A Dead Man in Malta

by Michael Pearce

  ‘The Victoria Lines? A complete waste of time? But that’s what I’ve always said!’ cried the Admiral impressed. ‘An army concept! Useless!’ Sophia elaborated her theories of military strategy and the need for a fluid and flexible defence system. ‘Exactly what I’ve always argued!’ said the Admiral, and congratulated Mrs Ferreira on having such a remarkable daughter. ‘Well . . .’ said Mrs Ferreira uneasily.

  Felix was deep in conversation with Dr Malia. ‘You see,’ he explained, ‘if you used bunk beds you could double the capacity of the ward.’

  ‘I’ve never thought of that!’ confessed Dr Malia: and, later, he was heard telling Mrs Wynne-Gurr what a remarkable son she had. ‘Well...’ said Mrs Wynne-Gurr, rather doubtfully.

  ‘But where is Paolo?’ asked Mrs Ferreira, looking around.

  ‘May I have a word with you?’ said Seymour, taking her gently aside.

  ‘I cannot believe it!’ declared Mrs Ferreira. ‘Where is the evidence?’

  ‘There’s quite a lot of it,’ said Seymour. ‘In each case he was on the spot when the victims died.’

  ‘On the spot?’ said Mrs Ferreira. ‘But they all happened in the hospital, and Paolo was never there!’

  ‘Well, he was,’ said Seymour. ‘Take when Kiesewetter was killed, for example. A great crowd of people surged into the hospital after he was taken there. Including the band. Among whom was Paolo. For a short time there was general chaos as they spilled around everywhere looking for Herr Kiesewetter. But Paolo knew exactly where to find him. Because Umberto had told him, had told everyone. There was only the question of getting into the room, and Paolo knew because he had worked in the hospital. He knew where the porters kept the key and in the general confusion it was easy to slip the key off the hook and use it to unlock the door of the nurses’ room, which was where Mr Kiesewetter was sleeping.’

  ‘But the band was not in the hospital when the others died!’

  ‘No, and that is where the evidence becomes crucial, particularly in the case of the killing done during the night. It took me some time to figure that out, actually, because there were several possibilities. First, whoever attacked the seaman, Turner, could have come in through the main entrance. Umberto, who was supposed to be on duty, had gone off to see his girlfriend, leaving Mario in charge. Mario is a good, conscientious boy but he is only a boy and might have been deceived. He did leave the entrance unguarded, actually, for a time, but that was when he was called to the ward after Turner had been found. He did think, in fact, that that may have been when the murderer got in, but it wasn’t, because of course, Turner was already dead.

  ‘In any case, there was a much more likely possibility. There is a cupboard at the end of Turner’s ward used only by Suzie for her assignations. She had, in fact, used it that night to meet another of the sailors, Cooper. She swore that he had left before the attack took place. She knew when the attack took place because, soon after, she heard the doctors and nurses trying to resuscitate Turner. Worried that there might be a search, she left the cupboard and crept out. But in theory there was the possibility that someone else, someone other than Cooper, had been in there with her. Both Suzie and Cooper denied this, but for us it had to be a possibility.

  ‘But there was another, more likely, possibility. Both Cooper and Suzie had left the hospital by an exit through the boiler room. They used the coal chute. But if they could leave, could not someone have come in that way?

  ‘The boiler men told me that would be difficult because there is a stiff board over the chute which would be hard to push aside from the outside, and also it would be hard for a big, or even normal-sized, man to get down there.

  ‘What I think happened was that there were two men, one big or biggish, the other definitely small. The small one came into the hospital earlier in the day, probably by the ordinary entrance, and then concealed himself until the boiler men had gone off duty. Then he entered the boiler room, climbed up the chute, wedged the board open and left. Later in the night he returned with an accomplice, who was, in fact, the killer, and together they were able to enter by the coal chute.

  ‘At first I thought that this was unlikely because, if you remember, Suzie and Cooper had left the hospital earlier in the night using the coal chute, and surely they would have noticed if the board had been wedged. I think that if they did, they thanked their stars and wriggled on. Anyway, they left it wedged open.

  That is, in fact, what happened. There were two men. We know that because they were seen coming out of the boiler room, by Dr Malia, who has, incidentally, identified them.

  There is also some supplementary evidence. The smaller man, who went up first and wedged the board, was initially reluctant to do so because it would dirty his clothes - he is very fussy about his clothes. He did dirty his clothes and was very aggrieved about it. We know this because he complained about it. He said that Paolo - because, of course, we are talking about Paolo as the other person involved - had promised he would get them cleaned. But he hadn’t done so. Partly because of that he was prepared to explain all this to Inspector Lucca and myself when we asked him about it. All the more so when we told him why we were asking. It came as a complete shock to him. He had no idea why Paolo wanted to get into the hospital. He is, I have to say, not very bright; and totally under Paolo’s thumb.

