A Dead Man in Malta

by Michael Pearce

  ‘I’d like to have a word with you, Mario, if I might.’

  ‘Certainly, sir. I’ll come back. Only I’ve got to find Dr Docato first as otherwise they’ll be held up. There’s some new equipment for Dr Docato.’ he explained to his mother. ‘But it’s in a crate and the crate is too big to get through the door, so they’ll have to unpack it. And they don’t like to do that unless the doctor it’s for is there, so that if there’s something missing, they can’t be blamed for it.’

  He hurried off.

  ‘An extra boy, just for a crate?’ said Laura, pursing her lips. ‘I’ll have to have a word with Berto. Of course, it may be a big crate.’

  ‘You keep a sharp eye on them.’ said Seymour.

  ‘I’m a bit of a dragon.’ said Laura. They’re all right, but they need to be kept up to the mark.’

  Seymour took Mario into the porters’ room, empty at the moment, with the porters out the back. He was plainly nervous.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mario,’ said Seymour encouragingly. ‘It’s nothing very important. I’m just trying to get a general picture of the way they do things in the hospital. I wanted to ask you about nights. You do occasionally work nights, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I wanted to ask particularly about the night the sailor died. You were here then, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yes. I was here.’

  ‘Helping Umberto?’

  ‘That’s right, yes.’

  ‘To do what, particularly?’

  The boy hesitated.

  ‘You do remember that night, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Yes, I remember.’

  ‘And what did Umberto want you to do?’

  ‘Oh, this and that,’ muttered the boy.

  ‘Exactly, please.’

  Mario looked unhappy.

  ‘I don’t remember,’ he said unwillingly.

  ‘Were you needed to turn someone over?’

  ‘Not that night.’

  ‘Or move something? Carry something around?’

  Mario looked even more unhappy.

  ‘Not much on that night, was there?’ said Seymour, guessing.

  ‘No,’ said Mario, suddenly relieved.

  ‘Then why did he ask you to come in?’

  Mario was tongue-tied.

  ‘Did he think there might be a need for you, for some reason?’

  ‘Yes, that was it,’ said Mario, relieved again.

  ‘What was the reason?’

  ‘I - I don’t know. Some reason.’ said Mario unhappily.

  Seymour thought. Mario sweated.

  ‘Something you don’t want to tell me.’ said Seymour.

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘It’s just that I forget.’

  ‘I don’t think you do forget. I don’t think you’re a boy who forgets things.’

  He waited.

  Mario said nothing.

  Seymour took a chance. ‘What I’m trying to find out, Mario, is whether it was possible for someone to get into the hospital at night unobserved.’

  Mario suddenly looked stricken.

  ‘But this would be difficult, wouldn’t it, if the porters were there?’

  Seymour waited. ‘They would see anyone come in, wouldn’t they?’

  Mario, it seemed, could only nod.

  ‘If they were there,’ said Seymour. ‘Were they there, Mario?’

  Mario looked intensely miserable.

  ‘All the night? Or did you have to go off somewhere? Together? The two of you.’

  ‘No,’ said Mario, with surprising definiteness.

  Seymour was puzzled. ‘No?’

  ‘Not the two of us.’

  ‘Just one of you, then?’

  ‘Iva.’ So low that Seymour could hardly hear him. Malti for yes.

  ‘Which one of you? Umberto?’

  ‘Iva.’

  ‘He had to go off somewhere, leaving you on your own?’

  ‘Iva.’

  ‘Do you know why he had to go off?’

  Mario was silent.

  ‘He had to check on somebody, perhaps?’

  After a moment there was the briefest of nods.

  ‘Or was it something else?’

  Mario’s face was wooden.

  Seymour tried a different tack. ‘You were left on your own, then, Mario. Did you mind?’

  Mario looked puzzled. ‘Oh, no.’ After a minute he volunteered: ‘I’m used to it.’

  ‘It often happens?’

  ‘Not often.’

  He corrected himself. ‘Quite often.’

  ‘So you were on your own, then?’

  Again, after a moment, the nod.

