Free Hindsight by Peter Dickinson Page B

left the same term I did—end of summer ’41.’
    â€˜Not very hopeful, I’ll try the teachers’ agencies. It might be worth putting an ad in The Times. You don’t remember anyone saying anything about how old Smith got hold of him. Smith … oh, bugger it …’
    â€˜Shall we call Mr Smith The Man and Captain Smith the Captain?’
    â€˜That’ll do for the moment. I want to draw your attention to the coincidence here. I don’t say it’s impossible that two people involved in Steen’s life in Paris in 1921 should turn up by chance in the same backwater in Devon, but it seems to me more likely that the later arrival came there on purpose.’
    â€˜I don’t …’
    â€˜From what I know of The Man’s habits he would have been perfectly happy to avoid agency fees by taking on a chance-come teacher who offered his services.’
    â€˜Well … you know, the Captain didn’t give the slightest impression that he wanted to be there. He made out he despised the rest of the staff, didn’t much like the boys and loathed the countryside. But he could be a bloody good teacher if he was interested in something. He could really put it over. I got my Eton Schol on a Greek epigram I translated right when all the others made a mess of it, because the Captain was nuts on the Anthology.’
    â€˜Snippets of homoerotics?’
    â€˜No sign of that, in practice. I was alone with him quite a bit.’
    â€˜Tastes too complex to be satisfied by fresh-faced boys, do you think? The trouble is I don’t know enough about him to begin to make a guess.’
    â€˜I doubt if I’m going to be much help to you. He hid himself, if you see what I mean. You never knew what he thought or felt, or even if he meant what he said.’
    â€˜So I’d gathered from your book.’
    â€˜Your idea is that he deliberately chose to come to Paddery to make contact with Molly Benison?’
    â€˜It seems to me possible.’
    â€˜Why on earth? Blackmail? She hadn’t got a penny, and in any case she wouldn’t have cared a hoot what anyone said about her.’
    â€˜Steen had a peculiar attitude to money. He made quite a bit and insisted on sensible business arrangements with his publishers, but as soon as he received any payments he spent the money or gave it away. He refused to invest or to save, on principle. I told you about his attitude to women and their purpose in the world. He left a number of bastards—I’ve traced five, for sure. He took very little interest in them, and could be extremely brutal with discarded mistresses. There was more than one suicide. But I can’t find a case when he was less than at least tolerant of a woman who had borne him a child, and he always saw to it that they did have money. This was a consistent pattern for most of his adult life. Then, in 1922, he made a will—a highly uncharacteristic thing for him to do in any case. Under its terms the income from most of his books was to be divided between three named beneficiaries—mothers, though the will doesn’t say so, of three of the five children I know about. The other two women had married reasonably well-to-do men. But the income from To Live like the Jackal … ’
    â€˜I imagine that’s where the real money was.’
    â€˜Sixty or seventy per cent over the years, I should think. He made a very odd arrangement indeed about that and The Fanatics, which until recently can hardly have earned twenty pounds a year. He set up a trust to receive the money and then disburse it according to instructions which were not to be disclosed. I’ve always thought this odd.’
    â€˜Rather Victorian.’
    â€˜More than that, completely out of keeping. Canny and secretive. Steen detested lawyers, and disliked secrets. For instance, he made no bones about naming the other three women …’
    â€˜Other?’
    â€˜So