Death at the Jesus Hospital

8

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 Elysees 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.’

‘Valuable work you’ve been doing, Johnny, valuable work.’ Powerscourt grinned at his friend. ‘I suspect they have all been sworn to silence, the old men. The one thing Sir Peregrine can’t have is publicity. His whole scheme might collapse once it got into the papers.’

Johnny stared silently at a couple of slices of ham. ‘I don’t think it’ll be any good asking them about it in the Rose and Crown,’ he said finally. ‘I’ll have to try them one at a time. The man Wood, Number Twelve, maybe that’s who I’ll start with. He’s got a pretty suspicious mind.’

‘One other thing, Johnny,’ said Powerscourt.

‘Oh yes?’ said his friend. ‘What is it now?’

‘Could you tell Inspector Fletcher about the codicil and all that? I’ve got to go back to London.’

‘Yes, yes, I’ll do that,’ said Johnny. ‘Don’t mind about me. Here I am abandoned on the island like that bloody woman from Crete whose name I can never remember. There was her bloody lover on his bloody boat, just visible from the shore, hull down on the horizon.’

‘Never mind, Johnny. At least the abandoned Ariadne was in the company of Bacchus, the god of wine. They tell me there’s some pretty good stuff in the cellars here. It’s said to come from the Elysian Fields themselves.’

Powerscourt found Inspector Miles Devereux in the council chamber of the Silkworkers Hall, a beautiful room where the inner circle of the company held their meetings.

‘If you’ve got to have a bloody office,’ Devereux drawled, ‘you may as well have it in a place like this.’ He waved a hand at the tall windows looking out over the Thames and a number of full-length Silkworker prime wardens lining the walls.

‘Look at this rogues’ gallery,’ he said, pointing at the paintings. ‘They look as though oysters wouldn’t melt in their mouths. I bet you they were as slippery as eels, mind you, lying about where the silk had come from, the precise location on the Silk Road, just like today, probably.’ Devereux scrabbled about in the papers in front of him and pulled out a couple of sheets.

‘I’m thinking of staying here,’ he said, ‘making this my permanent office. As long as we haven’t solved the case, that’ll be fine. Once we have been successful, a grateful company might leave me here as a thank you for services rendered. If you get bored you can always go downstairs and jump in the Thames or wait for some assassin to come and slit your throat.’

Powerscourt smiled. He thought boredom might be a permanent problem in the life and times of Miles Devereux.

‘Sorry for the waffle,’ Devereux said, sitting up straight in his chair. ‘This is an account of what happened at the grand dinner the other day. I don’t think there’s anything unusual except for the amount of Haut Brion they seem to have got through. I’ve checked with the company manciple and he assured me it was nineteen bottles of the stuff, most of them drunk by only five or six people. My papa would have approved of the Haut Brion, though never in those quantities.’

Powerscourt glanced through the paper. There was little of interest there. He told the Inspector about the Silkworkers codicil and its implications.

Devereux whistled and began pacing about the room. ‘This is like something out of a penny dreadful,’ he said. ‘And Sir Rufus Walcott was the leader of the opposition inside the company? Fascinating.’

Eventually Miles Devereux sat down on the edge of his desk and voiced a concern that had been in Powerscourt’s mind since the previous evening. ‘I say, Lord Powerscourt. This could be the motive for all the murders. Suppose there was opposition to the changes at the Jesus Hospital as well as in the livery company itself. Suppose there was more opposition at Allison’s School up there in Norfolk. Three places where the supporters of Sir Peregrine or indeed Sir Peregrine himself might have had a motive for murder. Maybe they said they were going to make it public, or write to The Times or their MP or something like that. There is one further possible consequence.’ He stopped suddenly and stared at Powerscourt. ‘This might mean that the strange marks on the bodies are a diversion, that they were stamped on the victims to draw attention away from the true motive, greed or preservation of your own position, whatever you might want to call it. Sir Peregrine had in his possession whatever strange instrument caused the marks. Either he or his accomplices then stamped it on the victims, hoping we would all be sidetracked away from the real murderer. Which, in a way, we have been.’

‘Exactly so,’ said Powerscourt, nodding at the young man. He had been surprised that Johnny Fitzgerald hadn’t reached the same conclusion an hour so earlier. Maybe the Elysian cellars had befuddled his wits.

‘However,’ said Miles Devereux, ‘this, as my superior officer would say, is speculation, little better than guesswork. Guesswork, he says about three times a week, never won a conviction at the Bailey. Is it time to interview Sir Peregrine yet, do you think?’

‘I think it’s too soon. I must be off in a moment. I have to tell our friends in Fakenham about the latest developments. Before we talk to Sir Peregrine I think we need to talk to the experts about that codicil. I don’t think we should rely on my brother-in-law’s view of the thing, even if he has talked to the man who thinks it’s a fake. I’m going to ask him to send you the names of the principal experts who thought it was genuine. I’ll call on the man from Cambridge on my way back from Norfolk. I’m not sure we’ll end up any the wiser, but we’ve got to do it.’

‘I say, what fun,’ said Inspector Miles Devereux, rising from his chair and dancing a little jig in front of a sixteenth-century prime warden dressed from head to toe in black. ‘I wouldn’t dare say it to my fellow policemen, Lord Powerscourt, but I can say it you. Black Death! Ancient codicils! Murder most foul! What fun! What tremendous fun!’

Inspector Albert Fletcher, the officer in charge of the investigation into the death in the Jesus Hospital, was a worried man. Even the news of the Silkworkers codicil did little to cheer him up. He could see that there was at last a motive, a clear motive, but the thought of fourteenth-century documents and clever modern forgers filled him with gloom. He had so far failed to solve his first murder case. He was not living up to his promise, the bright future so many had predicted for him. Nothing he had tried so far seemed to have yielded very much. He summoned his sergeant and gave more instructions.

