got a fair deal out of life I could play my cards better.’
CHAPTER THREE
While Percy Phinn was attending Bach’s Mass a search- party was out from the gang that bowed to him as patron, chairman, and final arbiter. They were frightened, and they wanted advice. Some of them laughed at Percy behind his back, some of them argued he was ‘dead clever’, but they all agreed he would never do them a dirty trick and they were all scared of him a little, especially when he fixed them with his big, sad eyes and lectured them on the good life. And now they needed help from somebody clever, somebody older, somebody they could trust. It could only be Percy. That was the unanimous decision, taken in full assembly in the cellar. But they couldn’t find him. He wasn’t in Johnny Hay’s billiards-room (billiards was the one game where he showed any talent), he wasn’t in the public library, he wasn’t in the house, he wasn’t at the corner watching the big girls go by, he wasn’t in the playground refereeing five-a-side football, he wasn’t at the swings pushing the kids higher and higher, he wasn’t anywhere. He had simply vanished. It showed how clever he was. They were baffled. They had never heard of the Bute Hall or Bach either. They were only ten or eleven years of age. Hughie Savage, the oldest of them, was not quite twelve. He couldn’t read very well, but he was shrewd and he could write out a three-cross double with no difficulty. He was far cleverer than his teachers ever suspected, and his line of humour was to put on a la-dee- da voice and speak in what he thought was an English accent. He had a big head on a bull neck and his ears stuck out like a couple of cabbages.
The scattered groups of the search-party returned by arrangement to the cellar at half past nine. When they were all present for the second time that evening Savage took the chair and reported Percy’s disappearance. The chair he sat on was a high-legged one with a broken back and a foot-rail. It was the chair Miss Elginbrod had sat on when Percy was in her class, but the back spars and the shoulder-rest came off one afternoon when she threw a cheeky boy across the room. He fell against it and knocked it over. When he got to his feet he kicked it apart in a fury while Miss Elginbrod whipped him round the legs with her strap. She sent it to the janitor for repair, and the janitor put it away in the cellar till he could find time to look at it. Death found him first, and the chair had lain there ever since, in the cellar below the school, the secret headquarters of the gang that Percy sponsored.
This was no picayune cellar. It was a sprawling low- roofed vault stretching below the main building and out under the playground, where it ended in an unexplored boundary of evil darkness. Not even Frank Garson had ever touched that far-off invisible wall, and when the Three High Clavigers of the Bethel Brotherhood ordered him to make a map of the cellar because Miss Elginbrod had praised his drawing and handwriting he left his sketch open at that side and along it he wrote in a scroll Here Be Rats. A door in the basement, at the end of an L-shaped line of wash-hand basins, opened to a dim and dangerous staircase that went steeply down to the bowels of the building, and that was commonly supposed to be the only door to the cellar. But because of the gradient on which the school was built there was another door to the cellar in Tulip Place, a blind alley round the corner from Bethel Street. It was a small, inconspicuous, dark-green door, hacked by many initials, and behind it was a chute. That was where the coal for the boilers had been delivered before the school changed over to electrical heating, and then the door was locked for good and forgotten.
Percy had a key to it from his father’s days as janitor. Three other keys were cut from his and given to the three oldest members of the Brotherhood. The cellar became their church, the scene of enrolment, expulsion, and initiation rites. It was to be entered only from the blind alley after the school was locked up for the night. Percy found a word for the keyholders who alone had the power to permit entry. He got it when he was grazing in a dictionary in the reference room of the library. He called them the Clavigers. To be a Claviger in Percy’s gang was the highest rank you could reach. He gave himself the title of Regent Supreme because the boys knew those two words, but he went to great trouble to explain to them what they meant apart from their occurrence in a television advert.
Over the undated years the cellar had become a junk- house, a dark neglected dump where people threw things they didn’t know what to do with. Scores of old registers, tied in tape and going back for decades, were stacked against a wall and crowned by bundles of ancient group mental tests and verbal ability tests, pupils’ record cards, report cards and medical histories. Nobody had ever dared destroy them. Such documents are intimidating. They have their own over-weening life. To burn them would be as brutal and immoral as committing murder. And you could never be sure they wouldn’t be wanted one day. Somebody might ask for the date of birth or the father’s name or the IQ of a pupil who had left years ago and was now in Barlinnie Prison for house-breaking. It would never do to reply, ‘The records have been destroyed.’ The whole point of keeping records is that they are kept after they are kept. Otherwise why keep them?
Scattered alongside these sacred but forgotten documents there were blackboard compasses, blackboard rulers, pointers, pyramids, cones, cylinders and spheres, a carton of inkwells with the bakelite rims chipped off by vandals so that they fell through the hole cut for them in the pupils’ desks, the broken pole of a dead traffic warden, a punctured hose, brooms, spades, shovels and rakes, brown paper piled four feet high with the salvaged string wound round the sheets, a pail of stucco, a barrel half-full of washing-soda, empty bleach bottles put aside to be filled with ink made from a powder, political maps of Europe, Asia and Africa dating from before the First World War, a coal-scuttle and a stirrup pump. On one side of the outmoded boiler was a woodwork bench with a vice that wouldn’t screw up tight, and on the other a ziggurat of broken dual desks. In front of the desks was an old piano with occasional dumb keys. It had been put there twenty-two years ago, when an insistent music- teacher asked for and got a new piano. The janitor filled in the correct form to have the old one uplifted, but somehow nothing was ever done about it. On top of the piano was the large hand-bell that had been rung to assemble and dismiss the school before the electric bells were put in. It was a heavy bell, solid brass, and Savage said it was worth at least a fiver as scrap metal, but Percy wouldn’t let him hawk it.
Across the cellar from the broken desks, under a tangle of legless chairs, educational publishers’ catalogues, pre- war copies of the Scottish Educational Journal, and five dozen derelict reading books called The Sunshine Way, were six tea-chests, three along and two deep, containing the costumes and small props used in the annual school concert. But there had been no annual concert for five years, and in that time there had been two new headmasters and Percy’s father had died of a thrombosis, so that nobody in the school knew exactly what was in them.
There were two weak ceiling lights in the cellar, but the Brotherhood preferred not to switch them on during council meetings. They lit six candles, using the bleach bottles as candlesticks, and the dim unsteady light, with flickering shadows on the walls receding into the damp darkness where the rats were, gave a proper obscurity to the arguments of the assembly.
‘I vote we carry on without the Regent,’ said Hugh Savage, Chief Claviger, whose Christian name was locally pronounced ‘Sheuch’.
‘No, I object,’ said Specky, Second Claviger, sitting on the inverted coal-scuttle to the right of Savage’s chair. He was a brassy, blethering confident boy, wearing thick convex glasses with thin wire frames, a Schools Health Service issue, and he talked like a book.
‘Well, we’ll vote for it,’ said Skinner, Third Claviger, sitting on a drawing-board placed across the pail of stucco. He was always called Skinny in affectionate abbreviation of his surname. It was only a fortuitous anomaly that he happened to be a chubby child.
The Three High Clavigers faced the ruck of the Brotherhood, obedient troopers who sat, knelt or squatted on the grimy stone floor. Savage was the strong arm, Specky was the brains and Skinny was the kind heart. In that cavernous gloom they looked like three subterranean judges addressing a jury of sooterkins.
‘I’m
