Money in the Morgue

by Ngaio Marsh

  Alleyn grimaced in the shadows, it was time to step forward.

  Mr Glossop went even redder in the face before blustering, ‘Who’s this now, spying on us in the dark? What the hell’s going on?’

  Sister Comfort advanced on Alleyn, ‘Mr Glossop, we have an English writer in the private room, this gentleman is he. I am, however, with you in demanding to know what on earth he is doing out of bed. Speak up!’

  Alleyn spoke quietly, ‘Thank you, Sister, but I’m afraid the story of my being a writer was one concocted in the hope I would be given complete rest. Very few of your soldiers would be interested in passing the time of day with a writer, I’m sure. The truth is,’ he said, looking around at the assembled cast, ‘I have been in New Zealand on some police business, thankfully concluded now, but unfortunately I managed to pick up a croup in the process. Mount Seager was recommended as a quiet place for my recovery, which I’m pleased to say it has been. Until now,’ he added with a wry smile at those now gathered together in the rain. ‘Fortunately, not only do I find that you need my services, this evening at least, but I believe I am well enough to offer them. Chief Detective Inspector Alleyn, CID, New Scotland Yard.’

  He stepped forward and, despite the combined protests of Dr Hughes and Father O’Sullivan, Alleyn began to untie the top of the body bag, his long fingers struggling a little with the damp ties. As he did so, he made a quiet note of those around him. Glossop was fussing, Sister Comfort noisily disapproving, the two young ladies at the edge of the circle both hovering slightly closer. He intended to pay even closer attention in a moment when he revealed the stolen bundles of notes he was sure were contained in the bag. It was quite obvious to Alleyn that when the porter had slapped his hand on the foot of the bag, bringing down the entire trolley, Kelly’s hand should have met the resistance of old Mr Brown’s feet, not the air at the empty end of an otherwise well-filled bag.

  So it was that Chief Detective Inspector Alleyn was also in something of a state of shock when, on finally loosening the top three ties of the bag he revealed, not Mr Glossop’s bundles of payroll due at four locations dotted across the stark and beautiful plains, that magnificent sum topped up with Rosamund Farquharson’s race day winnings, but Matron’s cold body.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  From his vantage point at the left of the trolley, close to the top of the body bag, Alleyn noted the many and several actions that followed, each one precipitating the next, as if the whole piece was an impeccably choreographed and rehearsed scene, not out of place on the London stage. Revue, he thought, rather than serious drama.

  The first bit of business took place on the sidelines between Rosamund Farquharson and Sarah Warne, a counterpoint to emphasize the central motif. At the revelatory moment, when the canvas bag was finally opened, Rosamund screamed rather more theatrically than was necessary and Sarah let out a low moan, which struck Alleyn as far more appropriate to the scene, although he paused to remind himself that it was Sarah who was the trained actress, not Rosamund. The two young women turned to each other, forming an elegant tableau, the tall and shapely blonde with her arm around the shoulder of her dark, petite friend, the pair backlit by the light from the open Records Office door.

  Alleyn also noticed that Dr Luke Hughes turned to step across to the small brunette as soon as she let out her soft moan, but apparently he thought better of it, twisted away and turned instead to the inanimate body on the trolley. The detective watched as the doctor appeared to both reach out to and shrink from Matron’s inert body on the trolley before them.

  ‘Should I …?’ he asked Alleyn, uncertainly.

  ‘You could check for a pulse, I think, Doctor,’ Alleyn said cautiously, ‘I fear this is now a police matter rather than one with a purely medical concern.’

  Alleyn watched closely as the younger man seemed to steel himself to touch the Matron and saw that when he did so his hand was trembling, ever such a little. It must have been difficult for the doctor, for all of them, she was their superior after all.

  The doctor stepped back with a shake of his head, ‘Nothing there.’

  Alleyn nodded in response and, indicating the ties, said quietly, ‘Please, close up the bag, if you will?’

