“I’ve done the audit, sir. It’s all in there. Everything we want and more. It’s even clearly labeled and in date order. Alphabetically ordered subsections. I told you Rapson was meticulous.” Gosling emerged with cobwebbed hair from the cupboard eager to get on. “What I’d have given to get my hands on this cache! But Rapson guarded his territory like a jealous dragon. I’d no idea that this was here!”
“Did you not? Look, Gosling, I hope you don’t mind my commandeering your services like this? I really would prefer to have a sharp lad like you on hand until I’ve got to the bottom of this.”
“Glad to have something useful to do, sir. The charade I’ve been involved with was getting very tiresome. I’ve been thinking of doing a bunk myself.”
Joe was delighted to channel his energy. “Boring, routine stuff first, Gosling. Worth getting it out of the way. The finances! It strikes me that this place bears all the hallmarks of a well-funded establishment. No tile off the roof, repainted last year, no money spared except in the matter perhaps of school dinners. Are the records-”
“Got them, sir.”
“Pull them out and work on them … over there on the rug, will you? You may need to spread the sheets out.” He pointed to a flat piece of choice Persian rugwork laid out over solid polished floorboards.
“What am I looking for?”
“Sounds obvious, but I think you’ll know it when you see it. Unusual amounts of cash in-or out. Don’t forget that Rapson could have been paying out blackmail money. The school may have something to hide, too. In fact, I’m pretty certain it has.”
“Right-o, sir.”
Joe noted with satisfaction that Gosling picked up the black book and set it beside him as he crouched on the floor and began to turn pages. There followed the occasional low whistle and hiss and “Crikey! Can the fives court possibly have cost as much as that?”
Seeing the boy was well settled into his task, Joe picked up the telephone and made a connection with Alfred Jenkins back in Chelsea.
“Alfred? Sandilands here. Just a quick call to tell you-you got him! My men trailed him, managed to arrest him and wring the truth out of him with surprising ease. A charmer by the name of Chisholm. Now-anything to confess, Inspector?”
There was a chortle at the other end that was audible in the room. Gosling had stilled his page scanning activities at the mention of the name, Joe noticed.
Inspector Jenkins stopped laughing and replied concisely and soberly. “Easy enough to arrest. They had grounds after all. I’d expect they found a certain item of lost property in the young gentleman’s left coat pocket. An old watch of my father’s went missing while Mr. Chisholm was making his delivery. I reported it of course. It had been on top of the chiffonier by the door when he came in to take a look at the railway. Wondered if it was him had made off with it. Well I never! Have they charged him?”
“No. Slippery customer. If he’s who I think he is, he’s got a rather influential and equally slippery organisation behind him. They call themselves MI5, and they’re all over the place. Mainly under my feet.” Joe flashed a warm smile down at Gosling. “Or at my feet. Still, well done, old man! I think he was after not the boy but something Jackie had unawares in his Afghan bag. That’s safely here with me too. We’ll have a pint in the Dick Turpin when I get back.”
Joe replaced the receiver and spoke confidingly to Gosling. “Chisholm? A colleague? If you thought you were the only officer involved with this, it seems you were mistaken.” He explained the old inspector’s part in the lift-incarceration at the Chelsea apartment.
The account seemed to give the young man a certain satisfaction, Joe thought.
“If he’s the chap I’m thinking of, he’s not exactly a colleague. Yes, he’s one of ours. Employed occasionally in the executive division. A thug. If Drummond was his target, this affair would appear to have escalated in importance.” Gosling shuddered. “I’d like to say we wouldn’t stoop to such measures, but the dirty washing does get handed over to others sometimes. Out of sight, out of mind. Deniable.” He bit his lip, hinting at knowledge that Joe did not have and knew better than to demand.
“I can imagine. Right, carry on, Gosling. I’m going to look through those box files of individual school records. Checking first the ‘lost boys,’ headed by Peterkin. If you want to unravel something, you tug on the end that’s sticking out first. Surprising how often that works.”
He extracted the seven envelopes belonging to the identified boys and began to leaf through them. “Mind if I talk aloud?”
“No, sir.” Gosling seemed surprised to be asked.
“Again, nothing much in common. One or two had health problems. Visits by the local doctor in the night recorded, very properly. A Dr. Carter attended.” Joe scratched a note to himself on his pad. “Occasional trip to hospital in Brighton for the more serious cases. Here’s a case of blood poisoning from an undeclared wound.… Ah! Here are symptoms that are clearly those of tuberculosis, according to Matron’s carefully worded note. Not a disease you want to see ripping through a dormitory.
“Right, let’s take a look at the fire-raiser. Set fire to the pig sties. Why? Bit young, these lads for enjoying an illicit cigarette, I’d have thought? Oh, my! Thick file. The arson was just the last of his little escapades. Bullying … torturing the school cat … rudeness … swearing at Matron. The lad seems to have been completely out of control and pretty thick with it. His scores on his monthly tests are abnormally low. Letter from the school asking his parents to remove him. No reply filed, but the very next week, he’s gone. Just gone.” Joe sighed. “I expect his parents took him away and had him locked up somewhere. Fire-raising? That can earn you a place in a mental institution any day. The boy sounds like a walking disaster to me.”
They ploughed on in companionable silence, flicking cards, occasionally comparing dates.
Gosling ran a finger along a row of figures. “Got it!”
“I’m glad you’ve got something; nothing else here is making much sense. Not much sinister sense, I’d say. Boys leave because they’re ill or naughty or obviously in need of a more rigourous regime than St. Magnus can provide. Nothing wrong with that. No mystery. Apart from young Peterkin. Fit as a flea, bright as a button, good as gold, you’d say. He rather breaks the pattern. Are we going to have to apologise to the school and beat a hasty retreat, Gosling?”
“Hold your horses! Oh, sorry sir! Take a look at these entries in the accounts. Large sums of money-a thousand pounds or more, not the same each time-have been paid into the school’s bank account and promptly paid out into a second account I haven’t got the sheets for here. Quite often a large building operation follows, with sums drawn back and re-spent.”
“These payments, do they correspond with any of our dates of interest?” Joe asked carefully.
“No, they don’t. They’re all off target. Hang on.… They turn up two, three and five weeks later. Ah, I have an exception … two exceptions. One’s the fire-raiser. His father paid over a large amount the very day the boy went missing.”
“For how much?”
“One thousand, five hundred pounds.”
“How much does it cost to rebuild a pig sty?”
“I can tell you exactly. It’s in the following month’s accounts. Work done in fast time by Mr. Green the local builder for … one hundred three pounds, ten pence.”
“Leaving a generous tip in the offertory box for St. Magnus. Remind me who he was, this Magnus chap-Patron Saint of the Sticky Fingers? ‘For your trouble, headmaster’? Hush money? Further information required, I think. And the other?”
“Peterkin, sir. I could have this wrong but-there’s an anonymous payment into the school, the week before he went missing. Again, it’s for a large sum: one thousand pounds.”