Death at the Jesus Hospital

by David Dickinson

  Inspector Fletcher came to join him, clutching a telegram. It was another missive from Sir Peregrine and told him of another murder at a property linked to the Silkworkers Company, in Norfolk this time, another murder marked by the mysterious imprint of the thistle deeply embossed on the dead man’s chest. Powerscourt was ordered to go to the scene as soon as possible.

  Allison’s School in Fakenham had been founded in the sixteenth century by Sir George Allison to replace a priory that had been abolished in the dissolution of the monasteries. Sir George endowed the school handsomely with a number of parishes in Norfolk and further properties in the City of London. The entire endowment was placed in the hands of the Silkworkers Company of London where it has remained to this day. There were over a hundred and fifty boys in the school, with the normal range of teaching and ancillary staff. The victim was the bursar. He was found in his office – pen in hand over a set of accounts on his table, strangled, with great purple weals on his neck – shortly after ten o’clock in the morning when he was due to attend a meeting with the headmaster concerning action against those parents who were late with their fees. His shirt had been ripped open to receive the imprint of the thistle that had disfigured the body of Abel Meredith at the Jesus Hospital in Marlow.

  Roderick Gill, the bursar, was nearing retirement in his fifty-fifth year, with fifteen years’ service at the school. His office was on a long corridor that everybody in the school used, from the teachers to the most junior boy to the cleaning staff.

  Powerscourt reflected on his train to Norfolk that the killer must have travelled this line yesterday, on his way to his second murder. Surely someone would have seen him. Or had the killer access to a large and powerful motor car which could have taken him to East Anglia with less chance of being spotted? He wondered if these two dates at the end of January carried any particular significance.

  Another murder, another Inspector of police. Not for the first time Powerscourt wondered about the wisdom of having so many different police forces in the country. Surely these two cases must be linked. Yet two separate forces would conduct their own investigations, with the possibility of much information falling into the cracks between the two inquiries.

  Allison’s School was in a state close to chaos. The porter at the front gate blamed the telephone. Mothers from near and far had heard of the murder and had come in person to seek assurances from the headmaster that their child was safe and should not be taken home immediately. Only a timely directive from the policeman on the case, Inspector William Grime, that all the boys were to remain in school until they had been questioned by members of his force, prevented a mass exodus. The queue to speak to the headmaster stretched for fifteen yards outside his office and out into the quadrangle. Powerscourt saw as his cab dropped him off that the mothers were growing more rather than less distraught. ‘There he was, that poor bursar man,’ he heard one of them say to her neighbour in the line, ‘sitting at his desk, and then, whoosh, he’s gone! Who’s to say the killer couldn’t do the same to my Georgie or any of the other boys? They still haven’t caught the murderer, you know. The brute’s still at large, waiting to kill again. He’s probably hiding in the grounds.’

  Some of the boys were in lessons, though Powerscourt doubted if they would learn very much on this day. Others were talking to the policemen in a geography classroom made over to the constabulary. Some of the younger boys, Powerscourt was told later, reported sightings of a bearded man climbing over the chapel roof early that morning; others mentioned a tramp who looked remarkably like the headmaster, who had taken to hiding round the back of the cricket pavilion. The boys had not yet learnt, Powerscourt was glad to discover, of the strange mark left imprinted over the dead man’s heart.

  It was late that afternoon before some sort of order was restored to the headmaster’s quarters. John Davies, the headmaster, had agreed to brief a group of mothers every morning in the main hotel in the town. He had secured, he told Powerscourt, an undertaking that no boys would be withdrawn until the police were satisfied with their collection of evidence. Inspector Grime had apparently indicated that that day might be some way away. The police had no wish for potential witnesses to be dispersed across central and southern England. Leaning back in his chair, Davies told Powerscourt that the affair could close the school down unless the murder was solved quickly. One mother taking her son away, he reckoned, could be dismissed as eccentric, two could probably be finessed as over-cautious, but let three go and the trickle could become a flood. Headmaster Davies was in his early fifties, brown hair beginning to turn grey above his ears. Years of power over classrooms and colleagues had left him with authority stamped on his face, a Roman consul in the glory years of the Republic perhaps, or a viceory of some far-flung outpost of Empire.

  ‘This is every headmaster’s nightmare, Lord Powerscourt, some out-of-the-way event like an outbreak of an infectious disease or a murder that makes the parents wonder if their child is safe. Stopping them taking their children away becomes like Canute trying to halt the incoming tide. I’ve just about managed it so far, but the water is lapping round my ankles and swirling round my calves at the back. God, I’ll be glad when all this is over and we can get back to serious problems like Form Three’s appalling French and the lack of a decent goalkeeper for the football team. You and I know perfectly well, Lord Powerscourt, that seventeen-year-old boys are quite capable of looking after themselves. But devoted mothers would not see the matter in those terms. Once the drip turned into a stream, Allison’s School could be empty in a matter of days. And think,’ he said finally, rising from his desk to prowl around his office, ‘think of the effect it’s going to have on recruitment for future years. Send your child to Allison’s where members of staff are throttled in their offices. Send your son to a school where the bursar is killed in broad daylight. Welcome to the murder class.’

