Death at the Jesus Hospital

7

The staff at the Athenaeum in London’s Pall Mall prided themselves on their knowledge of their members’ wishes, which bedroom a country member preferred if staying overnight in town, where the members liked sitting for lunch, which of them took wine by the glass at lunchtime and which took it by the bottle. By now they had years of experience of dealing with the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office. Sir Fitzroy Robinson Buller liked the corner table in the garden room for luncheon with his guests, he always ordered lamb, cooked rare, he usually took a glass or two of Pomerol with his main course and if he was in a really good mood he would have a glass of Barsac with his pudding. Now his overcoat had been safely deposited in the cloakroom and a glass of the club’s driest Amontillado was in front of him as he perused the menu and waited for his guest. The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police was late. His cab was stuck in traffic. Sir Edward Henry complained to himself that he was meant to be in control of traffic movements in the capital. The two men shared a political master, Herbert Gladstone, son of the famous Prime Minister of the previous century.

Pleasantries were exchanged over the soup. Light skirmishing began with the main course and the Pomerol. When his lamb was nearly over, Sir Fitzroy made his move.

‘Let me tell you in confidence,’ he began, ‘that I am seriously worried about the Home Secretary and his position in the government. Having a Gladstone in the cabinet may have been a gesture towards the glorious Liberal past, but our Herbert is a pale copy of his famous father. Having one leading institution operating on the hereditary principle might be thought strange, but to have two is surely a mistake. By now, after centuries of experience, the vicissitudes of successive monarchs should have warned us off perpetuating that system anywhere else.’ Sir Fitzroy paused for a sip of his wine. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, ‘I digress. My real concern is with these recent murders, the ones where the victims have strange markings on their chests. I fear that knowledge may seep out, and the newspapers will know that the three cases are linked. I fear there may be a public outcry. Three police forces trying to catch one murderer. What a waste of public money! Is it for this that we pay our taxes? Why do we not appoint a single man from the ranks of the Metropolitan Police to take charge of the affair? I have made this suggestion in a memorandum to the Home Secretary but I have had no reply. He sits, yet again, on the fence, Herbert The Unready, unable to make his mind up. What do you say, Henry?’

Sir Edward Henry had realized long ago that politics played as large a role in his job as policing. Over the years he had tried to maintain as much freedom of action for his force without alienating his political masters. In theory the Home Secretary could order him to do something. In practice, if he was careful, he could keep his distance. Occasional scraps had to be thrown down, apparent concessions that might keep the authorities quiet while giving little away.

‘I fully understand your anxieties, Sir Fitzroy,’ Sir Edward began, thinking about his defences. ‘I am sure you would agree that a rational man might organize our policing very differently if he were given a clean slate. Other countries have a national body which can investigate cases which cross the boundaries of separate forces. But, as things stand,’ he paused to polish off the remains of his roast beef, ‘I have no powers which would enable me to take the case over. I have a most efficient and imaginative man on the case of Sir Rufus of the Silkworkers, murdered in his own hall. But I cannot order the Norfolk Constabulary to hand over the case to one of my officers, any more than I could instruct the Buckinghamshire force to hand over the death in the Jesus Hospital. Only the Home Secretary has the power to do that. The ball, I fear, is in your court rather than mine, Sir Fitzroy.’

‘Surely you must agree that such a course of action would be the right one in these circumstances?’ Sir Fitzroy was beginning to tap the table with the fingers of his left hand, a sure sign, to those that knew him well, that he was growing angry.

‘That’s as may be, Sir Fitzroy, but we in the Metropolitan Police have long memories. People still remember the case of Inspector Whicher and the Road Hill murders half a century ago. A detective was called in from the Met. He identified the killer. He was not believed. Indeed, he had to abandon the case and his career in the police force. Local rivalries played a part in that. Only later did it transpire that Whicher had indeed identified the murderer correctly, but his theories were ignored by the local authorities. We do not look forward to a repeat of such incidents.’