  Father O’Sullivan, who had only recently regained his footing after the absurd interval with Will Kelly and the trolley, was now watching in abject horror as Dr Hughes stepped back. The vicar uttered an unintelligible and extremely guttural mumble of horror, and was again drawn to the earth, his knees giving way beneath him. He staggered backwards, collapsing on the first of the two steps up to Matron’s office.

  Alleyn noticed that Sister Comfort herself staggered for a moment, seemingly torn between shock and distress at the sight of her adored superior laid out on the trolley and the deeply-ingrained sense of duty that drew her to Father O’Sullivan’s aid. It would have been bad enough had it been Mr Brown’s body abused in this way, but for it to be her beloved Matron was patently too much. In the split-second that Sister Comfort vacillated, Alleyn allowed himself a grim wager on which way she would leap and was pleased to note that he won his own bet. Sister Comfort took a sharp intake of breath, jolted a little as if an unseen hand had slapped away her incipient hysteria and she stepped quickly to the vicar. She had him back on his feet in a trice and was speaking in a no-nonsense tone that Alleyn admired for its efficacy while admitting that he was no different to the regular soldiers in finding her combination of assertion and aggrieved insistence highly aggravating.

  ‘Right then, Father O’Sullivan, let’s get you into Matron’s office. I’ll have you seated there and we can work out who is responsible for this appalling incident. This is all too much.’

  Alleyn held out a hand to stop her, ‘If you don’t mind, Sister—’

  ‘Mind? There’s plenty to mind, don’t you think, Inspector? I’m simply trying to do my job.’

  ‘And quite right too.’ Alleyn’s tone was both charming and very clear. ‘However I must also do my job and given the circumstances in which we find ourselves, it seems that mine takes precedence over yours.’ She began to bluster and he spoke over her in a cool tone that allowed no argument. ‘I’ll need to take a close look at that safe before anyone else enters the office I’m afraid, and I’d also like to look at the papers there on Matron’s desk.’ He indicated beyond Sister Comfort to Matron’s desk where a mess of jumbled papers were rudely scattered. ‘Given the conjunction of theft and well—’ Alleyn shook his head looking down at the trolley, and everyone present was grateful he chose not to be any more specific, ‘the confusion in which we find ourselves, I think we had best assume that Matron’s office is out of bounds for now.’

  Sister Comfort was clearly put out, but decades of training had left her not only susceptible but also partial to a well-defined hierarchy and it was obvious that the detective quite outranked her at this juncture. She nodded her head making no effort to disguise her irritation and settled Father O’Sullivan on the top step, not quite inside the office.

  No sooner had the vicar taken up a more comfortable position than Mr Glossop demanded the spotlight for his own oratory.

  ‘Now look here,’ he said to Alleyn, ‘I’ve no flamin’ idea who you think you are, coming over the big I-am, but this is New Zealand, God’s own country you know, and we’ve our own police who’re among the best in the world, same as our soldiers and our sailors and our air force come to think of it. It’s all very well you playing the great white chief, but there’s four payrolls gone missing here tonight, and now God only knows what’s happened to Matron, a better woman you wouldn’t find if you searched from here to Cape Reinga, right across the Tasman too I don’t doubt. So I reckon if anyone is to—I mean, damn it all to hell, but—well—,’ he seemed suddenly to run out of steam and took a long slow breath to puff himself up again. ‘Well,’ he tried once more, and Alleyn noticed Mr Glossop was sweating still more profusely than he had been even moments earlier, there were great beads of perspiration drippin
g down his face and onto his damp shirt, ‘It’s all fine and good you taking the reins and, and all that, but—but Matron and the money and dammit, where is the old fellow’s body? Eh? Where’s the bloke we knew was dead? What the flippin’ blazes is going on round here?’

  With that the fat man’s too solid flesh seemed to melt, indeed so gradually did his legs give way beneath him, his lungs run out of breath, his words lose their splutter, that he was still speaking as he collapsed slowly to the ground, for all the world like a deflated hot air balloon, elegantly coming to land.

