A Dead Man in Malta (5 page)

‘And you yourself?’

‘Not, sort of, to notice. But Terry—’ It was only afterwards, when they got talking, that the thought had come.

Seymour was inclined to doubt whether any of them had seen anything.

Chapter Three

The voice was not exactly loud but penetratingly clear. It came from the Registrar’s office, the door of which had been left ajar so that the air could circulate.

‘There will be fifteen of us,’ it was saying. ‘No, sixteen now, an extra one has just joined.’

‘
Sixteen
?’ said another voice, a man’s voice, incredulously. ‘That’s rather a large number!’

‘Not when spread over the whole hospital.’

‘The
whole
hospital?’

‘Yes. They could go to different wards and then change around.’

‘Even so—’

‘And then, of course, we’d all like to see the specialist units. My husband says that the Ophthalmics here is particularly good.’

‘Yes, well, thank you. Or him. We are always glad to welcome a colleague. But, you know,’—determinedly—‘a colleague is one thing, a party of …’

‘Yes?’ said Mrs Wynne-Gurr.

‘Well,
general
visitors, shall we say—’

‘Oh, we’re not quite general visitors. We have a lot of expertise and experience among us.’

‘—is another,’ finished the Registrar.

‘As I say, we have quite a lot of—’

‘But, Mrs Wynne-Gurr, this is not really a question of First Aid, it’s sort of Second Aid. All our nurses are trained and qualified—’

‘Of course they are! And quite right, too! That is what I keep saying to Headquarters. Nursing should be a profession alongside other professions, and for that to happen, the highest standards must be maintained. I quite understand your concern, Mr Ormskirk.’

‘Oh, good—’

‘But you need have no worries on that score. We would not dream of interfering. We would just help with the humbler things. No duty too humble for us, Mr Ormskirk. We are here just to watch and learn.’

‘Well, thank you. That’s very nice. But—’

‘Here is the list of names. There are sixteen of them now. As I said, an extra one has just joined. When she heard about the Maltese visit she was particularly anxious to come. She’s from Tangier—’ Tangier, thought Seymour?
Tangier
? Surely—‘And is thinking of starting up a branch here.’

It couldn’t be! Surely!

‘She will be a great asset,’ said Mrs Wynne-Gurr. ‘And it will be very helpful for her to see another branch in action. I have written her name at the bottom. Miss de Lissac.’

Miss de Lissac? It
was
Chantale! How the hell had she managed to attach herself to the party? She was not a member of the St John Ambulance. To the best of his knowledge she had never heard of it. How had she got to know—?

He realized, with sinking heart, how she had got to know. He himself had told her.

Outside the hospital the boy was sitting morosely, looking at the ships in the harbour. He had plainly decided that he wasn’t interested in them, either.

‘Have they thrown you out?’ said Seymour.

‘More or less,’ said the boy.

‘Ophthalmics no good?’

‘Been there, done that,’ said the boy.

‘What haven’t you done?’

‘The Armouries. They’ve been closed ever since we got here.’

‘Too bad. Why are they closed?’

‘They’re rearranging things in the Apartments. The trouble is,’ said the boy, ‘they were what my project was going to be on.’

‘The school set you a project?’

The boy nodded. ‘As part of the deal. They would let me off a week early so that I could come out here. But I would have to do a project.’

‘Couldn’t you do it on something else?’

‘I could, but I wanted to do it on weaponry. Dr Malia suggested I do it on the Infermeria. But I’ve gone off hospitals.’

He looked at Seymour. ‘You’re a policeman, aren’t you? Investigating those murders.’

‘If they are murders, yes.’

‘I wouldn’t mind doing a project on that.’

‘You wouldn’t find much to go on.’

‘But that would be the point, wouldn’t it? That would be real research. Not just looking up something in a book which everybody knows already.’

He walked along beside Seymour.

‘I wouldn’t mind being a policeman,’ he said.

‘It’s not all like that,’ cautioned Seymour.

‘Are you CID?’

Seymour nodded.

‘I wouldn’t mind being in the CID.’

‘You don’t usually go there straight away.’

‘Have you done other murders?’

‘It’s not all murders, of course.’

‘Still!’

He was quiet for a moment.

