Death at the Jesus Hospital (6 page)

Shortly after eight o’clock the next morning Powerscourt met Inspector Grime outside the main entrance to the school. Over from their left came the enormous racket of one hundred and fifty boys eating their breakfasts at the same time. In front of the buildings a severe frost had turned the playing fields almost white.

‘No more murders in the night anyway,’ said the Inspector morosely. ‘I suppose our man’s got clean away by now, damn his eyes. Hospital first for you, my lord. Ask for Dr Pike, as in fish, he’s expecting you. Then we’ve left the
bursar’s
quarters exactly as they were before he died for you, before we start taking things away. The headmaster wants his office papers and the ones in his room left where they are now. Count yourself lucky, my lord. I’ve got the three youngest classes to talk to this morning. One at a time, for God’s sake. Might as well listen to the birds on the marshes as this lot. All those maps and globes in that room get me down. I always hated geography when I was at school, the teacher used to steal our pencils when he thought we weren’t looking. Never mind. I’ll see you later this morning. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. God help us all.’

The boys were being released from breakfast,
charging
down the corridors to find their books for early
lessons
. A tall boy of about eighteen in a striped blazer, who Powerscourt thought must be a prefect, was shouting at them. ‘How many times do I have to tell you! Walk, don’t run in the corridor!’

The hospital was new, the paint still fresh, the walls not marked by the passage of too many trolleys. Dr Pike was
a young man of about thirty who told Powerscourt
cheerfully
that he had no idea about the marks on the chest, that death must have been almost instantaneous, and that the murderer must have had very strong arms. Death, he said, must have happened between the hours of eight and nine thirty. To Powerscourt’s surprise he inquired about Inspector Grime.

‘How is the good Inspector these days? Is he still as
miserable
and morose as ever? He came here last year to
investigate
some nasty thefts from the dispensary and we almost kept him in he was so gloomy. Might have cheered him up, a week or so on the mental ward with people even more disturbed than he is.’

‘Since you ask,’ Powerscourt replied with a smile, ‘I’d have to report that there appears to be little change in the patient’s condition. Barometer permanently set to miserable, as far as I can see. He seems a capable officer, mind you.’

‘Oh, he is. He cleared up our burglary very quickly. Send him my regards anyway. Tell him we often think of him up here at the hospital.’

The late bursar’s rooms were on the top floor of the new building. He had a large sitting room and a tiny bedroom at the back. Powerscourt saw that one long wall was entirely covered with files. Bursar Gill, it appeared, had been a
careful
man. Looking closer, Powerscourt discovered that Gill had been one of those people who never threw anything away, the years marching across the wall to end in the year 1909. In this universe of files, 1910 had not yet begun. Not for him the annual cull of useless papers, sorted into the good and the useless between Christmas and the New Year. The earliest file went back to 1855 when Gill was seven years old. There were papers relating to his early schooling, even a report or two from a well-known prep school near Oxford, ‘very quiet in class’, ‘shows promise in
mathematics
’, ‘poor grasp of Greek grammar’. But then there was a gap in the files. From 1865 to 1880 there was nothing at all.
Powerscourt wondered if these were the files that Gill had been burning in his last days, some in the college
incinerator,
some in his own grate. Perhaps he had simply changed his mind about filing, a young man with better and more interesting things to do with his time than pushing pieces of paper into folders. Perhaps he had spent his entire life in those years pursuing women over forty.

In the years that followed there was a file a year,
sometimes
two. They showed that Gill had worked for years for a firm of accountants in London before coming to Norfolk. His years at Allison’s were thoroughly covered, though Powerscourt noticed that the subject matter was always in the public sphere, details of the estimates for the new buildings put up around the turn of the century, records of the annual financial performance of the school, separate sections for his role as the treasurer at the church. But of
correspondence
with ladies, under or over forty, there was no trace at all. Of anything that might have made him fearful in his last days there was no sign either. Powerscourt looked closely at the bottom of the grate in case the remains of any documents were still to be found among the ash but there was nothing. He wondered if Gill had a secret hiding place somewhere in this room where compromising or frightening letters might be found. He decided to ask Inspector Grime’s men to test the room for such a place. Grime could authorize that in a murder hunt. He, Powerscourt, could not.

