Death at the Jesus Hospital

by David Dickinson

  Inspector Grime’s sergeant, a young man called Peter Morris, had nurtured hopes of becoming a draughtsman or an artist before being claimed by the more mundane appeal of the police force. This was his first murder inquiry. But he liked to keep his hand in when he could. He had constructed for his Inspector a great chart which stood proudly on one wall of Grime’s office. It was a timeline, with the days before and after the murder marked in different colours. Black, in harmony with his beard, marked the suspect’s movements. Blackbeard, as all the policemen referred to him now, first appeared in the chart on the day before the murder. He had arrived in the town at seven o’clock in the evening on a train from King’s Lynn. The policemen noted glumly that he had arrived in the dark. Then he seemed to disappear. No bar or hotel or bed and breakfast establishment remembered such a man. The black entry appeared again the following morning, entering the school and killing its bursar early in the morning. Then he vanished once more.

  The Inspector and his sergeant were having a conference by the chart the morning after Sir Peregrine’s night visitor arrived at the Elysian Fields. ‘Right,’ said Inspector Grime, ‘we’ve had seventy replies so far and this is all that stands up. Is that right, Sergeant?’

  ‘I’m afraid it is, sir. I think some members of the public are too ready to offer help. We’ve had reports of all sorts of men with black beards but most of them were the wrong age or the wrong height. Some more reports should come in today, sir.’

  Inspector Grime snorted. He had had such high hopes when the original description was provided by the sixth-former David Lewis. Now it seemed to be turning to dust in his hands. ‘Where did the bugger sleep, for God’s sake? Are there any empty houses or cottages he could have used? He can’t have disappeared between seven in the evening one day and eight o’clock in the morning the day after, can he?’

  ‘I’ve got people checking on all the empty dwellings, sir, to see if any of them might have been occupied. I don’t have the answers yet. Could I make a suggestion, sir?’

  ‘If you must,’ said Grime whose reluctance to listen to subordinates made him unpopular with his men.

  ‘I tried this the other day, sir, on my way home. If you skip over the fence at the side of the school football fields you could be in Allison’s School grounds without anybody knowing you were there. There are all kinds of outbuildings there, cricket pavilions, football changing rooms, a couple of barns, a great shed full of mowing machines and things. I checked with the school, sir, and they say they don’t bother to lock them at night. Blackbeard could have spent the night in there. There’s running water in some of them so he could have washed and things like that. It’s possible, sir.’

  Inspector Grime snorted once again. ‘That’s as maybe. But how did the bugger get away? Nobody saw him getting on to a train out of Fakenham the next morning. I doubt very much if he would have wanted to hang around just after he’d killed the bursar. And he must have dumped the postman’s uniform somewhere along the way.’

  ‘He could have dumped the uniform anywhere as he was getting away,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘So how do you suggest he got away then?’ The Inspector repeated his question. ‘Did he have supernatural powers, do you suppose?’

  Inspector Grime’s sarcasm was as unpopular as his dislike of suggestions. Sergeant Morris just carried on.

  ‘He could have walked, sir.’

  ‘Walked? Where could the man have walked to, for God’s sake?’

  ‘Norwich, sir, perhaps.’ The sergeant noticed that his Inspector was turning red and reaching in his pockets for his pipe, usually a bad sign. ‘I know it’s a long way but you’d be much less visible there with all those people in the railway station. He could have gone anywhere from Norwich, sir, as you well know.’

  ‘Would you like to take over the entire investigation, Sergeant? Use your vast experience in murder cases to solve the mystery of the vanishing Blackbeard?’

  ‘Certainly not, sir, but could I just make one last suggestion and then I’ll keep quiet. I’ve got the highest respect for your position and your experience, sir, as you know.’ Sergeant Morris was well aware that the Inspector had to write a report on his conduct in the next ten days. More or less continuous helpings of humble pie were usually required at this point. Sergeant Morris thought yet again about requesting a transfer to a different part of the county.

