‘I see,’ Alleyn replied, his mind made up, ‘Now listen Bix, I know the tunnel heads towards the Bridge, under or skirting your offices. I’m going to have a look in the other direction.’
‘I heard it’s blocked that way, Sir.’
‘Yes, I’ve heard the same. Regardless, I’m going to try. I’ll count aloud at a steady pace, one step for each count and I’d like you to do the same. Keep counting even if you can’t hear my voice, will you? When I get to whatever is at the end, I’ll turn and come back, still counting.’
‘Count out loud, Sir, I can do that. Any chance of telling me why?’
‘I could, Bix, and I promise I will, but right now I’d rather like to get on with working out what’s down here before those three soldiers come back knocking on the morgue door with a Victoria sandwich to provide ballast for our cups of tea. Ready? One … two … three …’
‘One … two … three … four …’ Bix started as an echo and quickly matched Alleyn’s pace, even as the detective’s voice became faint, fainter, and then silent.
It took just over two hundred paces, always marching forward, always looking ahead, before Alleyn noticed any change in his surroundings, the gradient beneath his feet felt as if it tipped upwards a little and he raised his hand above his head just in time to stop his forehead cracking into a small jut of outlying rock.
‘I take that back about the troglodytes,’ he thought to himself, continuing to count aloud but lowering his voice, aware that he must be beneath either the wards or the offices by now. For the next sixty steps the gradient continued to rise, until Alleyn found he had to bend his head, always holding his free hand above his forehead to take care he didn’t knock himself out. The length of rope had long come to an end and he was debating whether to keep on towards the caves in this uncomfortable manner when the hand he held above his head registered an end to the stone and then the sure sign of rough wooden boards as a wicked splinter pierced his knuckle and announced a change in roofing material rather more brutally than necessary.
‘Damn and blast it.’ Alleyn was reaching for his handkerchief to stem the flow of blood when he remembered what else was in his breast pocket and how often he had already used the handkerchief as a careful glove. ‘Nothing for it, I shall have to be a mewling boy and suck at the thing to get it out.’
As he carefully removed the splinter Alleyn looked about him in the torchlight. He couldn’t be sure, but he had a sense that the tunnel hadn’t run quite true, he fancied he’d felt a subtle shift to the east. If that was the case, and judging by the number of steps he’d taken so far, he might be nearing the staff offices, perhaps even directly beneath them. The low wooden ceiling above and the possibility that he might be nearing the Transport Office where he had temporarily incarcerated his cast of suspects was hugely enticing, perhaps this was his chance to unpick some of the tangled threads. Taking care to move even more quietly, with the torch low to the ground in case the boards above were not entirely covered by the rich earth of the plains, he moved slowly forward, still counting as he went.
One hundred and thirty-nine steps later his care was rewarded when he heard a low rumble that gradually morphed into several different murmurs of various pitch, and was finally discernible as half a dozen voices, more than one of them passionately raised. He made his way still more diffidently, edging silently towards the sound, his neck and shoulders stooped to the point of discomfort. Eventually he was close enough to determine one voice from another. When looking at the fencing around the bottom of the offices, enclosing the space where they were raised off ground, he’d noticed weed-covered earth beneath, but it must have been a finer layer of soil than he had assumed. It took a few moments for his hearing to adjust to the distortions of distance and density, but eventually he was able to make out a number of different voices, filling in the gaps with guesses of his own where he couldn’t quite make out their words.
‘Unbearable,’ the voice said, followed by a few more words in the same tone, further adverbial furies Alleyn guessed, ‘That we should be … well, you know what I mean, that we … it’s unbearable, when my bosses hear about this … been treated, there’ll be hell to pay. Starting with that … Pommie …’
Alleyn nodded grimly. Glossop was still on his high horse and Alleyn himself the object of his ire. Several other voices responded. One of them, a man’s voice, was in assent, Father O’Sullivan perhaps. Two others, both lighter in tone, the young women’s voices, were demurring.
‘What else could he do? Matron dead … that money missing … someone out here … culprit.’
