‘ “I thought as you was going on Monday,” I says. “I’ve changed my mind,” he says, “and my friend will be expecting me.” So off he goes with his briefcase, and that’s the last I seen of him.’
‘Didn’t he take a suitcase?’
‘Not unless he took it in the morning and left it at the station on his way to school. I never seen him actually leave, so I can’t say as to that, but my nephew says he only had his briefcase when he left.’
‘I see. But when he didn’t turn up again, didn’t you wonder what had happened to him?’
‘Well, I seen as he took umbrage when I told him he ought to have banked the money instead of bringing it into my house and I had took umbrage when he said (more or less) as there might be dishonest people here, so when he never come back I guessed he had changed his lodgings, but I did expect to get his notice which has never come, and that do surprise me, because he always acted very proper and as a gentleman should, taking his hat off to me in the street and everything.’
‘But you didn’t do anything about his leaving like that? It must have put you out.’
‘Do anything? I telephoned round all the hospitals, that’s what I done, but I couldn’t get any news. Of course, he had never told me where his friend lived, so he may be in hospital somewhere miles away. I reckon I done all I could. What more could anybody expect?’
‘Perhaps you could have telephoned the school and let us know that he hadn’t come back.’
‘Why should I do that? If a tenant walks out on me, do I want everybody to know?‘
‘You didn’t think he was the sort who would walk out on you. You’ve just said so. I wish we knew the address of this friend of his. He may have been taken ill there. We need a medical certificate to cover his absence, you see.’
‘He never volunteered no address and it wasn’t no business of mine who he went and stayed with. It might have been a lady. You never know, with them quiet ones, what they gets up to on the sly, but I believes in minding my own business so long as my lodgers keeps my rules.’
‘Did he have regular letters from anybody?’
‘I couldn’t say. The girl puts out the post on the little table in the hall and the tenants picks up their letters either, before they go to work or when they come in, the post not arriving at exactly the same time each morning. Here!’ She eyed Margaret and spoke excitedly. ‘You don’t think he’s gone and scarpered with all that money, do you?’
‘Good gracious, no!’ But it was a thought which had been in Margaret’s mind ever since she had left the headmaster’s study. ‘Teachers don’t do that sort of thing.’
‘Only some of the parents have had a job to scrape the money together, you know. It isn’t all that easy, when you’ve got a family, to find eighty pounds.’
‘The school would make everything good, but there’s no question of Mr Pythias doing anything wrong. If you want to know what I think, I think Mr Pythias has met with an accident which hasn’t injured him enough for him to be taken to hospital but has given him a shock and caused him to lose his memory for a time. He may be wandering about, not knowing who he is or where he ought to be. He must be found, for his own sake.’
‘I don’t want to get mixed up with the police!’
‘Neither does the school, but he’ll have to be accounted for, won’t he? I mean, if he had decided to give notice to you, he would have done it before this. Besides, he would have turned up at school, no matter where he spent the Christmas holidays, unless he was ill. This really must be looked into.’
‘Well, I didn’t really think he was the sort to just walk out without giving me his notice, I’ll allow that. Besides, his clothes, most of them, are still here. Naturally I’ve been to his room to check. Perhaps it is a bit worrying, like you say.’
‘I wish you had let us know that he had left here.’
‘Well,’ said the landlady, ‘all I could have told you is that he isn’t here now. I couldn’t tell you where he had gone, so you’d have been no better off as to that, would you? I don’t reckon it was any of my business to let the school know.’
The news with which Margaret Wirrell returned to the school perturbed Mr Ronsonby deeply. He sent the secretary for the deputy head and, when Burke came in, he said, ‘Pythias has not returned to his lodgings. He had all that money with him when we broke up for Christmas and then had an argument, it seems, with his landlady. Because of this, he went off earlier than expected, carrying the money with him, and I have a most uneasy feeling that he may have been set upon and robbed.’
‘I suppose that’s possible,’ said Burke. ‘A good many people knew about the journey to Greece. Quite a number of parents had opted to join the party and any number of others must have heard about it and knew the date by which payments had to be in, but how do we know he didn’t go back to his lodgings?’
‘Margaret has just returned from a visit to Pythias’s landlady. The woman knows nothing about him since the Friday on which we broke up. If the money has gone, it will have to be replaced, of course. I am deeply concerned for Pythias. I’m afraid it means calling in the police and that will involve the school in the last kind of publicity we want.’
‘There’s the time lag, too,’ said Burke. ‘It’s more than three weeks since we broke up. I suppose — ’ He hesitated and Ronsonby finished the sentence for him.
‘The unthinkable can’t possibly have happened,’ he said. ‘Pythias cannot have absconded with the money. I will never believe that of a member of my staff.’
2
In Retrospect
« ^ »
Mr Ronsonby had more things on his mind than the mystery of Mr Pythias’s absence from his duties, worrying, inconvenient and puzzling though that was.
Although the Sir George Etherege school had been operating for some time, the buildings were still being completed. They had been planned and the foundations laid when the 1939 war put an end to the project for years. Boys continued to attend what had become known as the Old School, about a mile away from the present building. Expanding numbers, however, and early murmurs of comprehensive education, had persuaded the education committee to reconsider the plan to build the new school on even more extensive lines than the original blueprint allowed for.
The consequence was that hordes of young workmen — to Mr Ronsonby and the staff their number appeared to be legion — sang, whistled and shouted their way through their own and the school’s working day. They kicked footballs against classroom outside-walls during their tea breaks and drove the beleaguered garrison of earnest schoolmasters almost crazy when they operated a concrete mixer which, as one of the junior masters put it, ‘made a row like the devil lambasting the legions of hell’. At any rate, while it was in action, it made any oral teaching impossible. Even the caretaker, an ex-policeman and unflappable in the ordinary course of events, began to feel the strain, but then, unlike the staff, he had to bear with the workmen and their noise during school holidays as well as after school hours and during Saturday overtime working.
The caretaker was named Sparshott. He had two children who were old enough to have left home, so, with his wife, his younger son and his dog, he lived in the cottage which had been built for him in the school grounds.
He disliked most of the schoolboys and he bitterly detested the young workmen, although he had made friends with their foreman, a man of his own age. Shortly before Christmas, he had said once or twice to him, ‘Can’t your lads clear up as they go along? The asphalt’s a shambles and the quad is worse. That hole they’ve sunk in the middle of the quad is big enough to bury an articulated lorry. Can’t they fill it in before the end of the Christmas holiday? It’s a bloody eyesore left like that.’