Money in the Morgue

by Ngaio Marsh

  ‘These appear to be trolley height, is that right, Bix?’ Alleyn asked, advancing towards the dark recesses that seemed to open into the land itself.

  ‘They are Sir, Will Kelly brings in a body and he—I’ll admit I’m guessing, I’ve not seen it myself. My guess is he just slides it in.’

  ‘Hopefully managing to avoid tipping himself in at the same time,’ Alleyn responded. ‘Hand me your torch, will you?’

  Alleyn shone the torch into the first three cavities. They appeared to reach a good seven feet back, and were as wide and long as the largest of men. He thought again of Fox for a moment and felt a primal shiver reach across his shoulders. He brushed it away with an impatient sniff.

  ‘Looks like it ends in rock back there, Bix?’

  ‘That’s right, Sir. The old boys who built the hospital knew what they were up to.’

  ‘Old boys?’

  ‘Farmers mostly, settlers. Those blokes could do anything you like with a yard and a half of Number 8 wire, but they took it seriously, all right, and there was one old boy—’ Bix paused and scratched his head, waiting to see if a little more scratching would help. When it didn’t he went on, ‘Sorry, Sir, his name’s gone in all the excitement, anyway, he got himself halfway through an engineering degree, proper examinations and all that malarkey, up in Wellington, and then the Boer War came and he was off with our lads over there. Well, they wanted engineers, obviously. They said there was nothing he didn’t know about building a bridge across a raging river or digging deep into the earth to find water, no matter how dry it looked. The story goes he never finished his degree, the war took it out of him, as it does some men. He didn’t become an engineer as such, but he was the one who told them they ought to build the morgue right here, and they all knew, because it was him who’d said it, they’d better listen. Told them it might look like a wooded slope up the back, but beneath the bush was the foothills, solid and proper. Too right. ’Course there was no electricity out here back then, that came long after, so this was the spot they chose. They dug down and let the rock do the insulating for them. Dry in winter, cool in summer.’

  Alleyn took in the information from Bix’s soliloquy, then indicated the lanterns, ‘And is there no electricity in the morgue still?’

  ‘I reckon Matron never saw the point, that and the bills were piling up. You can’t rob Peter to pay Paul in a hospital, Sir.’

  ‘No?’ Alleyn said, almost wearily, and checked himself. If Bix had a great deal to say, at least he was offering it willingly. Eliciting information about the scene of a crime was a basic technique taught to every constable, he must be losing his touch if he’d almost silenced a witness. ‘Do explain.’

  ‘A hospital is a world unto itself, not unlike the army. Or the police force, I don’t doubt. My mother was a nurse, before she married my father, so I knew it for a fact before I came here. The hospital is ruled by the Matron. She says what’s what and even the fanciest of surgeons works that out for himself after a while. Everyone knows it’s right that she’s in charge, ’cause they live and breathe the hospital, it’s all they do. They weren’t meant to get married you see, back in the old days, and if they did they had to leave the job, so those that stayed, they’d pretty much given their lives to it. This Matron does, or she did, anyway, I mean—’

  Bix stopped, looking to the body bag on the trolley.

  ‘Go on,’ Alleyn asked.

  ‘I reckon she figured, Gawd bless her, there’s no point spending money putting electricity in the morgue when the roofs are leaking and bills want paying. She’s the one who’ll get it in the neck from the patients in the end. My point being, she can’t—I mean she couldn’t—rob herself, could she?’

  ‘And it’s not as if those resting in the morgue will complain of the lack of electric light?’

  ‘Exactly, Sir,’ Bix smiled, delighted to be in the company of someone who cared for his musing.

  Closer inspection revealed exactly what Alleyn had expected from the start, the morgue was disappointingly ordinary. It was small, as befitted a rural hospital that had, at least until wartime, dealt with little more than farming accidents and the routine life events of welcome births and the expected deaths of those whose lives had run their course on this fertile land.

