A Dead Man in Malta

by Michael Pearce

  ‘Do you know, they used to boil their surgical instruments?’

  ‘Did they? Well, that was very advanced of them - ’

  ‘Oh, they weren’t doing it to sterilize them. Dr Malia says they thought it would reduce the pain. But it would have helped, wouldn’t it? I mean, it would have cut down the numbers dying.’

  ‘I expect so, Felix. Now - ’

  ‘They were fed off silver dishes.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Sophia says, though, that when the French were on the island they seized all the silver and melted it down so that they could pay for Napoleon’s wars.’

  ‘Well, there you are. That’s the French for you.’

  ‘Fed off silver?’ said one of the ladies. ‘Everybody?’

  ‘I think so.’ said Felix. ‘Though maybe not the lunatics.’

  ‘Lunatics?’

  ‘Lunatics and galley slaves were treated on the first floor.’

  ‘But they were treated?’ said the lady who had spoken before. ‘Well, I consider that very enlightened.’

  ‘Yes, but Sophia says that the structure of the organization reflects the class-ridden society of the time. Slaves at the bottom, knights at the top.’

  ‘Felix.’ said Mrs Wynne-Gurr, ‘would you like to go off on your own somewhere? You’ve been over the Infermeria several times already and I’m sure you would like to give it a miss this time.’

  ‘Oh, no, Mum. I’d be very interested to see it again. You notice different things each time you go through it.’

  Mrs Wynne-Gurr sighed.

  Chantale, still tired from the journey from England, although hardly from the exertions of the day, fell asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow; but then, almost immediately after, or so it seemed to her, she was woken by an ear-splitting noise. At first, in her dazed state, she thought it was in the room with her, but then she realized it came from outside.

  It sounded like a concert. Right under her window. But not exactly a concert. A performance, by a band of some sort. The instruments were mostly brass and the music was stirring. Martial, you could have said. It was a bit like the music the bands had been playing at the Marsa racetrack.

  It was the music the bands had been playing at the Marsa racetrack.

  She looked out of the window. It was one of the bands, too. The band was parading up and down the street, not just under her window but under everybody else’s, too. Many of the inhabitants of the houses had come out to join in the fun. The street was packed with people. Not just grown-ups but children, too, who in England would have been in their beds hours before. Young, old, men, women - everyone was there!

  Chantale soon realized that if you couldn’t beat them, the best thing was to join them. She threw on her clothes and some sandals and went downstairs. The front door was open and Mrs Ferreira was standing outside.

  ‘Our band!’ she said, turning a blissful face to Chantale.

  All her children were there, except, for some reason, Sophia. Even Mrs Ferreira’s father, that solid, slightly dour, man with his feet very much on the ground, was there.

  There, too, were many of the relatives she had seen, the uncles, the cousins and the aunts, not all from her house but from the houses round about, all excited and pressing around the band as it paraded up and down.

  There was Paolo, with a young woman -

  Chantale stopped. It couldn’t be! But, yes, it was. She was sure. The woman he was with was the young woman she had come upon in the cupboard in the hospital. Her face was now not sleepy but animated. She was waving her arms and clapping her hands above her head, shouting excitedly to the band, possibly singing with it.

  Paolo, too, without any instrument but beating time, was cheering the players on.

  And definitely with the young woman she had seen in the cupboard. He had his arm around her and once, delighted by the rendering of a particular piece of music, she threw her arms about his neck.

  But everyone was throwing their arms about each other, and jumping up in an attempt to see the band better, and waving rapturously.

  ‘Our band!’ said Sophia with pride, materializing suddenly.

  ‘What are they celebrating?’ asked Chantale.

  ‘Oh, they’re not celebrating anything in particular. They’ve just been rehearsing, and I suppose they got a bit carried away.’

  She broke off to wave to someone.