‘And … forget, there’s … winnings … too.’
So the first must have been Sarah Warne, the second Rosamund Farquharson.
Then another voice took her up on the matter of her winnings, ‘… always about you, Miss Far …’ clearly Sister Comfort was still in a state of high dudgeon, ‘… patients and staff alike … our duty to the hospital … beloved Matron.’
He waited a little longer, hoping to eavesdrop something that might be more useful than the usual gripes, but it seemed the only discussion going on above his head was to do with Maurice Sanders’s opinion about the folly of allowing a Pommie Inspector to take the helm. Rosamund Farquharson opined on the foolishness of thinking they could afford to wait until the local constabulary were able to join them and Glossop grudgingly agreed that the matter was far too important to wait until the lines and the bridge were mended. Alleyn raised an eyebrow, relieved to hear he wasn’t considered entirely surplus to requirements.
He turned back to retrace his steps and started counting under his breath to make sure he and Bix had the correct numbers for comparison. Then he caught a brief exchange that gave him pause.
Rosamund Farquharson must have asked something of Father O’Sullivan, perhaps to do with old Mr Brown’s death, for the vicar responded brusquely and in such a sharp tone that Alleyn had a sudden image of the previously gently-spoken man as a very different kind of vicar when lecturing from the pulpit, ‘Matron and I have … working relationship for a dozen years or … nothing but … welfare of … entrusted to us … forefront in our … You, young … judge everyone by your own lights.’
Something in the vicar’s affronted tone and Rosamund’s sharp retort made Alleyn frown, and then nod, and finally smile as he made his way back along the tunnel retrieving the rope and counting his steps as he went. In another hundred paces the boards above his head once more became the rock of the foothills, and he straightened his neck and shoulders with a sigh of relief. By the time he pulled himself through the cavity in the morgue wall, his face lit by the torch he rolled beneath his chest, he was feeling positively jaunty.
‘Eight hundred and fifty-nine,’ Bix heaved a sigh as he spoke, the effort it had cost him to keep his count on time and in rhythm showed on his face. ‘I never was any good at square-bashing, Sir, they weren’t going to make me Sergeant Major, that’s for sure.’
‘Seven hundred and twenty-four,’ Alleyn countered, ‘I’m a little taller than you, so perhaps our pacing was slightly off, but better than that, I stopped for a few moments while you were no doubt counting merrily away.’
Bix peered at his superior, ‘You look like the cat that got the cream, Sir.’
‘Not quite, but I may have caught a glimpse of a ghost, and that’s cheered me enormously. Your turn, Sergeant, take the rope, hold on tight and pop back into the tunnel, will you?’
‘To check out a ghost, Sir?’ the sensible Bix asked, perplexed.
‘I think not, I’d like you to head south this time and ensure that the tunnel does indeed lead in the direction of the Bridge and that there isn’t a wide open door welcoming anyone to help themselves to the wine cellar.’
‘You’d be hard pushed to find any wine out here, drop of cream sherry maybe.’
Alleyn smiled his thanks and added, ‘Try to be a little faster than I was, will you? I fear our worrisome crew in the Transport Office will turn to mutiny if
I leave them locked up for an awful lot longer.’
‘I’m very happy to head off alone, Sir, if you want to get back to your interviews.’
‘I do rather, Bix. Are you certain you’re up to it? In the tunnel with no one on the other end of the rope?’
Bix grinned, his cheery face quite animated, ‘Sir, we were both in the first war, and glad it was over, damned unhappy when this other fuss started up, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t sometimes envy the younger men their adventures. I’m not scared of ghosts and I’m as sure as you are about where that end of the tunnel leads to. You head off to our merry band of rioters, I’ll take the route south and come on back to join you with proof of the pudding if there’s any to be had.’
‘You’re a good man, Bix, thank you.’
