Death at the Jesus Hospital (29 page)

‘That is correct.’

‘But some of the tickets will be for a return journey. You would pay for such a ticket all together, maybe with a slight reduction, even if you got two separate pieces of paper as you do with a train ticket. But even though it might say that you boarded the ship in Durban, you could be going home. 
You could have started out in London. And if a lot of the tickets were returns, bought in London, and even though some of the passengers would be marked as having boarded in Durban, and though they would obviously be travelling from South Africa to London, they’d be coming home again. They’d have bought their tickets in London. Mystery Man, on the other hand, would be coming on a ticket almost certainly bought in South Africa, maybe Durban Southampton Durban, but his journey would be the first leg, not the second of the trip. All of which, I think, means that if we can find out where the passengers bought their tickets, we can discount all those return tickets bought at the London end. That should eliminate quite a lot of people.’

‘Well done, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt. ‘That should save us a heap of trouble.’

Ten minutes later Lady Lucy drew a stream of bubbles coming out of an enormous champagne bottle on her pad. ‘We’re through, Inspector. We’ve got thirty-one names of the right age and sex in the first-and second-class accommodation on the three ships.’

‘Excellent,’ said Devereux. ‘I’ve got thirty-two but one of mine is a minister so I think I’ll get rid of the holy man. Some pretty strange occupations on board these vessels. Did you get the chap who was a musical instrument vendor, for heaven’s sake?’

‘We did,’ said Powerscourt, ‘and a quarryman and a fishmonger and a house painter.’

‘Well, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll take these names to our telegraph office and set to work. I’ll wire over to Thomas Cook to see if any of their branches sold the things. Once we’ve eliminated the people who bought their tickets here I’ll launch the South Africans. The Inspector looking after us in Durban is a famous rugby player – he was on their inaugural tour here four or five years ago. He says he has very fond memories of playing in England.’

‘Dammit, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt after the Inspector left,
‘there’s something niggling at the back of my mind and I can’t get my hands on it. It’s slipped away. I think it might be important.’

‘Well, Francis, you know my views. If you worry away at it, whatever it is, it won’t come to you. If you think of something else altogether, it’ll make its own way to the front of your brain. Think of the latest sins and wickednesses of our precious twins. That should do the trick.’

Powerscourt never heard the end of the sentence. He had shot out of the room and returned almost at once with an enormous atlas under his arm. He took a notebook from his jacket pocket and riffled through the pages. Then he opened the atlas at a page showing the west of England. ‘Contrary to popular opinion after my announcement about passenger lists, Lucy, I have to repeat that I am not going out of my mind. You will recall that the Mr Smith, correctly named or not, said he had to get back to the West Country. And I have just remembered what I was searching for in my mind. When I first met Inspector Devereux in the Silkworkers Hall he was looking at a collection of rubbish that had been collected after the dinner. Among the objects was a part of a ticket, whether bus ticket or train ticket I know not, from a place ending in “be”. Now that is pretty useless in itself, there are a great many place names ending in “be”. And I remember thinking at the time that it could have been the murderer himself who dropped the ticket stub – all the Silkworkers who were there that night came from central London. Now let’s have a hunt for places ending in “be”. I think it means valley in Celtic. Let’s look at Dorset. Here we are. Kingcombe, Barcombe, Loscombe, Melcombe Horsey, riding centre presumably.’

‘Combe Fishacre,’ Lady Lucy took up the chase, ‘Thorncombe, Combe Almer, Motcombe, what a lot of Combes.’

‘Let’s try Devon,’ said her husband. ‘Ellacombe,
Maiden-combe,
Overcombe, Widecombe, Babbacombe Bay.’

‘Holcombe, Harcombe,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘Boscombe, Salcombe, Combe Buckfastleigh, Branscombe.’

‘I’m sure there’s a whole lot more. I’m going to contact the London Library in a minute. The librarian there is an expert on British place names, I think he even wrote a book on them a couple of years back.’

‘Forgive me, Francis, I’m being dense. What can we do with this list of place names?’

‘We can’t really do anything with them until we have narrowed down the list of names. Now I think about it, mind you, they might help produce the names. This is one of the great beauties of having an Inspector on board, my love. He brings entire police forces with him. We suggest to the good Inspector Devereux that he contacts his brothers in Christ in the counties of Devon and Dorset and Cornwall and ask them which, if any, of the places might be large enough to be issuing tickets, and in which place a man intent on murder might want to hide himself. If the murderers, and I now think there were probably at least two of them, have arrived in one of these places recently, the police should either know about it or know who will tell them, estate agents or hoteliers, those kind of people.’