  ‘Let’s hear it, if I must.’

  ‘Well, sir, I’m sure you must have thought of this already. You’ve got so much more experience than me. But suppose this Blackbeard is our man. He travels up here from we know not where, could be anywhere in the country. That suggests to me that the motive, the reasons behind Gill’s death, may have nothing to do with the school, or the Silkworkers or his affair with the married woman and the disappearing stonemason husband. The motive might lie elsewhere.’

  Inspector Grime blew out an enormous mouthful of smoke. The tobacco was relaxing him.

  ‘That’s perfectly possible,’ he said. ‘It’s equally possible that Blackbeard was a hired killer. You can pick up people like that in London very cheaply these days, a hitman who’ll kill somebody for a couple of hundred pounds. The real murderer could still be local, but he could be a man who has decided to hire Blackbeard to hide his own identity.’

  ‘Do you believe that, sir?’

  ‘Do you know, Sergeant, I’m not sure what I believe any more.’

  Inspector Miles Devereux had removed his feet from the desk and hooted with laughter when Johnny Fitzgerald telephoned with the news about overnight visitors at the Elysian Fields. He asked Johnny to see if the visitor was coming back to London by train. If so, once Johnny told Devereux the time of the train, she could be intercepted at the London end. Inspector Devereux looked forward to questioning her.

  But his main concern that morning was with the two principal characters in his section of the investigation, Sir Peregrine Fishborne who was very much alive and Sir Rufus Walcott who was very much dead. He had decided two days before that he needed more information about them, about their past, about anything that happened some time before that might give rise to sudden death years later. Two of his brightest men had been given the task of finding as much as they could about the life stories of the dead man and the one who had succeeded him as Prime Warden of the Silkworkers Company.

  ‘It’s all very conventional,’ said David Lawrence, the constable assigned to Sir Peregrine. ‘I started in Who’s Who, that’s not much use really, a whole lot stuff about his progress through the livery company. I talked to a couple of reporters who write about the City, sir, and they said his life only got interesting with this row about the Silkworkers and the codicil. He’s well connected, Sir Peregrine, one cousin on the board of one of the big banks, another runs a shipping company, a third is a big noise in Lloyd’s the insurers. You could, one of these reporters said, coast along quite happily in the slipstream of those relations if you kept your nose clean and played your cards right. Sir Peregrine’s chairman of a middling sized insurance company, plenty of money, but not as much as the other members of the family. The other reporter thought this was what started him off on the codicil and the selling off of the assets. He has to keep up with Cousin Rupert at the bank and Cousin Jeremy at the shipping and Cousin Nigel in Lloyd’s.’

  ‘Would Sir Peregrine become richer than the others if he sold off the assets?’ asked Devereux, thinking perhaps of his own family where the brothers proliferated but the assets had long since disappeared.

  ‘Richer, probably,’ said Constable Lawrence, ‘but I didn’t ask that question, so that’s a guess.’

  ‘And what of Sir Rufus?’ Inspector Devereux was hoping for better things from his second sleuth, Constable Conrad.

  ‘He’s pretty conventional too,’ said Conrad who was, at twenty-two years of age, the youngest member of Devereux’s team. ‘There is one curious thing about him, sir, and that’s his entry in Who’s Who.’

  ‘What on earth has
happened to his entry in Who’s Who?’

  ‘There’s this gap, sir. St Paul’s School, Christ Church, Oxford, then a gap until he’s thirty-five years old. At that point he turns up on the board of the Town and Capital Insurance Company and never looks back. My informants said he was a whizz with figures, sir, calculate the likely profit on any takeover in a second or two once he knew the share price and the sales figures and the state of the balance sheet.’

  ‘Have you been able to trace anything at all in the missing years?’

  ‘Not a thing, sir.’

  ‘God bless my soul,’ said Devereux, ‘I never heard the like.’

  ‘As I said, sir,’ Constable Conrad pressed on, ‘once word got out about his ability with figures, he was on boards all over the place. And, to be fair to him, most of his companies prospered.’

