Dark Dawn Over Steep House

by M. R. C. Kasasian

  ‘What sort?’ Sidney Grice asked suspiciously while wiping his hand.

  ‘Nepal.’ He had a good head of wild peppery hair and whiskers to rival those of an unsheared ram.

  ‘That is acceptable.’

  Mr Bligh ushered us into a cosy sitting room with deep armchairs of crumpled leather, and books stacked in multiple columns and pyramids on the floor.

  ‘I see time has not mellowed you, Mr Grice.’

  I smiled. ‘Not that I have noticed.’

  ‘Little girls very rarely notice anything beyond the fashion plates.’ Mr Bligh rummaged about in his beard.

  ‘I would not know.’ I picked up a leather-bound book with gold lettering on the cover. ‘Not having socialized with many little girls since I was one myself.’

  ‘When the criminals of this world bask in gentleness and benignity, I might follow suit.’ Mr G snatched the book from me.

  ‘I doubt it,’ I said, stung by his failure to defend me.

  Mr Bligh strode into the hall and boomed out, ‘Tea.’

  ‘Is your bell not working?’ I asked.

  ‘I do not like bells.’ Our host delved back into his whiskers. ‘I cannot have one in the house.’

  ‘Why is that?’ I asked.

  ‘Because I do not like them,’ he said, slowly and indulgently.

  Mr G rolled his eye. ‘Miss Middleton does not listen.’

  ‘I wondered why you do not like them,’ I tried to explain.

  ‘Because I cannot have one in the house.’ Mr Bligh was markedly less patient this time. He jumped on to a hefty brown tome to increase his height advantage over us both.

  ‘You will recall, unless you have subsided into senility . . .’ My guardian clipped on his pince-nez and opened the tome. ‘The outbreak of scrotal carcinoma at University College Hospital in—’

  ‘Seventy-eight,’ Mr Captain Bligh broke in. ‘I am not likely to forget that.’

  ‘Unless you have subsided into senility.’ Mr G immersed himself in the book.

  ‘Can one of you enlighten me?’ I enquired.

  ‘I am not sure,’ Mr Bligh replied, ‘given your inability to grasp the idea that I do not like bells and cannot have them in the house.’

  ‘Please try.’ I resisted the urge to stand on a book myself, as I felt sure I should be scolded if I did.

  There were six carriage clocks on the mantle shelf, all ticking, but each set five minutes earlier than the one to its left, the one furthest to the left being about three hours fast.

  They are clocks,’ Sidney Grice responded to my puzzled gaze.

  ‘It is a short and simple story and not worth sitting down for.’ Mr Bligh jumped off his dais. ‘Is that the only reason you have come here?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sidney Grice said, before I could concoct an account of having long been anxious to meet the famous surgeon.

  ‘In that case . . .’ Captain Bligh marched back to the hall and bellowed, ‘No tea and hurry,’ before taking centre-stage again on the hearthrug. ‘There was an outbreak of inflamed crusty growths of the scrotums of all our patients in St Agatha Ward. Mr Lamb was in charge and he diagnosed it as carcinoma. An ex-sweep’s boy suffered – as they are prone to do – from the affliction and Lamb subscribed to the unpopular theory that certain types of cancers are transmittable and that the only cure was surgical excision before the whole body was affected.’

  ‘Castration,’ I clarified.

  ‘Castration,’ Mr Bligh clarified for my benefit. ‘If you know what that means.’

  ‘I used to help at a farm,’ I said and he looked at me pityingly.

  ‘And I am sure that you were very good at planting potatoes.’

  ‘It was sheep,’ I corrected him, and he sniggered.

  ‘Have some sense, child.’ Bligh took his fingers for a walk through his side-whiskers. ‘You cannot plant sheep.’

  I would not have minded planting him at that moment.

  ‘Whilst we are on the subject of things ovine,’ Mr G said urgently, ‘would this even more than usually incompetent surgeon Lamb be Mr David Anthony Lamb?’

  He pencilled a footnote and turned the page.

  ‘I am not sure about the Anthony.’ Mr Bligh wandered to the hearth to rattle the fire irons.

  ‘One can never be sure about Anthonys,’ Sidney Grice pronounced sadly.

  ‘Were all the patients emasculated?’ I asked, not sure if the conversation was leading anywhere.