‘I don’t think we’re going to get any more cables today,’ said Inspector Devereux, fresh from the Metropolitan Police telegraph room. ‘You should have had copies of all them,’ he went on, stretching his legs out in front of the fire in Markham Square. ‘What do you think of the news so far?’

‘Normally,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘I’m a hopeful sort of person. But here we are. We’ve eliminated most of the people 
travelling Durban or Cape Town to Southampton. There’s absolutely no sign of the people we’re interested in, or might be interested in if we knew who they are. Half of the place names in Devon and Dorset have reported back and there’s no sign of the suspects there either. The field is contracting all the time. What happens if we’ve got it all wrong? What happens if they’re not South African at all, if they didn’t need to come here on a great liner because they lived here already? What happens if the strange mark on the dead bodies is just a decoy, a red herring designed to throw us off the scent? What happens if we’ve got everything wrong?’

‘You’re very pessimistic this evening, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I think it’s too soon to give up the ghost. We’re not out of the hunt yet. Let’s wait and see what news tomorrow brings.’

‘But what happens if I’m right and we’ve got everything wrong?’

‘I don’t believe we have got everything wrong, Lucy, my love. But I tell you what I would do if we were wrong.’

‘What’s that, Francis?’

‘I should present my compliments to the Honourable Company of Silkworkers and resign from this case with apologies for failure. And then I should retire completely from all investigations of every sort. Like the man in
Candide
, I should cultivate my garden.’ 

‘How many more of these calls do we have to make, Sarge? We did about fifty yesterday.’ James Robertson was the newest recruit to the Devon Constabulary, currently being inducted into the skills required in the force by an experienced sergeant, John Pickles, based at Ilfracombe police station in the county of Devon.

‘Calm down, young man, you’ll never get on if you’re too excitable, that’s what I was always told at your age.’ Pickles glanced round the little harbour where many of the hotels and guest houses were located. ‘We did most of the work yesterday evening. Not long to go now.’

‘We had to work until after eight o’clock last night as you well remember,’ said the young man. ‘My tea was cold and my mother was just about to go down the police station and ask what had happened to me. What are these people supposed to have done, anyway? Lifted the Crown jewels? Tried to assassinate Mr Lloyd George?’

‘Never you mind what they’re supposed to have done. They’re dangerous criminals. That’s all we need to know. Now then, why don’t you stop complaining and go and make inquiries in the Hotel Bristol across the road. I’ll take the Wellington just here. Off you go now.’

Just over a hundred miles to the south another sergeant was making his way into the heart of Salcombe. He had lived here all his life, Sergeant Mark Vaughan, apart from
an unhappy year on loan as a junior constable in the Met. The local Inspector, based in the mother ship at Kingsbridge, knew at once he was the man for the job. ‘Pop into Salcombe in the morning, Sergeant Vaughan, and see if there’s anything in this,’ he said the previous afternoon, handing over the wire from London. ‘I can’t imagine a more unlikely place than Salcombe for a party of villains to hide, but we’d better check.’

Inspector Devereux was back at his command post with the telegraph machines. The first message came from Ilfracombe and it reported that there was nobody of the descriptions given to be found in the town. A thorough search had been carried out and no strange persons discovered apart from a couple of Greek sailors who appeared to have jumped ship. Even the Inspector was growing worried now. There were only a couple messages more to come. Had they made an enormous mistake? He resolved not to tell Powerscourt yet about the news from Ilfracombe. He took comfort, very small comfort, from the fact that a reference book in the police library said that both Boscombe and Ilfracombe had much greater populations than Salcombe, which had yet to report. Maybe they had found something down there among the shrimp nets and the fishing boats.

Salcombe, close to Plymouth on the Devon side, is surrounded by the sea. Through the centre of the little town runs the harbour, part of the estuary which ebbs and flows each day as the tide travels the six miles back and forth from the larger town of Kingsbridge and then out into the English Channel. Tiny, perfect beaches line the sides. A ferry runs every day in summer, taking passengers up and down from Kingsbridge. As it reaches the open sea, the waters are guarded by Bolt Head on the Plymouth side and by Prawle Point on the Dartmouth side. The sea is in Salcombe’s blood. Over the years the men of Salcombe have sailed against Philip of Spain’s Armada, smuggled brandy and tobacco to be hidden in secret caves in the cliffs, and sent fast sailing ships, fruit schooners, to bring in fresh oranges and other exotic fruit 
from Spain and the Azores. In recent years its beauty and the mild climate had been bringing in more and more visitors.

