‘There are a number of theories as to why we know so little about it, Lord Powerscourt,’ Orlando carried on. ‘The first is that it happened on the same day as Rorke’s Drift where a small band of British soldiers held off repeated attacks from an enormous band of Zulus many times their number. We must have ten or twelve large paintings of Rorke’s Drift compared with this one little chap of Isandlwana.’
‘Didn’t the general commanding the whole British force secure lots of Victoria Crosses for the Rorke’s Drift people? I seem to remember being told by some veteran that they were flying around like chocolate bars at a children’s party.’
‘If you were of a cynical disposition, Lord Powerscourt,’ Orlando Thomas was looking as innocent as the day is long at this point, ‘you could say that Lord Chelmsford, officer commanding, used the success at Rorke’s Drift to conceal the earlier catastrophe. And you’d have to admit that he has been more or less successful.’
‘How long have you had the painting, Sir Charles?’
The director of the National Gallery smiled. ‘That’s a curious tale, Lord Powerscourt. It used to belong to a man called Smith Dorrien, Horace Smith Dorrien. He was actually present at the battle of Isandlwana and one of the very few to get away. The painting used to hang on the wall of his drawing room. But he found people looked at him very strangely when they asked about the battle and were told he’d survived. They all thought he must have run away, which he didn’t do at all. He was only obeying orders when he left. The last straw, he told us, was when he was entertaining some French military man as part of the Entente Cordiale, and the Frenchman actually said to him, “Run away then, did you? Probably best thing you ever did. Means you’re still here. Discretion better part of valour, c’est vrai, n’est ce pas?” So he packed the thing up and sent it off to us. He said he hoped we’d look after it. Which we have.’
‘And where is this Smith Dorrien person to be found now?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘Is he still alive?’
‘Very much so,’ said Sir Charles, ‘He’s still with the army but he’s now General Officer Commanding, Aldershot. I took the liberty of telephoning him before you came. He’ll be more than happy to see you this afternoon or tomorrow morning. Then he has to go to Sandhurst for a few days.’
‘Did you tell him about the marks?’ Powerscourt asked.
‘I just told the general there was something of a mystery involved and that he should be able to help.’
Powerscourt rose to take his leave. ‘Thank you very much indeed, Sir Charles. I cannot say how grateful I am for this news. I feel a whole new shaft of light is opening up in my investigation. Quite where it’s going to take me I have no idea, but without your help I couldn’t even start. Thank you again.’
‘I think you may have forgotten something, Powerscourt. Lunch at the Savoy when your investigations are complete? I think we should add young Orlando to our party as he’s done this excellent research, don’t you? They tell me the chef at the Savoy Grill has found a miraculous new source for oysters.’
Inspector Grime had brought the Lewis brothers to Inspector Devereux’s police station. When questioned again about their whereabouts on the day and night of the murder in Fakenham they had stuck to their story about the chess, even though their accounts of the result were incompatible. They had tried to laugh off their inconsistencies by saying it was easy to forget such a thing. Could Inspector Grime, Montague Lewis asked, remember what he had to drink the last time he was in a pub? Well, the results of chess matches were like that for him and his brother. Inspector Grime was not impressed. The two men were now locked up in the cell where a person next door could hear every word that was said.
‘This is a right pickle and no mistake,’ said William, staring unhappily at the bars on the cell window.
‘Do you think we should ask for a lawyer?’ said Montague. ‘Aren’t they bound to let us have one?’
‘As far as I understand it, they are and they aren’t. I mean they will say yes, of course, but then the man will be sent to the wrong police station, or they won’t pass the message on immediately. He’ll get held up.’
‘Did that horrid policeman tell you how long we’re going to be kept here?’
Inspector Grime, on the other side of the wall, grimaced.
‘No, he didn’t,’ William replied. ‘He just said we could be locked up for a long time.’
‘Do you think they have food in a place like this? Or do we just starve?’