‘I know we’ve asked house to house for anything strange or any strange persons seen on the morning of the murder,’ Inspector Fletcher began. ‘I think I got the times wrong. And the ring around the hospital was probably too small. I want you to get all the men you can find and begin house-to-house inquiries in a five-mile radius of the hospital. And ask about the two days before the incident as well as the morning of death, could you? Some visiting murderer could have hidden himself away down there in those boathouses. Look sharp about it now.’

The sergeant always knew when his master was in a bad mood. It was pointless to raise any objections. He saluted smartly and left the room as fast as he could. Inspectors, he said to himself, bloody inspectors. Surely they could remember their own trials and tribulations when they were mere sergeants. Begging for uniformed men from their superiors to take part in what the superiors would regard as ridiculous fancies was one of the most difficult things in a sergeant’s life. And the keeper of these good men and true, one Superintendent Maurice Trotter, had a very pretty daughter who sang in the sergeant’s church choir. He was thinking of striking up a conversation with her the next time they met.

Johnny Fitzgerald was entertaining Number Twelve to lunch in the Elysian Fields. The members of the hospital had been to the funeral of Abel Meredith the day before. The medical men had finally given up hope of finding anybody who could identify the strange marks on the chest and delivered the body up for burial. The old men had enjoyed the service, singing the hymns with gusto, some of them even managing to kneel down for the prayers, the stern words about the body of Abel Meredith being committed to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, cheering and reassuring to the old men who were still alive.

The dining room in the Elysian Fields was only half full and Johnny had secured a table next to the tall windows looking out over the river. Henry Wood, Number Twelve, wearing his official uniform of blue coat with white buttons and tricorne hat, was pleased to be asked to such a luxurious establishment but slightly suspicious of Johnny’s motives. He was the man who had worked in the fish trade before coming to the hospital. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of Johnny. Maybe, Number Twelve thought, he was a pike with those teeth. Sometimes he wondered if he mightn’t actually be a shark.

His host was charming, urging more hock with the fish course, and ordering an expensive bottle of Beaune with the veal. They chatted amiably enough over the first course with Johnny encouraging Henry Wood, Number Twelve, to tell him more about what went on in the hospital. Over the apple pie, seeing that the subject seemed unlikely to come up of its own accord, Johnny made his move.

‘What are you all going to do about the Silkworkers ballot and those plans to sell off the assets?’ he inquired.

‘How do you know about that?’ replied Number Twelve.

‘I’ve a cousin who belongs to the livery,’ Johnny lied cheerfully, ‘not that he’s ever been near a silkworm in his life. He said there was a lot of argument going on.’

‘Well, that’s certainly true with us.’ Number Twelve looked round him as if he thought he might be under surveillance of some kind. He took a large gulp of Beaune and Johnny knew he was hooked. ‘Fact is,’ Number Twelve went on, ‘we’ve all been sworn to secrecy. We’re not meant to breathe a word about it to anybody.’

In his long experience of human nature working with Powerscourt, Johnny knew that there is nothing some people sworn to secrecy like better than telling somebody else about it at the earliest possible opportunity.

‘Were you all united in your opinions then, up there at the hospital?’

Number Twelve laughed a sarcastic laugh. ‘We were not. Absolutely not. I’ve never known the men so divided as they were about this vote. People came to blows once or twice.’

‘Really?’ said Johnny.

‘It was that bad.’ Number Twelve, Henry Wood, finished his glass and looked expectantly at the Beaune. Johnny topped him up and ordered another bottle.

‘So where does opinion stand now?’

‘I’m not quite sure, actually. To begin with, nearly everybody seemed to be in favour of selling up. Warden Monk was particularly keen on the plan. I’ve often wondered,’ Number Twelve leant forward at this point and whispered, ‘if he wasn’t in the pay of that horrible man Sir Peregrine Fishborne!’

‘Seriously?’ said Johnny.

‘Very seriously. That man is capable of anything. I wouldn’t be surprised if he turned out to be the murderer.’

‘You said informed opinion was initially for selling up. Did some people change their minds?’

‘Well,’ said Number Twelve, admiring the colour of the wine in its splendid bottle, ‘the opposition were very clever. They said they could see all the attractions, money in our pockets from our share of the sale of the assets, that sort of thing. But, they said, there was no guarantee about what was going to happen to the Jesus Hospital later on. If the Silkworkers effectively ceased to exist, even though some people said it would come back again when the war was over, who was going to look after us in the meantime? Who was going to pay all the bills? They said, the opposition, that our situation would become untenable. The Prime Warden and his cronies could kick us out and sell the hospital off to the highest bidder and turn it into houses or flats. We would become notorious, they said, decrepit old men walking the streets of Marlow and Maidenhead with begging bowls in our hands and nowhere to rest our weary heads at night.’

‘That must have put the fear of God into some of the men,’ said Johnny. ‘But tell me, what of your own position? Which side were you on?’

Johnny thought he knew the answer to that. He did.

‘I was with the opposition, myself. Any change in the position of something as marginal as an almshouse must be risky. People probably wouldn’t pay for them to be built if they didn’t feel they had to. The founder, the original Gresham back in sixteen whatever it was, must have thought it would improve his chances of getting into heaven. Otherwise he wouldn’t have bothered. I wouldn’t think Sir Peregrine and his friends think they might be going to hell. They wouldn’t behave like this if they did.’

‘And who was the leader of the opposition, as it were, the main voice against Sir Peregrine?’

‘Well, it was Number Twenty, actually. He was very persuasive when he was alive, Abel Meredith.’

And now he’s dead, Johnny said to himself. He opposed the changes and now he’s dead, just like that other one, up there in the Silkworkers Hall.