CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Dr Hughes followed Alleyn back into the yard and he made for the Records Office, but Alleyn held out a hand to stop him, ‘I’d like to take a quick look at Matron’s office, if you don’t mind accompanying me?’
Hughes nodded his assent and they stopped at the steps to Matron’s office. Alleyn crouched down and peered at the boarding on either side of the steps.
‘All of these buildings are raised off the ground, are they? Offices, wards and army buildings?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Hughes said, ‘I noticed it too when I first arrived. It seems to be very common out here, many of the buildings are raised a foot or two off the ground rather than dug into foundations. They add this skirting effect with boarding to cover the emptiness beneath the building. All of it made of wood, of course.’
‘Less likely to come down in an earthquake, I suppose?’
‘Exactly.’
Alleyn shone Bix’s torch on either side of the steps and along the shallow fence of skirting described by Hughes. ‘I see what you mean. It’s almost as if the offices were just dropped into place by a child playing at building a hospital. They’ve blocks to hold them off the ground. That keeps out the damp as well as potential flooding, I imagine, then this odd little bit of fencing around the bottom to cover the gap and give the illusion that the outer walls go right to the ground. Ingenious.’
Hughes smiled wearily in the dark and Alleyn could hear the resignation in his tone, ‘As I’ve found in my time here, Inspector, there is a great deal in New Zealand that is built on illusion and much of it ingenious indeed.’
‘You shall have to tell me more later, Hughes. For now, would you mind terribly cooling your heels out here while I have a quick look inside Matron’s office? Bix and I meant to give it a once-over on our way back from the morgue but we were dragged away by that damn fool fuss playing out with Glossop at the centre. I shan’t be long.’
Pulling the keys from his pocket, Alleyn let himself into the office. He crossed deliberately to the desk and, after covering his hand with his handkerchief, he reached carefully for the desk lamp. He smiled to himself at the extent of the care he was taking and he thought, ‘There’s likely any number of jumbled prints on the lamp, and no certainty the thief needed the light, but I don’t want to put the noses of the local police out of joint before we’ve even met.’ He found and turned on the lamp. Returning to the door he said to Hughes, ‘An awful bother, I know, but you wouldn’t mind standing in the light here, would you? It won’t do for me to lose my first suspect before interrogation.’
‘When you put it so nicely,’ Hughes responded drily, shifting a step to his left and placing himself in the faint line of warm lamplight.
‘Good man,’ Alleyn nodded pleasantly, turning to continue his study of the office.
It was exactly as they’d left it just over an hour earlier, the safe door wide open, Matron’s leather chair upturned where Glossop had sent it flying, the pile of papers fanned out on Matron’s desk. Alleyn knelt before the safe and shone Bix’s torch into the empty space, confirming what they all knew, the safe was indeed quite empty.
He stared at the open safe for a minute longer, wishing Fox was alongside him and then looked down to Dr Hughes in the yard, ‘Odd, don’t you think, Hughes?’
‘Which part, Inspector?’ Hughes replied with a look around him and an incredulous shrug, ‘I have to say, it all feels very odd to me.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Alleyn answered distractedly, a deep furrow dividing his high brow, ‘I meant that the safe was left open, unlocked. The lock was not forced, which means the thief had a key and yet they did not lock the safe after them, which would at least have ensured the theft remained undiscovered until Matron came to return the payroll to Mr Glossop in the morning. Odd.’
‘Perhaps someone disturbed them? Or they lost it in the act of transferring the payroll?’
‘Perhaps,’ Alleyn acceded and then turned his attention to the mess of papers on the desk.
He leafed through the scattered pages using his pen to separate them. There were a few letters to do with medical matters and specific patients, but the bulk of the papers were bills and quite overdue ones at that. The sums in themselves were not enormous, but the accumulated total was such that any establishment would find it difficult to repay without a serious windfall or a generous benefactor, ideally both. He sifted through the letters again, carefully checking the dates at the top of each one. While they were not in the tidy order he might have expected given Matron’s attention to duty, they were, more or less, dated consecutively, as if someone had been through them hurriedly, pushing the papers apart to find one they sought above all others. Eventually he found one letter that was neither a medical letter nor a bill. He carefully inched it out from the pile and frowned as he read it. When he turned to the post-script he whistled softly to himself. ‘Oh gods. That poor woman.’ Alleyn checked himself. He’d instructed his men often enough that it did no good to feel pity for anyone at this stage of the game, not when there was much still to discover about the players.