  ‘But there is yet another thing: Paolo was seen entering the ward that night. By Mr Vasco. Now, Vasco was unwilling to make a direct identification of Paolo as the person who entered the ward; but he made an indirect identification which, along with the other evidence, enables us to say definitely that Paolo, I am afraid, was the killer. More to the point, the way he made his identification gives us a clue to the reason why Paolo killed these three men.’

  ‘I cannot believe this!’ said Mrs Ferreira. ‘What sort of men are these witnesses? Malia, half crazy and half asleep all the time: Vasco, embittered to the point of madness. And this third one, worried about dirtying his clothes - who is he?’

  ‘Luigi.’

  ‘Luigi! That twerp! He’ll say anything!’

  ‘He’ll say anything that Paolo tells him to.’

  ‘Paolo wouldn’t tell him to say this!’

  ‘For once, confronted with the reality of the situation, Luigi is prepared to go against what Paolo says. Especially since he is being urged to tell the truth by someone for whom he feels as great a regard as he does for Paolo: Suzie.’

  ‘Suzie! Well, you have made a choice of witnesses, I must say!’

  ‘Maybe. But, in his way, he loves her.’

  ‘And she?’

  ‘Loves him. In her way. Perhaps that is putting it too strongly. She is fond of him and tries to care for him.’

  ‘She treats him like a little dog!’

  ‘You can love dogs. And dogs, in their way, can love you.’

  Mrs Ferreira made an impatient gesture. ‘Malia, Vasco, Luigi, Suzie - are those the people your case depends on?’

  ‘There is another thing,’ said Seymour. ‘Luigi is an Arab, or part Arab. Like Paolo.’

  Mrs Ferreira burst into tears.

  ‘This is prejudice!’ she said angrily, through her sobs. ‘He has never been allowed to get away from this. All his life. What he is, we have made him. Our family. All of us. And now we are trying to - we are saying that he is responsible for those terrible things. But he is not! He is not!’

  ‘He has confessed that he is.’

  ‘You have made him do that! You and Lucca between you!’

  ‘He is a sick man.’

  ‘He is not sick! We have driven him out. And he behaves peculiarly as a result. Peculiarly, but not ... evilly. He is ... different, I grant you that. But that is what we have made him. Inside, he is - I know he is! He has a cause. The cause is different from yours, but - ’

  ‘I am not objecting to the cause. But in his pursuit of it he has become out of touch with things the rest of us take for granted. There is a line between fighting reasonably for your cause and fi
ghting unreasonably, and it is to do with the effect on other people. Let me give you an example: Melinda.’

  ‘Melinda?’

  ‘Mrs Wynne-Gurr took you through her theories about the murders - tried out her ideas on you. She had worked out that one nurse, the same nurse, was present in the case of all three murders. Melinda.’

  ‘What she suggested was ridiculous.’

  ‘I agree. Logical, but ridiculous. And it did not exclude other possibilities. That someone else had also been present. And, as we know, Paolo was. But Paolo was also present - do you remember? - when Mrs Wynne-Gurr outlined her theories to you. He heard, and what flashed into his mind was a way of using them himself. He would reinforce the case against Melinda and safeguard himself - because he couldn’t be quite sure that Vasco would not give him away.

  ‘Very cunningly he did so in a way that not only threw suspicion on Melinda but also drew attention to the possible role that Vasco himself could have played in the process. He sent an anonymous letter pointing out, as Mrs Wynne-Gurr had done - in fact, borrowing what he had heard her tell you - Melinda’s proximity on all three occasions and adding information of his own - that after the attack on Herr Kiesewetter Melinda had taken a message to say that the attack had been successful.

  ‘The message - and there had been one, although it did not say that - had come from Vasco, thus implicating and, Paolo hoped, discrediting him and anything he might say. But it had another purpose, too. The letter said, falsely, that Melinda had taken it to the British Navy Headquarters at St Angelo, thus implicating them as well.

  ‘There was a further point to this, which was important. It is to do with the reason why Paolo chose to mount an attack on Kiesewetter in the first place. The attacks on the sailors were easy to understand. They were British and Paolo had a grudge against the British. Not only that, the grudge had been inflamed by recent disagreements over football and over Suzie which involved those particular seamen. But why the attack on the German Kiesewetter?

  ‘Something Sophia had said earlier struck me. She said that when they were watching the balloons Paolo had made a remark to the effect that the hospital had better brace its ideas up if it was dealing with a German because the Germans made a fuss about inadequacy. Sophia said he had seemed particularly struck by his observation. I think it was then that he decided to follow Kiesewetter into the hospital and kill him - simply because it would make trouble between England and Germany. And it was this point, of course, that he was reinforcing by claiming that Melinda had taken such a message to the British Navy Headquarters. The claim was made in the letter to the German Consul, who was investigating Kiesewetter’s death.

