The Empty House (12 page)

“Good God,” said Peter. He looked again and saw that it was not a young man but a very large and well-constructed boy. “Key Three.”

“The very same.

“I can’t say I should have recognised you.”

“Well, I expect I have grown a bit in the last five years. You look almost exactly the same.”

“I know,” said Peter. “Thin, dopey, and untidy. Your brother told me. I ran into him at Bridgetown.”

“He said he’d met you. Come and have a word with F. B. He’s always talking about you. He says you are the only natural mathematician the school has ever turned out.”

“He won’t want to be bothered. He’s probably up to the eyes in end-of-term reports.”

“Nonsense,” said the boy. “He’ll never forgive me if I let you slide off without seeing him.”

He steered Peter under the red stone tower and down the passage, through a crowd of boys who stood aside respectfully to let them through; the respect, Peter guessed, being more for his guide than for himself.

They found Mr. French-Bisset in a deck chair on the lawn. He was completing the
Guardian
crossword puzzle and seemed untroubled by end-of-term reports or by anything else.

Peter had always got on well with his housemaster, an angular bachelor with red hair, a sharp tongue, and an educated taste in claret. He jumped up, shook Peter by the hand, and said, “Now, isn’t that a nice surprise! You’ll stay to supper.”

“Well—”

“Of course you will. The house monitors are all having supper with me. You remember? It’s an ordeal I subject them to at the end of each summer term for the good of their characters. You’ll be able to meet them and decide how far they’ve gone downhill since your time. Bring your car round and park it in the drive.”

“Actually, I walked up.”

“Then you won’t want to walk all the way back again after supper. I can easily give you a bed for the night.”

“I haven’t any things with me.”

“My dear Peter, you’re talking to an experienced bachelor. I always keep a spare pair of pyjamas and shaving kit for people who drop in.”

“Well—” said Peter. It was an attractive and a nostalgic idea. Also, he remembered the annexe of the Stanhope Arms, which was on the corner of the High Street and caught the full blast of the through traffic. “It’s very good of you. I shall have to do some telephoning.”

“My study is at your disposal.”

The first person Peter spoke to was Mr. Knight. The landlord seemed more relieved than disappointed. He said, “I’ve had two applications for that same room since you left and the third just come in. A commercial gentleman. I’ll tell him he’s lucky. No, that’s quite all right. We’ll keep an eye on your car for you. You can come and pick it up in the morning.”

The next person he wanted was a man whom he addressed as Theo. He missed him at the British Museum, but caught him at home.

“It’s odd about the trowels,” agreed Theo. “Are you certain?”

“Quite certain. The ones I saw were all the same.”

“Not welded?”

“Not welded. Riveted. I happened to remember an article I read. It was in one of the Sunday colour supplements. Perhaps you remember it?”

“If it’s the one I’m thinking of, it was written by my boss at the B.M.”

“It said that you had to have a special sort of trowel for archaeological work. If you used an ordinary gardening trowel, the rivets got worn flat in no time and the handle came off.”

“If your Professor was an experienced man, it certainly sounds odd. Tell me more. What had he found?”

“The usual sorts of things. There were a lot of pots, and some flint arrowheads – and oh, yes, archers’ wrist guards.”

“Flat, square things with holes in the corners?”

“That’s right.”

“What period?”

“I don’t know exactly what year it was. The site was thought to be a Roman magistrate’s villa with a small settlement round it.”

“That makes it a bit difficult to understand the flint arrowheads, quite the wrong period. What about the pots?”

“They looked genuine enough. They were a rather nice sort of orange colour with pictures on them. They were not exactly pictures. They were sort of stuck onto the clay.”

“What were the pictures? Fights and banquets?”

“That sort of thing.”

“Did you happen to notice the name of the craftsman?”

Peter thought about it. He said, “Yes. There were names on two of them. Part of a name on one. m. perren—. The rest was missing. And tigranis. That was inside a sort of wreath on the other.”

“And you want to know if these are pots which could have been found in a West Country Roman settler’s villa?”

“That’s exactly what I want.”

“I haven’t got the reference books here. I’ll have to look them up tomorrow morning. If it’s urgent, I’d better telephone you.”

