by M. J. Trow
Mary Ann
R
hadegund Hall is approached by the Great North Road, left a bit, up a bit and you’re there. So was Inspector Lestrade that Wednesday in August, a little before luncheon. The building itself, set in magisterial grounds, was new. An imposing, red-brick façade, fronted by elaborate wrought-iron gates. To the west stood the Gothic block of the chapel, dedicated to St Rhadegund, and to the east the equally imposing house of the Headmaster.
Lestrade crossed the lawns above the First Eleven Square, looking for signs of life. There were none, save the lowly chanting of a first declension from somewhere in the building’s bowels. He recognised the sound from his own days at Mr Poulson’s Academy at Blackheath. Had it been the second declension wafting on the breeze that morning at Rhadegund, Lestrade would not have recognised it. He had not got that far. Still, he reasoned, a lack of classics had proved no obstacle. Here he was on this bright, sunny morning, thirty-four-years old and an Inspector of the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard. Not bad for a beginner.
He found a door and walked through it, remembering, as he usually did, to open it first. The darkness hit him like a wall and he groped his way forward through what was clearly a corridor, lined, as his eyes acclimatised, with the heavy pipes that were the lifeblood of the Rhadegund heating system, and with photographs of darkly handsome young men in caps and long shorts, posing heroically before what appeared to be the main doors of the school. He saw a light at the end of the tunnel and followed it until he found the door. Dark green lockers rose up sheer on each side of it, not unlike those at the Yard where he habitually hung his Donegal in wet weather, and where, in the unhealthy basement, the sergeants stored their tripe sandwiches and naughty French postcards.
’Yes,’ a muffled voice responded to his knock. The glass was bubbled so that the occupant of the room appeared at first to have a few hundred heads. Lestrade was quite relieved to find he had only one.
‘Cap size?’ The occupant did not look up from an enormous ledger on the desk.
‘Er . . . seven, I think,’ Lestrade answered.
‘Don’t suppose you know your inside leg measurement?’ the occupant grunted.
‘No, I don’t,’ Lestrade said, ‘and I don’t think I’d tell you even if I did.’
‘Now look here, young . . .’ The occupant looked up.
‘Lestrade,’ said Lestrade. ‘Inspector Lestrade.’
‘Is this some sort of joke?’ the occupant asked, with an even sourer look on his face than usual.
‘If it is, I suppose it’s on me,’ said Lestrade. ‘I’m looking for the Reverend Algernon Spooner.’
‘The Chaplain?’
Lestrade nodded. The occupant relaxed his grim jaws. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I thought you were a new boy come for a fitting.’
Lestrade looked uncomprehending, never a rare situation.
‘Oh, forgive me.’ The occupant sensed the Inspector’s bewilderment. ‘I am the Bursar, Charles Mercer. My job is to kit out new boys and to replace items of uniform as necessary.’
Mercer the Bursar? Lestrade mused. It all seemed very unlikely. The Bursar rang a bell at his elbow and a schoolboy appeared through a panel in the wall, bent almost double under other huge ledgers. He was of a decidedly shadowy complexion.
‘Ah, Singh Minor, this gentleman is a policeman. He wishes to see the Chaplain. Be a good chap and take him to the chapel, will you?’
‘Yes, sir,’ chirped the lad. ‘This way, sir.’
Lestrade thanked Mercer and followed the boy through a labyrinth of passageways until they entered a quadrangle.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ said the boy. ‘Are you really a Miltonian?’
Lestrade tried not to show his surprise that an Indian public schoolboy should be familiar with London thieves’ cant. ‘“Pig” would be nearer the mark,’ he said. ‘Why, are you a lag?’
‘No,’ the boy laughed. ‘A Sikh, originally, but I’m not proud.’
The conversation was rapidly parting company with Lestrade and he was glad when Singh knocked on the vestry door.
‘So you’ve got old Spooner at last, have you?’ the boy asked. ‘What is it? Kinchin-lay? Griddling? No, don’t tell me – rating. It has to be.’
‘Does your headmaster know about you?’
‘Nails? No fear,’ grinned the boy.
There was an intonation from within and Singh opened the door. ‘A gentleman to see you, Mr Spooner,’ he said with the diction and decorum of an angel. He winked at Lestrade. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘he doesn’t voker Romeny.’
