Death at the Jesus Hospital (25 page)

Powerscourt recalled the ability of the best trained
military minds to concentrate totally on the matter in hand and not be diverted into other channels. He produced his drawings of the marks left on the victims’ chests. Smith Dorrien stared at them carefully. Then he produced an eyeglass from the drawer in his desk and gave them some more detailed attention.

‘Good God, Powerscourt, now I see why you were in the National Gallery in the first place. You’d gone to look at that painting I gave them some years back. Isandlwana. What a terrible place. What a terrible battle. It was the first one I ever saw, you know. I presume the people at the National Gallery have been suggesting that those short weapons you can see in my picture, the knobkerries, could have been the cause of these marks. Am I right?’

‘Absolutely, General. I have been thinking on my way here about the various explanations a man might come up with for the presence of such marks.’

‘Such as?’

‘Well, the most obvious, I suppose, is that the murderer had one of these knobkerries lying about in his house or in his attic, left him by a parent or an uncle perhaps, picked up maybe at some country house auction, and he put the marks on to throw mud in our eyes, to make us wonder about the marks rather than other aspects of the killing.’

‘I don’t think you really believe that, Powerscourt, do you?’

‘I’m not sure that I do, actually. The thing is that the
doctors
say the blows with the knobkerrie probably occurred before death, but they can’t be sure. Doctors can be as
difficult
to pin down as lawyers sometimes. That says to me that the marks are central to the stories of all three killings, that there is a link binding them together.’

‘We are not meant to speculate too much in the military, as you know, Powerscourt, apart from thinking about what your opponent is going to do next. But it sounds from what you say that all three victims were roughly the same age,
fifties in the case of the Jesus Hospital man and the bursar, rather more in the case of Sir Rufus.’

‘That is correct. I should have told you that there is a blank space of fifteen years in the early life of Sir Rufus, according to his entry in
Who’s Who.’

‘Never trusted
Who’s Who
myself. They never check
anything
, those people, just take a man’s version of himself at face value. Odd. Pretty damned odd, if you ask me.’

Powerscourt was looking at an enormous calendar on the wall behind Smith Dorrien’s desk. There were rings round various days in different colours, red and black and green, each one presumably denoting some military activity of fixed date. He told Lady Lucy later that day that the idea came to him as he wondered if any of the circled dates might denote a family birthday in the general’s household.

‘Do you know the date of the battle of Isandlwana, General?’

‘I do, or rather I think I do. I’ll just check it so we can be sure.’ He delved into some grey military almanac on the side of his desk. ‘Thought so, memory not going quite yet, thank God. The battle was fought on the twenty-second of January, eighteen seventy-nine.’

Powerscourt stared at him for a moment. His mind shot back to the painting he had seen that morning, brave
redcoats
hemmed in against a grey mountain, being
slaughtered
by the bloodthirsty Zulu warriors.

‘Out with it, Powerscourt, what’s so upsetting about the date, for heaven’s sake?’

Powerscourt wondered if the general might be about to start shouting at him. ‘It’s just this, General. The first murder, the one at the Jesus Hospital, took place on the twenty-second of January this year. The chances of that being a coincidence must be about three hundred and
sixty-five
to one.’

‘Good God, how very strange. Speculation must come more readily to a man in your profession than it does to
me, Powerscourt. How do you think these events could be related?’

Powerscourt was looking at the calendar again. ‘God knows,’ he said. ‘Maybe the murders have something to do with the battle, though it’s hard to think what after
thirty-one
years. Tell me, General, can you remember how many are said to have died at Isandlwana?’

‘That’s a tricky question,’ said General Horace Smith Dorrien. ‘You must remember that I was ordered from the field to take a message to the rear. I wasn’t there at the end. I didn’t see most of the carnage. Certainly over a thousand of our men were slain by the Zulus. They didn’t take any prisoners. They hardly left any wounded, they finished them off as they lay on the ground. And after that the dead were disembowelled to a man. Their clothes were stripped from their bodies. Any number between five and fifty were said to have survived but those figures are very unreliable.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Well, it wasn’t going to be good for your career if you were a member of one of the regiments there to have survived. You could only have done that by running away earlier and faster than everybody else. Some men made a stand where they stood. They were all slaughtered. But another body of men tried to save themselves. Many were cut down by the Zulus who ran faster. But if you did escape – and I heard stories of a number of people in this position – you wouldn’t be in any hurry to return to the military. You might be court-martialled and shot if you did. So a lot of people could have drifted off and never rejoined the army at all.’

‘And if you did that, would you be registered as a deserter?’

