The Journeying Boy (28 page)

But now this curious episode in the Paxton affair, of which the present chapter has stumblingly attempted a rude chronicle, was nearing its term. Mr Thewless had reached the topmost stair, and his knees were trembling. Nevertheless, he now attempted and achieved what he had not hitherto ventured upon: he ran. The door of his own room was open and visible before him; he had only to gain it, bolt it behind him, and tumble into a bed which, whether sheeted or not, offered a sufficiency of bedclothes of rougher integument to permit of his gaining the species of somewhat infantile security now with a quite resplendent candour uppermost in his mind. He ran – a swift glance having delusively assured him that the corridor was as void as he could hope. But even as the goal was within his grasp this assurance was betrayed, and one of the creatures of his long struggle – whether of design or through some hasty miscalculation of the line on which he stood – appeared hard before the doorway, barring his path. At this Mr Thewless perforce looked indeed – and what he saw was a shrouded figure hurriedly assume the posture, sufficiently hinted beneath an enveloping sheet, of some placidly posed Apollo of the Phidean age. It was a grotesque revelation beneath which Mr Thewless felt his nether limbs turning shamefully to water; and it is once more a mark of his quality that he now decisively acted in the very terminal moment in which action was possible to him. The candlestick which he still bore as a bludgeon he turned incontinently into a missile which he hurled with all his residual force at the figure before him. At this the figure gave a yelp of pain – a yelp swiftly overtaken in Mr Thewless’ ear by a roaring as of great waters. Mistily he saw the figure stagger, the sheet drop away and then – for a brief flash, whether of revelation or hallucination – the swimming, melting, fading features of the man with the beard and the pebble glasses.

Even at this juncture he cannot altogether have lost consciousness. For, mingled with painful and massive auditory phenomena assuredly subjective in origin, he heard shouts, running footsteps, breaking glass, a violently closing door, glimpsed the elder Mr Bolderwood, red-faced and brandishing a revolver; glimpsed too the younger Mr Bolderwood, pale, swiftly calculating, similarly armed. These things faded, and he next knew that his head was being raised on a small, taut arm. He opened his eyes and saw that it was Humphrey who supported him – supported him much as in his dreams an interminable aeon ago. The boy was looking down at him with compunction, with amusement innocent of all malice. Mr Thewless felt that things had passed off not too badly and that he might reasonably go to sleep.

While these simple passages of melodrama were transacting themselves at Killyboffin Hall, Detective-Inspector Cadover had been pursuing a plodding investigation into the murder in the cinema. He had failed to find any short cut to the identity of the dead man by way of the young lady with whom he was accustomed to dine confidentially at Smith’s. For the degree of confidence involved in this particular satisfaction of certain of man’s simpler needs had not extended to the communication of a surname and address; and when the clue of the casual letter referring to a scientist’s son had failed him Cadover was no further forward than at the moment of his first glimpse of the young man’s formidably anonymous corpse.

He had recognized this over his breakfast; recognized it with an insistence that spoke of his obscure sense of some special urgency in the affair. Nothing was less his inclination than to sit back and wait the event, even although his experience told him that this was now the course that the cinema case was most likely to pursue. His night’s perambulations had been a sharp disappointment; in such subsidiary clues as remained to his hand he had very little faith; in all probability the next stage of the matter would be represented by somebody’s turning up to claim the body. This always happened. It was remarkable – Cadover reflected over a somewhat inattentive communion with his wife at the breakfast-table – how hard it was in a civilized community to disappear without fuss. Taken in the mass, we have come to hold life extraordinarily cheap – far cheaper, surely, than any culture since something dimly Sumerian or Babylonian. We scrap a generation by violent and costly means, and very soon it is the cost and not the scrapping that troubles us. But let the loneliest old woman vanish from her garret and presently the local police station is besieged by a throng of her intimate acquaintance demanding an instant dragging of the local ponds. Only there is a time-interval in these disappearances; and one of the longest gaps, Cadover knew, is apt to occur between the disappearance of just such a person as his present corpse suggested and the emergence of a body of inquiring relatives. For young men of the sort either have, or by their mothers, sisters, or wives are apprehended to have, impulses liable to take them regrettably out of the family circle from time to time. The awkwardness produced by this – by the lurking suspicion that the missing man may, in the vulgar phrase, be enjoying a night, or series of nights, on the tiles – had often, in Cadover’s experience, occasioned deplorable delay in the inquiries made by devoted persons into the disappearance of entirely blameless men. Human beings can be as inhibited by shyness before the very gates of death as before the door of a strange house to which one has been casually bidden to a party. About the young man of military appearance shot dead at the showing of
Plutonium Blonde
questions would almost certainly be asked. But they were unlikely to be asked for several days yet.

