Driving back to Helmingham next morning, I felt like a man who has left behind him in a railway carriage a half-finished detective story. The puzzle remained, but I was deprived of the means of pursuing it. Any effort of my own would be entirely amateurish, and the two professionals with whom it had pleased the Deputy Assistant Commissioner to say I had been ‘conferring’ were going their own way about the matter. Moreover I hadn’t been as useful as I might have been. There was at least one point I ought to have made that I had forgotten all about. Not long before the disappearance of the boys, a suspicious character or characters had been in contact with David Daviot. There was the incident in an unfrequented part of the school grounds reported to me by Father Edwards, and there had been David’s own story of an approach made to him in a public park. The notion of an authentic talent-scout from the theatrical world was absurd, but a crook nosing around to spy out the boy’s habits and ideas and particular friendships was another matter. I ought to have reported on that.
There was something else that, so far as I could remember, we hadn’t touched upon. Sir Henry Daviot was an eminent person, at least in a conventional sense of the term. His judgements would often be in print; his birthday would be recorded in newspapers; that kind of thing. But was he a man of any wealth? Criminals setting up in this comparatively new field of kidnapping for profit had the pick of all England to choose from. Robin Hayes, the son of a small embezzler, would make no appeal to them at all, and it was presumably only his being David’s companion at a critical moment that had been the occasion of his abduction. But how much more attractive a prize was the judge’s grandson? Judges were not at that time (nor are they, I believe, now) strikingly well paid. As barristers they might still have accumulated a small private fortune before being elevated to the bench. But unless they were also men of inherited wealth they would scarcely be prime targets for well-informed criminals.
This last thought was a particularly disturbing one, and it led me to a reconsideration of what I had been inclined to dismiss as a fantastic persuasion on Sir Henry’s part. Perhaps, after all, revenge and not cupidity was the mainspring of the affair. The telephone message the judge had received appeared not quite to square with this – unless, indeed, a thirst for vengeance was to be assuaged by a kind of fine. But it remained a nasty possibility.
As I drove into the school grounds, with their round dozen of big bleak brick houses scattered irregularly round the perimeters of cricket fields and rugger grounds, their newer utilitarian blocks of class-rooms and labs, their centre in the incongruous Gothic chapel heaved up like a stranded whale, I became conscious of the emptiness of the place. There were no boys. There were no boys either hurrying and shouting and (a Helmingham phrase) ballyragging around, or sedately walking with an open book in the hope of rapidly making up on prep undone. The boys had all gone away, but would return on Sunday evening – all except David Daviot and Robin Hayes. I seem to recall that it was the alien character of what had happened, its remoteness from normal Helmingham life, that held my mind, overshadowing even the horrific threat implicit in the situation.
It had begun to snow, so heavily that during the last few miles of my run everything had been turning white as I drove. Within inches of the snug interior of the car I knew that on every side there lurked piercing cold. In Heynoe, until I turned up the central heating, it would be none too warm. My housekeeper was absent, and the two middle-aged women who formed its remaining resident staff had quarters of their own, adequately heated, in a remote corner of the building. I reflected glumly that I possessed no house, no home, in my own right. Heynoe was merely a hypertrophied tied-cottage. When the place had done with me as a housemaster I’d simply be out on my ear. It was as I drew up before the front door (the door upon which Robin had inflicted such damage) that the self-indulgent character of these musings shocked me, and I was overwhelmed by a new and dreadful question. Just what did this sudden, savage, premature winter – for it was now that – mean to the captive boys? In what sort of conditions might they be held by men who could make to Sir Henry Daviot such a telephone call as he had received? I was back with the monstrous unexpectedness of what had entered my life. It was as if I had gone to sleep securely here at Helmingham and woken up in the Chicago of Al Capone.
I suppose I was in a confused state of mind. I got out of the car and opened the boot to take out a suitcase which wasn’t there; I had forgotten that my night’s absence had been unpremeditated. I put the car away, took off my overcoat, picked up some letters from the hall table, and set about finding myself something to eat. Before I got far with this there was a ring at the front-door bell, and on returning to the hall I saw through a window a car very much grander than my own, together with some indication of a male person standing on the doorstep. I decided – I don’t know why – that here was that sort of pestilential prospective parent who turns up without notice at an inconvenient hour and expects to be shown round the entire school. But business is business, and at Heynoe it was comfortable regularly to have a longer waiting-list than I might be able to accept. So I opened the door prepared to be adequately welcoming. It was to find myself confronted by Jasper Tandem.
