Death of an Unsung Hero

by Tessa Arlen

  “I think I will sit quietly on the bench for a moment.”

  He was instantly solicitous. “Of course you should. Mrs. Jackson, will you see to her ladyship?” Then he turned away from them and went to consult with Major Andrews, who had carefully turned the body of Captain Bray onto its back. He shouldn’t have done that, Clementine thought. And why are they trampling the bed?

  She patted the bench next to her in invitation and Mrs. Jackson sat down. After a moment or two Clementine said, “Well, Jackson, what are you thinking?”

  “I was thinking about the beginning of the war, m’lady, and our visit to Hyde Castle.”

  The murder of Rupert Bartholomew at Hyde Castle! Why, she hasn’t spoken about that in two years. Clementine remembered how keenly Mrs. Jackson had participated in their investigation; Jackson had even persevered when she had been ready to throw in the towel, but she had learned that any reference to their involvement in unsavory matters after the fact were taboo. Really understandable, Clementine decided, respectability would prevent her from ever admitting, probably even to herself, that she had been involved in anything as distasteful as prying. Does this mean she is prepared to be involved in this particular instance or is she reminding me in advance that she would prefer not?

  “Anything in particular that springs to mind, Jackson?”

  “I was thinking that this was rather an angry sort of murder, m’lady, angry and violent.”

  “I would have thought all murders were violent, Jackson.”

  “Then I am not putting it very well, m’lady. Captain Bray’s violent end makes me think that it was possibly a murder carried out on the spur of the moment. I am assuming that the potato spade was the weapon, which perhaps I shouldn’t do. But my first impressions are that the captain’s death was not planned and that the culprit evidently hit him more savagely than was needed to…”

  “Kill him?”

  “Yes, m’lady.”

  They sat in silence for a moment or two. “The obvious culprit is Lieutenant Phipps, Jackson. At least that is the most understandable connection and one that I expect the police will jump to.”

  She glanced at her housekeeper and noticed a very slight frown creasing her forehead. “I have been sitting here for a few minutes now and I am wondering why Lieutenant Phipps came into the kitchen garden at all. You see, he was coming from the orchard to the kitchen-garden courtyard with some apples for the press, so why didn’t he wheel his barrow up the east drive on smooth going instead of taking a detour into the kitchen garden?” She waved in the direction of the closed north door into the garden. “He would have had to open that door, wheel the barrow in and turn and close it, then negotiate the paths with a cumbersome and heavy load. If he had wheeled the barrow up the drive he would have merely had to turn in through the archway—so much easier than this circuitous route.”

  “I am sure the police will pick up on that one too, m’lady, which means that Lieutenant Phipps might very well be arrested. And we have the War Office and Medical Board inspection next week. I am sure that a murder on the premises will not go down well with that lot.”

  “Oh dear heavens, Jackson, you are right, that will certainly be a problem. And how on earth are we going to break it to Mr. Bray that his brother, on the road to recovery, has been murdered while he was in our care?”

  Chapter Four

  “It only takes about twenty minutes to drive up here from Market Wingley—what is holding them up?” Lord Montfort asked for the fourth time as he and Major Andrews joined Clementine and Mrs. Jackson under the walnut tree after Captain Martin had left to return to the hospital. “What time is it now?” He took out his watch, then stuffed it back into his waistcoat pocket. “Nearly an hour since I put that blasted telephone call through. They must have had a puncture.” And to his wife: “Clemmy, I really think you need not wait here, you still look awfully pale.”

  “I am quite all right.” Clementine felt immensely tired, but she was determined to stay. “Look, here is Valentine now. Goodness me, he has brought half of the Market Wingley police force with him.” She watched the chief constable for the county lead his men down the garden path toward them.

  * * *

  After a brief inspection of the body by both Colonel Valentine and his inspector, it was left in the competent hands of a police sergeant and one of the two police constables that had accompanied Colonel Valentine from Market Wingley.

