Death at the Jesus Hospital

by David Dickinson

  ‘What news do you have from your records, Colonel? I have to confess that until the general told me, I had no idea livery companies were involved with the military.’

  ‘Well,’ said the Secretary, ‘if you look at their long history, it’s a fairly recent development, by which I mean the second half of the last century. With us, it started with the wounded returning from the Crimea and it continued from there. Most of our work was with help for the injured or with the widows whose husbands had been killed on active service for Queen and country. I’ve checked all those names you sent me and couldn’t find anything at all that goes back to eighteen seventy-nine. We have records for all three of the deceased but their involvement seems to have begun at a much later date.’

  ‘I see,’ said Powerscourt, feeling as if a fish had just escaped from his clutches and was swimming happily away from his line.

  ‘There is one thing that might interest you, my lord. I don’t know if it’s any use, it probably isn’t. Sir Rufus was a regular visitor to South Africa in his later years. He was involved with a big investment trust that did a lot of business over there. He used to go once every couple of years. I think he went to Australia and Canada too, if that helps.’

  Powerscourt wondered if the arrival of Sir Rufus and a couple of articles in the local newspaper might have reawakened a thirst for revenge.

  ‘That is most useful, Secretary. Thank you very much. If anything else occurs to you, please get in touch.’

  Lady Lucy was drinking tea when Powerscourt returned to Markham Square. She had been feeling rather left out of things since her spell as temporary French teacher at Allison’s School. Her husband dropped into his chair by the fire.

  ‘Any luck with the Silkworkers, Francis? ‘

  ‘Well, yes and no,’ said Powerscourt, running a hand through his hair, as he told her what the Secretary had discovered.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about this case, Francis, and I’ve got a theory, well, theory might be too grand, a guess, a piece of speculation.’

  ‘Fire ahead, Lucy, fire ahead. Your guesses are usually more useful than other people’s theories.’

  ‘Have you read a novel called The Four Feathers by a man called Mason, Francis? It came out seven or eight years ago, I think.’

  Powerscourt confessed that as yet he had not read the book.

  ‘It’s about four British officers about to go off to an African war. One of them, Harry Feversham, changes his mind at the last minute and decides not to go. He’s got a perfectly valid reason, he just doesn’t tell anybody what it is. The other three think he’s a coward and each one sends Harry a white feather as a symbol of Harry’s lack of courage. His fiancée also sends him a white feather so he’s now up to four. Eventually he decides he has to redeem himself, so he goes off to Africa where he performs various heroic deeds and gradually has the feathers cancelled. And in the final scene he gets the girl back too.’ Lady Lucy sat back and looked expectantly at her husband. ‘Don’t you see, Francis, this could be like the Four Feathers in reverse?’

  Powerscourt still looked confused.

  ‘Let’s look at it this way, Francis. These four young men, well, they were young then, the three dead ones and the murderer, are all part of the same unit in South Africa. You can tell from the letter that they’ve had some motto going between them – the letter talked about one for all and all for one, like those dreary musketeers. But when the battle starts, everything falls apart. Three of the men don’t send the fourth a white feather, they leave him for dead on the battlefield. It took Harry Feversham a long time, not thirtyone years admittedly, to work his way back. Our mystery man takes rather longer to have his revenge. Maybe he falls in love. That would stop you thinking of revenge for a while, even for a man, I would have thought. Then, years later, something, maybe one of those visits from Sir Rufus, brings him back to thoughts of revenge.’

  ‘I say, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt, ‘do you suppose Sir Rufus mentioned that he belonged to the Silkworkers Company when he was in South Africa? If he did, our man from the the Revenger’s Tragedy might have thought that all three men, very close at the time of the battle, belonged to it too. His principal problem, how to find his victims, would have been solved.’

  ‘Well, you know what you have to do, Francis.’

  ‘Sorry, Lucy, I don’t understand.’

  ‘It’s simple, surely. All you have to do is to ring the Silkworkers Secretary again and ask him to check back over the last six months to see whether anybody has been making inquiries about Sir Rufus or Abel Meredith or the dead bursar Gill. If you are really lucky, we might get a name and an address.’

