A Sudden, Fearful Death

by Anne Perry

  “I have a friend”—he used the word without thinking—“who nursed with you in the Crimea, a Miss Hester Latterly …”

  Her face softened with instant pleasure. “You know Hester? How is she? She had to return home early because of the death of both of her parents. Have you seen her recently? Is she well?”

  “I saw her two days ago,” he answered readily. “She is in excellent health. She will be most pleased to know you asked after her.” He felt slightly proprietorial. “She is largely nursing privately at present. I am afraid her outspokenness cost her her first hospital post.” He found himself smiling, although at the time he had been both angry and critical. “She knew more of fever medicine than the doctor, and acted upon it. He never forgave her.”

  Florence smiled, a peaceful inward amusement, and he thought a certain pride. “I am not surprised,” she admitted. “Hester never suffered fools easily, especially military ones, and there are a great many of those. She used to get so angry at the waste and told them how stupid they were and what they should have done.” She shook her head. “I think had she been a man, Hester might have made a good soldier. She had all the zeal to fight and a good instinct for strategy, at least of a physical sort.”

  “A physical sort?” He did not understand. He had not noticed Hester being particularly good at planning ahead—in fact, rather the opposite.

  She saw his confusion and the doubt in him.

  “Oh, I don’t mean of a type that would be any use to her,” she explained. “Not as a woman, anyway. She could never bide her time and manipulate people. She had no patience for that. But she could understand a battlefield. And she had the courage.”

  He smiled in spite of himself. That was the Hester he knew.

  But Florence was not looking at him. She was lost in memory, her mind in the so recent past.

  “I am so sorry about Prudence,” she said, more to herself than to Monk, and her face was suddenly unbearably sad and lonely. “She had such a passion to heal. I can remember her going out more than once with field surgeons. She was not especially strong, and she was terrified of crawling things, insects and the like, but she would sleep out in order to be there when the surgeons most needed her. She would be sick with the horror of some of the wounds, but only afterwards. She never gave way at the time. How she would work. Nothing was too much. One of the surgeons told me she knew as much about amputating a limb as he did himself, and she was not afraid to do it, if she had to, if there was no one else there.”

  Monk did not interrupt. The quiet sunlit room in London disappeared and the slender woman in her drab dress was the only thing he saw, her intense and passionate voice all he heard.

  “It was Rebecca who told me,” she went on. “Rebecca Box. She was a huge woman, a soldier’s wife, nearly six feet tall she was, and as strong as an ox.” The smile of memory touched her lips. “She used to go out into the battlefield, ahead of the guns even, and pick up the wounded men far beyond where anyone else would go, right up to the enemy. Then she would put them across her back and carry them home.”

  She turned to Monk, searching his face. “You have no idea what women can do until you have seen someone like Rebecca. She told me how Prudence first took off a man’s arm. It had been hacked to the bone by a saber. It was bleeding terribly, and there was no chance of saving it and no time to find a surgeon. Prudence was as white as the man himself, but her hand was steady and her nerve held. She took it off just as a surgeon would have. The man lived. Prudence was like that. I am so sorry she is gone.” Still her gaze was fixed on Monk’s as if she would assure herself he shared her feeling. “I shall write to her family and convey my sympathies.”

  Monk tried to imagine Prudence in the flare of an oil lamp, kneeling over the desperately bleeding man, her strong steady fingers holding the saw, her face set in concentration as she used the skill she had so often watched and had thus learned. He wished he had known her. It was painful that where there had been this brave and willful woman now there was a void, a darkness. A passionate voice was silenced and the loss was raw and unexplained.

  It would not remain so. He would find out who had killed her, and why. He would have a kind of revenge.

  “Thank you very much for sparing me your time, Miss Nightingale,” he said a little more stiffly than he had meant. “You have told me something of her which no one else could.”

  “It is a very small thing,” she said, dismissing its inadequacy. “I wish I had the remotest idea who could have wished her dead, but I have not. When there is so much tragedy and pain in the world that we cannot help, it seems incomprehensible that we should bring even more upon ourselves. Sometimes I despair of mankind. Does that sound blasphemous, Mr. Monk?”

  “No ma’am, it sounds honest.”

  She smiled bleakly. “Shall you see Hester Latterly again?”

  “Yes.” In spite of himself his interest was so sharp he spoke before he thought. “Did you know her well?”

  “Indeed.” The smile returned to her mouth. “We spent many hours working together. It is strange how much one knows of a person laboring in a common cause, even if one said nothing of one’s own life before coming to the Crimea, nothing of one’s family or youth, nothing of one’s loves or dreams, still one learns of another’s nature. And perhaps that is the real core of passion, don’t you think?”

  He nodded, not wishing to intrude with words.

