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.”
Joe grew tense. “So, what are you saying?”
“That, at first look, all these disappearances are accompanied within certain loose time limits by considerable payments to the school.”
“Through the reigns of three headmasters? Can they have been aware?”
“No way they can’t have been aware, sir. They must all have thought it above board.”
“So the three heads were all happy to accept the donations—were comfortable enough with them to put them straight into the school accounts, which I see are lodged with perhaps the most prestigious bank in London. Do we interpret them as kind gestures? Some of these fathers may well have been—usually are—alumni of the school themselves. And, wealthy men that they are, they show their gratitude or assuage their embarrassment by making a hefty donation. Some schools couldn’t continue in business without such support.”
“You’re right, sir. My own father made a similar if more modest gesture when I left my prep school, and I never set anything alight.” He sighed and sat back on his heels. “Worth going on with this trawl, then, sir?”
“Oh, I think so. Check all the dates we have suspicions of. Just in case.”
Gosling continued to rustle his way halfheartedly through the sheets, collating the dates in the black book and ticking off names on a pad he kept close by him.
Narrowing his eyes, Joe went to look over his shoulder. “You’ve missed one. What’s this?” he asked, pointing. “This large sum coming in. Two thousand pounds. Can you trace it to source?”
“No. None of them. You’ll need a warrant to get a sight of the bank’s details, sir, to get hold of any names. You’ll have to go back to London for that. Um, this one did catch my eye but, look, it’s outside the dates we’ve been looking into. It’s larger than the others. The kind of sum a rich old codger might leave as a legacy. It can’t be connected.”
“Everything’s connected. What’s the date of the entry?” Joe persisted.
“It’s very recent. Just a week before Rapson died.” Gosling turned a concerned face to Joe. “Now, would someone be paying good money to have Rapson topped, I wonder?”
“Mmm. He was up to no good—I think he was paying out regular sums of his own as blackmail. Could this be linked in some way? But it’s all the wrong way round and a sum like that, it’s out of the league of bookies, local casino sharks and thugs of that nature. You can hire a top hit man from London to attend to your needs for fifty quid. What kind of service will cost you two thousand? Total massacre of the royal family? What’s he been meddling with that earned him a knife in the ribs?”
“And why pay the school? I can’t see Farman banking his cheque and rushing out with a freshly sharpened steak knife to earn his fee and then spend it on Persian carpets for the combination room.”
Gosling got up and came to look once more at the nine cutout faces. “I’m not entirely sure why Rapson got his scissors out and did this, sir. This little gallery.”
“Aide mémoire?”
“A list would have sufficed. He didn’t need to keep their poor little faces close. He was no sentimentalist. He’d caught onto something shady in the disappearances, we’re agreed on that much. Could he have been doing a little blackmailing on his own account, do you suppose?”
“Slapping these down on someone’s desk and snarling, ‘I know your secret, Mr. X!’ ”
Gosling jumped and looked up sharply. “That would work with me but, sir! I’ll tell you something that would really scare the shit out of me if I had something to hide!”