  ‘Are there any links between the two of them? Apart from service with the Silkworkers?’

  ‘There’s a Norfolk connection, sir.’ Constable Lawrence had returned to the fray. ‘We only realized it when we were comparing notes just before we came to see you. Sir Peregrine has a house in Norfolk, near Melton Constable. Big place, peacocks on the lawn, lots of gardeners.’

  ‘And my man, Sir Rufus, he’s got a great pile just outside Aylsham. I don’t know about peacocks but they say the garden is by Capability Brown. The places can’t be more than ten to fifteen miles apart.’

  The telephone rang. Inspector Devereux’s face broke into a wicked grin. ‘No sign of her at all, you say? Disappeared? Not gone off in the boot of the big car? Never mind. Keep me posted, Johnny. Happy watching.’

  Inspector Devereux told his men about the late-night visitor to Sir Peregrine’s suite at the Elysian Fields, and that she seemed to have disappeared. Johnny Fitzgerald could find no trace of her this morning.

  ‘Only one thing for it, sir.’ said Constable Lawrence cheerfully, ‘you need a permanent vigil at that hotel. Apprehend the young lady once she appears. Have a serious talk with her, then bring her in for questioning.’

  ‘Quite right, sir.’ Constable Conrad was keen to join the hunt. ‘With that kind of watching operation, you need twenty-four-hour cover, sir. A man on watch every hour of the day, sir. I’m sure the two of us could handle it.’

  The Inspector laughed. ‘Get away, the pair of you. If there’s any handling of this young lady to be done, then it must be carried out by the senior officer on the case. That’s me. I shall, of course, let you know how I get on.’

  Lord Francis Powerscourt was walking from the railway station to the Jesus Hospital in Marlow. A light rain was falling. He suspected that two if not three of his Inspectors felt sure that Sir Peregrine was the murderer, and were close to arresting him. Earlier that day he had sent a wire to Inspector Grime, asking him if there were any reports that Sir Peregrine had been at his house in Norfolk at the time of the bursar’s murder, or if the huge black car had been seen near the school at that time. Powerscourt was not convinced that Sir Peregrine was the killer. In his mind he always came back to the strange marks on the dead men’s chests, surely not only a link between the murders but a shout of defiance, a taunt to anybody investigating them.

  As he approached the building, he stopped suddenly and drew back to the side of the road. Fifty yards from the front door Warden Monk was having a conversation with a man Powerscourt had not seen in this case before. Indeed it was a couple of years since they had last met. Monk seemed to be nervous, rubbing his hands together over and over again. The man had been Powerscourt’s contact point when he had worked for the government a few years before. His name was Colonel James Arbuthnot and he was a senior officer in the British Secret Service.

  12

  Powerscourt saw Monk turn on his heel and head back towards the front gate of the hospital. Colonel Arbuthnot was coming his way. He was small, about five feet eight inches tall, with a handlebar moustache and a Roman nose. He fiddled constantly with a white rose in his buttonhole, as if he was on his way to a wedding. Powerscourt stepped out of the shadows into the middle of the road.

  ‘Good morning, Colonel,’ he said cheerfully, ‘and what brings you to Marlow today?’

  Arbuthnot looked at him carefully. ‘Ah, Powerscourt,’ he replied. ‘I’d heard you were involved in this matter.’

  What on earth, Powerscourt said to himself, was a senior British intelligence officer doing at the Jesus Hospital? It didn’t make sense.

  ‘I am indeed,’ he replied, ‘and what, pray, has the death in the almshouse got to do with you or with your department?’

  ‘I don’t feel obliged to answer any of your questions, Powerscourt. This is a matter of state security. You, of all people, know the rules.’

  Powerscourt remembered that these people made Trappist monks seem talkative.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ he went on, ‘was Abel Meredith one of yours? I find that scarcely possible.’

  ‘In the world of intelligence, Powerscourt, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must get back to London.’

