Death at the Jesus Hospital

11

Inspector Grime pounded the table with his fist when Lady Lucy and Powerscourt told him the news. ‘By God!’ he said. ‘You’ve managed to find out what a police Inspector, a headmaster and a bloody Bishop couldn’t manage, you’ve got us a description. Now we can get going!’

He shouted for his sergeant and strode over to a map of Norfolk on his wall. ‘Now then, Sergeant Morris,’ he began. ‘First of all I want a house-to-house search of Fakenham and the surrounding villages. Does anybody remember seeing a man, middle thirties, average height with a great black beard on the days before the murder or on the day itself? Suspect may have had foreign accent but we can’t be sure. Blighter must have got here the day before. Blighter must have stayed somewhere. All hotels, boarding houses, you know the drill. Blighter must have got here somehow. God knows where he came from, we’ll just have to try all stations. Cromer, Holt, Swaffham, King’s Lynn, Norwich, I want signs put up in all those places asking anybody who remembers seeing our bearded friend on the day of the murder or, more likely, the day before to report to their local police station. I’ll send a wire to all those stations directly after this meeting.’ Inspector Grime stopped. ‘Is that clear? Any questions?’

‘Only this,’ said his sergeant. ‘We know he came here to kill the bursar. But he must have gone away too. Should we ask people who were on the trains if they saw him leaving too? Same journey, only both ways? Travelling on a return ticket, if you like?’

‘You’d better include that,’ said the Inspector grumpily, reluctant to admit he might have forgotten something important. ‘Please amend the instructions accordingly.’

The sergeant departed to organize the manhunt. Only the police had the manpower to undertake such a search, Powerscourt said to himself. But he did wonder if they hadn’t missed the obvious point. The murderer might have been sporting a large black beard on the fatal day. How long had it taken him to grow it? In other words, how long before the event had he known that he was going to come to the school and kill the bursar? And, more important still, did the murderer still have the beard? Or had he shaved it off? He mentioned his reservations to Lady Lucy as they walked back to the hotel. He didn’t say anything to Inspector Grime. He didn’t want to spoil his enthusiasm. As he took a cup of tea, another thought struck him. If you were the murderer, maybe you would suppose the police’s first assumption would be that the killer would shave the beard off. But suppose the murderer was playing double bluff? Suppose he was still wandering around with a great black beard, reckoning that the police were now looking for a cleanshaven man. Maybe the beard would be his best form of disguise after all.

Johnny Fitzgerald had been approaching the old men of the Jesus Hospital one at a time. He had become a familiar figure in the almshouse, popping his head round a door one moment, inviting an elderly resident for coffee or lunch at his hotel the next. He had realized by now that you could discount the first ten, maybe the first fifteen minutes of any conversation with a silkman resident at the Jesus Hospital. Once he had uttered the familiar words how are you, the man would be off. It reminded Johnny of cavalry officers he had known in his army days who always spent the first part of any conversation talking about their horses. So he knew by now that Nathaniel Jones, Number Five, known as Jones the Steam from his days as an engine driver, was troubled with the gout, not that he drank a lot, only four or five pints a night and a couple of whisky chasers, and that he had trouble sleeping. There followed a list of all possible remedies from counting sheep to listing the names of all your classmates in your last year at school. Christy Butler, Number Thirteen, had trouble with his back. Sitting down for meals, he told Johnny, had become very difficult. Maybe he would have to eat standing up. But he couldn’t go to sleep standing up, could he? That Dr Ragg, he was no more use than a teetotaller in a saloon bar, he never gave you proper medicine. William Taylor, Number Sixteen, usually referred to as Pretty Billy, a nickname that had followed him throughout his life, true in his youth, ironic in old age, said he just felt ill most of the time. He ached. He sweated. He limped. He had headaches. He was, he told Johnny, like some old engine that has been run for too long and is just about to collapse. Looking at him, Johnny thought Number Sixteen was probably right.

