by Ngaio Marsh
‘Pull yourself together, man,’ she hissed, ‘Look where you are, look at the spectacle you’re making of yourself. There are people here who are terribly ill, a gentleman has just died and you are howling like a banshee in the door to Matron’s office. What on earth has happened?’
Glossop, brought up short by Sister Comfort’s mention of Matron, seemed to come to his senses, if only a little. He stumbled backwards into the office, pulling Sister Comfort with him, to ensure she could see the gaping maw of the empty safe. Her solid frame hid the view from the staff and patients craning their necks to see what had happened, so that all they could see beyond the Sister were the white gesticulating arms of Glossop’s damp shirt.
Rosamund Farquharson meanwhile, was now on the steps trying to see past Sister Comfort and into the office, ‘My winnings—Matron had all of my winnings, the whole damn lot!’
Even in her passion, she omitted to mention that Matron had deducted ten pounds from those winnings, nor did she mention the five pounds that had gone to Private Sanders. Rosamund might be upset, but she wasn’t foolish. In her anguish over her loss she also appeared to have lost her nicely rounded vowels.
From his spot on the porch to Military 1, Maurice Sanders watched as Rosamund tried to push past Sister Comfort. He still had a soft spot for Rosie, he didn’t want to see her making a fool of herself in front of this lot. At the same time he knew he had already contributed more than enough to tarnishing her name among her peers as well as his own, those VADs could be vicious gossips, and it was this awareness that held him back from actually leaping across the yard to her rescue.
‘Lucky get-out there, mate,’ he whispered to himself a moment later, when Sarah Warne stepped up to Rosamund’s side instead, saving Maurice from a chivalrous side to his character that neither he nor his comrades had previously noticed.
Sarah’s voice was calm but her eyes were sharp as she put her hand on Rosamund’s arm, ‘Let’s not make too much noise right now.’ She edged closer and whispered, ‘Can’t you see they’re all enjoying it far too much? You don’t need to give them what they want, Rosie, not always.’
Rosamund turned to look at the assembled crowd of patients, the VADs and other night staff, everyone keen to see what would happen next, all of them eager for a scene. She spoke out of the side of her mouth to Sarah, ‘Fair enough, but oh, wouldn’t I like to give them the full-blown damn and blast it scene they want. All right Sarah, I’ll be the good girl. Lead on, Lady Macduff.’
She held out her hand to Sarah and allowed herself to be led meekly into Matron’s office. They were just inside out of the slowing rain, when a voice called out from the men standing in the porch of Military 1.
‘Oi, Sister, shouldn’t someone find Matron?’
The call was taken up by the servicemen in their serried ranks, shouting the same until it turned into a song, ‘Fetch the Matron, fetch the Matron, fetch the Matron bring her here, bring her ’ere—fetch the Matron and—Bring—’Er—’Ere!’
At the sound of the men’s jollity, Mr Glossop finally lost his temper completely, he elbowed Sarah and Rosamund aside the better to direct his ire towards the servicemen across the yard, eliciting a ‘Boo!’ from the men in the porch, an angry ‘Hi, there!’ from Dr Hughes and the decidedly more threatening, ‘Watch it, you great oaf, or I’ll bloody well give you something to moan about!’ from Maurice Sanders.
Ignoring them, Glossop took the topmost of the two steps to Matron’s office as his dais and launched into a diatribe against the hospital, the road to the hospital, the bridge on the road to the hospital, the clapped-out van he had been given to drive on the absurd road and over the absurd bridge to the absurd hospital, gearing himself up with a stream of furious invective peppered throughout with the kind of language that prompted even the usually taciturn Bob Pawcett to turn to Cuthbert Brayling with, ‘Got to admit, Cuth, he’s got a turn of phrase. Wouldn’t be out of place from a navvy, or Sanders here on a bad day.’
Sister Comfort, incensed by the language and much else besides, grabbed Glossop by the ear, pulled him back into the office, sat him down in the old leather chair and demanded he cease immediately. She silenced both Rosamund and Sarah with a single glance, and then she took charge.
‘Where is Sergeant Bix? Well?’