Alleyn carefully folded the letter, the handkerchief covering his long fingers, and slid it into another envelope from the stack on the shelf beside Matron’s desk. Once it was safely stowed, he folded the envelope and put it in his pocket. Touching his pipe, a thought occurred to him.
‘I wonder, Hughes,’ he said, crossing to the door where the doctor waited, ‘if you might accommodate me? I’ve been cooped up all evening in that private room in Military 1—’
‘On your mysterious “other business”, Inspector?’
‘Quite so,’ Alleyn replied briskly. ‘And I’d very much like a tour of the grounds. If you don’t mind we could walk and talk, and I’ll take the opportunity to smoke a pipe.’
‘Do you always offer your potential suspects the choice of location for their interrogation?’ Hughes asked, finding himself a little relaxed for the first time that evening and thinking that perhaps, under other circumstances, he might rather enjoy the company of his fellow Englishman.
‘Only those I feel have something they’d like to say.’
‘Oh,’ Hughes said with a frown, his shoulders and stomach instantly tense once more. ‘I had no idea I was so very obvious.’
‘Now then, young cub, don’t go all petulant on me,’ Alleyn rejoined. ‘I’m just rather well practised at this bit of detecting, and I far prefer to speak with one who wants to talk than with those from whom I am forced to poke and pry their secrets. What do you say?’
‘Do I—do I have a secret to tell you?’ Dr Hughes stuttered, sounding shaken.
‘Would you like a walk, Hughes?’
‘Ah. Yes. I would. Yes, thank you, Sir.’
‘Good-oh.’
Now that the wind had swept away the clouds of the evening, the combination of a newly-risen half-moon and the vast sweep of the Milky Way led Alleyn to decide there was enough light for them to walk without the torch. He had an idea that Hughes might be more willing to talk in less light.
‘Are you all right without the torch, Hughes?’
‘I prefer it, Sir. Especially if you’re to interrogate me.’
‘I imagine a villain might feel the same,’ Alleyn said lightly.
There was a wry smile in Hughes’s voice as he replied, ‘But would a villain have the sense to point it out?’
‘A canny one might, hoping to take the old man for a fool.’
‘But you are neither old nor a fool, Inspector.’
‘You flatter me. Let’s begin.’
At first Dr Hughes responded monosyllabically to Alleyn’s questions about his training, his work in the field and his initial reluctance to stay in New Zealand. He opened up when he admitted that, adept as he had become at patching up young men to send them back to war, he did so with a terrible ambivalence.
‘I want to heal them, that’s my job, my calling you might say. I’ve wanted to be a doctor for as long as I can remember and
a surgeon ever since I started my training. But at the same time I feel very strongly that I want to keep them safe, and I know they’re safer here, in hospital. Not that they’d thank me for doing so.’
Alleyn asked, ‘Do you also wish to keep yourself safe?’
‘I’m not a coward, Inspector,’ Hughes bridled at the suggestion.
‘I know that,’ Alleyn said simply, ‘but you have seen action. It wouldn’t be wicked to wish to preserve your own life, just as you wish to preserve the lives of others.’
Alleyn knew it would be useful in the coming hours to use the payroll theft and the revelation of Matron’s body to ask questions that might also shine a light on his espionage inquiry, and Hughes seemed to be labouring under a painful self-imposed silence. Just as Alleyn was gearing himself up to play the hard man, Hughes stopped in his tracks.
‘I need to tell you something, Sir.’
‘And must we stand still while you do?’
‘Oh no, I’m sorry. Of course not.’
They walked on along the yard and around to the main entrance where Alleyn had previously noted a well-placed bench. The sound of the swollen river ever closer, Alleyn felt rather than saw Hughes’s fear, heard it in his careful step, his fretful sigh. He’d hoped the young man would simply blurt it out, whatever it was, but it was not to be.