When he discussed it with the Inspector at break time that morning he found the policeman in unusually
cheerful
mood. ‘It might be nothing, it probably is,’ he said to Powerscourt, walking slowly along the front of the
dormitory
block, ‘but one of those young hooligans said
something
very interesting to me this morning. I’ve heard all sorts of rubbish. You’d think they had better things to do with their time than read the works of Sexton Blake, but no. Most of the boys had theories that were wildly improbable. But just this one lad, fourteen years old, looking exactly like
the choirboy he is, gave me a very interesting snippet. It was the postman, he said. What was the postman doing there that early in the corridor where Roderick Gill’s office was? Postmen don’t usually arrive till mid-morning break. And he thought, but he wasn’t sure, that this wasn’t the usual postman. Now here, my lord, here is where he becomes a credible witness, young Ewart Jenkins. When I asked him how the postman was different, taller, shorter, fatter, that sort of thing, he said he couldn’t answer, he couldn’t be sure. If I went on making suggestions, he said, he would get confused. He was sure about what he had told me, but no more. I’m going to talk to the postal people once I’ve finished with the lower forms. One of their senior men lives a couple of doors from me.’

Shortly before lunch it began to snow. It fell quickly,
settling
on the roofs of the red brick buildings, obliterating the grass on the playing fields. Out in the Wild West beyond the football pitches a junior gardener reported that the lake was frozen. If the weather went on like this for a day or two, he said, the ice might be firm enough for skating. With the snow came a bitter wind that blew the snow into drifts up against the school windows and rendered the headmaster’s car virtually invisible just outside the front door. One of the younger science teachers brought out a series of sticks he had used in years gone by. He got the boys to place them in different places around the school and to write down in their notebooks the height of the snow on all the days it remained. The teacher believed this would teach his pupils the value of experiments and the proper collection of data.

The weather put the headmaster in a remarkably good mood. He observed with glee to his deputy, a very boring man who had been teaching the same history syllabus for over thirty years – at this point in the school year, towards the end of January, it was time to kill Cromwell off for
the senior forms and move on to the Restoration – that at least those wretched mothers would not be turning out to complain in the same numbers. He so hoped, he said, with a singular lack of Christian charity, that they would be bloody well snowed in for days, if not weeks.

In the lunch break smaller boys began construction of a vast snowman which Powerscourt thought was going to be on the same scale as the Statue of Liberty on Ellis Island in New York. Elder boys organized snowball fights. The prefects in their striped blazers tried to look superior,
gazing
with lofty indifference on the activities of their younger brothers and schoolfellows as if they, the prefects, had put away these childish things years before.

Powerscourt wondered if the snow made the business of detection easier or more difficult and decided it made no difference at all. That afternoon, while the Inspector departed to talk to the Royal Mail, he proposed to call on the late Roderick Gill’s mistress. The Inspector was delighted Powerscourt had taken on this particular assignment.

‘Fact is, my lord,’ he said, neatly dodging a long-distance snowball sent his way by the finest fielder in the First Eleven, ‘I think you’ll do that much better than I would. I’m actually not sure I could bring myself to start asking questions about her affair with Gill, if that’s the right way to put it. I’d be too embarrassed.’

‘I’m afraid I’ve had these kinds of conversations before,’ said Powerscourt. ‘They’re not too bad as long as you keep the whole thing as matter-of-fact as possible. Don’t even think of mentioning the word love. It would only set them off.’

‘Good God! How absolutely frightful for you. I’ll be much happier with the postmen.’

Twenty minutes later Powerscourt was walking up the Cromer Road to Mrs Mitchell’s house just beyond the
postbox.
The snow was still falling, the countryside almost
obliterated
by its thick white coat. The house was a two-storey
cottage with a thatched roof and ancient windows. Mrs Mitchell, when she answered the door, was not ancient at all. Powerscourt thought she looked much younger than the forty years assigned to her by the headmaster. She was blonde with soft blue eyes, her figure almost totally
concealed
behind a large blue apron dotted with bunny rabbits.