‘Well, that’s a relief,’ sighed Lestrade.
The Reverend Spooner was a largish man with a sharp nose and rimless spectacles. His bull neck ought to have belonged to another man. Perhaps Singh was right. He’d half-inched it from somebody else.
‘Can I help?’ The Reverend shook Lestrade’s hand and offered him a pew.
‘My name is Inspector Lestrade. I am making enquiries into the death of Mr Edmund Gurney at Brighton some weeks ago. I believe you were a close friend.’
The Chaplain suddenly jerked sideways as though from a sharp blow and yanked open the door. The stunted nut-brown figure of young Singh collapsed onto the carpet.
‘What don’t good Christians do?’ Spooner bellowed through his nose.
‘Listen at keyholes, sir,’ Singh scrambled upright.
‘Quite right. Are you working for Mr Mercer at the moment?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Well, when you’ve finished, come back here. I have some crass bandlesticks for you to polish.’
Lestrade’s ears played him false for a moment, but the boy said, ‘Very good, sir,’ and shambled off sheepishly.
‘Now,’ the Chaplain turned to Lestrade, ‘where were we. Ah, yes, Edmund. A tragic loss, Inspector. Tragic.’
‘When did you last see Mr Gurney, Mr Spooner?’
The Chaplain placed an ecclesiastical finger on his chin. ‘Ah, let me see. Not for some time, I fear. Not certainly since the spring.’
‘How did he seem when you saw him last?’
‘Seem? Well, Edmund was always rather a sortured toul, Inspector.’
Lestrade blinked.
‘I don’t think Edmund was ever really happy. All that Other World nonsense, you see.’
‘You didn’t approve of Mr Gurney’s dabblings in spiritualism, then?’
Spooner grew less ecumenical. ‘Nankly, fro,’ he said. ‘Oh, I know there are those who subscribe to Christian spiritualism, but not for me. Better the naight and strarrow.’
Lestrade shifted uneasily in his chair and introduced a surreptitious finger into his ear, twisting his head slightly to catch whatever drift he could from the Chaplain.
‘Tell me,’ the Chaplain intoned, ‘is there anything . . . suspicious . . . about Edmund’s death?’
‘Why do you ask?’
Spooner smiled. ‘Come on now, Inspector. I may be the cousin of a dear old queen. I may even be the Chaplain of a school. But I am not a fool. Senior police officers do not make enquiries into suicides. Do they?’
‘I must . . .’ but Lestrade never finished his sentence because a scream shattered the silence of the morning vestry.
‘What’s that?’ Lestrade was on his feet.
‘It might be Matron,’ Spooner suggested. ‘What day is it?’
‘Wednesday,’ Lestrade reached the door first.
‘No. It’s Carman’s day off.’
‘Carman?’
‘An amorous groundsman we have here. Too many rhododendron bushes, you see.’
Lestrade wasn’t sure he did.
‘This way.’ Spooner set off at a foxtrot along the corridor, out into the quad, with Lestrade at his heels.
‘Mr Spooner, Mr Spooner?’ A little woman in white stood at the top of a flight of stone steps, jumping up and down.
‘What is it, Mrs Shuttlecomb, the rats again?’
She flapped wildly, waving
her apron at the Chaplain, screaming hysterically. Spooner reached her in one bound and slapped her heartily around the face. ‘You’re screaming hysterically,’ he told her.
‘I know, sir,’ she continued as before, pointing vaguely behind her. Spooner shook her by the shoulders. No effect. He hit her again. This time she went down heavily and lay still.
‘That looked suspiciously like grievous bodily harm.’ Lestrade gave him his professional opinion.
‘Muscular Christianity,’ Spooner corrected him, and hurtled through the door.
Lestrade hurtled after him into what was obviously a laundry. The air was damp and filled with bleach. The floor was wet, a fact the Reverend Spooner had doubtless learned to live with. Not so Lestrade.
‘Watch out for the . . .’ The Chaplain stopped in mid-sentence as the Inspector slid the length of the room, pirouetting acrobatically into a row of sheets. Alas, the sheets were merely a blind, disguising as they did the far wall.
‘ . . . soap,’ Spooner concluded.
Lestrade dragged himself up the brickwork, moving like a creation of Mary Shelley’s, as though with a bolt through his neck.