  ‘Great God, Lucy! Well done, well done indeed. I’ll go and call him now. I think I’ll say that the approach may have been oblique, somebody searching for a long lost friend, that sort of thing. I don’t think an intelligent murderer is going to leave his real personal details behind at this stage.’

  Powerscourt shot down the stairs to the little study with the telephone. ‘We’ll have to wait a while,’ he said on his return. ‘The Secretary’s assistant looks after the correspondence and it may take an hour or so. The Secretary is going to check every letter to see if it mentions one or more of the three men. He’s quite excited about the whole thing, Lucy, he says it’s better than writing out the monthly newsletter to all Silkworkers which was his task for the day.’

  Inspector Grime was, for once, a happy man. He had sent to York to have the errant stonemason, Jude Mitchell, brought back to face justice in Fakenham. Mitchell’s wife was believed to have had or be having an affair with the murdered bursar Roderick Gill. Mitchell himself had disappeared for well over a week between two different assignments working at York Minster. Now he was waiting for the Inspector in the most unpleasant cell in the building. No police cells are ever going to win prizes for design and beauty, but the one holding Jude Mitchell had only a slit for a window and a smell nobody had ever been able to identify or remove. The police officers tended to conduct their interviews in short spells before escaping for a reviving burst of fresh air.

  ‘Now then, Mitchell, you could start by telling us where you’ve been all this time. Your wife has been worried sick.’

  ‘Is that what she told you? Lying bitch! She wouldn’t have minded if I’d dropped down dead or fallen off a big ladder at the minster. More time for her to misbehave herself all over the town.’

  ‘You haven’t answered my question, Mitchell. Where have you been all this time?’

  ‘I told that rude colleague of yours up in York where I’ve been. He’s had plenty of time now to check out what I told him. I was with my sister. She lives a mile or so to the north of York. I was with her all the time.’

  ‘So why did your wife not tell us about your sister?’

  ‘There’s nothing that woman would like more than to have me locked up and hanged for a murder I didn’t commit. Surely even you can see that, Inspector.’

  ‘I don’t want any lip from you or you’ll never get out of here at all. Even if you were up there near York you could still have given yourself a little holiday and come back down here to murder Roderick Gill.’

  ‘How many times do I have to tell you, I didn’t do it.’

  ‘You can stay here as long as you like. I just hope you’ll see sense and tell us how you did it next time I come back for a little friendly conversation.’ Inspector Grime stormed out of the cell.

  Rhys the butler picked up the phone before Powerscourt could reach it. Powerscourt thought Rhys liked saying, ‘The Powerscourt Residence,’ into the machine.

  ‘Powerscourt?’ said the Secretary to the Silkworkers Company. ‘I have some interesting news for you. I think you’re going to like it.’

  20

  ‘Please put me out of my misery,’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘Very well, what we have is a letter, dated about three months ago from a firm of solicitors in South Africa called Rutherford, Rutherford and Botha. It’s quite short. T
his is what it says. “Dear Sir, we are acting for the estate of a recently deceased businessman. In his will the gentleman left considerable sums of money to two colleagues who had served with him in the British Army some years ago. We are anxious to trace these two people, an Abel Meredith and a Roderick Gill. Both should be over fifty years old. We have reason to believe that the men may be members of, or have links with, the Honourable Company of Silkworkers. Thanking you in advance for your co-operation, Yours sincerely, Thomas Rutherford.”’

  ‘Great God, Secretary, that’s astonishing news. Do you have a copy of your reply?’

  ‘I have it in front of me, my lord. It acknowledges receipt of the letter and gives the addresses as the Jesus Hospital in Marlow and Allison’s School in Norfolk. There was no further correspondence.’

  ‘And I presume that there is no indication as to the name of the businessman, if he ever existed?’

  ‘None at all. You could try the firm on the telegraph and see if they are willing to say anything.’

  ‘Is there,’ said Powerscourt, ‘any indication of where they were based, this firm of solicitors?’

  ‘Sorry, I should have mentioned that, my lord. There is an address in Johannesburg on the notepaper, though that may not exist any more than the dead businessman.’