  ‘What on earth does she mean?’ Bligh grasped the poker like a storybook illustration of a householder confronting a burglar, and I winced for I had been attacked with one of those before and still suffered occasional headaches.

  ‘Perhaps I should rephrase that.’ My guardian eyed me reprovingly. ‘Miss Middleton was wondering if all the patients were emasculated.’

  ‘All bar the sweep.’ Mr Bligh drove the poker into the unlit coals. ‘He escaped by climbing out of a window.’

  ‘And what happened to him?’ I asked, and Mr Bligh made an ufff noise.

  ‘He escaped by climbing out of a window.’

  ‘After that?’ I tried again.

  ‘Yes.’ He made no attempt to hide his irritation this time. ‘After that he escaped by climbing out of a window.’

  ‘Do you know what happened to him subsequent to his escape?’ Sidney Grice tore the bottom paragraph off a page and held it up like a manifesto.

  Mr Captain Bligh extracted the poker in a decidedly Arthurian manner. ‘I would have told you if your idiot girl hadn’t kept pestering me to repeat myself. Is she deaf?’ He raised his voice. ‘Are you deaf?’

  ‘As a dog,’ I replied.

  ‘Many dogs have excellent hearing,’ he told me.

  ‘Unless they are deaf,’ I quipped, uncertain how I had got into this squabble.

  ‘What was the ultimate fate of the sweep?’ Mr G asked, and Captain Bligh resheathed his weapon in the stand.

  ‘How in the name of Cosmas, Luke and Damian should I know that?’

  ‘I think you mean names,’ I muttered.

  ‘But,’ Mr Bligh condescended to tell us, ‘he was re-diagnosed when he was put into Lister Ward with a fractured pelvis from falling out of the window, as having a bad case of crusted scabies, which – as you, but not your mentally retarded ward, will know – is highly contagious. It transpired that a trainee nurse – who was Irish and a Roman Catholic and therefore afraid of dirty bits – had given all the patients a wash down there.’ He pointed as if she had carried out the task in his cellar. ‘With the same flannel.’

  ‘And was he cured?’ I was almost flattered that he felt no need to explain to me what a flannel was.

  ‘You cannot cure a broken pelvis, which is—’

  ‘The hip bone,’ I chipped in.

  ‘The hip bone,’ he informed me. ‘You just have to hope it heals itself.’

  ‘Did the other patients ever find out about Lamb’s mistake?’ Mr G replaced the torn-out paper upside down.

  ‘Many did,’ Mr Bligh told him. ‘It was supposed to be hushed up, but the nurse confessed to anyone who would listen and many who would not. Lord above knows why but she blamed herself.’

  ‘Catholics are trained to feel guilty,’ Sidney Grice remarked, ‘especially the Hibernians.’

  ‘It is in their blood,’ Bligh corrected him.

  ‘You are probably thinking of poteen,’ I chipped in to blankness. ‘Could you enquire of your friend if any of the patients took legal action?’ I asked my guardian, and he did.

  ‘Some of them threatened to sue but they would have got nowhere.’ The surgeon grasped his own lapels. ‘Goodness me, if a doctor is not allowed to make mistakes, who is?’

  ‘Nobody,’ I guessed, and picked up a slender blue volume.

  ‘We are not talking about nobody.’ Mr Bligh stamped his foot. ‘It is only through making mistakes that medicine makes advances.’

  ‘Not through research and careful observation?’ I glanced at the title – Cheeky Maids Love
to be Spanked – and wondered if Molly would agree, and, seeing that the old surgeon had no intention of responding, asked, ‘Where would the records of those cases be kept now?’

  Mr G was wiping his hands on a green handkerchief decorated with images of leaping red ponies.

  ‘They would be kept in the hospital records.’ Mr Bligh put on a pair of smoked spectacles.

  ‘And are they?’ Mr G shook out his handkerchief, making the ponies prance playfully round their field.

  ‘No.’

  I glimpsed myself in the surgeon’s blanked-out eyes.

  ‘Perhaps, for Miss Middleton’s benefit, you could elucidate.’ Mr G mopped his forehead, though the room was on the chilly side.

  ‘Very well.’ Bligh felt his way forward in a manner similar to my godfather’s crossing of the beam in Steep House. ‘I shall explain in the simplest possible terms and, in order to hold her fleeting attention, in the style of a brief anecdote.’ He bumped into a low, square table, upsetting a pillar of journals. ‘After the possibility of a misdiagnosis came to light Mr Lamb took all the patients’ medical notes to check through them, but had them stolen on the way home, and so the hospital lost all records of the names and addresses of all of the patients.’

