‘That certainly looks as though the boys intended to run away,’ said Laura, when, having accomplished nothing, she and Dame Beatrice were on their way home.
‘Yes, undoubtedly. Moreover, the other missing article is also significant.’
‘You mean the Ordnance map of the New Forest area. Mrs Travis said it was missing from her husband’s collection.’
‘I think the purloining of the map may be very important. It could indicate that the boys had the clear intention of running away, especially if Donald Travis took his accredited capital with him.’
‘If they are really running away and have pinched a map, Southampton is definitely the place they’d make for.’
‘The police will try to find out whether a motorist or lorry driver gave the lads a lift. They would hardly think of walking all the way to Southampton if they could get transport,’ said Laura.
‘Young boys might find it difficult to thumb a lift, as I believe it is called.’
‘Yes, it takes bone-headed, gormless girls to make a success of the gesturing thumb and the display of shapely limb, I suppose,’ said Laura.
‘Southampton?’ said Routh, when he heard Laura’s theory. ‘Ship aboard as cabin boys? That could well be their idea, Mrs Gavin. It’s still a young boy’s dream, I suppose, to run away to sea, even in these days. One thing, they are hardly likely to realise their ambition and, that being so, they’ll be left out on a limb unless they do the sensible thing and come straight home. They’ll maybe get a tanning when they get back, and another from the headmaster, but that would be better than having somebody do an Oliver Twist on them.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Oliver Twist fell among thieves, didn’t he? There’s plenty of scope for a thin young boy to be picked up by an experienced gang who prefer to make an illegal entry without breaking windows. A skinny little chap aged twelve or thirteen, like these two, could be put through an open bathroom or lavatory window to open up a house from the inside, if you see what I mean. Once these little lads find themselves left high and dry in a big town, they’re easy money for professional cracksmen.’
‘Well, you had better find them quickly, then.’
‘I’ve got three squad cars out on different routes, ma’am, but no reports have come in yet. The trouble is that the young fools have got such a long start of us. They left home some time early on Saturday morning — perhaps late on Friday night. They could be anywhere by now and in anybody’s hands. Young boys from this area and coming from decent homes haven’t got the savvy of slum kids or London cock-sparrows. They mayn’t be all that innocent, but ignorant of the world and its ways they undoubtedly are.’
‘Is there anything
‘Best leave it to us, ma’am. We’ve got the resources.’ An earlier broadcast appeal had soon brought a response from the public, some of it crackbrained, most of it unhelpful. A medium telephoned to say that she had seen ‘two little bodies, like the Babes in the Wood, buried under leaves in the New Forest’, but gave no location. More reasonable news began to come in. A shopkeeper reported that on Saturday morning two boys had come in as soon as she opened and had bought buns, sweet biscuits and cans of soft drinks. Another shopkeeper reported a sale of cheese at around the same time to two boys of, he thought, the age specified in the broadcast.
The general opinion in the masters’ common room was that a lot of fuss was being made over nothing and that the boys were playing truant and would return home when they had had enough of it or had spent all their money. The only member of staff who could have made a useful contribution was Mr Pybus, the art master, who had actually seen the boys on the road and spoken to them, but from whose woolgathering and narcissistic mind all recollection of the incident, which had also occurred on the Saturday, had vanished. Indeed, to do him justice, it is doubtful whether he had heard any of the comments which were made in the staffroom, since he spent most of the time when the staff gathered during the break or in part of the dinner-hour in sorting over the store of paintings, drawings and pottery which he kept ready for displaying to inspectors or, on open days, to the boys’ parents. He proposed to stage a mammoth exhibition at the grand official opening and was planning what he hoped would be some pleasant surprises for the visitors which would bring him much credit and acclaim and perhaps would attract the attention of the local press.
A very definite clue, however, came to the police from a lorry driver who said that he had heard the broadcast and had seen, in the dusk of Saturday evening, two boys on the road to Cadnam in the New Forest. They said they were on their way to Southampton, where they told him they lived, and the driver had arranged for an empty coach following his lorry to give them a lift.
The search, thereupon, was focused on the port, although Sergeant Bennett said to Routh that he betted the boys had smuggled themselves on board a boat after all. There was news, however, at the central railway station. The same two boys had bought food at the station buffet more than once, and the girl who had served them had done so for the last time on the Sunday. Following this report there came a flood of information, much of it useless. The usual crop of psychopaths turned up, one of them even going to the police with a toupee which he declared he had snatched from the head of a boy who had stolen his watch and run away.
Less bizarre information came in and some far more credible stories. The boys had been seen sitting on a park bench talking to a woman. They had been seen down by the pier from which the Solent ferries to the Isle of Wight departed. A woman remembered seeing two rumpled, rather dirty, very tired boys in the waiting room at the central station. This last statement buttressed that made by the girl at the buffet, but did nothing to push the enquiry further forward. There was no doubt that the boys had been in Southampton on the Sunday, but it was not until a post-office clerk telephoned to report that a boy named R. Travis had drawn money out on demand that the police learned that the boys had still been in Southampton on the Monday morning.
This seemed to narrow the search, but after the post-office report there was no more news to be had. Enquiries at three Southampton railway stations produced no evidence that the lads had bought tickets and taken a train — ‘although,’ said Routh, ‘I wouldn’t put it past a couple of boys to take platform tickets out of a slot machine, go through the barrier when a train was in and smuggle themselves on to it. If they did that, they could be anywhere by now, including Portsmouth or somewhere in Somerset or Devon.’
When Routh heard of the report by the post-office clerk, he drove to Southampton, where the Hampshire constabulary were making every effort to trace the missing boys. Leaving his car (which was his own and not a police vehicle) in a car park, he sought directions to the branch office where the clerk worked and interviewed her. She could tell him nothing more. One boy, not two, had come into the post-office, but she was sure of the name and had recorded it and she gave a description of the boy which fitted.
On his way back to the car park, Routh had to pass the shop window in which the notice of an exhibition of Mr Pybus’s paintings was displayed. He stopped and read the notice, looked at the picture beside it and felt sufficiently
