Not My Blood djs-10

by Barbara Cleverly

  “Take the keys back,” Joe said. “Go down to the garage and bring my car round to the front door. We’ll give you five minutes’ start. And stay in the driving seat, engine running. Something tells me you’re a better driver than I am. And as long as your hands are wrapped around a steering wheel I can keep an eye on them. Dorcas will map-read for you. Dorcas, which hospital are we looking for?”

  Dorcas gaped for a moment. “She couldn’t say. She didn’t know or didn’t remember the name. Sorry, Joe. I was trying to-”

  “Yes, I heard you. Go on.”

  “We can rule out Brighton; that’s in the opposite direction. We must go north towards London.”

  “It’s probably one of those little cottage hospitals, locals-for-the-use-of, you find scattered around the countryside. Some of them are very good. But which? Did she say how long they’d been on the road before the boy succumbed?”

  “Um … wait a minute … she said an hour. Not that I’d take that as gospel; she was very upset and not at all clear. You’d say she’d only been told half the story. You know how men can be-‘Watch what you say! Mustn’t frighten the horses or the ladies, must we?’ ”

  “The boy left here at ten,” Joe said, puzzled by Dorcas’s lack of her usual sharpness before he remembered that she was not a motorist and didn’t think in terms of miles per hour. “So they were on the road for an hour at the most, probably less. An hour at what speed in the snow, in that car?”

  “Thirty, tops,” said Gosling. “Say twenty. Twenty to thirty miles north of here on the London road or just off it. Country area, sparsely populated. Big centres to north and south of it supplying serious medical care-you’re right, Sandilands. It’ll be cottage hospitals at the best. The kind that handle mostly maternity cases or farming accidents. Shouldn’t we get hold of a county list and start ringing hospitals in that range?”

  “That’ll take forever!” Joe was impatient. “And always assuming they’re prepared to confide in a stranger over the telephone. You know how discreet the medical trade can be. If we hit on the right one and it turns out to be the wrong one-if you see what I mean-they’re going to deny all knowledge anyway. Look, Dorcas, spend a moment cutting out this photograph of Spielman, will you? We may need to use it as identification. We’ll take it with us.”

  “Tempting Fate, Joe? Finishing off Rapson’s work for him like that?” Dorcas’s voice was subdued. “I’m not sure I want to do this.”

  “Superstitious nonsense-just get on!”

  Dorcas supplied him with the cutout then searched for and found a motoring map in her bag. “It’s small scale, but it’ll do. How many hospitals can there be off the main London road? Not many, and if the chauffeur saw the sign with a drama going on in the back seat, I’m sure we can find it with three people looking out. I’ll find a suitable one and guide you there. Leave it to me.”

  They listened as Gosling clattered down the staircase and Joe hastily began to collect up documents and put them away. Dorcas hurried to help him.

  “Why did you lose your rag with that young man, Joe? Nasty scene. I’m sure he didn’t deserve it.”

  “I don’t trust him. He works for the opposition. I wanted to shock an admission out of him, and if you hadn’t poked your nose in I might have got it. It’s a well-known technique. You’ll have noticed that he’s younger and stronger than I am and that he’s no stranger to the noble art, so-”

  “So you used your other advantages? The low cunning and clunking fist I mentioned. But what really provoked you to violence?”

  “His pretence of cooperation was irritating me. And I don’t forget it was Gosling we came upon shunting little Spielman off in a Daimler.”

  “We’re getting closer.”

  “What is this? How many layers of the onion have you peeled off me so far? You know I can’t be doing with any of that analysis nonsense.”

  “I think it was the boys, wasn’t it? The sudden realisation that Jackie and Spielman might be in danger. That caused the eruption. The translation of pent-up feelings into physical action. Good. I’m relieved to find there’s still a heart beating under the stiff navy suiting and the gold frogging. I could phrase that in more scientific terms, half of them German, but I don’t want to annoy you.”

  “No time to be annoyed. One more thing to do before we shoot off into the night. Pass me that note pad, will you?” Joe scribbled on a sheet of paper and tore it off, talking at the same time. “Look, while I get this delivered, I want you to send Jackie straight to Matron to tell her he’s staying the night.”

