Authors: Scott Hunter
My hand shot to my mouth to stifle a scream.
I had returned to the original bed chamber. Impossible, but the evidence was before me. There was the bed, the dresser, the bowl of fruit. The candle holder.
Behind me, the door closed with a heavy
clunk
.
I wrung my hands, close to despair.
I went to the small window and wiped it with the corner of my night dress. I could see very little, the view being obstructed by the irregular crenellations of the roof. The moon had vanished into thick cloud and I could make out very little in the heavy murk except a line of wind-bent trees, their darker silhouettes following the edge of the estate like a ragged palisade. It was as if the house were clothed in its own darkness. I felt panic rising in my breast and took a deep breath to calm myself.
Think
, I said aloud.
Think
.
And then I heard footfalls upon the staircase.
The dread sound grew closer and closer until I heard the creak of the final step. The handle click-clacked as if brushed by bony fingers and I froze, rooted to the spot in terror.
The window.
I lifted a small stool and threw it against the glass. It bounced back and I picked it up again. With a strength born of desperation I battered it against the window frame. Glass shattered and the frame fell away into the darkness. A gust of wind blew into the bedchamber and extinguished the candle. My hands scrabbled for a hold and I felt a sharp pain as a jagged piece of glass cut into my fingers.
Behind me, I heard the door close with a sharp report, as though slammed in anger.
And then, I do not know how, I found myself outside, clinging to the dormer projection of the attic room like a mountaineer who had lost her rope. Below me the roof fell sharply away. A tendril of icy cold egressed from the chamber and crept down my spine as I hung, half-suspended in space. My teeth were chattering uncontrollably and my tongue was dry, cleaving to the roof of my mouth as I looked down into nothingness.
I felt again the cold, possessive touch upon my flesh and then I was falling, sliding down the sheer angles of the roof, limbs flailing, my mouth open in a silent scream.
When I came to myself I was lying half in and half out of a wild laurel, the thickness of which had broken my fall. I was dazed, disoriented. I tried to stand but my legs would not support me and I fell onto the gravelled area where once the carriages would have deposited the lords and ladies attending Sir William’s various balls and entertainments. My inability to walk did not deter me from wishing to put distance between myself and that cursed place; I began a slow and painful crawl towards the gateposts. As the gate loomed I felt a strong sense that my progress was being observed, and I raised my head a little to find that indistinct shapes had begun to form in a rough semicircle by the gates. Children, many children, clad in the rags of poverty, had silently congregated, summoned perhaps by that same malevolent presence whose attentions I had avoided only by the slightest margin. One stood apart, a red-haired lad of ten or eleven years, and raised an accusing finger. I had seen him before, I remembered, sitting on the village bench.
I watched, transfixed as the first rays of dawn issued above the treetops and fell upon them one by one, dispersing their shades as a fine mist must concede to the inevitability of God’s ordained cycle of darkness and light.
As day broke I must have lost consciousness once again for the next thing I clearly remember is coming to in a carriage as it jolted along the lane to the doctor’s house. I heard the reassuring sound of male voices and knew that I was safe. I heard later that I was found several hundred yards from the gates by a young farmer on his way to the market. It was fortunate for me that he was passing - he would not normally have taken such a detour, but he had felt impelled to catch a glimpse of the grand house for himself, such was its reputation.
And that, Inspector Keefe, is a true account of my experiences in the spring of nineteen hundred and seventeen.
Inspector Diarmuid Keefe laid down his notebook. ‘It’s a very persuasive story you tell, right enough, Mrs MacLennan - that’s not to say an inventive one.’
‘It is no invention, Inspector.’
Keefe scratched his forehead with his pencil. ‘Jenny - may I call you by your first name? We’ve known each other long enough, have we not?’
‘It will be six years this summer, Inspector.’
‘Six years.’ Keefe paused and tapped his pencil thoughtfully against his cheek. ‘Now that’s a long time to put up with living in a place like this.’
‘I am managing sufficiently well.’
Keefe nodded. ‘Yes, I can see that you are relatively comfortable. You have your own room, at least, unlike many.’
‘Poor souls,’ Jenny MacLennan said. ‘I fear that they would not know - nor care - where they laid their heads.’