Peter gave Theo the number of the Stanhope Arms Hotel, rang off, and sat thinking for a few minutes. All right. Suppose Professor Petros was a fraud, was that fact of the least importance to his investigations? He felt, as he had done at the beginning of more routine assignments, that there were a number of uncertainties, some of which might be relevant; others would certainly be irrelevant. But the faster he cleared away their relevancies, the sharper would the truth appear.

He dialled another number. Roger had reached his home and was relaxing with his pre-dinner drink. He listened in some astonishment to what Peter had to say.

“Nutty as ever.”

“Who?”

“You are. Only you would ring me up with a question like that.”

“It’s very important.”

“I hope so. I charge double price for advice given out of hours. Say it again.”

“DS 16384.”

“It can’t be a motor-car number.”

“I’d deduced that.”

“Why do you suppose I’d be likely to know what it meant?”

“Because you’re a solicitor. And I found it in a solicitor’s office.”

“Then why didn’t you ask him what it meant?”

“That wouldn’t have been practical.”

“Up to your games again, are you?”

Roger’s firm did a lot of work for Phelps, King and Troyte, and was resigned to being asked to undertake unusual investigations for them.

“What it sounds most like,” said Roger at last, “is a Land Registry number. Where was this particular solicitor’s office?”

“In Exeter.”

“Well, that makes it even more likely. Because DS is the symbol for all registered titles in Devon and Somerset.”

“Isn’t there some index, so that you can find out which property it refers to?”

“There is an index. But it’s not open to the public. Only to the owner of the property and someone with legitimate reason for consulting it. An intending purchaser, someone like that.”

“Couldn’t you pretend to be acting for a purchaser?”

“Sooner or later you’re going to get me struck off the rolls.”

“I’m sure you’ll manage it somehow.”

“It’ll mean someone going down to Tunbridge Wells. That’s where they keep the records.”

“Send someone down tomorrow. Charge it to us, of course, and give me a ring at Riverton 496. It’s the Stanhope Arms. Before lunch if you can, but I’ll hang on as long as I have to.”

“The Nelson touch,” said Roger. “Close with the enemy. Lose not an hour. And look where it got him. One arm, one eye, and a hero’s funeral.”

Dinner that night was by candlelight. Afterward, Peter remembered the three boys who came down with Key by their appearances more than by their names. There was a big, fair boy, a small, swarthy, twinkling boy, and a thin, serious boy with glasses. To start with, they were quiet, formal rather than nervous, but a second glass of their housemaster’s claret loosened them up.

A twist in the conversation brought it around to the question Peter had been asking himself that afternoon.

“Softer?” said Mr. French-Bisset. “No, I don’t think that’s the right word. Boys nowadays work harder. They have to. There’s more competition for university places every year. And I think they play just as hard. The thing is, they don’t take it so seriously. When I was a boy here – that was in the forties – rugger was still a religion. Even if you weren’t good, you had to pretend to be very keen about it. Nowadays I don’t suppose a boy would actually be lynched if he said he thought it was a stupid game and he preferred something more intelligent—”

“Like croquet,” suggested Key.

“Croquet’s a terribly rough game,” said the dark boy. “My young sister once hit me with her mallet. I’ve still got the scar.”

“What’s made the most difference between then and now,” said the fair boy, “is having a room to yourself.”

The others agreed with this.

“It’s an innovation since your time,” said Mr. French-Bisset. “Being a bachelor, I don’t use nearly as much of the private side of the house as my predecessor did. We’ve reorganised a whole wing into small single rooms for the ten senior boys.”

“Bliss,” said Key.

“It makes all the difference,” agreed the fair boy. “Pigging it with thirty others in the day-room when you first came was bad enough. But being forced to share a room the size of a large cupboard with someone you didn’t really like—”

Everyone laughed. There was some joke here that Peter didn’t understand.

“It’s not that we’re soft,” said Key. “We’re just more grown-up. Old Garland used to rattle on about the days when he was here. It must have been about sixty years ago, but it sounded like
Tom Brown’s Schooldays.
New boys being made to sing solos in the prep room on Sunday evening and have boots thrown at them. What good was it supposed to do them?”

“Useful if you were planning to be an actor,” said the dark boy. “First-night nerves would never seem so bad again.”

