Death at the Jesus Hospital

by David Dickinson

  Smith Dorrien paused and stared out at his parade ground, his mind back on the battlefield in South Africa. ‘Judging from what you told me about their ages, yes, it is possible.’

  ‘I want to ask your advice on another related matter, general. Where could I lay my hands on a knobkerrie? I need to show it to one of the medical men to see if it caused the marks. That is the most important thing for me now.’

  ‘Well, I don’t have one myself,’ said the general, ‘but I know a man who does, or who almost certainly does. Fellow by the name of White, Colonel Somerset White. He’s retired now, lives in a big house near Marlow. I’ll let him know you’re coming. He’s got an enormous barn full of weapons he’s picked up in his career, much of it in Africa. I know he’s got Zulu spears and assegais so he’ll almost certainly have a knobkerrie. The colonel’s been saying for years that the government should have an army museum where the public could come and see all his stuff but nothing ever happens. Bloody politicians.’ The general looked up an address in a small black book on his desk.

  ‘Here we are. The Oaks, Marlow, Buckinghamshire. I’m sure he will be able to help. Now then, I’ve got another useless officer coming to see me on a charge. I would ask one thing of you, Powerscourt.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘If you need further advice or assistance, then you must come back to me. I’d be delighted to help in any way I can.’

  ‘Thank you so much, General. And thank you for all your help today.’

  As Powerscourt gathered up his drawings, he felt the fires of wrath were being stoked again. Smith Dorrien was reading some report in front of him and making furious marks with a black pen. The general was turning red in the face. He began squeezing a different pen in his left hand very hard. His left foot was tapping angrily at the leg of his desk. Powerscourt managed to escape to the comparative sanctuary of the outer office.

  ‘For what we are about to receive,’ a tubby captain was saying to the lieutenant, ‘may the Lord make us truly thankful.’

  There was a bellow from the far side of the door. ‘Murphy! Murphy, you bloody fool, come in here at once!’

  ‘I think,’ said the young lieutenant, ‘that what the gladiators are supposed to have said on their way into the Coliseum is more appropriate, actually: “Ave Imperator, morituri te salutamus. Hail, Caesar, we who are about to die salute you.”’

  Inspector Grime and Inspector Devereux made their way back from the listening cell to Devereux’s office.

  ‘It nearly worked, dammit,’ said Inspector Grime. ‘I wonder if they suspected we were listening in.’

  ‘What do you think they were up to?’ asked Inspector Devereux. ‘Do you think they popped up to Fakenham and slew the bursar?’

  ‘I don’t think they went to Fakenham, but I could be wrong. It would have been incredibly risky to walk up that corridor first thing in the morning, even if you were disguised as a postman. They must have been known by sight to some of the pupils from the time they spent around the town with their mother. But I’m not ruling anything out just yet. I just need to find out what they were up to that evening.’

  ‘Something to do with women, perhaps,’ said Inspector Devereux darkly. ‘Maybe they were having a joint massage with the fair Frankie. I can’t see her being too particular about the clientele if the money was right.’

  Inspector Grime bent down to tie up a shoelace. ‘I know what I’ll do,’ he said. ‘I’m going back to that cell right now. I’ve tried this before and it usually works. I should have thought of it before.’

  ‘What are you going to tell them? That you suspect them of consorting with prostitutes? Seducing young women beneath the age of consent?’

  ‘Worse than that, Devereux, much worse. I’ll give them an hour to make up their minds. If they don’t tell, their mother will be notified that they’ve been arrested.’

  ‘On what grounds?’

  ‘I shall tell them that as they are so reluctant to admit what they were doing, I shall inform their mother that they are being held under suspicion after being arrested in a brothel. A homosexual brothel. That might do the trick.’

  A letter from Paris had arrived for Powerscourt. Lady Lucy watched him open it at the breakfast table.

  ‘It’s from my friend, Monsieur Olivier Brouzet,’ he told her, munching absent-mindedly on a piece of toast.

