restore order.
As soon as Routh was noticed, the noise stopped. Boys who had been standing in the gangways the better to get their views across, sat down. Boys who had been stamping their feet gave themselves a rest. Boys who had been beating a tattoo with rulers put these down. Mr Scaife, who had given up a hopeless struggle, took his head out of his hands to see to what he owed the restoration of peace and sanity.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘it’s you again, Inspector.’
‘Another word with Carter, if I may, sir. Now, Carter, when you got your bike back, the saddlebag — what kind of saddlebag would that be?’
‘The useful kind. It hung down from the crossbar. It’s a proper touring bike and nearly new. I only had it for Christmas.’
‘Maycock borrowed it, and told you he was going to visit his aunt, and you don’t think he went to Stemlees Bottom. Tell me, was your bike muddy as well as wet when he returned it?’
‘No, but the water hasn’t done my saddlebag any good.’
‘So you don’t think he had ridden it into a ditch?’
‘No. It would have been muddy all up the wheels and it wasn’t.’
‘So you deduced a watersplash. Good for you. We shall need you in the force before long.’ Routh heard the noise break out again as soon as he was in the corridor. He returned to the headmaster, thanked him and departed. He was well acquainted with the environs and he knew of two watersplashes, both well within cycling distance of the town. One was in the next village, but there was no need whatever to push or ride a bicycle through it. Cars were obliged to take to the water, but there was a handy wooden footbridge which cyclists and pedestrians could use.
The other watersplash was further off and was at what Routh called ‘the back of beyond’. Here again, however, there was a footbridge. In wet weather the splash could be as much as five feet deep, for it lay in a dip in a country road at the foot of a steep gradient. A packhorse bridge had been built high up at the side of it, however, a couple of centuries previously.
‘I don’t think a watersplash is the answer,’ Routh said to Detective-Sergeant Bennett, ‘but it’s the only clue we’ve got, so we’ll take a posse and some dogs and see what we can turn up. I don’t suppose there’s much to worry about. All the same, the boys were in school the night those chaps broke the washroom window and got into the quad. They might have recognised somebody even if young Sparshott didn’t, so we’ve got to find them and make sure they’re all right.’
At the Sir George Etherege school Mr Ronsonby addressed himself to his secretary. ‘I’m extremely worried about those missing boys,’ he said. ‘What do you think we can do?’
‘Ask Dame Beatrice to find them for us,’ said Margaret Wirrell.
13
Writers and Painters
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Mr Ronsonby has lost two boys,’ said Dame Beatrice to Laura Gavin.
‘From your tone I don’t think you mean that two of his own sons have died. It must be to do with the school.’
‘How perceptive you are! Yes, the two young boys who managed to bamboozle the caretaker into admitting them to the school after hours have disappeared. Mr Ronsonby wants us to find them.’
‘Don’t the other boys know what they are up to? Boys usually know that sort of thing about one another. Are they truanting?’
‘It appears that they bear an unblemished reputation.’
‘Then they are certain to be villains! There is no such thing as a boy with a genuinely unblemished reputation. What’s the story?’
‘The boys were present when (it is now assumed) two men, having broken into the school, began to disinter the body of Mr Pythias. It is now the beginning of the summer term and these two boys have failed to turn up at school. They are supposed to have camped out on the heath for a few days, but nothing more has been heard of them. Their parents and Mr Ronsonby are extremely worried and the police have been notified.’
