Death at the Jesus Hospital

by David Dickinson

  ‘Very helpful,’ said the Inspector, wondering what a brutal QC at the Old Bailey, would make of this strange method of timekeeping. ‘And now perhaps you could tell me what you heard.’

  ‘I heard somebody coming down the stairs,’ Number Nineteen began. ‘And there was a bump as if he was bringing something heavy down with him. It wasn’t very loud. The walls here are pretty thick so you don’t hear very much from next door.’

  ‘Did you look out of the window? To see where the person went, I mean?’

  ‘Well, I did take a little peep out of the window, but I couldn’t see anything much. It was too dark.’ Number Nineteen leant back in his chair and sighed, as if he had just come through a long ordeal.

  ‘And that was all? There wasn’t anything else?’ Inspector Fletcher thought his man had said all he was going to say, but he had to be sure.

  ‘That’s all I can remember.’

  The Inspector felt that the information was useful but hardly sensational. Somebody in the little community was likely to have been aware of something, the man who lived next door more likely to have heard it than most. What was interesting, as he said to his sergeant that evening over a pint at the Marquis of Granby near the Maidenhead police station, was that the unorthodox timekeeping of James Osborne, Number Nineteen, placed the murder somewhere between four and six in the morning, which was exactly the same as Dr Ragg’s conclusion, who had at his disposal all the latest scientific expertise.

  Lord Francis Powerscourt received his commission and his instructions in the morning post. He had a head of unruly black hair and a pair of blue eyes inspected the world with detachment and irony. He thought that Sir Peregrine did not waste much time on pleasantries. There was no mention of whether he would wish to take the case or not. There was no thank you for helping out at the end. He was told in no uncertain terms that the doctor was a milksop, the Warden a crook and the policeman one of the most useless specimens ever to put on a uniform. Lady Lucy was intrigued by the idea of the almshouse. She had heard of them, of course, but she had never actually seen inside one. Would Francis be able to arrange that? she wondered aloud, passing him another slice of toast. Her husband muttered darkly about such places maybe having it written in the rules and regulations that women were not allowed on the premises, being too likely to provoke excess excitement in the old gentlemen and thus be harmful to their health. Lady Lucy was tall and slim with blonde hair and a pretty little nose. Her eyes were a deep blue, deeper than her husband’s, and quite disconcerting when they were wide open.

  Powerscourt thought about his children as he drove off down to Marlow in his Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, freshly polished by Rhys the butler and chauffeur. Lady Lucy’s son by her first marriage, Robert, was now in the Royal Navy, believed at that moment to be on manoeuvres in the Pacific. Thomas, eldest son of Powerscourt and Lady Lucy, with his mother’s mouth and his mother’s eyes, was seventeen years old with a flair for languages and mathematics. The boy attended Westminster School and was virtually fluent in German, Russian and French. Powerscourt felt Thomas could have picked up Hottentot at record speed if required. Olivia, the eldest daughter, was at St Paul’s School for Girls, eager to be an art historian and continually dragging one or both of her parents to exhibitions of people they had never heard of in obscure parts of London. On one occasion Olivia had persuaded her parents to take her to Paris where the entire city seemed to Powerscourt to be filled with blotches of paint on canvas masquerading as modern masterpieces. The twins, eight years old, were tormenting the teachers at a nearby school. Powerscourt was certain that a successful career in international crime awaited them if all else failed.

  But it was Thomas he worried about. He had told Lady Lucy of his deepest concerns two days before, and she had confessed that her fears were exactly the same. Powerscourt was fairly sure there was going to be a war with Germany. This wasn’t unusual – some of the newspapers had been prophesying such a conflict for years. And, unlike some commentators who predicted a quick war, Powerscourt felt it would be long. And very bloody, with a great many deaths. Maybe it would be like the American Civil War all those years ago. All the young men would want to go and fight for their country. Many of those would go and die for the cause. Including one Thomas Powerscourt who could be called up if there was a war that started as early as next year. What were they to do? For the moment neither of his parents had any idea.

  Inspector Fletcher had not been told he was coming. Neither had Monk the Warden. Neither had the old men. So Powerscourt’s first moments in the Jesus Hospital were spent showing parts of his letter of commission and generally persuading them that he was a bona fide investigator.