‘Well, you might have been, if anybody had been keen to establish a true record of what happened. I don’t think anybody ever conducted a proper review of the battlefield to establish the identities of the dead. They just lifted the
names out of the regimental rolls and assumed they had all been killed. Commanding Officer Chelmsford was off
looking
for a different bunch of Zulus when the battle happened. So he wasn’t keen to establish the facts as they didn’t reflect too well on him. Most of the other officers were dead and the living in other regiments who hadn’t been at the battle were happy to record all those whose whereabouts they didn’t know as killed in action. Much neater that way. Close the account down, that sort of thing.’

‘Am I right in thinking, General, that you could have survived Isandlwana but that everybody would think you were dead?’

‘You are. There is a further complication about those
regimental
rolls, mind you. They were completely up to date at the time they were taken, but that could have been months before the battle. In the interim people went home sick or were discharged and new recruits whose names were not on the rolls joined up in their place. There were a number of cracks where people could fall through the system.’

‘And where would I find those regimental rolls now, General?’

‘Hold on a moment, Powerscourt.’ The general returned to his almanac which he seemed to regard as the fount of all knowledge for things military. ‘Bloody politicians,’ he said with feeling. Powerscourt suspected that bloody
politicians
could be worth a whole afternoon of ranting
invective
. Two telephones might end up in pieces on the floor. ‘They will keep changing things for no apparent reason. Many of the men at the battle came from the Twenty-fourth Regiment of Foot, known as the Warwickshires. They’re now known as the South Wales Borderers, God knows why, headquarters at Brecon, God help you. Unless you can find a copy in the War Office, though I rather doubt that. Are you going to see if any of your victims are on the last regimental rolls before the battle? Bloody thankless task, if you ask me.’

‘If I think it necessary, General, then I will head off to Brecon. Do you think it possible that one or all of the victims could have been present at the battle?’

Smith Dorrien paused and stared out at his parade ground, his mind back on the battlefield in South Africa. ‘Judging from what you told me about their ages, yes, it is possible.’

‘I want to ask your advice on another related matter, general. Where could I lay my hands on a knobkerrie? I need to show it to one of the medical men to see if it caused the marks. That is the most important thing for me now.’

‘Well, I don’t have one myself,’ said the general, ‘but I know a man who does, or who almost certainly does. Fellow by the name of White, Colonel Somerset White. He’s retired now, lives in a big house near Marlow. I’ll let him know you’re coming. He’s got an enormous barn full of weapons he’s picked up in his career, much of it in Africa. I know he’s got Zulu spears and assegais so he’ll almost certainly have a knobkerrie. The colonel’s been saying for years that the government should have an army museum where the public could come and see all his stuff but nothing ever
happens
. Bloody politicians.’ The general looked up an address in a small black book on his desk.

‘Here we are. The Oaks, Marlow, Buckinghamshire. I’m sure he will be able to help. Now then, I’ve got another
useless
officer coming to see me on a charge. I would ask one thing of you, Powerscourt.’

‘Of course.’

‘If you need further advice or assistance, then you must come back to me. I’d be delighted to help in any way I can.’

‘Thank you so much, General. And thank you for all your help today.’

As Powerscourt gathered up his drawings, he felt the fires of wrath were being stoked again. Smith Dorrien was reading some report in front of him and making furious marks with a black pen. The general was turning red in the
face. He began squeezing a different pen in his left hand very hard. His left foot was tapping angrily at the leg of his desk. Powerscourt managed to escape to the comparative sanctuary of the outer office.

‘For what we are about to receive,’ a tubby captain was saying to the lieutenant, ‘may the Lord make us truly thankful.’

There was a bellow from the far side of the door. ‘Murphy! Murphy, you bloody fool, come in here at once!’

‘I think,’ said the young lieutenant, ‘that what the gladiators are supposed to have said on their way into the Coliseum is more appropriate, actually:
“Ave Imperator, morituri te salutamus.
Hail, Caesar, we who are about to die salute you.”’

Inspector Grime and Inspector Devereux made their way back from the listening cell to Devereux’s office.

‘It nearly worked, dammit,’ said Inspector Grime. ‘I
wonder
if they suspected we were listening in.’

‘What do you think they were up to?’ asked Inspector Devereux. ‘Do you think they popped up to Fakenham and slew the bursar?’

‘I don’t think they went to Fakenham, but I could be wrong. It would have been incredibly risky to walk up that corridor first thing in the morning, even if you were disguised as a postman. They must have been known by sight to some of the pupils from the time they spent around the town with their mother. But I’m not ruling anything out just yet. I just need to find out what they were up to that evening.’