Peter said, “Surely old Garland can’t still be here?”

“He retired last year. He lives at Ilfracombe and spends his time composing crossword puzzles and double-dummy bridge problems.”

“He’d remember Alex Wolfe, I expect.”

At the mention of the name, all the boys looked up together. Peter realised that they must know all about it, and must have heard—how, through Key Senior via Key Three?—that he was connected with it.

The dark boy said, “Can you tell us what really did happen?”

“If you want me to protect you,” said Mr. French-Bisset, “you’ve only to say the word.”

“No, that’s all right,” said Peter. “I don’t know what happened. Not yet. But I am trying to find out. I expect you read about it in the papers.”

Key said, “My brother used to talk about Mr. Wolfe a lot. And that’s odd, when you come to think about it, because none of us Keys have ever had any brains—”

“Tell us something we don’t know,” said the dark boy.

“Pipe down,” said Mr. French-Bisset. “Go on, Key.”

“It wasn’t even as if they were here together. Mr. Wolfe left a year or more before my brother arrived. But boys were
still
talking about him. I think they realised he was something special even then.”

“I expect it was because he was normal,” said the fair boy. “Most science masters are freaks.”

The thin, serious boy, opening his mouth almost for the first time, said to Peter, “You don’t really think Mr. Wolfe’s dead, do you?”

“I rule,” said Mr. French-Bisset, slowly looking at Peter, “that that question is out of order. I wonder if I dare offer you all a glass of port.”

“That depends what port it is,” said Key reasonably. “If it’s the 1963, it ought to go quite well with the claret.”

As Peter lay in bed that night listening to the wind whispering among the tops of the tall trees outside his window, he was not thinking about the problem of Dr. Wolfe. He was thinking that he liked Mr. French-Bisset a lot; more than he had done when French-Bisset was simply his housemaster, because then he had not understood him so well. He wondered if people realised what lasting effects, for better or worse, schoolmasters had on the boys they taught. Particularly in boarding schools. For ten of the most impressionable years of their lives, schoolmasters were much more important to boys than their parents. Sometimes you were lucky, sometimes quite definitely not. Peter remembered one housemaster, when he had been there, who had been a clergyman—

He drifted off to sleep.

It was at almost exactly this moment that Mr. Birnie’s nightmare began.

A click, which half woke him, as the lock of his bedroom door was forced back. Then soft hands, which lifted the bedclothes. Others, less soft, which held him down. A hand which clamped a cloth over his mouth to stop him whimpering. The sharp prick of a needle in his arm. Then merciful nothingness.

The rain clouds rolled up again during the night and it was through a grey world that Peter trudged down to the town next morning.

He found the Stanhope Arms in an uproar, and old Mr. Knight as nearly worried as he had ever seen that stolid Devonian.

“Lucky you’ve turned up,” Mr. Knight said. “We’d have had to send and fetch you.”

“Who? Why? What’s up?”

“It’s the police. They’ll tell you.” He indicated the door of the private bar. “You go along in.”

The private bar still smelled of the beer which had been drunk there and the cigarettes which had been smoked there the night before. Seated behind one of the tables was a small, stout man whom Peter had never seen before. On each side of him sat a uniformed policeman.

Mr. Knight said, “This is Mr. Manciple. You were asking about him.”

The larger of the two policemen, who had the stripes of a sergeant on his arm, said, “Sit down, Mr. Manciple. Perhaps you can help us.”

“Perhaps I can,” said Peter, “if you’ll tell me what it’s about.”

“I ought to be in hospital,” said the stout man.

“Mr. Birnie here had an unfortunate experience last night.”

“Yes?” said Peter. He examined the stout man, who looked as if he had dressed in a hurry and had then crawled through a hedge. His cheeks and all three of his chins were unshaven, his eyes were red-rimmed, and there was a white crust around his mouth. Peter thought that Mr. Birnie had had a severe shock, or was suffering from a record hangover.

“It would appear,” said the Sergeant, consulting his notebook, “that Mr. Birnie was abducted forcibly from his bedroom last night, drugged, taken away by car, subjected to intimidation and questioning, and then abandoned by the roadside at an early hour this morning. Fortunately, a passing motorist saw him and brought him back here and we were informed.”