  My dear Powerscourt,

  Please forgive me for not replying sooner to your inquiries about the unfortunate man at the Jesus Hospital. Urgent business brought me back to Paris in rather a hurry. I have spoken to the superior officer of the man you mentioned, Colonel Arbuthnot. I have also involved one of our agents in Berlin. The dead man, Meredith, made four trips to Hamburg in the last few years, always staying in the same hotel. He was a courier, taking messages from his masters in London to their people in the field. He was not a spy. The idea that the Germans might have turned him into a double agent is nonsense. The colonel was trying to lead you up the garden path there.

  In short, I doubt very much if his activities in the murky waters of intelligence had anything to do with his death.

  With best wishes,

  Yours sincerely,

  Olivier Brouzet

  Powerscourt handed the letter over. ‘Another door closes, my love.’

  ‘What do you think this bit means, Francis?’ said Lady Lucy after she finished reading the letter. “I have also involved one of our agents in Berlin.” What sort of agent would know in this level of detail about somebody else’s secret service?’

  ‘There’s only one thing it can mean, Lucy. The French must have an agent inside the German intelligence outfit. That’s the only place they could have confirmed their information.’

  ‘Great God,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Do you think we have an agent in there in Berlin too? Do the Germans have a spy inside our outfit?’

  Powerscourt smiled. ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised.’

  PART FOUR

  THE BAR AT SALCOMBE

  17

  ‘Lord Powerscourt, delighted to meet you.’ Colonel Somerset White had a head shaped like an egg with a few wisps of hair above the ears. He had a solid moustache and a red complexion as if he spent a lot of time out of doors. The Oaks was a modern house, looking, Powerscourt thought, as if its owner might have designed it himself after a long spell in the Deep South of the United States. A great veranda ran round the building as if the inhabitants of Buckinghamshire needed deep shade for half the year.

  ‘How is my friend Smith Dorrien?’ he inquired. ‘Temper under control, eh?’

  ‘I’m not sure I’d go that far,’ said Powerscourt. ‘One fellow seemed to be getting well roasted before I went in and there was another man being trussed for the oven as I left.’

  ‘Dear me,’ said Somerset White. ‘He should be more careful, he really should. The pity of it is that he’s done more than anybody to improve the lot of the ordinary soldier. It’s the officers he has the rows with.’

  ‘He was very helpful to me,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Now then, let me tell you what my business is about.’ For the second time that day Powerscourt went through the catalogue of murders, the list of suspects, the marks on the bodies that he was now beginning to suspect might have been inflicted by knobkerries from the Zulu wars.

  ‘We’d better go over to the barn, Lord Powerscourt. I think I’ve got a couple of them over there. I just hope we’ll be able to find them.’

  Powerscourt wondered what conditions in the barn-cum-museum would be like if their owner was unsure about finding his exhibits.

  The first section of Somerset White’s building was all order and neatness, row upon row of ancient swords and shields and lances and daggers, all neatly lined up on trestle tables down one side of the barn. Each item had a label in White’s spidery hand beside it. Along the other side were pistols, guns, flintlocks, blunderbusses, Baker rifles from Wellington’s time, even, to Powerscourt’s great delight, an early version of Congreve’s rockets f
rom the Peninsular Wars which usually caused more panic in the companies of their owners with their boomerang flight path than they did in the ranks of their enemies. Once more the labels bore witness to hours and hours of research, with a description of the firepower of each weapon, its probable date of construction and a list of the battles where they would have been used.

  In the middle of the barn there was a rough partition with a door in the centre. On the far side it was chaos. There was a great pile of stuff in the centre of the floor, weapons of every shape and size, bits of uniforms, regimental colours, small pieces of artillery, curved swords, straight swords, krises and tulwars from Ceylon and India. And that was just the surface. God only knew, Powerscourt thought, what was underneath.