‘Something to do with women, perhaps,’ said Inspector Devereux darkly. ‘Maybe they were having a joint massage with the fair Frankie. I can’t see her being too particular about the clientele if the money was right.’

Inspector Grime bent down to tie up a shoelace. ‘I know
what I’ll do,’ he said. ‘I’m going back to that cell right now. I’ve tried this before and it usually works. I should have thought of it before.’

‘What are you going to tell them? That you suspect them of consorting with prostitutes? Seducing young women beneath the age of consent?’

‘Worse than that, Devereux, much worse. I’ll give them an hour to make up their minds. If they don’t tell, their mother will be notified that they’ve been arrested.’

‘On what grounds?’

‘I shall tell them that as they are so reluctant to admit what they were doing, I shall inform their mother that they are being held under suspicion after being arrested in a brothel. A homosexual brothel. That might do the trick.’

A letter from Paris had arrived for Powerscourt. Lady Lucy watched him open it at the breakfast table.

‘It’s from my friend, Monsieur Olivier Brouzet,’ he told her, munching absent-mindedly on a piece of toast.

Powerscourt handed the letter over. ‘Another door closes, my love.’

‘What do you think this bit means, Francis?’ said Lady Lucy after she finished reading the letter. “I have also involved one of our agents in Berlin.” What sort of agent would know in this level of detail about somebody else’s secret service?’

‘There’s only one thing it can mean, Lucy. The French must have an agent inside the German intelligence
outfit.
That’s the only place they could have confirmed their information.’

‘Great God,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Do you think we have an agent in there in Berlin too? Do the Germans have a spy inside our outfit?’

Powerscourt smiled. ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised.’

‘Lord Powerscourt, delighted to meet you.’ Colonel Somerset White had a head shaped like an egg with a few wisps of hair above the ears. He had a solid moustache and a red complexion as if he spent a lot of time out of doors. The Oaks was a modern house, looking, Powerscourt thought, as if its owner might have designed it himself after a long spell in the Deep South of the United States. A great veranda ran round the building as if the inhabitants of Buckinghamshire needed deep shade for half the year.

‘How is my friend Smith Dorrien?’ he inquired. ‘Temper under control, eh?’

‘I’m not sure I’d go that far,’ said Powerscourt. ‘One
fellow
seemed to be getting well roasted before I went in and there was another man being trussed for the oven as I left.’

‘Dear me,’ said Somerset White. ‘He should be more
careful
, he really should. The pity of it is that he’s done more than anybody to improve the lot of the ordinary soldier. It’s the officers he has the rows with.’

‘He was very helpful to me,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Now then, let me tell you what my business is about.’ For the
second
time that day Powerscourt went through the catalogue of murders, the list of suspects, the marks on the bodies that he was now beginning to suspect might have been inflicted by knobkerries from the Zulu wars.

‘We’d better go over to the barn, Lord Powerscourt. I
think I’ve got a couple of them over there. I just hope we’ll be able to find them.’

Powerscourt wondered what conditions in the barn-cum-museum would be like if their owner was unsure about finding his exhibits.

The first section of Somerset White’s building was all order and neatness, row upon row of ancient swords and shields and lances and daggers, all neatly lined up on trestle tables down one side of the barn. Each item had a label in White’s spidery hand beside it. Along the other side were pistols, guns, flintlocks, blunderbusses, Baker rifles from Wellington’s time, even, to Powerscourt’s great delight, an early version of Congreve’s rockets from the Peninsular Wars which usually caused more panic in the companies of their owners with their boomerang flight path than they did in the ranks of their enemies. Once more the labels bore
witness
to hours and hours of research, with a description of the firepower of each weapon, its probable date of construction and a list of the battles where they would have been used.

In the middle of the barn there was a rough partition with a door in the centre. On the far side it was chaos. There was a great pile of stuff in the centre of the floor, weapons of every shape and size, bits of uniforms, regimental colours, small pieces of artillery, curved swords, straight swords, krises and tulwars from Ceylon and India. And that was just the surface. God only knew, Powerscourt thought, what was underneath.

‘Sorry about this,’ said Somerset White. ‘You need to understand how I collect all this stuff. Auctions maybe in provincial towns, never in London, house sales where the owners sell everything in the place after a death, a few advertisements in the local newspapers in places near Aldershot and Camberley. Our ancestors were a pretty rapacious lot. I don’t know if you were aware of that, Lord Powerscourt. Sometimes I have thought that there must have been some enormous emporium by the quayside,
Harrods International perhaps, or Harrods India, where the victorious officers and men could buy up booty to take home with them. The raw material, if you like, for a triumph, not through the streets and temples of Rome, but at the Limes or the Old Rectory in Bracknell or Pangbourne. Anyway, if you keep records of annual deaths in
The Times,
you can work out that more people die in the time between October and April than they do in the rest of the year. Pretty obvious, I should say. So that’s when I do my collecting, attending the auctions and so on. In the summer I sort it all out so I can display the stuff on the shelves. I’ve got a sword and gun man from the Wallace Collection up in London who comes down to give me a hand with the dates.’ Somerset White paused and wiped his hand on the side of his trousers. Powerscourt wondered what was going to happen next.

