So Miss Sparrow had been right, and Iain Macleod, although Robin’s closest friend, had got it wrong. Not Morocco or California, but Uptoncester. Whatever calamity had happened there, I ought to have experienced a certain relief in this discovery. Miss Sparrow had expressed faith in the boy’s basic common sense, and here was the admirable woman’s judgement vindicated. With whatever extravagance, whatever wounding rhetoric to myself the flight from Helmingham had been accompanied, its good-hearted character on Robin’s part was now established. Discovering or imagining young David Daviot to be in a horrible situation, he had simply decided to carry him off to his own home, his mother and his sister – from which refuge he no doubt intended, as Miss Sparrow had conjectured, to open negotiations with Sir Henry Daviot to secure the boy’s permanent removal from School House. There hadn’t been much knowledge of the world and its ways in the manoeuvre, but at least it had been unselfish and honourable.
It is a curious fact that at this juncture I have to record in myself an irrational tinge of disappointment. I can find no very secure explanation of this. Was it the issue of a kind of smothered romanticism lurking unsuspected in my own heart? Could I conceivably have felt anything alluringly romantic in the notion of those two ignorant boys attempting a get-away beyond the bounds of respectable society? A mere fleeting fantasy of the kind was thoroughly disturbing. I hurried back through the snow from the Head Master’s house to Heynoe, intent on giving the news – good so far as it went – to my sagacious Matron. I was halfway there before there returned to my mind with any force the remaining and overpowering horror of the affair. That dull house in its quiet crescent had been a goal unachieved.
Somewhere on their route to it the boys had vanished, had fallen into the hands of abominable criminals.
Miss Sparrow received my communication without surprise, and even with a slight impatience which was odd until she explained herself.
‘There has been a message for you,’ she said. ‘A telephone call that I took myself – and from Sir Henry. He would be grateful if he might so far trespass upon your kindness – you remember the way he talks – as to go up to town at once and confer with him.’
‘To confer with him?’ It came inconsequently into my head that I had been judged to have ‘conferred’ with Owen Marchmont and Ogilvy. ‘Has he invited Stafford and Taplow as well?’
‘I think not. It was my impression that he rather regards Robin Hayes as the clou to the whole riddle, and judges that you know more about him than anybody else.’
‘It’s the man being crazy again. Did he sound crazy?’
‘Not in the least. Wholly collected and purposeful. And what he seemed to be arranging was a formal meeting with the police authorities in charge of the case.’
‘I’d better go.’
‘Certainly you had. And I can get you through to the station in my car. With luck you’ll catch the fast train.’
I hadn’t even got out of my overcoat, and now there was no time to be lost. Bizarre as this unexpected summons to London appeared to be, I found a certain relief in the bustle of it. I worried about the train, estimating the possibility of its being held up by the atrocious weather. But it wasn’t so. I got myself (unlike the boys) a first-class ticket, and tumbled into an empty compartment in which, predictably, something had gone wrong with the heating. I wondered whether there was any heating, whether to go wrong or right, in whatever evil place the boys were secreted. And again and again there came back to me, with a sensation as of a sudden blow on the heart, the remoteness of what had happened from any experience I had my bearings in. Around me in a sense, or no further off than a newspaper before my nose, was a world in which not the march of armies or the thunder of cannon, but sporadic small-scale violence was becoming as common as football matches or bad weather. Airliners on their normal occasions were being ‘hijacked’ over every continent on the globe; ‘terrorist’ was a term ceasing to belong to French eighteenth-century or Russian nineteenth-century history and was cropping up in every bulletin from the BBC. Merely because one was a law-abiding citizen one had no title to a sense of outrage if coercive violence slapped out at one. These were my reflections as a taxi trundled me up Haverstock Hill to the Hampstead dwelling of Sir Henry Daviot. It was a house upon every lintel of which there might have been incised an assurance of the Queen’s peace. But a policeman, too impassive even to stamp his chilly feet, stood on the doorstep.