‘God knows. I’ve not been in a police cell like this before.’
‘Do you think we should tell them the truth?’ said Montague.
Inspector Grime turned his ear ever closer to the wall.
‘Certainly not,’ said William. ‘Very bad idea. Think of what might happen then.’
‘I think we should try the lawyer,’ said Montague. ‘At least we’d be doing something useful rather than fretting ourselves to death in this bloody cell. Damn the policeman! Damn his sergeant too!’
‘Damn the whole bloody lot of them,’ agreed William.
Inspector Grime decided to leave the Lewis brothers where they were for the time being. The only thing he had gleaned from his sojourn up against the wall was that both of them were lying about their activities on the night before Roderick Gill was murdered. But then, he reflected, he’d known that already.
Aldershot, Powerscourt thought, had that air of impermanence that hangs over garrison towns all over the world. Headquarters of the British Army, it could send thousands of the soldiers based there off to distant wars across the globe. Dick Turpin and Springheeled Jack may have graced the place with their exploits in the past, the Duke of Wellington on his enormous horse and enormous statue might dominate the streets today, but a quarter of the population could disappear in a week or less.
The General Officer Commanding’s office was in an imposing building facing the parade ground. Powerscourt was escorted to the office of General Horace Smith Dorrien by a handsome young lieutenant who looked rather embarrassed as he asked him to wait. They could hear a fist banging on the table next door and a mighty roar of disapproval.
‘What do you mean you missed parade because you didn’t wake up in time?’ Crash! Bang! ‘What does the army give you a bloody servant for if not to make sure you can get out of your bloody bed when the time has come? What do you have to say for yourself, man?’ Crash! Bang! ‘Speak, dammit! Or have you lost your voice as well as your wits?’ Crash!
‘I’m afraid the general does have something of a temper on him,’ whispered the young lieutenant.
‘How long do these turns go on for?’ Powerscourt whispered back, remembering some veteran shouters in his time in the military, who seemed able to go on for an hour or more in a single rant.
‘Hard to say, sir,’ the lieutenant murmured. ‘Form book’s not much use on these occasions.’
‘Have you lost the power of speech? Have you? Well, you’d bloody well better find it! Fast!’
‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.’
‘Is that the best you can do, for God’s sake? Look here, Captain Morris, not that you’re likely to be captain much longer if I’ve got anything to do with it, what do people join the army for? What do they want from the army, the King and the Prime Minister and all those damned politicians up at Westminster? I’ll tell you what they want. They want us to protect the country from attack and defeat the King’s enemies. Defeat means fighting, you bloody fool. Fighting, for God’s sake. Why do you think the army has people doing drill until their arms nearly fall off and their feet swell up in their boots? Discipline, that’s what it means. Discipline!’ Crash! Bang! Crash! ‘And why do we need discipline? I’ll tell you why we need discipline, you pathetic wreck of a human being. With discipline, soldiers will do what they’re told however dangerous it may seem. They’ll die where they’re sent if they have to. Those poor unfortunate soldiers under your command know that. Discipline also includes getting out of bed in the morning on the day when your men are on p
arade.’
Powerscourt and the lieutenant heard a low muffled sound that might have been a man crying. Then there was an almighty crash accompanied by a tinkling sound that lasted a few seconds and then died away.
‘Great God,’ the lieutenant whispered, ‘there goes the telephone. That’s the fourth one this year. Heaven knows how I’ll get another one out of the engineers.’
Even the general seemed taken aback by his assassination of the telephone. There was a brief silence.
‘For God’s sake, stop blubbing, you fool! Nothing gets my goat more than people supposed to be officers of His Majesty blubbing. More lack of discipline. You’re pathetic. Just get out of here, before I throw something at you. Go on, clear out.’
A red-faced captain fled the field of battle. Powerscourt was to learn later that he had resigned his commission that very afternoon and complained to his MP about Smith Dorrien’s behaviour. Nothing was heard of Morris again in the town of Aldershot.
