Chapter the Third

Brother Matthew's Hands



Everyone in the kitchen knew that the crafty Cyril Napp had been able to deal with much more serious incidents than this one. A born politician, the Abbot was perfectly capable of speaking to the Board of Trustees at their next meeting and getting them to reverse their ruling to cut the Freikinder program. But the good Abbot was a very busy man who had a lot of other responsibilities in these troubled times, and one more burden was not what he wanted right now. Brother Matthew, who had been the source of many of the Abbot's troubles, knew this better than most.

Perhaps it was this, or perhaps it was his own feeling of secondary guilt, but the back of Brother Matthew's hands were itching. Since a boy this had meant that he was disturbed or uncomfortable about something, and, not being a primary player in the current situation, he could not place the source of his itching.
"Brother Gregory," he asked, "could you go over with me exactly what happened after the morning session ended at school today." He felt certain that something was missing from the story.

Dragged from his self-inflicted despondency, Mendel tried to focus his mind on the details of the late morning. Slowly, and with prompting from Makyatta who had witnessed some of the incidents, he put the sequence together. "At least that's how I remember it," he said at the end, "but I may have left out one or two things, I wasn't thinking about the book, I was thinking about the boys and how they were being unjustly treated."

Makyatta, who remembered the change in Mendel after he had been told by Auspitz about the cuts, added, "I seem to remember you didn't have the book when you came back into the classroom after talking to the Tomin boys." Mendel nodded, but there was a frown of confusion across his brow, "I just wasn't thinking about the book," he admitted, "I remember using the book in class, and I think it was still in my hand later when I had to give Jiri and his brother the bad news, but after that ... it is all a bit blurred."
"Was there any time when the Tomin boys could have taken the book without you seeing them?" Brother Matthew asked, his hands still itching. Much, he felt, depended on when and how the book had got into the sack.

"I don't know," Mendel said miserably. He put his head back between his hands and rested his elbows on Brother Victor's table. "I left them in the corridor outside the classroom, so I suppose it is possible."
"Apart from the boys, was anyone else in the corridor when they were leaving?"
"I didn't see anyone, all the classes had left about ten minutes before, so the school was almost empty," Mendel said, once again desperately trying to recover a dim memory.
"Humm," mused Klacel, trying to join up two facts, "and when did Druer and Brother Timothy leave?"
"I don't know, I didn't see them again after our meeting."
"But ..." Makyatta started to say, then stopped. No matter how he felt about Mendel and the Tomin boys personally, this was, strictly speaking, none of his affair.
But Brother Matthew had detected something in the tone of Makyatta's voice. "Go on," he said.
"Brother Timothy must have still been in the school and the corridor at just this time, or how could he have seen the boys leave," Makyatta slowly put his thoughts into words. "It was about an hour after Brother Gregory had his meeting in Dr Auspitz's study, yet Brother Timothy was still in school at the lunch break."

"And Brother Timothy says he saw the boys put the book into their bag, so that must have been in the corridor just before they left," Brother Victor added.
"Humm," said Brother Matthew yet again, a picture slowly forming in his head, "so, we place Brother Timothy at the scene of the crime, and he is our only witness as to what happened. He is also the boy's accuser, captor and chief prosecuting Friedensrichter - 'magistrate'. That is a lot of roles for someone just passing by."
The four men around the table just looked at the pine surface and said nothing, each was lost in his own speculation.