‘And what about these murders?’ he said then. ‘In the hospital?’

‘We don’t know they are murders yet.’

‘My mum doesn’t think they’re murders.’

‘No?’

‘She thinks they’re just incompetence. But, then, she thinks that most things that go wrong are just incompetence.’

‘She may have a point!’

‘But Dr Malia thinks they
are
murders. He says that deaths in a hospital don’t happen just like that. He says the nurses are perfectly competent. And so are the doctors. They’re deliberate, he says. But I say, how can they be? You’ve got to have a reason for killing somebody. And if you’ve got three deaths, you have to have three separate reasons. And that seems unlikely. But Dr Malia says there might not be three separate reasons, there might be just one reason. He says there is a certain type of person who is drawn to people lying there helpless and in certain circumstances they might want to kill them. But that’s not a very nice thought, is it?’

‘It certainly isn’t. And while that may occasionally be true, it’s not true very often.’

‘But it could be true, couldn’t it?’

‘Oh, it
could
be true.’

‘That’s what I told my mum. And she said that wasn’t a nice thing to think, and that I’d better stay away from Dr Malia if he’s putting thoughts like that into my head.’

A girl down by the landing stage waved at him.

‘That’s Sophia. She’s got a project, too.’

‘What’s hers on?’

‘The Victoria Lines. But it’s a waste of time, she says, because we know all about them. They were built at the end of the last century and we know who built them: the British. They were intended to protect Valletta from a land attack from the north. Sort of like Hadrian’s Wall. But Sophia says that was a daft thing to do because all they had to do was sail round them.’

‘Sounds logical!’

‘She says they’re good for walking on, though. You can see for miles. She says she’d take me. We could have a picnic.’

‘It sounds a nice idea. Is she out here for a holiday, too?’

‘No, she’s here all the time. She’s Maltese. What do you think of the Maltese?’

‘They seem all right.’

‘That’s what I think, too. But my mum says: just be careful because they might not be. But she said that about Dr Malia too, and he’s a doctor.’

‘I think a schoolgirl might be all right.’

They were lying there in neat rows, a row down each side of the ward. The beds were neat, too, with the ends of the blankets tucked neatly in. Beside each bed was a small locker and they were neat as well. The tops were kept clear. A glass was allowed to stand there but only a glass. Everything else, presumably, had to be kept inside.

This was a naval hospital, of course and a disciplined place. But Seymour had a suspicion that the order was due less to the Navy than it was to the ward sister, a thin, redoubtable lady named Miss Chisholm.

‘You keep it all shipshape,’ he said.

She smiled.

‘I do,’ she said.

She said she had worked for the Navy all her life. Her last posting had been in a hospital in Cyprus. She liked working abroad, she said. The nurses were often better. There weren’t many jobs around for women so you got applicants of higher quality. And, no, they didn’t all run away to get married. They knew what marriage for many women was like and that they would be better off as a nurse; at least until they were thirty.

But, surely, in a place like this they would have plenty of offers?

‘Oh, yes. The girls keep a league table pinned up in the nurses’ room. But every nurse knows that when a man is lying there he’s particularly susceptible. And that when he can get up …’

‘Less?’

She smiled. ‘It’s time for him to go.’

‘And you yourself …?’

‘Bottom of the league.’

She remembered the day well, and was scathing about the seamen’s suggestion.

‘This was an able-bodied seaman. Able-bodied in all senses. He had just been fighting in a waterfront bar. Yes, he’d been knocked about; but are you telling me he would have let himself be overpowered by a nurse? It’s usually the other way round.’

‘A man, then?’

‘Yes, but what man? As far as I’m concerned, there are only three sorts of men: patients, staff and visitors. We do have porters and orderlies, of course. We call them in if we want things moved around. But they don’t come into my ward unless I say so. And that afternoon I didn’t say so.’

‘Visitors?’ prompted Seymour.

‘I’m not against visitors, particularly in a place like this. It often does the lads good to see their mates. But you’ve got to keep on eye on things. Otherwise they can get out of hand. You’ve no idea what they’ll get up to. Or what they think is a good thing to cheer up their mates. A bottle, usually. If you don’t watch out, in no time there’s a party going on. So I make a point of walking through the ward when we’ve got visitors. And no bottles come in on my watch, I can tell you.