Alleyn clapped him on the back and let himself out of the morgue as Bix struggled through the wall cavity and into the tunnel. The detective emerged into the warm night, whistling ever so softly.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Alleyn took a deep breath as he approached the Transport Office. If anything, now that there was just a thin wooden wall between him and the occupants, the argument within sounded more bad-tempered, simmering tensions closer to the point of boiling over. He stopped, frowning, which way to play it? A show of temper might flush out a few more clues, on the other hand he was tired and frustrated at the vital matter in hand being so effectively derailed by the incidents of the evening. It wouldn’t do to let his temper get the better of him at this point, not when so many others were out of control. He quickly made up his mind and just as the noise inside seemed to reach a peak, he unlocked and slowly opened the office door. A witness to the melee within, Alleyn was treated to the choicest snippets of the assembled cast’s fight scene.
‘You’ve no flippin’ right to talk to me like that, none at all,’ Glossop glared at Rosamund Farquharson, his face a vivid puce, a heavy vein throbbing alarmingly in his temple, ‘Your loss is pathetic compared to mine, I’m by far the most aggrieved party here—’
‘Aggrieving you mean,’ interrupted Maurice Sanders, smirking, with a wink around the room and a flick of his rogue curl.
‘You say that Mr Glossop, but mine’s a personal loss,’ Rosamund said, ‘yours is a company loss and the government will take care of that. Who’s going to make up my own loss, eh? Tell me that.’
‘Loss? I didn’t flamin’ well lose all that cash, missy, it was nicked and now I reckon we all know who did it.’
Glossop paused for breath and grunted in Alleyn’s direction to let him know his presence was noted.
In response, the detective murmured a cool, ‘Pray do tell, Mr Glossop, it will make my night so much simpler.’
His calm tone earned him a mimed round of applause from Rosamund Farquharson which Alleyn acknowledged with a slight nod, his impeccable manners quite lost on Mr Glossop.
‘Welcome back, Inspector, a bit damn late, but welcome back. That Māori’s run off and you can bet he’s taken the whole bloody lot of my payroll back to the pā and squirreled it away.’
‘Shut it, Glossop,’ Maurice Sanders said, with a great deal less charm than he’d exhibited a moment earlier, ‘Cuth’s our mate and our comrade, and if you accuse him of being a thief one more time I’ll shut your mouth for you.’
‘We’ll have less of the language too, thank you, Mr Glossop,’ added Father O’Sullivan.’ ‘There are ladies present.’
‘Ah yeah, make a fuss about my language would you? What’s it you mind, Vicar? Bloody or damn?’
‘Both,’ Rosamund and Sarah spoke together.
‘Fine coming from the pair of you,’ Glossop rounded on the younger women, ‘this hospital is going to rack and ruin, Sister Comfort here’s got no more control over these soldiers than she has over you girls, the pair of you no better than you should be, and yes, I do mean you too, Miss Warne, all butter wouldn’t melt while you cosy up to the young doctor here, and him lapping it up. Don’t think I can’t see what’s going on, you’re plain as day, the lot of you. This place is a farce and I can’t wait to wake up out of it all, it’s a rotten stinking nightmare is what it is.’
‘That’s enough, Mr Glossop,’ Alleyn said, his voice threateningly low. ‘Whatever nightmare you believe yourself to be in, I don’t think any of us need your inchoate ranting to wake the entire hospital.’
‘Maybe it’d be a good thing if I did, about time the patients here knew what a shambles of an outfit it all is,’ Glossop grumbled, determined to have the last word.
‘If you’re quite finished?’ Alleyn’s fixed smile, contrasting sharply with his cool demeanour finally squashed the fat man, who pulled out his damp handkerchief to wipe his sweaty brow, earning him a disgusted wince from Rosamund and Alleyn asked, ‘Now, would anyone like to tell me where Corporal Brayling might be?’
After a moment of blessed silence, Private Pawcett raised wary eyes and mumbled, ‘We don’t flamin’ well know, is the truth of it. He took off about ten minutes ago. Came over all moody and silent and then just said he’d had enough, he had to get out.’
‘But you don’t suspect him of the theft?’
‘Too right we don’t,’ replied Sanders. ‘He’s a good mate is Cuth, and we were with him the whole night anyway.’