‘Perhaps not,’ Keefe agreed. During his earlier journey through the sanatorium he had encountered a group of inmates, eyes full of emptiness and shoulders slumped as they were herded from one bleak corner of the institution to another. ‘And how is your health, generally, Jenny?’
‘I have experienced no further trouble, Inspector. The doctors have been most thorough in both observation and treatment.’
Keefe grunted. He recalled that immediately after her arrest MacLennan had been rushed to hospital with stomach pains. They had operated without delay, and according to the medical records, they had eventually been obliged to perform an hysterectomy for a severely infected womb. She had been readmitted on one occasion for a suspected secondary infection, from which, despite the onset of septic shock, she had made a remarkably good recovery, this despite the doctors’ frankly gloomy prognosis. Jenny MacLennan’s immune system was, it seemed, nothing if not robust. Notwithstanding, Keefe had remained oddly troubled by the conviction that, for whatever reason, certain information regarding MacLennan’s medical history had been withheld. However, gentle pressure having been applied, he had been assured that all pertinent facts had been disclosed, and he was therefore obliged - albeit grudgingly - to accept that, on this occasion, his usually reliable intuition had misdirected him
.
The physical side of her health dealt with, Keefe moved on. ‘Jenny, both you and I know full well that you are as sane as the next woman, so let me ask directly: why do you persist with this nonsensical account?’
‘I have told you the truth, Inspector. Just as I told it to you after my arrest.’
Keefe leaned forward suddenly. ‘Orla Benjamin was bludgeoned to death by a heavy cane handle which was found to be covered in your fingerprints. No one else was seen in the vicinity on the night of the murder. No one.’
‘I am aware of the so-called evidence, Inspector. And not a day goes by that I do not mourn the loss of my friend.’
‘You never argued? Never had a disagreement?’
‘Never.’
‘The tone and content of the various conversations you enjoyed with Mrs Benjamin seem - how shall I put it? - too good to be true. Trite, even.’
‘Indeed? You are clearly not accustomed to the manner in which women conduct their friendships, Inspector. The interaction of you menfolk with one another is quite a different thing.’
‘Is that so?’ Keefe pressed on. ‘You alluded to Mrs Benjamin’s concern for your husband on more than one occasion. Were you jealous of the attention she paid him?’
‘Why should I have been? Her intentions were both platonic and honourable.’
Keefe sat back in the uncomfortable wooden chair with a grunt. ‘You’re a stubborn woman. But is that not a trait of your mother’s countrymen?’
‘I have no idea, Inspector.’
‘Your mother was born in Frankfurt, correct?’
‘You know that to be true, so why ask again?’
‘And you were brought up in Germany until you were eighteen years of age, when you went to train as a nurse in England.’
‘My father was an Englishman. It was a natural path to take.’
Keefe harrumphed. It was late and he was hungry. In a fortnight’s time he would retire from the force, move to the country, begin a new life. A happy prospect - except for the troubling case of Jenny MacLennan, which still haunted his waking hours and nights as it had done since the original murder investigation of nineteen seventeen. He had acted as sergeant to the senior investigating officer, one Patrick Flynn who had recently died of lung cancer. Jenny MacLennan: an attractive young woman and yet a murderess - it had been a notorious case which had concluded, for Keefe at least, in the unsatisfactory verdict of manslaughter whilst in unsound mind. Jenny MacLennan had escaped the death sentence, sure, but had been committed to what was, in Keefe’s view, a living death by incarceration in St Judith’s criminal lunatic asylum.
‘Jenny.’ Keefe spread his hands. ‘What do you hope to gain by this? The death penalty is no longer hanging over you; a confession would result only in your transfer to a more comfortable environment - and yet you seem content to be labelled a madwoman, which I am certain you are not. Tell me about the missing papers in William Benjamin’s study.’
Jenny MacLennan sighed deeply. ‘Inspector, please tell me that you are not leading me down that well-worn path anew. I know nothing of missing papers, and I have made this clear in past interviews with Superintendent Flynn and yourself. The only person able to shed further light upon these ‘missing’ documents is, as you are well aware, no longer with us. Therefore I can only repeat what I have told you on previous occasions - I do not know what might or might not have happened to these papers.’