White grabbed a couple of aprons from a hook on the back of the door. ‘You’d better put this on,’ he said. ‘It’s amazing how much dirt and dust these old weapons collect on their journeys here. Now then, this what I always say to myself on these occasions, rummage, rummage!’

With that White got down on his hands and knees and began riffling through the heap of assorted weaponry in front of him. A collection of tunics, sashes, spears and
cutlasses
began forming another pile to his left. Powerscourt, on the opposite side of the mound of weapons, began to do the same.

‘It’s amazing the stuff people hang on to,’ said White, pausing briefly to examine a long straight spear with a lethal blade. ‘Do you know, I’ve got three white shirts worn by Charles the First on the morning of his execution at the Banqueting House. I’ve got four pairs of boots as worn by Lord Cardigan at the charge of the Light Brigade. And I’ve got five nightshirts as worn by Admiral Nelson during his time with Lady Hamilton. Not exactly sure he’d have bothered with nightshirts myself.’

‘Colonel,’ said Powerscourt, his right arm deep into his vast heap of stuff, ‘you don’t, I suppose, have any idea where your knobkerries might be? I mean, can you
remember
when you bought them and where they might be in our treasure trove?’

‘I haven’t a clue,’ said Somerset White cheerfully. ‘If I’d known where the bloody things were, we wouldn’t have had to embark on this fishing expedition, would we?’

Powerscourt reflected bitterly that it was like fishing without bait. He felt his hand touching the hilt of a sword. Pulling firmly, he drew the weapon out of the pile. It was like no sword he had ever seen. It had a short blade. One side had been cut away in sections so that a row of serrated indentations like irregular teeth ran down the blade to the tip.

‘What in God’s name is this contraption, Colonel?’ said Powerscourt, waving the object above his head like some demented warrior from long ago.

‘Do you know,’ said the colonel, sitting on the floor rather than rising to his feet, ‘that’s only the second one of those things I have ever seen. It’s Italian, I think, and it’s called a sword breaker. Your enemy’s sword would be destroyed in the teeth. All you’d have to do would be to finish him off. It’s as if you’ve disarmed your opponent, effectively.’

Powerscourt put it to one side and plunged back into the pile. He had decided to try a new policy now. Rather than going straight into the section in front of him, he decided that a better approach might be to open everything up, to scoop out great swathes of weaponry until the top
resembled
the surface of a volcano, a shallow shape like a dish, that enabled you to see much more of the assorted
memorabilia
. He was just sitting back to enjoy his new creation when there was a shout of triumph to his left.

‘I told you there were a couple of the bloody things here!’ said Colonel Somerset White, pulling out a pair of sticks with thistle-shaped markings on the circular ball at the top.
‘This one has twice as many spikes or studs as the other one, not sure what that means for your corpses. But you’d better have these, Powerscourt, as you said, you’ll need them for the medical men to pronounce one way or another.’

‘Can you remember where you got them, Colonel? Something might come back to you if they’re a fairly recent purchase.’

Somerset White got slowly to his feet. He looked as though he might have trouble with his back. He took off his apron very slowly.

‘I think I’ve got it. They were at an auction in Basingstoke, property of a Major Digby Holmes, who had recently passed away. The auctioneer, I remember now, said the knobkerries had come back with the major from the Zulu wars. Mind you, bloody auctioneers would say anything to sell you things. I’ve had one or two real disasters from dodgy
auctioneers
. Maybe Major Holmes fought in that battle with the unpronounceable name you were telling me about. Never fought in Africa myself, even managed to avoid the Boer War. Served in India all my time. Enough of this. I expect you want to be on your way with our little friends here, Lord Powerscourt. If I can help in any other way, please let me know.’

‘Thank you so much, Colonel, there is one thing. Does the Major leave a widow behind him, or was he single at the end?’

‘There is a widow, a Mrs Laetitia Holmes, I believe. They said at the auctioneers that she’d been wanting to throw out all her husband’s military stuff for years. His end was an opportunity not to be missed.’