How, then, was Cadover to proceed? He summoned his available information – which consisted, in effect, of the scanty letter received by Miss Joyce Vane and the yet scantier entries in the dead man’s diary. The picture to be built up from these documents was not remarkable for detail. The young man had engaged himself as a private tutor to take a boy to Ireland. The address to which they were going was unknown but might possibly incorporate the word – or fragment of a word –
Hump
. There was a substantial probability that it lay somewhere within the extensive area served by a series of wandering light railways of which the starting-point was the junction of Dundrane.

Next, the boy in question was the son of a scientist. This scientist was eminent either in the field of atomic physics or in some more or less related field which casual and uninformed reference might so name. Was anything else known of him? Cadover frowned. In the space in his new diary appropriate to Thursday – the day, that was to say, on which he had died – the prospective tutor had written the words
gun for boy 1.15
. This might, of course, refer to some quite inexpensive weapon – say, an air-gun of one of the well-known popular makes. But against this reading there had to be set one of the two entries immediately preceding; the one that read
N I police re guns etc
. The suggestion here of Customs regulations to be complied with, as also the season of the year, pointed to substantial designs upon the game birds of Ireland. The probability, then, seemed clear. The eminent scientist had delegated the new tutor to buy the boy a shot-gun.

Cadover reached for
The Times
– in the advertisement columns of which, at this time of year, there would certainly be a number of such weapons offered for sale. And presently he was confirmed in what he had supposed. Sporting guns were uncommonly costly in these days. Moreover, private tutors could not be altogether inexpensive. So here was something else that might reasonably be inferred about the unknown scientist: he was a person of some substance. And at this Cadover recalled Sir Bernard Paxton, whose style of living would here have fitted him so nicely into the picture. Unfortunately, Sir Bernard had proved a most abysmal blank, and in this he had been at one with two other comfortably circumstanced savants whom Cadover had interviewed on the previous night: Lord Buffery and Sir Adrian Ramm.

What more was there to go on? On the apparent eve of his departure, and at the seeming instance of his future pupil, Miss Vane’s nameless friend had been persuaded to visit a cinema; and in that cinema he had been killed. Now, although many tutors, private or otherwise, are undoubtedly moribund, a positively dead tutor is of no use at all, and can certainly not be employed to take a small boy to Ireland. It seemed likely, therefore, that the particular small boy involved was not in Ireland now, and that inquiry at Dundrane or beyond would yield no very immediate result. For with the death of the tutor the Irish project had surely fallen through.

But where, then, was the boy now
? This initial question raised a series of others of a complexity which, until now, Cadover had not quite fully realized. Had the boy left the cinema before his tutor was killed – or at least unaware that he had been killed? Was this scientist’s son at home somewhere in London now, in a household merely perplexed by some unexplained hitch in a holiday plan? It was difficult to see any plausibility in this. Moreover, it took no account of another factor which now leapt at Cadover as of sudden immense significance.

The dead man’s visit to
Plutonium Blonde
– there was his own word for it as given in his note to Miss Vane – had been something urged upon him by his new pupil. And
Plutonium Blonde
was assuredly the only film then in London during the showing of which a member of the audience could be shot, or otherwise violently despatched, without the risk of instant alarm; the only film, certainly, to combine a moment of absorbing suspense with an ear-splitting inferno of sound. Was the whole Irish proposal, then, bogus – the means, simply, of establishing a relationship whereby the unfortunate young man could be fatally lured into a certain cinema at a certain hour?