  The headmaster sent Powerscourt on his way, saying that he had called an emergency meeting of the governors, some of whom were on the evening train from London. He recommended him to the bursar’s closest friend in the school, a maths teacher called Joshua Peabody.

  The maths teacher wore some of the strongest glasses Powerscourt had ever seen. The poor man, he thought, must be nearly blind. Receding hair, shirt buttons fastened out of line and a general air of absent-mindedness gave Peabody the appearance of a professor of some abstract subject like linguistics or Indo-Arabic languages, whose wife has recently left him. Powerscourt wondered what the boys thought of him.

  Peabody led Powerscourt out of the school on to a path that circled the football pitches and took them some distance away from the main buildings. Only when they were well out of earshot did he speak.

  ‘This is a terrible business,’ he began, kicking a punctured football into the long grass, ‘terrible. I can scarcely believe it, even now. It’s so unfair that it should happen to Roderick.’

  ‘Perhaps you could tell me about him. It always helps.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know anything at all about his early life, where he was born, where he went to school, that sort of thing. He never talked about growing up, not to me, at any rate. I only got to know him when I joined the staff here nine years ago. He was never the heart and soul of the staffroom, Roderick, if you know what I mean. Maybe we teachers are always a little uneasy in the company of bursars, I don’t know. I do know that he took his job very seriously. The headmaster was fond of saying that if all the teachers kept their books as well as the bursar, his life would be much easier.’

  ‘So how did you become friends?’ asked Powerscourt, noting that the net at the back of the football pitch needed mending, another item of expenditure to be recorded in the bursar’s ledgers.

  ‘He loved the mountains,’ Joshua Peabody said. ‘When I was younger and my eyes were better I was always climbing whenever I could. Roderick, too, had been a fine mountaineer in his youth. Now we’re not so young we used to go on walking holidays in Scotland or in the Alps. He alway
s used to say that he wanted to see the Himalayas before he died, though I don’t think he ever did anything about it. He and I were planning a trip to the Dolomites in the Easter holidays.’

  None of this, Powerscourt reflected, was likely to draw a killer to Allison’s School and murder its bursar at his desk. ‘Did he have any enemies? Do you have any suspicions about something in his past perhaps that could have led to his terrible end?’

  ‘As I said,’ Peabody had taken his glasses off and was rubbing them carefully on a large and rather dirty handkerchief, ‘I don’t know very much about his past. There is one thing I should tell you, Lord Powerscourt. It only started about two weeks ago, maybe less.’ There was a pause while the handkerchief was restored to its pocket and the glasses replaced. Peabody looked more than ever the absent-minded professor, wondering where he has left his books. ‘Over the last week or two,’ he went on, ‘Roderick Gill changed. He became a frightened man. He would stare anxiously at strangers when the two of us were walking into the town for a drink. I think, but I’m not sure, that he had been burning a lot of documents in the school incinerator and in the grate in his own rooms. Whether those were papers relating to his past or to the school or something else altogether I do not know.’

  Two small boys kicking a football dashed past them on their way to the goal with the broken netting.

  ‘Roderick would wait for the post in the morning with a look almost of terror on his face. One of the English teachers said he knew the cooked breakfast in the staff dining room was bad, but that was no reason to be afraid of it. I know that Roderick had asked for, and been granted, the option of two weeks of compassionate leave to begin the Monday after next. He had refused to tell anybody, not the headmaster, not even me, his closest friend in Allison’s, where he proposed to go. And now this.’ Peabody waved his hand back in the general direction of the school. ‘All this fuss. Policemen. Anxious mothers. Special investigators from London. The headmaster fretting about the future of the school. All of this Roderick Gill would have found very hard to bear. Whatever it was he was afraid of,’ Peabody stopped and looked Powerscourt in the eye for the first time during their talk, ‘he never told me. He never told me what it was. Roderick Gill was a very frightened man in the last days of his life. Whatever or whoever it was he was frightened of, he was quite right to be terrified. They’ve got him in the end.’

  3

  Powerscourt found Inspector Grime staring wearily at a large map of North America on the wall of the geography classroom. Grime was grey haired now, with lines etched on his face and on his forehead. He had the air of a man who had seen as much as he wanted of crime and most other human activities. He was one of those unfortunate people who give the impression that they really enjoy being miserable.

  Powerscourt told him of his conversation with Peabody and the fear that had gripped Roderick Gill in his last days.

  ‘Peabody?’ he said. ‘That the one who teaches maths and wears those strong glasses? It’s a wonder he can read his own equations when he writes them on the blackboard.’

  ‘The same,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I’m sure some schools wouldn’t employ him because he looks so scruffy. Bad example to the pupils, that sort of thing. Shoes polished, blazer middle button fastened, tie straight, that’s what they like.’

