“Can’t remember. What was it?”
“You said that the students don’t gang up on us. Well, it seems to me that they’ve ganged up on Jones, you know, and they ganged up on my predecessor, didn’t they?”
“Only a few of them. Barry reports that he’s been discharged from hospital—Merve, you know. Gassie won’t have him back, though. He’s persuaded Merve’s uncle to give him a job in his steelworks. As for Jonah, well, he’s been asking for trouble for years.”
“Granted. But, having ganged up on him, why are some of the students so uneasy? I mean, you wouldn’t say that my swimmers have much in common with Richard, who is a muscle man and operates the shot and occasionally the hammer, and Rixie, who’s a discus man, would you?”
“I don’t quite get your point.”
“Look, it’s what Celia is always getting at. The various squads here are not only in competition with other colleges and the big clubs and so forth; they are very much in competition with one another. That’s why there’s no real cohesion in Joynings. The College doesn’t add up.”
“So?”
“Well, it makes for our convenience in a great many ways, but it means that, in this case, the probable parking of Jones in something they refer to as the whale’s belly has gone outside all their normal behaviour.”
“I’ve answered that one. What the virtuous, such as you and me, couldn’t have brought about—i.e., the complete fusion of all the warring sects in College—the egregious Jonah has accomplished simply by being just that shade above the odds which, even to our delinquent flock, makes all the difference.”
“Possibly. I grant you that, but I return to my first point: why, having decided to banish Jones in this way, are some of them so uneasy? Apart from Richard, who’s a sentimentalist, these kids are tough nuts. They must therefore have reason to be afraid of something. I really think we’d better find Jones, you know.”
There was a long pause. Hamish, who had learned from Dame Beatrice, his mother’s employer and his own best friend, the value of silence, waited while Henry thought over what had been said.
“How long did the prototype remain in the whale’s belly?” asked Henry suddenly.
“Three days and three nights, or so I seem to remember.”
“Oh, well, then, we need not worry unduly. Jonah won’t come to harm in that time if we don’t manage to find him before Saturday morning. I expect they will count Wednesday, so that leaves the rest of today and all of Friday. They say they’re feeding him, and that’s the main thing. I think, you know, we may assume that Jonah will be at breakfast on Saturday morning or even at dinner, if he’s lucky, tomorrow night.”
“But supposing they’ve shut him up in some place where the oxygen is liable to give out? They may not have thought of that. I wonder who started the rumour that he’d resigned? Of course, I know it’s a coverup by the students to account for his absence, but nobody has really swallowed it, so it didn’t get them far.”
“That’s true enough, but you know what cuckoos they are. Well, your panic-warning about lack of oxygen has impressed me more than a little, so I do think perhaps it behoves us to look for the wretched fellow.”
“When do we begin?”
“After lights-out. We’ll give the halls of residence a good hour and a half, I think, before we up with our electric torches and have a scout round. You realize when all this must have taken place, don’t you?”
“During the film, I suppose.”
“I’m afraid so. Attendance at the show was optional, in any case, but, apart from that, it would have been easy enough for two or three of the chaps to slip out. The hall was in darkness and, anyway, people do drift in and out during a longish film, if only to visit the loo.”
“Is it certain that Jones was in College during the film?”
“Well, he was present at lunch, if you remember, so I imagine he was on the premises later. At any rate, he helped me (to my great surprise, I must say) to supervise the clearing of the dining-hall and the setting-out of the chairs ready for the film-show, and that would have made it rather late for him to get to the pub. Besides, I think he had some plan to sit next to Lesley at the film, because I heard her telling him in no uncertain tone that she would be in the gym with her competition squad while the show was on, and wouldn’t be attending it.”
“Well, there’s no doubt some of the hearties know where he is and have pressurized the lesser brethren into keeping quiet. I’m not concerned about his diet, and if they’re keeping him fed, they must be letting in a little air, but I do hope the lunatics haven’t overdone the thing in other ways. He’s a powerful chap, although he’s gone to seed a bit, and I think they may have had to rough him up before they could get him put away,” said Hamish.
“More than likely,” Henry agreed. “Oh, well, I’ll meet you outside your room at half-past twelve.”
They separated. At half-past ten that night, Hamish, with two hours to get through before zero hour, composed a letter to his mother. In it he mentioned Jones’s disappearance, putting this down to a students’ rag, and added that he thought the College and its inhabitants would interest Dame Beatrice. Having addressed the letter and stamped it, he strolled downstairs to the College collecting-box which was just outside the front door, and put in his letter. Every member of staff possessed a front-door key, so, having closed the door behind him, he decided to go for a walk in the grounds, and began by taking a path towards the sports field.
He skirted the running-track and strolled towards the men’s changing-rooms. He had been wondering where the students could have hidden Jones if he were still somewhere on the premises and, although he thought the choice of the changing-rooms would have been an unlikely one, he decided to make a reconnaissance.
It was dark by this time, but the summer night was full of stars. As he walked across the turf—for the changing-rooms had been put up on the side of the grounds furthest from the house but nearest to the halls of residence—he thought about the Warden and wondered, not for the first time, what that enigmatical man was really like. From Gascoigne Medlar his thoughts turned again to Jones. Even allowing for all the claims which close relationship—and was a brother-in-law so close a relative, after all?—it seemed strange that such a single-minded egoist as he judged Medlar to be should tolerate, at close quarters and for so long a time, the only person on the College staff who seemed bent on sabotage. How many of Jones’s exploits could be put down to sheer but well- intentioned idiocy became more and more doubtful, but of his drinking-habits and the even more reprehensible actions to which his self-indulgence committed him, there seemed no reasonable doubt. Medlar’s continued toleration of him seemed remarkable enough to be mysterious unless (again it occurred to Hamish) Jones was in a
