by Evelyn James
Clara looked at the seals on the box.
“P.L.?” She asked.
“Percival Lynch. He had a signet ring with the initials on, he was rather fond of sealing wax on letters,” Professor Montgomery raised a sentimental smile. “There was no harm in Percival, he was the sort of man you could not help but like. I really don’t want to see his name sullied by all this business, he does not deserve that. He is in Who’s Who, you know, had an entry since 1888. Let me find a copy.”
Professor Montgomery rose and disappeared to study the stacks around him. Clara turned the box around on the table, looking at it from all angles. It was a labour of love, she was sure of that. Professor Lynch had taken the time to cut out the metal and bend it to shape and then solder it together. It had probably taken him hours, considering he did not appear a natural metalworker. And all for some strange prophecy and secret magic he believed in. Just what was driving this man when he created this thing?
Montgomery returned with the 1902 edition of Who’s Who.
“This was published just after he died,” he said.
He spread the book before Clara and pointed out Professor Lynch’s entry. It was a typical Who’s Who rendition of someone’s life; rather bland and boring, talking about academic credentials and not a lot else. Clara was far more interested in the people behind such entries, the personal details – who they married, who they didn’t, what they believed, what they were like. However, the review of Professor Lynch’s public life in the book was certainly glowing and he was clearly a well-respected astronomer, even if he had done nothing truly remarkable, other than identify a previously unknown (and rather unimportant) star.
“I hate to think of his reputation being cut to pieces by talk that he turned to fortune telling in his later years,” Montgomery dropped his voice as he spoke.
Clara was peering at the seams of the box, trying to see if there was a gap that she might be able to pull the papers through, but Professor Lynch had been very thorough with his solder.
“Tell me about Professor Lynch’s obsession with astrology,” Clara asked Montgomery.
“I don’t think there is a lot to say. It started perhaps five or six years before he died. We noticed he was not quite himself. Little things, memory slips, forgetting meetings, sometimes calling people by the wrong name. Around the same time, he began visiting the observatory on a nightly basis, some thought he was on to the discovery of another star,” Montgomery smiled wistfully at the memory. “If only that had been true. He was clearly looking at the stars to make his charts. He had been doing it all in secret, I guess he knew what we would all think, but in the last eighteen months of his life he began to talk about his new hobby openly. He was very unwell by then, the doctors had told him there was no hope, which is the cruellest thing of all. He was often bedridden for days and that depressed him. It was terrible to see.
“I don’t recall it all in detail now, but I remember one of my colleagues mentioning to me that Professor Lynch had been speaking some wild ideas. It was already known I would take his place as director, and I felt an overwhelming duty of care towards the old man. After I heard this talk, I went to see Lynch. I found him surrounded by all these papers, they were astrological charts. I was flabbergasted, but Lynch merely smiled. Told me he had been writing his own horoscope and it looked promising. He was certain the stars had revealed he would get better soon.
“How can you deny a man his delusions when he is plainly dying? I never questioned him on the matter, I just kept it as quiet as possible.”
“I completely agree with your actions, Professor Montgomery,” Clara reassured him. “There is no point upsetting a man on his death bed. If it gave him comfort to think the stars predicted he would recover, then who are we to judge him?”
“Oh, but I did judge him,” Montgomery said sadly. “Not aloud, you see, but in my head. I judged him a silly old fool and I was angry to see him playing with such nonsense. I regret that so much now. I was a lot younger then, I thought I understood everything, I thought there was only science and any man who looked to something other than that for his answers had to be insane. As you grow older, you begin to question your opinions. You perhaps mellow a bit.”
Clara smiled at him politely.
“You do not need to explain yourself to me,” she said. “We are all allowed our private opinions.”
“And now we have this box,” Professor Montgomery sighed. “Maybe if I had not been so… dismissive of old Lynch’s views back then, we might have talked about this and I could have… I don’t know, maybe persuaded him it was a bad idea?”
