Death at the Jesus Hospital (13 page)

The phoney postman had bumped into Lewis on the morning of his murder run and had apologized. ‘I’m so
sorry,’ he had said and continued on his way. Lewis
probably
had the most acute ear in the school. The accent, he declared to his friends, was not English, the man was a foreigner. He was not American either, said David Lewis, having spent six months in Washington three years before. Quite where the phoney postman did come from he could not be sure.

That night the overtaxed men of the Metropolitan Police had another burden added to their load. Word, their
sergeants
and inspectors informed them, had come from the very top. They were to be on guard all night at various properties and almshouses belonging to the Silkworkers Company. The danger, they were told, could come from the inside with the inmates trying to kill each other or from the outside with unknown villains come to murder the residents. Two constables stood in the doorways of grand houses in the City owned by the Silkworkers.

PC James Jones, five years off retirement, spent the night inside and outside the Hospice of the Holy Trinity in Blackheath. He told his wife of long standing he thought it had to do with German spy rings operating in the City of London. PC Albert Smith, who had been married for eight days, was on patrol at the Hospice of St Michael in Richmond. He said to his new wife as he left that he might be away all night, but that he would be at home all day the next day and he didn’t expect to be that tired. PC John Walsh, on duty at the Jesus Hospital in Haringey, made himself conspicuous by pacing noisily up and down the little quadrangle. He believed that a gang of thieves were intent on stealing the hospice’s magnificent collection of silver which they left carelessly on display in a cabinet with no lock. That at any rate was the view of his sergeant who had made representations about the silver in the past but to no avail. And PC Walter Buchan, at six feet five inches the tallest officer among them, kept vigil over the old men in the Almshouse of St John the Divine in Clerkenwell. He
had told his wife before he set off that the world had gone stark raving mad.

The following morning Sir Fitzroy Robinson Buller, Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, sent another memorandum to his master. He reminded the minister about his earlier message about the three murders and hoped the Home Secretary would soon be in a position to deliver an authoritative judgement. In the meantime he described the measures taken around the various
properties
belonging to the Silkworkers. If the government were pressed in parliament or in the newspapers about what they were doing in these cases, the Home Secretary could now point out that all necessary steps were being taken to safeguard the public.

There were two telegrams for Powerscourt the
morning
after the police watch began. One was from Johnny Fitzgerald with the latest news from Marlow and the old gentlemen’s wills. The other came from Inspector Grime, and Powerscourt could feel the disappointment and the frustration behind the words about the total lack of
information
from the boys of Allison’s.

‘Damn it, Lucy,’ he said, stretching out on the sofa in front of the fire, ‘I feel like some military commander miles and miles from the front who has to communicate with his generals by runner or by telegram. Don’t think Napoleon had to go in for this sort of thing. By the time I have taken one lot of information on board, another lot comes in from elsewhere which changes the picture altogether. I suppose I’ll just have to get used to it.’

‘I’m sure you’ll get to the bottom of it, my love,’ said Lady Lucy, used to these moments of doubt in the course of her husband’s investigations. ‘I do think the news about Sir Peregrine and the Silkworkers is fascinating, Francis. Do you think he just wants to make off with the money?’

‘I know he’s been using the argument about the Germans all over the place. The headmaster man up in Norfolk told me about that one. I’ve been investigating things for so long now, Lucy, I always think the worst of everybody. So in my
opinion the whole case may be about Sir Peregrine getting his hands on the money.’

There was a discreet cough at the door. Rhys, the Powerscourt butler, always coughed to announce his arrival when he had to make an unexpected appearance.

‘Telephone, my lord.’ Rhys usually sounded as if he had just come from or was just about to go to a funeral. ‘From Norfolk, my lord. The headmaster of Allison’s, my lord.’

Powerscourt shot down the stairs to the room looking out over the square that he used as a study. It was gloomy outside, the rain rattling against the windows in Markham Square.

‘Headmaster,’ he said, ‘how nice to hear from you. How are things up there in Norfolk?’

‘My apologies for ringing you at home, Lord Powerscourt. I need some advice.’

‘Fire ahead,’ said Powerscourt cheerfully.

‘Yesterday morning we had a real postman retrace the steps of the murderer up the long corridor in the school. At the same time as the earlier visit, of course. I appealed to the boys at assembly, very soon after the visit, to report anything they had seen on the day of the death to Inspector Grime. I told them he would be in the OTC room all day.’

‘And?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘That’s just it,’ replied the headmaster. ‘There is no and. Nobody came forward. The Inspector waited all day and nothing happened. He was very cross by the time he left, I can tell you.’

‘Do you think the boys knew something but didn’t want to tell? Or that they hadn’t seen anything at all?’