  ‘I’m not surprised you’re here, mind you,’ said the Inspector after a call to his superiors at Maidenhead had convinced him Powerscourt was genuine, ‘I don’t think Sir Peregrine cared for me at all.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Powerscourt cheerfully. ‘He’ll think differently when you’ve solved the murder.’

  Fletcher told Powerscourt all he knew about the case over a hasty lunch at the Rose and Crown. It was an old coaching inn, the Rose and Crown. The front was festooned with red and white roses, appropriate to the origins of the name, in spring and summer. The back room with its eight small tables was the destination of choice for the old men of the Jesus Hospital, its walls and faded curtains stained with centuries of smoke. Powerscourt wanted to know if he could see the body and the room where Abel Meredith had lived.

  ‘What do you know of livery companies, my lord?’ asked Fletcher. ‘We don’t have any of those things in Maidenhead or Taplow or Pinkneys Green. One or two of the old men drone on about them and I don’t understand it.’

  ‘I doubt if I know much more than you do, Inspector. They’re very old, going back to the fourteenth century, those sort of times. To start with they were guilds, defensive guilds, if you like, formed to look after the common concerns of brewers or bakers or fishmongers, or silkworkers, who banded together to look after their own particular interests. They had special uniforms and great halls where they held their feasts and so on. Most important,’ he paused to digest a portion of the local steak and kidney pie, ‘they are now rich, very rich. Many of the members left property to their company in their wills. Number Sixteen Lombard Street might have been worth five or six pounds in thirteen ninety, it’s worth a lot more now. Hundreds and hundreds of times more, I should think.’

  Powerscourt took himself to the Maidenhead Hospital immediately after lunch. The Inspector had telephoned before they went to the Rose and Crown to ensure that the body was not moved yet. Powerscourt introduced himself and his mission to the old attendant. He thought, as he often did when looking at corpses, how quickly life moved out of people. A moment before they had been alive with fluent features and eyes and faces that expressed their emotions. Then they were transformed into something you could have found on a butcher’s slab.

  He looked for a long time at the marks above the heart. ‘Have you seen anything like these before?’ he asked the elderly attendant who looked as though he had been a curator of corpses since the Crimean War, if not before.

  ‘Nope, I have not, my lord. Neither has any doctor in this hospital. You know what they’re like, doctors, with the new and the unexpected, they’ve flocked down here, peering at the mark and prodding at it like they’ve never seen a dead body before. One of them said it was the sign of some African witch doctor, stamped on the bodies of the dead to improve their passage to the next world. I ask you. We don’t have no Africans or no witch doctors in Marlow, not even over in Reading, if you ask me.’

  Powerscourt stared again at the thistle-like marks on the body.

  ‘Were you here when they undressed him?’ he asked.

  ‘I was indeed,’ said the attendant, casting a quick glance at the corpse.

  ‘I was wondering,’ said Powerscourt, ‘not that it’s any use for the investigation, but I was wondering if the mark above the heart was put t
here before or after he was killed. Was it knife first? Or the other way round?’

  ‘The shirt wasn’t buttoned up, my lord. Not when they brought him here, anyway. Dr Ragg noticed that, I remember. I’m not sure what the order was, my lord. It would be easier to kill him first, pull back the shirt and then put the mark on him. He couldn’t put up a fight if he was dead.’

  Powerscourt started work on a drawing of the mark in his notebook.

  ‘Hold on, my lord, this might be helpful. One of our young doctors is going to send an article to the medical journals to see if anybody can identify the mark. He was very good with his pencil, so he was.’ The old man opened a drawer in the table and pulled out a bundle of three or four drawings of the strange marks. ‘Perhaps you would like to have one or two of these, my lord. It might be useful.’

  ‘That’s so much better than my effort, I’m more than grateful to you.’ Powerscourt gave the old man half a crown and hurried on his way.

  Inspector Fletcher was looking forward to Powerscourt’s return. As he continued his interviews with the old men of the Jesus Hospital, he had encountered a pair who were so confused they left his head spinning. Numbers Nine and Ten insisted on being interviewed together. Otherwise, they said, they would get in a muddle. They brought a whole new line of evidence into the investigation. Johnny Johnston, Number Nine, had spent his working life in the post office. Peter Baker, Number Ten, had been a clerk in the City.

  ‘Of course it must have to do with the Silkworkers Company, the death,’ said Number Nine.

  ‘Stands to reason,’ said Number Ten.