There was one topic Johnny always came round to in these conversations. He never approached it head on, he came in from the side or from the back, he never knocked on the front door. On the question of the Silkworkers’ vote — Devereux had passed on the news about the dates — Johnny found opinion undecided. He noticed a reserve in the old men, as if some further injunction had been added to the earlier demands for silence.

That evening Johnny was at his usual position at the table in the Rose and Crown nearest the bar. This was where the old men liked to sit, closest to where the pretty barmaid would be as she pulled pints for the silkmen. The talk was of minor ailments at first. When he judged that all were present who were going to come, Johnny took the initiative.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I would like to ask you about something that has been troubling me. You see, I have a relative in the Silkworkers Company up in London and he has been telling me about the vote that’s coming up. Now, it’s for you to decide how to cast your vote, obviously, but I think there is a risk that you could make a terrible mistake. But I can only say that when I know how you are going to vote. I think most of you were against it when Number Twenty was with us. Is that still how it is today?’

Silence fell over the saloon bar. The old men looked at each other but did not speak. The barmaid even looked in from the public to see if one of the old gentlemen had actually died halfway down a pint of Wethered’s Best Bitter. Eventually Jack Miller, Number Three, the former bank clerk, broke with the discretion of a lifetime and spoke up.

‘We’re not meant to speak to anybody about this,’ he began.

‘Who says so?’ said Johnny, draining his glass.

‘Well, it’s Warden Monk, Mr Fitzgerald, sir, but seeing as it’s you, I think we can make an exception.’

‘Has he been saying this all along, or only recently, the Warden?’

‘Well, he did say it at the start, but he repeated it very definitely only the other day.’

Curiouser and curiouser, Johnny said to himself. Sir Peregrine comes to the hotel at night. Monk puts the frighteners on about speaking to anybody the next morning. What else had Monk and Sir Peregrine been cooking up in the ornate splendour of the Elysian Fields?

‘That’s very interesting,’ he said, ‘but tell me, are you still of the same mind? To oppose the changes, I mean?’

One or two of the old men glowered at each other. Johnny wondered if they might come to blows. Even the barmaid pulling another round failed to distract them in the usual way.

‘It’s like this, see.’ John Watkins, Number Fifteen, who had lost two fingers of his left hand in some battle long ago, rarely spoke and was therefore regarded as a fount of very deep wisdom by his fellow silkmen. ‘Some people have changed their minds, and that’s a fact. I shall mention no names and no numbers. I leave that to others. But I do believe that there are special circumstances regarding those who have changed their minds and betrayed all our futures for thirty pieces of silver. I shall say no more.’ Number Fifteen returned to his tankard.

Johnny waited for somebody else to speak.

‘We don’t know what to do for the best, Mr Fitzgerald,’ said Edward Cooper, Number Seven, ‘and that’s a fact. We don’t understand about codicils and things from hundreds of years ago. We’re simple folk here, so we are. What would you advise us to do?’

Not for the first time, Johnny felt a great wave of sympathy for the silkmen. Here they were, abandoned by their families, if they had any family left, thrown together with a group of people they had never known before, complicated arguments about money and codicils they did not properly understand swirling around over their heads, still frightened there might be a murderer in their midst, poised to strike again. They’re parked, he said to himself, in death’s waiting room, hanging on for the last train.

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen, I am perfectly happy to give you advice though I would warn you that I have no more experience in financial matters than most of you. But first I would like to know what’s going on. What did John Watkins, Number Fifteen, mean when he talked about thirty pieces of silver? You can tell me, gentlemen. I’m not going to let you down.’

There was a pause. Considerable amounts of beer were poured down the silkmen’s throats as they wondered what they should do. Sometimes one draught was not enough. A second was needed, and in two cases a third was required to set the thought processes into full working order.