Johnny Fitzgerald was beginning to think he had been abandoned, rather in the fashion of Robinson Crusoe. True, the rather louche purlieus of the Elysian Fields, illuminated from time to time by the visitations of Frankie the masseuse
on missions of mercy to Sir Peregrine, were more than
comfortable
, certainly better than Crusoe’s island. Johnny had noticed that Frankie carried a large handbag on occasions, filled, he presumed, with the instruments of torture of the masseuse’s trade. He still spent a number of evenings in the Rose and Crown entertaining the old men of the Jesus Hospital. He had continued his policy of lunching the
silkmen
one at a time and it was on one of those occasions, on a bleak day in Buckinghamshire with the rain lashing against the windows of the hotel, that he hit the jackpot.

He was entertaining Freddy Butcher, Number Two, a cheerful little man who had once been a bus driver by trade and had family connections with the Silkworkers. Number Two was cleanshaven with a great red mark down the right-hand side of his face. One section of informed opinion in the almshouse said that he had crashed his bus on the Clerkenwell Road, killing a couple of elderly passengers. The other view was that he had been caught misbehaving with the wife of a well-known criminal who had set about his face with a knuckleduster.

By this stage the first bottle of Pomerol had come to an end, and Johnny, who had only had a couple of glasses, ordered a refill. Something told Johnny that Number Two wasn’t used to this amount of alcohol at lunchtime. Maybe he would let slip something important. Johnny poured him another glass. Two plates of roast duck arrived, groaning with apple sauce and roast potatoes and parsnips.

‘I’ve felt for some time,’ said Johnny, ‘for all the
convivial
evenings in the pub, that people are holding back on me. There’s something they’re not telling me. If somebody would tell me, maybe the mystery would clear up and you could all be left in peace.’ Johnny had been a foot soldier in the great demonstration to the Maidenhead police station, reasoning that there needed to be somebody able bodied present in case one the old boys had a heart attack or keeled over from some other ailment. In the event the old boys
had cut quite a dash, marching the last hundred yards in their best uniforms, attracting a good deal of public
sympathy
for their efforts and an article in the local newspaper.

It was the red wine that did for Freddy Butcher, Number Two, and possibly for Number Four, Bill Smith, known as Smithy, as well.

‘You’re quite right, of course,’ said Number Two, holding up his glass for a refill. ‘We have been holding something back.’

Johnny waited for a forkful of duck and parsnip to go down.

‘There was a feud, you see, it had been going on for months.’

Johnny remained silent, hoping for more intelligence.

‘Number Four and Number Twenty, the man who was killed, they had been at each other’s throats, you see.’

‘What was it about?’

‘Well, nobody knew for certain, I think it had to do with something in Number Twenty’s past. I think he may have told Smithy about whatever it was and Number Four took against Number Twenty from then on. Number Four was forever telling anybody who would listen that Number Twenty was a bloody coward.’

‘When was the last time they fell out?’ asked Johnny.

‘The day before Number Twenty was killed actually. This time they had the row in the middle of the quadrangle, nearly coming to blows.’

‘Did anybody hear what they were saying?’

‘Oh yes. It seems odd now, but that Abel Meredith, Number Twenty, was shouting at Number Four, “
if
you call me a coward once more, I’m bloody well going to kill you, so I am.”’

‘Wrong way round,’ said Johnny

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Well, it wasn’t Number Twenty who did the killing. He was the victim, wasn’t he? What happened then?’

‘What happened then?’ Number Two, Freddy Butcher, who had been making his way pretty steadily down the second bottle, sounded suddenly as though the drink might have got the better of him. Then he seemed to get a second wind, cheered on by another large draught of the Pomerol. ‘Well, Warden Monk came out of his office wearing his best blue cravat and told them to shut up. He said that if there were any more rows like that, he would have them thrown out of the hospital, dumped outside the front door with their belongings in a paper bag. He sounded as though he meant it too.’

‘How very interesting,’ said Johnny. ‘Did Warden Monk also tell you all not to mention the row to the police or anybody else?’

‘How did you know that? He did, as a matter of fact. He said that anybody who told the police would also be thrown out, dumped by the front gate and the rest of it, complete with possessions in a paper bag. It’s a pretty powerful threat, Johnny. Most of us don’t have anywhere else to go. That’s why we ended up in the Jesus Hospital in the first place.’

‘And nobody knows any more about what they were arguing about?’

‘No. You know what it’s like in these places, Johnny. If anybody heard any more detail, every single person in the hospital would have known all about it before you could brew a cup of tea.’

When Johnny had seen his guest off the premises after a large helping of apple pie and a glass of calvados, he took a taxi to Maidenhead police station. He thought Inspector Fletcher would be keen to hear his news.