The Journeying Boy (16 page)

‘That is a most improper thing to say, even as a joke.’ Cadover relented. ‘I rather agree with you, all the same. But Clodd’s affairs have nothing to do with us at the moment.’

Cadover sank into a reverie which lasted until he was shown into the presence of Lord Buffery. The eminent scientist was playing with an electric train arranged round the circumference of a billiard-room, and he showed no disposition to abrupt this activity when Cadover was announced. ‘Police?’ he said, raising his voice above the rattle of a goods train which was clattering across a viaduct. ‘Well, what d’you want?… Son? Of course I’ve got a son.’ He flicked a lever and an express emerged precipitately from a tunnel. ‘Going away with a tutor? Naturally he is. What else should I do with him in these absurd summer holidays?… Peter? Certainly not. Going with a Frenchman to somewhere near Grenoble… Interested in model railways?’

A second goods train had now come into operation and was avoiding the first at sundry crossings in a hair’s breadth way reminiscent of an antique comic film. The refrigerated vans appeared to be particularly noisy. Lord Buffery pressed a button on a switchboard beside him and the express engine instantly emitted a series of realistic and penetrating whistles. And now a great deal of shunting appeared to be taking place in the obscure and extensive area beneath the billiard-table. The uproar grew. Cadover took a pace forward by way of indicating polite attention to these phenomena, and was at once made aware that the floor was an ordered litter of porters, passengers, cars, taxis, Bren-gun carriers, ambulances, motor-cyclists, hay-wagons, and other miscellaneous paraphernalia of locomotion all of an appropriate scale. Lord Buffery looked with some apprehensiveness at the size of Cadover’s boots, and then at a collection of navvies complete with tools, brazier, and night-watchman’s hut which was dangerously in their proximity. ‘Deuced hard to replace, these,’ he said apprehensively. ‘Just mind the steam-roller.’

Cadover, minding the steam-roller, resolutely returned to business. ‘Your son,’ he asked, ‘doesn’t happen to be a bit of a handful all round?’

Lord Buffery deftly brought another express into action and simultaneously indicated that he had not quite caught the question. Cadover bellowed it anew. Lord Buffery’s features assumed an expression of sudden exasperation; he stretched out his hand and the whole various uproar died away on the tracks; he stood up and moved gingerly towards the door. ‘This way,’ he said. His voice had sunk into a sudden gloom.

Cadover followed him through a long corridor and saw a door thrown open before him. Inside was a great stillness and clear white light – this and the faint smell which electricity seems to generate when being used in oblique and ingenious ways. The place was some sort of advanced laboratory. And its sole occupant was a small, weedy boy with a bumpy forehead, large glasses, and prominent teeth. For a moment he looked up from the complicated system of retorts and test-tubes over which he was bending, contemplating Cadover without curiosity and Lord Buffery with disapproval tempered with tolerance. And then he returned to his affairs.

Lord Buffery murmured an apology and closed the door. ‘Harold,’ he said resignedly, ‘is entirely given over to study. I call it a damned dull life. Now, if you want to see a boy who
is
a bit of a handful, I advise you to go round to Paxton. Not long ago his lad threw a cream-jug at me.’ Lord Buffery paused admiringly. ‘Deuced expensive one too, I should think. Great connoisseur is Paxton – ceramics, pictures – all that sort of thing… But it would be a long time before Harold would throw so much as a calorimeter at you. Would you care to come upstairs and see my workshop? I’m just finishing rather a good model of the Forth Bridge… No? Well, good evening to you.’

At least, Cadover thought as he made his way to the car, Lord Buffery appeared untroubled by the larger issues involved in the exploitation of atomic power. ‘Sir Adrian Ramm,’ he said to the driver, and once more sank back into reverie.

But Sir Adrian Ramm’s only son was in a nursing home with appendicitis; he was a reasonably well-conducted child; and there was no proposal that he should go anywhere with a tutor. Sir Adrian could not afford a tutor and would not employ one if he could. As a class of men, he regarded their morals as bad.

But now it was time to return to the Paxton mansion. Cadover realized that his hopes were substantially set in this quarter. For this he had perhaps small logical justification. Indeed, he found that he was attaching obscure significance to the lurking presence of Soapy Clodd, although this petty scoundrel was almost certainly no more than an accidental intrusion upon the picture. All he really had to go upon was this: that the dead man’s pupil had been unruly, and that young Paxton had thrown a cream-jug at the President of the Royal Society. Nevertheless, he knew that he would be disconcerted were the Paxton trail to prove a dead end.