“We cannot second guess ourselves, we have to go with what is here, before us. Now we have a problem to attempt to resolve,” Clara paused. “I need to know, Professor Montgomery, how honest do you expect me to be in this matter?”
“I do not follow?” Montgomery looked confused.
“One of the ways to discredit this box and to put off your colleagues from going through this complicated opening ritual, is to produce evidence that Professor Lynch had lost his mind in his final days. If it could be medically proven he was imbalanced mentally by his sickness, then it would be hard for your colleagues to continue to place faith in the contents of this box.”
Montgomery paused, understanding what she was saying and also faced by a dilemma. He frowned, then he dropped his head a little.
“Miss Fitzgerald, as much as I would prefer to mask my predecessor’s madness in his final months, I also see that this would be a necessary evil to, as much as anything, save his reputation as an astronomer. Better that he be proved to have been insane in his last days, and that all this astrology nonsense was a product of that madness, than for him to be held up as a leading example of a worthy astronomer giving room to astrology.”
Professor Montgomery looked miserable, but his options were limited.
“I believe it would be for the best if you could prove Professor Lynch was insane when he began this astrology mischief.”
“I shall see what I can find out,” Clara said gently.
“Thank you,” Professor Montgomery managed a weak smile. “Now, I’ll show you were the Lynch papers are kept. They will hopefully prove useful to you, though I regret to say they have never been catalogued and are in the same order as when they were deposited here twenty years ago.”
“I’m sure I’ll manage,” Clara promised.
Chapter Four
Someone was hammering on the Fitzgeralds’ front door. Tommy Fitzgerald had been in the morning room, which overlooked the garden at the back of the house, reading a newspaper. He rose to see who was trying to get their attention so urgently. He met with Annie in the hallway, also summoned by the knocking.
“Somebody sounds upset,” she remarked to Tommy as she stepped ahead of him and opened the door.
Captain O’Harris was stood on the doorstep. The former RFC pilot was looking extremely frantic, his eyes were a little wild as he stepped over the threshold.
“Is Clara in?”
“Sorry, old chap,” Tommy said, concerned at his friend’s appearance. “She is out on a case.”
“By Jove, man, I need to see her!” O’Harris ran a hand across his face, from forehead to chin, as if he was trying to pull off the anxiety that was engulfing him. “But I can’t stop and wait, I’ll have to call on her later.”
“What on earth has happened?” Tommy asked him. “Do you think you should sit down?”
“I can’t hang about,” O’Harris refused the offer. “I have to get to the hospital. It’s a terrible mess, Tommy. Look, why don’t you come with me? You might not be Clara, but you aren’t too shabby.”
O’Harris managed a half-hearted grin at his joke. Tommy could see the man was desperate for someone to confide in and did not want to face whatever emergency was worrying him alone.
“Of course I’ll come,” Tommy agreed. “We’ll leave a message for Clara, so if she returns before we do, she will know to come to the hos
pital.”
“Yes, that is a grand idea!” O’Harris nodded.
He watched Tommy with impatience as he fetched his coat.
“Don’t worry, Captain,” Annie patted his arm. “I’ll make sure Clara knows where you are.”
O’Harris pulled a tight smile, it looked rather pained.
“Thanks Annie.”
Tommy was finally ready and hurried out the door with O’Harris. The captain had come to the house in his car and the great, shiny green beast was parked just outside on the road attracting curious glances from the neighbours. Jones, O’Harris’ driver, was waiting patiently inside.
“This has to be the worst day I have had in a long while,” O’Harris muttered to Tommy as they climbed in the car. “Jones, straight to the hospital please.”
The car pulled from the curb and Tommy settled back in the leather seat.
“You better explain,” he said.