To this last circumstance the judge almost immediately alluded – and to an effect of slight embarrassment which surprised me.
‘Mr Syson, it is very good of you to come up. My car will be round in half an hour, and we will go and see those men at Scotland Yard. I suppose, you know, it must be acknowledged I am getting on, and occasionally subject to not very rational alarms. One of these occasions I know you have witnessed. How erroneously it was conceived, you will presently be made aware of. But there is a shade more substance, perhaps, to what has succeeded it. Hence the presence of that fellow on my doorstep.’
‘He did give me a hard look,’ I said. ‘But he made no move to search me for a bomb.’
Why I indulged this unsuitable levity I don’t know. Miss Sparrow’s ‘collected and purposeful’ was a just description of Sir Henry as he now was – which was not at all as I recollected him. Had I been an innocent man in a dock with this judge on the bench in front of me, I’d have had considerable confidence that he would steer things the right way. This change in Daviot may have thrown me out a little.
‘First about Hayes,’ he said, ‘the man who has decamped from that injudiciously conceived prison. Nobody has set eyes on him, you know, so he can’t be altogether a fool.’
‘I suppose not, Sir Henry.’ The judge’s speech, as may be imagined, was a considerable relief to me. Sooner or later he was bound to be given an account, even if in terms of Owen Marchmont’s tactful doctoring, which would invalidate what he had just said. But at the moment my improper conduct in the Hutton Arms was unknown to him and could occasion no awkwardness between us.
‘But that he left Hutton Green in pursuance of some vague design against me is a hypothesis I now unreservedly reject. The fellow is, as the policemen like to say, in the clear, so far as that is concerned. And the same is almost certainly true of his unfortunate son, the boy Robin. Robin’s rash conduct may well have been cleverly precipitated by the news of his father’s behaviour, but the connection between the two events stops there. It is true that Mr Ogilvy, whom I understand you have met, has given thought to another interpretation of the matter, which would imply the extraordinary postulate that Robin Hayes has been a party to a cunning deception, and is not in fact being held against his will. But I don’t believe it, and Ogilvy, a man of wide experience of criminals and their ways, doesn’t believe it either.’
‘I myself, Sir Henry, judged it incredible from the start.’
‘Quite so, Mr Syson, and the fact has had great weight with me. As has the opinion of that sensible woman I met in your company. Miss Wren, I think.’
‘Sparrow.’
‘Miss Sparrow. You both know the boy. I think it is equally true that I know my grandson. I am deeply attached to David, but I see him in one aspect as a rather vain and gullible child. There is all that nonsense about a theatrical career. But what bearing that may have on the situation must be regarded at present as obscure.’
‘Yes.’
‘So Robin, poor boy, is also in the clear. And if any harm has come to him, or to my grandson, or to both of them, I think I can assure you that the judiciary will take a severe view of the fact.’
I held my peace before this, the notion of retributive justice seeming to me to carry no comfort whatever. But it was, of course, Sir Henry Daviot’s sort of thing.
‘And now, Mr Syson, let us turn to Robin Hayes in his family connection. You may have remarked that I was considerably startled to hear that a man called Jasper Tandem is his uncle. Tandem happens to be known to me as not exactly a model citizen. He has had several close shaves, if the truth be told.’
‘With the law?’ The mild colloquialism in which the judge had indulged startled me a little. I could almost hear discreet mirth in court.
‘Certainly. And over a long period of years. When he was a very young man, and I was myself a junior counsel, hard up and practising at the criminal bar, I once tried to see him sent down. I didn’t succeed. Nor has anyone else since – although his subsequent life has certainly not been a blameless one. It is conceivable, indeed, that he has been involved in matters putting him uncomfortably in the power of professional criminals.’
‘These seem significant circumstances, Sir Henry.’