There was nobody in England whom, at that moment, I less wanted to see. This man’s freakish folly – or worse – had surely been at the root of the entire calamity confronting us. He had money – clearly he had no end of money – and he had scattered a lot of it in the interest of what was certainly meant to be mischief and had in fact been disaster. He had given his nephew a thousand pounds and thus encouraged him to behaviour resulting, however obscurely, in hideous misadventure – and had further thrown the boy off balance, I didn’t doubt, by having already provided Mr Hayes with the means to effect his foolish escape from Hutton Green.
Whether these censorious thoughts were going through my head as I recognised Tandem on my doorstep I don’t know. Quite probably not. I was certainly telling myself that there would be no point in preaching at the man.
‘Ah, Syson!’ he said – apparently in surprise that I should myself have to answer my doorbell. ‘I hope this is a convenient time for a call?’
I looked at my watch (which wasn’t exactly polished behaviour) and saw that it was a quarter to one. There was no escaping the implication of this.
‘Not at all,’ I said (thoroughly weakly). ‘You won’t have lunched? I’m alone, and was just about to find myself something. Will you join me?’
Predictably, Tandem said that he would, and I went through the proper rituals of taking his coat, asking him if he’d care to wash after his drive, finding him a glass of sherry, and then going in search of a meal that turned out to be chiefly a cold ham. What was thus created was a first-class false situation. Once the man had a knife and fork in his hands I was obliged to see the thing civilly through.
‘A bad situation, this,’ Robin’s uncle said comfortably – or rather, perhaps, with an affectation of that, since I felt that actually he was in a condition of considerable alarm. ‘My brother-in-law, for a start. I can’t imagine what has prompted him to such folly. I visited him, my dear Syson, only the day before he bolted, and at least he didn’t seem wrong in his head.’
I believe I resented ‘My dear Syson’ even more than the impudence of the whole statement. He couldn’t of course be aware that I had been to both Uptoncester and Hutton Green and knew all about that bunch of grapes. What he did know – as immediately appeared – was the raw fact of the kidnap.
‘And now the two boys,’ he said. ‘A fellow from Scotland Yard came to see me yesterday, and told me what you, no doubt, know already. He told me he was making routine enquiries upon the instructions of some big wig in the police. They’d gathered I’d been to see my nephew here just before he went off with the other lad. So they thought I might be able to throw some light on the matter. I had to say I was only too sorry that I could not. A kidnapping! It’s too dreadful. My poor sister!’
I didn’t trust myself to speak.
‘I doubt,’ Tandem said, ‘whether that old fellow Daviot has a penny – or not the sort of penny that is relevant in an affair like this. I felt I had to go carefully – very carefully, indeed.’
Again I said nothing. For a moment, even, the man’s train of thought was obscure to me.
‘It’s a form of criminal activity,’ Tandem went on, ‘that has been developing abroad. I hear about such things.’ He hesitated upon this, almost as if he had made some injudicious statement. ‘In Italy, for example. The Mafia go in for it. And the key point, Syson, is this: situations develop in which the interests of a family either differ from those of the police or there has to be a pretence that they do so. Of course, it isn’t always people that are abducted. Works of art are just as good. Better, in some ways. They don’t, after a fashion, have to be fed. And they’re easier to keep an eye on.’
‘And don’t suffer,’ I said. ‘There’s a point there.’
‘Perfectly true – not that I’d thought of it. Have you noticed, in reading about such things, how often stolen works of art just turn up unharmed in an inconsequent way in a barn or a left-luggage place or a public lavatory? With the police, as likely as not, taking great credit for their recovery. There’s not much difficulty there, since the ransom money comes in a quiet way from an insurance company or even from a Ministry of Fine Arts, or the like. With people – a couple of boys, say, as in the present instance – it’s rather different. A schoolboy isn’t as important as a Rembrandt or a Titian. So there’s no public money ever so privately available.’
Tandem was speaking confidently now: very much the man who knows. I had to sit and watch him eating my ham and drinking my claret.
‘Where does this take us?’ I asked.
‘It takes us to a position in which a victim’s relatives and friends want to pay up, and the whole legal establishment – in this country it would be the police and the law officers of the Crown – are dead against that sort of giving in. Or the authorities try to exploit the appearance of giving in to set a trap for the kidnappers. There can be a real conflict of interests.’
‘Yes,’ I said – thus offering anything like acquiescence for the first time. I could see that Jasper Tandem, nasty as I obstinately thought him, did know what he was talking about. ‘So what happens?’
