A red-faced captain fled the field of battle. Powerscourt was to learn later that he had resigned his commission that very afternoon and complained to his MP about Smith Dorrien’s behaviour. Nothing was heard of Morris again in the town of Aldershot.
Inside the office, the volcano seemed to have been turned off. The fires of fury had abated. The lieutenant introduced Powerscourt and left the room. General Horace Smith Dorrien was well over six feet tall. He had a long thin face with a small well-trimmed moustache, a prominent nose and pale blue eyes. He wore his uniform with the air of a man who never takes it off.
‘Powerscourt,’ said General Smith Dorrien, ‘Powerscourt. Boer War. Military Intelligence. You did very well, as I recall.’
‘I did have that honour.’
‘Now then, that man at the National Gallery, Holroyd I think he’s called, tells me you’re investigating a series of murders where the victims have mysterious marks left on their chests. He thinks I may be able to help. Is that right?’
Powerscourt told him the story of the three deaths in chronological order, leaving nothing out. He included all the details of Sir Peregrine Fishborne and his plans for the funds of the Silkworkers Company.
‘Fishborne, did you say, Powerscourt? Man who drives around in an enormous motor car as if he’s an American tycoon cruising down Wall Street?’
‘That’s the man.’
‘Good God, we had a son of his through our hands here a couple of years back. Slippery fellow. Never paid for his round in the mess, slightly suspect when dealing at cards, if I remember correctly.’
‘What became of him?’ asked Powerscourt.
‘We managed to pack him off to Ireland, actually. Never a popular posting, Ireland, natives not friendly, always liable to take a pot shot at you when you’re not looking. Come, we digress.’
Powerscourt recalled the ability of the best trained military minds to concentrate totally on the matter in hand and not be diverted into other channels. He produced his drawings of the marks left on the victims’ chests. Smith Dorrien stared at them carefully. Then he produced an eyeglass from the drawer in his desk and gave them some more detailed attention.
‘Good God, Powerscourt, now I see why you were in the National Gallery in the first place. You’d gone to look at that painting I gave them some years back. Isandlwana. What a terrible place. What a terrible battle. It was the first one I ever saw, you know. I presume the people at the National Gallery have been suggesting that those short weapons you can see in my picture, the knobkerries, could have been the cause of these marks. Am I right?’
‘Absolutely, General. I have been thinking on my way here about the various explanations a man might come up with for the presence of such marks.’
‘Such as?’
‘Well, the most obvious, I suppose, is that the murderer had one of these knobkerries lying about in his house or in his attic, left him by a parent or an uncle perhaps, picked up maybe at some country house auction, and he put the marks on to throw mud in our eyes, to make us wonder about the marks rather than other aspects of the killing.’
‘I don’t think you really believe that, Powerscourt, do you?’
‘I’m not sure that I do, actually. The thing is that the doctors say the blows with the knobkerrie probably occurred before death, but they can’t be sure. Doctors can be as difficult to pin down as lawyers sometimes. That says to me that the marks are central to the stories of all three killings, that there is a link binding them together.’
‘We are not meant to speculate too much in the military, as you know, Powerscourt, apart from thinking about what your opponent is going to do next. But it sounds from what you say that all three victims were roughly the same age, fifties in the case of the Jesus Hospital man and the bursar, rather more in the case of Sir Rufus.’
‘That is correct. I should have told you that there is a blank space of fifteen years in the early life of Sir Rufus, according to his entry in Who’s Who.’
‘Never trusted Who’s Who myself. They never check anything, those people, just take a man’s version of himself at face value. Odd. Pretty damned odd, if you ask me.’
Powerscourt was looking at an enormous calendar on the wall behind Smith Dorrien’s desk. There were rings round various days in different colours, red and black and green, each one presumably denoting some military activity of fixed date. He told Lady Lucy later that day that the idea came to him as he wondered if any of the circled dates might denote a family birthday in the general’s household.
‘Do you know the date of the battle of Isandlwana, General?’
‘I do, or rather I think I do. I’ll just check it so we can be sure.’ He delved into some grey military almanac on the side of his desk. ‘Thought so, memory not going quite yet, thank God. The battle was fought on the twenty-second of January, eighteen seventy-nine.’
Powerscourt stared at him for a moment. His mind shot back to the painting he had seen that morning, brave redcoats hemmed in against a grey mountain, being slaughtered by the bloodthirsty Zulu warriors.
‘Out with it, Powerscourt, what’s so upsetting about the date, for heaven’s sake?’
Powerscourt wondered if the general might be about to start shouting at him. ‘It’s just this, General. The first murder, the one at the Jesus Hospital, took place on the twenty-second of January this year. The chances of that being a coincidence must be about three hundred and sixty-five to one.’
‘Good God, how very strange. Speculation must come more readily to a man in your profession than it does to me, Powerscourt. How do you think these events could be related?’
Powerscourt was looking at the calendar again. ‘God knows,’ he said. ‘Maybe the murders have something to do with the battle, though it’s hard to think what after thirty-one years. Tell me, General, can you remember how many are said to have died at Isandlwana?’
‘That’s a tricky question,’ said General Horace Smith Dorrien. ‘You must remember that I was ordered from the field to take a message to the rear. I wasn’t there at the end. I didn’t see most of the carnage. Certainly over a thousand of our men were slain by the Zulus. They didn’t take any prisoners. They hardly left any wounded, they finished them off as they lay on the ground. And after that the dead were disembowelled to a man. Their clothes were stripped from their bodies. Any number between five and fifty were said to have survived but those figures are very unreliable.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Well, it wasn’t going to be good for your career if you were a member of one of the regiments there to have survived. You could only have done that by running away earlier and faster than everybody else. Some men made a stand where they stood. They were all slaughtered. But another body of men tried to save themselves. Many were cut down by the Zulus who ran faster. But if you did escape — and I heard stories of a number of people in this position — you wouldn’t be in any hurry to return to the military. You might be court-martialled and shot if you did. So a lot of people could have drifted off and never rejoined the army at all.’
‘And if you did that, would you be registered as a deserter?’
‘Well, you might have been, if anybody had been keen to establish a true record of what happened. I don’t think anybody ever conducted a proper review of the battlefield to establish the identities of the dead. They just lifted the names out of the regimental rolls and assumed they had all been killed. Commanding Officer Chelmsford was off looking for a different bunch of Zulus when the battle happened. So he wasn’t keen to establish the facts as they didn’t reflect too well on him. Most of the other officers were dead and the living in other regiments who hadn’t been at the battle were happy to record all those whose whereabouts they didn’t know as killed in action. Much neater that way. Close the account down, that sort of thing.’