  “I take it you’re thinking he’s not in danger anymore?”

  Joe sighed. “To be honest, I think another poor lad is on his way to meet old Charon, two obols tucked under his tongue. It’s time to fight another bout with the Infernal Lord or whatever Gosling called him. And this is one I’m not certain we can win. Hercules, where are you?”

  “No idea what you’re maundering on about, but buck up, Joe! I’ve seen you take on the devil before and win.”

  “Right. That looks tidy. Nothing more we can do. I expect old Farman will be straight in here the moment our backs are turned, but-what the hell!” Joe tucked the black book into the pocket of his overcoat and grabbed his scarf.

  Inspector Martin got the call just after 3:00 P.M. He pulled on the gumboots he kept by the door and questioned the breathless young constable who was hopping from foot to foot in excitement just outside.

  “I said we got it, sir! In the melt. Right in the middle of the yard. The knife. Six inches. Meat knife. Still got blood traces on it. You can cancel the dogs.”

  “Good lad. Who needs bloodhounds when he’s got you and Sergeant Savage on a lead, eh?”

  The two men sploshed their way down the path towards the farm buildings and Martin looked up anxiously at the sky. Not much daylight left-an hour at best, he calculated. But it would do. He stopped at the sound of a car engine starting up in one of the old covered horse-stalls that served as the school garage and watched as the Scotland Yard man’s Morris belted out backwards, skidded into a three-point turn, and then proceeded more carefully down the route to the front of the school.

  “Yard buggering off early,” he remarked to the constable. “Will that be London hours he’s keeping, do you think?”

  The constable nodded and grinned. “Perhaps he’s had enough and he’s off back to the bright lights for good. Had his snoop around, seen nothing, tucked his swagger stick under his arm, and suddenly-‘Carry on, Inspector’ is what we hear.”

  “ ‘Sod off, Inspector’ is what I’m hearing,” Martin grunted.

  “Except we don’t hear. Gone without so much as a ta-very-much.”

  This rapid exit was exactly what Martin had been hoping for. A clear run at a demanding task without the Fancy Pants Met officer breathing down his neck now lay before him. His departure was only to be expected, and the constable had it right. Of course. So why the dejection he was feeling? Deceived? Let down? Martin reviewed his vocabulary and selected: Fucked up! Always a man who could analyse his own feelings and motives, he further decided to condemn his own pride. He’d wanted to show off for this bird. To demonstrate to the Met that he could run a crime scene and come up with the goods. He’d looked forwards to conferring with the commissioner in the matey way the bloke had seemed to favour. All words. Slather. Veneer. Hadn’t even the manners to say he was taking off and wish him luck.

  Martin sighed. Ah, well. Another entry in the book of experience.

  “Sir! Sir!”

  Martin turned to see a school steward slithering down the path in his indoor shoes, waving a bit of paper.

  “What’s up, lad?”

  “Message from that visitor. Sandilands. He said it was urgent.”

  Martin took the folded sheet from him and read:

  “Martin! Emergency. Boy missing. Another!

  I leave in pursuit. Regroup your office, first light.

  Good luck with the sniffers! J.S.”

&n
bsp; Martin smiled at the crisp officer’s phrasing and tucked the note in his pocket. “All’s well, constable. And don’t fret about the Met. He’ll be back to bother us.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Ten miles north and the light was fading fast. The big car boomed on through the gloaming and Joe was glad of the powerful headlights. Glad also of the strong and confident young hands on the wheel. Gosling was a natural driver and-unusually for one his age and capability-silent on the subject. He didn’t refer to Joe’s modest, workmanlike motorcar as “she.” He didn’t bother Joe with questions he couldn’t answer on mileage, torque or the rattle under the near-side wheel arch. He managed even to avoid a sneering comparison with the Bentley most young men’s uncles seemed to own these days.

  Dorcas was sitting next to him in the front passenger’s seat, a map in one hand and a police hand-torch in the other. She was alert and scanning both sides of the road.

  “Not so cold now,” Gosling said. “That’s a soft southerly blowing in. The thaw’s well under way. This lot’ll be completely gone by morning.”