  ‘Improved terms and conditions of residence, that’s what they said. They’d paint my place from top to bottom and it hasn’t had a lick of paint in years. You’ve got to look behind the picture to see all the walls were white to start with. Everything else is dirty grey now.’

  ‘That’s one way of looking at it,’ said Peter Baker, Number Ten. ‘The other people say there won’t be any money left to keep up the hospital. We’ll be thrown out and the place will be sold for rich people’s houses.’ He paused and peered out of the window. ‘Thrown out,’ he repeated, ‘thrown out. Where would we go?’

  ‘But there’s them that say they can’t do that. Throw us out, I mean. The statues – no, they’re not statues, are they? What’s the word?’

  ‘Statutes?’ offered Numbered Ten.

  ‘Statutes, that sounds right,’ Johnny Johnston, Number Nine, went on. ‘They say they can’t throw us out. If they sell this place they have to build us another, that’s what that man in the grey suit told us.’

  ‘Hold on a moment,’ said the Inspector. ‘Could we just take this from the beginning. You’re not saying that the hospital is going to be closed, are you? It’s been going for nearly four hundred years.’

  ‘Sold,’ said Number Ten. ‘Turned into luxury houses. People like living in luxury houses in Marlow, people with plenty of money, I mean. We’re not meant to talk about this, Inspector, we’ve all been sworn to secrecy. But it’s a great worry and that’s a fact.’

  ‘It only gets sold if one lot of Silkworkers have their way.’ Johnny Johnston, Number Nine was scowling at the very idea that the hospital might be sold. ‘That man with the big moustache didn’t think it could happen.’

  ‘But the other fellow, the thin lawyer man with the long face and the monocle from Chancery Lane, he said it was going to happen anyway.’

  ‘Didn’t moustache man say there had to be a vote? The vote that Warden Monk is so keen on?’

  ‘Gentlemen, please.’ Inspector Fletcher put down his notebook. ‘Am I right in saying that there is a discussion going on in the Silkworkers Company about the future of the Jesus Hospital? And that one group wants to sell it and the other doesn’t? And somehow or other there is to be a vote on the matter, here in the hospital?’

  ‘Not just in the hospital, Inspector,’ said Peter Baker, Number Ten, who felt that his experience working in the City gave him more authority than most on this subject. ‘That’s where you’re wrong. All the members of the Silkworkers Company are to have a vote. We’re all members. We wouldn’t be admitted to the almshouse if we weren’t, you see.’

  Inspector Fletcher sighed. He couldn’t see how these transactions could lead to Abel Meredith having his throat cut. He returned to the more prosaic details of the murder. Had either Number Nine or Number Ten heard or seen anything unusual on the night of the death? No, they had not. Did Abel Meredith have any enemies, as far as they knew? There was a pause.

  ‘Yes,’ said Johnny Johnston, Number Nine, ‘yes, he did.’

  ‘He cheated,’ said Number Ten, ‘he cheated at cards and he cheated at shove ha’penny over at the Rose and Crown.’

  Inspector Fletcher did not have the strength to ask how a man could cheat at shove ha’penny.

  ‘He was very unpopular,’ Peter Baker, Number Ten, added, ‘probably the most unpopular man in the hospital.’

  ‘Come, come now, ah, hm,’ said Johnny Johnston, Number Nine, ‘you’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead. Somebody or something is meant to come and strike you down if you do.’

  This may have been the Inspector’s first murder investigation but he did not lack imagination. His horizons had been broadened by regular readings of the many novels of E. Phillips Oppenheim. They kept the latest volume for him in the Maidenhead Public Library. He knew from experience how bitter relations could become in closed societies like police stations or almshouses. With little to occupy the inmates’ minds, cheating could be magnified out of all proportion. Could it, he wondered, be magnified enough to become a motive for murder? He wasn’t sure.

  ‘He was always borrowing money, that Meredith man,’ Number Nine went on.

  ‘And he never paid any of it back,’ added Number Ten. The corpse was beginning to assume pariah status in Inspector Fletcher’s mind. He paused for a moment.

  ‘Maybe he simply forgot,’ he said, ‘forgot to pay it back, I mean.’

  ‘Don’t think so,’ said Number Ten. ‘And there’s another thing. I don’t think he ever took a bath.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ said his friend, ‘he wasn’t the only one in this place who never takes a bath.’

  The Inspector had had enough. For once he managed not to pause, even for a second.

