Death at the Jesus Hospital

2

‘Do you think I should tell him?’ Number Nineteen, a tall, very thin man called James Osborne, with a few white hairs left on the side of his head, was talking to his friend from Number Eleven. Number Nineteen was next door to the apartment of Abel Meredith, still interred in the hospital morgue. Inspector Fletcher was working his way round the almshouse, questioning each old gentleman in turn. Number Eleven, from the other side of the quadrangle, was, in contrast to his friend, short and rather fat with a full head of curly brown hair. His name was Archie Dunne and his last job had been as a car mechanic.

‘For the fifth time, James,’ Number Eleven said, ‘I think you should tell the Inspector. It can’t do any harm.’

‘I’m not sure, I’m not sure at all. It might get me into trouble. What would happen if they threw me out of here? I’ve got nowhere else to go.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. They’re not going to throw you out. If you don’t tell him, you’ll just worry about it for days.’

‘Oh dear.’ James Osborne, Number Nineteen, began rubbing his hands together, as if he were a reincarnation of Lady Macbeth, a sure sign that he wasn’t happy. ‘What am I going to do? That policeman will be here in a minute. Oh dear.’

‘Well, he won’t want me here when he does come,’ said Number Eleven. ‘You should tell him, James. It’s the right thing to do. It’s the only thing to do, for God’s sake. What would Mabel say if she was here? You know perfectly well what Mabel would say. Tell him, that’s my last word on the matter.’

Even as he said it, Archie Dunne, Number Eleven, realized that mention of Mabel was probably a mistake. Mabel’s passing, after all, just over a year before, was the reason Number Nineteen was in the Jesus Hospital, unable to cope on his own.

‘Don’t mention Mabel, please. Don’t set me off again. I couldn’t bear it.’

There was a light knock on the door. Inspector Fletcher said a polite good morning and sat down in the second chair. Deprived of a place to sit, Archie Dunne from Number Eleven made his excuses and left.

The Inspector was learning fast about the memories and afflictions of old men. They were, he thought, the most unreliable collection of witnesses he had ever come across. They weren’t lying, or if they were, they weren’t aware of it. They weren’t lying deliberately. They were also, although he didn’t know it, well suited to his temperament, the pauses, the hesitations. A more vigorous officer might have flustered the silkmen so much they would have said anything at all to be rid of him.

‘How kind of you to give up your time to see me this morning. I’m sure all you old gentlemen are still shocked by the events of yesterday.’

Number Nineteen did not feel it necessary to tell the policeman that his next fixed appointment was the weekly game of shove ha’penny at eight o’clock in the evening at the Rose and Crown in five days’ time.

‘It’s all very upsetting,’ he said, and gave a pause the policeman would have been proud of, ‘most unexpected.’

‘Now then.’ Inspector Fletcher opened his notebook and wrote Number Nineteen in large letters at the top of a clean page. ‘I have to write things down too, you see. Otherwise I forget them. They go clean out of my mind.’ The Inspector managed a little smile at this point. ‘What I would like you to do is just tell me in your own words everything you did yesterday morning, from the time you woke up until the body was found.’

Number Nineteen looked alarmed, as if this was an awful lot to remember in one go.

‘Well,’ he began, ‘I must have woken up some time around seven, half past maybe. I don’t have a watch, you see, so I take my bearings from the light and the people moving around outside. I got dressed as usual. Thursday is my day for a clean shirt so I put that on. I’d polished my shoes the night before, I don’t know why, I usually do them after breakfast. Then I went downstairs and out into the court. Most of the men were talking over by the hall. Number Fifteen, he’s not been right in the head for weeks now, that Number Fifteen, he was crying like a baby. I’d seen plenty of dead bodies in my time in the army so I wasn’t that bothered. Shocked, mind you, shocked that such a thing should happen in a place like this.’

By this stage in his career Inspector Fletcher had mastered the art of looking at his interviewee and writing his notes at the same time.

‘That all sounds very normal, Mr Osborne,’ he said. ‘Can you remember anything unusual?’

This was the moment Number Nineteen had been dreading. This had been the subject of his discussion with Number Eleven and the unfortunate invocation of the dead Mabel. What was he to do? He waited for so long before he spoke that the Inspector knew his man had heard something in the night. It would have been too dark to see anything at the time of the murder. The Inspector thought there was only one thing it could have been but he might be wrong. He leant forward in his chair.