‘Please forgive me,’ she said, pointing to her apron, when Powerscourt had made his introductions. ‘I was just making a cake for the children’s tea. They’ll be so excited about the snow.’

Powerscourt had timed his arrival for the gap after lunch before any children might be home from their lessons. Mrs Mitchell showed him into a small chair by the fire.

‘I expect you’ve come about Roddy,’ she began. ‘The vicar told me about his death yesterday. It’s terrible, just terrible, he was such a kind man.’

‘Please forgive me, Mrs Mitchell, if I have to ask some difficult questions. I’m afraid death and murder have no respect for people’s history or their emotional lives. Could I ask when you first became friends?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘Not the particular day, just the time of year.’ Avoid the ‘l’ word at all costs, he reminded himself again. Friendship was a much duller word, but useful on occasions.

‘It must have been two years ago,’ she replied, ‘round about the time of the Harvest Festival. I always help out in St Peter and Paul round about then and Roddy was in the church a lot, working on the accounts. He had to present them to the parish council the week after.’

‘So the friendship developed in the weeks and months after that service?’ said Powerscourt, wondering what would happen if he had asked when they became close.

‘Well, yes,’ Mrs Mitchell said, blushing slightly. ‘It would have been about the middle of December. Jude, my
husband,
was away a lot around then, working at York Minster.’

‘Quite so,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I’m not concerned with the nature of your relationship with the bursar, Mrs Mitchell,
but I would like to know about Mr Gill’s state of mind in the weeks before he died.’

‘It’s so strange hearing you call him Mr Gill,’ she said. ‘He was always Roddy to me.’

‘What did the vicar say about the manner of his death, may I ask?’

She gazed into the fire. Outside on the window sill an angry robin was staring at them, as if it blamed them for the snow. ‘He told me Roddy had been murdered,’ she said finally, ‘by a person or persons unknown, as he put it. What a terrible phrase. So impersonal.’

Powerscourt supposed the information must have reached the vicar via the headmaster.

‘Well, I’m afraid he was, murdered, I mean. That’s why it’s important we know about his state of mind.’ Powerscourt was speaking as gently as he knew how. He suspected Mrs Mitchell might burst into tears at any minute and he would have to leave. ‘One of his colleagues told me he was worried about something in the last weeks,’ he went on.

‘I couldn’t say,’ she said ‘All the time I knew him he was a very calm person. He was like a sailing ship that never had to adjust the sails, if you know what I mean. Things might change around him but he stayed the same, calm and quiet and matter-of-fact.’

‘Just what you would expect from somebody who trained as an accountant,’ said Powerscourt. ‘But you didn’t notice any changes in the weeks before he died?’

Mrs Mitchell looked into the fire once more. ‘I don’t know,’ she said at last. ‘He didn’t tell me. And I hadn’t been seeing as much of Roddy as I used to, these last three or four months. He was so busy on the history of the relations between the Silkworkers and the school and trying to work out if the changes were going to help Allison’s or not. But I do remember him saying that the past never leaves you alone, never.’

Powerscourt wondered about the missing years in the
filing system on the shelves of Gill’s room. ‘Did he talk to you about his earlier life at all, about growing up, being a young man, that sort of thing?’

‘No, he didn’t, Lord Powerscourt. Oh dear, you must think I’m a terrible witness, unable to answer so many of your questions. He never talked to me about any previous women in his time either. It was as if,’ she paused for a moment, ‘as if I was the first woman in his life. That’s how it seemed to me at the time, anyway. Thinking about it now, I’m sure I wasn’t the first one, not by a long chalk. But I’m not complaining. I can’t make a fuss about the times when I didn’t know him.’

‘How very sensible,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Did he ever tell you if he had been
married
before? Before he knew you, I mean?’