‘Damn it, Lord Powerscourt, about fifty or sixty boys must have seen the phoney postman that morning. If they were properly awake – and many may not have been – they must have realized that this was not the normal time for the man with the mail to arrive. And I suspect that they may
have taken against the policeman. He can be a bit surly at times, Inspector Grime.’

‘Could you or your colleagues talk to the boys individually? Would that work?’

‘I don’t think they would talk to us either. They’ll have decided en masse not to talk to the policeman. They’re bright enough to see that if they talk to the staff it’s
virtually
the same as talking to Grime. The information will go straight to the police.’

‘I see,’ said Powerscourt.

‘I’m acutely conscious that the boys in my charge appear at the moment to be obstructing the police in their inquiries. That can’t be right. What do I do if Grime turns nasty and takes one or two of my pupils down to the police station?’

Powerscourt could see the serried ranks of parents lining up outside the headmaster’s study in the headmaster’s mind. He could hear the voices in the headmaster’s head.

‘I’m not going to stand for this, my son hauled off to the local police station!’

‘I’m taking my two boys home immediately, and they won’t be coming back!’

‘I’ve known our member of parliament for many years now. You’ll be hearing from him very soon!’

‘My sympathies, Headmaster,’ said Powerscourt, ‘you’re in a very difficult situation, and it’s not of your making.’

‘I’ve had three members of staff laid low by the influenza today. We’re going to have to rework the entire timetable.’

Something in what the headmaster said set off a train of thought in Powerscourt’s brain. It couldn’t work, could it? It would be too difficult to arrange, surely. Or would it? To hell with it, why not? There was nothing to lose.

‘Headmaster,’ he said, ‘a thought has just struck me which might, just might, help us out of some of our difficulties. It is rather a long shot and I don’t want to tell you about it until I have had time to think it through. Could I call you back inside the hour?’

‘Of course,’ said the headmaster. ‘I will wait by the telephone.’

Powerscourt shot back up the stairs to tell Lady Lucy the news. Then he put a proposition to her.

‘You can’t be serious, Francis.’

‘I am, my love, I am.’

‘Well,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘it’s very unusual. I don’t think such a thing is happening anywhere else.’

‘I’m sure it is. This is nineteen ten after all, not eighteen hundred and forty.’

‘In a way,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘I suppose it might be rather fun. I’m sure I could do it. Yes, Francis, yes, why not? I shall fulfil my duties in my earlier name of Mrs Hamilton.’

Powerscourt ran back down the stairs. ‘Headmaster,’ he said, ‘I have a proposition to put to you.’

The headmaster listened carefully to Powerscourt’s proposals. Then he laughed. ‘Splendid idea!’ he boomed down the phone as if he were addressing the parents on Speech Day. ‘I propose we put it into action on Monday, the day after tomorrow. A week’s service for a start, more if required.’

Thomas Monk, Warden of the Jesus Hospital in Marlow, was awake very early the next morning. Monk was a worried man. Eight of the old gentlemen had arrived in his office the day before and demanded their wills back. Monk had watched out of his window, fingering his pale blue cravat, as the octet marched in line out of the hospital and down the road to the solicitor’s offices. Monk still had three of their wills in his possession. He suspected that the owners of those wills had forgotten where they had put them. Any one of those old men could arrive at any time and demand their last will and testament. But that was not the full extent of his problems. Only one of the three wills he still had contained any money, and its owner, in Monk’s judgement, was not
going to be around for very much longer. Experience at the hospital had left Monk a good judge of how long its members had left to go – if he could have taken odds on the life expectancy of the different inhabitants of the Jesus Hospital with the local bookkeeper in Maidenhead, he would certainly have done so.

The Warden’s principal concern had to do with the will of Number Twenty, Abel Meredith. This was the one with slightly over two thousand pounds, originally going to Meredith’s brother in Canada. His conversation with Henry Wood, Number Twelve, in which he had implied that half the money went to Canada, the rest to him, had led to Andrew Snow, Number Eighteen, remembering an earlier conversation with Meredith, in which he, Number Eighteen, was told all the money was going to the brother in Canada. And that had led directly to the old men requesting their wills back. All of them had voiced their concerns about Meredith’s will and where his legacy was going. He had said nothing, but he knew he had to do something. Otherwise the old men, led by that slippery Number Twelve, might complain to the Silkworkers Company in London.

The inmates of the Jesus Hospital eased the pains of their days at the Rose and Crown, famed for its barmaid and the smoke. Monk had never visited the place, feeling it would be beneath him to be seen drinking in the same place as the residents of the almshouse. Five minutes’ walk in the opposite direction was the Duke of Clarence, a place that was pretending not be a pub at all, but some sort of superior watering hole for people coming for boat rides on the Thames or going for lunch or dinner at the expensive hotel on the island up the road. Even the public bar in the Duke of Clarence looked as though it might contain a couple of stockbrokers from the City. It was here, the
previous
evening, over two pints of mild and bitter, that Monk formulated his plan for the next morning.