  “Nasty underfoot?”

  “Not bad. Slushy rather than slippery, and the gritters have passed this way. Thirty seems safe on this stretch. As long as I don’t do anything silly with the brake pedal, we’ll be all right. Miss Joliffe? Dorcas? Can you see anything on the map that might be a hospital?”

  “No. A way to go yet. I’ve been studying the map, and I’ve got my eye on a likely place. Don’t worry-I’ll tell you in good time to make the turning off. Keep going.”

  A few minutes later Gosling exclaimed, “There! A sign. Prince Albert’s Hospital. Half a mile.”

  “That’s not marked on here,” Dorcas objected. “There’s no ‘H’ for hospital.” And added vaguely: “A capital ‘H’ does mean hospital, doesn’t it? Not hotel or hostelry?”

  “Worth a look,” Joe decided. “Turn off, Gosling.”

  Gosling eased the Morris off the main road and into a still snowbound side road.

  “Not such good going, sir, but others have been up here before us, so we’ll manage.”

  “I think you’re wasting your time. This has come up far too soon. It can’t be the one,” was Dorcas’s advice.

  “Carry on, Gosling,” was Joe’s.

  They rounded a bend, and there it was on a hilltop, silhouetted against the dying orange glow of the western sky. Gosling’s foot came off the accelerator, and the car shuddered to a halt.

  “Blimey! What do we make of that? We’ve bolted down the wrong rabbit hole. Surely this isn’t what we’re looking for?” he said.

  “Told you so! Let’s get back to the main road. We’re wasting time,” Dorcas snapped.

  “Shush!” Joe said. “It’s not the cottage hospital I was expecting. More like a country house hospital! Grand. Extensive grounds.”

  “ ‘Gothick pile dramatically placed within vestiges of monastic edifice … c. 1860,’ would the guide book say?”

  “Yes. I think so. Mid-Victorian, I’d guess. And, say what you like about Mid-Victorians, when it came to throwing up a crenellation or two, they didn’t stint.”

  “That’s not a hospital,” said Dorcas firmly. “It’s someone’s estate.”

  “She’s right. It can’t be a hospital, sir.”

  “If it is a hospital, it was put up with a good deal of loving care and pots of money by some doubtless Gradgrinding mill-owner to assuage a guilty conscience. There’s one like that on almost every hilltop in this county. Philanthropists trying to outdo each other in the charity stakes. Shall we go on up?”

  “Wait a minute!” Gosling said. “What we don’t see is ambulances and other hospital vehicles parked at the ready in the grounds. No one coming or going. Who would come out all this way for medical care anyway? You’d go south on the main road to Brighton or north to London. Listen, I don’t think this is right.” Gosling squirmed in his seat. “Over there, still covered in snow. There’s a name plaque of sorts. Give me the torch, Dorcas.”

  “Here you are. Do you want to borrow a glove, George?”

  He dismissed the offer with a grin, got out and, with broad sweeps of his bare hand, cleared the marker and shone the torch full on the golden curlicued letters. In silence they read:

  Prince Albert’s Hospital for the Mentally Afflicted.

  Gosling got back in and said, grumpily, “We’ve wasted half an hour. Not a hospital at all! It’s a mental asylum! A loony bin! The chauffeur would never have brought the boy here. We’d better get back onto the main road and pick up the trail again.” He started to turn the key.

  “No! Stop!” Joe yelled at him. “It’s exactly where he might have brought him. And exactly the place where he could have received treatment. Spielman wasn’t mentally ill, we know that. But.… But. These places have the facilities.… Don’t they, Dorcas?”

  She was finding her words awkward to get out. “I’m afraid they do. Perhaps you didn’t know that over ten percent of the patients in the country’s asylums are … epileptics. And, no, they are not mentally deranged or dangerous by our reasoning but by law are classed as defective, and the asylums have to take them in when they are submitted. A certificate signed by two doctors will do it. If you consult the Schedule of Forms of Insanity you’ll find it: ‘Diseases of the nervous system.’ Epilepsy. K3. Listed alongside sunstroke and syphilis, probably.”

