Death at the Jesus Hospital by David Dickinson Read Free Book Online

headmaster sent Powerscourt on his way, saying that he had called an emergency meeting of the governors, some of whom were on the evening train from London. He recommended him to the bursar’s closest friend in the school, a maths teacher called Joshua Peabody.
    The maths teacher wore some of the strongest glasses Powerscourt had ever seen. The poor man, he thought, must be nearly blind. Receding hair, shirt buttons fastened out of line and a general air of absent-mindedness gave Peabody the appearance of a professor of some abstract subject like linguistics or Indo-Arabic languages, whose wife has recently left him. Powerscourt wondered what the boys thought of him.
    Peabody led Powerscourt out of the school on to a path that circled the football pitches and took them some distance away from the main buildings. Only when they were well out of earshot did he speak.
    ‘This is a terrible business,’ he began, kicking a punctured football into the long grass, ‘terrible. I can scarcely believe it, even now. It’s so unfair that it should happen to Roderick.’
    ‘Perhaps you could tell me about him. It always helps.’
    ‘Well, I don’t know anything at all about his early life, where he was born, where he went to school, that sort of thing. He never talked about growing up, not to me, at any rate. I only got to know him when I joined the staff here nineyears ago. He was never the heart and soul of the staffroom, Roderick, if you know what I mean. Maybe we teachers are always a little uneasy in the company of bursars, I don’t know. I do know that he took his job very seriously. The headmaster was fond of saying that if all the teachers kept their books as well as the bursar, his life would be much easier.’
    ‘So how did you become friends?’ asked Powerscourt, noting that the net at the back of the football pitch needed mending, another item of expenditure to be recorded in the bursar’s ledgers.
    ‘He loved the mountains,’ Joshua Peabody said. ‘When I was younger and my eyes were better I was always climbing whenever I could. Roderick, too, had been a fine mountaineer in his youth. Now we’re not so young we used to go on walking holidays in Scotland or in the Alps. He always used to say that he wanted to see the Himalayas before he died, though I don’t think he ever did anything about it. He and I were planning a trip to the Dolomites in the Easter holidays.’
    None of this, Powerscourt reflected, was likely to draw a killer to Allison’s School and murder its bursar at his desk. ‘Did he have any enemies? Do you have any suspicions about something in his past perhaps that could have led to his terrible end?’
    ‘As I said,’ Peabody had taken his glasses off and was rubbing them carefully on a large and rather dirty handkerchief, ‘I don’t know very much about his past. There is one thing I should tell you, Lord Powerscourt. It only started about two weeks ago, maybe less.’ There was a pause while the handkerchief was restored to its pocket and the glasses replaced. Peabody looked more than ever the absent-minded professor, wondering where he has left his books. ‘Over the last week or two,’ he went on, ‘Roderick Gill changed. He became a frightened man. He would stare anxiously at strangers when the two of us were walking intothe town for a drink. I think, but I’m not sure, that he had been burning a lot of documents in the school incinerator and in the grate in his own rooms. Whether those were papers relating to his past or to the school or something else altogether I do not know.’
    Two small boys kicking a football dashed past them on their way to the goal with the broken netting.
    ‘Roderick would wait for the post in the morning with a look almost of terror on his face. One of the English teachers said he knew the cooked breakfast in the staff dining room was bad, but that was no reason to be afraid of it. I know that Roderick had asked for, and been granted, the option of two