“Too late. It’s too late. Joe, they’ve got him. He could be dead by now.”
“Can’t be. What the hell! Between here and London. What on earth happened?”
“That was his mother. She was very distraught. In floods of tears but I managed to understand her. En route for London in the back of the car, he was taken ill. She couldn’t bring herself to say the word, but I know what he was suffering from—it was epilepsy. Matron told me herself. She was glad to see the back of him because she was getting scared by the increasing frequency and ferocity of his attacks. The parents had agreed that he could no longer be accommodated at the school. He was recalled to London. Pending transit to Germany. The family is German—well, half: his father. They were planning to get treatment from a German clinic.”
“What did the chauffeur do?” Joe asked.
“The best he could. The lady had nothing but praise for him. Alarmed by the boy’s condition, he saw a sign on the road and the name of a hospital. He instantly drove off the main road and presented himself with the boy as an emergency at the hospital minutes later. Spielman was still alive, he says, when they arrived, and doctors whisked him away into a ward for treatment. The chauffeur telephoned London for instructions, following which he returned to the family home with his story, and the boy’s father set out to Sussex to perform his paternal duties. He left central London an hour ago.”
“Hold on,” Joe said calmly. “I think I need to check all this, but it sounds as though a natural event has occurred and been handled in the best possible way—”
Gosling broke into this soothing speech. “Rot! If you’ll take advice from someone you’re determined to place on the wrong side of the fence, get in your car and drive while you can.” He took Joe’s keys from his pocket and threw them onto the desk. “Find this hospital. Get there before Spielman senior. Insist on seeing the boy. Dead or alive, as they say. The payment had been made; Rapson knew a boy was under threat. And now one has disappeared. If you ignore this, Rapson died in vain!”
“Take the keys back,” Joe said. “Go down to the garage and bring my car round to the front door. We’ll give you five minutes’ start. And stay in the driving seat, engine running. Something tells me you’re a better driver than I am. And as long as your hands are wrapped around a steering wheel I can keep an eye on them. Dorcas will map-read for you. Dorcas, which hospital are we looking for?”
Dorcas gaped for a moment. “She couldn’t say. She didn’t know or didn’t remember the name. Sorry, Joe. I was trying to—”
“Yes, I heard you. Go on.”
“We can rule out Brighton; that’s in the opposite direction. We must go north towards London.”
“It’s probably one of those little cottage hospitals, locals-for-the-use-of, you find scattered around the countryside. Some of them are very good. But which? Did she say how long they’d been on the road before the boy succumbed?”
“Um … wait a minute … she said an hour. Not that I’d take that as gospel; she was very upset and not at all clear. You’d say she’d only been told half the story. You know how men can be—‘Watch what you say! Mustn’t frighten the horses or the ladies, must we?’ ”
“The boy left here at ten,” Joe said, puzzled by Dorcas’s lack of her usual sharpness before he remembered that she was not a motorist and didn’t think in terms of miles per hour. “So they were on the road for an hour at the most, probably less. An hour at what speed in the snow, in that car?”
“Thirty, tops,” said Gosling. “Say twenty. Twenty to thirty miles north of here on the London road or just off it. Country area, sparsely populated. Big centres to north and south of it supplying serious medical care—you’re right, Sandilands. It’ll be cottage hospitals at the best. The kind that handle mostly maternity cases or farming accidents. Shouldn’t we get hold of a county list and start ringing hospitals in that range?”
“That’ll take forever!” Joe was impatient. “And always assuming they’re prepared to confide in a stranger over the telephone. You know how discreet the medical trade can be. If we hit on the right one and it turns out to be the wrong one—if you see what I mean—they’re going to deny all knowledge anyway. Look, Dorcas, spend a moment cutting out this photograph of Spielman, will you? We may need to use it as identification. We’ll take it with us.”
“Tempting Fate, Joe? Finishing off Rapson’s work for him like that?” Dorcas’s voice was subdued. “I’m not sure I want to do this.”
“Superstitious nonsense—just get on!”
Dorcas supplied him with the cutout then searched for and found a motoring map in her bag. “It’s small scale, but it’ll do. How many hospitals can there be off the main London road? Not many, and if the chauffeur saw the sign with a drama going on in the back seat, I’m sure we can find it with three people looking out. I’ll find a suitable one and guide you there. Leave it to me.”
They listened as Gosling clattered down the staircase and Joe hastily began to collect up documents and put them away. Dorcas hurried to help him.
“Why did you lose your rag with that young man, Joe? Nasty scene. I’m sure he didn’t deserve it.”
“I don’t trust him. He works for the opposition. I wanted to shock an admission out of him, and if you hadn’t poked your nose in I might have got it. It’s a well-known technique. You’ll have noticed that he’s younger and stronger than I am and that he’s no stranger to the noble art, so—”
“So you used your other advantages? The low cunning and clunking fist I mentioned. But what really provoked you to violence?”
“His pretence of cooperation was irritating me. And I don’t forget it was Gosling we came upon shunting little Spielman off in a Daimler.”
“We’re getting closer.”
“What is this? How many layers of the onion have you peeled off me so far? You know I can’t be doing with any of that analysis nonsense.”
“I think it was the boys, wasn’t it? The sudden realisation that Jackie and Spielman might be in danger. That caused the eruption. The translation of pent-up feelings into physical action. Good. I’m relieved to find there’s still a heart beating under the stiff navy suiting and the gold frogging. I could phrase that in more scientific terms, half of them German, but I don’t want to annoy you.”
“No time to be annoyed. One more thing to do before we shoot off into the night. Pass me that note pad, will you?” Joe scribbled on a sheet of paper and tore it off, talking at the same time. “Look, while I get this delivered, I want you to send Jackie straight to Matron to tell her he’s staying the night.”
“I take it you’re thinking he’s not in danger anymore?”
Joe sighed. “To be honest, I think another poor lad is on his way to meet old Charon, two obols tucked under his tongue. It’s time to fight another bout with the Infernal Lord or whatever Gosling called him. And this is one I’m not certain we can win. Hercules, where are you?”
“No idea what you’re maundering on about, but buck up, Joe! I’ve seen you take on the devil before and win.”
“Right. That looks tidy. Nothing more we can do. I expect old Farman will be straight in here the moment our backs are turned, but—what the hell!” Joe tucked the black book into the pocket of his overcoat and grabbed his scarf.
INSPECTOR MARTIN GOT the call just after 3:00 P.M. He pulled on the gumboots he kept by the door and questioned the breathless young constable who was hopping from foot to foot in excitement just outside.
“I said we got it, sir! In the melt. Right in the middle of the yard. The knife. Six inches. Meat knife. Still got blood traces on it. You can cancel the dogs.”
“Good lad. Who needs bloodhounds when he’s got you and Sergeant Savage on a lead, eh?”
The two men sploshed their way down the path towards the farm buildings and Martin looked up anxiously at the sky. Not much daylight left—an hour at best, he calculated. But it would do. He stopped at the sound of a car engine starting up in one of the old covered horse-stalls that served as the school garage and watched as the Scotland Yard man’s Morris belted out backwards, skidded into a three-point turn, and then proceeded more carefully down the route to the front of the school.