“Last night we realised that one of the guests at the home was missing,” Captain O’Harris ran a convalescence home for servicemen who were suffering mental health problems caused by their war experiences. He admitted what he was doing was a drop in the ocean when it came to the true extent of the problem – so many men were still reliving the traumas of war, years after their service. But it was a start. O’Harris never called his clients ‘patients’, they were always his guests. The very word ‘patient’ could make the men feel judged. “We were very concerned about his absence, and I had some of the staff check about the grounds for him. The men are free to come and go from the home, however, we do insist they are back by ten o’clock at night. That is when we lock up and we like to know where everyone is. Honestly, Tommy, I thought the fellow might have done himself in when he was nowhere in the house. In some regards, as horrid as that would have been, it would have been easier to deal with than what had actually occurred.”
“This sounds very serious,” Tommy had his full attention on O’Harris now.
“We had no success searching the grounds, so we expanded the search into the town, with little result. We were trying to avoid drawing too much attention to what we were doing. You know that some people have been critical of the presence of the Home in Brighton?”
Tommy admitted that he had heard this. Some people thought the men who were coming to O’Harris’ Home were dangerous lunatics, criminally insane and trained to fight from their time at the Front. They had resented the project; there had been outcry that they would be murdered in their beds. The protests had been unable to stop O’Harris’ scheme, but it had left a strain on him. He constantly felt the need to prove that his guests were not going to cause anyone any harm, in fact, the only person who was usually at risk from them, was themselves.
“The search was fruitless, and I hoped that when morning came we could discover the fellow. With any luck he had just been out drinking too late. I kept myself awake all night wondering if he might have jumped off the pier or walked into the sea. I envisioned all the ways he might have killed himself. I never contemplated another option.”
“You are worrying me now,” Tommy said, dropping his voice even though they were in the car. “What has occurred?”
“Inspector Park-Coombs appeared on my doorstep this morning,” O’Harris continued. “As you might imagine, I thought he had come to tell me they had recovered a body. As it happened, the police had found our lost guest alive, but he was in hospital.”
“He had tried to kill himself?” Tommy asked.
“Not unless he had found a way to stab himself in the back,” O’Harris replied, his tone bleak. “He was found in an alley, the blade still in him. He had crawled there. He had lost a lot of blood.”
“Crikey!” Tommy gasped. “Who would do such a thing?”
“I don’t know, but there is more,” O’Harris said glumly. “They traced his route back to where the incident had occurred, it was quite easy to follow the trail of blood. They found the body of a woman. She had been stabbed too, in the stomach. She had not managed to crawl away and had died where she was attacked. She was partially hidden by some dustbins. The police are working on the theory that she was stabbed by my fellow and then managed to grab the knife and stab him in the back.”
“They have no proof of that?” Tommy asked quickly.
“Well, my chap had blood all over his hands. The police say because the knife was still in his back, he had not bled enough to have gotten all that blood over him from his own wound. His shirt was sodden with blood. Tommy, this does not look good, as much as I want to believe the fellow innocent, he does, literally, have blood on his hands.”
Tommy groaned. It did sound damning, and if the scenario the police envisioned was true, it would not just be the end of the man, but probably the end of O’Harris’ Home. The doomsayers would be proven right that the ‘guests’ were dangerous. Captain O’Harris would not be able to carry on under such an atmosphere of fear and suspicion.
“Who is the fellow?” Tommy asked.
“That’s the worst of it, Tommy, it’s Private Peterson.”
Tommy closed his eyes for a minute. Private Peterson was one of O’Harris’ subsidised patients. Most of the men at the Home paid for their care, it was a private venture, after all; but the captain had made provision for one or two ‘charity’ cases, men who desperately needed the help he could offer, but who lacked the money to afford it. Private Peterson had been the first such patient, and O’Harris had offered him the place because he was an extreme case. He suffered hallucinations and chronic depression. He had been in and out of his local lunatic asylum, every occasion he seemed to have recovered, it was only a matter of time before he succumbed to his demons again. He was suicidal and barely clinging onto life.