  ‘Perhaps they are celebrating a little,’ she said. ‘Mrs Mumtaz has had a baby. And the Boys’ Under Fifteen has won a match. In fact, they’ve reached the semi-final.’

  ‘Do they always carry on like this?’

  ‘Always,’ declared Sophia.

  She waved to someone else, a girl of about her age, but dressed in a different kind of school uniform.

  ‘I saw your Uncle Paolo.’ said Chantale.

  ‘Oh, yes? It’s not his band, but, of course, he knows lots of people in our street.’

  ‘He was with a girl.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’ said Sophia.

  ‘He was. He had his arm around her.’

  ‘This would be a first!’ said Sophia.

  ‘That was not my impression.’ said Chantale.

  ‘No? Oh, well, things are looking up, then.’

  ‘That girl over there.’

  ‘Oh, that girl. Suzie. She doesn’t count.’

  ‘Why doesn’t she count?’

  ‘Well, he’s not going to marry her, is he? And from the point of view of my family, that’s all that counts.’

  ‘Why isn’t he going to marry her?’

  Sophia laughed, but said nothing.

  ‘I saw her yesterday in the hospital.’

  ‘She works there. Sometimes.’

  ‘She’s not a nurse?’

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘An ancillary worker of some kind?’

  Sophia laughed again. ‘You could call it that.’

  ‘Is she a ... a prostitute?’

  ‘Not exactly. A lady whose virtue is particularly easy, my grandfather says. She sleeps around but she only goes with you if she likes you, and it’s not always for money. She’s just very casual. She works in the hospital laundry but she’s very casual about that, too, so much so that they got rid of her. But sometimes they need her when there’s a lot of work to be done and then they take her back. But she never stays long. She doesn’t like being tied down. A bit like Uncle Paolo, I suppose. Though he’s not really like that. Casual in that sense, I mean. He’s deadly serious except about marrying.’

  The girl saw them looking at her and said something to Uncle Paolo. Then they worked their way through the crowd across to them.

  ‘You saw me, didn’t you? In the cupboard.’

  ‘Yes.’ said Chantale.

  ‘They never go in there so I use it sometimes.’

  ‘I saw you come out.’

  ‘You didn’t say anything, though, did you? I half expected that you would. In fact, I more than half expected it. I was sure you would give me away. So I put my clothes on pretty quickly. But then you didn’t.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Actually, I couldn’t think what I ought to do, so I did nothing.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do anything to hurt the hospital, you know. I work there. In the laundry. But sometimes I have had to stay on because there’s so much washing to be done. They make me do the sheets and sometimes I don’t finish them until quite late. It’s not worth me going home so I sometimes stay in the cupboard. Especially if I’ve been in there already.’

  ‘You oughtn’t to be doing that in there,’ said Paolo.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’

  ‘Not regularly. And not with British sailors.’

  ‘They’re all right.’

  ‘Well, they’re not all right. There was that business with Luigi.’

  ‘They had nothing to do with it. Not with the stabbing.’

  ‘Not with the stabbing, no.’

  ‘Anyway, than
ks again.’ said Suzie.

  ‘This lady is the one that bandaged Luigi up,’ said Paolo.

  ‘Did you?’ said Suzie, surprised. ‘Well, thanks for that, too. Luigi is my bloke. Some of the time.’

  On his way to the hospital Seymour ran into Lucca.

  ‘Hello!’ he said. ‘How are things?’

  ‘Bad,’ said Lucca. ‘I’ve had a man from the German Consulate in with me all morning asking questions. About that German who died. He’s got to write a report. He went on and on and in the end I said: “Look, Herr Backhaus, I don’t know about you, but I’ve been up since five and on since six and I’ve hardly had a bite. So if it’s all right with you, I’m stopping for one right now!”

  ‘“It is a long time, perhaps,” he said grudgingly.

  ‘“It bloody is,” I said.

  ‘So we stopped and I had a beer and a sandwich. But he didn’t have anything. He just stood there watching me, waiting to get on with it. “How about you, Mr Backhaus?” I said. “Can I get you something?”