  ‘I’ll see what we can do,’ Powerscourt replied, ‘though I don’t hold out much hope. Thank you so much, Mr Secretary.’

  He bumped into Inspector Devereux on his way back upstairs, being escorted to the drawing room by Rhys. There was general excitement when Powerscourt told him and Lady Lucy the good tidings from the Silkworkers Hall. And that was not all. ‘I too have news,’ said the Inspector. ‘I have been on a sort of Cook’s Tour of London’s private investigators. Few, I regret to have to tell you, inhabit districts as superior as Markham Square in Chelsea. They all have one well-appointed room, fire in the grate, hunting prints on the walls, that sort of thing, to talk to their clients. The rooms behind, where they do most of their work, are much more squalid. I’d been to about to six or seven, many of them grouped around Lincoln’s Inn Fields for some reason I cannot fathom, and had no success at all. But as I moved east I struck a small piece of gold. In one of those little alleys off Fleet Street there is a one-man outfit – most of the others have half a dozen staff or more – called Joshua Wingfield Wallace and he had a tale to tell. Four or five weeks ago Wallace received a letter with no address and no signature but containing a ten-pound note and asking for maps and directions and general information about two particular places. Our Joshua was a bit suspicious about the lack of name and address, but ten pounds is ten pounds so he did what he was asked. You’ll never guess where the two places were.’

  ‘Jesus Hospital,’ said Lady Lucy.

  ‘Allison’s School,’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘Top of the class, both of you,’ said the Inspector.

  ‘Where did he send the information?’ Powerscourt was walking up and down the room now. ‘Did somebody come and collect it?’

  ‘Our friend was far too canny for that, my lord. The reply was to be sent to await the arrival of a Mr Smith at the Paddington Hotel round the corner from Paddington Station. The man who was on duty at the hotel reception that day is not due to clock in again until five o’clock this evening when I have arranged to go and talk to him.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Powerscourt, ‘excellent.’ He was now walking up and down the room so fast that Lady Lucy worried he might be about to crash into a wall.

  ‘Passenger lists,’ he said suddenly.

  ‘Passenger lists?’ said Inspector Devereux, looking at Powerscourt in that concerned way people have when their friends or relations are falling ill or going mad.

  ‘Passenger lists? Are you feeling unwell, Francis?’

  ‘Passenger lists,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I repeat, passenger lists.’

  He strode down the drawing room and settled on the edge of the sofa by the fire. ‘Consider what we have just learnt, Lucy, Inspector. I don’t mean our friend the oneman band near Fleet Street, I mean the letter found by the Silkworkers. We have one faint indication from the school that points to South Africa. Now we have this letter, real or not, from a firm of solicitors, real or not, supposed to come from Johannesburg. It seems to me quite likely that even if all the other information is false, the point of origin may be the real one. So Mystery Man sends out his initial inquiries from his home town. But he has to get here. And the only way to get here, unless you can find yourself a spaceship, is by boat. Mystery Man must have boarded a liner in Durban to come here. I think Durban is the nearest big port to Johannesburg but I could be wrong. But his name will be on the passenger list of the liner that brought him here.’

  ‘You are quite right, my lord,’ said the Inspector, ‘or he could have boarded the ship in Cape Town. I became rather an expert in these sailing lines when I was a boy, I’m afraid. I had about eight toy ships I used to play with in the bath. Union Castle Line, my lord, formed by a merger of two companies in nineteen hundred.’ The Inspector closed his eyes for a moment as if some great feat of memory was upon him.

  ‘She probably sailed on this route,’ he said, frowning in concentration. ‘Southampton, Madeira, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Durban, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town, St Helena, occasional, Ascension occasional, Las Palmas, occasional, Southampton. There was a round-Africa service you could take if the other ships were full, but it took longer. The route I’ve just mentioned took over a fortnight from Cape Town to Southampton, longer from Durban.’

  Powerscourt was reminded of Leith, Lord Rosebery’s train-obsessed butler, who was a walking timetable for the great railway routes of Europe. It looked as though the Inspector was his maritime equivalent.

