No Winding-Sheet

‘There must be some books, yes, but the governors also suggest wristwatches and cameras, lightning calculators, tool sets and, of all things, conjurors’ outfits. Then they want to give new shirts to the rugby first fifteen and special blazers for the cricketing first eleven.’

‘Thus returning most of the money to its sources of origin. Well have we been described as a nation of shopkeepers,’ said Mr Burke in cynical reference to the way many of the governing body made a living.

‘Exactly. One can hardly blame them and no doubt a boy would be better pleased with a watch or a camera than with a copy of the works of Shakespeare or a set of Jane Austen’s novels. Take young Scaife with you and see what you can do. You know which emporia are kept by members of the governing body. Oh, and don’t forget gramophone records. Scaife will know what appeals to boys. He has his occasional uses. I wish his discipline was firmer, though.’

‘How about Phillips? Aren’t gramophone records more in his line? Won’t he expect to choose them?’

‘He would choose classical music. No, take Scaife. You can leave the sixth to work in the library and I will keep an eye on Scaife’s little boys while he is gone. I’m glad he’s got his runaways back. They and the literary-minded Prouding are now spending each break and games period in copying out for me the whole of A Comedy of Errors.’

This, as it turned out, was almost the only punishment meted out to Travis and Maycock, for Mr Travis’s bark turned out to be far worse than his bite, so, apart from stopping Donald’s pocket money until enough had accumulated to replace the sum he had drawn out at the post office in Southampton, Mr Travis had imposed no other penalty and was happy enough to have his son safely back at home.

‘You guffin!’ he said. ‘If you were scared by that letter, why didn’t you show it to your mother and me?’

Maycock, in a way, was less lucky, for his mother turned tearful on him and reiterated through her sobbing, ‘Oh, how could you go off like that without a word? How could you go off and leave me all alone?’

Meanwhile, having been relegated to playing a minor role in the hunt for the murderer, Routh was following his own line of enquiry, but was fully prepared, if his chance discovery of the exhibition of paintings turned out to have any significance, to share his knowledge with his superiors a little later on.

In one respect he was lucky. Mr Ronsonby telephoned him and said that at the official opening of the school there would be on display a number of prizes of a kind tempting enough to attract a thief. The headmaster wanted a policeman in plain clothes on duty at the school until the gifts had been distributed, and he asked for the Detective-Inspector’s co-operation.

‘There is more than five hundred pounds’ worth of the stuff,’ said Mr Ronsonby, ‘more than enough to tempt a petty criminal. Moreover, much of it is readily portable.’

‘I’ll come myself,’ said Routh, who had been wondering how to obtain a seemingly unofficial interview with Mr Pybus without arousing the art master’s or anybody else’s suspicions that his questions were other than innocuous. ‘I’ll have a Detective-Constable on duty as well, but I know all the local sneak-thieves and they know me, so don’t worry about your prizes, sir. I expect they’re insured, anyway.’

‘Well, thanks to the Church of England, those boys have been rounded up,’ said Laura, ‘so we need not bother about them when we get to Southampton. Do you think there is anything in this idea that Pybus had pinched Pythias’s pictures and is exhibiting and, I suppose, selling them as his own work? If so, he’d be a lot safer doing it in London. Southampton isn’t far enough away from the school to be a safe place to pull off a fiddle like that.’

‘I think there must be a striking resemblance between the sketch on this letter — I have borrowed it for purposes of comparison — and the picture in the art dealer’s window, but we shall see. I am also wondering whether the pictures on exhibition bear a signature and, if they do, whose it is,’ said Dame Beatrice.

Routh had described the location of the shop. They had no difficulty in finding it. The picture and the notice were still in the window and it hardly needed much scrutiny of the sketch on the letter to identify the similarities between it and the painting at which they were looking. They went into the shop and to the long room at the back of it where the rest of the paintings were on display.

‘Everything is for sale, ladies,’ said the proprietor hopefully.

There were at least fifty pictures on the walls of the small gallery. Dame Beatrice took out the letter Pythias had written to Mrs Buxton, looked at the sketch of Greek fishing boats and then studied two or three paintings which she could not believe were the work of the letter writer.

They were copies of the figures and decoration on sixth-century black- and red-figured pottery. One was of a black-figure emphora depicting the decapitated Gorgon Medusa with the goddess Athena, the god Hermes and the hero Perseus standing by and holding the Gorgon’s head. By the same devoted but laboured hand was a copy of the red-figured vase by the Andokides painter, but, again, although it was a faithful copy of the original, it gave the impression of aiming at nothing more than meticulous accuracy and lacked any kind of spontaneity.

Among the other pictures were a spirited portrayal of the Lion Gate at Mycenae, an impression in sepia of the Cyclopean walls of ruined Argos and, with the narrow end-wall of the gallery all to itself, a large picture of the Acropolis at Athens, masterly in its detail and almost breathtaking in its impact on the beholder. There were also studies, by the same hand, of the theatre at Epidaurus and the harbour of Piraeus.

Dame Beatrice looked again at the letter, went back to look again at some paintings of Cyclades seascapes, and then bought the picture of fishing boats in harbour for which the drawing in the letter had been a preliminary sketch.

She always carried a small magnifying glass in her handbag, and before she had gone to the counter she had looked at the bottom corners of each picture on show and then handed the glass to Laura. Their findings were the same.

‘Well,’ said Laura, when they were outside the shop, ‘every picture has the same symbol, but no actual signature, yet they are not all the work of the same artist.’

‘And the symbol?’

‘Well, at school we always called it pi. It was useful when one was dealing with the measurements of circles. It used to remind me of one of the triolithons at Stonehenge, so I rather liked it.’

‘Pi is the letter “p” in the Greek alphabet, of course, and the choice of it by both