  ‘How unfortunate,’ I said.

  ‘How should I know how unfortunate it was?’ Mr Bligh rubbed a barked shin. ‘I only know that the hospital authorities were not very happy and that Mr Lamb retired, probably worn out by all the other complaints against him.’

  ‘Do you know what they were about?’ I asked.

  Mr Bligh glowered at me. ‘You have not understood a single word I said, have you?’

  I tried one more tack. ‘If the sweep was in Lister Ward, surely they must have made their own records?’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake.’ Bligh grabbed hold of his own hair. ‘It goes without saying that he was deaf and dumb, which – I had better explain – means he could neither hear nor speak. We only knew him as Sweep and we called him that because he used to be one, otherwise we would have called him something else.’

  ‘Like Baker’ I suggested, and Mr Bligh threw back his head like a wolf at the moon, but, I was disappointed to find, did not howl.

  ‘No, not Baker. He was a sweep – a sweep-a sweep-a sweep. How many more ways can I say it.’

  ‘You have only said it one way but four times,’ I argued.

  ‘It is time to go.’ Mr G spun on his heel.

  ‘Can you explain about the bells again?’ I asked meekly as my godfather headed for the door.

  The surgeon stumbled on to his knees over a footstool. ‘Bother.’ He picked himself up. ‘I sometimes wonder why I wear these things.’

  ‘Goodbye, Mr Captain Bligh.’ Sidney Grice waved like a signalman trying to flag down a train in an emergency and, when we were outside, he explained, ‘Mr Captain Bligh does not like bells and, incidentally, when I talked about the criminals of this world basking in gentleness and benignity, I have no serious expectations of that happening.’

  83

  Lies, Lucifer and the Leper Colony

  IN THE CAB I asked, ‘Why do you never stand up for me when people insult me?’

  Sidney Grice took a swig from his flask, something I was never allowed to do with mine. ‘Why do you not for me?’ He tapped the cork back in. ‘In fact you twice made remarks about my lack of mellowness.’

  And I realized that he was right. ‘I did not think you cared.’ I shaded my eyes against the sun and wished I could have borrowed Mr Bligh’s spectacles.

  ‘You were not wrong to adopt that belief.’ He nibbled the collar of his Ulster overcoat with his lips.

  We sat in silence, jostling over a rough surface that had been temporarily repaired before I came to London.

  ‘Would you like me to be nicer to you in future?’ I asked after some thought.

  ‘Good Lord, no,’ he protested. ‘You are kind to street urchins, beggars and stray animals. Am I to be included in their numbers?’ ‘Perhaps not.’

  ‘What causes scabies?’ He rattled his halfpennies.

  ‘Lice,’ I said, though he must have known the answer.

  He cupped his ear.

  ‘Lice,’ I repeated.

  ‘Louder.’

  ‘Lice,’ I shouted.

  ‘Three times in rapid succession and as loud as you can, if you please.’

  ‘Lice-lice-lice,’ I yelled at the top of my voice.

  A young man carrying a pyramid of brown paper parcels nearly spilled them; a miniature poodle hid in its mistress’s skirts, and the hatch slid open.

  ‘Tell ’er the truff for gawdsake, squire, before the ’orse ’as annart attack.’

  ‘I knew I could rely on you to make a scene,’ my guardian said with evident satisfaction, as we turned left into Gower Street.

  *

  Sidney Grice popped his eye out as he habitually did in the evenings. They fitted much better since he had permitted me to make a gutta-percha impression of his socket and they looked better, after I had the idea of getting a young painter by the name of Sickert to match the colours and tones of his left eye on a piece of card.

  ‘I know we agreed that the attacker may be unable to father children.’ I perched on my armchair. ‘But there must be plenty of other men in such a condition apart from those unfortunate patients.’

  ‘Twenty-seven thousand, four hundred and eighteen hours and nineteen minutes ago, Mr Anthony Lamb was battered to death in Brompton Cemetery.’ Mr G tied on a violet patch.

  ‘I remember reading about it. They never caught his murderer, did they?’ I went to the window. A boy was doing cartwheels across the road and springing up with his hat held out, in the vain hope of a donation, and I wished that I had seen him earlier. ‘But how can you prove that the killer was one of his patients?’

