‘Doesn’t sound too good, does it? If those two men were trying to dig up the body and the boys recognised them, the men might not feel safe while the boys are still alive. But what does Ronsonby think
‘I think there must be some evidence at the school which perhaps we could unearth.’
‘I bet there is, but if the other boys haven’t given it to the police, they are not likely to give it to us.’
‘Mr Ronsonby says the location of the campsite which the two boys gave to their classmates is not the place where they seem to have camped. He refers to second-year boys. How old would they be?’
‘First years are eleven to twelve, so second years would be twelve to thirteen — nearer thirteen at this end of the school year. I’ll tell you what! It’s a very long shot, but from my memories of the short time I spent as a mentor and preceptor, I recollect what hell the last couple of days of the term could be. Everyone on the staff is longing for breaking-up afternoon or else for a sub-machine gun to pick off the class one by one, but you had to hang on to your sanity and in desperation you set them work to do which they and you both knew would never be looked at, let alone marked. There wouldn’t be any specialisation, either, for at least that last couple of days, so you would be stuck with your own mob from nine until four while you were trying to make out reports and lists. It was hell, as I remember it.’
‘I see what you mean, I think. I am not referring to your last remark, but to the fact that somewhere among this litter of unread and grudgingly produced exercises there may be a clue to the real holiday intentions of the missing boys.’
‘I said it was a long shot, and it certainly is.’
‘I see only one difficulty. If the teacher had no intention of reading the work, it would hardly have been done in a regular exercise book, would it?’
‘Oh, no, of course it wouldn’t. In that case it would
‘A clear indication of the ephemeral nature of the end product. That brings me to my point. Would not all such sheets of paper have been thrown away on the last day of the term?’
‘Probably not. Most teachers would try to hoodwink the class by bunging the papers into a drawer as though for future reference.’
It was true that specialisation was discontinued during the last couple of days of term at the Sir George Etherege school, but the younger masters had their own ways of getting through the time without the loss of their own or their pupils’ lives. They made private arrangements to swap classes.
The masters most in request were the junior English master — ‘you can find ’em something to read, can’t you? — or you can read aloud to them or something?’; Mr Pybus, the art master — ‘kids are always happy splashing paint about, so do us a favour, Pybie’; and the music master, Mr Phillips, who, although he ranked as senior staff, was always willing to get rid of his own boys and hold gramophone sessions for the boys of others’. The other member of the syndicate was the master who took PE and games. Having no classroom resources, he was an enthusiast for the swap-classes method of getting through the dreaded end of term.
Mr Ronsonby was well aware that these transactions and plottings went on and he had no objection to closing a blind eye to them. In any case, the swap-shop could flourish only on a limited basis and among only a few of his staff. In fact, it was better, he thought, to wink at these unofficial exchanges rather than to put up with the anarchy which he knew would prevail in certain classrooms if a weak teacher was left for several hours in charge of the same set of boys. If this happened, he knew that it would result in boys being sent down to him for punishment just when he was at his busiest and least anxious to be disturbed.
Dame Beatrice’s telephone call found him in conference with Mr Burke and Margaret Wirrell. They were going over the lists of primary-school children who were expecting transference to the Sir George Etherege building at the beginning of the autumn term.
Just before Dame Beatrice’s telephone call came through, Margaret had made coffee for Mr Ronsonby, Mr Burke and herself and Mr Ronsonby had been retailing an amusing anecdote concerning a Catholic junior school which sent a consignment of eleven- to twelve-year-olds to him each September, there being no senior school of their own persuasion in the neighbourhood.
‘You know that our custom is to ask the junior-school heads to come up and see me?’ he said. ‘Of course, when the little boys arrive at the beginning of term they are set an English and a maths test so that we can grade them according to our own ideas and standards, but as a matter of courtesy I always ask the head teacher to place the boys in what the junior school considers to be their order of merit.
‘Well, the head of St Saviour’s happens to be a nun, so when I handed her the list she had sent in to us and asked her to ignore the fact that the names were in alphabetical order and to assess the children she was sending, she refused to look at it. “Oh, Mr Ronsonby,” she said, “nobody but the good Lord could place these children in order of merit.” ’
Mr Burke, who had already heard the story, laughed dutifully.
‘Oh, well, the junior-school assessments often don’t agree with ours,’ he said, ‘so she was probably on a non- collision course there.’
It was at this point that Margaret took Dame Beatrice’s call.
‘Dame Beatrice wants to know whether the second-year boys wrote essays at the end of the term,’ she said, ‘and especially whether Maycock and Travis did any work on paper.’
‘Sure to have done,’ said Mr Burke. ‘Moreover, from staffroom gossip, I happen to know that Waite, who takes the second years for English, set the essays and Pybus got the boys to illustrate them, and that both the compositions and the pictures were then handed over to Scaife as the form master, so, unless he has thrown them away, they are still in his cupboard.’
‘Pybus, eh? What a good-natured man he is, to help the younger fellows!’ said Mr Ronsonby, who knew full well that, far from being good-natured enough to help the junior masters, Mr Pybus was concerned only to get shot of his own form, who neither liked nor respected him and called him, almost to his face, Old Piebald, a slighting reference to his receding hair. The school’s nickname for Mr Pythias had been the Old Python, but this was a tribute, in its way, to a strong disciplinarian of whom it was as well to be wary.