  ‘So you were the only one who was there, then, when they discovered that the sailor had died?’

  ‘Iva.’

  ‘On your own?’

  ‘The doctor was there. And the nurse. Two nurses. I didn’t have to ... do anything. They decided to leave him there. Until another doctor came in. It was just that they thought ... that he might have to be moved. That is why they called ... a porter.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Me, yes.’

  After a moment he said: ‘They usually do move them. If it’s at night. So that in the morning it’s gone. When everybody wakes up.’

  ‘But not on this occasion?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have been easy, anyway, if you were on your own. Were you still on your own?’

  ‘Iva.’

  ‘Umberto wasn’t back?’

  ‘Le.’ No.

  ‘When did he come back?’

  ‘Later,’ said Mario unwillingly. After a moment -

  ‘I haven’t told my mother,’ he said. ‘She would be angry.’

  ‘With you? Or with Umberto?’

  ‘With both of us. If she knew.’

  Chantale feared that this was going to be a long day. Apart from the excitement of the girl in the cupboard, and the rather different interest provided by the difficult Mr Vasco, nothing, but nothing had happened. It was much the same in the new ward. And that seemed likely to be the way that it normally was in wards. Unless there was some sort of crisis. Or unless there was a murder, of course.

  She wondered what was the point of her being there. What was she supposed to see? What was she expected to be observing?

  As the morning wore on she began to feel more and more mutinous.

  It was a relief when Seymour put in an appearance, although also an irritation in that the nurses paid much more attention to him than they had to her. This was true even of Macfarlane, that old, cold stick. How had he managed to swarm his way through the defences of even that pillar of Scottish rectitude? And then Chisholm in the other ward.

  Nor was her irritation mollified when she was allowed to take him into the nurses’ room and offer him a cup of tea, for she saw the nurses’ league table on the wall, and when she had worked it out, felt an unusual, and, possibly Arab fit of much disapproval overtaking her. League table of proposals indeed! They were, she told herself, just a bunch of randy schoolgirls.

  Mrs Wynne-Gurr appeared on one of her rounds just before lunchtime.

  ‘A very profitable morning!’ she said with satisfaction. ‘I have learned a lot.’

  So had Chantale; and two of the things she had learned were, first, that she would never make a nurse, and, secondly, that the idea of securing her passage by enrolling in the St John Ambulance had been a dreadful mistake.

  Seymour had somehow, typically, oiled his way through the hospital’s defences and secured permission to take her out for a quick lunch. Her spirits rose but then fell again when it became apparent that what was envisaged was a brief sandwich in a bar. Blasted away by Chantale’s fury, Seymour had hastily proposed that they make up for it by a really good Mediterranean meal that evening. ‘Paella.’ he had suggested temptingly. ‘Or maybe a good mullet.’ Since Chantale had tasted neither of them since she had been in England, she was prepared to
make concessions; and in the end they had eaten a sandwich lunch sitting on a sea-wall looking out over the harbour. Where they could see the ships, said Seymour.

  Chantale pointed out that they were all warships. ‘How typically British!’ she said. ‘Well, they’ve got to go somewhere.’ said Seymour. But Chantale, sensitive to expressions of imperial power, whether British or French, felt uncomfortable. Maybe it had been a mistake coming to Malta.

  Her spirits were slightly cheered by a dghajsa passing near them on its way across the harbour to Valletta. The eyes painted on its bow seemed to be watching them as it passed but she didn’t mind them, they were cheerful eyes, seeming almost to wink as they went by.

  ‘Why don’t the British paint eyes on their warships?’ she asked Seymour.

  ‘They can see all right without them, I suppose.’ said Seymour.

  ‘They make the boats more human,’ said Chantale.

  However, this encounter with the human had cheered her up and she began to tell him about her morning. She told him about the girl in the cupboard and cheered up still more when he didn’t believe her.

  And then she told him about Mr Vasco.

  ‘What the nurses have to put up with!’

  ‘Yes. I’ve come across him myself,’ he said. He was interested, however, in what she told him about Vasco’s ambivalence over her being an Arab.