  ‘That’s as may be,’ said the Inspector, ‘but the boys say he’s a brilliant teacher, especially with the ones who don’t like mathematics. Anyway, he’s told you more about the dead man than I’ve learnt from these boys all afternoon. Only thing we’re sure of is that Bursar Gill died somewhere between eight and nine thirty in the morning. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that corridor where his office was. It’s the main thoroughfare of the school, with classrooms and offices off it, including the dining hall at one end and the chapel off a side corridor at the other.’

  ‘Would there be lots of boys moving about between those times?’ Powerscourt asked.

  ‘Breakfast is at eight o’clock, my lord. By about twenty past lots of them are going back to their dayrooms or their studies to get the books they need for morning lessons. By a quarter to nine they all charge up the corridor again for morning prayers. By nine o’clock they’re back in it again en route to the first lesson. Somebody must have seen something.’ The Inspector gave an aged globe a vigorous shove and the continents of the world whizzed round on their axis. ‘They’re so young, these boys, and so innocent most of them, even the older ones, they leave you feeling quite exhausted and very old, very old indeed.’

  ‘What did they tell you?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘Well, I don’t know if somebody told them to say as little as possible or not. It certainly sounded like it. I’ve heard burglars in Norwich in my time who were more forthcoming than some of these lads. Basically, they didn’t know the bursar at all. He didn’t teach them, he didn’t do any coaching at games. They hardly ever saw him. The only thing they knew about him was that he had dismissed the previous head cook for overspending his budget and fiddling the figures. The new man, apparently, is terrible. One cheeky monkey suggested one of the boys might have killed him because the food is now so bad they’re hungry all the time. A couple of them said he looked worried. One of the senior years said Gill had been spotted in the town drowning his sorrows in The Poacher’s Catch with the maths teacher Peabody. He didn’t say how he came by this information, mind you. The rogue must have been skulking in the public bar – the staff here use the lounge, always have.’ The Inspector gave the globe another spin. ‘I’ll have to interview the rest of them tomorrow and maybe the next day, though I don’t have much hope of anything very useful. The headmaster insisted I interview every single pupil, probably so they can tell their parents. You’ll be wanting to see the body, my lord, down at the hospital in the town.’

  Powerscourt wondered how many years these maps had been on the walls. The colours were going. Central Canada, he observed, had faded to a dull pink while the two coastlines at opposite ends of the country were still red. ‘Have you ever seen anything like that mark on his chest before, Inspector?’

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,’ replied Inspector Grime, ‘not even up here in the wilds of Norfolk.’

  Later that evening Powerscourt met the headmaster in his study. Davies had his feet on his desk and was nursing a very large glass of whisky.

  ‘I don’t normally drink in the term time at all, but that governors’ meeting was terrible,’ he said, grimacing at the memory. ‘They virtually accused me of having carried out the murder. There’s one very old governor who was at the school about the beginning of the last century, and he’s been on the governing body for years, certainly far longer than I’ve been headmaster here. Discipline, he always goes on about discipline. In his day, I expect, a boy was flogged for anything at all, shoelaces not properly tied, running in the corridor, that sort of thing. He claimed lack of discipline caused the bursar’s death, though he couldn’t explain how.’

  Powerscourt saw that the headmaster’s study was more or less what you would expect in a place like this. There was an enormous desk, virtually guaranteed to intimidate nervous new teachers or schoolboy criminals. The walls were lined with school photographs. There was an oar from the First Trinity Boat Club, the rowing arm of Trinity College, Cambridge, behind the headmaster’s desk. Powerscourt noticed that a recently appointed bishop of the Church of England and a junior member of the cabinet had rowed on the Cam with the headmaster. There were bookshelves, one shelf full of a volume called The Future of the Public Schools, written by the headmaster himself. A selection of vicious-looking canes were prominently displayed next to the oar to strike fear into the hearts of malefactors.

  ‘Peabody says Gill was frightened in the last few weeks of his life. Did you notice that too, Headmaster?’

  It was just like being in the army, Powerscourt remembered. You called a man by his title, not by his name, as if function was the sole criterion in addressing your fellow man.r />
  ‘I thought he looked a bit under the weather. But remember, Powerscourt, there are a lot of people to look after here. I’m not the matron or the father confessor to the staff or anybody else.’

  ‘May I ask you a difficult question, Headmaster? I apologize for troubling you but time is important in murder cases. What precisely was the link between the school and the Silkworkers Company down in London?’

  ‘I wish they’d stay in London, those people, and not come up here and give me a hard time during governors’ meetings,’ the headmaster said wearily. ‘The Silkworkers look after the endowments of the school. Always have, always will, I expect. The chairman of the board of governors is always one of theirs, as are four of the other school governors. It’s like one of those cabinets packed with the prime minister’s relations in Lord Salisbury’s time. The family, or in our case the Silkworkers, call the shots. It would be very difficult to push through a policy they didn’t approve of. Silkworkers appointed me, they’ll probably appoint my successor.’