  He turned to a sturdy table set against the wall opposite the cavities. The stainless steel cladding that covered the wooden surface reflected and added to the light from the lanterns. No doubt it was upon this table that post-mortems were carried out. To the right of the table was a small desk with a heavy ledger on top. Using his handkerchief as a glove, and careful only to touch the cover and pages by the top corner, Alleyn lifted the cover and flicked through several pages, revealing dates, names and causes of death in a clear, rounded hand. The last date was in October this year.

  ‘Private Patrick Fisher?’ he asked Bix.

  ‘Paddy Fisher. Big West Coast family. Great kid, Blue they called him, on account of his red hair, you know?’

  The Inspector allowed that he didn’t and Bix went on.

  ‘They brought him back covered in burns. We thought he’d make it, you know? Thought he’d get through, but burns like that, compromises the whole system, doesn’t it? Smallest thing and you’re gone. The kid was beginning to turn the corner, picked up a cough one week, it was pneumonia the next. Poor bugger.’

  Alleyn nodded, turned away to leave Bix to his thoughts. Alongside the ledger were several large hide-bound books of anatomy, a shelf above held the usual quantity of surgical spirit, embalming fluid and the like, including half a dozen glass vials of various liquids alongside a set of different sized syringes, each of the vials individually labelled both ‘Poison’ and ‘Do Not Ingest’. Alleyn found himself gruesomely thinking that those for whom the liquids were destined probably did not need the warnings. The glass door to an adjacent corner cupboard showed a set of weights and enamel dishes that had no doubt held organs and guts in their time. The whole place appeared to have been polished to within an inch of its life, gleaming with a dull sheen in the lamplight and the detective had to concede that even Bailey would have had trouble getting fingerprints from a room as thoroughly cleaned as this.

  ‘How well do you know the morgue, Bix?’ Alleyn said.

  ‘Not well, Sir, but I’ve been in here on occasion, supervising one of the lads come to fetch a fellow soldier.’ He paused, ‘I know it might feel that we’re out of it over here, to those of you who’ve been in London, but as well as the lads we’ve lost in action, there’s been blokes sent home in the hope of getting better after losing a leg, or a chunk of their guts blown out, maybe they’ve had some time on one of the hospital ships, Sir, but even so, they’ve been no-go in the end. So I don’t know it well, but I’ve been in here more often than I’d like.’

  ‘There’s nothing out of the ordinary?’

  Bix looked around.

  ‘Sorry to let you down, but nothing seems off that I can see.’

  ‘Not at all, Bix. And is it always this spotlessly clean?’

  ‘The whole hospital is, Sir, if Matron has—sorry—if she had her way. All that cleanliness next to godliness palaver, a tartar for it she is. Was.’

  Alleyn took Bix’s torch and shone it again into the empty cavities one after the other, noting the absence of dust, the smooth shine on the chiselled-out spaces, each one finished on the base with a dull steel which shone in the torch beam.

  He stepped back, ‘I can think of worse places to be laid out than nestled at the foot of your astonishing mountains.’

  ‘You sound like one of our Māori lads, Inspector, always on about the land and how it’s a living thing, they are.’

  ‘A healthy respect for natural forces does none of us harm, Bix.’

  ‘Fair enough, Sir.’

  Alleyn returned the torch to its owner and rubbed his long hands together, it was definitely cooler in here than the rest of the hospital, the settlers had done a good job.

  ‘Right Bix, we’ll
get Dr Hughes to come down and see if he can’t establish a cause of death. I’ll set you to keep an eye on him, if you will.’

  Bix looked horrified, ‘Ah, come off it, Sir, you don’t suspect young Hughes, do you? Surely not.’

