“ ‘Sod off, Inspector’ is what I’m hearing,” Martin grunted.

“Except we don’t hear. Gone without so much as a ta-very-much.”

This rapid exit was exactly what Martin had been hoping for. A clear run at a demanding task without the Fancy Pants Met officer breathing down his neck now lay before him. His departure was only to be expected, and the constable had it right. Of course. So why the dejection he was feeling? Deceived? Let down? Martin reviewed his vocabulary and selected: Fucked up! Always a man who could analyse his own feelings and motives, he further decided to condemn his own pride. He’d wanted to show off for this bird. To demonstrate to the Met that he could run a crime scene and come up with the goods. He’d looked forwards to conferring with the commissioner in the matey way the bloke had seemed to favour. All words. Slather. Veneer. Hadn’t even the manners to say he was taking off and wish him luck.

Martin sighed. Ah, well. Another entry in the book of experience.

“Sir! Sir!”

Martin turned to see a school steward slithering down the path in his indoor shoes, waving a bit of paper.

“What’s up, lad?”

“Message from that visitor. Sandilands. He said it was urgent.”

Martin took the folded sheet from him and read:

“Martin! Emergency. Boy missing. Another!

I leave in pursuit. Regroup your office, first light.

Good luck with the sniffers! J.S.”

Martin smiled at the crisp officer’s phrasing and tucked the note in his pocket. “All’s well, constable. And don’t fret about the Met. He’ll be back to bother us.”

CHAPTER 18

Ten miles north and the light was fading fast. The big car boomed on through the gloaming and Joe was glad of the powerful headlights. Glad also of the strong and confident young hands on the wheel. Gosling was a natural driver and—unusually for one his age and capability—silent on the subject. He didn’t refer to Joe’s modest, workmanlike motorcar as “she.” He didn’t bother Joe with questions he couldn’t answer on mileage, torque or the rattle under the near-side wheel arch. He managed even to avoid a sneering comparison with the Bentley most young men’s uncles seemed to own these days.

Dorcas was sitting next to him in the front passenger’s seat, a map in one hand and a police hand-torch in the other. She was alert and scanning both sides of the road.

“Not so cold now,” Gosling said. “That’s a soft southerly blowing in. The thaw’s well under way. This lot’ll be completely gone by morning.”

“Nasty underfoot?”

“Not bad. Slushy rather than slippery, and the gritters have passed this way. Thirty seems safe on this stretch. As long as I don’t do anything silly with the brake pedal, we’ll be all right. Miss Joliffe? Dorcas? Can you see anything on the map that might be a hospital?”

“No. A way to go yet. I’ve been studying the map, and I’ve got my eye on a likely place. Don’t worry—I’ll tell you in good time to make the turning off. Keep going.”

A few minutes later Gosling exclaimed, “There! A sign. Prince Albert’s Hospital. Half a mile.”

“That’s not marked on here,” Dorcas objected. “There’s no ‘H’ for hospital.” And added vaguely: “A capital ‘H’ does mean hospital, doesn’t it? Not hotel or hostelry?”

“Worth a look,” Joe decided. “Turn off, Gosling.”

Gosling eased the Morris off the main road and into a still snowbound side road.

“Not such good going, sir, but others have been up here before us, so we’ll manage.”

“I think you’re wasting your time. This has come up far too soon. It can’t be the one,” was Dorcas’s advice.

“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.