‘There was something,’ he said very gently, ‘something in the night, wasn’t there? I wonder if it was something you heard.’

‘I won’t get into any trouble, will I?’ The old man looked very frightened now.

‘No, no, there won’t be any trouble. Not unless you killed him and I don’t think you did that!’

They both managed a laugh of sorts. Gallows humour, said the Inspector to himself, making a mental note to tell his wife about it that evening.

‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.’ For a brief moment the Inspector thought James Osborne, Number Nineteen, was going to confess all. ‘For not having a watch, you see. I can’t tell you what time it was. When I heard the noises, I mean.’

He had said it now. It hadn’t been that bad. He began to feel a little better after the start of his confession.

‘Can you be any more specific about the time? Was it nearer the dawn than the middle of the night?’

Number Nineteen paused for thought. ‘Forgive me for bringing in personal details, Inspector, but I usually have to go to the bathroom two or three times during the night. The last time, I think would be about six o’clock. I’d only been twice when I heard the noises. Four o’clock? Something like that? Is that helpful?’

‘Very helpful,’ said the Inspector, wondering what a brutal QC at the Old Bailey, would make of this strange method of timekeeping. ‘And now perhaps you could tell me what you heard.’

‘I heard somebody coming down the stairs,’ Number Nineteen began. ‘And there was a bump as if he was bringing something heavy down with him. It wasn’t very loud. The walls here are pretty thick so you don’t hear very much from next door.’

‘Did you look out of the window? To see where the person went, I mean?’

‘Well, I did take a little peep out of the window, but I couldn’t see anything much. It was too dark.’ Number Nineteen leant back in his chair and sighed, as if he had just come through a long ordeal.

‘And that was all? There wasn’t anything else?’ Inspector Fletcher thought his man had said all he was going to say, but he had to be sure.

‘That’s all I can remember.’

The Inspector felt that the information was useful but hardly sensational. Somebody in the little community was likely to have been aware of something, the man who lived next door more likely to have heard it than most. What was interesting, as he said to his sergeant that evening over a pint at the Marquis of Granby near the Maidenhead police station, was that the unorthodox timekeeping of James Osborne, Number Nineteen, placed the murder somewhere between four and six in the morning, which was exactly the same as Dr Ragg’s conclusion, who had at his disposal all the latest scientific expertise.

Lord Francis Powerscourt received his commission and his instructions in the morning post. He had a head of unruly black hair and a pair of blue eyes inspected the world with detachment and irony. He thought that Sir Peregrine did not waste much time on pleasantries. There was no mention of whether he would wish to take the case or not. There was no thank you for helping out at the end. He was told in no uncertain terms that the doctor was a milksop, the Warden a crook and the policeman one of the most useless specimens ever to put on a uniform. Lady Lucy was intrigued by the idea of the almshouse. She had heard of them, of course, but she had never actually seen inside one. Would Francis be able to arrange that? she wondered aloud, passing him another slice of toast. Her husband muttered darkly about such places maybe having it written in the rules and regulations that women were not allowed on the premises, being too likely to provoke excess excitement in the old gentlemen and thus be harmful to their health. Lady Lucy was tall and slim with blonde hair and a pretty little nose. Her eyes were a deep blue, deeper than her husband’s, and quite disconcerting when they were wide open.

Powerscourt thought about his children as he drove off down to Marlow in his Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, freshly polished by Rhys the butler and chauffeur. Lady Lucy’s son by her first marriage, Robert, was now in the Royal Navy, believed at that moment to be on manoeuvres in the Pacific. Thomas, eldest son of Powerscourt and Lady Lucy, with his mother’s mouth and his mother’s eyes, was seventeen years old with a flair for languages and mathematics. The boy attended Westminster School and was virtually fluent in German, Russian and French. Powerscourt felt Thomas could have picked up Hottentot at record speed if required. Olivia, the eldest daughter, was at St Paul’s School for Girls, eager to be an art historian and continually dragging one or both of her parents to exhibitions of people they had never heard of in obscure parts of London. On one occasion Olivia had persuaded her parents to take her to Paris where the entire city seemed to Powerscourt to be filled with blotches of paint on canvas masquerading as modern masterpieces. The twins, eight years old, were tormenting the teachers at a nearby school. Powerscourt was certain that a successful career in international crime awaited them if all else failed.