  ‘Sorry about this,’ said Somerset White. ‘You need to understand how I collect all this stuff. Auctions maybe in provincial towns, never in London, house sales where the owners sell everything in the place after a death, a few advertisements in the local newspapers in places near Aldershot and Camberley. Our ancestors were a pretty rapacious lot. I don’t know if you were aware of that, Lord Powerscourt. Sometimes I have thought that there must have been some enormous emporium by the quayside, Harrods International perhaps, or Harrods India, where the victorious officers and men could buy up booty to take home with them. The raw material, if you like, for a triumph, not through the streets and temples of Rome, but at the Limes or the Old Rectory in Bracknell or Pangbourne. Anyway, if you keep records of annual deaths in The Times, you can work out that more people die in the time between October and April than they do in the rest of the year. Pretty obvious, I should say. So that’s when I do my collecting, attending the auctions and so on. In the summer I sort it all out so I can display the stuff on the shelves. I’ve got a sword and gun man from the Wallace Collection up in London who comes down to give me a hand with the dates.’ Somerset White paused and wiped his hand on the side of his trousers. Powerscourt wondered what was going to happen next.

  White grabbed a couple of aprons from a hook on the back of the door. ‘You’d better put this on,’ he said. ‘It’s amazing how much dirt and dust these old weapons collect on their journeys here. Now then, this what I always say to myself on these occasions, rummage, rummage!’

  With that White got down on his hands and knees and began riffling through the heap of assorted weaponry in front of him. A collection of tunics, sashes, spears and cutlasses began forming another pile to his left. Powerscourt, on the opposite side of the mound of weapons, began to do the same.

  ‘It’s amazing the stuff people hang on to,’ said White, pausing briefly to examine a long straight spear with a lethal blade. ‘Do you know, I’ve got three white shirts worn by Charles the First on the morning of his execution at the Banqueting House. I’ve got four pairs of boots as worn by Lord Cardigan at the charge of the Light Brigade. And I’ve got five nightshirts as worn by Admiral Nelson during his time with Lady Hamilton. Not exactly sure he’d have bothered with nightshirts myself.’

  ‘Colonel,’ said Powerscourt, his right arm deep into his vast heap of stuff, ‘you don’t, I suppose, have any idea where your knobkerries might be? I mean, can you remember when you bought them and where they might be in our treasure trove?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue,’ said Somerset White cheerfully. ‘If I’d known where the bloody things were, we wouldn’t have had to embark on this fishing expedition, would we?’

  Powerscourt reflected bitterly that it was like fishing without bait. He felt his hand touching the hilt of a sword. Pulling firmly, he drew the weapon out of the pile. It was like no sword he had ever seen. It had a short blade. One side had been cut away in sections so that a row of serrated indentations like irregular teeth ran down the blade to the tip.

  ‘What in God’s name is this contraption, Colonel?’ said Powerscourt, waving the object above his head like some demented warrior from long ago.

  ‘Do you know,’ said the colonel, sitting on the floor rather than rising to his feet, ‘that’s only the second one of those things I have ever seen. It’s Italian, I think, and it’s called a sword breaker. Your enemy’s sword would be destroyed in the teeth. All you’d have to do would be to finish him off. It’s as if you’ve disarmed your opponent, effectively.’

  Powerscourt put it to one side and plunged back into the pile. He had decided to try a new policy now. Rather than going straight into the section in front of him, he decided that a better approach might be to open everything up, to scoop out great swathes of weaponry until the top resembled the surface of a volcano, a shallow shape like a dish, that enabled you to see much more of the assorted memorabilia. He was just sitting back to enjoy his new creation when there was a shout of triumph to his left.

  ‘I told you there were a couple of the bloody things here!’ said Colonel Somerset White, pulling out a pair of sticks with thistle-shaped markings on the circular ball at the top. ‘This one has twice as many spikes or studs as the other one, not sure what that means for your corpses. But you’d better have these, Powerscourt, as you said, you’ll need them for the medical men to pronounce one way or another.’

  ‘Can you remember where you got them, Colonel? Something might come back to you if they’re a fairly recent purchase.’

  Somerset White got slowly to his feet. He looked as though he might have trouble with his back. He took off his apron very slowly.