‘They may certainly be that – and you will see why there was a point at which I was disposed to suspect somewhat extensive conspiracy. But at least we here confront a puzzle. Tandem made his nephew that quite extraordinary gift of money. Was it in furtherance of some criminal intent to which the uncle was more or less constrained – and of which the nephew was quite unaware? Was its motive to get the boys into a situation more favourable for abduction than would be afforded while they were secure within a populous boarding-school? That is a question to which you must give the most careful consideration.’
For the moment I could only nod silently. It was as if Mr Justice Daviot had believed himself to be delivering his charge to a jury.
‘What I myself pause on,’ he continued, ‘is the amount of the gift. Indeed, its magnitude would be a reasonable term.’
‘It certainly seems to me an unnecessarily large sum for the purpose you are suggesting.’
‘But yet, Mr Syson, consider.’ Sir Henry raised a hand as if to restrain some headlong speed in my own cogitations. ‘Here in young Hayes is a normally level-headed boy – yet usefully (as one may put it) a little off balance as a consequence of the misfortune in his family. Might not the sudden gift of a very large sum of money serve to unbalance him further? I recall his friend who spoke up to me so well. With the Scottish name.’
‘Iain Macleod.’
‘Yes. When he spoke of Morocco or California it turns out that he was mistaken, so far as Robin Hayes’s succeeding conduct was concerned. But it was a good suggestion, all the same. A thousand pounds would serve as a strong prompting to travel far afield. But the escapade, if undertaken, would not get far. The boys would be trapped by the kidnappers upon some early opportunity their folly had created. But that the trap originated with Tandem, one need not believe. He was an agent merely – and perhaps a not wholly willing one at that. Mr Syson, what is your general impression of the man’s character?’
‘I have been thinking of him in terms of mischief or malice, rather than as one involved in some conspiracy. Anything simply malicious seems to appeal to him. Witness his tempting his brother-in-law to that idiotic breaking out of prison. But I’ve had no more than a couple of encounters with Tandem. I gather that as a boy he was expelled from his school, and I feel that his attitude to public schools in general has remained mixed ever since. On the one hand nostalgia taking rather tiresome and even unwholesome forms, and on the other resentment and an impulse to make trouble if he can.’
‘He may have been forced into making more trouble than he had the stomach for. When did you last see him?’
‘It was only yesterday. He paid me a visit at Helmingham that puzzled me a good deal.’
‘Just why, Mr Syson?’
‘I had an odd feeling that he felt himself to be on the fringe of something dangerous. I told Mr Ogilvy about it on the telephone. He seemed interested.’
‘As well he might. Can you be more precise about this impression you received?’
‘I don’t know that I can, Sir Henry. Tandem was very insistent that he hasn’t any money to speak of. It was as if nothing but a sum that might have to be raised was in his head. And I had an unaccountable feeling – again I told Ogilvy about it – that the anxiety he exhibited was in some way spurious.’
‘It may well have been, if he was playing a double game.’ The judge was suddenly grim. ‘A worthless fellow.’
‘Then why should he turn up on me?’
‘Why, indeed? If I may say so, Mr Syson, it is an acute question. And now we had better go and see the police. A good many of them are involved, and the convenient thing will be that we should go to them, rather than the other way round. If you are agreeable.’
‘Yes, of course.’ I felt that in this last consideration Sir Henry was in a routine way consulting his own dignity. His distress and anxiety were emphasised rather than masked by the stiff control he was exercising over himself.
So we went out to his now-waiting car: a chauffeur-driven affair. The policeman saluted – and then, rather as an afterthought, stepped down and opened the door of the vehicle. The slushy pavements were quite deserted, except for a single figure on the other side of the road. He was peering up at the house-numbers, and had the air of a man trying to find his way about. My glimpse of this struck an odd chord for a moment in my mind. But I gave no further thought to it.