But it was Thomas he worried about. He had told Lady Lucy of his deepest concerns two days before, and she had confessed that her fears were exactly the same. Powerscourt was fairly sure there was going to be a war with Germany. This wasn’t unusual — some of the newspapers had been prophesying such a conflict for years. And, unlike some commentators who predicted a quick war, Powerscourt felt it would be long. And very bloody, with a great many deaths. Maybe it would be like the American Civil War all those years ago. All the young men would want to go and fight for their country. Many of those would go and die for the cause. Including one Thomas Powerscourt who could be called up if there was a war that started as early as next year. What were they to do? For the moment neither of his parents had any idea.

Inspector Fletcher had not been told he was coming. Neither had Monk the Warden. Neither had the old men. So Powerscourt’s first moments in the Jesus Hospital were spent showing parts of his letter of commission and generally persuading them that he was a bona fide investigator.

‘I’m not surprised you’re here, mind you,’ said the Inspector after a call to his superiors at Maidenhead had convinced him Powerscourt was genuine, ‘I don’t think Sir Peregrine cared for me at all.’

‘Never mind,’ said Powerscourt cheerfully. ‘He’ll think differently when you’ve solved the murder.’

Fletcher told Powerscourt all he knew about the case over a hasty lunch at the Rose and Crown. It was an old coaching inn, the Rose and Crown. The front was festooned with red and white roses, appropriate to the origins of the name, in spring and summer. The back room with its eight small tables was the destination of choice for the old men of the Jesus Hospital, its walls and faded curtains stained with centuries of smoke. Powerscourt wanted to know if he could see the body and the room where Abel Meredith had lived.

‘What do you know of livery companies, my lord?’ asked Fletcher. ‘We don’t have any of those things in Maidenhead or Taplow or Pinkneys Green. One or two of the old men drone on about them and I don’t understand it.’

‘I doubt if I know much more than you do, Inspector. They’re very old, going back to the fourteenth century, those sort of times. To start with they were guilds, defensive guilds, if you like, formed to look after the common concerns of brewers or bakers or fishmongers, or silkworkers, who banded together to look after their own particular interests. They had special uniforms and great halls where they held their feasts and so on. Most important,’ he paused to digest a portion of the local steak and kidney pie, ‘they are now rich, very rich. Many of the members left property to their company in their wills. Number Sixteen Lombard Street might have been worth five or six pounds in thirteen ninety, it’s worth a lot more now. Hundreds and hundreds of times more, I should think.’

Powerscourt took himself to the Maidenhead Hospital immediately after lunch. The Inspector had telephoned before they went to the Rose and Crown to ensure that the body was not moved yet. Powerscourt introduced himself and his mission to the old attendant. He thought, as he often did when looking at corpses, how quickly life moved out of people. A moment before they had been alive with fluent features and eyes and faces that expressed their emotions. Then they were transformed into something you could have found on a butcher’s slab.

He looked for a long time at the marks above the heart. ‘Have you seen anything like these before?’ he asked the elderly attendant who looked as though he had been a curator of corpses since the Crimean War, if not before.

‘Nope, I have not, my lord. Neither has any doctor in this hospital. You know what they’re like, doctors, with the new and the unexpected, they’ve flocked down here, peering at the mark and prodding at it like they’ve never seen a dead body before. One of them said it was the sign of some African witch doctor, stamped on the bodies of the dead to improve their passage to the next world. I ask you. We don’t have no Africans or no witch doctors in Marlow, not even over in Reading, if you ask me.’

Powerscourt stared again at the thistle-like marks on the body.

‘Were you here when they undressed him?’ he asked.

‘I was indeed,’ said the attendant, casting a quick glance at the corpse.

‘I was wondering,’ said Powerscourt, ‘not that it’s any use for the investigation, but I was wondering if the mark above the heart was put there before or after he was killed. Was it knife first? Or the other way round?’

‘The shirt wasn’t buttoned up, my lord. Not when they brought him here, anyway. Dr Ragg noticed that, I remember. I’m not sure what the order was, my lord. It would be easier to kill him first, pull back the shirt and then put the mark on him. He couldn’t put up a fight if he was dead.’

Powerscourt started work on a drawing of the mark in his notebook.