Inside the office, the volcano seemed to have been turned off. The fires of fury had abated. The lieutenant introduced Powerscourt and left the room. General Horace Smith Dorrien was well over six feet tall. He had a long thin face with a small well-trimmed moustache, a prominent nose and pale blue eyes. He wore his uniform with the air of a man who never takes it off.
‘Powerscourt,’ said General Smith Dorrien, ‘Powerscourt. Boer War. Military Intelligence. You did very well, as I recall.’
‘I did have that honour.’
‘Now then, that man at the National Gallery, Holroyd I think he’s called, tells me you’re investigating a series of murders where the victims have mysterious marks left on their chests. He thinks I may be able to help. Is that right?’
Powerscourt told him the story of the three deaths in chronological order, leaving nothing out. He included all the details of Sir Peregrine Fishborne and his plans for the funds of the Silkworkers Company.
‘Fishborne, did you say, Powerscourt? Man who drives around in an enormous motor car as if he’s an American tycoon cruising down Wall Street?’
‘That’s the man.’
‘Good God, we had a son of his through our hands here a couple of years back. Slippery fellow. Never paid for his round in the mess, slightly suspect when dealing at cards, if I remember correctly.’
‘What became of him?’ asked Powerscourt.
‘We managed to pack him off to Ireland, actually. Never a popular posting, Ireland, natives not friendly, always liable to take a pot shot at you when you’re not looking. Come, we digress.’
Powerscourt recalled the ability of the best trained military minds to concentrate totally on the matter in hand and not be diverted into other channels. He produced his drawings of the marks left on the victims’ chests. Smith Dorrien stared at them carefully. Then he produced an eyeglass from the drawer in his desk and gave them some more detailed attention.
‘Good God, Powerscourt, now I see why you were in the National Gallery in the first place. You’d gone to look at that painting I gave them some years back. Isandlwana. What a terrible place. What a terrible battle. It was the first one I ever saw, you know. I presume the people at the National Gallery have been suggesting that those short weapons you can see in my picture, the knobkerries, could have been the cause of these marks. Am I right?’
‘Absolutely, General. I have been thinking on my way here about the various explanations a man might come up with for the presence of such marks.’
‘Such as?’
‘Well, the most obvious, I suppose, is that the murderer had one of these knobkerries lying about in his house or in his attic, left him by a parent or an uncle perhaps, picked up maybe at some country house auction, and he put the marks on to throw mud in our eyes, to make us wonder about the marks rather than other aspects of the killing.’
‘I don’t think you really believe that, Powerscourt, do you?’
‘I’m not sure that I do, actually. The thing is that the doctors say the blows with the knobkerrie probably occurred before death, but they can’t be sure. Doctors can be as difficult to pin down as lawyers sometimes. That says to me that the marks are central to the stories of all three killings, that there is a link binding them together.’
‘We are not meant to speculate too much in the military, as you know, Powerscourt, apart from thinking about what your opponent is going to do next. But it sounds from what you say that all three victims were roughly the same age, fifties in the case of the Jesus Hospital man and the bursar, rather more in the case of Sir Rufus.’
‘That is correct. I should have told you that there is a blank space of fifteen years in the early life of Sir Rufus, according to his entry in Who’s Who.’
‘Never trusted Who’s Who myself. They never check anything, those people, just take a man’s version of himself at face value. Odd. Pretty damned odd, if you ask me.’
Powerscourt was looking at an enormous calendar on the wall behind Smith Dorrien’s desk. There were rings round various days in different colours, red and black and green, each one presumably denoting some military activity of fixed date. He told Lady Lucy later that day that the idea came to him as he wondered if any of the circled dates might denote a family birthday in the general’s household.
‘Do you know the date of the battle of Isandlwana, General?’