  Alleyn shook his head, ‘Whether I suspect him or not is irrelevant. One of the worst aspects of this blasted job is that one is obliged to treat absolutely everyone with suspicion. A certain style of modern detective fiction might show our hero rushing to a terribly clever supposition by page sixteen and spending the rest of the novel proving himself right, but for your long-suffering actual policeman there is merely painstaking elimination and solid detective work, which means questioning every possible suspect. That will be my next task. Let’s just look over Matron’s office first, shall we?’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  It was testament to the resourceful settlers in whom Bix had such pride that the noise of the fracas from the Transport Office struck them forcefully the moment the sergeant opened the heavy morgue door into the asphalt yard. Alleyn grimaced and declared that Matron’s office could wait, while Bix broke into a run, throwing the torch back to the Inspector in an underarm pass that Alleyn deemed worthy of New Zealand’s famed rugby players. As Bix hared off to deal with matters in the office, Alleyn took his time locking up the morgue. He had no doubt who was causing a fuss back at the Transport Office, nor did he have any concern about Bix’s ability to handle the matter. He studied the key in his hand, felt the smooth turn of the lock as he tried it, and the deft, certain click of the deadbolt sliding into place in the dark. Safe as the grave. He winced at his appropriate turn of phrase and turned back into the yard, past the porter’s lodge. Several of the night staff had left their lonely posts to come to the porches of their wards, while a number of newly-awakened patients were peering into the dark from verandahs and windows.

  Alleyn whispered to the nurse in the first porch he came to, the sparsely populated Civilian 1, ‘I’d get your charges back to bed, if I were you, Nurse. I’m sure you don’t want to hear from Sister Comfort about the proper care of night wards?’

  He had almost invoked Matron in his warning and thought better of it as the words were forming in his mouth, not only was Sister Comfort on the premises and at least available to be presented to the staff, she was plainly a more daunting prospect than Matron.

  ‘Oh no, I wouldn’t want to worry Sister Comfort, not at all,’ squeaked the nurse and Alleyn could almost hear her blanching at the thought.

  ‘Sergeant Bix has it all in hand,’ he added.

  ‘It did sound like an awful row,’ she answered, backing away slowly.

  Alleyn smiled in the dark, his voice light and soothing, ‘The sergeant seemed to think a possum might have found its way into the Transport Office, feral creatures, I gather?’

  ‘Crikey yes,’ she answered, satisfied with this answer and called to her fellow nurse, one ward up, ‘Possum they reckon, Sandra, no cause for alarm.’

  ‘No cause for alarm?’ Sandra answered with a hearty laugh, ‘You’ve obviously never had a possum eat right through your telephone wire!’

  The message was passed along the porches and verandahs, the night nurses resumed their posts, the patients their beds, and Alleyn smiled with pride at a lie that came so easily and was so apt for the location.

  By the time he was at the other end of the long yard, the wards were again hushed but for the grunts of their inhabitants and the Transport Office itself was as silent as one of the many dormant volcanoes Alleyn had observed in his travels throughout New Zealand. As silent and as potentially lethal.

  ‘Thank you, Sergeant,’ he said to Bix as he stepped into the tight confines of the office, tighter still since Bix’s man had brought over the three hastily-dressed soldiers from Military 1.

  Bix nodded and stepped aside, allowing Alleyn to take up his position beside the door.

  The Inspector looked around him at the small company crowded into the office, the faces that stared back were a mixed bag. There were masks of fury, resentment, guilt, dismay and, he was intrigued to note, amused boredom playing on Rosamund Farquharson’s freshly lipsticked mouth.

  ‘I’m most awfully sorry to have kept you waiting all this time,’ Alleyn began, playing up the reticent Englishman, he had an idea that a mask of his own might come in useful as the night progressed. ‘I’m sure you’re all feeling a little concerned by the events of the evening so far.’

  ‘Concerned?’ expostulated one of the soldiers, a tall, sallow chap with a surly expression, ‘I’ll say we’re flamin’ well concerned.’

  Bix raised a hand in caution but he was ignored and Private Bob Pawcett went on, ‘We’ve been dragged from our kip in the middle of the night with no reason and no call for all this high-handedness either, I might add. We get here and Rosie fills us in on the god-awful scene with the Matron. No one’s telling us anything other than it’s not even our own police who are playing the Almighty giving out orders like nobody’s business. Glossop lets on it’s some Pommie bloke and then you turn up, the fellow that’s been skulking about Military 1 for the past week and never even made any damned effort to introduce yourself to us, thinks he’s above the likes of an ordinary soldier, you’ve made that quite clear.’