‘Over here!’ the Chaplain called. Lestrade edged towards the Chaplain, his head on one side like a badly stuffed budgerigar. ‘Lood Gord,’ he heard Spooner mutter.
Floating in the cold water of a large stone bath was the body of a girl, her dress and petticoats spread wide on the water, but heavy with suds.
‘We must get her out.’ Spooner plunged his hands into the water.
‘No!’ Lestrade wrenched him back and his neck clicked, causing him to cry in pain. ‘There’s no point. Please don’t touch anything.’ He circled the bath a few times, noting the tell-tale signs. The girl was about seventeen, he guessed, not unattractive. There was the inevitable froth around nose and mouth, although in the suds it was difficult to be sure. ‘Who was she?’ he asked.
‘Maggie Hollis. She lives in the village.
‘Any reason why she should be here?’
‘She works – oh, God – worked here. With the lady I had occasion to correct outside. Mrs Shuttlecomb, the wretched old besom. Was it an accident?’
Lestrade looked at Spooner, then at Maggie. Something in the suds caught his eye and he pulled up his cuff and thrust his hand into the water, ice cold. He raised the dead girl’s left hand. The fingers were wrinkled. It didn’t help she was a washerwoman anyway. He looked at the moon face, the pale skin. His mother had been a laundress. But it was the right hand that held his attention then. He lifted that too. It was clenched tight, like a fist.
‘I said . . .’
‘I know what you said, Mr Spooner,’ said Lestrade. ‘No, I don’t think it was an accident.’ He pointed to the fist. ‘What the coroner calls a cadaveric spasm,’ he explained.
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means that the girl grabbed something as she died.’
‘I don’t follow.’
Lestrade began to prise open the fingers. ‘If it’s a bar of soap or a bag of blue, it could still be an accident, but if it’s anything else . . .’
As the fingers snapped back, Lestrade saw what Maggie Hollis was gripping in her iron fist. It was a small, black cylinder, about two inches long, made of wood and bone. ‘What do you make of this?’
Spooner looked at the object and shook his head. ‘I’ve no idea,’ he said.
‘You’d better get some help,’ Lestrade told him. ‘Where’s Matron?’
‘On reflection, she’s not due until tomorrow. You see, Inspector, we aren’t actually open yet. The Tichaelmas Merm doesn’t start until Monday.’
‘I thought I heard a Latin lesson . . .’
‘Ah, yes, the boarders. Or at least some of them. Their parents are in foreign parts, hill stations in India, mostly. You met Cherak Singh Minor. He and his brother are typical. I can’t say I’m altogether happy with their presence.’ He closed confidentially to Lestrade. ‘Some of them are barely civilised, Lestrade. No conception of the Thirty-nine Articles.’
‘Tut, tut,’ Lestrade shook his head.
‘But Dr Nails sees it otherwise, of course. Our Christian duty et cetera, et cetera.’
‘Dr Nails?’
‘The Headmaster. He’s been in the Himalayas himself all summer. Following in Whymper’s footsteps.’
‘Not all of them, I hope,’ Lestrade said. ‘Mr Spooner, do you have a key to this room?’
‘No, but Mrs Shuttlecomb will have.’ The Chaplain marched to the door and rummaged in the clothing of the prostrate laundress. ‘Thought so.’ He held it up triumphantly. Lestrade edged his way to the door, a good deal more gingerly than when he had come in, and locked it behind him, placing the key in his pocket.
‘Do you know who else has a key?’
Spooner thought for a moment. ‘Probably Adelstrop.’
‘Adelstrop?’
‘Head groundsman. Berfect plighter, if you ask me. Look, Lestrade, are you telling me,’ Spooner bent to Lestrade’s ear, a rakish angle since it nearly touched his shoulder, ‘are you telling me poor Hollis was murdered?’
Lestrade nodded, rather with a gesture of the village idiot.
Spooner straightened. ‘Lood Gord,’ at least interjections were consistent, ‘I’d better get the police. Oh . . .’ He stepped over the recumbent Mrs Shuttlecomb.
‘Leave that to me,’ Lestrade stopped him, ‘and unless you want total panic on your hands you won’t breathe a word about this to anyone, not for the moment.’
‘Right.’ Spooner marched down the steps.
‘Haven’t you forgotten something?’ Lestrade asked.