  ‘Thank you very much for your assistance, gentlemen. If you remember anything else that you think may be useful, please get in touch.’

  He walked back to Monk’s office, thinking of a man with stinking clothes making his way to the Rose and Crown to cheat with borrowed money at the shove ha’penny table. But he couldn’t connect that figure with the corpse with its throat cut and a strange mark on its chest stretched out in the morgue at the Maidenhead Hospital.

  Among his many responsibilities at the almshouse, Thomas Monk, still wearing his black cravat, was the custodian of the old gentlemen’s wills. They were stored in a little safe in the corner of his office. This practice was not included in the ordinances of the Silkworkers Company for the inhabitants of the Jesus Hospital. The custom had begun with Thomas’s reign as Warden and he had not bothered to tell any of his masters from the Silkworkers Hall in London about it. If the old men had not made a will – and Thomas was sure to discover this if they failed to hand it over on arrival – then he was prepared to help them for a small fee. He had, he assured the intestate newcomers, a draft will prepared by the finest solicitors in the capital which he could make available for them. Indeed he would help them fill it in. It just happened that the draft will ran to two pages. The second page merely repeated that this was the last will of the testator and left room for the signatures.

  Since the murder Thomas had not had the time, or been alone in his office long enough, to check what the status of Abel Meredith’s will was. He suspected Meredith had had his will already prepared on arrival. He didn’t like to check in case Powerscourt or one of the policemen should barge into his office at the wrong time and start making inquirie
s.

  The Inspector took Powerscourt for a walk down to the river on his return from the Maidenhead morgue. He felt there was a network of old men trying to listen in to any of his conversations in the hospital. He told Powerscourt about the possible changes at the almshouse and the unpopularity of the victim.

  ‘I’ll speak to my brother-in-law about the Silkworkers Company,’ Powerscourt said to the Inspector as they neared the bottom of Ferry Lane. ‘He knows about these things, or if he doesn’t, he knows people who do. What did you think of all the rest of it, the cheating at shove ha’penny and so on? I know these are old men and that feelings can run high in places like this, but they’re not going to lead to murder, are they?’

  Inspector Fletcher agreed. ‘Damn it,’ he said, staring at a pair of swans making a regal progress down the Thames, ‘I knew there was something I forgot to ask the doctor. I’ll have to find him this evening.’

  ‘What was it that you forgot to ask?’

  ‘Well, it’s this, my lord. You just have to look at the old men walking out of the hall. Do any of them have the strength to commit the crime? It’s hard to imagine any of them being able to summon up enough force to draw a knife across the dead man’s throat like that.’

  ‘You could well be right,’ said Powerscourt thoughtfully. ‘I wonder if you could devise some sort of test to work out who would have had the strength to do it, like drawing the bow at the end of the Odyssey.’

  There was a pause. A small flock of black river birds flew past, close to the water’s edge.

  ‘The killer, if the killer comes from inside, would surely fail any test to deflect suspicion,’ said the Inspector gloomily.

  Half an hour later Powerscourt went to look at Abel Meredith’s room before the police took the contents away. He remembered suddenly the instructions given to new entrants to the Royal Hospital Chelsea, that men could bring precious little with them for there was precious little room in their quarters, and that earthly possessions were not needed whether they were going on to heaven or to hell. Here Powerscourt found the clothes, the few books Abel Meredith had brought with him to what he must have thought would be his last resting place on earth. The inhabitants of these almshouses came here to live out their last days and their hosts would not welcome the prospect of wading through a mountain of personal belongings when the residents went to the cemetery and the grave. One thing did strike him. Most people, he thought, would have brought some mementoes of their past life with them, family photographs if they had any, letters from relatives or from a workplace, some keepsake left them in a relative’s will. There was none of that. Abel Meredith had arrived with a few spare shirts and trousers and a jacket and a few books and personal knick-knacks, but nothing else. It was as if he had deliberately obliterated most of his sixty-four years on earth. Had he something to hide? There were no official documents of any kind. There was, he noticed, no will to be found among his few papers. He wondered again about the strange marks on the dead man’s chest. One of the doctors in the hospital had talked of witchcraft, of strange African practices come to an unsuspecting Buckinghamshire. Powerscourt didn’t think that could be true, Africa was too far away. But if they weren’t African, where in God’s name had they come from? The mountains of Peru? The Gobi desert? The high passes of the Hindu Kush? He was lost.