‘I do, or rather I think I do. I’ll just check it so we can be sure.’ He delved into some grey military almanac on the side of his desk. ‘Thought so, memory not going quite yet, thank God. The battle was fought on the twenty-second of January, eighteen seventy-nine.’
Powerscourt stared at him for a moment. His mind shot back to the painting he had seen that morning, brave redcoats hemmed in against a grey mountain, being slaughtered by the bloodthirsty Zulu warriors.
‘Out with it, Powerscourt, what’s so upsetting about the date, for heaven’s sake?’
Powerscourt wondered if the general might be about to start shouting at him. ‘It’s just this, General. The first murder, the one at the Jesus Hospital, took place on the twenty-second of January this year. The chances of that being a coincidence must be about three hundred and sixty-five to one.’
‘Good God, how very strange. Speculation must come more readily to a man in your profession than it does to me, Powerscourt. How do you think these events could be related?’
Powerscourt was looking at the calendar again. ‘God knows,’ he said. ‘Maybe the murders have something to do with the battle, though it’s hard to think what after thirty-one years. Tell me, General, can you remember how many are said to have died at Isandlwana?’
‘That’s a tricky question,’ said General Horace Smith Dorrien. ‘You must remember that I was ordered from the field to take a message to the rear. I wasn’t there at the end. I didn’t see most of the carnage. Certainly over a thousand of our men were slain by the Zulus. They didn’t take any prisoners. They hardly left any wounded, they finished them off as they lay on the ground. And after that the dead were disembowelled to a man. Their clothes were stripped from their bodies. Any number between five and fifty were said to have survived but those figures are very unreliable.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Well, it wasn’t going to be good for your career if you were a member of one of the regiments there to have survived. You could only have done that by running away earlier and faster than everybody else. Some men made a stand where they stood. They were all slaughtered. But another body of men tried to save themselves. Many were cut down by the Zulus who ran faster. But if you did escape – and I heard stories of a number of people in this position – you wouldn’t be in any hurry to return to the military. You might be court-martialled and shot if you did. So a lot of people could have drifted off and never rejoined the army at all.’
‘And if you did that, would you be registered as a deserter?’
‘Well, you might have been, if anybody had been keen to establish a true record of what happened. I don’t think anybody ever
conducted a proper review of the battlefield to establish the identities of the dead. They just lifted the names out of the regimental rolls and assumed they had all been killed. Commanding Officer Chelmsford was off looking for a different bunch of Zulus when the battle happened. So he wasn’t keen to establish the facts as they didn’t reflect too well on him. Most of the other officers were dead and the living in other regiments who hadn’t been at the battle were happy to record all those whose whereabouts they didn’t know as killed in action. Much neater that way. Close the account down, that sort of thing.’
‘Am I right in thinking, General, that you could have survived Isandlwana but that everybody would think you were dead?’
‘You are. There is a further complication about those regimental rolls, mind you. They were completely up to date at the time they were taken, but that could have been months before the battle. In the interim people went home sick or were discharged and new recruits whose names were not on the rolls joined up in their place. There were a number of cracks where people could fall through the system.’
‘And where would I find those regimental rolls now, General?’
‘Hold on a moment, Powerscourt.’ The general returned to his almanac which he seemed to regard as the fount of all knowledge for things military. ‘Bloody politicians,’ he said with feeling. Powerscourt suspected that bloody politicians could be worth a whole afternoon of ranting invective. Two telephones might end up in pieces on the floor. ‘They will keep changing things for no apparent reason. Many of the men at the battle came from the Twenty-fourth Regiment of Foot, known as the Warwickshires. They’re now known as the South Wales Borderers, God knows why, headquarters at Brecon, God help you. Unless you can find a copy in the War Office, though I rather doubt that. Are you going to see if any of your victims are on the last regimental rolls before the battle? Bloody thankless task, if you ask me.’
‘If I think it necessary, General, then I will head off to Brecon. Do you think it possible that one or all of the victims could have been present at the battle?’
Death at the Jesus Hospital Page 25