  “Lady Montfort…” The old colonel was holding his hat in his hands, and his lined face creased more deeply as he smiled down at her sitting on her bench. “What a terrible thing to have happened, it must been a most unpleasant thing to find.” Colonel Valentine murmured all the conventional phrases to ladies who have had a horrid shock as he ushered them back up the gravel path toward the kitchen-garden courtyard. “Let us all go back to the Hall, perhaps a cup of tea?”

  They filed through the garden door and into the courtyard. Clementine noticed that a swarm of wasps was enjoying the half-crushed apples left in the barrel. The smell of sweet juice drying in the sun was almost nauseating. I don’t think I will ever be able to drink a glass of cider again, without remembering Captain Bray lying in our kitchen garden.

  With her husband solicitously on her right and Mrs. Jackson on her left, they continued in silence on up the drive to the hospital. It was so breathtakingly hot that Clementine had never been so grateful to walk into the dim interior of the marble hall of the old dower house as she was that afternoon.

  Mrs. Jackson, seeing Lord Montfort’s hesitation, led the way into what once had been his mother’s drawing room, and was now used as the officers’ day mess. “Perhaps we might open the windows a little, Jackson?” With the windows open the heat in the room seemed if anything to intensify, but at least the smell of stale cigarettes began to lessen.

  Tea was offered as Colonel Valentine made the introductions. “Just a glass of water please,” Clementine murmured to a young woman in a VAD uniform, who looked startled and sped away, to return with a wet glass of tepid water in her hand.

  Colonel Valentine’s inspector was a tall, reedy man with a long, nervous face and eyes that slid about the room, taking in every detail. Clementine noticed that he had neglected to remove his hat when he had come into the house. “Lord Montfort, may I present Inspector Savor?” Colonel Valentine gestured to his inspector looking out of the window and whistling through his teeth as he shifted small change around in his trouser pockets.

  “Saveur?” Lord Montfort asked in considerable surprise, taking care with his pronunciation. “Are you of Gallic extraction, Inspector?”

  “Sav-or, your lordship.” The inspector’s correction was emphatic.

  “Oh, I see, Saber, so not French then?”

  “No, your lordship, I am not, and it is Savor.”

  “Right then.”

  What on earth is the matter with Ralph? Clementine knew that years of enthusiasm for the shoot had left her husband a little deaf. Muffing the inspector’s name so thoroughly makes him sound quite potty.

  “My apologies for our late arrival, Lady Montfort.” She was grateful to Colonel Valentine for cutting in on the music-hall exchange between the two men. “We are alarmingly short-staffed at headquarters and have been taken up with a theft in the last day or so; a considerable amount of petrol seems to have been misappropriated.” The chief constable bowed his head to her in apology for the hour they had waited in the kitchen garden. Clementine thought that he had aged in the past two years, his eyebrows were thicker and more wiry and his bearing a little less upright.

  “Good God—stolen petrol—how much?” Her husband seemed far more shocked that valuable petrol had been stolen than he was by the death of Captain Bray.

  “Well over eight hundred gallons.”

  “That much? Yes, that is serious.”

  Clementine guessed that this conversation would take up a considerable amount of her husband’s time with his old pal Colonel Valentine, so she took over wi
th the introductions. “Colonel Valentine this is Major Andrews. He is the Commanding and Chief Medical Officer of Haversham Hall Hospital. This is Captain Martin, he is one of our officer-patients—the captain was with me when we discovered Captain Bray’s body; and you have already met Mrs. Jackson, who was appointed as Haversham Hall Hospital’s administrator just before we opened our hospital.” Introductions made, the police constable was given a chair by the window so that he could take notes, and the inspector took off his hat, sat down, and made himself comfortable in a way that Clementine found both consciously disrespectful and rather defiant.

  Colonel Valentine seated himself on a sagging green cretonne-covered sofa and everyone else pulled up straight-backed chairs and dutifully sat in a circle around him—everyone, that is, noticed Clementine, except her husband. Lord Montfort continued to stand, his hands clasped behind his back in the middle of the room. And it was he who was the first to speak.