  ‘Another one with crazy, mixed-up ideas about the Arabs!’ she said.

  ‘I can understand it,’ he said. ‘With the Arabs being so close. You wouldn’t know whether to be for them or against them.’ Chantale, half Moroccan, half French, found that position entirely understandable.

  Seymour thought he should follow up Chantale’s tale of the girl in the cupboard. He found the cupboard but, alas, no girl inside it. There were, however, signs of occupation. A mattress was there, leaning against the wall; and evidence suggested that it had not been used just for sleeping.

  He asked the nurse in the ward about it.

  ‘Oh, it’s just used for storing,’ she said, and looked him straight in the face as if defying him to advance any other hypothesis.

  Coming out of the ward he ran into the three sailors, Cooper, Corke and Price, whose account of what they had seen, or half seen, in the ward has sparked off such a furore in the newspapers.

  They were just going in.

  ‘Now, what brings you here?’ he said.

  ‘Just visiting.’ said Cooper.

  ‘Your mate, of course, is no longer here.’

  ‘We’ve got other mates,’ said Corke in a slightly hostile tone.

  ‘We like to visit the sick.’ said Cooper unctuously. ‘It’s a sort of errand of mercy.’

  ‘Oh, yes!’ said Seymour sceptically.

  ‘No, really!’ Cooper insisted. ‘There are a lot of our boys in here, and we like to come round once or twice a week to cheer them up.’

  ‘Give them someone to talk to.’ said Price.

  ‘So it wasn’t just Turner you came to see?’

  ‘No, no. We like to do the rounds.’

  ‘We’re like that,’ said Cooper.

  ‘But Turner was a special mate of yours?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, you could say that.’

  ‘You were with him when he got injured, weren’t you? Or, at least.’ he said, turning to Price, ‘you were.’

  ‘We all were.’

  ‘In the bar?’ ‘Yes. Just having a peaceful drink - after the match.’

  ‘You had been to see a match, had you?’

  ‘Yes, we like to see a match. They have them in the evenings here, when it not so hot.’

  ‘And then you went on to the bar?’

  ‘For a peaceful drink,’ Cooper insisted.

  ‘So how was it that they didn’t get to be so peaceful?’

  ‘A bunch of Maltese came in. Well, it was all right at first. They were on one side of the room, we were on the other. Just talking normally, like.’

  ‘So how did it start?’

  ‘Someone must have said something.’

  ‘One of them said something,’ said Cooper.

  ‘After the match?’

  ‘Well, no,’ said Price. ‘That’s what I couldn’t understand. If it had been, I mean, well, you might have understood it. But it wasn’t that.’

  ‘Some of them hadn’t even been to the match.’

  ‘And then one of them said something?’

  ‘Yes. It was that little bloke,’ Price said to the others. ‘He came in after the others and seemed to have something against Terry, because he just stood there looking at him.’

  ‘I didn’t see him,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Well, no, you wouldn’t have,’ said Price, ‘because he was sort of standing to one side. My side. And I saw him staring at Terry, and I thought: Hello, is he a long-lost friend? But he didn’t look that friendly. And then he said something to the others, and one of them said something, to poor old Bob, I think it was. And then Bob said something, replied, as it were. And then the next moment someone had hit him!’

  ‘Them was the aggressors,’ said Cooper.

  ‘I don’t think he hit him that hard. Just a tap, really. But Bob was off balance and went down. And, of course, once you’re on the floor anything can happen.’

  ‘Boots!’ said Corke briefly.

  ‘Well, we weren’t having that,’ said Cooper. ‘Not to our mate!’

  ‘And the next moment it was a sort of free-for-all!’ said Corke.

  ‘You’ve no idea why he took against you?’ Seymour asked Cooper.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come across him before?’

  ‘Never seen him before in my life.’

  ‘Once it had started, I lost sight of him.’ said Price. ‘Just disappeared!’

  ‘Ran off, I think,’ said Corke.

  ‘Having started it!’ said Cooper.

  ‘Didn’t see him again.’ said Price.