  As Sister Comfort left the bewildered Father O’Sullivan, stepping over Will Kelly to tend to the gibbering Glossop, Alleyn looked at the scene before him and, thinking that the New Zealand women were proving themselves far stronger than their menfolk, he checked his watch and gave his orders, turning to Sarah Warne and Rosamund Farquharson.

  ‘The storm appears to have very nearly blown itself out, but I take it that even a reduction in howling torrents and formidable wind is unlikely to make a difference to the possibility of a working telephone line or a passable road into town?’

  Sarah Warne disengaged herself from Rosamund’s protective arm and stepped forward, ‘That’s right, I’m afraid. Olive who runs the exchange in town is bound to have worked out that the lines are down by now, she’ll have let the engineers know, but they start at that end and then work their way out with repairs.’

  ‘All the way out here in the middle of nowhere? It’ll take all night, if then,’ Rosamund interjected.

  Sarah Warne spoke over her friend, ‘That’s not fair, Rosie, it’s not as if there are dozens of men available to do the work.’

  ‘You’re telling me,’ Rosamund answered, with a wholly inappropriate wink in light of the circumstances.

  Exasperated, Sarah turned back to Alleyn, ‘We’re not quite the backwater you might think.’

  ‘I don’t think that at all, far from it. I very much appreciate the necessity of checking lines of communication thoroughly and in such a manner that no vital points are missed.’

  ‘And to be fair,’ Rosamund Farquharson added, taking a small step forward herself, ‘there’s nothing anyone could do about the bridge losing its planks, not even the Met’s finest.’

  There was something in the young woman’s tone and demeanour that set Alleyn’s teeth on edge. He looked sharply at her, and was astonished to see a sly smile play about her lips, her green eyes sparkling.

  ‘I don’t imagine I’m the Met’s finest, merely the only representative of any police force at hand,’ he replied shortly, hoping to dampen her spirits before her colleagues were drawn far enough from their morbid reveries to notice her inappropriate impertinence.

  ‘That’s not what the papers have been saying about you,’ she grinned again. ‘You’re not going to go all false modesty on us now are you, Inspector? Not in our hour of need?’

  ‘If I can be of assistance then I shall certainly do so. Given the situation in which we find ourselves, it behoves each of us to do our best to sort this matter as quickly as possible. Don’t you agree, Miss—?’

  ‘Farquharson, Rosamund. Rosie if you like.’ She said, holding out her hand to Alleyn who took it in a state of bemused interest. ‘And there’s no need to come over the stuffed shirt with us,’ she went on, giving him back his hand after a warm shake, ‘We’re not in Belgravia now, Inspector.’

  ‘Quite, Miss Farquharson. We’re at the Mount Seager Hospital, standing in the dregs of a tempest, contemplating a major robbery, the missing corpse of an elderly man, the found body of the most senior and longest-serving staff member in the hospital, along with an impassable river and a useless telephone line, both of which preclude any endeavours by the local constabulary to deal with the incidents of the past hour. I frankly doubt that even the most traditional of the supercilious detectives found in a certain type of crime fiction would maintain a stiff upper lip in the face of such a bizarre contrivance of events. Time then, to take control over circumstance.’

  All of which would have made a perfectly elegant curtain to Act One, had not Will Kelly awoken, taken in the scene around him, let out a long and loud belch, and demanded of the gathered players, ‘What’s for tea? I do believe it’s time for me tea.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Alleyn lost no time in giving his commands.

  ‘Sergeant Bix, is it? I’d like you to instigate a thorough search of the hospital premises, take only the most trusted of your administrative staff with you.’

  ‘Righto, Sir. There’s a couple of lads, real good men but neither passed for field duty, very unhappy about this office work, damn hungry for action.’

  The detective supressed his impatience and nodded his approval, ‘Tell them, and anyone you may meet in the course of your search, that you are looking only for Miss Farquharson’s winnings. The men in the military wards obviously know that a theft has occurred, Mr Glossop has made sure of that and their wards are directly opposite Matron’s office so they have already seen a great deal more than I’d have liked. I’d rather we didn’t alert the entire hospital to the full extent of our concerns. Meanwhile, letting those who are aware see that a search is in progress might, with a good wind, keep their natural curiosity at bay and allow us to sort the rest of this chaos as quickly as possible.’

