Colonel Butler's Wolf (3 page)

EXCEPT FOR A
pedestrian fifty yards ahead of him and an empty van parked at the far end of it, the road was empty. Butler counted off the lamp-posts until he came to the fourth, dawdled for a moment or two playing with his shoelace to let the fellow turn the corner, and then ducked smartly into the evergreen shrubbery.

Beyond the outer wall of leaves he stopped to take his bearings. It was quiet and gloomy, and the light was green-filtered through the canopy above him, but it was the right place beyond doubt—he could see the path beaten in the leaf-mould at his feet. He followed it noiselessly, twisting and turning through the thicket of almost naked branches, until he saw the garden wall ahead of him.

It was, as Dingle had said, an incomparable piece of bricklaying: a craftsman’s wall, as straight and solid as the day it had been built out of the fortune old Admiral Eden had picked up in prize money back in Nelson’s time.

“ … to keep the locals out—Eden never trusted the lower orders after the Spithead mutiny. And that was what attracted the first headmaster when the house became a school back in ‘28; only he was more concerned with keeping boys
in
of course … “

Butler ran his eye along the wall. It was all of ten feet high and crowned with a line of vicious iron spikes which reminded Butler of the
chevaux de frise
barricades of spiked wood he had seen round the government villages in Vietnam four years before. Again, Dingle had been quite right: it seemed un-climbable without artificial aids.

“ … Except such a barrier only serves as a challenge to a particular sub-species of boy. It only looks unclimbable: in reality I believe there are three recognised points of egress and at least two well-used entrances … “

He followed the track along the foot of the wall until he reached the rhododendron tangle.

“ … Young Wrightson’s favourite place—I beat him for using it too obviously back in ‘35—the boy was a compulsive escaper. I believe the Germans found that out too. I’ve no doubt the branches there will be strong enough now to bear your weight … “

Like the pathway, the rhododendron limbs bore the evidence of regular use—the appropriate footholds were scarred and muddy—but the top of the wall was lost in the luxuriant foliage of a clump of Lawson cypresses growing on the other side of it.

Butler wedged himself securely in the rhododendron and gingerly felt for the hidden spikes in the cypress.

Once again the old man’s intelligence was accurate: one spike was missing and others were safely bent to either side or downwards, presenting no crossing problems. And on the garden side the cypress offered both cover and a convenient natural ladder to the ground.

It was all very neat, ridiculously easy, thought Butler as he skirted the evergreens on the neatly-weeded path which led towards the school buildings. True, if the lodge-keeper had been prepared to let him into the school in the first place, in the headmaster’s absence, it would not have been necessary at all. But then he would never have known where the old school records were kept, and that in itself justified the encounter with Dingle.

Except that the whole business smacked of the ridiculous : to be required at his age and seniority illegally to break into a boys’ preparatory school like some petty burglar in order to trace the childish ailments and academic progress of one of its old pupils! It might be necessary. His instruction indicated that it might even be urgent. But it was not exactly dignified.

He sighed and squinted up at the tiny attic windows, each in its miniature dormer. At least he. knew where he was going.

And at least, thanks to Dingle, he would be entering rather than crudely breaking in. Here was the wood-shed beside the changing room; and here, reposing innocently on the rafters, was the stout bamboo pole with the metal loop on the end which generations of late-returning masters (and possibly boys too) had used to gain entry.

He pushed open the tiny window: sure enough, it was possible to see the bolt on the back door six feet away. He eased the pole through and captured the knob of the bolt with the wire loop.

The changing room contained an encyclopedia of smells: sweaty feet and dirty clothes, dubbined leather and linseed oil and linament—the matured smell of compulsory games on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Through the changing room into the passage. The smell was subtly altering now, from athletic boy to scholastic boy: chalk and ink and books and God only knew what—floor polish maybe, and feet still (or perhaps the feet smell was the characteristic boy smell). It was a combined odour Butler remembered well, but with elements he could not recall nevertheless. Obviously there would be ingredients in a private boarding school, which opened its doors when money knocked, different from those in his old state grammar school. David Audley and young Roskill would know this smell better— perhaps that was why they had wanted to put Roskill on this scent.