The question, in many ways more a command than an enquiry, was answered by the sound of boots clipping to attention on the asphalt. Those gathered outside Matron’s office parted and made way for the sergeant. It was all his men along the wards could do not to cheer. They were fond of Bix, a friendly and capable man who had little truck with the sort of hospital rules that appeared to have been invented purely because Sister Comfort preferred it that way.
‘Here, Sister.’
‘Indeed. And yet we have all been “here” for some time. Why is it, Sergeant Bix, that my hospital staff are continually required to keep your men under control?’
‘To be fair, Sister, it’s way past lights out and I’ve a hell of a—loads of, sorry—paperwork to get through in the office, what with so many of this lot heading off back to duty in a few days.’
Bix’s case for the stern leadership of his men was not reinforced when several of the soldiers hanging off Military 1’s verandah whistled and cheered their approval at the thought of leaving the hospital. The sergeant turned to the servicemen with an air of a man who had had more than enough of brokering peace between servicemen and nurses in the past few months, and the spectators became quiet, almost as if they were settling into their cinema seats, the main feature finally about to begin.
It was all Sister Comfort could do not to rage at Bix the way she wanted to rage at the men, and it was only her faith in the value of hierarchy that held her back. Instead she lowered her voice and spoke quietly to Bix, ‘There has been a theft.’
‘Righto, Sister, then we’ll need to investigate,’ said Bix, stating the alarmingly obvious. ‘How much has gone?’
‘Mr Glossop’s van sustained a flat tyre during his rounds, with several hospitals still on his delivery list. Matron secured the contents of his pay-box in her safe and now we find the safe wide open and Mr Glossop’s payroll appears to be missing with four establishments still awaiting their money.’
Bix’s eyebrows raised to his receding hairline and Sister Comfort took that as a sincere appreciation of the situation.
‘Indeed. Young Miss Farquharson also appears to have lost her winnings from a day at the races, Matron was safeguarding that sum for her as well.’
‘So we ought to get a search going, right?’
Sister Comfort frowned, ‘Given the large sum involved in Mr Glossop’s payroll, I really don’t want any of the patients to know what has occurred. Gossip is a most dangerous thing in any hospital.’ She paused and glared at Rosamund Farquharson who had opened her mouth to point out that theft was possibly a little bit worse, ‘There may yet be an explanation, Miss Farquharson. Let us hope that there is. For now, Sergeant Bix, I’d rather we took the line of least said, soonest mended, so I will recommend to Matron that we pass it off as a search for Miss Farquharson’s winnings.’
Sister Comfort then turned to Sarah, ‘Miss Warne, drive round to the Bridge Hotel and let them know there has been a theft, and they need to be on their guard, for all we know the thief is trying their luck at every establishment in the foothills.’
Sarah nodded and ran nimbly around to the area behind the kitchen where the vehicles were parked.
Sister Comfort turned back to Sergeant Bix, ‘Until we can contact the local police force—and I shall get onto that immediately—I suggest the safest course of action is to get these men back to their beds.’
‘Fair play,’ Bix nodded and turned smartly to the door, ‘Right then,’ he shouted across to the men as he strode into the yard, ‘We all like a lark, but give it a go, lads, back to bed. Come on now, let’s be having you, one two, one two, quick march.’
The men fell sharply into line, allowing their trainin
g to take precedence over their understandable curiosity and the civilian patients followed suit.
‘You there,’ Sister Comfort continued in her mission to bring order to chaos, pointing at the VAD whose head was poking out of the Records Office window, ‘Get on the telephone to the police station at Gold’s Corner and tell them there’s been a robbery. Yes, I know there’s only one constable and he’ll be off-duty by now’ she said, pre-empting the answer, ‘but I’m sure he has a direct line to his superiors in town and can alert them faster than we can. Then he can join us here and offer some semblance of order while we wait for the police to sort out what on earth has happened.’
The VAD shook her head, shrugged, and answered with a nonchalance that had Sister Comfort wanting to throttle her, ‘No can do, Sister, already tried. The line’s down, there’s no operator on the line, nothing doing.’
She had barely uttered these words when they heard the bus trundling up the driveway far faster than usual. With a squeak of brakes, Sarah Warne ran back, breathless.