  ‘I do apologize,’ Alleyn spoke coolly, ‘I was not at liberty to reveal my identity, and as a military man yourself, you’ll understand the need to obey rules.’

  There was a pointed tone to Alleyn’s voice when he mentioned rules, prompting a hurried, ‘He does that, we all do,’ from the good-looking Private Sanders who also took the opportunity to kick his mate in the shins.

  Pawcett was not to be silenced, ‘You pull rank all you like, Sarge,’ he nodded to Bix, ‘I’ll take it from you, you’re my boss after all, at least you are here at the hospital, but I’m damned if I’m going to be kept in here all night with no bloody reason given and no idea when we’re allowed back to our beds either. And all three of us still recuperating.’

  ‘That’s a very good point, Private,’ Alleyn agreed. ‘And of course, I’m sure that you and your fellows here have fastidiously stuck to the regulations regarding recuperation, have you not? No late nights, no card games when you could sneak past the night nurse, no going out beyond the hospital boundaries? That is right, isn’t it?’

  Pawcett had the sense to shut up then, there was something in Alleyn’s tone that suggested a military past and a soldier who did not suffer fools gladly, whether they were seniors or subordinates.

  Alleyn was about to continue when Rosamund spoke up, a twinkle in her pretty eyes, ‘Don’t you even want to know what the row was about, Inspector?’

  ‘Not especially, Miss Farquharson. You see, I doubt very much that your account would accord with Mr Glossop’s, or his with that of the Private here, so I’d prefer to leave that for the moment and concentrate on the less salacious but rather more pressing duties ahead of me.’

  Alleyn turned to Bix and they quietly exchanged a few words, the sergeant nodding his head from time to time and taking notes in his military notebook. Finally, Bix nodded assent one last time, left the office, and Alleyn turned back to the chorus of expectant faces.

  ‘Now begins the most irritating of police tasks. I shall have to interview each of you, one by one, to better understand what has happened here tonight.’

  Alleyn saw that Glossop, even redder in the face than before, was about to protest, and he held up his hand, ‘I am sorry, Mr Glossop, I fully appreciate that as you personally have the trust of no less than the Government of New Zealand, you find the suggestion you might be guilty of anything at all both preposterous and insulting. I expect all of you feel this way to some extent.’ He smiled ruefully, ‘Almost all of you. Police procedure is a dreary thing and yet it must be followed. Dr Hughes, if you’ll follow me, we can get started and then Sergeant Bix will take you down to the morgue to see if you can’t find any answers regarding Matron. I’m hoping that while I conduct these interviews Bix will
complete an investigation of his own and find either the missing money or the missing Mr Brown Senior, preferably both, and we shall all be safe in our beds before long.’

  Dr Hughes raised an eyebrow, ‘How likely do you think that is, Inspector?’

  Alleyn shrugged lightly, ‘No less likely than a theft, a missing body and a spare turning up out of the blue. Shall we?’

  Dr Hughes stood and Alleyn noticed his quick glance to Sarah Warne who was avidly studying the transport rota at her desk. He noticed too that Hughes darted an even quicker glance to Rosamund Farquharson and the surprisingly half-hearted smile she gave back. Despite his brief acquaintance with Miss Farquharson, it did not seem in keeping with her character for her to smile quite so wanly in response.

  Alleyn made a mental calculation and followed it with a brief announcement, ‘I’ll speak to Father O’Sullivan after Dr Hughes, and then you three soldiers,’ he said to the men of Military 1, ‘You might as well all come along together as you seem to be so happily in each other’s pockets. Bix will fetch you when I’m ready.’

  ‘We can find our way to the Records Office,’ Pawcett mumbled.

  ‘I’m sure you can, but the earlier disturbance has underlined a necessity for security, so I shall lock this door after Dr Hughes and myself.’

  ‘But, but—’ Glossop spluttered, ‘what if that means you’re locking us in here with a murderer?’

  Alleyn smiled as he held open the door for Dr Hughes, ‘It could be, Mr Glossop, that I am locking him—or her—out. You might feel more comfortable if you look at it that way. Now please, do behave yourselves, we’ve a great deal to get through yet.’