“I’ll call him and tell him to bike over here. He’ll come like a bird.”
“Do. And maybe we’d better get your boy, too, Mr. Felse. He was on the scene before Mr. Towne arrived, there just may be something he can tell us.” He handed the telephone across his desk, and Tim dialled his own number.
And thus began the great hunt for Paddy Rossall.
“No, he isn’t,” said Phil. “He didn’t come home to lunch. I took it for granted he’d sneaked round to the dunes to watch your operations from a distance, since you wouldn’t let him in on the ground floor. Maybe he cadged a lunch with Aunt Rachel. Try there. I’m waiting for those apricots, the monkey!” She added at the last moment, with the first faint and distant hint of anxiety in her voice: “Call me back if you find him, Tim, won’t you?”
“No, he isn’t,” said Miss Rachel, with some asperity because of her own irrepressible conscience. “Tamsin took a snack out to him about half past eleven, and he’d already filled his basket and gone. Naturally I took it he’d taken them home to Phil. Oh—and he hasn’t been near the church, either? He’d want to keep out of sight, of course. Well, don’t fuss over him, Tim, that’s fatal. He’ll come home when he’s hungry.”
She replaced the receiver with unnecessary violence, and found Tamsin studying her very narrowly across the desk.
“I gather Paddy didn’t go home.”
“No, he didn’t. You said yourself where he’d most likely be,” snapped Miss Rachel.
“I know I did, but it seems he isn’t. And I didn’t know, when I published my estimate, what you’d been saying to him—did I?”
“You still don’t,” pointed out Miss Rachel, all the more maliciously for the alarm she couldn’t quite allay, and wouldn’t acknowledge. “He’ll come home when he’s got everyone nicely worried, that’s what he’s after. I’m not going to fall for that, if you’re stupid enough to buy it. Children are born blackmailers.”
He was perfectly all right, of course. He was simply hiding somewhere and sulking, and gloating over the uneasiness he was causing everyone. Well, it wasn’t going to work. He’d run away once, as a very small boy—like many another before him, in dudgeon over some fancied injustice. But he’d come home fast enough when it began to rain. Children are realists; they know which side their bread’s buttered.
“No, he isn’t,” said Dominic, surprised. “Have you got Dad there? No, not to worry, only we heard the rumours that are running round, and we couldn’t help wondering. But we haven’t seen anything of Paddy. Yes, of course I’ll come, like a shot. Well, I’ve been out there on the Head part of the morning, it
“He isn’t anywhere,” said Tim, banging down the receiver for the tenth time. Dominic was already with them by then, with a negative report and a curiosity that positively hurt him, though he was containing it manfully. “That’s all his closest friends crossed off. And he hasn’t had anything to eat! I don’t like it.”
Hewitt didn’t like it, either. His solid face, conditioned to the suppression of all feeling except the deceptive pessimism he used for business purposes, was letting anxiety through like a slow leak.
“He wouldn’t go off anywhere out of town without telling anyone. He isn’t irresponsible. It isn’t that he’d do anything harebrained. But anyone can have an accident.”
“I’m wondering,” said Hewitt heavily, “if he saw something else, when he saw—or thought he saw—that body in the water. Maybe without at all realising the significance of what he was seeing. I’m wondering if he saw
“You don’t think he could be in danger?” asked Tim, shaken and pale.
“I’d have said no, up to this noon. But now it’s all over this town that Trethuan’s body has turned up, and the hunt’s on. Whoever killed him will be pretty desperate now to remove anyone who may—even may—have noticed and recognised him, and may blurt out to the police what he knows.”
“Then we’ve got to find Paddy, quickly. My God, if anything happened to him—”
“Nothing will happen to him,” protested Simon strongly. “He’ll turn up soon, safe and sound, and with a perfectly simple explanation, you see if he doesn’t.”
But Hewitt was already on his feet, and reaching for the telephone. “I’d rather not wait, Mr. Towne. What was he wearing this morning? Oh, Blakey, I want every man we can spare, we’ve got a full-scale hunt on our hands. We’ve lost a boy—young Paddy Rossall, most of our fellows will know him on sight. Missing with a bike, since this morning. Yes, we need everybody.”
“Well, if it’s like that, you’ve got a handful of volunteers right here,” said Simon, solid and calm at Tim’s shoulder. “You’re the boss, where do we start?”
Tamsin turned from her uneasy pacing along the range of the library windows, and marched through the doorway into Miss Rachel’s sitting-room. The old lady looked up with a face resolutely complacent, and told herself for the twentieth time that day that young people nowadays had no stamina. No wonder all modern children were spoiled.
“They still haven’t found him,” said Tamsin. “I’m sick of this, I’m going down to help look for him.”
“You’re going to do nothing of the sort. Don’t be foolish. His parents are bad enough, there’s no need for you to start. The boy is where he went of his own will, you may be absolutely sure, and he’ll turn up when it suits him. When he’s demoralised everybody so much that he needn’t fear reprisals. Not before!”
“You,” said Tamsin forcefully, “are a heartless old woman, that’s what you are. I wish you’d tell me what you did to him this morning. I know there’s something.”
“What I did to him, indeed! Don’t be impertinent! I’m the old woman who pays your salary, at any rate,” said Miss Rachel tartly, because no matter how firmly she held the door, the demons were getting through it. “You’d better remember that, miss. I hate dining alone, and you know it. And I haven’t had my game of chess. So stop being melodramatic, and get the board.”
“You’ll have to make do with patience,” said Tamsin. “I shan’t be here.”