  ‘And then the police came,’ said Corke.

  ‘And then our very own little blue-eyed boys!’ said Cooper. ‘And beat the hell out of us. They shoved us on to their boat - they’ve got a special boat, you see, for the likes of us. And they were pushing us on board, when one of them sees Bob. “He looks in a bad way!” he said. “Sick bay for him!” “Hadn’t we better get him to the hospital?” another of them says. “It’s just round the corner.” Well, I thought this was our chance. “Let us take him,” I says. “Me and my mates. We were nothing to do with all this,” I said, “and we knows the hospital.” “You were nothing to do with it?” says the Petty Officer. “You boys bloody started it!”

  ‘Well, there was a bit of an argument at that point, but then someone shouted: “There’s trouble at Antonio’s!” and they thought they’d better get there. So they said we could take poor Bob to the hospital, and if they had any more trouble from us that night, they’d kick the hell out of us. So we went.’

  They passed on into the ward and when he looked in a little later Seymour saw them assiduously going round the beds chatting to their incumbents.

  ‘Quite touching, really.’ said Sister Chisholm. ‘They come every week, twice or three times a week, and go round religiously to everybody. And not just this ward!

  They usually look in on Macfarlane’s ward. They’ve got mates there, too. I don’t mind them coming round, they bring a bit of life into the place. Of course, you’ve got to keep an eye on them. God knows what they’d get up to if you didn’t! Although, as a matter of fact, I do know what they’d get up to; they’d never leave the nurses alone. So I always make a point of being here when they visit, and that keeps things decent. I suppose I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for them. I’ve known them for a long time. They were out on the Singapore station with me.’

  ‘The Singapore station?’ said Seymour. ‘Ah, you must have been there when - ’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Sister Chisholm, ‘when Cooper was in hospital there and witnessed, or heard about, the famous snoring incident. Well, I’m sorry to di
sappoint you, but that story is an old chestnut which regularly makes the rounds every time a new ship comes in. It wasn’t true then and it’s not true now. But everyone in the Navy takes it for Gospel.’

  Chapter Seven

  ‘And this.’ said Mrs Wynne-Gurr, ‘is where it all began. Where we began.’

  The ladies were impressed.

  ‘The headquarters of the Knights of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, the Grand Master’s Palace.’

  ‘Actually, this is not, strictly speaking, where they began,’ said Felix, tagging along for once, with some interest. ‘They started in Jerusalem.’

  ‘Thank you, Felix - ’

  ‘And then they moved to Rhodes.’

  ‘Yes, well, thank you, Felix

  ‘The Palace wasn’t started till 1520. But the Order had been set up in 1085.’

  ‘If I may continue,’ said Mrs Wynne-Gurr resolutely, ‘when the Order was first established on the island of Malta, this was its headquarters. It is, as you see, a very grand building, and even grander inside. The principal apartments are on the first floor, the piano nobile as it is called. They are built around the courtyard and include the Council Chamber and the Supreme Council Hall - ’

  ‘And the Armouries,’ said Felix, ‘although they’re at the back.’

  ‘I do recommend you, while you are here, to find an hour in your busy schedule to visit them.’

  ‘You won’t be able to get into the Armouries,’ said Felix. ‘They’re closed.’

  ‘I don’t expect you’ll be wanting to visit them.’ said Mrs Wynne-Gurr crushingly. ‘As I say, the Grand Master’s Apartments are worth a visit. However, the main focus of your interest will be the Sacra Infermeria, the Holy Infirmary, which was, at the time it was built, in 1574, the most modern hospital in Europe. And the largest, with over five hundred beds.’

  ‘Five hundred and sixty-three.’ said Felix, ‘which could be increased to nine hundred and fourteen. Dr Malia says that this is very important.’

  ‘Yes, well - ’

  ‘Most of them would be in the Long Hall.’

  ‘Which we shall go and visit now. If you would follow me - ’

  ‘Five hundred and eight feet,’ said Felix. ‘The longest room in Europe.’

  ‘Thank you, Felix.’