  ‘I will not excuse you, Colonel, until you have told me something of your business here.’

  Arbuthnot gazed up and down the little road as if he suspected German agents might be lurking behind the trees. He twisted the rose in his buttonhole once more. ‘This is all very difficult,’ he said finally. ‘Under the terms of the paper you signed those years ago you are still committed to serving the interests of the department whenever you are called to do so. It will be much more convenient for me if I can learn whatever you have discovered from your lips rather than having to make repeated trips to this bloody backwater. Are you happy to do that for your country?’

  ‘I am, but only on condition that you tell me what the department’s interests are with the late Meredith.’

  Arbuthnot paused again. A lone horseman galloped slowly down the road. When he had passed out of sight, the colonel spoke again. ‘We do not like having to conclude bargains with people who are, in effect, our own agents. But I will make you an exception in this case. If you tell me what you know about the death of this wretched man, I will tell you something of our interest in him.’

  Was this a genuine offer? Would Arbuthnot take on board all he knew and give him nothing in return? How much did he know already? For all Powerscourt knew, he could have been in touch with one or more of the inspectors on the case already.

  ‘Well,’ he said finally. ‘The first thing to say is that I have, for the present, no idea at all who killed him. There is one thing you should know. Meredith’s body had a strange series of marks on his chest. The same marks were found on the bodies of two other men, murdered in the days after the death in Marlow, both connected with the Silkworkers Company. One was a former Prime Warden of the Silkworkers, whose body was found by the water at the Silkworkers Hall near Tower Bridge. The other was the bursar of Allison’s School at Fakenham in Norfolk which has always had very close links with the Silkworkers. The existence of the strange marks is known only to those at the very heart of the inquiry. It has not been made public.’

  ‘Do you believe that the marks hold the key to the mystery, or mysteries?’

  ‘I do not know, Colonel. There is a plan, organized by the current Prime Warden of the Silkworkers, to sell off the company’s assets and distribute them among the members. This plan has proved contentious. There are disagreements about the provenance of some ancient documents which would seem to give sanction to the sale of the assets. The members here, like the members at the school, were mainly opposed to the sell-off. The chief opponent, the figurehead of the opposition, was the body found by the Tower, Sir Rufus Walcott. Apart from that, we have little to go on. So far we know very little about the past lives of the men in the Jesus Hospital. Maybe you could enlighten me on that.’

  ‘You have been very frank, Powerscourt. Thank you for that.’ The colonel took another furtive look up and down the road. Secrecy, Powerscourt thought,
their own secrecy will be their undoing. ‘Let me try to give you such information as may be useful to you. The department, shall I say, has always had an interest in the Silkworkers. They are able to travel to and from Europe freely, ostensibly to meet with other guilds and similar ludicrous organizations. It’s bizarre, the extent to which the middle classes of Europe like dressing up in uniforms and livery from the distant past.’

  ‘You mean they are messengers? Picking up reports from agents? Dropping off requests for more information?’

  ‘You may think what you will,’ Arbuthnot smiled a glacial smile, ‘it is not for me to comment.’

  ‘Was Meredith a messenger for you? How long had be been working for you then?’

  ‘That is a difficult question to answer. I am now going to tell you the most sensitive part of our position, in return for your earlier and future help. If you agree to the future, that is?’

  Powerscourt felt he had little choice. ‘I do,’ he said. Visions of endless future meetings, held like this one, on the nation’s side roads or in derelict buildings in the capital flashed across his mind.

  ‘Meredith was originally employed by us as a courier. We now suspect the Germans may have turned him, through bribery or brute force, to work for them. But we are not sure.’

  ‘Heavens above, man, are you saying he turned into a double agent? Do you think the Germans might have killed him? God in heaven.’

  ‘You may think what you will. I have told you the relevant points. It is not for me to comment any further. We shall meet again.’

  Colonel Arbuthnot adjusted the rose in his buttonhole once again and set off towards the railway station. Powerscourt watched him go.