  ‘I think I’ve got it. They were at an auction in Basingstoke, property of a Major Digby Holmes, who had recently passed away. The auctioneer, I remember now, said the knobkerries had come back with the major from the Zulu wars. Mind you, bloody auctioneers would say anything to sell you things. I’ve had one or two real disasters from dodgy auctioneers. Maybe Major Holmes fought in that battle with the unpronounceable name you were telling me about. Never fought in Africa myself, even managed to avoid the Boer War. Served in India all my time. Enough of this. I expect you want to be on your way with our little friends here, Lord Powerscourt. If I can help in any other way, please let me know.’

  ‘Thank you so much, Colonel, there is one thing. Does the Major leave a widow behind him, or was he single at the end?’

  ‘There is a widow, a Mrs Laetitia Holmes, I believe. They said at the auctioneers that she’d been wanting to throw out all her husband’s military stuff for years. His end was an opportunity not to be missed.’

  Johnny Fitzgerald was beginning to think he had been abandoned, rather in the fashion of Robinson Crusoe. True, the rather louche purlieus of the Elysian Fields, illuminated from time to time by the visitations of Frankie the masseuse on missions of mercy to Sir Peregrine, were more than comfortable, certainly better than Crusoe’s island. Johnny had noticed that Frankie carried a large handbag on occasions, filled, he presumed, with the instruments of torture of the masseuse’s trade. He still spent a number of evenings in the Rose and Crown entertaining the old men of the Jesus Hospital. He had continued his policy of lunching the silkmen one at a time and it was on one of those occasions, on a bleak day in Buckinghamshire with the rain lashing against the windows of the hotel, that he hit the jackpot.

  He was entertaining Freddy Butcher, Number Two, a cheerful little man who had once been a bus driver by trade and had family connections with the Silkworkers. Number Two was cleanshaven with a great red mark down the right-hand side of his face. One section of informed opinion in the almshouse said that he had crashed his bus on the Clerkenwell Road, killing a couple of elderly passengers. The other view was that he had been caught misbehaving with the wife of a well-known criminal who had set about his face with a knuckleduster.

  By this stage the first bottle of Pomerol had come to an end, and Johnny, who had only had a couple of glasses, ordered a refill. Something told Johnny that Number Two wasn’t used to this amount of alcohol at lunchtime. Maybe he would let slip something important. Johnny poured him another glass. Two plates of roast duck arrived, groaning with apple sauce and roast potatoes and parsnips.

 
‘I’ve felt for some time,’ said Johnny, ‘for all the convivial evenings in the pub, that people are holding back on me. There’s something they’re not telling me. If somebody would tell me, maybe the mystery would clear up and you could all be left in peace.’ Johnny had been a foot soldier in the great demonstration to the Maidenhead police station, reasoning that there needed to be somebody able bodied present in case one the old boys had a heart attack or keeled over from some other ailment. In the event the old boys had cut quite a dash, marching the last hundred yards in their best uniforms, attracting a good deal of public sympathy for their efforts and an article in the local newspaper.

  It was the red wine that did for Freddy Butcher, Number Two, and possibly for Number Four, Bill Smith, known as Smithy, as well.

  ‘You’re quite right, of course,’ said Number Two, holding up his glass for a refill. ‘We have been holding something back.’

  Johnny waited for a forkful of duck and parsnip to go down.

  ‘There was a feud, you see, it had been going on for months.’

  Johnny remained silent, hoping for more intelligence.

  ‘Number Four and Number Twenty, the man who was killed, they had been at each other’s throats, you see.’

  ‘What was it about?’

  ‘Well, nobody knew for certain, I think it had to do with something in Number Twenty’s past. I think he may have told Smithy about whatever it was and Number Four took against Number Twenty from then on. Number Four was forever telling anybody who would listen that Number Twenty was a bloody coward.’

  ‘When was the last time they fell out?’ asked Johnny.

  ‘The day before Number Twenty was killed actually. This time they had the row in the middle of the quadrangle, nearly coming to blows.’

  ‘Did anybody hear what they were saying?’