  “I would be grateful if you would talk to Lady Montfort first, Valentine. We must both be on our way; Captain Bray’s brother is expected to join us at the house this afternoon.” He glanced at the clock on the chimneypiece. “Good Lord, is that the time? We shall be late for him. What a lamentable state of affairs.”

  “Yes, I am so sorry to have kept you all waiting. Let’s talk about what happened to…” Colonel Valentine looked down at a paper in his hand, “to Captain Sir Evelyn Bray. Perhaps, if it would not distress you too much to do so, would you tell me how you came to find the late captain, Lady Montfort?” Colonel Valentine’s white-tufted brows rose to his hairline as he asked his first question.

  Clementine straightened her back, folded her hands in her lap, and point by point gave him an account of what had happened from her arrival at the cider press to the moment when she had accompanied Captain Martin into the kitchen garden to find Captain Bray lying in his potato bed. “I think it would be helpful to you, Colonel, if Corporal Budge was to describe the state Lieutenant Phipps was in when he came into the yard through the east door of the kitchen garden.” She respected Budge and believed that if anyone could, the hospital orderly would give the chief constable a better sense of the hospital, the work they were doing here, and the state of mind of their patients.

  Corporal Budge was sent for and moments later he was with them, standing smartly to attention, his eyes fixed somewhere above his commanding officer’s head.

  “At ease, Corporal,” Major Andrews said. “Just tell Colonel Valentine here what happened in the kitchen courtyard, please. Start from when Lieutenant Phipps came in from the kitchen garden.”

  “Lieutenant Phipps was in a state of considerable shock, sir, when he arrived in the yard at about half past two o’clock. It was a few moments before he was calm enough to tell us that he had found the dead body of Captain Bray in the garden—with his head, as Lieutenant Phipps put it, ‘smashed.’”

  “He had been able to identify him then?”

  Budge paused. “Yes, he had, sir. He said, ‘Captain Bray is in the kitchen garden, lying facedown in the dirt with his head smashed in.’”

  “The captain was alone when Phipps found him?”

  “Phipps did not mention anyone, sir, but I expect so, the captain always liked to work in the garden by himself.”

  “Do you mean to tell me that he worked alone in that extraordinarily large area, that he did not have any help?”

  Corporal Budge cleared his throat and glanced over to Major Andrews for assistance, which he promptly gave. “Yes, the captain was rather reclusive. There were other officers in the kitchen-garden detachment, as we call it, since our officers are encouraged to garden and as you say it covers a large area—”

  “Over two acres,” interrupted Lord Montfort and looked at his watch.

  “But when Captain Bray worked in the kitchen garden, he preferred to work alone, and this was because…?” Clementine could almost hear the derision in Inspector Savor’s voice.

  “He was still in the army, wasn’t he?” A more polite inquiry from Colonel Valentine.

  “To answer both your questions, he was still in the army; this is a military hospital, and active work for a positive purpose, like gardening or helping with the harvest, is a useful cure for our patients.”

  “A cure for what, Doctor?” Again that rather condescending tone from the inspector, and Clementine frowned.

  “Actually my rank is major, and with respect, our patients’ therapies are something I may not discuss with you, Inspector.” Major Andrews did not look at Savor, and the inspector said, “We’ll see about that.”

  Not only condescending but truculent too. Clementine glanced over at Colonel Valentine and the elderly man lifted his hand.

  “If you would oblige us, Major Andrews, this is a murder inquiry.” His quiet voice was a contrast to the lounging Inspector Savor’s insolent tone. “Anything you can do to help us understand Captain Bray’s circumstances, anything that would help us piece together the reason for his murder … is not only welcome, it is required.”

  “Certainly, Colonel, I will do whatever I can to help you.”

  “And I want to know where everyone in your hospital was, while Captain Bray was enjoying his solitude in the kitchen garden,” Inspector Savor said, reclaiming his position as interrogator.