  “‘Perhaps a glass of milk,” he said.

  ‘Milk is not what I would go for in Malta. Or, indeed, anywhere. But if that was what he wanted, he could have it. So I got him one.

  ‘But then I thought: look, I don’t mind standing anyone a beer, but this is not like that. This is an expense incurred in the line of duty. So when I got back I banged it in as expenses. And the bloke in the office looks at me and says: “Are you having me on, Lucca? A glass of milk?” “It was for him!” I say. He purses his lips, cold, accountant lips, and says: “Are you sure, Lucca? Are you sure you’re not trying to take the piss out of me?”

  ‘And he bloody disallowed it!’

  ‘Suzie?’ said Sister Chisholm. ‘She works in the laundry.’

  ‘Not just the laundry,’ said Seymour.

  Sister Chisholm was silent for a moment. Then she sighed.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I know what you mean.’

  ‘Here, for instance.’

  ‘Not here,’ said Sister Chisholm. ‘Not actually in the wards.’

  ‘Where, then?’

  ‘In a place like this there are lots of odd corners. And Suzie would know them all. She’s been here a long time. In fact, you could say she grew up here.’

  ‘Grew up here?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking. She was born here. And then she sort of stayed. She’s been here so long that she’s part of the place. Part of the shipboard fittings, as they call it. That’s how she began. As the result of a shipboard fitting. Her mother was a cleaner in the hospital, her father - well, a passing seaman, I suppose. He passed, and she was left with the baby.

  ‘Of course, they all knew about it. Both the hospital staff and the seamen. But they were very good. About it and to her. The sailors, I mean. They gave her money, enough to live on, and the hospital was reasonable, too. It kept her on as a cleaner.

  ‘Well, the baby grew up, and the seamen remembered and used to ask after her. They brought her presents, toys when she was small, then perfume and things like that. Money, sometimes. They looked her up when they were in port. She grew up thinking she was part of the Navy. And that was how they saw her, too, as part of the Navy. They still looked out for her. Only, as she grew up, they looked out a bit too well and she became a shipboard fitting.

  ‘That’s how it was when I got here. She was part of the furniture I inherited. I received strict instructions from my predecessor to keep her up to date on birth control and to check regularly that she kept free from disease.

  ‘Well, there you have it. You could say we condone her plying her trade. Only no one sees it as that, and I don’t think she does. No money passes - she insists on that. They’re nice to her and she’s nice to them, that’s how she sees it. But they still make a donation on her behalf every time they get into port. Sometimes they give it to Laura. “For Shipboard Fittings,” they say. I think that a lot of them, especially the new ones, don’t know what it means. And I’m not entirely sure that Laura does, either.’

  ‘I thought you’d come looking for me sooner or later,’ said Suzie.

  ‘Yes,’ said Seymour.

  ‘That girlfriend of yours, the Arab one, she saw me, didn’t she?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She didn’t do anything about it. I thought she might.’

  ‘She told me.’

  ‘Well, I thought she would once I realized that you were together. But when she didn’t do anything about it, I rather hoped that you wouldn’t, either.’

  ‘I still might not.’

  ‘Depending on what?’

  ‘Depending on what you tell me now.’

  Suzie nodded.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ she said, after a moment.

  ‘You know why I’m in Malta, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. You’re the police.’

  ‘And you know what I’m doing here?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, in a small voice. ‘It’s those blokes, isn’t it?’

  ‘The ones who were murdered, yes.’

  She flinched. ‘I don’t like it when you say it like that.’

  ‘It’s true, though, isn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘One of them was in the ward where the cupboard is.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Were you there that night?’

  She hesitated.

