‘Well, count me out,’ said the history master. ‘I did two stints for Pythias last week.’
‘Didn’t we all?’ said another voice.
‘There’s the bell,’ said the deputy head. ‘I’ll let you know at break, then, who’s drawn the short straw.’ When assembly was over, he went to the headmaster to report.
‘Everybody in except Pythias,’ he said.
‘What, again?’
‘Yes. I suppose he’ll have sent in a medical certificate this morning.’
The headmaster opened his door and said to the prefect who was doing private study in the vestibule and keeping an eye on the queue of boys waiting to hand over dinner money to the secretary, ‘Ask Mrs Wirrell to spare me a moment, Pitts. Ah, Margaret,’ he went on, when she entered his office, ‘has the post come?’
‘Yes, mostly educational publishers’ catalogues. I was going to bring them in when I’d checked the dinner money.’
‘Nothing from Mr Pythias?’
‘No. Isn’t he in?’
‘He is not in and this is his third day. No telephone message, either? He really ought to have found some way of letting us know by now. See to the dinner money and then get his lodgings on the telephone, will you? Ask whether his landlady can account for his absence and tell her a medical certificate is needed. If he is ill, he must have seen a doctor.’
The secretary (Mr Ronsonby sometimes told his wife that he would sooner lose any member of his staff, even Burke, the deputy head, rather than let Margaret Wirrell go) returned to her office and rang up Mr Pythias’s landlady.
‘George Etherege school here. Can you give us any news of Mr Pythias? He hasn’t been in since the holiday and we’ve had no medical certificate… No, he hasn’t shown up this morning, either… You haven’t seen him since the school broke up?… Oh, I see… You think he has been staying with friends over Christmas? Yes, I see. Very well, I’ll tell the headmaster. Thank you.’ She rang off and went back to make her negative report.
‘No luck about Mr Pythias. He isn’t at his lodgings. The landlady says he went away for Christmas, and she hasn’t seen him since the Friday we broke up. He seems to have walked out on her without giving notice.’
‘Well, we ought to have heard from him by now. It sounds as though there must have been a disagreement.’
‘She said nothing about anything like that.’
‘Whatever can have happened to the man? Look, Margaret, you’ve got to go out this morning to bank the dinner money. Could you call and have a word with the woman? Before Christmas? And she hasn’t heard from him?’
‘So she says.’
‘That seems strange and I shall be glad of an explanation. I need not tell you to be tactful with her, but, really, I do think she ought to have let us know that he had not shown up. Here we have been waiting since Thursday and have had no news of him at all.’
‘I’ll ring her again and find out when she will be in. Any time before lunch will do for banking the dinner money.’
‘Yes,’ said the headmaster, ‘and that reminds me. I wonder whether Pythias has banked the journey money? One cannot be too meticulous where school funds are concerned.’
‘I told him you had suggested that I took charge of the cash as it had to be banked in a separate account, but he said he had seen you about it.’
‘Yes, he did see me. He was anxious to keep the matter in his own hands and, as he had made all the arrangements and had organised the whole thing, I thought it right to allow him to do it his way. After all, he is the senior geography master and has travelled in Greece, of which he is a native, and has given up much of his own time to working out all the details of this journey to Athens.’
‘The staff are usually only too glad to push school money matters on to me, so I was quite glad to let him carry on on his own.’
‘Money collected from the parents in such large amounts is always a responsibility, of course. I wish now that we had not waited so long before chasing him up, but Pythias has been on the staff for some time and one dislikes the idea of chivvying and harassing a sick man. When you see the landlady, do not give the impression that we are worried in any way, but point out that the situation has taken on an air of slight mystery which is rather disturbing. Anyway, see what she has to say. She may be able to clarify the situation in a more satisfactory way than she was willing to do over the telephone.’
‘It didn’t sound much like it just now,’ said the secretary.
It sounded even less like it when she encountered the landlady face to face. The house was a large Victorian residence built at a time when the children of middle-class families were numerous, but now the rooms were let as bedsitters. Apart from the landlady and her husband, there were now five tenants, the woman told Margaret.
‘I don’t take marrieds,’ she said, when she and Margaret had summed one another up, ‘or any other kind of couples. Never know who you might get, do you? Single gentlemen such as Mr Pythias are what I cater for, and no visitors allowed. Like I told you over the phone, the last day I sees him he come back as usual — well, a bit later, actually, because he had had some paperwork to do in connection with the school journey this next summer, he said, kind of apologising for being a bit late for his tea.’
‘Oh, you knew about the journey.’
‘My sister’s boy is going.’
‘Oh, yes? He’s at the school, then, is he?’
‘Wilbey, his name is, Chad Wilbey.’
‘Oh, yes, I know Wilbey. He is in 5A, isn’t he?’
‘That’s right. You must have a wonderful memory for names.’
Margaret, who, as the headmaster could have testified, had a wonderful memory for more important things than the names of the boys who had been in the school longest, said: ‘Mr Pythias has arranged the whole journey, as, of course, he has lived in Greece and knows it well. Did he seem quite like his usual self when you saw him last?’
‘Yes and no.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘He was all of a fidget, so I guessed what he’d got in his briefcase. You see, I knew the deadline for paying in the money for that trip to Greece because some of it was mine, me helping my sister out so her boy could go. Well, nobody pays away good money before they’ve got to, do they? I mean the electricity and the gas and the telephone and the rates and the income tax. You don’t part up until the last minute — well, most people don’t, do they?’
‘No, I suppose that’s true.’
‘So I says — kind of joking, like, not wishing to give offence to a good tenant — as I suppose he’s worth robbing, at which he looks at me very straight and asks what I think I’m talking about, so I looks at him just as straight and says, if his briefcase is crammed with what I think it’s crammed with, I’m not having it under my roof for Friday night, Saturday and Sunday, as it should have been banked Friday dinner-time. “It’s asking for trouble,” I says, “in these wicked, unlawful times,” I says, “when you don’t know who your friends are and all this crime about,” I says. “You should have got that money in earlier,” I says, “and banked it in your dinner-time,” I says, “and not brought it into a respectable house to be a temptation to goodness knows who.”
‘Well, he turned very huffy and said as he had no intention to burden me or himself with any responsibility and as soon as he’d had his tea the money would be put in a safe place — “and not in this house,” he said nasty-like. So I give him his tea — a nice bit of cured haddock off the thick end and a poached egg on top — and then he tells me as he is going off by train that very evening to spend Christmas with his friend.