  Alleyn was all too aware that the real reason for his presence at Mount Seager still took precedence, no matter that the situation before him demanded his attention. He briskly gave the rest of his orders. Matron’s office was to be out of bounds until he had taken a good look around. The door was closed, locked, and Sister Comfort reluctantly handed over her own full set of keys to the hospital buildings. Until Matron’s keys were found, Alleyn was determined he would at least have one full set about his own person. He acknowledged to himself that it was quite possible that her own keys were on Matron’s body, somewhere in that blasted body bag, but now was not the time to once again reveal the cold body of their beloved superior to the contingent of horrified onlookers. Will Kelly was ordered to sleep off the effects of the spirits he vehemently denied drinking, his brogue becoming stronger with each denial, ‘Lemonade only, I tell you, I’m a shandy man,’ and Sergeant Bix frogmarched him down to the Surgery anteroom to overcome his vapours.

  In the few moments they were gone Alleyn made a hasty calculation as to possible culpability and decided Bix was also the safest bet to remove Matron’s body to the morgue. Until he was able to interrogate those standing in the yard, he knew that anyone present might be hiding something about the theft or Mr Brown’s missing body or even what had happened to Matron. Bix had been at the furthest distance in the army offices and he seemed a very regular sort of sergeant. Alleyn heartily approved of a regular sort of sergeant and felt he had no choice but to trust him.

  On Bix’s return Alleyn took him to one side, lowering his voice, ‘How secure is the morgue?’

  ‘One way in and one way out, Sir,’ he replied.

  Alleyn considered the friendly, open-faced man before him for a moment and then he decided, ‘It’s highly irregular and I’d very much like to look over the morgue first myself, but nothing about this evening is proving regular, so let us take the line of least resistance in this case.’

  ‘Sir?’ Bix asked, genuinely perplexed and not a little awe-struck at Alleyn’s presence and easy assumption of status.

  ‘Forgive me,’ Allen replied, ‘I’ve been too long from straightforward detecting and tonight’s events have caused me to slip back into the easy manner I have with my own sergeant, a shorthand in which we often seem to understand what the other is thinking.’

  ‘Right you are, Sir. So you’d like me to—?’

  ‘Take Matron’s body to the morgue. Leave it there, on the trolley, just as it is now. Until we can establish exactly what has taken place, I don’t want her disturbed any more than absolutely necessary. Lock the morgue door and return the key to me. You and I will go down together as soon as possible, to ensure th
e morgue is as secure as you attest, and once I’ve had a chat with Dr Hughes about his whereabouts this evening, we can let him attempt to ascertain the cause of death.’

  ‘And then I’ll get on with the search, but only say it’s for the young lady’s missing winnings, not the payroll?’

  ‘Exactly that.’

  ‘Very good, Sir,’ Bix replied, and taking the key from Alleyn he marched himself along the yard between the offices and the wards. Alleyn watched him go and wished for some of the excitement Bix clearly felt at being involved in a criminal case. His own over-riding sense was one of frustration that this incident had interrupted an already disturbed night, coupled with distaste for the upset he would undoubtedly bring to those still awaiting their own orders, at least some of whom must be entirely innocent of any wrong-doing and yet question them he must, prying into their lives regardless of innocence or otherwise.

  He turned and surveyed the group before him, ‘Miss Warne, the offices look to be almost identical in size, am I right?’

  Sarah quickly divined the reason behind Alleyn’s question and gave him the kind of fully-informed answer that eased his frustration a great deal.

  ‘The staff offices are, but they don’t all have the same amount of space inside, it depends on how many desks and chairs and whatnot they’ve got in them. The Surgery is smaller, to make space for the anteroom where they keep the anæsthetic preparations, iodine and all the other necessities for surgical procedures, medicines and such. They’re all locked away, of course,’ she added hastily.

  He warmed to her immediately, ‘Thank you. In that case, between the Transport Office and the Records Office, which will afford us a modicum of comfort in the task that lies ahead?’