‘Hold on, my lord, this might be helpful. One of our young doctors is going to send an article to the medical journals to see if anybody can identify the mark. He was very good with his pencil, so he was.’ The old man opened a drawer in the table and pulled out a bundle of three or four drawings of the strange marks. ‘Perhaps you would like to have one or two of these, my lord. It might be useful.’

‘That’s so much better than my effort, I’m more than grateful to you.’ Powerscourt gave the old man half a crown and hurried on his way.

Inspector Fletcher was looking forward to Powerscourt’s return. As he continued his interviews with the old men of the Jesus Hospital, he had encountered a pair who were so confused they left his head spinning. Numbers Nine and Ten insisted on being interviewed together. Otherwise, they said, they would get in a muddle. They brought a whole new line of evidence into the investigation. Johnny Johnston, Number Nine, had spent his working life in the post office. Peter Baker, Number Ten, had been a clerk in the City.

‘Of course it must have to do with the Silkworkers Company, the death,’ said Number Nine.

‘Stands to reason,’ said Number Ten.

‘Improved terms and conditions of residence, that’s what they said. They’d paint my place from top to bottom and it hasn’t had a lick of paint in years. You’ve got to look behind the picture to see all the walls were white to start with. Everything else is dirty grey now.’

‘That’s one way of looking at it,’ said Peter Baker, Number Ten. ‘The other people say there won’t be any money left to keep up the hospital. We’ll be thrown out and the place will be sold for rich people’s houses.’ He paused and peered out of the window. ‘Thrown out,’ he repeated, ‘thrown out. Where would we go?’

‘But there’s them that say they can’t do that. Throw us out, I mean. The statues — no, they’re not statues, are they? What’s the word?’

‘Statutes?’ offered Numbered Ten.

‘Statutes, that sounds right,’ Johnny Johnston, Number Nine, went on. ‘They say they can’t throw us out. If they sell this place they have to build us another, that’s what that man in the grey suit told us.’

‘Hold on a moment,’ said the Inspector. ‘Could we just take this from the beginning. You’re not saying that the hospital is going to be closed, are you? It’s been going for nearly four hundred years.’

‘Sold,’ said Number Ten. ‘Turned into luxury houses. People like living in luxury houses in Marlow, people with plenty of money, I mean. We’re not meant to talk about this, Inspector, we’ve all been sworn to secrecy. But it’s a great worry and that’s a fact.’

‘It only gets sold if one lot of Silkworkers have their way.’ Johnny Johnston, Number Nine was scowling at the very idea that the hospital might be sold. ‘That man with the big moustache didn’t think it could happen.’

‘But the other fellow, the thin lawyer man with the long face and the monocle from Chancery Lane, he said it was going to happen anyway.’

‘Didn’t moustache man say there had to be a vote? The vote that Warden Monk is so keen on?’

‘Gentlemen, please.’ Inspector Fletcher put down his notebook. ‘Am I right in saying that there is a discussion going on in the Silkworkers Company about the future of the Jesus Hospital? And that one group wants to sell it and the other doesn’t? And somehow or other there is to be a vote on the matter, here in the hospital?’

‘Not just in the hospital, Inspector,’ said Peter Baker, Number Ten, who felt that his experience working in the City gave him more authority than most on this subject. ‘That’s where you’re wrong. All the members of the Silkworkers Company are to have a vote. We’re all members. We wouldn’t be admitted to the almshouse if we weren’t, you see.’

Inspector Fletcher sighed. He couldn’t see how these transactions could lead to Abel Meredith having his throat cut. He returned to the more prosaic details of the murder. Had either Number Nine or Number Ten heard or seen anything unusual on the night of the death? No, they had not. Did Abel Meredith have any enemies, as far as they knew? There was a pause.

‘Yes,’ said Johnny Johnston, Number Nine, ‘yes, he did.’

‘He cheated,’ said Number Ten, ‘he cheated at cards and he cheated at shove ha’penny over at the Rose and Crown.’

Inspector Fletcher did not have the strength to ask how a man could cheat at shove ha’penny.

‘He was very unpopular,’ Peter Baker, Number Ten, added, ‘probably the most unpopular man in the hospital.’

‘Come, come now, ah, hm,’ said Johnny Johnston, Number Nine, ‘you’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead. Somebody or something is meant to come and strike you down if you do.’