‘I tell them, too. “Your mate wouldn’t be here unless he was ill,” I say. “And if you give him drink, he’ll be iller. When he’s out, he can drink as much as he wants. And so can you. But while you’re in here it’s got to be cut out. You go by my rules here. Chisholm’s Rules, they call it, and while I’m in charge they’re the rules we go by. Got it?” They usually do.’

‘And that afternoon …?’

‘Three visitors together. All seamen. Cooper, Corke and Price. They’ve been here before and they know the rules. That doesn’t mean, of course, that they won’t try and break them. But I’m an old hand and they respect that. Anyway,’ she said, laughing, ‘I know them of old. I knew Cooper when he was on the Singapore station. And I don’t mind them. They cheer people up.’

‘They say that on their way back, after seeing someone else, they went past the door of the ward and saw someone bending over a patient—their mate—with a pillow—’

‘Nurses are always bending over patients. And sometimes with a pillow.’

‘This wasn’t a nurse.’

‘No?’ She thought for a moment. ‘Cooper, Corke and Price are not altogether reliable, you know.’

‘I didn’t think for a moment that they were. Nevertheless …’

She thought again. ‘I could ask around, if you like. The other nurses. And the patients nearby.’

‘It might be helpful.’

‘Well, it might be more helpful if I did it rather than you did it. I don’t mean to be rude, but most of the patients are seamen, and the lower deck tends to be suspicious of the police. No doubt with good reason.’

‘Might they not be equally distrustful of everyone in authority?’

‘They might,’ she conceded. ‘And that is why I shall conduct my inquiries through the nurses. Who are
not
viewed in quite the same way, especially if they are young and pretty!’

The third person to die had died during the night. Here, again, there was a redoubtable ward sister. She was called Macfarlane; not Mrs or Miss Macfarlane, or even Jane Macfarlane; just Macfarlane. She seemed to be in charge of the ward both days and nights. It was
her
ward, she explained. Yes, there was a night nurse but Macfarlane, who had a long naval history behind her and seemed by now to have watch-keeping built into her, sometimes gave her ‘a turn below’.

How about on the night in question?

Not that night, in fact. She had been out with friends. She would certainly have looked in but she had this previous engagement. She had asked the senior nurse to look in instead. She had done so and then reported that everything seemed all right. The duty nurse had actually mentioned Wilson, the injured sailor, to her. She had said that he seemed restless, asleep but lightly, and talking in his sleep. She wondered if she should administer a sedative but the senior nurse had advised not.

And then had left?

Yes, but no one had been remiss. The night nurse had made her rounds; and it was during one of these that she had found that the seaman had stopped breathing. She had immediately tried to resuscitate. It could have been, she thought, only a short time before that he had died.

And had she been aware of any intruder?

No, and there had better not be an intruder. Not even the sort that were usually smuggled in: young women. Macfarlane was fierce about this.

‘Even when they’re half dead, they think they can carry on as they normally do. But they can’t. “Do you want to die?” I ask. “It would be a good way to go!” they usually reply. And the girls are no better. So we have strict rules against anybody entering the ward at night.’

While Seymour was wandering around the ward checking how they might have done, he noticed himself being observed by a patient close to the bed in which the seaman had died. He spoke to him but the man turned over on to his side without replying.

‘I wondered if he had understood me,’ he said to Macfarlane.

‘Oh, yes, he understood you, all right,’ she said.

‘Then …?’

‘He’s like that. About the British especially.’

‘How does he manage when he’s on board?’

‘He’s not usually on board. He keeps a small shop. We take in some patients from the locality who are not Navy. This one thought he had trouble with his appendix. It’s not that, I’m afraid.’

Seymour was about to walk on when he stopped. ‘Does it give him pain?’

‘He says it does.’

‘During the night?’

‘Occasionally, certainly.’

‘Keep him awake?’

Macfarlane hesitated. Then she spoke to the man in Maltese.

‘All the time, he says. But he’s a bit of a grumbler.’

‘Ask him if he saw anything the night Wilson died.’

Macfarlane addressed the man. He shook his head.

‘No,’ she said. She hesitated, however. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘although I speak Maltese, I do not speak it that well. I’d better get one of the nurses.’