Cadover inspected this proposition carefully, and there came a point at which he had to boggle at it. That point was simply the proposed purchase, or acquisition, of the gun. If the boy was only a decoy, and the proposal to take him to Ireland a mere figment, this business of getting him a gun, Cadover felt, would simply not have happened; to have suggested it to the victim, and thus to have put him in the way, presumably, of inquiring after such a weapon, would be a useless bringing into the notice of sundry shop people a situation for which as little publicity as possible would be desired. Moreover, the whole supposition, further considered, seemed fantastic. To invent an eminent scientist, and provide him with a son who must be taken to Ireland, because it was for some reason necessary that a commonplace young man should be murdered, was a course of things too laboriously oblique to be sensible. And that an actual scientist of eminence should be involved in such a design, and should employ either an actual or a pretended son to further it, was surely a scheme of things equally fantastic. Cadover on the whole was disposed to believe in the scientist, in his son, and in the authenticity of some proposal to send that son to Ireland in the company of the man whose death he was now puzzling over. But from this it seemed to follow that it had been a boy innocent of any evil design who had accompanied – nay, persuaded – the doomed man into the cinema. On this supposition, how could any sense be made of what had followed?

There had been talk of two boys
. And here Cadover got out his notes of the day before and propped them against the coffee pot. There had been talk of two boys – and there was some indication, moreover, that five persons in all had been in some degree involved in the affair in the cinema. Three seats had been booked together; to occupy the first of these a woman had arrived independently; to occupy the other two the dead man had arrived along with a fifteen-year-old boy. Subsequently, and before the discovery of the body, the woman and the boy had left unnoticed. But there was this to be remarked: that the boy upon his arrival had struck an usherette as being, in fact, not quite the sort of boy that he was holding himself out to be. This, of course, the usherette had announced only after the perpetration of an interesting murder. It would be folly to give weight to it. But it would be a graver folly to ignore it entirely.

Next, there were the remaining two of the five seats somehow concerned. From these, which had been booked independently, there had come out, apparently before the murder, and also before it was possible to have seen the main film through, a lad and a girl. The girl had been cross and bewildered; the lad had been hurrying her away. And the grand fact about the boy who was thus seen leaving the scene with a girl was a singular point of similarity he bore to the boy who was earlier seen to arrive upon it with the man who was killed. In an age in which many English public schools have dispensed with so much as a cap both the boys who had come under observation were sporting bowler hats. That the boy who came with the man was the
same
who had left with the girl was a hypothesis which, as soon as one peered into the matter, presented considerable difficulty. Suppose, then, there were indeed
two
boys. The identical style of their headgear was scarcely to be explained by the obvious supposition that here were two friends from the same school attending a cinema in each other’s company, since it appeared certain that they occupied seats independently booked. On the other hand, it by no means followed from this last fact that the boys were in no significant relationship the one with the other. Coincidence might have brought them together with some immediate result thoroughly germane to the mystery.

It was after this fashion that Cadover’s mind ploughed slowly forward as he presently made his way to Scotland Yard. In recognizing that the casual and the causal might have been bewilderingly at interplay in the cinema, he had an instinctive feeling that he was getting a first grip on the case. He knew comparatively little of what had happened at the Metrodrome, but it was enough to enable him to suspect that
too much
had happened; that the episode had taken on some complication it was not intended to bear. But along with this persuasion there grew up in his mind another to which he found himself equally disposed to attend. In any mental picture of the affair that he attempted to conjure up, or that came to him involuntarily as he essayed a more abstract dealing with it, he found that the predominant feature was the two boys with their several bowler hats. They balanced the composition like a pair of identical twins in comedy, dodging now one and now the other out of the wings to the diversion of a bewildered audience. Or, better perhaps, the evocation was of farce; of one character with a false beard impersonating another character with a real one. And surely that was it! Cadover, reaching his room at length and hanging up his own bowler hat, concluded that some element of impersonation would be found to lie near the heart of the mystery.