Money in the Morgue: The New Inspector Alleyn Mystery. Stella Duffy

with Private Sanders, and don’t make that face, I could hardly have failed to notice, you have the entire team of VADs gossiping about you, and goodness knows what the soldiers in Military 1 say in private, given their words in public are bad enough. There is a man dying here tonight, alone but for a grandson who, I now discover, barely knows him and chose not to visit him until tonight, despite several requests. You have a chance to redeem yourself, take the consequences of your actions and get to work on a new start. It is the one chance I will give you.’

      Matron’s voice was low and considered, but her words cut far deeper than Sister Comfort’s scolding. Rosamund tried to respond but, when she opened her mouth, she found she had no words to express her shock. Matron nodded in satisfaction.

      ‘Leave your winnings with me, I shall lock the money in my safe and, when your shift is finished in the morning, you may collect the balance of ninety pounds.’

      Matron finished her words, emphasising the word ‘ninety’ to assure Rosamund that she meant to follow through with her threat.

      Rosamund clicked open her purse, dumped the bundle of notes on Matron’s desk and rushed from the office. Had she been in any state to slam the door behind her, she would have done, instead the warm wind did the job for her, slamming the door and rattling the whole office with its force.

      Matron sat down and looked at the notes, at the key in her hand, and the neatly gathered pile of unpaid demands littering her desk. The small office shuddered as another gust of wind battered the thin weatherboard walls, a shock of lightning briefly lit the sky beyond the bare window, a stronger crack of thunder hard on its heels, and finally the downpour began. Matron leaned back in her worn leather chair and nodded. At least the torrent would keep anyone else from her door for the moment.

       CHAPTER SIX

      The occupant of the private room at the front of Military 1 was also having a difficult evening. He had been trying for some time to write a letter, a letter that was overdue and yet, for the life of him, he couldn’t seem to put pen to paper this evening. Nor had he managed to do so on any of the three evenings preceding. The rain now drumming a fierce tattoo on the corrugated iron roof above, syncopated with that which fell on the curved frame of the porch beyond, might have had something to do with it, but he feared his inability to express himself on paper was the symptom of a deeper malaise. It was just possible that he was homesick.

      ‘My dearest Troy’, he began again.

      He stopped, looked at the page, crossed out the three words and took a clean sheet of paper.

      ‘Darling Troy’.

      Shaking his head, he took up a third sheet of paper and tried once more.

      ‘My Troy’.

      Again he faltered. ‘You utter dolt, Alleyn,’ he whispered to himself, conscious of the ward full of men mere feet away beyond the flimsy partition walls that formed the small private room he had been assigned as the base for this operation.

      ‘Troy is far from being a fool,’ he went on, ‘she knows very well there is a great deal to do with your work that you cannot say to her and even more that you struggle to say in person, let alone on paper. And God knows when this letter will get to her. Just write the words, you blasted idiot.’

      He could not. Whether it was the incessant rain drowning all possibility of contemplation, or the sense of several dozen men beyond the thin walls, few of them sleeping, all with their own worries, all missing their own loved ones, Alleyn knew himself defeated.

      He stepped away from the small table that served as a desk, stretching as he did so. He reached for his pipe and lit it, holding the match for a moment in his long, thin fingers. By the light of the match, and that thrown from the dimmed desk lamp, he saw himself reflected in the side window. A tall man stared back, a raised eyebrow rapidly followed by a frown. He rubbed his nose and sighed, cracking the window open a little further to shift the reflection and let in the scent of the drenched roses that were all about the hospital. The roses, at least, would be glad of the rain. Alleyn was glad of it himself, he’d been sleeping badly in the fierce heat of the past week, and it hadn’t helped that the secrecy of his task here at Mount Seager meant he had been cooped up in this private room almost the whole time since he had arrived under cover of darkness a week earlier, awaiting word from his superiors. The reason for his arrival at Mount Seager was known only to Alleyn himself, the Chair of the Hospital Board, an old and trusted friend of the most senior man in the New Zealand police force, and a single contact at the hospital. Matron appeared to have bought the story that Alleyn was the Chair’s English cousin, a writer collecting traditional tales in the Antipodes, cut off from home by the war and struck down by the kind of nervous distress known only to the most modern of artists and then only those with a private income. The tale was given out that he needed rest and quiet, and so rest and quiet—or as much as the men of Military 1 would allow—had been prescribed. He had been in place for the past week, listening through the partition walls, noting movement beyond this side window and the smaller one that opened onto the porch with a good view of the yard beyond, and studying the notes and observations passed on by his contact. As yet, there had been no development worth reporting to his superiors and nothing at all to write to Troy.

      Alleyn looked at the travel alarm clock on his table, it was almost a quarter past ten. The grumbling and subdued guffaws of the men next door would abate soon. He sat down at the table, took up a clean sheet of paper and tried again.

       My dear Fox,

       As will be abundantly clear to you, my perspicacious friend, I am now well and truly arrived in New Zealand. You know I began my work in Auckland, welcomed rather fulsomely by the estimable local police force of that fair city. You will understand when I say I am grateful to have been spared their enthusiasm any longer. I was diverted almost at once from my appointed city and, that matter dealt with—a longer tale, for another time—I have been sent on dispatches to an altogether different part of this astonishing land. Of course I am not able to indicate precisely where, suffice it to say that were I allowed to have a good look around I should come back to you with tales of glorious scenery and majestic landscapes. There is, understandably, a growing unease to do with matters offshore. For those of us at home in London it has, I confess, been a little too easy to assume these lands at the end of the earth are safe from the ravages of war, but while their cities remain unharmed, their people are a different matter. A great many sons have left for King and Country, and too many have not returned. Those who have returned have often done so in very different health from that with which they left. There is a mix of concern for ‘Home’ as many of them still call it, an understandable concern for their own young men, coupled with a palpable worry that Japan is edging closer by the day. I must say, I fear they are right and it turns out my superiors in this endeavour hold the same view, with good cause. It is to be hoped that Troy is as accommodating as our own dear Scotland Yard. In addition to the personal trials of being so long from home, I admit to finding the idea of yet another summer Christmas quite absurd, however extraordinary the surrounding scenery. I fear I shall never accustom myself to the idea of good old St Nick in cricket whites. The time, Brer Fox, is quite out of joint.

       I shan’t go into the details of my current abode, other than to say that my legendary skills have detected not one but two affairs of the heart that are, true to form, failing to run smooth. I have also noted an understandable if tiresome degree of complaint from the stout fellows confined to the ward rather than barracks. The Matron here has a very modern approach to their convalescence, giving them ample opportunity, once they are well enough, to roam the grounds, play card and board games, read from well-stocked shelves. She maintains that distracting them from their injuries and illness will afford them far faster recuperation than the more usual enforced rest. She may well be right, they are very young after all, and young heads can be easily swayed when difficulty hits. Many of these chaps are the good sort who signed up right away, gung-ho and ready to take on the worst that Hitler could throw at them, the youngest among them have had to grow up awfully fast. No doubt they’ve