  “So, a sufferer from epilepsy can be put away in one of these places and kept out of society for the rest of his life and no one will ever question it?” Gosling sounded shocked.

  They stared at the darkening façade of the vast building. “A thousand patients, at least, they probably house in there,” Dorcas said. “So there’s a good chance that a hundred of them are epileptics.”

  “And now it could be a hundred and one,” Gosling’s voice was grim. “A coincidence, are we wondering? Look, I have to say Spielman was showing none of the warning signs when he stepped into that Daimler with his book tucked under his arm. He’d had an attack just last week. I’m no expert but, as his games master, I had noticed they occurred at a few weeks’ distance from each other.”

  “Prearranged? Taken away and locked up in a lunatic asylum without his mother’s knowledge?” Joe said. “I think we should find out.”

  Was it the sun sinking lower behind the hills, the raucous calls of rooks returning to their nests in the elms that stood sentinel in the parkland, or a sudden dip in energy that made Joe’s heart drop to his boots? The crenellations he had been admiring were no longer stylish but forbidding. “Halt! Who goes there?” they said. Joe searched in vain for a password.

  “What are we waiting for?” Gosling said urgently. “Let’s see if we’ve beaten Herr Spielman to it.”

  Martin sank to his knees in the slush and stared at the weapon. He took the paper evidence bag the constable was holding out to him, wrote on the outside in indelible pencil, added his signature, and then picked up the knife delicately at the join between blade and shaft with his handkerchief around his fingers.

  “On your bike, constable,” he said, handing over the bag. “Put this in the messenger bag and take it to the nick. I’ve told them to expect it by teatime. They’ll get it to Brighton tonight, and we might know by tomorrow whose prints are on there. If we’re lucky. Oh, and tell the sergeant I’m popping down to Ma Bellefoy’s for a cup of tea and a chat, will you?”

  His welcome was what he had come to expect over the last few days: warm, even slightly flirtatious, but with an underlying reserve.

  The inspector blew into his cup to cool his tea. “The best tea, Clara,” he remarked, “and served in the best china.” He sipped carefully. “Funny taste. Nice, though. Very pleasant in fact. What is it?”

  Clara Bellefoy looked at him in satisfaction over the rim of her matching cup. “These were the last two of a set that got smashed, up at the school. Specials for governors and such-like. They were going to chuck them out, so I asked for them.” She allowed herself a tight smile and added:
“Not that many perks in being a school-skivvy. Farman gave me a note to prove they weren’t nicked. Want to see it?”

  Martin waved away the unpleasant suggestion.

  “The tea-now that’s something you won’t get at the Co-op, Inspector. It’s called ‘Earl Grey,’ and the pleasant taste is bergamot. Or so it says on the tin. I only use it for special visitors. And no, I didn’t buy it, Mr. Sharp-Eyes! It got given to me-well, to Betty-by the school steward. Unwanted present to the staff from a parent. They didn’t like it and told him to pass it on to someone deserving.”

  “And, naturally your Betty came to mind?”

  “Course she did! I’m not stupid! She’s on most of those men’s minds! The only pretty girl for ten miles around-you’d expect it.”

  “Still single at-what is she-nineteen? Twenty? What’s she waiting for?”

  “She’s seen the mistakes her mother made, and she’s not going to repeat them. The right bloke will come along one day. I’m not losing sleep over it.”

  “Well, I have to congratulate you, Clara,” Martin said with sincerity, glancing meaningfully around the pin-neat parlour. “She’s a credit to you. And the little lad-you’ve done a fine job by him. Where is Harry?”

  “Upstairs in his room. He ran off when he heard you coming. Nothing wrong with his hearing. He doesn’t like strangers. Usually he goes all shy and can’t find the words to speak. Sometimes he gets quarrelsome and finds exactly the wrong ones. When he flies into a temper it can be very embarrassing to hear him. He tries his best to swear, Mr. Martin. I don’t know why. I try to teach him right and wrong and good manners but sometimes … sometimes … you’d say he’d got the devil in him. I think he learns those words from the lads who work in the stables. It must be that, because he doesn’t go to school, and he hears nothing of the kind at home.”