Here Comes a Chopper (25 page)

‘Bet you,’ said one Burnett to his friend Sawleys, ‘I can get my head out through that embrasure, or whatever it’s called.’

‘What do you say we have a shot at climbing up the chimney?’ said one Pullin to his opposite number, Sellingford. ‘I bet you could get a jolly long way up if you tried.’

‘Bet I can climb higher than you can,’ Sellingford replied immediately.

‘Wonder what would happen,’ enquired one
Kingsford of his partner Mapping, ‘if we shoved a fist into the middle of the Battle of Waterloo?’

‘Can’t think why they stick a thing like that in the middle of the Tower,’ complained Mapping, who had not yet learned to despise the steep ladder of learning. ‘What’s it got to do with the Normans?’

‘Oh, don’t be an owl,’ responded Kingsford. ‘What have the Normans got to do with
it?
I bet the Battle of Waterloo was far more important, anyway.’

‘That’s not the point, you ass! In any case, they were important in different ways. Don’t look now, but here’s the keeper.’

The thirty were at last divorced from the lower floor with all its attractions, and were persuaded to go across to the staircase (which, fortunately, they had not had time to discover for themselves) and ascend to the little Norman chapel. It was after they had descended a long staircase to the well, and, having been wrested thence, were once more in the open air, that it occurred to Parkinson to count heads. Twenty-eight boys were present.

‘Oh, damn!’ said Parkinson. ‘Who’s missing?’

‘I’ll go and round them up,’ said Roger. ‘It’s Kirby and Healy-Lunn, isn’t it?’ He returned to the White Tower and searched it faithfully. There was no sign of the truants. The truth dawned on him as he disgustedly rejoined the party. ‘I bet they cut their stick at the entrance as soon as we’d counted up and taken the tickets,’ he said. ‘Goodness knows
where
they are now! They may be anywhere.’

He applied to the custodian at the gate, but
received no comfort. Several schools were visiting the Tower that day, and the attendants had been kept extremely busy. Roger took a feverish walk round, but, apart from an abortive chase of two school caps which proved to be different from those of his own boys, as he perceived as soon as he got nearer them, he had no encouragement in his search. He returned to Parkinson.

‘I think they must be outside somewhere,’ he said. ‘Probably thought they’d be bored. They came last year, I believe. At least, Kirby did. I suppose they’ve gone off on a toot.’

‘Better give chase, I suppose, then,’ said Parkinson gloomily.

‘O—oh,
sir!’
said twenty-eight reproachful voices.

‘Aren’t we going to see where the Princes in the Tower were murdered?’ demanded Kingsford.

‘And where Sir Walter Raleigh’s ghost walks?’ enquired Mapping. ‘I think I’m psychic, sir.’

A babel broke out, during which Anne Boleyn’s head and Colonel Blood were mentioned by the disappointed boys. Roger, receiving a resigned and acquiescent nod from Parkinson, strode away back to the gate, and the others went onwards towards the Bloody and Beauchamp Towers.

Once outside the Tower precincts it dawned upon Roger that Kirby and Healy-Lunn were not entirely the perishing little nuisances he had supposed them. The sun was shining, the Thames, so near Tower Bridge and Saint Catherine’s Dock, was full of life, and he was freed for a time from his little
charges and their incessant questions and chatter. Keeping their fingers off the polished armour, too, had been more than one man’s work, and he felt fatigued. To be alone, even for five minutes, while he hunted the two stragglers, would be restful and refreshing, he decided.

His own tastes urged him to the river. He argued, too, that this was the way the boys would have taken. There was a river steamer about to leave the small pier. She was just casting off. Roger stood a moment to watch, and then began to run. On her deck, leaning over the rail to watch operations, were Kirby and Healy-Lunn.

He was almost thrown on board by willing hands, and told to get his ticket from the master. The screw began to revolve, the pier to back away, and the steamer set her nose eastward, reversed her engines and began to gather speed for her trip.

Roger was no sooner aware of all these facts than he began to think he had done a foolish thing.

‘Where do we stop?’ he enquired of a woman with three children and some bundles.

‘Sarfend, dearie. Least, that’s where
I’m
agoing.’

Roger sighed with relief. The steamer would call, then, at Greenwich. Bad enough, but not nearly as bad as it might have been. The two boys were safely tied up. He would have half an hour to himself and then give them the shock of their lives.