‘I see,’ said Sir Fitzroy, his fingers tapping ever harder. ‘This is most unsatisfactory.’

Sir Edward Henry knew that to make an enemy of the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office was as dangerous as making an enemy of the Home Secretary himself. All kinds of minor but irritating obstacles could be put in his way, lack of cooperation over police pay, threats of public inquiries into controversial cases.

‘There is one thing I can do,’ he said finally. ‘I am very concerned about the fact that all these murders have links with the Silkworkers Company. They have a number of properties, particularly almshouses, in the London area. I propose to mount a guard over all of them round the clock until further notice. And I will send a message to the other chief constables in southern England that we are proposing to do this. I don’t think the writ of the Silkworkers Company stretches as far as Aberdeen, probably not even up to York.’

Surely that, he said to himself, should appease Sir Fitzroy. It’s not precisely what he wanted but it’s something more than a fig leaf.

‘Splendid, Henry, simply splendid. I shall take steps to inform the Home Secretary when I return to the office. That should give him a push in the right direction.’ Long experience told him that you seldom achieved your objectives in the jungles of Whitehall by proceeding in a direct line. Crab-like progress was the order of the day. He beckoned to the waiter and ordered a second glass of Barsac for them both.

Inspector Miles Devereux was sitting in a borrowed office in Cannon Street police station with a bunch of papers in his hand. These were the reports of the officers sent to interview all those who had attended the fatal dinner in the Silkworkers Hall. Like so much police work, the details were all here. Devereux was bored by details as he was bored by so much of police routine. But he knew that he had to take them seriously. Otherwise he could make a mistake. Scratching the back of his head, he finished the last report. There was nothing here that could possibly help with their inquiries. He picked up a fresh sheet of paper and wrote ‘Silkworkers Feast’ at the top. Then he began writing an account of what happened hour by hour until the murderer struck. If you were in a job where details mattered, he said to himself as he reached eleven o’clock and the Haut Brion began to flow more freely, the least you can do is to make sure that your facts are right.

Lord Francis Powerscourt was with his brother-in-law William Burke in his vast office in the City of London once more. Burke was seated behind an enormous desk thick with files in neat bundles that made him look like a First Sea Lord or the Viceroy of India.

‘For God’s sake, William,’ said Powerscourt, ‘can’t you come and sit in one of these chairs by the fire. You’re too terrifying behind that thing. You look like some American tycoon about to ruin his enemies.’

Burke laughed. He took up a sheet or two of paper from his desk and joined Powerscourt on the other side of the marble mantelpiece.

‘I have some interesting news for you, Francis, about our friends the Silkworkers. Remaining liverymen still alive, no further deaths overnight, I trust?’

‘All left alive present and correct, as far as I know,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I wouldn’t vouch for tomorrow, mind you. Or the day after.’

Burke grunted and fished around in his pockets for a pair of spectacles.

‘There are two ways of looking at what’s been happening here, Francis. One benign, the other sinister. You can’t take a view until I tell you what’s been going on. The Silkworkers have been in existence since the early fourteenth century. Nobody is certain about the exact date of their foundation but various records begin to appear after thirteen thirty-eight or thereabouts. To understand the current controversy in the company, you have to go back to a little known codicil to a document believed to have been written in thirteen fifty, just after the Black Death of thirteen forty-eight. This wretched codicil was only discovered in the Silkworkers archives three or four years ago. All kinds of people have been excavated from their lairs to pronounce judgement on it, university professors, cathedral librarians, every archivist who could be found within a twenty-mile radius of Temple Bar. All of them, with one exception, say it is genuine. I’ll tell you about the exception in a moment.’

Burke helped himself to a large cigar from a brass and silver humidor on the table in front of him. ‘You have to imagine, these wise men say, what it must have been like just after the Black Death. Thousands and thousands of Londoners were dead. Contemporaries said you could catch the stench of rotting bodies far outside the city walls. The dead were piled so high on some streets that the survivors had to tread on the corpses to continue their journeys. Think most of all, the professors and the rest of them say, of the effect it must have had on men’s minds. Their God, they felt certain, had deserted them. Perhaps this was the beginning of the end, the Book of Revelation come to Lombard Street and Cornhill, the number of the beast replacing all the numbers they had in their early ledgers. Maybe the plague would return over and over again until there was nobody left alive.’