  ‘It was part, that is, of Paolo’s general opportunistic political scheming, an illustration, I think, of the extent to which he had now crossed the line between what was reasonable and what was evil. And on that last issue, just think of the impact of what he was doing on a perfectly innocent person, Melinda. Not to mention a rather less innocent Vasco. Who, I think, will now be willing to testify that he saw Paolo enter the ward that night.’

  Afterwards, Mrs Ferreira returned to the fenkata. It was her fenkata and she was never one to shirk her duties. The St John Ambulance ladies were distributed around the tablecloths, sitting with the families whose guests they had been and exchanging vows of eternal friendship and repeated visits which became even more fervent as the glasses of alcoholic lemonade went down. At a certain point the band struck up, the nurses put away their rabbit bones and took off their shoes and began to dance, and the picnic became, in the words, but not necessarily disapproving words, of one of the English St John ladies, ‘positively Bacchanalian’.

  In the midst of the revels Seymour suddenly saw Luigi, allowed out of jail, under the watchful eye of Inspector Lucca, and the still more watchful eye of Suzie, to play in the band. Luigi was still entirely bewildered but, now in his best, cleaned-up suit, was prepared to blow his heart out for the occasion.

  Lucca, benign, but fearful of the opprobrium he knew he was going to suffer from the Ferreira clan, the inhabitants of Birgu, the Maltese generality and probably, once Herr Backhaus had reported home, the German one as well, timidly plucked up courage to ask Mrs Ferreira for a dance. Mrs Ferreira, ever generous and eager to believe the best of people, was prepared on this occasion to waive the usual Maltese treatment for someone they considered a traitor, a knife in the back, and, after consideration, consented. Lucca was, after all, Maltese and from Birgu; and perhaps would do better another time.

  Another person who was present was Mr Vasco’s brother. He had just been visiting Mr Vasco and reported, with astonishment and some concern, that his brother was unusually quiet. He attributed this, to her surprise, to the influence of Chantale. ‘He always had a soft spot for Arabs,’ he said. ‘He used to say that they were only doing what we ought to be doing. I told him that if that meant doing what Paolo had done, he could count me out. I was a bit surprised that he didn’t bite my head off.’

  At one point in the proceedings Mrs Wynne-Gurr was observed talking to Melinda. ‘I was quite wrong,’ Felix heard her saying. Felix was astounded; he had never heard her use such an expression before and thought, first, that he had misheard and then, second, that she wasn’t well. Sophia said, however, that it was big of her to say so. She said that it was a very un-English thing to do, and she asked Felix if possibly his mother was not entirely English. Felix, who had hitherto taken his mother’s and his own Englishness for granted, was somewhat taken aback. However, he applied to his father who said that there was some Welsh and Scottish and Irish blood in the family, as there was in most English people. ‘We’re all pretty mixed up by now.’ ‘Like Malta,’ said Sophia, relieved.

  The Arab issue was weighing on her, as it was on the whole Ferreira family. The Ferreiras had at once closed ranks around Mrs Ferreira but also, feeling some sense of guilt, around Paolo, too. Indeed, Sophia suddenly started to take up cudgels on behalf of the Arabs. ‘Another lost cause!’ said Grandfather, and that started the father-and-mother - in fact, grandfather - of a quarrel ferocious even by the standards of Grandfather-Sophia disputes. Somehow, however, it cleared the air and they took to visiting Paolo together, both in his prison cell and later in the special hospital to which he was transferred.

  Felix, probably put off by his mother, had never been one for causes lost or otherwise, but now revised his position, having come across Sophia in tears one day. He had, in fact, revised all his positions as a result of the Maltese holiday; as, indeed had Sophia.

  They handed in their projects on time and both did very well. Sophia had amended her original thesis and now drew attention to the Victoria Lines inside everybody, thus earning from her teachers commendation on the balanced view she had developed recently, an observation which made Grandfather choke over his (English) tea. Felix’s project had transformed itself, too, into something like a work-study of hospitals, ancient and modern, which left even Mrs Wynne-Gurr shaken.

  The real fruit of the change in emphasis came years later after he had completed his medical studies and then switched unexpectedly to hospital administration, in which he was astonishingly successful.

  His new work required him to visit St George’s Hospital at Hyde Park Corner where he ran into Sophia again. Sophia had found, as had so many bright Maltese girls, that about the only job open to her was as a nurse, and she had been sent to London for her training. There, as well as taking up once more with Felix, she took up the cause of female suffrage; where she met again Mrs Wynne-Gurr, now a prominent lady in the cause, as well as being an experienced knocker-on and opener-up of doors. Some of which benefited Sophia considerably. They were altogether a formidable family team.

  Sophia remained in touch with Chantale and continued to give her the benefit of her thinking. And Felix remained in touch with Seymour. He found that the political skills Seymour had honed through years of experience of working with the Byzantine processes of Scotland Yard were an invaluable
source of advice in his struggle with the no less Byzantine processes of health care.