This may have been the Inspector’s first murder investigation but he did not lack imagination. His horizons had been broadened by regular readings of the many novels of E. Phillips Oppenheim. They kept the latest volume for him in the Maidenhead Public Library. He knew from experience how bitter relations could become in closed societies like police stations or almshouses. With little to occupy the inmates’ minds, cheating could be magnified out of all proportion. Could it, he wondered, be magnified enough to become a motive for murder? He wasn’t sure.

‘He was always borrowing money, that Meredith man,’ Number Nine went on.

‘And he never paid any of it back,’ added Number Ten. The corpse was beginning to assume pariah status in Inspector Fletcher’s mind. He paused for a moment.

‘Maybe he simply forgot,’ he said, ‘forgot to pay it back, I mean.’

‘Don’t think so,’ said Number Ten. ‘And there’s another thing. I don’t think he ever took a bath.’

‘For God’s sake,’ said his friend, ‘he wasn’t the only one in this place who never takes a bath.’

The Inspector had had enough. For once he managed not to pause, even for a second.

‘Thank you very much for your assistance, gentlemen. If you remember anything else that you think may be useful, please get in touch.’

He walked back to Monk’s office, thinking of a man with stinking clothes making his way to the Rose and Crown to cheat with borrowed money at the shove ha’penny table. But he couldn’t connect that figure with the corpse with its throat cut and a strange mark on its chest stretched out in the morgue at the Maidenhead Hospital.

Among his many responsibilities at the almshouse, Thomas Monk, still wearing his black cravat, was the custodian of the old gentlemen’s wills. They were stored in a little safe in the corner of his office. This practice was not included in the ordinances of the Silkworkers Company for the inhabitants of the Jesus Hospital. The custom had begun with Thomas’s reign as Warden and he had not bothered to tell any of his masters from the Silkworkers Hall in London about it. If the old men had not made a will — and Thomas was sure to discover this if they failed to hand it over on arrival — then he was prepared to help them for a small fee. He had, he assured the intestate newcomers, a draft will prepared by the finest solicitors in the capital which he could make available for them. Indeed he would help them fill it in. It just happened that the draft will ran to two pages. The second page merely repeated that this was the last will of the testator and left room for the signatures.

Since the murder Thomas had not had the time, or been alone in his office long enough, to check what the status of Abel Meredith’s will was. He suspected Meredith had had his will already prepared on arrival. He didn’t like to check in case Powerscourt or one of the policemen should barge into his office at the wrong time and start making inquiries.

The Inspector took Powerscourt for a walk down to the river on his return from the Maidenhead morgue. He felt there was a network of old men trying to listen in to any of his conversations in the hospital. He told Powerscourt about the possible changes at the almshouse and the unpopularity of the victim.

‘I’ll speak to my brother-in-law about the Silkworkers Company,’ Powerscourt said to the Inspector as they neared the bottom of Ferry Lane. ‘He knows about these things, or if he doesn’t, he knows people who do. What did you think of all the rest of it, the cheating at shove ha’penny and so on? I know these are old men and that feelings can run high in places like this, but they’re not going to lead to murder, are they?’

Inspector Fletcher agreed. ‘Damn it,’ he said, staring at a pair of swans making a regal progress down the Thames, ‘I knew there was something I forgot to ask the doctor. I’ll have to find him this evening.’

‘What was it that you forgot to ask?’

‘Well, it’s this, my lord. You just have to look at the old men walking out of the hall. Do any of them have the strength to commit the crime? It’s hard to imagine any of them being able to summon up enough force to draw a knife across the dead man’s throat like that.’

‘You could well be right,’ said Powerscourt thoughtfully. ‘I wonder if you could devise some sort of test to work out who would have had the strength to do it, like drawing the bow at the end of the Odyssey.’

There was a pause. A small flock of black river birds flew past, close to the water’s edge.

‘The killer, if the killer comes from inside, would surely fail any test to deflect suspicion,’ said the Inspector gloomily.