O’Harris had been warned that he was too tough a case, but he wanted such a challenge, he wanted to prove that his methods, his Home, could transform even a man so woefully lost to his mental nightmares. Maybe it had been arrogant, maybe it had been a foolish act of pride, to prove himself to all those who criticised what he was doing, but O’Harris had made up his mind.
“I thought Peterson was doing better,” he explained. “He seemed so much happier and calmer. These last few weeks I really saw a change in him. I have the best doctors at the Home, they are men who know their stuff and are progressive in their treatments. They had seen steady improvement with Peterson and were beginning to feel hopeful that he would be able to return to normal life.
“His nightmares were easing, and they had been a burden to him for years. He was engaging in the various therapies we were offering; he would work in the garden, or on the cars. He was attending the lectures we hold in the afternoons and was working his way through the library shelves. He had even tried his hand at an art class a local lady comes in to teach. Last week he actually laughed, and it was a genuine, heartfelt laugh. I saw joy in his eyes. I really thought we were winning.”
O’Harris shook his head.
“There was nothing to make us suppose he was dangerous, nothing,” O’Harris let out a whistle of air. “He had never caused harm to anyone, even in the middle of his worst hallucinations, he never lashed out. I thought he was the gentlest soul in the house. I can’t begin to imagine how this could have happened.”
“You think maybe he slipped into an hallucination and lashed out at this woman accidentally?” Tommy asked. He had experienced partial hallucinations in his past, especially when he had just returned from the Front. He had always known in some part of him they were not real, but they were horrific, nonetheless.
“That is the only way this makes sense,” O’Harris sighed. “Unless I completely misread the fellow. At least, if it was a moment of insanity, he shan’t hang, but spend the rest of his days in a prison for the criminally insane.”
“I can tell you now that Clara will want to be involved in this,” Tommy said, trying to reassure him. “She will not let this rest until she has dug out the truth. How strongly do you believe in the possibility he did this?�
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“I don’t know,” O’Harris closed his eyes and winced. “My thoughts are so wrapped up with the fear of what this will do to the Home and, I confess, I am angered that I might have been so gullible as to fail to see this coming. My pride is hurt and I am not thinking straight. I want him to be innocent, because I don’t want people thinking my men are dangerous, nor do I want them looking at me as if I was the biggest fool alive. And that is not a good enough reason. I can’t think clearly.”
O’Harris was becoming agitated. Tommy kept his voice calm.
“All right, look, we shall figure this out. It’s all a shock at the moment, but once we have our heads around it, we will be able to see a way forward. What has Peterson said so far?”
“Inspector Park-Coombs told me that Peterson was barely alive when he was taken to hospital. He was lucky, a man heard someone calling for help and came out of his yard. He saw Peterson on the ground and when he realised there was a knife in his back, he had the local doctor summoned. Naturally, the doctor said Peterson needed to be sent to the hospital and had an ambulance called.
“A police constable was alerted by the man who found Peterson. It was obvious a crime had been committed. The constable whistled for more help and then the Inspector was sent for. That is when they searched the alley and traced back to the dead woman. Peterson was rushed to hospital and had to be operated on at once to carefully remove the blade. They don’t think anything vital was struck, but had he been left any longer in that alley he would have bled to death too.”
O’Harris stopped, looking at his hands which were trembling.
“Dare I say, if he had died, we might have been spared this nightmare?”
“No,” Tommy told him, “had he died, we would have no answer to this mystery. Better he is alive and able to speak to us. So, what has he said?”
“Sorry,” O’Harris shook his head, realising he had failed to answer Tommy’s question. “Peterson was unconscious through the night, he came around this morning. There was a constable outside his room and as soon as he knew he was awake he sent for Park-Coombs. Peterson told the Inspector that he could not remember a thing. He went to the picture house and then started to walk home. He went through the alleys, but he does not recall the woman or even being stabbed. I’m not sure the Inspector believed him.”