Butler shook his head angrily and cleared his thoughts. Turn right, away from the classrooms, Dingle had said.

Abruptly he passed from an arched passageway into a lofty hall, with a sweeping staircase on his left. This was the main entrance of the Hall itself—and there, where the staircase divided, was the Copley portrait of Admiral Eden himself still dominating it—the old fellow’s grandfatherly expression strangely at odds with the desperate sea battle being fought in the picture’s background. Perhaps he was attempting to compute his prize money … he was likely happier presiding over middle class schoolboys here than being gawped at in some museum by the descendants of the men he had so often flogged at the gratings.

Butler’s footsteps echoed sharply as he strode across the marble floor and up the staircase. On the left the battle honours of Eden Hall.. .
Capt. S. H. Wrightson
1934-38— the compulsive escaper—
DSO, MC
…
and on the right, among the academic honours …
N
.
H. Smith
1957-62—
Open Exhibition, The King
’
s College, Oxford.
That was under the 1967 list. And there was Smith again in the 1970 names—
First Class Honours in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.
So Smith had changed subjects, from English to P.P.E.—a proper radical subject grouping if Dingle’s suspicions had any foundation to them .. .

Cautiously Butler climbed higher. From marble staircase to mahogany parquet flooring; from mahogany floor to the solid oak of the second floor stairway. Next the polished oak of the dormitories—and there, on the left, the door to the attic stairs.

This one was locked, as Dingle had said it would be. But he had also said that the door was a feeble one, secured with a cheap lock and opening inwards on to a small landing of its own. So for once brute force seemed to be the proper recipe. Butler examined the door briefly, to pinpoint the exact target area. Then he took one pace back, balanced himself on his left leg and delivered a short, powerful blow with the flat of his heel alongside the doorknob.

Beyond the door there was another change of atmosphere, not so subtle and unrelated to the school itself: the varnished woodwork was cruder and the plaster rougher under the dust of ages. This was the entrance to the servants’ world, the night staircase by which they had answered calls from the bedrooms below. And somewhere at the other end of the house would be a second stair leading from the attics directly down to the kitchen and the other half of their life of fetching, cleaning, carrying and cooking.

And this, thought Butler without any particular rancour, would probably have been his world in the days of Admiral Eden and his sons and grandsons—not Major John Butler, late of the 143rd Foot, but perhaps at best Butler the butler to the Edens. In his arguments with Hugh Roskill about the good old days he admired and regretted so deeply Butler had been struck by that quaint irony: Roskill, the liberal, always saw himself among the masters, while Butler, the conservative, could never imagine himself on the gentleman’s side of the green baize door leading to the servants’ quarters.

And here (though without the green baize) were those quarters in their cobwebby reality: a rabbit warren under the eaves—though now the warren was jammed not with housemaids and footmen and pantry-boys, but with all the accumulated and discarded paraphernalia of years of prep, school life: piles of fraying cane-bottomed chairs, rolls of coconut matting, strange constructions of painted wood and canvas which Butler recognised at second glance as the stage furniture of “HMS Pinafore”, or maybe “The Pirates of Penzance”.

It was a mercy that Dingle had been precise in his directions and that the slope of the roof itself made it easy to follow them: the records should be at the very end of the warren.

Just why they were located so far from easy access perplexed Butler to begin with, for the passageway between the objects was narrow. But perceptibly the school debris thinned and in the last room but one—he could see the light of the end window ahead—gave place finally to objects which likely dated from the Eden family era: cracked Victorian pots, an elephant’s foot stool and a pile of rusty, but still nasty-looking native spears, the relics of some colonial trophy of arms that had once graced the walls below.