‘Very well,’ said Peter Baker, Number Ten, ‘I’ll tell you, if nobody else will. Just the other day it was, Monk calls a meeting straight after breakfast. Funny how they all make their announcements first thing in the morning. Maybe they think our wits leave us during the course of the day. I suppose they might be right. Anyway, Monk says he has a special statement to make. It concerns the ballot, he says. He has been given to understand — pompous fellow, that man Monk, always was — that all those who vote in favour of the changes will receive what he called a discretionary emolument. He had to explain that, of course. Basically, if you vote yes, in Monk’s presence and he sees you do it, then you get ten pounds. That’s a lot of money, Mr Fitzgerald. It’s more than I have to live on for a year and I’m sure that holds true for many of my colleagues here.’

‘Discretionary? Emolument?’ James Osborne, the locksmith, Number Nineteen, had risen, rather unsteadily, to his feet. ‘It’s just another word for bribe. That’s all. They’re trying to buy us off!’

‘I don’t suppose anybody asked Mr Monk how much he would be getting if he delivered the votes?’ Johnny was ordering another round with a wave of his hand as he spoke.

‘Nobody did, sir, though I think we should have done.’ This was Henry Wood, Number Twelve, the man Johnny had lunched with at the hotel, lubricated by a couple of bottles of Beaune. ‘I’m going to say what I think. This is all very difficult for the people in the Jesus Hospital, Mr Fitzgerald. Time has a lot to do with it. None of us are going to last very long. If the livery company is broken up, we all receive a payment for that, because we’re all members of the Silkworkers Company. We’re like shareholders, getting our cut when the company is sold on. Mr Monk says nobody can be precise as it depends on the state of the stock market and the property market when the assets are sold. He claimed it could be between thirty and fifty pounds. Now there’s this extra money on top of that. Some of the men here would have more money in their hands than they have ever had in their lives. And if things start to go wrong in the hospital after a couple of years — even though they have always said it will be protected, whatever that means — it won’t matter very much. Half of us will be dead. It’s all very well to talk of doing the right thing for posterity and voting no, but I don’t think you feel virtuous when you’re in your coffin, six feet underground, with the lid screwed down.’

‘It’s all a question of timescales,’ said Christy Butler, Number Thirteen, staring hard at the low level of his beer in the glass. ‘If you think you’re going soon, within a year or a year and a half, say, vote yes and enjoy the money while you can. If you think you might still be drinking this excellent bitter in ten years’ time, you’d better vote no or you might not be able to afford it. Short time left means yes, long time left means no.’

‘That’s all very well,’ said Johnny Johnston, Number Nine, the former postman, whose glass was completely empty, ‘but how on earth are we meant to know how long we’re going to last? Even the bloody doctors aren’t going to tell us that.’

There was another silence. Johnny Fitzgerald remembered being told that Number Nine had been conducting a vendetta against Dr Ragg for years over the treatment, or, as Number Nine maintained, the lack of treatment for his gout. He called for refills. He wondered what the assets of the Silkworkers were worth on the open market. He wondered if Inspector Devereux had found out. Johnny rather liked Miles Devereux. He decided that the best thing to do would be to keep this particular ball in play. Maybe Sir Peregrine Fishborne would have to make another trip to the Elysian Fields late at night.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘you were kind enough to ask me for my advice. I do not think we have sufficient information to form a balanced judgement. I think you need clarification on one particular point. While I agree with my friend Number Twelve that it must be difficult to feel virtuous in the grave, I do feel that we owe certain obligations to our successors. You are all good men and true.’ Are you sure? he said to himself. One of them might be a murderer. Better press on. ‘I do not think that you would want the Jesus Hospital to close its doors for ever just so that you could receive what one of your colleagues referred to as thirty pieces of silver. When I say clarification, I mean this. You should ask to see the full accounts of the hospital for the last five years. Then you take an average of the figures. Then you ask for a legally binding document, signed in the presence of solicitors, which guarantees that an amount of capital capable of producing that amount of annual income with a fifteen per cent safety margin will be placed in a reputable bank and is only to be used for the maintenance of the Jesus Hospital.’

