by Ngaio Marsh
Alleyn addressed the sergeant in a light and measured tone, ‘Bix, I was about to lead these gentlemen back to the Transport Office so that I might begin my next interview, however I think it’s best if you and I head on down to the morgue. Miss Warne will have to wait a little longer.’
Hughes was plainly preparing to interrupt, whether it was at the mention of Sarah Warne’s name or in a fluster about whatever had sent them running, Alleyn wasn’t sure, but either way, he chose to stop the young doctor before any damage could be done, ‘And Dr Hughes, I expect you know the ins and outs of the hospital rather better than many of your patients, I wonder if you might take the men here to the kitchen?’
‘The kitchen?’ Pawcett spluttered, incredulous.
‘I was thinking it’s time we woke up the night porter, Mr Kelly. A good strong dose of coffee ought to do the trick, if such a thing is available.’
‘There’s Camp Coffee and Chicory, it’ll have to do,’ Sanders muttered.
‘Delightful,’ Alleyn proclaimed, ‘Dr Hughes, I trust you’ll be so kind as to administer the medicine?’
Hughes started to protest and then he nodded uncertainly, aware that the detective was handling the situation and, Alleyn noted with relief, sensibly chose silence as his best course of action.
Alleyn went on, ‘And perhaps a pot of tea and whatever they have in the way of biscuits for those back in the Transport Office? I’m sure Mr Glossop, in particular, has had enough of being cooped up with no sustenance. I believe they drill young constables these days with the maxim that a man will give up any number of secrets if he’s hungry. However, I rather fear that keeping a New Zealander from his cup of tea is a step too far.’
‘We’re not a bunch of short order cooks, you know,’ Pawcett blurted out.
‘Indeed, but you have also assured me that you are not at all unwell. I suggest, therefore, that making yourselves useful is the most valuable thing you can do this evening. I’ve been led to believe that the New Zealand digger is the most resourceful soldier of them all—’
‘Too damn right,’ Sanders nodded vigorously.
‘Marvellous. Tea and biscuits all round. A veritable midnight feast.’
Alleyn cheerily trotted the few dozen paces to the Transport Office, popped his head into the office to tell those assembled that sustenance was on its way and his faith in their New Zealand love of a good cup of tea meant he trusted them to remain in the office. Leaving the door ajar and a row of astonished faces looking after him, he walked briskly towards the morgue with Bix.
The three servicemen looked after them, even more surprised to hear the Inspector whistling as he went.
‘What the flippin’ heck was all that about?’ asked Corporal Brayling.
‘Dunno mate,’ answered Private Pawcett, shaking his head, ‘The bloke’s daft as a brush if you ask me.’
‘No one’s asking you, Pawcett,’ Dr Hughes said sharply as he rounded up the soldiers and led the way to the kitchen.
CHAPTER TWENTY
‘She just wasn’t there, Sir. Here. She wasn’t here.’
Bix gestured expansively in his shock and his several shadows danced against the walls, arms conducting an unseen orchestra of amazement.
‘Matron wasn’t here?’ Alleyn repeated, his own voice betraying shock and something closer to anger.
The evidence before them was all too clear; the old trolley once again overturned, the morgue resolutely empty and, despite the evidence before them, Alleyn’s incredulity rose as Bix repeated his story.
‘We came in, me and Dr Hughes. I lit the lamps just like before. We turned to have a look at the trolley—well, I did, the doctor was staring at it in shock. Or horror, yeah, I’d say it was more bloody horror, ’scuse my French.’
‘Excused,’ Alleyn said, automatically, staring at the trolley himself.
‘And, as you can see, no Matron.’
‘No Matron,’ Alleyn parroted, inwardly kicking himself for his dense responses, ‘You’re quite sure we locked the door behind us when we left?’
‘Quite sure, Sir. And I’ve had Sister Comfort’s keys on me all this time.’
‘Who else has a key?’
‘The only keys out here at the hospital are Matron’s, they’re the ones we haven’t yet found, and Sister Comfort’s keys that you gave me to lock up with here.’
‘No spares?’