The same manservant admitted him – and in what he felt was a sinister quiet. Had some horrid revelation burst upon the household and prostrated it with gloom? Cadover hoped so – and followed the soft-footed butler into a sombre library. A tall, pale man with a high forehead sat writing at a dark, heavily-carved table which served as a desk. He rose as Cadover was announced and advanced across the dimly-lit room. ‘I understand that you are a police officer?’ The voice was low and precisely cultivated. ‘What is your business with me?’

‘I apologize for intruding upon you, Sir Bernard. But the matter is of some urgency.’ Paxton, Cadover knew, was a person of much consequence in the world – of much more consequence than Lord Buffery. And he found himself treating the great man with a more than usually wary respect – and explaining the reason of his call without at all resenting the fact that he was not invited to sit down.

The tall figure listened in silence. Then he shook his head. ‘I can be of no help to you. There is no proposal that my son should go away with a tutor.’

‘The boy is at home now?’

‘He is on a short visit to an aunt in another part of London. As it happens, I called upon her and saw them both less than an hour ago.’

‘Has your son been in any way out of hand recently?’

The tall man could just be discerned in the subdued light as raising his eyebrows. ‘As my son can demonstrably have no connexion with the person who has died in the cinema,’ he said stiffly, ‘the question does not arise.’ Then he suddenly smiled faintly, as if charitably willing to relieve his obscure caller’s embarrassment under this rebuke. ‘As a matter of fact, the boy is sometimes the very devil. Not very long ago he threw a cream-jug at Lord Buffery.’

At this Cadover, doing what was plainly expected of him, gave evidence of mild mirth. Then, moved by a sudden impulse, he spoke again. ‘I have another question, which I hope you will not find vexatious, sir. Have you any suspicion that there may recently have been an attempt to blackmail your son?’

‘To blackmail him!’ The words came with a curious quality – almost as if from one suspecting a trap and momentarily out of his depth. ‘Certainly not. It is a most improbable circumstance.’ The tone was confident again now. ‘Had I reason to suppose anything of the sort I would at once call in the police.’

‘It is merely that a criminal who specializes in that sort of thing – in preying upon the common misdemeanours and concealments of adolescents – has been observed lurking near your house. It is more than probable that your son is not involved. But I should advise you, Sir Bernard, to bear the circumstance in mind. A sensitive boy so preyed upon may be enduring a very dangerous strain. On our side, we shall see that the man’s present activities are investigated. And now I must not take up more of your time.’

The tall figure had already touched a bell and was steering Cadover dismissively towards the door. As he did so he appeared to notice Cadover’s eyes upon a painting at the end of the room. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said, ‘I have that hanging there because it is so uncommonly like my son.’

Cadover, thus prompted, looked at the painting more carefully; it was of an aristocratic little boy, dark-haired and dark-eyed, dressed in hunting costume. Cadover wished that the light was better; he was fond of painting – and here surely was an original Velazquez! He remembered Lord Buffery’s remarking that Sir Bernard Paxton was a connoisseur. ‘Surely–’ he said.

‘Yes – to be sure.’ The tall figure was now waiting impatiently for the door to open. ‘It’s an old picture – very old indeed… If I can be of further help to you, please let me know. But, as you see, you are on a false scent here. Good evening.’

The silent manservant conducted Cadover across the hall and handed him his bowler hat, not without taking a glance inside it first. Cadover set it firmly on his head, and fleetingly inspected himself as he did so in a large mirror before him. This mirror revealed the door through which he had just come; it opened as he looked and the figure of the eminent scientist whom he had disturbed came rapidly out and disappeared into the gloom of a corridor.

The manservant had opened the front door and Cadover saw his car waiting at the bottom of the flight of steps and beyond the broad pavement. And at the same time he heard a voice speaking sharply and authoritatively from what might have been the direction of the main staircase of the house. ‘Jollard…’ said the voice. The manservant closed the door softly upon Cadover and he heard no more.