‘Sometimes the family or friends get the money through in spite of any resistance that is put up. They may achieve their bargain. On the other hand, the kidnapped person may have been a corpse for weeks.’
‘I can see the risk.’
‘Well, these chaps are after money – big money.’ Tandem paused on this, and to an effect of considerable emphasis. ‘Not a doubt of it. And it’s almost impossible, as I’ve said, that Daviot has a penny. So you see how it may be Robin who is at the centre of the picture, after all. My sister, needless to say, hasn’t a bean either. But I’m the boy’s uncle, and it’s the common belief that I have. So I thought I must explain something to you, Syson. Knowing you have been such a good friend to the lad.’
‘I don’t think I quite understand you, Mr Tandem,’ I said – probably the more stonily because it wasn’t quite true. I had a fair notion of what was coming.
‘The fact is – and I hope you’ll regard it as very much in confidence . . .’
‘Mr Tandem, I cannot agree to accept confidences. The situation makes anything of the kind wholly inappropriate. Whatever you tell me I will consider myself as at liberty to communicate, should I judge it desirable, to the police. And I am already in contact with them.’
This brought the man momentarily to a halt. But then he nodded with impressive decision.
‘Quite right,’ he said. ‘I withdraw the condition, and only ask you to be discreet. And now for the plain fact. Anxious though I might be to put up the money in a quiet way, it simply would not be possible. Like Dogberry in the play’ – and Tandem produced an unattractive smile at this elegant Shakespearian allusion – ‘I have had losses. My affairs are very seriously embarrassed.’
‘I find it the more surprising, then, that you should have wantonly given your nephew that very large sum of money.’
This shook the man, and I suddenly saw that my notion of his being a guest and not to be upbraided was a piece of antique nonsense.
‘Robin told you about it?’ he asked.
‘Nothing of the kind. The amount on the cheque happened to be observed – no doubt as being in a bold hand. I can’t say more than that. But it was grossly irresponsible. It was encouraging the boy to behave in a foolish way at a time when he happened to be much upset. It was contemptible, just as is your anxiety to avoid involvement in the wretched situation you envisage. And now you will no doubt wish to leave my house.’
‘Just one moment.’ Understandably, Jasper Tandem had turned pale. ‘It was perhaps injudicious, particularly as I could ill afford the money. I just wanted the boy to have a good time during his half-term break.’
‘And I suppose you wanted your brother-in-law to have that when you smuggled more money into Hutton Green. Incidentally, that was a criminal offence.’
Blessedly, the man was now on his feet. (He had finished both claret and ham.) I took some satisfaction in the thought that I was about to turn him out into the snow. A glance through the window revealed that a blizzard was developing. Another couple of hours, it struck me, and Heynoe and all Helmingham might be snowed up. It was true that the school owned a snow-plough which had once cleared a whole hockey-field amid tremendous applause – promptly dashed when the ground was declared too hard for safe play. It seems unlikely that the reminiscence came to me at just that moment. What did come to me was the appalling thought that, with a little ill luck, I might have been landed with a stranded Jasper Tandem for hours or even days.
He took his leave – but it wasn’t before having recovered aplomb. Not Mr Pecksniff himself (to switch from Shakespeare to Dickens) could have withdrawn from a discomfiting encounter to a larger effect of rational benignity and a slightly wounded consciousness of merit aspersed. As I watched the Daimler make an uncertain effort to gain traction and then depart smoothly enough down my drive, I expected to find myself indulging the luxury of extreme indignation. But this didn’t happen. Instead, I was conscious only of being increasingly puzzled. Puzzlement, of course, was now the order of my day, the Hayes/Daviot affair being mysterious in every direction – mysterious as well as horrible. But about Robin’s uncle there was something especially unaccountable. The cheque, and the banknotes under Messrs Fortnum and Mason’s grapes, I continued to find not really bewildering. Sheer delight in malicious contrivance could account for them. But supposing that he really were so despicably enslaved to his own larger financial interests as to panic at the possibility of having to pay out big ransom-money for his nephew, what could prompt him to make a journey to Helmingham to protest his penury to me – who, although in one aspect deeply involved, was only peripheral to the family’s problem? I could find no answer to this question. I was left with a groping sense that his purpose had been to put something on record, but that it was a something other than it had purported to be. I could hardly have come up with a notion more nebulous than this. It left my mind as blank and void as was the whitened, the obliterated landscape outside my windows.