The Fairleighs contended that they were superior to the Head Masters and vice versa. Therefore, if any Head Master boy were caught sneaking into Fairleigh uninvited, said boy had better be fast on his feet and good with his fists. In addition, news of such a break-in would be all over school the next day.
Therefore, the prankster must either be a master of infiltration and deception, or there must be more than one.
I continued to drink my coffee, and Bartholomew and I continued to speculate on the pranks until I sought my bed and slumber. The matter of Middleton, for the time, was dropped.
But the matter reasserted itself almost immediately. Bartholomew woke me early the next morning to tell me that Middleton had been killed in the night, his body fetched up in a lock of the nearby canal.
Chapter Two
I had to saddle a horse myself in order to ride out to the canal the next morning because Sebastian and every other stable hand had abandoned their posts. Bartholomew boosted me aboard then followed me on foot to Lower Sudbury Lock and the crowd gathered there.
This canal was one leg of the Kennet and Avon Canal, which bisected England from Bath to Reading. I was told that over one hundred locks raised and lowered water so that canal boats could navigate across the heartland of England. The intricate locks and arched bridges were fairly new, the canal having been completed and open for use within the last decade.
This morning, my only interest in the canal was in the body of the hapless groom that floated in it.
The gates of the lock were closed, and a barge waited quietly on the lower side. The pumps clanked as the lockkeeper, a fleshy man with lank hair and sweat-stained clothes, turned the sluice wheel. Water noisily drained from the lock to the flat pond that housed the excess water. The parish constable, a sturdy man of about forty years, stood on the narrow parapet of the lock, peering over the side.