Breakfast was nearly over in the Jesus Hospital. The
tomato ketchup and the HP sauce had been sprayed over pairs of sausages and a helping of fried bread this
morning,
accompanied by what the old men thought were two rather mean rashers of bacon. As the meal came to an end and the last cups of tea were passed round, the Warden came in and knocked on the table nearest the door for quiet.

‘Gentlemen!’ he said. ‘Silkmen, forgive me for
interrupting
your breakfast, but I felt I had to speak to you on a matter of some urgency.’ Monk was speaking quite slowly and very loudly for the benefit of his audience. ‘Yesterday a number of you came to see and asked, very properly, if you could have your wills back. I agreed, as I should, to these requests. But some of you also voiced concerns about the will of our late colleague Abel Meredith, Number Twenty. Maybe I am wrong here but I felt that there was an
implication
that I might have tampered with this will in some way. Nothing could be further from the truth.’

Monk paused at this point and gazed round the old men. He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a couple of pieces of paper. ‘This is Abel Meredith’s will. I am going to hand it round so you can all read it. Whatever you might have thought, you will see that all the money goes to his brother in Canada.’ With that, Monk handed the
documents
to Jack Miller, Number Three, and sat down. This was indeed the original will. This was part of the plan Monk had concocted in the Duke of Clarence the evening before. Monk thanked God he had kept the earlier version hidden inside his special floorboard.

It took some time for the papers to be passed round the company. Spectacles had to be found. Meredith’s writing was not of the clearest and often needed decoding by a neighbour. The strain of reading through such a paper, surrounded by your fellows in the hospital, made some of the silkmen so nervous they had to stop for a rest in the
middle
of it. Those who had read it fidgeted uneasily in their
chairs, keen to escape into the quadrangle outside for a good gossip about its contents. After nearly an hour they were finished. Number Three, Jack Miller, gave the will back to Monk.

‘Thank you very much for your time, gentlemen,’ he said and walked out of the dining room. As he strode back to his office he smiled as he thought of the second part of the plan concocted on his mild and bitter in the Duke of Clarence. This was going to be his revenge on the Jesus Hospital. The original would go back into its floorboard. The will he would send to the London solicitors,
however,
would be the one he had forged some time earlier, the one that left half the money to the brother and the other half to him. Monk knew how long the legal niceties could take. Correspondence to and fro from Saskatchewan might add a couple of months to the timescale, particularly if the Canadian lawyers, like so many in England, were partners in the well-known firm of Slow and Bideawhile. It might be a year or more before the thing was settled. And by then some of the old men would have forgotten. And the others would be dead.

The silkmen of the Jesus Hospital may have drunk in the Rose and Crown, Thomas Monk may have patronized the Duke of Clarence, but Johnny Fitzgerald was staying in the expensive hotel on the island in the river a quarter of a mile from Marlow. The new owners originally wanted to call it the Champs Élysées after the great thoroughfare in Paris. They settled for the Elysian Fields instead, a name they thought brought a touch of glamour, a suggestion of divine food and wine and maybe a faint hint of naughtiness, Turkish belly dancers perhaps, or girls imported from the Moulin Rouge.

Lord Francis Powerscourt left home early to take
breakfast
with Johnny Fitzgerald. He planned to visit all his
key players in one day to tell them about the Silkworkers codicil, for this, he thought, put the whole case in a different light.

‘Good God, Francis,’ said Johnny, pausing in his progress through a small mountain of kedgeree, ‘you’re not trying to tell me that the whole case may revolve round a piece of paper over hundreds of years old written by some bloke who had just escaped the Black Death? And that the bloody thing may be a forgery?’

‘I am,’ said Powerscourt. ‘And there’s more. You will recall that stuff I just told you about there being a vote and that eight out of ten of the members had to approve any alterations to the rules?’

‘I do.’

‘Well, all of your old gentlemen have a vote. They have to become members of the Silkworkers Company when they sign up for the Jesus Hospital. Twenty votes is quite a lot. They could be more important than we think.’

‘Nineteen, actually,’ said Johnny indistinctly through a final mouthful of kedgeree. ‘Dead men don’t vote.’

‘Sorry,’ said Powerscourt.

‘For God’s sake, Francis, won’t you eat something? You’re making me nervous sitting there like a high court judge at the Old Bailey not having anything at all apart from a tiny slice of toast. Have a poached egg or two, in heaven’s name.’

Powerscourt began to work his way through the eggs dumped on his plate by his friend.

‘I suppose you want me to run this lot up the flagpole with the old boys,’ said Johnny, glancing at a very pretty young American lady at the next table whose husband was complaining loudly to the waiter about the coffee. ‘I wonder why they haven’t talked about it before. I don’t recall a single mention of it in all the time I’ve been marooned down here.’