  “I agree,” she went on thoughtfully. “I know nothing of her past, but I learned to trust her integrity as we worked night after night to help the soldiers and their women, to get food for them, blankets, and to make the authorities allow us space so the beds were not crammed side by side.” She gave an odd, choked little laugh. “She used to get so angry. I always knew if I had a battle to fight that Hester would be by my side. She never retreated, never pretended or flattered. And I knew her courage.” She hunched her shoulders in a gesture of distaste. “She loathed the rats, and they were all over the place. They climbed the walls and fell off like rotten plums dropping off a tree. I shall never forget the sound of their bodies hitting the floor. And I watched her pity, not useless, not maudlin, just a long slow ache inside as she knew the pain of others and did everything within her human power to ease it. One has a special feeling for someone with whom one has shared such times, Mr. Monk. Yes, please remember me to her.”

  “I will,” he promised.

  He rose to his feet again, suddenly acutely conscious of the passage of time. He knew she was fitting him in between one meeting and another of hospital governors, architects, medical schools, or organizations of similar nature. Since her return from the Crimea she had never ceased to work for the reforms in design and administration in which she believed so fervently.

  “Whom will you seek next?” She preempted his farewell. She had no need to explain to what matter she was referring and she was not a woman for unnecessary words.

  “The police,” he answered. “I still have friends there who may tell me what the medical examiner says, and perhaps what the official testimony is of other witnesses. Then I shall appeal to her colleagues at the hospital. If I can persuade them to speak honestly of her and of one another, I may learn a great deal.”

  “I see. May God be with you, Mr. Monk. It is more than justice you must seek. If women like Prudence Barrymore can be murdered when they are about their work, then we are all a great deal the poorer, not only now, but in the future as well.”

  “I do not give up, ma’am,” he said grimly, and he meant it, not only to match his determination with hers, but because he had a consuming personal desire to find the one who had destroyed such a life. “He will rue the day, I promise you. Good afternoon, ma’am.”

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Monk.”

  5

  JOHN EVAN was not happy with the case of Prudence Barrymore. He hated the thought of a young woman with such passion and vitality having been killed, and in this particular instance all the other circumstances also con
fused and troubled him. He did not like the hospital. The very smell of it caught in his throat even without his awareness of the pain and the fear that must reside here. He saw the bloodstained clothes of the surgeons as they hurried about the corridors, and the piles of soiled dressings and bandages, and every now and again he both saw and smelled the buckets of waste that were carried away by the nurses.

  But deeper than all these was a matter disturbing him more because it was personal, something about which he not only could, but was morally bound to, do something. It was the way in which the investigation was being conducted. He had been angry and bitter when Monk had been maneuvered into resigning by events in the Moidore case and Runcorn’s stand on the issue. But he had grown accustomed to working with Jeavis now, and while he did not either like or admire him, as he did Monk, he knew that he was a competent and honorable man.

  But in this case Jeavis was out of his depth, or at least Evan thought so. The medical evidence was fairly clear. Prudence Barrymore had been attacked from the front and strangled to death manually; no ligature had been used. The marks of such a thing would have been plain enough, and indeed the bruises on her throat corresponded to the fingers of a powerful person of average enough size; it could have been any of dozens of people who had access to the hospital. And it was easy enough to enter from the street. There were so many doctors, nurses, and assistants of one sort or another coming and going, an extra person would be unnoticed. For that matter, even someone drenched in blood would cause no alarm.

  At first Jeavis had thought of other nurses. It had crossed Evan’s mind that he had done so because it was easier for him than approaching the doctors and surgeons, who were of a superior education and social background, and Jeavis was nervous of them. However, when a large number of the individual nurses could account for their whereabouts, in each others’ company or in the company of a patient from the time Prudence Barrymore was last seen alive until the skivvy found her in the laundry chute, he was obliged to cast his net wider. He looked to the treasurer, a pompous man with a high winged collar that seemed to be too tight for him. He constantly eased his neck and stretched his chin forward as if to be free of it. However, he had not been on the premises early enough, and could prove himself to have been still at his home, or in a hansom on his way up the Gray’s Inn Road, at the appropriate time.

  Jeavis’s face had tightened. “Well, Mr. Evan, we shall have to look to the patients at the time. And if we do not find our murderer among them, then to the doctors.” His expression relaxed a little. “Or of course there is always the possibility that some outsider may have come in, perhaps someone she knew. We shall have to look more closely into her character….”

  “She wasn’t a domestic servant,” Evan said tartly.

  “Indeed not,” Jeavis agreed. “The reputation of nurses being what it is, I daresay most ladies that have servants wouldn’t employ them.” His face registered a very faint suggestion of a smile.

  “The women who went out to nurse with Miss Nightingale were ladies!” Evan was outraged, not only for Prudence Barrymore but also for Hester and (he was surprised to find) for Florence Nightingale too. Part of his mind was worldly, experienced, and only mildly tolerant of such foibles as hero worship, but there was a surprisingly large part of him that felt an uprush of pride and fierce defense when he thought of “the lady with the lamp” and all she had meant to agonized and dying men far from home in a nightmare place. He was angry with Jeavis for his indirect slight. A flash of amusement lit him also and he knew what Monk would say, he could hear his beautiful, sarcastic voice in his head: “A true child of the vicarage, Evan. Believe any pretty story told you, and make your own angels to walk the streets. You should have taken the cloth like your father!”