‘Other than the half hour or so you say he went off to speak to his wife, at the bend in the river, where the distance is most narrow, so they could speak across the rushing water?’
‘Yeah, sure, but—’
‘Unfortunately not, Private Sanders. No matter how well you personally trust your comrade, and well you might, you do not know what Corporal Brayling was doing in that half hour and neither do I—nor do you, Mr Glossop,’ he said, pre-empting the fat man’s interjection. ‘Now, you will listen to me and listen well.’
Alleyn proceeded to tell them calmly and categorically what he thought of their behaviour. It was a lecture he’d been longing to give for the past few hours and he handled it masterfully, reminding those before him of their stations in life and the confusions and upsets they had witnessed in the past hours. His oration was just finished when there came a perfectly-timed knock on the office door. Alleyn opened it to see Bix standing to the side in the dark.
‘A word, Sir, if I may?’
Alleyn silently thanked Bix for drawing his speech to a close, he had been on the verge of enjoying himself too much, which would have risked inviting scorn rather than the chastened good behaviour he hoped to invoke in his audience.
He turned back to the room, ‘Do try to get along, won’t you? All of you?’
Directing the last to Glossop, he went out to join Bix in the yard.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
‘The tunnel goes to the bridge, Sir, as we figured, but it turns a few times on its way, not as direct as I’d have thought. Mind you, digging around rock, you’d just go the path of least resistance, I reckon.’
‘What did you find?’
‘No ghosts, not even any spirits,’ Bix shone the torch on a dusty bottle in his hand, enjoying his own joke. ‘It leads to the Bridge Hotel’s cellar, all right, or maybe part of it. I came up to a wide part of the tunnel they look to have commandeered for storage, with a locked door beyond it that I reckon leads to the cellar itself. Take a look at this bottle, Sir.’
He handed it over, shining the torch on the bottle in Alleyn’s hand.
‘There were dozens of crates of them, all with no label.’
Alleyn shook his head, frowning. He was trying to rein in the irritation he felt with Bix for spinning out this story when there was so much else to get on with and then, looking at the wide grin on Bix’s face, he suddenly realized, ‘Oh I see, do you think the Bridge Hotel is brewing its own beer and passing it off as stock?’
‘Not quite, Sir, I don’t think you’d get many of the blokes round this way caught out in a trick like that. We New Zealanders are pretty particular about our beer, but you’ve heard of the six o’clock swill?’
‘Yes Bix, I have indeed been introduced to your country’s alarming custom of closing your public houses at six in the evening.’
‘And you’ll understand that the Bridge sometimes stays open a little later than six o’clock?’
‘A policeman’s lot would be an even unhappier one were he committed to enforcing the closing times of every public house in either your nation or in mine.’
‘You’ll get no disagreement from me on that, but Will Kelly said he was drinking lemonade tonight, you remember?’
‘I do.’ Alleyn was smiling, intrigued, as he carefully removed the stopper from the bottle. It took just a sniff of the cork to appreciate that the bottle contained not lemonade but a clear spirit, and a very strong one at that. ‘And I can guess where you’re headed with this, Bix, but surely a man of the world such as Mr Kelly could tell the difference between a sip of lemonade and a sip of home-brewed spirit, sold after hours?’
‘It’s thirsty work, carting bodies about, what if he’d grabbed his bottle of lemonade, taken a big gulp without pausing to check—why would he, if it was his own bottle—and the stuff was so strong it knocked him out, right out? And what if someone had wanted to knock him out so they could switch the bodies? What if they’d put the alcohol in his bottle for that very reason?
Alleyn smiled, ‘It’s true that an awful lot of our work begins with “what if”, but I usually prefer to go on something a little more substantial. Even if we were to assume that Mr Kelly usually spends his long nights sipping from a bottle of lemonade rather than strong spirit, and that someone therefore chose to tamper with his bottle in order to knock him out long enough to swap old Mr Brown’s body for Matron’s, as yet we have no reason for this body swap. That it happened we are sure, why it happened is the conundrum.’
‘Fair point, Inspector.’