“Carry on, Gosling,” was Joe’s.
They rounded a bend, and there it was on a hilltop, silhouetted against the dying orange glow of the western sky. Gosling’s foot came off the accelerator, and the car shuddered to a halt.
“Blimey! What do we make of that? We’ve bolted down the wrong rabbit hole. Surely this isn’t what we’re looking for?” he said.
“Told you so! Let’s get back to the main road. We’re wasting time,” Dorcas snapped.
“Shush!” Joe said. “It’s not the cottage hospital I was expecting. More like a country house hospital! Grand. Extensive grounds.”
“ ‘Gothick pile dramatically placed within vestiges of monastic edifice … c. 1860,’ would the guide book say?”
“Yes. I think so. Mid-Victorian, I’d guess. And, say what you like about Mid-Victorians, when it came to throwing up a crenellation or two, they didn’t stint.”
“That’s not a hospital,” said Dorcas firmly. “It’s someone’s estate.”
“She’s right. It can’t be a hospital, sir.”
“If it is a hospital, it was put up with a good deal of loving care and pots of money by some doubtless Gradgrinding mill-owner to assuage a guilty conscience. There’s one like that on almost every hilltop in this county. Philanthropists trying to outdo each other in the charity stakes. Shall we go on up?”
“Wait a minute!” Gosling said. “What we don’t see is ambulances and other hospital vehicles parked at the ready in the grounds. No one coming or going. Who would come out all this way for medical care anyway? You’d go south on the main road to Brighton or north to London. Listen, I don’t think this is right.” Gosling squirmed in his seat. “Over there, still covered in snow. There’s a name plaque of sorts. Give me the torch, Dorcas.”
“Here you are. Do you want to borrow a glove, George?”
He dismissed the offer with a grin, got out and, with broad sweeps of his bare hand, cleared the marker and shone the torch full on the golden curlicued letters. In silence they read:
Prince Albert’s Hospital for the Mentally Afflicted.
Gosling got back in and said, grumpily, “We’ve wasted half an hour. Not a hospital at all! It’s a mental asylum! A loony bin! The chauffeur would never have brought the boy here. We’d better get back onto the main road and pick up the trail again.” He started to turn the key.
“No! Stop!” Joe yelled at him. “It’s exactly where he might have brought him. And exactly the place where he could have received treatment. Spielman wasn’t mentally ill, we know that. But.… But. These places have the facilities.… Don’t they, Dorcas?”
She was finding her words awkward to get out. “I’m afraid they do. Perhaps you didn’t know that over ten percent of the patients in the country’s asylums are … epileptics. And, no, they are not mentally deranged or dangerous by our reasoning but by law are classed as defective, and the asylums have to take them in when they are submitted. A certificate signed by two doctors will do it. If you consult the Schedule of Forms of Insanity you’ll find it: ‘Diseases of the nervous system.’ Epilepsy. K3. Listed alongside sunstroke and syphilis, probably.”
“So, a sufferer from epilepsy can be put away in one of these places and kept out of society for the rest of his life and no one will ever question it?” Gosling sounded shocked.
They stared at the darkening façade of the vast building. “A thousand patients, at least, they probably house in there,” Dorcas said. “So there’s a good chance that a hundred of them are epileptics.”
“And now it could be a hundred and one,” Gosling’s voice was grim. “A coincidence, are we wondering? Look, I have to say Spielman was showing none of the warning signs when he stepped into that Daimler with his book tucked under his arm. He’d had an attack just last week. I’m no expert but, as his games master, I had noticed they occurred at a few weeks’ distance from each other.”
“Prearranged? Taken away and locked up in a lunatic asylum without his mother’s knowledge?” Joe said. “I think we should find out.”
Was it the sun sinking lower behind the hills, the raucous calls of rooks returning to their nests in the elms that stood sentinel in the parkland, or a sudden dip in energy that made Joe’s heart drop to his boots? The crenellations he had been admiring were no longer stylish but forbidding. “Halt! Who goes there?” they said. Joe searched in vain for a password.
“What are we waiting for?” Gosling said urgently. “Let’s see if we’ve beaten Herr Spielman to it.”
Martin sank to his knees in the slush and stared at the weapon. He took the paper evidence bag the constable was holding out to him, wrote on the outside in indelible pencil, added his signature, and then picked up the knife delicately at the join between blade and shaft with his handkerchief around his fingers.
“On your bike, constable,” he said, handing over the bag. “Put this in the messenger bag and take it to the nick. I’ve told them to expect it by teatime. They’ll get it to Brighton tonight, and we might know by tomorrow whose prints are on there. If we’re lucky. Oh, and tell the sergeant I’m popping down to Ma Bellefoy’s for a cup of tea and a chat, will you?”
His welcome was what he had come to expect over the last few days: warm, even slightly flirtatious, but with an underlying reserve.
The inspector blew into his cup to cool his tea. “The best tea, Clara,” he remarked, “and served in the best china.” He sipped carefully. “Funny taste. Nice, though. Very pleasant in fact. What is it?”
Clara Bellefoy looked at him in satisfaction over the rim of her matching cup. “These were the last two of a set that got smashed, up at the school. Specials for governors and such-like. They were going to chuck them out, so I asked for them.” She allowed herself a tight smile and added: “Not that many perks in being a school-skivvy. Farman gave me a note to prove they weren’t nicked. Want to see it?”
Martin waved away the unpleasant suggestion.
“The tea-now that’s something you won’t get at the Co-op, Inspector. It’s called ‘Earl Grey,’ and the pleasant taste is bergamot. Or so it says on the tin. I only use it for special visitors. And no, I didn’t buy it, Mr. Sharp-Eyes! It got given to me-well, to Betty-by the school steward. Unwanted present to the staff from a parent. They didn’t like it and told him to pass it on to someone deserving.”
“And, naturally your Betty came to mind?”
“Course she did! I’m not stupid! She’s on most of those men’s minds! The only pretty girl for ten miles around-you’d expect it.”
“Still single at-what is she-nineteen? Twenty? What’s she waiting for?”
“She’s seen the mistakes her mother made, and she’s not going to repeat them. The right bloke will come along one day. I’m not losing sleep over it.”
“Well, I have to congratulate you, Clara,” Martin said with sincerity, glancing meaningfully around the pin-neat parlour. “She’s a credit to you. And the little lad-you’ve done a fine job by him. Where is Harry?”
“Upstairs in his room. He ran off when he heard you coming. Nothing wrong with his hearing. He doesn’t like strangers. Usually he goes all shy and can’t find the words to speak. Sometimes he gets quarrelsome and finds exactly the wrong ones. When he flies into a temper it can be very embarrassing to hear him. He tries his best to swear, Mr. Martin. I don’t know why. I try to teach him right and wrong and good manners but sometimes … sometimes … you’d say he’d got the devil in him. I think he learns those words from the lads who work in the stables. It must be that, because he doesn’t go to school, and he hears nothing of the kind at home.”
“Is he warm enough up there on his own?”
“Course he is! I always keep a fire going for him in the grate, and he’s got a new set of tin cars to play with. It’s his retreat. When he’s gone off up there I don’t bother him. He’s all right.”
Martin cocked his head to a photograph of Clara’s son and daughter, a studio print in a wooden frame sitting on the upright piano. “A fine-looking pair, missis. He’s a good-looking little lad. Takes after his ma. Same curly dark hair.” He leaned forwards and asked quietly: “What went wrong for him? If you could tell me, there might be something I could suggest … some help I could recommend.…”