  “Daydreaming?” Jeavis said, cutting into his thoughts. “Why the smile, may I ask? Do you know something that I don’t?”

  “No sir!” Evan pulled himself together. “What about the Board of Governors? We might find some of them were here, and knew her, one way or another.”

  Jeavis’s face sharpened. “What do you mean, ‘one way or another’? Men like the governors of hospitals don’t have affairs with nurses, man!” His mouth registered his distaste for the very idea and his disapproval of Evan for having put words to it.

  Evan had been going to explain himself, that he had meant either socially or professionally, but now he felt obstructive and chose to make it literal.

  “By all accounts she was a handsome woman, and full of intelligence and spirit,” he argued. “And men of any sort will always be attracted to women like that.”

  “Rubbish!” Jeavis treasured an image of certain classes of gentleman, just as did Runcorn. Their relationship had become a mutually agreeable one, and both were finding it increasingly to their advantage. It was one of the few things in Jeavis which truly irritated Evan more than he could brush aside.

  “If Mr. Gladstone could give assistance to prostitutes off the street,” Evan said decisively, looking Jeavis straight in the eye, “I’m quite sure a hospital governor could cherish a fancy for a fine woman like Prudence Barrymore.”

  Jeavis was too much of a policeman to let his social pretensions deny his professionalism.

  “Possibly,” he said grudgingly, pushing out his lip and scowling. “Possibly. Now get about your job, and don’t stand around wasting time.” He poked his finger at the air. “Want to know if anyone saw strangers here that morning. Speak to everyone, mind, don’t miss a soul. And then find out where all the doctors and surgeons were—exactly. I’ll see about the governors.”

  “Yes sir. And the chaplain?”

  A mixture of emotions crossed Jeavis’s face: outrage at the idea a chaplain could be guilty of such an act, anger that Evan should have said it, sadness that in fact it was not impossible, and a flash of amusement and suspicion that Evan, a son of the clergy himself, was aware of all the irony of it.

  “You might as well,” he said at last. “But you be sure of your facts. No ‘he said’ and ‘she said.’ I want eyewitnesses, you understand me?” He fixed Evan fiercely with his pale-lashed eyes.

  “Yes sir,” Evan agreed. “I’ll get precise evidence, sir. Good enough for a jury.”

  But three days later when Evan and Jeavis stood in front of Runcorn’s desk in his office, the precise evidence amounted to very little indeed.

  “So what have you?” Runcorn leaned back in his chair, his long face somber and critical. “Come on, Jeavis! A nurse gets strangled in a hospital. It’s not as if anyone could walk in unnoticed. The girl must have friends, enemies, people she’d quarreled with.” He tapped his finger on the desk. “Who are they? Where were they when she was killed? Who saw her last before she was found? What about this Dr. Beck? A foreigner, you said? What’s he like?”

  Jeavis stood up to attention, hands at his side.

  “Quiet sort o’ chap,” he answered, his features carefully composed into lines of respect. “Smug, bit of a foreign accent, but speaks English well enough, in fact too well, if you know what I mean, sir? Seems good at his job, but Sir Herbert Stanhope, the chief surgeon, doesn’t seem to like him a lot.” He blinked. “At least that’s what I sense, although of course he didn’t exactly say so.”

  “Never mind Sir Herbert.” Runcorn dismissed it with a brush of his hand. “What about the dead woman? Did she get on with this Dr. Beck?” Again his finger tapped the table. “Could there be an affair there? Was she nice-looking? What were her morals? Loose? I hear nurses are pretty easy.”

  Evan opened his mouth to object and Jeavis kicked him sharply below the level of the desktop where Runcorn would not see him.

  Evan gasped.

  Runcorn turned to him, his eyes narrowing.

  “Yes? Come on, man. Don’t just stand there!”

  “No sir. No one spoke ill of Miss Barrymore’s morals, sir. On the contrary, they said she seemed uninterested in such things.”

  “Not normal, eh?” Runcorn pulled his
long face into an expression of distaste. “Can’t say that surprises me a great deal. What normal woman would want to go off to a foreign battlefield and take up such an occupation?”

  It flashed into Evan’s mind that if she had shown interest in men, Runcorn would have said she was loose principled and immoral. Monk would have pointed that out, and asked what Runcorn would have considered right. He stared at Jeavis beside him, then across at Runcorn’s thoughtful face, his brows drawn down above his long narrow nose.

  “What should we take for normal, sir?” Evan let the words out before his better judgment prevailed, almost as if it were someone else speaking.

  Runcorn’s head jerked up. “What?”

  Evan stood firm, his jaw tightening. “I was thinking, sir, that if she didn’t show any interest in men, she was not normal, and if she did she was of loose morals. What, to your mind, would be right—sir?”

  “What is right, Evan,” Runcorn said between his teeth, the blood rising up his cheeks, “is for a young woman to conduct herself like a lady: seemly, modest, and gentle, not to chase after a man, but to let him know in a subtle and genteel way that she admires him and might not find his attentions unwelcome. That is what is normal, Mr. Evan, and what is right. You are a vicar’s son. How is it that I should have to tell you that?”