Two officers, both men, both with the look of officials with an unpleasant task to perform.‘Roy Straitley?’‘Mea culpa,’ I said.Perhaps not the happiest choice of words. But I had been expecting them. I was Nutter’s form-master. And it had been a couple of days now since the boy’s disappearance. Two officers, one old, one young, both with the same appraising eyes – they might almost have been father and son. I invited them in, but they would not sit down, remaining in the hallway, like door-to-door salesmen with nothing to sell.I told them what I knew, which wasn’t much; that the boy had been away from School during the last two weeks of term; that I had been making enquiries.The elder of the two men, a man in his fifties called Stackhouse, said: ‘Why’s that?’I explained that one of Nutter’s friends had expressed concern.‘Concern about what?’I shook my head. ‘He just thought Nutter wasn’t himself.’‘And what do you think he meant by that?’I thought back to my interview with little Johnny Harrington.