‘Honestly, Hughes, do you really want me to probe? I will if I must, but I find that part of the business awfully distasteful and I’d far rather not.’
‘I’ll say it. I’ve been a damned fool, Inspector.’
‘A fool but not a thief?’
‘You shall judge.’
Ahead in the darkness the river sung out its swollen speed. Alleyn imagined it must be very high now and wondered how much of the storm had taken place up in the mountains themselves, if there was still a great deal of water to flow downhill towards the hospital, crashing over the brutal boulders and biting at the riverbank. They took their seats on the bench thoughtfully provided for hospital visitors who might need a break from the bustle and worry inside the complex of buildings. The two men sat companionably as Alleyn carefully filled and lit his pipe, took a long draw, waited for Hughes to light his cigarette, and finally the detective spoke into the night air, ‘I’ve been as patient as I can, Dr Hughes, but there are several others awaiting their turn in the confessional. Come on now, spit it out.’
‘Very well. I love Sarah, Inspector. Deeply. But I know I am not good enough for her.’
‘Indeed?’
‘I had a terrible time of it on my last trip out. Dreadful. And now I fear I am broken. I wake in the night, crying and sweating, I see visions of the men I tried, and failed, to save. You know, Inspector, Matron is, oh damn it all, she was a great boon to me. She’s been a nurse for many years, she listened to me. Sometimes people don’t want to know how it is, but she let me speak. I told her some—’ he hesitated, ‘some tales. I told her some of the things we were forced to do out there, by circumstance, you understand. There were methods we employed, unorthodox methods. I became skilled at putting men out of their suffering, often for all too brief a moment. On many occasions my surgical skills were useless. Very often the best I could offer was relief from pain and perhaps, sometimes …’
His voice broke off and Alleyn spoke into the night, careful not to look at the young man on his right, ‘Do try to remember, I am a policeman, Hughes.’
‘I do, but you have seen battle, I think?’
‘Yes. And I have known many men use their professional skills to do what they could for the injured, the broken, and those beyond salvation.’
‘So you know what I—’
Dr Hughes heard the warning in Alleyn’s voice when the detective interrupted brusquely, ‘I know only what you tell me.’ Alleyn waited a moment and then prompted, ‘Men have suffered terrible things in war and come home broken, and women have still loved them, stood by them. Are you sure that’s all there is to say?’
‘All?’ asked Hughes in despair, ‘I’m a wreck. At first I hated being here in New Zealand, hated feeling as if I’d escaped while my fellows were still in the thick of it. But then I hoped that the quiet out here might help, the nightmares might stop if I concentrated on doing my best for the men in these wards.’
‘Did it work?’
‘For a while, yes, all was calm, but for the past month or so, in fact since I began to settle here ever such a little, the nightmares have come back with a vengeance. I cannot stand to look at a corpse, I start shaking if I’m alone with a body. I could barely cope with the old man’s death earlier tonight and you saw me funk your order to examine Matron’s body. I can’t …’ He stopped and his voice was very quiet when he said, ‘Sarah deserves better than me. She deserves a man who is not a coward.’
‘Have you said any of this to her?’
Hughes shook his head, ‘I can’t. I’ve mentioned concerns about money, let her believe I’m in debt. I thought perhaps if she thought I was less of a—’
‘A catch?’
‘Oh no, she’s not like that, not at all.’
‘But even so, you’re willing to treat her as if she is “like that”, rather than explain what is truly troubling you?’ Alleyn waited a moment before he went on, and when Dr Hughes did not respond his tone was very stern, ‘I don’t know Miss Warne, but she doesn’t strike me as the charmed life sort of girl. I imagine she might be very understanding if you could bring yourself to tell her the truth—the whole truth, mind,’ he added quietly.
Hughes turned to Alleyn in horror, ‘Is that what you’d do?’
Alleyn groaned, ‘Dear God, you don’t want to know what I’d do, it’s what I’d advise. My own record of speaking my heart to young women is neither here nor there. You’re being a fool, Hughes, to yourself and to Miss Warne, and you know damned well what I’m talking about.’