‘There is a spare set, but it’s in town, with the Chair of the Hospital Board, just in case. Matron always had the keys about her. She isn’t—wasn’t—the losing things type.’
‘Indeed, to lose one body might be considered carelessness.’
‘Sorry, Sir?’ Bix asked.
‘Nothing at all.’ Alleyn frowned, ‘And so a midsummer night’s dream becomes a winter’s tale.’
‘I really don’t follow.’
‘Don’t mind me, Bix, I become facetious when perplexed. Right now I am perplex’d in the extreme. I fear there are only two possible reasons for this preposterous situation.’
‘Go on then,’ Bix looked at Alleyn with all the enthusiasm of a smart Labrador offered the chance of a long walk and a good many rabbits, and Alleyn was sorry to have to disappoint him.
‘I assure you Bix, it is not that I don’t trust you. Given that I have chosen to work with you this far, it would be quite foolish of me not to continue to do so now, but I find myself hard up against my training. I’ve been taught, and largely obeyed the teaching, to speak my mind only once I am in possession of at least a modicum of facts. Facts are decidedly thin on the ground just now.’
Alleyn stopped, abruptly crouched to the floor and scanned anew for footprints. Nothing seemed changed from when they were in the morgue not an hour ago and yet he had the clear sense of something having moved. It was neither the trolley nor Matron’s missing body, but something about him was ever so slightly out of kilter. ‘But I’m damned if I can say what it is,’ he thought, tapping the cold rock floor with his fingertips. He stood again, more slowly this time, looking about them as he did.
‘That being the case, Bix, at this juncture it is wise to move on.’
Alleyn clapped his long hands together as if to provoke himself to action and looked up surprised at the dull suggestion of an echo. ‘Hullo!’ He clapped again as Bix looked on. ‘Sergeant,’ he said to the perplexed soldier, ‘I shall enlist you. Run back to the Transport Office and make sure that Hughes breathes not a word of this to anyone else, not one word. Once you’re sure they’re all contained, fetch me a length of good rope.’ Alleyn paused, moved closer to the cavities in the rock, clapped his hands once more and, screwing up his face as he made a quick calculation, he said, ‘Forty foot, or perhaps fifty. Yes, that ought to do it.’
‘Forty or fifty foot of rope, Sir. Very good.’ Bix nodded, for all the world like a secretary checking dictation and Alleyn congratulated himself on his choice to trust the sergeant.
‘Exactly the thing. We’ll also need a pair of new torches if at all possible, the best you can lay your hands on. Good man, step to it.’
Alleyn waited a few moments just to be sure the sergeant was well and truly gone, and then he bent down to remove his shoes. While close to the ground he looked around again, the floor was not quite as smooth and clean as it had been a little earlier, but without a proper forensics man there was no saying if the scuff marks and dusty prints were anything more than those created by Bix and Hughes’s size nines leaping about in shock at discovering Matron’s body was missing and their subsequent scurry to reveal the next element of this increasingly fantastical night. Alleyn was about to stand and continue readying himself for Bix’s return, when he noticed something in the far corner that appeared to have slipped into the hair-thin gap between the sloping natural floor and the dug-out wall that held the cool cavities for dead bodies. He leaned down as far as his long legs would allow and, with his handkerchief covering his fingers he carefully tugged at what he now saw was the edge of a piece of paper. It held tight for a
tantalizing moment and then came free. As it did so it also fluttered very lightly in a breeze that could not have come from the closed door to the morgue itself. Alleyn smiled and held the paper up to the light. It was, as he had suspected, a pound note. He turned it over and saw James Cook, all serious thought and good sense.
‘Captain,’ he nodded.
He had carefully folded the note into the handkerchief when Bix returned to the morgue, a hefty length of rope over his right shoulder, ‘Fifty foot, Sir. As ordered.’
‘Very good,’ Alleyn nodded and, walking to the left-hand side of the row of vaults, he adroitly dived headfirst into the gap and began to shuffle his frame into the coffin-sized hole in the rock.
Bix looked on in shock as Alleyn’s muffled voice came back to him, ‘If you’ll be so kind as to tie the rope around my ankles, good and tight, Bix, that will do nicely. Do make sure you’re holding on. If I come to rock in a few inches you can help pull me back out again, if not, I’d rather not go shooting off head first into the underworld without some sort of counterweight.’