  ‘Part of it,’ she said. ‘The early part. Then I moved somewhere else.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I heard them talking. I’d been asleep, and then I woke up. There were several of them and I was surprised at that because it’s usually just the nurse, and sometimes another nurse comes in to see her. But this time there was a man’s voice, one of the doctors. So I thought maybe he’d been called in because there was an emergency. But it didn’t sound like that. Then I realized and I didn’t like it. I wanted to get out quick. So I waited until I got a chance and then sneaked out. I thought there might be a search, you see.’

  ‘Why should there be a search?’

  ‘I heard them talking. Someone said: “Like the other one.”’

  ‘Turner?’

  ‘I don’t know his name.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, there’d been a lot of talk. Not just in the laundry room but all over the hospital. People knew the doctors were puzzled. And someone said they were wondering if - well, if it might not have been an accident. And so, when they said: “Like that other one,” it gave me the creeps. I mean, the thought that there might be some crazy bugger, and that he might have been in the ward next to me - Christ, he might have come in!’

  ‘And you thought they might start searching?’

  ‘Yes. I thought I’d better get out. Right out. I didn’t feel like staying in the hospital at all. So I left.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘How did you get out? Without being seen?’

  ‘Oh, it was easy. I got out by the coal chute. It goes down into the boiler room. No one’s there at night, so it was easy.’

  ‘Do other people know about the coal chute?’

  ‘They must do. But it’s not the sort of thing you think of, is it? I mean, they know that coal is delivered and gets down to the boiler room, but they don’t go beyond that.’

  Seymour took his time, and then said: ‘Suzie, there’s one other thing I’ve got to ask you, I’m afraid: were you alone in the cupboard that night?’

  Suzie didn’t reply at once. Then -

  ‘No,’ she said, very softly.

  ‘Did he leave before you did?’

  ‘Yes.’ even more softly.

  ‘You know why I have to ask you this?’

  ‘Yes. But it wasn’t him. He’d gone long before.’

  ‘By the coal chute?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ve told him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you sure he went straight there after leaving you?’

  Suzie was silent fo
r quite some time. Then she said: ‘You can’t be, can you? But it wouldn’t have been him. He couldn’t have done - what you’re thinking.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They were friends. Mates. Him and the one in the bed.’

  ‘You know that, do you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He’d been in to see him. To see how he was. Because they were mates.’

  ‘Can you tell me his name?’

  ‘I don’t remember his name. But it wasn’t him. I know that.’

  ‘Look, when the boiler is working, it’s working. Right? We don’t need to be there all the time. It does all right without us. And it does all right without us at night. We go off at eight and set it so that it carries on without us. Until we come in at six the next morning. If anything goes wrong, I’m just around the corner. From my house I can come in less time than it takes to walk from one side of the hospital to the other. Umberto has only got to give me a call.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Seymour. ‘I’m just checking on security, that’s all. I was wondering if someone could get into the hospital using the coal chute.’

  ‘It would be easier said than done. Look, I’ll show you. There’s a flap on the chute, see? It may not look much but it’s as stiff as a board. Particularly if you were trying to get in from outside. It takes a big load of coal to push that open. A man on his own couldn’t do it.

  ‘And even if he could, he wouldn’t be able to get far. Not if he had a normal pair of shoulders on him. I know. I’ve tried it.

  ‘If you were a bit smaller? Even then you’d have a job. Just take a look. There’s a bend in it, see? The coal sort of slips past, but a man, well - As I say, I’ve tried it. We had a load which got stuck once. All right, there’s bendier people than me. And maybe if you took your clothes off, so you were bollocks naked, and greased yourself all over, like I’ve heard some of those Africans do. You could do it. But who’s going to strip himself naked in the streets of Birgu and grease himself all over? And then crawl over the lumps of coal at the bottom?

  ‘One of those sailors? Yes, I know they’re like monkeys, they can wriggle their way in anywhere. But don’t forget about the flap. It’s like a big, heavy board. Maybe if you got some help from inside you could manage it. Or if you had wedged it open beforehand. But if you’d just come along and tried to get down it, well, you’d have a job on.