Half an hour later Powerscourt went to look at Abel Meredith’s room before the police took the contents away. He remembered suddenly the instructions given to new entrants to the Royal Hospital Chelsea, that men could bring precious little with them for there was precious little room in their quarters, and that earthly possessions were not needed whether they were going on to heaven or to hell. Here Powerscourt found the clothes, the few books Abel Meredith had brought with him to what he must have thought would be his last resting place on earth. The inhabitants of these almshouses came here to live out their last days and their hosts would not welcome the prospect of wading through a mountain of personal belongings when the residents went to the cemetery and the grave. One thing did strike him. Most people, he thought, would have brought some mementoes of their past life with them, family photographs if they had any, letters from relatives or from a workplace, some keepsake left them in a relative’s will. There was none of that. Abel Meredith had arrived with a few spare shirts and trousers and a jacket and a few books and personal knick-knacks, but nothing else. It was as if he had deliberately obliterated most of his sixty-four years on earth. Had he something to hide? There were no official documents of any kind. There was, he noticed, no will to be found among his few papers. He wondered again about the strange marks on the dead man’s chest. One of the doctors in the hospital had talked of witchcraft, of strange African practices come to an unsuspecting Buckinghamshire. Powerscourt didn’t think that could be true, Africa was too far away. But if they weren’t African, where in God’s name had they come from? The mountains of Peru? The Gobi desert? The high passes of the Hindu Kush? He was lost.

Inspector Fletcher came to join him, clutching a telegram. It was another missive from Sir Peregrine and told him of another murder at a property linked to the Silkworkers Company, in Norfolk this time, another murder marked by the mysterious imprint of the thistle deeply embossed on the dead man’s chest. Powerscourt was ordered to go to the scene as soon as possible.

Allison’s School in Fakenham had been founded in the sixteenth century by Sir George Allison to replace a priory that had been abolished in the dissolution of the monasteries. Sir George endowed the school handsomely with a number of parishes in Norfolk and further properties in the City of London. The entire endowment was placed in the hands of the Silkworkers Company of London where it has remained to this day. There were over a hundred and fifty boys in the school, with the normal range of teaching and ancillary staff. The victim was the bursar. He was found in his office — pen in hand over a set of accounts on his table, strangled, with great purple weals on his neck — shortly after ten o’clock in the morning when he was due to attend a meeting with the headmaster concerning action against those parents who were late with their fees. His shirt had been ripped open to receive the imprint of the thistle that had disfigured the body of Abel Meredith at the Jesus Hospital in Marlow.

Roderick Gill, the bursar, was nearing retirement in his fifty-fifth year, with fifteen years’ service at the school. His office was on a long corridor that everybody in the school used, from the teachers to the most junior boy to the cleaning staff.

Powerscourt reflected on his train to Norfolk that the killer must have travelled this line yesterday, on his way to his second murder. Surely someone would have seen him. Or had the killer access to a large and powerful motor car which could have taken him to East Anglia with less chance of being spotted? He wondered if these two dates at the end of January carried any particular significance.

Another murder, another Inspector of police. Not for the first time Powerscourt wondered about the wisdom of having so many different police forces in the country. Surely these two cases must be linked. Yet two separate forces would conduct their own investigations, with the possibility of much information falling into the cracks between the two inquiries.

Allison’s School was in a state close to chaos. The porter at the front gate blamed the telephone. Mothers from near and far had heard of the murder and had come in person to seek assurances from the headmaster that their child was safe and should not be taken home immediately. Only a timely directive from the policeman on the case, Inspector William Grime, that all the boys were to remain in school until they had been questioned by members of his force, prevented a mass exodus. The queue to speak to the headmaster stretched for fifteen yards outside his office and out into the quadrangle. Powerscourt saw as his cab dropped him off that the mothers were growing more rather than less distraught. ‘There he was, that poor bursar man,’ he heard one of them say to her neighbour in the line, ‘sitting at his desk, and then, whoosh, he’s gone! Who’s to say the killer couldn’t do the same to my Georgie or any of the other boys? They still haven’t caught the murderer, you know. The brute’s still at large, waiting to kill again. He’s probably hiding in the grounds.’

Some of the boys were in lessons, though Powerscourt doubted if they would learn very much on this day. Others were talking to the policemen in a geography classroom made over to the constabulary. Some of the younger boys, Powerscourt was told later, reported sightings of a bearded man climbing over the chapel roof early that morning; others mentioned a tramp who looked remarkably like the headmaster, who had taken to hiding round the back of the cricket pavilion. The boys had not yet learnt, Powerscourt was glad to discover, of the strange mark left imprinted over the dead man’s heart.