So that was that. The boy who had thrown the cream jug was out of it. Cadover, with an irrational feeling that he had just failed to make a lively acquaintance, climbed wearily but doggedly into the car. ‘Professor Musket at Dulwich,’ he said. ‘Then round to Sir Ferdinand Gotlop at Bromley and on to Dr Marriage at Greenwich. After that we go right across to Highgate and Wood Green and New Barnet…’

How very queer the association of these familiar and unassuming names with the recesses of atomic physics! How infinitely alarming, when one came to think of it, the spectacle of Lord Buffery and his electric trains! Cadover sat back in the gathering London night and enfolded himself in gloom like a blanket. The car ran over Waterloo Bridge; he peered westward and shook his head at the blank and innocent face of Big Ben, as if doubtful whether those within the shadow of St Stephen’s Tower had quite as sharp an eye as was desirable upon that sinister billiard-room… The car, sequacious of Professor Musket, purred through the emptying streets.

Cadover got to bed in the small hours – irritated by defeat; more obscurely irritated by he knew not what. Of those few of London’s millions who were on familiar terms with proton and electron the male progeny were all comfortably – or in some cases uncomfortably – accounted for. Eminent scientists, it appeared, had no special skill in maintaining amicable relationships with their young. Sir Ferdinand Gotlop’s son had run away to sea, another boy made mysterious disappearances for a week at a time, but was at present safely at home studying existentialism; a third was believed to be living in a cellar with a group of juvenile anarchists learned in the manufacture of explosives. But of any youth about to set out for Ireland with a tutor there was no sign whatever.

Restlessly Cadover searched for an explanation. And the likeliest surely was this: that the dead man’s letter to Miss Joyce Vane was wholly misleading. The father of the lad referred to might indeed be a terrible scientific swell, while his connexion with atomic physics was illusory. The young man might have thrown in this touch just to be impressive – or perhaps he had a vague notion that smashing atoms was the invariable business of all scientists sufficiently eminent. And if something of this sort was the case, the clue provided by this letter was altogether slighter than it had seemed. It was a pointer still, but a pointer into the haystack of London’s scientific folk in general. Long before one could get at the matter this way the identity of the dead man would have emerged by some other route. What Cadover had looked for was a short cut. After numerous exhausting windings it had turned out to be only a dead end. And he still had the uneasy persuasion that time was all important in the case.

Dawn was breaking before Cadover fell asleep. He dreamed of interminable journeys through the night, of the deep vibration of steamers and the rattle and sway of trains. Sometimes Lord Buffery would appear gigantic in a fitful moonlight, a portentous presence brooding over interminable sidings, here stooping to pick up a steamroller and there straddling across a valley like the cantilevers of a bridge. And up and down the corridors of the labouring trains, round the decks and hatches of the plunging steamers strode a great blonde woman in a wisp of shift – amorous, arrogant, and armed. Now she was stalking Cadover himself – and now a dark-haired, dark-eyed boy dressed in the rich and sombre garments of imperial Spain. The rhythm of the train, of the steamer, formed itself into a single word, pounded out a single insistent trisyllabic word…

Cadover woke up, aware of a mind at once dream-sodden and on the verge of discovery. In all that maze of talk which he had threaded through London and its environs the night before – in all that maze of talk there had been a single significant word. Or had there been the
lack
of that word; instead of it had there been an awkward, an unexpected periphrasis? Cadover sat up and shook his head, aware now that he was pursuing only some phantom of thought. He planned the day’s work, the new attack that he would make upon the problem of the unknown body in the cinema.

The sea was perfectly smooth; the deep vibration of the steamer was scarcely perceptible; of the myriad stars overhead each was precisely in its appropriate place for that particular hour, century, aeon. All these facts were reassuring to Mr Thewless. He stood on deck watching the diminishing lights of Heysham Harbour. Beside him stood a perfectly ordinary boy called – undoubtedly called – Humphrey Paxton. In front of him stretched six weeks or so of considerable but by no means overwhelming difficulty. For these weeks Mr Thewless was already making various competent plans. They would read the fourth book of the
Aeneid
and thereby bring sex and the emotional difficulties of adolescence a little into the open. They would give a good deal of time – much more time than would normally be justifiable – to English poetry, and they would incidentally consider fancy, imagination, day-dreaming, and the possible confusions of fiction and fact into which certain types of minds – particularly growing minds – may fall. English composition might take the form of writing, on the one hand, an adventure story in which the narrator was the hero, and, on the other hand, a sober but not uninteresting diary of actual observations made upon people and things. Such common-sense measures might clear matters up quite as effectively as the probings of child psychologists.