  Oh dear, thought Clementine, it seems the inspector doesn’t like this hospital any more than our local people do. Even their old friend Colonel Valentine seemed to have formed an antipathy toward the men they were treating here. What is it about these old Boer War veterans that they simply cannot seem to grasp that modern warfare inflicts wounds on not just the body but the mind too?

  “If you wish to know where everyone was while Captain Bray was gardening, Inspector, it will be simple enough.” Major Andrews turned to Corporal Budge. “If you would be so good, Corporal.”

  “Only seven officers remain at present in the hospital as of this morning, sir. Thirteen officers passed their medical review and returned to duty last week.” He said this with pride, but neither policeman seemed terribly impressed, Clementine noticed. Budge cleared his throat to continue. “Three of them are on farm detachment today: Lieutenant Forbes at the Home Farm, Lieutenant Standish at Dodd Farm, and Lieutenant Carmichael over at Brook End Farm; they all left after breakfast at eight o’clock this morning, sir, and will not return for another hour.

  “The three officers who were with me in the kitchen-garden courtyard on cider detachment after lunch: Captain Martin and Lieutenants Fielding and Phipps spent the morning with either one of our medical officers: Captain Pike and Major Andrews.”

  “Thank you, Corporal.” Colonel Valentine lifted a restraining hand to his inspector, who had started to chip in with a question. “Major Andrews, what about this morning and these three officers who were in the hospital, can you account for their time with you?”

  “I was in consultation with Captain Martin at nine o’clock. He was with me until half past ten, and then I was with Lieutenant Phipps until … I think he was with me until noon. Captain Pike saw Fielding at about the same time, so you would have to check with him. Sister Carter gave all three officers their monthly physical when they were not in consultation. I can vouch that all three of the officers were with us in the medical wing until luncheon.”

  “Thank you, Major Andrews. Now let me see … you say three of your officers have been away from the hospital all day, so we will have to check at their farms. Hmm…” He ran his finger down one side of his mustache. “Luncheon was taken at what time? Was everyone present?”

  Corporal Budge stood to attention as he answered. “Yes, sir, all the officers on cider detachment were present in the officers’ mess for luncheon at one o’clock. The officers on farm detachment took their lunch at their farms. Captain Bray was given a sandwich in the kitchen garden—”

  “Because he likes to be alone,” interrupted the inspector.

  Colonel Valentine ignored his inspector. “Did you say that Captain Bray is s
ome sort of a recluse?”

  “Captain Bray was an amnesiac, Colonel,” said Major Andrews, and when the chief constable looked confused, he went on to explain: “He had lost all memory when he returned after the Battle of Beauville Wood in March; without his identity discs they would not have known who he was or what battalion he came from. At the beginning of this month his memory had started to improve, he remembered his name and who he was, but not much of anything else. By using certain therapies such as painting and gardening as well as medical consultation, we believed that he would gradually recall his memory not just in the last months but before the war, too. We were in fact very hopeful that this would be the case.”

  “Painting.” Colonel Valentine’s voice was not derisive, but he did not sound impressed. “Painting pictures, that sort of thing?”

  “Yes, Colonel, painting helps to unlock images that aid in restoring memory. Occupational cures such as gardening, for example, or working on a farm; ordinary everyday activities like making one’s bed, or the simple business of pressing apples for cider, help lessen the stress and tension of nervous disorders. In the case of amnesia, the patient learns new information to replace what was lost, or to use intact memories as a basis for taking in new information.”

  “Good Lord above, what a way to run a war.” Colonel Valentine looked over at Clementine and her husband, saw that they were not with him in his thinking, and gestured to Inspector Savor as if he had heard enough and that it was now his turn. Oh no, thought Clementine, please don’t tell me that this miserable clod is going to be handling this inquiry. She looked across at Mrs. Jackson, who was sitting with her face composed as she gazed down at the green-and-yellow tartan pattern of the drawing room carpet.