“Well, have you grasped what’s been happening?”
“I’ve grasped my ticker, which is good enough for me. Half a second. The old man wants to see the rest of the prefects. He’s going to work through the house in batches, instead of man by man. I’ll just go round the studies and rout them out, and then I’ll come back and explain. It’s perfectly simple.”
“Glad you think so,” said Fenn.
Kennedy went and returned.
“Now,” he said, subsiding into a deck-chair, “what is it you don’t understand?”
“I don’t understand anything. Begin at the beginning.”
“I got the yarn from the butler—what’s his name?”
“Those who know him well enough to venture to give him a name—I’ve never dared to myself—call him Watson,” said Fenn.
“I got the yarn from Watson. He was as excited as anything about it. I never saw him like that before.”
“I noticed something queer about him.”
“He’s awfully bucked, and is doing the Ancient Mariner business all over the place. Wants to tell the story to everyone he sees.”
“Well, suppose you follow his example. I want to hear about it.”
“Well, it seems that the police have been watching a house at the corner of the High Street for some time— what’s up?”
“Nothing. Go on.”
“But you said, ‘By Jove!’”
“Well, why shouldn’t I say ‘By Jove’? When you are telling sensational yarns, it’s my duty to say something of the sort. Buck along.”
“It’s a house not far from the Town Hall, at the corner of Pegwell Street—you’ve probably been there scores of times.”
“Once or twice, perhaps,” said Fenn. “Well?”
“About a month ago two suspicious-looking bounders went to live there. Watson says their faces were enough to hang them. Anyhow, they must have been pretty bad, for they made even the Eckleton police, who are pretty average-sized rotters, suspicious, and they kept an eye on them. Well, after a bit there began to be a regular epidemic of burglary round about here. Watson says half the houses round were broken into. The police thought it was getting a bit too thick, but they didn’t like to raid the house without some jolly good evidence that these two men were the burglars, so they lay low and waited till they should give them a decent excuse for jumping on them. They had had a detective chap down from London, by the way, to see if he couldn’t do something about the burglaries, and he kept his eye on them, too.”
“They had quite a gallery. Didn’t they notice any of the eyes?”
“No. Then after a bit one of them nipped off to London with a big bag. The detective chap was after him like a shot. He followed him from the station, saw him get into a cab, got into another himself, and stuck to him hard. The front cab stopped at about a dozen pawnbrokers’ shops. The detective Johnny took the names and addresses, and hung on to the burglar man all day, and finally saw him return to the station, where he caught a train back to Eckleton. Directly he had seen him off, the detective got into a cab, called on the dozen pawnbrokers, showed his card, with ‘Scotland Yard’ on it, I suppose, and asked to see what the other chap had pawned. He identified every single thing as something that had been collared from one of the houses round Eckleton way. So he came back here, told the police, and they raided the house, and there they found stacks of loot of all descriptions.”
“Including my cap,” said Fenn, thoughtfully. “I see now.”
“Rummy the man thinking it worth his while to take an old cap,” said Kennedy.
“Very,” said Fenn. “But it’s been a rum business all along.”
XXII
KAY’S CHANGES ITS NAME
For the remaining weeks of the winter term, things went as smoothly in Kay’s as Kay would let them. That restless gentleman still continued to burst in on Kennedy from time to time with some sensational story of how he had found a fag doing what he ought not to have done. But there was a world of difference between the effect these visits had now and that which they had had when Kennedy had stood alone in the house, his hand against all men. Now that he could work off the effects of such encounters by going straight to Fenn’s study and picking the house-master to pieces, the latter’s peculiar methods ceased to be irritating, and became funny. Mr Kay was always ferreting out the weirdest misdoings on the part of the members of his house, and rushing to Kennedy’s study to tell him about them at full length, like a rather indignant dog bringing a rat he has hunted down into a drawing-room, to display it to the company. On one occasion, when Fenn and Jimmy Silver were in Kennedy’s study, Mr Kay dashed in to complain bitterly that he had discovered that the junior dayroom kept mice in their lockers. Apparently this fact seemed to him enough to cause an epidemic of typhoid fever in the place, and he hauled Kennedy over the coals, in a speech that lasted five minutes, for not having detected this plague-spot in the house.
“So that’s the celebrity at home, is it?” said Jimmy Silver, when he had gone. “I now begin to understand more or less why this house wants a new Head every two terms. Is he often taken like that?”
“He’s never anything else,” said Kennedy. “Fenn keeps a list of the things he rags me about, and we have an even shilling on, each week, that he will beat the record of the previous week. At first I used to get the shilling if he lowered the record; but after a bit it struck us that it wasn’t fair, so now we take it on alternate weeks. This is my week, by the way. I think I can trouble you for that bob, Fenn?”
“I wish I could make it more,” said Fenn, handing over the shilling.
“What sort of things does he rag you about generally?” inquired Silver.
Fenn produced a slip of paper.