The estate agent’s office, open only in the mornings two days a week in the winter and spring, was manned this morning by Jimmy Johnston, another young man whose job took him regularly between offices in Kingsbridge and Salcombe. Mark Vaughan and Jimmy Johnston had been at school together and were still friends in their late twenties. Sergeant Vaughan was tall and slim with piercing blue eyes. He was a feared centre three-quarter in the county rugby team, famous for gliding through the opposition lines like a man who seems to have left the room without actually opening the door, as the rugby correspondent of the
Western
Morning News
put it.

‘Good to see you, Marky boy,’ said Jimmy, six inches shorter than his friend with a shock of red hair. ‘Are you here on business or dropping in for a chat?’

‘Business, I’m afraid,’ said Sergeant Vaughan, lowering himself into an ancient armchair, ‘and it might be serious.’

‘I see,’ said Jimmy, going to the door and closing it with a sign saying back in half an hour on the side facing the street. ‘Fire ahead, my friend.’

‘The inquiry comes from an Inspector in the Met. He’s investigating a triple murder, I don’t know where. He is interested in a party of two or three people, who might or might not be South Africans, who might or might not be staying in a place in the West Country like Salcombe. They would be in a hotel or a rented house. If troubled, they could be extremely dangerous. Does that ring any bells, Jimmy?’

‘Holy Christ,’ said Jimmy Johnson, ‘I think it does. Just give me a minute to think about it.’ He began pulling papers out of a drawer in his desk and placing them on the table. ‘I’ve been wondering if I should let you know about these people for some time,’ he said. ‘You could say I’ve been expecting you. We have a party of three foreigners, staying in Estuary House just up the road from here, between the Marine Hotel 
and the Yacht Club. Bloody enormous place, Estuary House, owned by some rich industrialist in Birmingham who asks us to let it for him when he’s not here. They came,’ he consulted his paperwork, ‘at the beginning of January. They took the house for three months. Strange thing was, we never saw any of them at all. The deal was organized through a man from Chesterton’s in London who came down to sort everything out for them. It was if they didn’t want to be seen.’

‘Have you had any dealings with them since? Do they wander about the town and so on?’

‘Not exactly, no. I mean there have been sightings, but only of them inside the house. Every inhabitant of Salcombe now peers up at the windows when he or she goes past. I have no idea if this is correct or not, but the gossip goes that there are three of them, one in his fifties or a bit older, one in his thirties, the last one a bit younger.’ Jimmy paused for a moment and looked at his door as if one of the visitors might be about to walk in. ‘They say,’ he went on, ‘that one of the younger ones has a great black beard, but he hasn’t been seen for a while. The other younger one is clean-shaven. But the really strange thing, and I don’t see how anybody could have invented it, is that the older man has only got one eye. He wears an eye patch on the other, as if he’s some pirate on the Spanish Main.’

‘Can we just go back a moment, Jimmy? The lease on Estuary House, whose name is that in?’

‘It’s in the name of the man from Chesterton’s.’

‘Are you telling me that nobody’s got an idea what these people are called? For all we know it could be Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego looking out at the harbour from that great house up there?’ Sergeant Vaughan’s granny used to read to him from the Scriptures last thing at night.

‘It could, though there are no rumours of our three having been sent into the burning fiery furnace.’

Sergeant Mark Vaughan looked around the office ‘You don’t have a telegraph here, I suppose?’

‘Place is too small,’ said Jimmy. ‘They’ve got one up at the Marine Hotel.’

‘Look, Jimmy,’ said Mark, ‘this could be very serious. I need to tell my bosses here and the police in London need to know all about it. Could you look up what paperwork you have about these people? The man from Chesterton’s, for instance, he must have had a bloody name even if his clients didn’t. And he must have an address. I’m going up to the hotel now. I may have to take a peek at Estuary House on the way.’

Sergeant Mark Vaughan stopped in the middle of the road and stared up at Estuary House. It was on three storeys with great tall windows on the first floor looking out over the harbour. A balcony ran most of the width of the house. On the top floor there were a couple of rooms with smaller balconies and elaborate railings. The curtains were still drawn on the first floor. On top there was a tiny gap, as if somebody needed room to stare out at the harbour and the little town.

Horace Ross, general manager of the Marine Hotel on the other side of the road, lived next door to Mark Vaughan’s aunt in a house near the waterfront.

‘Horace, you old rogue,’ said the sergeant cheerfully. ‘Why didn’t you report that you had some very strange people staying across the way? People have gone to jail for less, you know.’

Horace Ross laughed. ‘I’ll say they’re strange, young man. Do you know, to this day I’ve only set eyes on the youngest one.’

