a time. He may be wandering about, not knowing who he is or where he ought to be. He must be found, for his own sake.’
‘I don’t want to get mixed up with the police!’
‘Neither does the school, but he’ll have to be accounted for, won’t he? I mean, if he had decided to give notice to you, he would have done it before this. Besides, he would have turned up at school, no matter where he spent the Christmas holidays, unless he was ill. This really must be looked into.’
‘Well, I didn’t really think he was the sort to just walk out without giving me his notice, I’ll allow that. Besides, his clothes, most of them, are still here. Naturally I’ve been to his room to check. Perhaps it is a bit worrying, like you say.’
‘I wish you had let us know that he had left here.’
‘Well,’ said the landlady, ‘all I could have told you is that he isn’t here now. I couldn’t tell you where he had gone, so you’d have been no better off as to that, would you? I don’t reckon it was any of my business to let the school know.’
The news with which Margaret Wirrell returned to the school perturbed Mr Ronsonby deeply. He sent the secretary for the deputy head and, when Burke came in, he said, ‘Pythias has not returned to his lodgings. He had all that money with him when we broke up for Christmas and then had an argument, it seems, with his landlady. Because of this, he went off earlier than expected, carrying the money with him, and I have a most uneasy feeling that he may have been set upon and robbed.’
‘I suppose that’s possible,’ said Burke. ‘A good many people knew about the journey to Greece. Quite a number of parents had opted to join the party and any number of others must have heard about it and knew the date by which payments had to be in, but how do we know he didn’t go back to his lodgings?’
‘Margaret has just returned from a visit to Pythias’s landlady. The woman knows nothing about him since the Friday on which we broke up. If the money has gone, it will have to be replaced, of course. I am deeply concerned for Pythias. I’m afraid it means calling in the police and that will involve the school in the last kind of publicity we want.’
‘There’s the time lag, too,’ said Burke. ‘It’s more than three weeks since we broke up. I suppose — ’ He hesitated and Ronsonby finished the sentence for him.
‘The unthinkable can’t possibly have happened,’ he said. ‘Pythias cannot have absconded with the money. I will never believe that of a member of my staff.’
2
In Retrospect
« ^ »
Mr Ronsonby had more things on his mind than the mystery of Mr Pythias’s absence from his duties, worrying, inconvenient and puzzling though that was.
Although the Sir George Etherege school had been operating for some time, the buildings were still being completed. They had been planned and the foundations laid when the 1939 war put an end to the project for years. Boys continued to attend what had become known as the Old School, about a mile away from the present building. Expanding numbers, however, and early murmurs of comprehensive education, had persuaded the education committee to reconsider the plan to build the new school on even more extensive lines than the original blueprint allowed for.
The consequence was that hordes of young workmen — to Mr Ronsonby and the staff their number appeared to be legion — sang, whistled and shouted their way through their own and the school’s working day. They kicked footballs against classroom outside-walls during their tea breaks and drove the beleaguered garrison of earnest schoolmasters almost crazy when they operated a concrete mixer which, as one of the junior masters put it, ‘made a row like the devil lambasting the legions of hell’. At any rate, while it was in action, it made any oral teaching impossible. Even the caretaker, an ex-policeman and unflappable in the ordinary course of events, began to feel the strain, but then, unlike the staff, he had to bear with the workmen and their noise during school holidays as well as after school hours and during Saturday overtime working.
The caretaker was named Sparshott. He had two children who were old enough to have left home, so, with his wife, his younger son and his dog, he lived in the cottage which had been built for him in the school grounds.
He disliked most of the schoolboys and he bitterly detested the young workmen, although he had made friends with their foreman, a man of his own age. Shortly before Christmas, he had said once or twice to him, ‘Can’t your lads clear up as they go along? The asphalt’s a shambles and the quad is worse. That hole they’ve sunk in the middle of the quad is big enough to bury an articulated lorry. Can’t they fill it in before the end of the Christmas holiday? It’s a bloody eyesore left like that.’
‘I know, Mr Sparshott, I know. The thing is, you see, as it’s there so’s they can bury the rubbish as it comes along.’
‘Then why can’t they go ahead and bury it? It’s an eyesore, I tell you. The headmaster was complaining about it after he took the morning assembly at the end of last term. From the platform, him and the staff have to look straight out of them big winders in the hall on to what looks like sommat as was left over from the blitz.’
‘I know, Mr Sparshott, but till they’ve done with making a mess there’s not much point in clearing of it up. They’re all union men, and if I was to order ’em to bury all that rubbish and fill in the hole, I’d have big trouble on my hands. There’s bound to be more rubbish before we’ve done, you see, and that ’ud mean digging another hole. They simply wouldn’t do it, Mr Sparshott, not nohow.’
‘There’s another thing the headmaster wants to know. When is that back entrance going to be finished? Till them back doors is on and I can lock the school up secure come the night, nothing ain’t safe from looters. As it is, youngsters gets in over the fence that’s round the field and plays merry hell. They let all the school chickens out over Christmas, blast ’em!’
Although in his uniformed days he had had only a modest function in a village some thirty miles out of the town in which the new school was being built, Sparshott was a conscientious man trained to accept responsibility. He was keenly aware that the school building housed a large quantity of valuable material, and the fact that he could not lock the back doors worried him.