‘I don’t—I’m not—’
Alleyn listened as Hughes attempted to claim otherwise and then gave up in the throes of the attempt. He spoke firmly, ‘You are and you do. There’s something else you’re not telling me and it’s as plain as day. As plain as Orion up there,’ he said, pointing to the vivid constellation above. ‘You really ought to say it yourself, it will be much nastier if I have to dig.’
‘Damn you, Alleyn, I can’t,’ Hughes muttered, bent forward, his head in his hands covering his face, ‘Even if it means you suspect me all the more, I cannot say it.’
Alleyn sighed, ‘Then we’d best get back and I’ll take on the next initiate. I’m sorry you’re suffering, Hughes, you’re not the first man to do so and you won’t be the last. There will no doubt be many more like you before this blasted war is out. I truly do not think a case of shell-shock or whatever they’re calling it these days is any reason to disqualify yourself from happiness with a young lady you say you love. I’m going to stick my neck out here and say that your bad case of guilty conscience may have less to do with the heat of battle or the events afterwards than you imagine. I’d hazard a guess that you’ve been the kind of idiot that gives young men a bad name. I’ll also state that you’re continuing to behave like an idiot by not telling me the whole truth.’ Alleyn stood up swiftly, stretching his long legs, and spoke over his shoulder to Hughes as he sped up, leading them back towards the hospital buildings, ‘I shall take my next victim to the Records Office, and while I’m hard at it, you and Bix must go down to the morgue, he can keep an eye on you and you can take a quick look at Matron.’ He spoke over Hughes’s demurral, ‘I’m sorry to ask, but you need do nothing more than assure me that she did not get knocked over the head or have her throat cut, anything else we shall leave to the local officers. Do you think you can manage that if Bix is with you?’
Hughes muttered an unhappy assent and Alleyn asked, ‘Now, who do you think I ought to question next? Our good vicar, the three boisterous soldiers, or perhaps one of Helena or Hermia?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘It’s midsummer night, although I fear there
will be no dreaming for any of us. Which young lady shall I interview next, the tall and fair Miss Farquharson or the small and dark Miss Warne?’
Not sure whether or not to consider himself in disgrace, the young doctor spoke into the dark, ‘Oh, well, I really couldn’t say, Sir.’
‘No, I rather thought you might come over all coy at that question. Look here, Hughes,’ Alleyn stopped himself, he was already overstepping his boundaries in taking this case on in the middle of the night, with Bix as his only support, then he shrugged and said it anyway, ‘In for a penny—look Hughes, I simply think, and I’m no expert on the ways of love or of women, but I do believe in making a clean breast of things if at all possible. Be honest with the girl, tell her what you feel, your situation, your fears if you can. What have you got to lose by coming clean?’
‘Everything, Sir, that’s the problem.’
Alleyn shook his head at the young man’s words, ‘In which case I imagine you’re not keen to be locked up in the Transport Office with everyone else?’
‘Not especially. There is another pressing issue though.’
‘More pressing than a visit to the morgue?’
‘I really ought to check on the wards, I have a few patients I like to see at this time of night, they’re in a great deal of pain and don’t sleep at all well. Sometimes it helps to have a friendly ear.’
‘Ah, so you’re medical doctor turned father confessor?’
‘If it’s useful. I want to be useful.’
‘I’m sure you do.’
‘We usually check on the night nurses around this time too, make sure everything is in order. It wouldn’t do for them to suspect something’s going on, would it?’
Alleyn rubbed his nose, ‘No it wouldn’t, well thought. Although I rather fear the cat may be out of the bag before dawn. Very well, take Sergeant Bix on your rounds with you, and as soon as you’re done, the pair of you can head down to the morgue. I know,’ he said, as Hughes started to protest, ‘I’m asking you to take on what I know must be an extremely distasteful task, one any friend of Matron’s might blanch at, let alone a young man ostensibly in her employ, because I need your help. Given what you’ve told me, or rather what you’ve not told me, I should think you’d be more than willing to find a way to get on my good side. Am I right?’