Unable to trust himself to utter any suitable response, Bix simply did as he was told, securing the rope firmly around his own waist so it had plenty of give, but he could also stop it short at the slightest word.
Alleyn continued to shuffle slowly towards the end of the cavity, doing so with a mounting sense of unease, he had never been particularly comfortable in enclosed spaces and this was, perforce, more enclosed than most. With just a few inches to go before he reached the end of the dug-out space, he carefully manoeuvred his hand up, past his head, and pushed his palm against cold rock. He explored it with his fingers, searching for a draught, for cooler air, anything that might suggest there was more beyond his hand than the heavy bedrock of the foothills. Eventually he gave up.
‘We’ll need to be quicker than this, even three cack-handed diggers can rustle up a pot of tea in this time,’ he thought, then raised his voice and shouted back, ‘Pull gently on the rope now, Bix, make it a spot easier for me to get out than to get in.’
Bix did as he was told and Alleyn repeated the procedure once again. By the time he’d reached the end of the fourth cavity with no change, Bix was rather enjoying himself and Alleyn realized that his new companion had been craving some of the excitement he’d been denied by working on the home front, the same excitement Bix’s younger charges yearned for and now, as their recuperation was almost over, were no doubt remembering to fear, if only a little.
‘If you don’t mind, I’d be happy to give it a go myself?’
The solid, stocky man looked up at Alleyn all keen and eager, and the detective was sorry to turn him down, ‘It can’t be, Bix, we may be here in Ninny’s tomb, but I fear you make a better Wall than a Thisbe to clamber through and speed is of the essence.’
Bix shook his head, ‘Sir, I think you just said no, and fair enough, I’m no beanpole like you, but that means you’re in again for number five out of eight and I reckon you’d better rattle those dags if you’re going to get a shoofti at it before that lot back there finish their brew and come knocking for us here.’
‘And I think you just told me to get a bloody move on.’
Alleyn laughed and went again head-first into the cavity. He had not quite entered up to his knees when he realized it felt different, cooler.
He shouted to Bix, ‘Hang on tight, my friend, this might be the one.’
‘Yes, Sir!’ Bix called back and the rope took on a reassuring pressure.
Not for the first time in his life Alleyn thanked his lucky stars for a good adjutant and headed forwards into the pitch dark. His stockinged feet were scraping the edge of the hole when he heard a commotion in the morgue chamber, he rapidly pulled his legs into the cavity as fast as he could and waited, his breath held, while he heard Bix speaking in the entrance area. The voices were too muffled to make out what exactly was said, but Alleyn was convinced by the barked tone and ready measure of the sergeant’s voice that he must have been talking to one or more of the soldiers.
A moment later Bix was back and he whispered to Alleyn in the vault, ‘Daft buggers the lot of them, thought we’d fancy a brew ourselves, so they brought it on down, all done up on a tray and fancy with a doily cover, like they think you’re Jean flippin’ Batten. Mind you, with it being no go, you might fancy a cuppa about now, boss?’
There was no answer and Bix watched the rope move inch by inch into the cavity, he quickly snatched it up again and held on until he heard the sepulchral voice of Inspector Alleyn, seemingly coming from all three of the last holes in the wall, ‘I rather expect I will have a cup of tea, Bix. Just as soon as I get back from investigating this chamber. Roll that torch through to me, will you?’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Once the dumbfounded Bix had rolled the torch into his waiting hands, Alleyn shone the light about him. In his briefing before he arrived at Mount Seager, he had been told about an old tunnel leading from the Bridge Hotel, beneath the hospital, and emerging somewhere in a set of caves to the north of the hospital, long overgrown with native bush. His contact on the Hospital Board assured him that the tunnel showed no sign of being used in any possible espionage. Apparently it was firmly locked where it joined the Bridge Hotel cellar and had been impassable for many decades at the cave end, as the morgue was always kept locked it was simply a closed space. He was further assured that the search had been conducted in such secrecy, that no one in the hospital or at the Bridge knew that there was any interest in matters below the ground. This information was repeated on the page that had given Alleyn pause when he was first handed the file and he had been itching to get into the tunnel since his arrival, but had been unable to do so without alerting the hospital staff to his quest. The theft and Matron’s body missing from the morgue provided him with the perfect opportunity to snoop about the grounds without anyone thinking his actions unusual, and the moment he heard the echo of his clapping hands, he guessed the morgue might be another entrance to the tunnel.