Dusk had been falling during my interview with David Daviot’s grandfather. By the time of our arrival at New Scotland Yard what passes for darkness in the heart of London was all around us. We were expeditiously received. I seemed just to glimpse the odd little revolving advertisement in which the place indulges, a large hall, a small memorial to something or other, when I found myself in a lift with Sir Henry and several silent men who appeared to have nothing to do with one another. The lift halted – although without permitting gravity to give us any notice of the fact – and we were shown into a room in which a further half-dozen men were sitting round a table. They stood up to receive us – or rather to receive the judge – but were already seated again and fingering papers before chairs had been found for us. No time was being wasted. And Ogilvy, who was at the head of the table, spoke at once.
‘Reports,’ he said. ‘Detective Superintendent Jefferson.’
Jefferson revealed himself by clearing his throat. He was a florid man whose principal endowment appeared to me to be a pair of unnaturally piercing light blue eyes. These, I thought, might well have taken him all the way from the beat to his present elevated position in the Metropolitan Police. A single glance from them would surely unnerve the most hardened malefactor.
‘Taking things in order, then,’ Jefferson said. ‘The first event we hear of is the prisoner Hayes escaping from Hutton Green. If escaping it can be called. Some might be in two minds about that.’
‘I hope,’ Ogilvy said, ‘that none of us are presently going to be in two minds over more important matters. Continue.’
‘Yes, sir. Next, there’s what he does. Crosses the road, as you may say, and puts up in the local pub – a comfortable one, by all accounts. You have to admire that, in a manner of speaking. But you have to learn from it as well.’
‘Good,’ Ogilvy said.
‘Thank you, sir. It’s a matter of the cast of mind revealed, isn’t it? An eye for the uses of the invisible because sublimely obvious thing.’ Jefferson paused on this, and I had leisure to recall Edgar Allan Poe. The Detective Superintendent’s criminological studies had perhaps extended to that story of a purloined letter. ‘Hayes,’ Jefferson continued, ‘is flushed out of that pub in a manner that hasn’t quite been made clear to me. So where does he go? Home. The obvious answer is Home. Of course it’s no more than a notion. Or was no more than a notion. But worth investigating.’
‘Eminently,’ Ogilvy said.
‘Thank you, sir. Of course we’ve had that house in Uptoncester fairly closely watched from the first. It has been very cold, it seems, down there. Colder by a long way than here in London. So people have been going about huddled up.’ Jefferson paused on this. ‘Huddled up,’ he repeated with an air of muted drama – and directed those intimidating eyes in a baleful manner upon an officer sitting across the table from him. ‘Of course it was local men who were keeping Hayes’s house under observation. And what one of them saw was a huddled-up figure coming down the road carrying what you might call a bill-board or scratch-pad. Stopping and ringing the bells at every house, and going into some of them. Reading the meters, he might have been, or working for one of those opinion polls. And this local Vidocq wasn’t much interested in him. Isn’t even sure whether he entered Hayes’s house. Or, for that matter, came out again. Only some dim thought about it came to him later on.’
‘I’ve always regarded him as a very responsible officer,’ the man who had been glared at said gruffly. ‘Of course I’ve had the surveillance tightened up, and nobody will now come out without being questioned. I’ve had instructions to be very chary about seeming to harass the ladies of the house. Mr Ogilvy, I hope you will corroborate that.’
‘Certainly,’ Ogilvy said. ‘So there Hayes Senior may be – and out of the way of further mischief. And there, for the moment, we can leave him. I doubt whether he’s very near the hard core of the affair. So carry on, Mr Jefferson, to your next performer.’
At this moment a uniformed man entered the room and handed Ogilvy a note. Raising a delaying hand, Ogilvy read it with what I judged to be increasingly studied composure. He then wrote a note himself, with which the uniformed man left the room. ‘Yes, Jefferson?’ Ogilvy said.
‘The next man, sir, would be Tandem. Hayes’s brother-in-law, that is.’