And the end room itself explained the location of the old records. The big round gable-end window, nearly a yard in diameter, let in plenty of light and two long framework shelves crammed with files ran at right angles to it. Beside the window was an old card table and one of the cane-bottomed chairs placed for the comfort of anyone who wished to consult the records. Evidently no one had desired to do that for a long time, thought Butler, running his finger through the thick dust on the table top.

But someone had done the filing nevertheless, in big, old-fashioned box files—parents’ accounts, heating, lighting, kitchen … he ran his dusty finger across them. Visits (Educational), Visits (Foreign exchange), Masters (Assistant)—the boys’ records must be on the other side.

BOYS (Medical)

Butler’s eye flashed down the lines of years—Smith’s would be well down towards the end—‘54, ‘55, ‘56—‘57 was fourth from the last. Presumably the head kept the most recent decade ready to hand in his study, banishing one old year annually to this attic.

A small cloud of dust rose from the table as he set the box on it.

Andrews B. J., Archer C. W., Ashcroft-Jones D. F
…
.
he thumbed quickly towards the back of the file …
Pardoe E.B. 
—a sickly boy, Pardoe, with a sheaf of notes from matron to testify to his ailments—
Trowbridge D. T.
—he had overshot the mark …
Spencer G. I.
—
Smith N. H.

Butler smoothed down the pages. Outside he could hear the wind whistle past the window beside his face. It had been still in the garden below, shielded by the tall trees, but up here there would generally be a breath of wind. He could hear the rumble of the traffic on the road outside and somewhere near there was a tree branch rubbing against the house. He fancied he could even distinguish the distant roar of the sea on the pebble beach away over the treetops.

“Boozy” Smith’s vital and fast developing statistics were all here, anyway, measured and recorded: the puny eight-year-old had been transformed by Eden Hall’s stodgy pies and puddings into a plump thirteen-year-old.

Measles without complications at nine and mumps when he was still too young for complications at ten … what was needed was some nice distinguishing scar, at the very least an appendix scar. Or a broken bone.

But scars and breaks there were none. And apparently no dental records either—that was a disappointment. The O positive blood group was something, but not much—if it was a positive identification they wanted he would need something much better than this juvenile information. Sore throats and athlete’s foot just weren’t good enough.

He pushed the file to one side. It was likely that these would be even Jess, eloquent than the medical material, in which case this whole farce would be unproductive.

BOYS
(Academic)

He knew better now where to reach Smith N. H.—it was pleasant to discover in passing that Pardoe’s poor health was offset by singular academic brilliance.

He cocked his head: by some freak of sound he could hear the sea quite distinctly …

But Smith’s academic record was, as he had feared, undistinguished by special aptitudes. Dingle’s memory was, as usual, exact: better at maths on the whole than English—
essays lacking in imagination
…
.
They were never going to identify Smith’s remains by the condition of his youthful imagination.

BOYS
(Sport)

A useful opening bat (right-handed)
…

Suddenly Butler sat bolt upright: Christ! It was impossible to hear the sea from here—not that steady roar.

That was not the sea
—

Four strides to the door. Try as he would Butler could not stop the next strides from turning into a panic-stricken gallop as he burst through the second door.

Smoke!

The sight of it seeping under the third door hit his brain one second before the smell confirmed his fear. He stared hypnotised by it for another second, cursing the slowness of his reactions. The sea had always been much too far away, too far to be heard.

This time he had his feet under control. Under direct command they marched him to the door. Under the same orders, his hand grasped the latch and opened the door. And then, under some older and more instinctive direction, the hand instantly slammed the door as the flames reached out towards him from the inferno in the room beyond.

Butler found himself facing back the way he had come, towards the round window, his shoulders set against the door as though the fire could be held back like a wild animal.

And that had been exactly what it had been like, or almost exactly: not a wild animal, but something demonic: the Fire Demon in “The Casting of the Runes” reaching out to seize him!