Spooner turned. ‘Um . . . oh right, Inspector,’ and turned to go.
‘No, I mean Mrs Shuttlecomb.’ He pointed to the lying laundress.
‘Ah, yes, of course. I’ll take her to the san. Best place, I think.’
He stooped and hauled the round little woman onto his shoulder, before taking the steps again.
‘Oh course.’ Lestrade came down sideways. ‘Maggie Hollis looks a solid wench. Whoever killed her would need to be pretty strong . . . ’
‘Yes . . .’ Spooner beamed. ‘Oh, I see.’ He regained his sangfroid. ‘No, no, this is cleric’s lift, Inspector. All theologians learn it to escape from the flames should their colleges be engulfed. It’s not a matter of strength, but how one uses it.’
‘Quite so,’ Lestrade agreed.
The Inspector was soundly asleep in his bed. Constable Neil of J Division was minding his own business in the vicinity of the Minories. It was a mild night, the last one of August, promising an Indian summer and Neil was hoping for a few minutes’ snooze before he called into the nearest fixed point and had his early morning cuppa. His corns threatened to get the better of him again. Still, he’d better make one last sweep before hanging up his truncheon and he turned the usual corners until he stumbled over something in a corner of the yard at Buck’s Row. He cursed as his knees hit the cobbles and he scrambled up to look closer at the bundle of rags he had fallen over. He jerked back, catching his breath as he did so, and fumbled for his whistle. Where the hell were the reliefs? Never one around when you want one. The shrill jarring of the Metropolitan Pattern whistle, 1879 Patent, brought two other coppers running.
‘Bill?’ Neil squinted in the dark to catch the silver numbers on the collar – 96J.
‘Jack?’ Constable Thain called back.
‘Who’s that with you?’
‘George Mizen, H Division. Who’s that with you?’
‘It’s a corpse,’ he whispered.
Mizen, the older man, checked his watch. It was a quarter to four. Thain took one look at Neil’s bundle and spun away, vomiting in a corner. Neil, of sterner stuff, knelt down and pulled back the shabby brown Ulster with its brass buttons.
‘Thain,’ Mizen snapped, ‘stop that and get a doctor. Llewellyn’s the nearest one. Step on it.’
Thain veered away and the others heard his boots clattering on the
cobbles.
‘She’s still warm,’ Neil whispered.
‘Right, lad. You wait ’ere and don’t touch nothin’. I’m goin’ to ’ave a look round.’
Dr Llewellyn hurried through the still, starry night. Carters were tumbling from doorways, tugging on flat caps and tying scarves. The City crawled into life. He would have arrived sooner, but he’d got himself hopelessly tied up in his pyjama strings. He fumbled in the yard, desperately trying to shake the sleep from his eyes. ‘Hold that damned thing steady!’ he snarled at Thain whose lantern, like his stomach, was all over the place. So, it transpired, was the stomach on the ground. It had belonged to a middle-aged woman with dark, greying hair plastered across her neck. Her throat had been cut, he guessed in two parallel sweeps, probably from left to right. Even a cursory lifting of the head proved that windpipe, gullet and spinal cord had all been severed.
‘Right.’ He took the rather superfluous stethoscope from his ears. ‘Can’t do anything for her here. Get her to the mortuary, Constable. Constable?’
But Thain was lying beside the dead woman. It was left to Mizen and Neil to carry them both away.
Inspector Frederick George Abberline rolled over in bed. Slowly, the distant woodpecker hammering somewhere in the distant forests of his dreams sharpened and hardened to become the doorknocker downstairs. He sat bold upright, causing the woman beside him to wake with a start.
‘Sorry, my love,’ he patted her and kissed her cheek, ‘that sounds like duty calling.’
‘What time is it?’ she slurred.
He floundered about for his hunter. ‘Good God, it’s nearly half-past eight.’
He leapt out of bed, hauling on his red combinations and pausing at the mirror only to slick down his hair before throwing open the sash of the window.
‘All right, Constable. No need to wake the dead. What’s the matter?’
The constable in the street below saluted and stepped back. ‘Beggin’ your pardon, sir,’ he said ‘but there’s been another one.’
Abberline straightened too suddenly and the sash parted his hair for him. ‘Where?’ he grimaced.
‘Buck’s Row, sir.’