He was able to stand, so whoever had chosen to dig out this area behind the wall of tombs had done so with grown men in mind, no Nordic troglodytes here, nor whatever was their Māori equivalent. He made a mental note to ask his old friend Dr Te Pokiha about his people’s folklore, and then brought himself back to his surroundings. With the rock of the morgue wall behind him, standing at his full height, and relieved there was a good hand’s width between his pate and the rock above, Alleyn looked about him. The torchlight shone bright, but even so, the dense rock seemed to soak up all illumination, allowing a clear picture for no more than a four-foot radius before the light was swallowed into the earth. Slowly and carefully Alleyn took a few steps to either side, making sure not to travel too fast and tug the rope from Bix’s hands. The good sergeant was no Ariadne and Alleyn had no interest in confronting a primordial minotaur in the dark.
The tunnel itself was fairly narrow, he knew his own limbs to be long, but even so, he could put his shoulder to one wall and touch the opposite with his palm. The width then, of Will Kelly’s ill-fated trolley, with just a little room to spare. He allowed himself a brief smile as he realized he was standing, literally, within the foothills of the mountains he had so admired in the past week. The smile rapidly left his face as he recalled his reasons for being here, one of which was ticking relentlessly closer. It seemed to Alleyn that far too much of the theft and missing bodies conundrum seemed to loop back to his espionage investigation. It was vital that he either keep the two apart until the latter was neatly folded away or find the links, and quickly. As soon as the telegraph wires were mended and the bridge passable, the local police would be alerted, and while he would be glad to hand over the matter of the theft, Matron and old Mr Brown’s body, he was loath to risk revealing the real reason he was at Mount Seager. Secrecy had been the watchword of this game from the start and Alleyn wasn’t about to allow a single night of mischief to ruin the hours of painstaking work that had led to this moment.
> He rubbed his nose and wondered again about taking Bix more fully into his confidence and then shook his head violently, ‘Get on with it, man, make haste!’
Facing the waist-high cavity that led from the morgue on one side and with his back against the rock on the other, Alleyn shone the torch in both directions, north towards the hospital buildings and south towards the Bridge Hotel.
‘Hi there, Bix?’ he called to his man in the morgue, ‘I appear to be in the tunnel that leads to the Bridge. What’s beyond the army offices? Are there any other buildings, or does the road simply go on to the Bridge Hotel? I’m wondering if this heads there directly.’
‘Might do, Sir. The pub isn’t far, half a mile on from our offices, if that,’ Bix replied, his voice oddly altered in its passage through the tomb, muffled yet strangely echoing through the rock.
‘With nothing in between?’
‘There used to be a few sheds for the hospital groundsman, a garage that was the stables when they kept horses, but they were knocked down when the war came and the bosses decided to station us out here along with the wounded servicemen. Caused a flamin’ fuss it did.’
‘I can imagine some of the patients found the building noise difficult?’
‘Perhaps they did, I was thinking more of the gardener and Will Kelly, boy oh boy did they kick up a fuss. They looked like a bunch of shacks but you’d have thought we were demolishing their old homesteads the way they went on. Some men can be pretty damn odd about their sheds, Sir. Mind you, Matron wasn’t happy either.’
‘No?’
‘Up in arms about it, not like her, usually she’s the unflappable type. Sorry, she was. That one’s going to take some getting used to.’
Bix’s voice faded and Alleyn prompted him, ‘Go on, Bix.’
‘Yes, Sir. See, I reckon Matron’s problem was she thought the hospital would have to fork out for the new shed, paths, asphalt and all that. The big bosses said they’d foot the cost, military taking it on the chin again if you ask me, but even so, she was still put out. In the end they left a lean-to for the gardener, she was adamant about that.’