It was just eleven o’clock. He went into the small saloon and had some beer. He did not know the rate at which the river steamers usually travelled,
but he reflected comfortably that Greenwich was only about five miles from Tower Pier by river and that the steamer seemed to be making good time. From Greenwich a bus, or, at most, a couple of buses, would bring him, he supposed, to Tower Bridge. As Parkinson and his boys would spend about three-quarters of an hour over lunch and in examining the old guns which were parked along the esplanade opposite the watergate of the Tower, the contretemps of Kirby’s and Healy-Lunn’s truancy would not have wasted very much time.

Roger had a second beer and a cheese sandwich. He filled and lighted his pipe. It was chilly on deck. He might just as well, he decided, remain in the stuffy but snug and cosy atmosphere of the saloon. Besides, the longer he could remain out of sight of the boys, the more pronounced would be the shock with which the sight of him would be greeted, and he was young enough to appreciate this fact.

The steamer threshed on through the Lower Pool and past the entrance of the Regent’s Canal. It semi-circumscribed the Commercial Docks and passed the West India Docks and the Isle of Dogs. It passed the Millwall Docks and rounded into dirty, historic Deptford. Along Limehouse Reach it ran, and past the mouth of the Deptford Canal. Then Roger went out on deck.

There lay Greenwich, with the Royal Naval College well in view, but the steamer took no account of this. To Roger’s almost open-mouthed horror, she ran on past Greenwich pier and the training ship drawn in under the starboard bank,
and swung into Blackwall Reach on her way to Gravesend.

Roger sought the bar-tender.

‘Where do we stop?’ he enquired.

‘Gravesend, Southend, Clacton-on-Sea,’ replied the man. Roger ordered a gin and another beer, and then seated himself on a plush-covered bench and leaned back, closing his eyes.

‘I say, sir,’ said the hateful voice of Master Kirby in the middle of a day-dream—or, rather, a waking nightmare in which Roger imagined himself being dismissed by the headmaster with opprobrium and without a character, ‘why don’t you come up on deck, sir? Healy-Lunn and I saw you come aboard, sir, and we couldn’t think where you’d got to. We wondered whether you were sea-sick. I have an aunt, sir, who is always sea-sick on the Thames. I say, sir, do you think I could ask for a ginger-beer, sir? Or is it like a public house in here? I’m awfully thirsty, sir.’

‘Oh, Lord!’ groaned Roger, fishing in his pocket for a shilling. ‘Here you are. I wish you’d both drop overboard and get drowned!’

‘Oh, thanks
awfully
, sir,’ said Master Kirby; but whether he was gratified by the gift or the pious wish Roger did not enquire.

He drank his gin and beer, and finished his cheese sandwiches, and then thought longingly of the food he had left in the care of one Munnings, who had offered to carry it for him and no doubt still had it in safe keeping. He dared not order more food or drink until he knew what the price of the tickets
on the steamer would be, and the three return fares to Tower Bridge. He cursed himself that he had spent so much already. And what on earth had induced him to part with a precious bob to that little swine Kirby, he wondered—Kirby, who, together with Healy-Lunn, was the cause of all this trouble and loss of time.

Kirby and Healy-Lunn came up to him.

‘Please, sir, we’ve got our tickets. The steward or someone came round. We took them to Gravesend, sir. Shall I go and get yours? And, sir, we’ve just passed a dredger. Did you see it? And there’s a tanker coming up, sir. Do come up on deck and see her!’

The steamer passed Blackwall Tunnel and slanted round Bugsby’s Reach. The Victoria Docks were far away to port. Woolwich Dockyard approached, and Woolwich Reach. The river mouth turned northward, buoyed all along the northern bank between George V Dock and the Northern Outfall bordering Barking Reach. Barking Creek went by, and the eighteen-foot sounding line remained obstinately along the northern shore.

Halfway Reach and Dagenham Breach—it was like a madman’s poetry, thought Roger. Jenningtree Point and Erith Marshes, Erith Reach and Erith Rands, Crayfordness and Dartford Creek, Purfleet, Long Reach, even Clement’s Reach—he knew them all from the chart and the log of his little motor cruiser
Sunfleet
—the semi-circular curve past Blackshelf and the training ships
Exmouth
and
Warspite
, the southern slant down to
Northfleet on Northfleet Hope, and so to Tilbury Docks and the Tidal Basin.

Tilbury Fort, and, opposite, Gravesend at last! The steamer rang bells and edged in. There was a crowd of people at the gangway to go ashore, and some were pushing. Roger thrust himself in front of his charges, who remained cheerfully prattling up to the very moment of disembarkation, and began making tracks for the gangway. Suddenly he heard behind him a shout in a childish voice, then a gasping snarl, then he got hopelessly jammed in the wedge at the gangway railing.