  ‘If my unparalleled powers of reminiscence have not failed me, which they never have yet, I believe that the witnesses reported hearing shouts of Lies, they were lies, as the crime was being committed.’

  I clicked my fingers. ‘And when I shouted lice, our cabby thought I was saying lies,’ I realized, ‘which shows that the murderer may well have been one of those patients. But we do not even know their names, and how does it demonstrate any connection between him and Lucy’s attacker?’

  ‘Pertinent questions,’ my godfather conceded, striding behind his desk. ‘But there is something itching inside the parietal lobe of my right cerebral cortex and I cannot scratch it.’

  ‘A mental louse,’ I suggested helpfully.

  ‘Something very like that,’ he agreed. ‘There is a link and I know it, but I cannot quite join the pieces together.’ He wrenched open a drawer of his filing cabinet and leafed through the files. ‘Now, where are we? Lacey, G. – Lacey, R. – Ladd, P. -’ His fingers raced through the rows. ‘Ah, here we are – Lamb, D. A.’ He paused. ‘Lamb, D. A.,’ he murmured in puzzlement. ‘Lamb, D. A.’ Sidney Grice froze. ‘Oh, how stupid you have been.’

  I was not sure if he was talking to me or himself, for his eyes were transfixed by the title at the top of his brown envelope.

  ‘What does Lamb, D. A. spell, March?’

  ‘Lamb, D. A.,’ I repeated stupidly.

  ‘Say it all as one word,’ he commanded.

  ‘Lam-day.’

  ‘Harden your ay.’

  ‘Lamb-da,’ I tried. ‘Lambda, the . . .’ I counted on my fingers. ‘Eleventh letter of the Greek alphabet.’

  ‘Write it.’ He thrust the envelope at me. ‘Write it on the back.’

  I placed the envelope on his desk. ‘Can I use your pencil?’ ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘Or your pen?’

  ‘Are you mad?

  ‘That was not the most tactful of questions,’ I complained.

  ‘I am not the most tactful of questioners,’ he assured me, which, of course, made everything all right. ‘But, if I had to worry about people’s feelings, I should have to start worrying about people instead of the important t
hings in life.’

  I folded my arms and hoped I did not look too much like our maid. ‘I suppose I am not important then.’

  ‘When?’ He slid the envelope back towards me.

  ‘Now.’ I glared at him. ‘Well? What is your answer to that?’

  He listened blankly. ‘The last question you posed concerned permission to use my pen and I believe that I was insultingly dismissive of that request.’

  I threw up my hands and got my bag from beside my chair, and found my own pencil with the notebook I kept but rarely used.

  ‘It is like an upside down V,’ I said, and wrote A.

  ‘By Lucifer.’ Sidney Grice almost danced on the spot in his frustration. ‘Must I spend every waking hour with a stubborn idiot girl?’

  ‘I was not aware that you knew any.’

  ‘For goodness’ sake.’ He threw back his head. ‘This is no time for one of your puerile sulks. Draw it in lower case, woman.’

  I supposed that woman was an improvement on girl, but it did not sound much like one. I gritted my teeth and wrote λ.

  ‘At last.’ He stabbed at my inscription with his left thumb. ‘And what – if I can persuade you to activate that minuscule part of your so-called mind that is not completely occupied with fashion and frippery and buttons and silly-silly frills – does that remind you of?’

  I traced the symbols with my finger. ‘A badly drawn X,’ I said.

  Sidney Grice let out a deep breath. ‘At last,’ he said

  84

  The Sultan’s Slave and a Greek Goddess

  SIDNEY GRICE BROUGHT out his Mordan mechanical pencil, which it was perfectly in order for him to use, and demonstrated his point.

  ‘I thought it odd when I asked Miss Bocking how the attacker had carved his symbol and she told me—’ He swung the pencil towards me as my cue.

  ‘In the same way as he beat me,’ I quoted, to finish his sentence, ‘slowly and deliberately.’

  ‘And yet,’ my guardian lowered his pencil, ‘in every case we have seen –Mistresses Hockaday and Bocking and Lady Brockwood – the X was wanting its upper-right arm.’

  ‘And Lucy said that he had cut both lines downwards,’ I recalled. ‘If you were drawing an X carelessly, it would be the end of your stroke that would be missing, not the start.’