Burke paused and blew an enormous smoke ring up to his intricately plastered ceiling. ‘With me so far, Francis? You are? Not too difficult? Good. Now to this wretched codicil. Nobody knows who drew it up or to what document it was attached. The bearded ones believe it may have been part of a new version of the Silkworkers’ constitution. Certainly the memory of the Black Death must have been paramount in the minds of those who wrote it. I asked one of the few experts who seemed to be under seventy years of age to make me a modern translation. I couldn’t make much sense of the original.’

Burke picked out one sheet of paper from his pile and began to read.

‘“As we have suffered most grievously in person and in property from the recent onslaught of the Great Mortality” — that’s the Black Death to you and me — “we, the Wardens of the Company, have introduced this codicil to assist our successors in time of plague, pestilence or peril. At such times, if the Prime Warden and his three colleagues deem that there is a great danger or threat to the persons, property or families of the Silkworkers, they may take such steps as they think fit to safeguard those persons, property or families for posterity. Thus the ancient misteries of the Silkworkers,” I know you’re going to ask, Francis, misteries comes from the Latin ministerium which means occupation, “may be preserved for the future to rank alongside the other misteries in the City of London. May Almighty God bless our deliberations at this time and preserve us in body and mind until the last days.”’

Burke laid down his cigar and blew a further smoke ring in the direction of a Lawrence portrait of an earlier City grandee on the wall.

‘That’s it, Francis. Except there’s a final paragraph after “the last days”, like a postscript. “Any changes proposed to the government of the Company in times of plague, pestilence or peril must be supported by the approbation of eight out of ten of the membership of the Company, their names or their marks to be recorded in the Company records. Any monies raised may be placed in property or other places. If the danger is great and the Lord of Hosts appears to have abandoned his people for the second time, the Company may be broken up, the monies divided in the following fashion: one half to the Prime Warden, one third to the Council, the remains divided among the membership according to their length of membership in the company.”’

‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, ‘that must have set the cat among the pigeons when the Prime Warden realized the implications. Tell me this, William, what do your wise men think that reference to “have suffered most grievously in person and in property ” means right at the beginning?’

‘If they’re honest with themselves, they don’t know. A couple of the professors say it refers to the collapse of property prices at the time of the Black Death. If your friends and relations are dying all around, you’re not going to put your house up for sale. Prices would have collapsed, they say.’

‘They may just be reading the present back into the past,’ said Powerscourt. ‘You said earlier, William, that there was a great argument going on among the Silkworkers. Where does this codicil come in?’

‘Well, the key section is the bit about the authorities being able to take such action as they think fit if there is a great danger from plague, pestilence or peril. The party for change, led by our mutual friend, Sir Peregrine, think that the threat of war with Germany is such a moment of peril. They point out, quite rightly, that were that to happen, the value of the Silkworkers’ assets would fall like a stone thrown from a high building. It would be a financial catastrophe. Why not, says Sir Peregrine, sell up now and buy everything back when the war’s over and prices are still very low. They’d make a killing, a real killing, I tell you. I’ve told you before how rich these livery companies are. They’ve got properties all over the City, some of them maybe dating back to the Black Death itself, who knows. When you join the Silkworkers as a full member, not like the old boys in the almshouses, you have to promise to leave either monies or securities or property to the company in your will. There are millions of pounds on the table here.’

‘So Sir Peregrine is proposing that they sell up. Fifty per cent to the Prime Warden sounds a pretty good deal to me, William. And what’s to stop any of them taking all their share for themselves and never giving any back to the company when the peril or pestilence has ended?’