Wind and rain had pushed back her short dark hair from her well-defined face and she looked deeply concerned, ‘Sister Comfort, I took the bus up as far as the bridge, but I can’t get round to the pub, there’s been a washout. Right where the road turns up to the pub, it’s all covered in rocks and branches. The river’s higher than I’ve ever seen it and it looks to be going awfully fast. I checked the bridge too, some of the loose planks must have been dislodged in the storm, there’s at least one of them totally missing and a couple of others sticking up looking like seesaws. Even without the rain, I daren’t risk going over it in the bus, I’d get stuck, or worse.’
Sister Comfort took a deep breath and, while her self-control was admirable, even she had to admit defeat at this juncture, ‘Oh for goodness’ sake, will someone not find Matron?’
CHAPTER TEN
As the servicemen of Military 1 pulled up their sheets, the occupant of the private room emerged and turned towards the doors leading out to the porch.
‘You don’t want to do that, mate,’ said one soldier.
Another added, ‘You missed all the fuss already,’ and lowered his voice to add to the man in the bed closest, ‘typical bloody officer class.’
‘Yeah, take it easy cobber, you might get a strain.’
They laughed and turned in.
The officer-class gentleman held up his pipe as if to say he was simply headed outside for a smoke and the foot soldiers of Military 1 gave him up for a classic chap of the upper ranks, no more sense than he was born with. If he wanted to risk Sister Comfort’s wrath and Matron’s too, for she must surely be on the warpath by now, then it was his look-out. They’d done their bit with the warning, clearly no one was going to tell the likes of them what was going on, they’d get it out of the VADs in the morning, it was time for some shut-eye.
Alleyn stood in the leeward shadow of Military 1’s porch from where he had a clear view to Matron’s office. He watched Sister Comfort and Mr Glossop for a while. The fat man held his head in his hands, rocking slightly from side to side, while Sister Comfort took a brief second, unaware that she was being observed, to let down her guard and look about her in dismay. He watched too as Glossop looked up and said something in a voice too low to hear across the yard, and immediately her starchy demeanour was back, any hint of vulnerability shut away. He saw Rosamund Farquharson and Sarah Warne exchange a glance, hold hands briefly, and he watched Rosamund take herself off to the Records Office on one side of Matron’s office and Sarah to the Transport Office on the other. Dr Hughes followed Sarah and Alleyn had an idea that the young doctor was asking for a private word, but Sarah turned, said a few words, and Dr Hughes trudged back along the yard to the Surgery, surplus to requirements.
For a second everything was still, the noise of the tempest had dropped to a dull drone and now the loudest sound was that of the swollen, racing river just a few hundred feet away. It was coming up to midnight. Alleyn rubbed his nose. He’d heard the interchange about the telephone line and the bridge, something must have happened that necessitated the intervention of the local police. With no one local to take charge, he ought to get into Matron’s office and see if he could help, but he had an odd sense that he’d learn more, as well as maintain his cover, if he could only hold off for a moment. He was also very aware that the midsummer night would be short and his real task was to follow up any possible leads or discrepancies throughout the night. Alleyn saw Sister Comfort lean towards Glossop and was sure he was about to witness something useful when the intimate moment was broken by the squeaking of uneven wheels, the rattle of a trolley that had seen far better days, and an out-of-place love song sung softly in a surprisingly mellow brogue.
Will Kelly stumbled into view from beyond the Porter’s Lodge, crooning of his love taken in his arms and how he’d given her kisses sweet. He was pushing a trolley upon which lay a closed canvas body bag. Kelly, the bag, and the trolley had all seen better days. At that precise moment, Father O’Sullivan appeared walking swiftly towards the scene of the fuss from the northern end of the yard. Alleyn assumed he was coming from Military 3 where the particularly damaged young men spent very difficult nights, no doubt some of them needed solace through the storm.
Sister Comfort, alerted by the singing and the squeaking, strode out of Matron’s office and launched herself across the yard at the porter, ‘What on earth is going on, Mr Kelly? And why is this poor gentleman not in the morgue?’ she hissed.