‘Oh, sir! Please, sir!’ cried Master Kirby, as soon as they were ashore and Roger, having demanded of a policeman the way to the railway station, had dragged them away from the dock past a church and along two streets. ‘Did you see the man with the knife, sir?’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Roger, uncomfortably reminded by this question of his previous escapes from injury.

‘A man with a knife, sir. Lunn bit him.’

‘Bit whom? What the devil are you talking about?’

‘He’s still got blood on his teeth, sir. Show Mr Hoskyn, Lousy. Perhaps you’d better spit. It might be poisonous.’

Master Healy-Lunn spat vigorously on to a passing cat. Roger glanced behind him. He had a suspicion, founded on past experience, that it was not unlikely that they were still being followed.

‘Much obliged, Lunn,’ he said lightly. ‘And now,
perhaps, Kirby, you’ll explain what you’re talking about.’

‘Well, sir, you know that squash getting off? Well, sir, you know we were just behind you? Well, sir, I don’t think the man understood that you were with us. He shoved us aside and then we saw the knife. Like a sailor’s knife, sir. Keary has one. The headmaster doesn’t like it, sir. He told Keary to put it away. Keary is a Rover Scout, sir. At least, he will be one as soon as——’

‘For heaven’s sake keep to the point!’ said Roger. ‘And
hurry!
I don’t want to miss a train!’

‘The odds against our catching a train, sir, without knowing the time-table,’ said Master Kirby, ‘are about one hundred thousand million to one, sir. My father worked it out. It is quite mystical—er—mythical to think, sir——’

‘Oh,
shut
up!’ shouted Roger.
‘And get a move on!’

The conversation was not resumed until they were all in the train. Then Roger turned to Healy-Lunn.

‘Well, sir,’ said Healy-Lunn modestly, ‘it seemed as if the man was going to put the knife in your back, sir. And as I wasn’t sure whether he was going to or not, I bit his hand, and he dropped the knife. I bit rather hard, sir.’

‘He’s the champion biter of the Sixth, sir,’ interpolated Master Kirby, who disliked the role of passive listener. ‘Last term he bit the end off a riding-crop, sir. You know the little loop that——’

‘Oh, shut up!’ said Roger. ‘Go on, Lunn.’

‘I’m afraid that’s all, sir.’

‘You bit his hand really hard? Which hand? Would you happen to know?’

‘Oh, yes. His right hand, sir. I bit him on the Mount of Venus, sir.’

‘Where on earth is the Mount of Venus?’

‘Oh,
sir!’
said Master Kirby. ‘Don’t you know
that?
It’s hand-reading, sir. I have an aunt who can do it. I know all the mounts, sir. Venus——’

‘Oh, shut
up!’
yelled Roger. ‘Go on, Lunn.’

‘The Mount of Venus is at the base of the thumb, sir. It is fairly fleshy.’

‘You mean you may have left a scar?’

‘I hope not, sir, but I think so. Do you think I shall have trouble with the police, sir?’

‘No, I know you won’t have trouble with the police, Lunn. In fact——’ He paused, and then added impressively, ‘You won’t even have trouble with the headmaster over this little jaunt of yours if you can contrive to keep your mouth shut.’

‘And Kirby, sir?’

‘Oh, blast Kirby!’ said Roger pardonably. ‘All right, all right. But, mind, Kirby, if you breathe a single solitary word——’

‘Oh, I won’t, sir! Not a sound! Oh,
thank
you, sir! Oh, sir, you are very, very good to us, sir! I would like you to know——’

‘I would like
you
to know that I’ll twist your neck if you don’t
shut up!’
said Roger.

‘So you see,’ wrote Roger to Mrs Bradley, ‘there seems good reason to suspect that somebody—I
suppose the murderer, and it looks very much like Sim—must think I know something against him, although I’m quite sure I don’t. Anyway, I am remaining in my digs, after dark every night, just in case, and am not going to the cinema at present. How is Dorothy? And what are the chances of Mrs Denbies’ being released without a trial if the police are fat-headed enough to arrest her? And anything might happen after that lunatic inquest!’

He wrote in a letter to Dorothy:

‘Mr Clinton wants me to go into residence for the rest of this term. It’s a frightful fag, but I suppose I’ll have to do it. It means I won’t be as free at week-ends, but that can’t be helped, and as I’m staying in, anyway, during the evenings, it won’t make all that difference. You might write as often as you can.’