‘What suspicious minds you people have,’ said Burke, shaking his head sadly, ‘but as it happens, you’re more or less right. Three months ago, I think, Sir Peregrine proposed this vast sell-off of all their assets. He’s been canvassing for votes ever since. They’ve got a rather unusual membership, the Silkworkers. Most of the livery companies don’t want to have too many members on board — you don’t want to be paying for elaborate feasts for five hundred or more. But the Silkworkers have an ordinance that says only Silkworkers can be admitted to their almshouses. Rather than go to the bother of changing their statutes, they simply enlist everybody who isn’t a Silkworker already into the company when they are taken in at places like your Jesus Hospital.’

‘Do you mean to say,’ Powerscourt was leaning forward, ‘that all the old boys in the Jesus Hospital in Marlow are members of the Ancient Mistery of Silkworkers? That they all have a vote, for God’s sake?’

‘They do.’

‘You’re not telling me that all the pupils at Allison’s up in Norfolk are members with votes too?’

‘They’re too young,’ said Burke, ‘but I bet many of the masters are members. I’m virtually certain that the late bursar must have belonged.’

Powerscourt rose to his feet and began pacing up and down the room, as he did so often in his own drawing room in Markham Square. Walking the quarterdeck was how Lady Lucy referred to it.

‘I think you said earlier, William, that one of your experts had doubts about the authenticity of the codicil?’

Burke laughed. ‘Yes, and a most entertaining fellow he is too. Professor of History at Cambridge, Fellow of Trinity, said by his contemporaries to be the brightest interpreter of the past since Thomas Babington Macaulay. Name of Tait, Selwyn Augustus Tait. He’s thought to be unable to write a word of his books until he’s taken a pint of claret on board. He read the codicil, the original version, in this room, in that very chair, Francis, where you’re sitting now.’

Powerscourt stared at his chair as if a scrap of historical wisdom might have been deposited on it by his distinguished predecessor. ‘What did he say?’

‘In actual fact, he read it twice. Then he said, “Mr Burke, I would not hold you to any figure, but tell me, what are the Silkworkers worth? Approximately. To the nearest million.”’

‘What answer did you give, William?’

‘I said five or six million, maybe more.’

‘What did he do then?’

‘He laughed. Then he asked if we had any decent claret about the place. “When my wits have been sharpened by a glass or two,” he said, “I shall give you my verdict.” Then he went out to stare at the view from that window behind you, the one where you can see St Paul’s.’

‘I presume the claret arrived in due course?’

‘It did, an excellent vintage it was too. When Tait had consumed two glasses, at a pretty rapid pace, it must be said, he laughed again and poured himself a refill. “It’s a fake,” he said, “that codicil. I’m almost certain it’s a fake.” And he laughed a third time.’

‘Like Saint Peter with the cock crowing perhaps. Did he explain why he thought that?’ asked Powerscourt, fascinated by the account of the claret-drinking historian, a cross between Johnny Fitzgerald and Edward Gibbon.

‘He did. Of course he did. For a start he said that people like the Silkworkers always looked after their archives very carefully. He had examined a couple of the livery companies ’ records in the course of his researches and found them extremely well annotated. He doubted if anything could have been found recently which would have been in existence for six hundred years without discovery. By this time, Francis, most of the original bottle had gone and I felt obliged to order another. The professor’s main objection was cynical. You always have to ask this question in these circumstances, he claimed. Cui bono? Who benefits? Who stands to gain from it? It was a good question for Cassius and Cicero, he said, and an even better one now, for the Silkworkers. Sir Peregrine and his colleagues could make fortunes, possibly millions for Sir Peregrine alone. He was sure the thing was a clever forgery, designed to provide an avenue through which the funds of the Silkworkers could be diverted into the pockets of their officers. Then he took another long pull of his claret and said good afternoon and left to catch his train.’

‘Was he weaving on his way out? Steering an uncertain course for the door perhaps?’

‘He was not, Francis. Selwyn Augustus Tait seemed as sober as you and I. Maybe there’s something in the air up there in the Fens with all that mist and those winds from the Urals.’