Will Kelly’s answer was a tipsy jumble of excuses, including the perfectly reasonable response that he had taken poor old Mr Brown down to the morgue but found it locked on his arrival. ‘And it’s Matron has the key, isn’t that so? I turned to make my way back, leaving the trolley tucked into the porch of the morgue, out of the rain. Not that this poor fella will feel the cold or the wet now, will he, but even so, respect for the dead—’
Sister Comfort tried to interject about his appalling breach of rules that had left a dead body unattended for any length of time, no matter the reason, but Kelly was not to be diverted from his tale.
‘I knocked and I waited but there was no reply from Matron’s office and I knew she wasn’t in the Transport Office or the Records Office because there were rows coming from both and it was the lovely accents of those two girls who’ve been away in England. So I knew, Sister, that neither were Matron. It’s a New Zealand accent she has and proud of it, as well she might be. Well, there I am with no key and poor old Mr Brown, may his soul rest in peace with the faithful departed, left down at the morgue, and I just popped into the room where he’d breathed his last you know, in case Matron was there with the young fella. Awful cut up the lad looked when I saw him earlier, and truth be told, she’s a soft heart on her for a fierce woman. Like you I’ve no doubt, Sister Comfort, a soft heart in there, somewhere—’ Kelly broke off for a moment as if he’d surprised himself considering Sister Comfort might have a soft heart after all, and then he was away again, ‘But no, she was not there neither. All there was, was that poor young lad, fast asleep and curled up on the floor, his face to the wall, his dear grandfather’s pillow to his chest. Heartbreaking. I’d half a mind to cover him up with the blanket off the bed and no matter that you’d scold me, Sister, and my hand was reaching out to it, but then I thought, that’s a dead man’s blanket Will Kelly, you leave it be. Then what happens next but the whole place is all of a racket with your man Glossop here, screaming blue murder and how was I to get the key from Matron with all that fuss going on, I ask you? How indeed. I took myself off round the back of the wards and made my way to the morgue in the rain avoiding all this fuss in the yard. Dark and spooky it was, the back way, I’ll tell you that for nothing. I went to the porch of the morgue and Mr Brown still on his trolley. I waited until the very moment you’d chased them all off back to their beds. Once the coast was clear I came back, not keen to leave him out on his own again. So here we are, your man and I, with our hand out for the key for the morgue
. Well, my hand’s out, his is likely as not setting fast. I oughtn’t to have left him the first time and I was feeling bad enough about it, so there’s no need to come it with your reproachful looks, Sister. I stand before you, an old man who wants only to put away his charge, for it’s thirsty work this carting about of bodies, yes it is. So, find me the Matron and find me the key and I’ll be out of your way in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.’
At that, Will Kelly thumped the foot of the body bag, proud of himself for getting through the whole speech. He must have hit the bag more forcefully than he intended, for the trolley gave a terrible screech, lurched precariously first to the left and then to the right, and finally the most uncertain of the wheels fell off and rolled across the damp asphalt of the yard and into the empty space under Matron’s office steps, lost in the mess of weeds beneath the office. A mess caused, as Matron could attest, by the need to cut back on gardeners’ expenses since the war. As the wheel came to a halt, the whole edifice, trolley and bag and body, slowly and decorously collapsed. Will Kelly stumbled, trying to hold up the body, but his age and state of inebriation made him no opponent for an unexpected wrestling match with a bagged corpse, and he ended up flat on his back, the body bag across him, the trolley atop them and the three remaining wheels spinning in the night.
Alleyn, still on the porch, groaned inwardly at the farce and shook his head at the task before him. With all the elements of a theft laid out in the yard he now had no choice but to reveal himself as a policeman and he must do so without explaining the real reason for his presence at Mount Seager. He looked to the body bag and back to Matron’s office with the empty safe. Glossop had taken it upon himself to right the trolley, the better to clear the body from Will Kelly who appeared to have passed out with shock or the exertion of telling his tale, or perhaps it was simply that the night’s intake of hard spirit had finally caught up with him. Father O’Sullivan, despite, rather than because of Glossop’s help, had scrambled beneath the steps for the truant wheel, wedged it under the uncertain leg and managed to hoist the body back onto the now-upright trolley, assuring the trolley’s stability by leaning against it with his substantial frame.