‘Ah, yes – Tandem.’ Ogilvy appeared to come to a decision. ‘One interesting thing about Tandem most of you haven’t yet heard about. He has been declaring himself as very apprehensive that a demand for ransom money may arrive on his doorstep, since it will be believed that he is the wealthy member of the family. Well, I’ve just heard—’ and Ogilvy tapped the note still in front of him—’what may relieve him of that anxiety. The kidnappers have moved again – and we can account ourselves lucky that they now feel in such a devil of a hurry. They’ve made their demand, but not to Mr Tandem. They’ve made it to the Lord Chancellor – or to his office, to be more exact.’
‘The Lord Chancellor!’ It was now for the first time that Sir Henry Daviot spoke. He sounded less dumbfounded than scandalised. ‘In heaven’s name what has Lord Hailsham to do with the abduction of my grandson and his companion?’
‘What, indeed. But, Sir Henry, may I put a question to you?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Does the name Kilroy convey anything to you?’
‘No.’
‘Or Kissack, or Hudson?’
‘I think not. But names come and go.’
‘Precisely. And the owners of these three have two things in common. They are all now in gaol. And it was you who sent them down.’
‘And the demand?’
‘Yes, Sir Henry. It’s not for money. It’s for men.’
This was a bombshell. It was rather as if an actual bomb had gone off in the big hall many floors below us. Or, more exactly, it was as if news had been received of rabies having crossed the English Channel. This was something which, commonly in a political context, was already happening in distant countries of which we knew little. Here, it was, I imagine, virtually a ‘first’. Robin Hayes and David Daviot were to be released from bondage if three common criminals were let out of gaol.
My own heart sank as the implications of this came home to me. Recently at the back of my head had been the possibility that, in a last resort, the law might turn a blind eye to some actual ransom being unobtrusively arranged. But now the kidnappers were revealed as having acted in ghastly ignorance, making a demand to which, surely, no English government would submit. I wondered confusedly whether I was right about this. I glanced at Daviot and imagined that I saw my conviction mirrored on his face. And then I heard Ogilvy speaking again.
‘So here is progress, gentlemen. Let us be clear about that. An hour ago we had nothing, or almost nothing, although we weren’t saying so even among ourselves. Now we have the names of these three men in gaol; and somewhere is a group of their associates who are mounting this caper. They must be close associates, and with loyalty enough to venture such a desperate game. The criminal records of those three – Kilroy, Kissack, Hudson – are certain to yield a lead on some of them. The files are being sifted through now.’
‘They must be reckoning on that,’ somebody said. ‘The villains must. That naming those names gives us some sort of line on them. They’ll have taken precautions accordingly.’
‘Perfectly true. Here’s our chance, all the same.’
With this, the meeting broke up – the affair having moved, as it were, into another gear. I wondered whether Ogilvy was putting a bold face on a desperate situation. Supposing a real trail were established, and the kidnappers knew the hunt was hot behind them: what would they then do with the two boys? Would they free them, and themselves simply make a run for it? Or would some more evil and vengeful course attract them? I thought – stupidly, no doubt, and in a fashion which liberal-minded persons will at once condemn – that it was a pity no image of a gallows could influence their deliberations.
Sir Henry Daviot invited me home for the night, but I distrusted our present ability to be of any support to one another. I went instead to a married sister in Kensington, who took entirely in her stride my unheralded arrival without so much as a toothbrush. In the course of perhaps an hour’s sleep I had a dream characterised by acute anxiety. This was unsurprising. But in it I found myself to be one of the companions of Hernando Cortes during his dreadful march from Mexico to Honduras in 1524, an episode about which I must have read in Prescott’s book when an undergraduate. This is of no significance for my narrative – unless, indeed, the useless behaviour of my mind in sleep prompted me to seek something to be useful about when awake. I ate a hasty breakfast, thanked my sister and brother-in-law for their hospitality, and caught an early train to Uptoncester.