‘Do we know if there is a timetable for this vote? By God, it’ll be more exciting than a by-election. The fate of these vast sums of money in the hands of a group of people many of whom have never seen a bolt of silk in their lives. A date, William, a date?’

‘I’m not absolutely sure,’ Burke replied. ‘Something tells me it is the middle of February, end of February perhaps? I’ll check for you.’

Burke fell silent for a moment. The great seventeenth-century French clock that had once graced the hunting lodge of Rambouillet ticked away the seconds of the late afternoon on the Burke mantelpiece. ‘I wouldn’t say this to anyone but you, Francis, but I blame democracy and the popular papers for so many of our troubles, I really do.’

‘Whatever do you mean, William?’ Powerscourt had never heard his brother-in-law as political or as philosophical as this before.

‘With democracy as we know it now, with all these extra voters on the rolls, politics is governed by the whims of the uneducated and the ignorant. The popular papers, especially the Daily Mail — God, how I hate the Daily Mail — have been exaggerating or inventing the threat from the Germans for years now. You can scarcely open a newspaper but there are these ludicrous scare stories in there. If the country were run by intelligent people like men of business, we could sort out the German problem in a weekend. “You would like a bit more of Africa,” we could say. “Well, have another bit. Have this bit here and that bit over there, while you’re about it, we’ve got far too much of it already.” So the German men of business would say, “That is very kind, now what would you like in return? Would you like us to stop building our dreadnoughts up there in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven? Would you like us to halt the arms race at a point where you always have four or five big ships more than we do so you and your people don’t feel threatened? Very good. We shall do it.” I’m sure it wouldn’t even take a weekend. But can you imagine what the newspapers would say back here? “Asquith gives Empire to Germans!” “British Empire handed over to the Hun!” The mass of the population who read the Mail and not The Times or the Morning Post would be up in arms. The government would fall within weeks. They would be pariahs, excluded from polite society, maybe even banned from their clubs, who knows.’ Burke sighed. ‘It’s all too late now, Francis, far too late. People talk about currencies being devalued so they lose their purchasing power and their value. Good government has been devalued by extending the franchise in this country but nobody could stop it.’

Powerscourt thought a diversion was needed. ‘William,’ he began, ‘I think it must be sitting in this chair where that other fellow sat. Have you any decent claret in the house?’

Burke laughed. ‘I’ll order some now, Francis. We could have the same wine as the professor had.’

Burke stopped halfway across the room and stared at his brother-in-law. ‘My God, Francis, how stupid of me. I’ve forgotten to tell you one of the most important facts of all about recent events at the Silkworkers.’

‘What was that?’

‘How could I be so foolish! There was a lot of opposition to Sir Peregrine and his friends in the Silkworkers. Can you guess who the leader of the opposition was?’

‘I have no idea, William.’

‘I’ll tell you who it was,’ said Burke. ‘It was the man recently found dead at the top of the steps leading down to the river in Silkworkers Hall with the strange mark on his chest. Sir Rufus Walcott, he was the leader of the opposition.’

One hundred and twenty miles away Detective Inspector Grime of the Norfolk Constabulary was a very angry man. He had been waiting all day for one of the boys of Allison’s School to come and speak to him about the visit of the phoney postman on the day of the murder of the school bursar Roderick Gill. That morning a real postman had retraced what they thought must have been the steps of the killer. The headmaster had addressed the pupils at the end of morning assembly before lessons began.

‘Good morning, boys,’ he had said, sweeping his black gown behind him as he spoke. ‘I know that you will all be as anxious as I am to clear up the recent murder in our midst. This morning I appeal for your help. Less than an hour ago the postal authorities and the police repeated the journey through our school of the murderer who came disguised as a postman. If this second visit by a real postman sparked any memories in your minds of that earlier, fatal trip, perhaps you would be so kind as to speak to Inspector Grime on my left here. He will be in the Officers’ Training Corps office for the rest of the day. Please see him if there is anything you remember, anything at all.’