Johnny took a monster pull on his beer. He realized he might have made it too complicated. He heard various mutterings among the old men. What did he mean by average? Surely capital referred to places like London or Paris. What was it doing here? What was a fifteen per cent safety margin?

‘Basically,’ said Johnny, ‘it means that you ask them to guarantee that there will be enough money to keep the hospital going in the future.’

Old heads began to nod in agreement at this moment. The barmaid announced in her sweetest voice that the Rose and Crown was closing for the night. The old men shuffled slowly back to the hospital. Johnny made his way back to the Elysian Fields. A taxi passed him as he neared the front door. Johnny had a brief glimpse of an enormous black car discreetly parked under the trees. A very pretty young woman got out of the cab and fiddled with her gloves. As she entered the reception area, Johnny caught a hint of very expensive perfume. ‘The usual keys, madam?’ the night porter behind the desk said. ‘The Baron Haussmann Suite?’

Johnny was astonished. Sir Peregrine had indeed come once more to the Elysian Fields but not to plan more bribes for the old men of the Jesus Hospital. Johnny looked at the girl’s back as she disappeared up the stairs. She seemed to be very pretty indeed. Johnny didn’t think she had come all this way at this time to discuss share options or exchange rates. I’ll be damned, Johnny said to himself. The old devil. Lucky bugger.

Inspector Grime’s sergeant, a young man called Peter Morris, had nurtured hopes of becoming a draughtsman or an artist before being claimed by the more mundane appeal of the police force. This was his first murder inquiry. But he liked to keep his hand in when he could. He had constructed for his Inspector a great chart which stood proudly on one wall of Grime’s office. It was a timeline, with the days before and after the murder marked in different colours. Black, in harmony with his beard, marked the suspect’s movements. Blackbeard, as all the policemen referred to him now, first appeared in the chart on the day before the murder. He had arrived in the town at seven o’clock in the evening on a train from King’s Lynn. The policemen noted glumly that he had arrived in the dark. Then he seemed to disappear. No bar or hotel or bed and breakfast establishment remembered such a man. The black entry appeared again the following morning, entering the school and killing its bursar early in the morning. Then he vanished once more.

The Inspector and his sergeant were having a conference by the chart the morning after Sir Peregrine’s night visitor arrived at the Elysian Fields. ‘Right,’ said Inspector Grime, ‘we’ve had seventy replies so far and this is all that stands up. Is that right, Sergeant?’

‘I’m afraid it is, sir. I think some members of the public are too ready to offer help. We’ve had reports of all sorts of men with black beards but most of them were the wrong age or the wrong height. Some more reports should come in today, sir.’

Inspector Grime snorted. He had had such high hopes when the original description was provided by the sixth-former David Lewis. Now it seemed to be turning to dust in his hands. ‘Where did the bugger sleep, for God’s sake? Are there any empty houses or cottages he could have used? He can’t have disappeared between seven in the evening one day and eight o’clock in the morning the day after, can he?’

‘I’ve got people checking on all the empty dwellings, sir, to see if any of them might have been occupied. I don’t have the answers yet. Could I make a suggestion, sir?’

‘If you must,’ said Grime whose reluctance to listen to subordinates made him unpopular with his men.

‘I tried this the other day, sir, on my way home. If you skip over the fence at the side of the school football fields you could be in Allison’s School grounds without anybody knowing you were there. There are all kinds of outbuildings there, cricket pavilions, football changing rooms, a couple of barns, a great shed full of mowing machines and things. I checked with the school, sir, and they say they don’t bother to lock them at night. Blackbeard could have spent the night in there. There’s running water in some of them so he could have washed and things like that. It’s possible, sir.’

Inspector Grime snorted once again. ‘That’s as maybe. But how did the bugger get away? Nobody saw him getting on to a train out of Fakenham the next morning. I doubt very much if he would have wanted to hang around just after he’d killed the bursar. And he must have dumped the postman ’s uniform somewhere along the way.’

