David Dickinson - Death at the Jesus Hospital

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?’