The boys filed out and headed for their classrooms. Many of them stared rather insolently at the policeman as they passed him on their way out. Inspector Grime had made few friends among the schoolboy population of Allison’s. He had spoken to them all by now. His bored manner did not impress. With one or two of them he had been downright rude. As the pupils settled into their desks to begin their day’s work, the word began to be passed round. It was started by a rather intelligent young man in the Fifth Form who proclaimed to all and sundry that he wanted to be an anarchist when he grew up. ‘Don’t speak to the policeman. Pass it on,’ he wrote and tore the page out of his notebook. He handed it to his neighbour. Inside ten minutes every boy in the room had read it. When the pupils changed classes at the end of the first lesson, those in on the secret told the colleagues they passed in the corridor. The would-be anarchist’s note was still travelling by the time of morning break at eleven. Within five minutes of that starting, every single boy in the school had received the message. The policy of non-cooperation with the civil authorities had been established in a little over two hours.

Inspector Grime sat in his temporary office surrounded by literature about the Officers’ Training Corps and a succession of military photographs on the wall. Boy soldiers from Allison’s marching past the front of the building. Boy soldiers at camp in some dreary part of Norfolk near the sea. Boy soldiers standing steady on parade beneath the Union flag. The headmaster had assured him that the witnesses would probably come during morning break. They did not. The headmaster then revised his opinion and informed Inspector Grime that the boys would come to him during the lunch hour. They did not. After lessons closed for the day the headmaster felt sure that this was the time for the boys to come forward. He asked his deputy if he had heard anything on the school grapevine about the boys’ attitude to the police Inspector. The deputy had no intelligence to offer. By now the headmaster was seriously worried. Were the boys in his care obstructing the course of justice? He found it impossible to believe that they had not noticed anything that morning. He wondered if there might be another way of getting them to talk.

Detective Inspector Grime was livid. He had read through all his notes on the case so far. He had learnt from one of the OTC handbooks how to dismantle and clean a rifle. He had read about making progress in open country and through difficult terrain, which was certainly where he felt he was now. Worse was to come. His sergeant arrived shortly before five o’clock to tell him of a message from the Dean of York, who had promised to make further inquiries about the whereabouts of one Jude Mitchell, cuckolded husband of the mistress of the dead man. The dean and his people had toiled all day for many days and caught nothing. Mitchell was nowhere to be found. They had cast their nets as far afield as Beverley to the east and Lichfield to the south and Ripon to the north, all minster or cathedral cities where a mason like Mitchell might have been able to take on temporary work. He was nowhere to be found.

‘Damn it, Sergeant,’ said Grime to his subordinate, ‘where the hell is the wretched man? You can’t just disappear like this. Not nowadays.’ The sergeant resisted the temptation to say that Mitchell appeared to have done precisely that. ‘Give me a moment, will you?’ the Inspector went on. ‘You can take this back and send it off. I’d better send a telegram with the latest news, or rather lack of it, to Lord Francis bloody Powerscourt. Damn the man and his fancy theories!’

Had Inspector Grime been a more sympathetic officer, one that boys might be happy to speak to about what they had seen, he would have heard some things that were not all that important to his investigation. But some sensible boys would have told him that the man was of average height. Others would have told him that the man seemed to be in his middle thirties. Others again would have told of a thick black beard. But one boy had information that would have made the Inspector and Powerscourt very interested indeed. This was a boy called Lewis, David Lewis, who was in his first year in the Sixth Form. Lewis was the best mimic in the school. He could impersonate his headmaster, his housemaster and the chaplain perfectly. When his friends persuaded him, he would deliver wickedly accurate sermons from the chaplain late at night, standing at the end of his bed in the dormitory with his dressing gown acting as cassock. On another famous occasion in Allison’s legend he had rung the headmaster, purporting to be his housemaster, about some detentions which were subsequently cancelled and caused a rift between the two schoolmasters which had not been healed to this day.

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.