‘Let’s get down to basics then. How many of them are there and what sort of ages?’

‘There are three of them. I’m sure of that because one of the waiters here saw them all sitting down together once. For the last couple of weeks there seem to have been only two of them. The third one has disappeared, or he’s not been seen.’

‘What on earth was your waiter doing over there?’

‘Sorry, Mark, I should have said. They have a lot of their meals delivered to them from the hotel here. Normally one of our waiters takes the food over on a big tray, two if there are a lot of courses, leaves it by the front door and rings the bell. The time they were all seen together the door was left open and our chap assumed he was meant to bring the supper inside.’

‘Age? Appearance?’ Sergeant Vaughan was writing very quickly in his notebook. Outside the windows in Ross’s office the seagulls were performing their dance to welcome the spring, swooping and soaring and shrieking above the water.

‘Oldest one, mid-fifties perhaps? Middle one with the great black beard, thirty-five or thereabouts, I should think. Youngest one mid-twenties. Oh, and I nearly forgot. The oldest one has lost an eye somewhere along the line. He was wearing a crimson eye patch the day our waiter spotted them all.’

‘See here, Horace, I need to ask you some more questions in a minute. But for now I need your telegraph machine. Right now, if you please. I think we’re going to make a Detective Inspector in the Met very happy indeed.’

Mark Vaughan sent his preliminary report to his Inspector in Kingsbridge. He suggested, and was later instructed, to stay in Salcombe for the rest of the day and gather as much information as he could about the mysterious guests in Estuary House.

This time Inspector Devereux did ring Markham Square with the latest news. ‘Lord Powerscourt?’ He was almost shouting with delight. ‘I think we’re in business. Let me read you this wire from Inspector Timpson in Kingsbridge near Salcombe in Devon.

‘“From Inspector Timpson, Devon County Constabulary. To Inspector Devereux, Metropolitan Police. Re: Triple Murder. Sergeant reports from Salcombe three males
staying in Estuary House, large villa by the sea. House lease arranged by London estate agent, address to follow. Eldest, mid-fifties, has lost eye, wears eye patch. Middle one, middle thirties, has long black beard, not seen for some time. Youngest twenty-five to thirty. No contact with the town. Stay in villa. Meals delivered from local hotel. No names known at all. Locals believe they are plotting a major crime somewhere, man with eye patch the mastermind.” What do you think, my lord?’

‘Excellent news, excellent, Inspector. I think we should pack our buckets and spades and prepare for a holiday by the seaside. Devon is usually bracing at this time of year.’

‘I think we should wait for the news from South Africa, my lord. Then we might have some names. I’ve asked the Kingsbridge police to seal Salcombe off, discreetly, of course, so nobody can get in our out without our knowledge. Their sergeant is making further inquiries in the town. Is there anything you would like to suggest for them?’

‘Laundry?’ said Powerscourt. ‘Is there a laundry facility in Salcombe? Or do they send it over to the hotel? And do they have access to a boat? There must be a reason for going to a place right on the water.’

‘I’ll pass that on, my lord. Hold on, there’s another message coming in. Looks like it might be from South Africa. I’ll call you back.’

Powerscourt stared out into Markham Square. Green was returning to the trees and there was a blaze of daffodils at the King’s Road end. The traffic was stuck again, a line of four red buses seemingly impaled in the middle of the street. He looked again at his atlas, establishing in his mind the precise whereabouts of Salcombe in relation to places like Torquay, Exeter, Brixham and Plymouth. He went to his telephone and placed a call to one Fruity Worthington, a close relation of Lady Lucy’s. By night Fruity was one of the leading lights of the West Country social scene, a tireless frequenter of hunt balls and dinner parties, and, a great boon
to hostesses with a surplus of ladies, he was still single. By day Fruity was a naval captain, based in His Majesty’s Western Fleet Headquarters in the City of Plymouth.

Regards? Regards? I’ll say regards fifty times over, Inspector Miles Devereux said to himself, as he telephoned the news from South Africa to the Powerscourts in Markham Square. The reaction was swift.

‘I’ve been checking the trains,’ said Powerscourt. ‘There’s a fast service that leaves Paddington in an hour or so. Could you catch that? And I’m sure you’ll leave a competent man on duty with those machines in case some more news comes through.’

‘Don’t worry, my lord, I shall join you on the train. I’m going to book us all in at the Marine Hotel. I’ll tell them that you’re a private investigator in case they’re not sure what you’re doing in our team and I’m going to take over the telegraph there for the duration of our stay.’