‘He could have dumped the uniform anywhere as he was getting away,’ said the sergeant.

‘So how do you suggest he got away then?’ The Inspector repeated his question. ‘Did he have supernatural powers, do you suppose?’

Inspector Grime’s sarcasm was as unpopular as his dislike of suggestions. Sergeant Morris just carried on.

‘He could have walked, sir.’

‘Walked? Where could the man have walked to, for God’s sake?’

‘Norwich, sir, perhaps.’ The sergeant noticed that his Inspector was turning red and reaching in his pockets for his pipe, usually a bad sign. ‘I know it’s a long way but you’d be much less visible there with all those people in the railway station. He could have gone anywhere from Norwich, sir, as you well know.’

‘Would you like to take over the entire investigation, Sergeant? Use your vast experience in murder cases to solve the mystery of the vanishing Blackbeard?’

‘Certainly not, sir, but could I just make one last suggestion and then I’ll keep quiet. I’ve got the highest respect for your position and your experience, sir, as you know.’ Sergeant Morris was well aware that the Inspector had to write a report on his conduct in the next ten days. More or less continuous helpings of humble pie were usually required at this point. Sergeant Morris thought yet again about requesting a transfer to a different part of the county.

‘Let’s hear it, if I must.’

‘Well, sir, I’m sure you must have thought of this already. You’ve got so much more experience than me. But suppose this Blackbeard is our man. He travels up here from we know not where, could be anywhere in the country. That suggests to me that the motive, the reasons behind Gill’s death, may have nothing to do with the school, or the Silkworkers or his affair with the married woman and the disappearing stonemason husband. The motive might lie elsewhere.’

Inspector Grime blew out an enormous mouthful of smoke. The tobacco was relaxing him.

‘That’s perfectly possible,’ he said. ‘It’s equally possible that Blackbeard was a hired killer. You can pick up people like that in London very cheaply these days, a hitman who’ll kill somebody for a couple of hundred pounds. The real murderer could still be local, but he could be a man who has decided to hire Blackbeard to hide his own identity.’

‘Do you believe that, sir?’

‘Do you know, Sergeant, I’m not sure what I believe any more.’

Inspector Miles Devereux had removed his feet from the desk and hooted with laughter when Johnny Fitzgerald telephoned with the news about overnight visitors at the Elysian Fields. He asked Johnny to see if the visitor was coming back to London by train. If so, once Johnny told Devereux the time of the train, she could be intercepted at the London end. Inspector Devereux looked forward to questioning her.

But his main concern that morning was with the two principal characters in his section of the investigation, Sir Peregrine Fishborne who was very much alive and Sir Rufus Walcott who was very much dead. He had decided two days before that he needed more information about them, about their past, about anything that happened some time before that might give rise to sudden death years later. Two of his brightest men had been given the task of finding as much as they could about the life stories of the dead man and the one who had succeeded him as Prime Warden of the Silkworkers Company.

‘It’s all very conventional,’ said David Lawrence, the constable assigned to Sir Peregrine. ‘I started in Who’s Who, that’s not much use really, a whole lot stuff about his progress through the livery company. I talked to a couple of reporters who write about the City, sir, and they said his life only got interesting with this row about the Silkworkers and the codicil. He’s well connected, Sir Peregrine, one cousin on the board of one of the big banks, another runs a shipping company, a third is a big noise in Lloyd’s the insurers. You could, one of these reporters said, coast along quite happily in the slipstream of those relations if you kept your nose clean and played your cards right. Sir Peregrine’s chairman of a middling sized insurance company, plenty of money, but not as much as the other members of the family. The other reporter thought this was what started him off on the codicil and the selling off of the assets. He has to keep up with Cousin Rupert at the bank and Cousin Jeremy at the shipping and Cousin Nigel in Lloyd’s.’