  ‘Whatever the route,’ Devereux said, looking slightly embarrassed as if he’d shown too much of himself, ‘they will have passenger lists, as you said, my lord. Whether they’re kept in Southampton or in London I’m not sure.’

  ‘Do you know, Inspector,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘exactly what information these lists contain?’

  ‘I’m afraid I do,’ Devereux replied. ‘The lists contain the passenger’s name, the port where he or she boarded the ship, the class they are travelling in, and the amount they paid for the ticket.’

  ‘Do they, by any chance,’ said Powerscourt, ‘contain the address in England the passengers are going to?’

  ‘They do not, my lord. But I suspect we might not necessarily believe any information Mystery Man entered on that score.’

  ‘I think,’ said Lady Lucy, smiling at Inspector Devereux, ‘that you are going to be able to answer every single question we can think of about passenger lists. Do you know how often the great liners travel from South Africa to London and how many people they have on board?’

  Inspector Devereux groaned. ‘I should have spent my time more usefully when I was a boy, Lady Lucy. Think of all the things I could have memorized, kings of France, presidents of the United States, all the known elements in the periodic table. I think I said before that the journey takes a little over a fortnight, so there will be two passenger lists every month. On average’ – Devereux was adding up the passenger numbers of the different ships but he wasn’t going to tell his audience that – ‘I should say that there are about two hundred in first class, another two hundred in second, and about a hundred in third.’

  ‘So,’ said Powerscourt, ‘given that the first murder took place on January the twenty-second, the anniversary of Isandlwana, we should go back to the beginning of December. I doubt if our Mystery Man would have arrived a day or two before his first killing. I think he would have given himself time to settle down. So there could be three sailings on which he could have travelled from South Africa, giving us about six hundred first-class passengers and another six hundred in second class. I think we can omit third class for now.’

  ‘But there won’t be six hundred names for us to wonder about, surely,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Some of the passengers will ha
ve boarded the ship at places other than Cape Town or Durban, some may have got off at Madeira if the ship stops there and not all the ships will be full at this time of year. Then there’s the fact that the Mystery Man or MM will be over forty-five if not over fifty. We can rule out anybody younger than that because they couldn’t have been at the battle.’

  ‘There might be another avenue we could explore,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Suppose we end up with eight or nine possible murderers from Durban – my knowledge of these liners is non-existent but I can remember a little of the geography from my time there in South Africa. It’s a long journey from Johannesburg to Durban but it’s about twice as long to Cape Town. I think you’d be on the train for two or three days. But our Mystery Man must have bought his ticket somewhere. Maybe the Union Castle have an office or an agent in place in Johannesburg or maybe he will have got it from a big travel agent. Could we hire somebody to look into that for us, Inspector?’

  ‘I don’t think we’d have to hire anybody, my lord. I’ll set the wheels in motion when I get back to the station. South Africa is only one hour ahead in the winter. We have reciprocal arrangements with their police on major investigations. They will go and make the inquiries for us – they will, in any case, be better acquainted with the means of buying tickets on their home turf and so forth.’

  ‘Just think, Lucy, think, Inspector,’ said Powerscourt, rubbing his hands together, ‘we might actually get a name at the end of this process. For so long I have wanted a name. Now at last we might be able to get one.’

  Inspector Devereux left for Paddington Station and an evening of preliminary telegraph traffic with Johannesburg and Durban. At the Paddington Hotel he discovered that the answer from Joshua Wingfield Wallace, the private detective, had been picked up shortly before seven o’clock the day after it was posted. The man on reception was new and eager to impress his customers and his bosses. He had, he said, tried to engage the Mr Smith in conversation, but with little success. The only information he got out of Smith, after handing over the letter, was that he, Smith, had to go back to the west of England on business the following day. He had gone to his room and not been seen until his departure the following morning. Smith had taken no meals or drinks of any kind in the Paddington. God knows, the man on reception at the time said, what he had done for food. He must have gone elsewhere by the back entrance. There was just one other thing, the young man on reception told Inspector Devereux. It would be easy to remember this Mr Smith, if that was his real name, which the young man doubted. The accent, the young man thought, was foreign though he couldn’t place it. He was of normal height, in his middle thirties, but he had a great black beard that reached down almost to his chest.