Keefe nodded grimly. Just three months after his wife’s murder, William Benjamin had suffered a similar fate to that of Lord Kitchener; the merchant ship
Noya
on which he was sailing as a VIP, was sunk
eight miles WSW of the Lizard
. However, this was not before Benjamin had drawn the late Superintendent Flynn’s attention to the fact that his desk had been rifled through and a number of sensitive documents stolen. In fact, until the fingerprints on the murder weapon had been confirmed as belonging to Jenny MacLennan, Flynn and indeed Keefe himself had been working on the theory that Orla Benjamin had been killed by the same intruder as had broken into the Benjamin’s property.
An orderly appeared at the cell door. ‘Are you all right, Inspector?’ he asked. ‘You’ve been a long while with MacLennan, right enough. The trolleys’ll be comin’ around soon.’
Keefe waved his hand. ‘Everything is just fine, thank you. I won’t be long now.’
Jenny MacLennan was regarding him with an expression bordering on amusement. ‘Oh, dear Inspector Keefe. How I wish that I could send you away a happier man.’
‘Then tell me what I need to know, Jenny. Tell me about your true feelings for Orla Benjamin.’
‘She was as a sister to me. Why would I harm her?’
‘Jealousy, perhaps. Or maybe she was just in the way.’
Jenny MacLennan laughed. It was an attractive laugh, which somehow made the sound more unsettling. ‘Inspector, your imagination knows no bounds.’
‘I fear that I cannot compete with your good self in regard to the powers of imagination, Jenny.’ Keefe shot her a searching look. ‘I am a police officer. I work with facts, motives, scientific methods. Sometimes the work is tedious. Very often I do not succeed in finding what I am searching for. But, sometimes my persistence is rewarded. You may be interested to know that I managed to track down your superior at the Belgian field hospital, a Sister Agnes Hawkins. She has recently retired to the south coast of England, but she remembers you well.’
‘Sister Agnes,’ Jenny MacLennan said. ‘A most formal woman, but a good nurse, for all that. And what did she have to say, Inspector?’
Keefe leaned forward, joined his hands together and rested his forearms on his thighs. ‘She told me that the nurse responsible for Captain Jack MacLennan’s welfare before your good self, one Nurse Alice Reed, fell victim to an unusual accident whilst off duty.’
‘Yes. I recall. Poor Alice. A head injury, was it not? From some loose piece of equipment?’
‘Equipment which you were supposedly in charge of.’
‘Is this some fresh accusation, Inspector? There was an investigation at the time; Sister Agnes would have been at pains to tell you. And everything was found to be in order.’
‘I’m sure it was, Jenny. But it was an unsettling incident nevertheless, one that Sister Hawkins has never been able to fully reconcile in her mind.’
A shrug.
‘Have you received news from home recently, Jenny?’
‘You know that I have not.’
For the first time that afternoon Keefe felt some shift of emotion beneath MacLennan’s calm exterior. ‘Ah,’ he shook his head sadly. ‘That’s a shame now, with Jack making such good progress and all.’
‘Progress? Tell me what has happened!’ Jenny MacLennan had risen to her feet and Keefe involuntarily scraped his chair backwards on the worn linoleum.
‘I will do, if you’ll be kind enough to take a seat.’ Keefe prompted her with a slight downward movement of his palm.
She reluctantly sat, smoothed her dress with a nervous gesture. Keefe felt like a musician tasked with playing a perfect series of notes - just one slightly off-key and he would have lost the moment. He moistened his lips. ‘I have received correspondence from your sister-in-law that Jack has been able to speak a few words from time to time in response to simple enquiries. He made a request for a newspaper recently and has begun to eat more heartily.’
Jenny MacLennan’s voice trembled a little. ‘That is indeed good news. Will you pass on a message for me, Inspector? You are aware, of course, that for a number of years now Grace has declined to enter into any form of correspondence with me?’
‘Well, now, there’s such a thing as a little give and take, Jenny, is there not?’
‘I cannot believe that you would stoop so low as to resort to emotional blackmail, Inspector.’ Jenny MacLennan’s composure had rallied and Keefe cursed himself inwardly. He had called the tune and been found wanting after all. The sound of clattering plates and strident voices from the corridor heralded the final refrain.