‘Would Sir Peregrine become richer than the others if he sold off the assets?’ asked Devereux, thinking perhaps of his own family where the brothers proliferated but the assets had long since disappeared.

‘Richer, probably,’ said Constable Lawrence, ‘but I didn’t ask that question, so that’s a guess.’

‘And what of Sir Rufus?’ Inspector Devereux was hoping for better things from his second sleuth, Constable Conrad.

‘He’s pretty conventional too,’ said Conrad who was, at twenty-two years of age, the youngest member of Devereux’s team. ‘There is one curious thing about him, sir, and that’s his entry in Who’s Who.’

‘What on earth has happened to his entry in Who’s Who?’

‘There’s this gap, sir. St Paul’s School, Christ Church, Oxford, then a gap until he’s thirty-five years old. At that point he turns up on the board of the Town and Capital Insurance Company and never looks back. My informants said he was a whizz with figures, sir, calculate the likely profit on any takeover in a second or two once he knew the share price and the sales figures and the state of the balance sheet.’

‘Have you been able to trace anything at all in the missing years?’

‘Not a thing, sir.’

‘God bless my soul,’ said Devereux, ‘I never heard the like.’

‘As I said, sir,’ Constable Conrad pressed on, ‘once word got out about his ability with figures, he was on boards all over the place. And, to be fair to him, most of his companies prospered.’

‘Are there any links between the two of them? Apart from service with the Silkworkers?’

‘There’s a Norfolk connection, sir.’ Constable Lawrence had returned to the fray. ‘We only realized it when we were comparing notes just before we came to see you. Sir Peregrine has a house in Norfolk, near Melton Constable. Big place, peacocks on the lawn, lots of gardeners.’

‘And my man, Sir Rufus, he’s got a great pile just outside Aylsham. I don’t know about peacocks but they say the garden is by Capability Brown. The places can’t be more than ten to fifteen miles apart.’

The telephone rang. Inspector Devereux’s face broke into a wicked grin. ‘No sign of her at all, you say? Disappeared? Not gone off in the boot of the big car? Never mind. Keep me posted, Johnny. Happy watching.’

Inspector Devereux told his men about the late-night visitor to Sir Peregrine’s suite at the Elysian Fields, and that she seemed to have disappeared. Johnny Fitzgerald could find no trace of her this morning.

‘Only one thing for it, sir.’ said Constable Lawrence cheerfully, ‘you need a permanent vigil at that hotel. Apprehend the young lady once she appears. Have a serious talk with her, then bring her in for questioning.’

‘Quite right, sir.’ Constable Conrad was keen to join the hunt. ‘With that kind of watching operation, you need twenty-four-hour cover, sir. A man on watch every hour of the day, sir. I’m sure the two of us could handle it.’

The Inspector laughed. ‘Get away, the pair of you. If there’s any handling of this young lady to be done, then it must be carried out by the senior officer on the case. That’s me. I shall, of course, let you know how I get on.’

Lord Francis Powerscourt was walking from the railway station to the Jesus Hospital in Marlow. A light rain was falling. He suspected that two if not three of his Inspectors felt sure that Sir Peregrine was the murderer, and were close to arresting him. Earlier that day he had sent a wire to Inspector Grime, asking him if there were any reports that Sir Peregrine had been at his house in Norfolk at the time of the bursar’s murder, or if the huge black car had been seen near the school at that time. Powerscourt was not convinced that Sir Peregrine was the killer. In his mind he always came back to the strange marks on the dead men’s chests, surely not only a link between the murders but a shout of defiance, a taunt to anybody investigating them.

As he approached the building, he stopped suddenly and drew back to the side of the road. Fifty yards from the front door Warden Monk was having a conversation with a man Powerscourt had not seen in this case before. Indeed it was a couple of years since they had last met. Monk seemed to be nervous, rubbing his hands together over and over again. The man had been Powerscourt’s contact point when he had worked for the government a few years before. His name was Colonel James Arbuthnot and he was a senior officer in the British Secret Service.