It was late that afternoon before some sort of order was restored to the headmaster’s quarters. John Davies, the headmaster, had agreed to brief a group of mothers every morning in the main hotel in the town. He had secured, he told Powerscourt, an undertaking that no boys would be withdrawn until the police were satisfied with their collection of evidence. Inspector Grime had apparently indicated that that day might be some way away. The police had no wish for potential witnesses to be dispersed across central and southern England. Leaning back in his chair, Davies told Powerscourt that the affair could close the school down unless the murder was solved quickly. One mother taking her son away, he reckoned, could be dismissed as eccentric, two could probably be finessed as over-cautious, but let three go and the trickle could become a flood. Headmaster Davies was in his early fifties, brown hair beginning to turn grey above his ears. Years of power over classrooms and colleagues had left him with authority stamped on his face, a Roman consul in the glory years of the Republic perhaps, or a viceory of some far-flung outpost of Empire.

‘This is every headmaster’s nightmare, Lord Powerscourt, some out-of-the-way event like an outbreak of an infectious disease or a murder that makes the parents wonder if their child is safe. Stopping them taking their children away becomes like Canute trying to halt the incoming tide. I’ve just about managed it so far, but the water is lapping round my ankles and swirling round my calves at the back. God, I’ll be glad when all this is over and we can get back to serious problems like Form Three’s appalling French and the lack of a decent goalkeeper for the football team. You and I know perfectly well, Lord Powerscourt, that seventeen-year-old boys are quite capable of looking after themselves. But devoted mothers would not see the matter in those terms. Once the drip turned into a stream, Allison’s School could be empty in a matter of days. And think,’ he said finally, rising from his desk to prowl around his office, ‘think of the effect it’s going to have on recruitment for future years. Send your child to Allison’s where members of staff are throttled in their offices. Send your son to a school where the bursar is killed in broad daylight. Welcome to the murder class.’

The headmaster sent Powerscourt on his way, saying that he had called an emergency meeting of the governors, some of whom were on the evening train from London. He recommended him to the bursar’s closest friend in the school, a maths teacher called Joshua Peabody.

The maths teacher wore some of the strongest glasses Powerscourt had ever seen. The poor man, he thought, must be nearly blind. Receding hair, shirt buttons fastened out of line and a general air of absent-mindedness gave Peabody the appearance of a professor of some abstract subject like linguistics or Indo-Arabic languages, whose wife has recently left him. Powerscourt wondered what the boys thought of him.

Peabody led Powerscourt out of the school on to a path that circled the football pitches and took them some distance away from the main buildings. Only when they were well out of earshot did he speak.

‘This is a terrible business,’ he began, kicking a punctured football into the long grass, ‘terrible. I can scarcely believe it, even now. It’s so unfair that it should happen to Roderick.’

‘Perhaps you could tell me about him. It always helps.’

‘Well, I don’t know anything at all about his early life, where he was born, where he went to school, that sort of thing. He never talked about growing up, not to me, at any rate. I only got to know him when I joined the staff here nine years ago. He was never the heart and soul of the staffroom, Roderick, if you know what I mean. Maybe we teachers are always a little uneasy in the company of bursars, I don’t know. I do know that he took his job very seriously. The headmaster was fond of saying that if all the teachers kept their books as well as the bursar, his life would be much easier.’

‘So how did you become friends?’ asked Powerscourt, noting that the net at the back of the football pitch needed mending, another item of expenditure to be recorded in the bursar’s ledgers.

‘He loved the mountains,’ Joshua Peabody said. ‘When I was younger and my eyes were better I was always climbing whenever I could. Roderick, too, had been a fine mountaineer in his youth. Now we’re not so young we used to go on walking holidays in Scotland or in the Alps. He always used to say that he wanted to see the Himalayas before he died, though I don’t think he ever did anything about it. He and I were planning a trip to the Dolomites in the Easter holidays.’

None of this, Powerscourt reflected, was likely to draw a killer to Allison’s School and murder its bursar at his desk. ‘Did he have any enemies? Do you have any suspicions about something in his past perhaps that could have led to his terrible end?’

‘As I said,’ Peabody had taken his glasses off and was rubbing them carefully on a large and rather dirty handkerchief, ‘I don’t know very much about his past. There is one thing I should tell you, Lord Powerscourt. It only started about two weeks ago, maybe less.’ There was a pause while the handkerchief was restored to its pocket and the glasses replaced. Peabody looked more than ever the absent-minded professor, wondering where he has left his books. ‘Over the last week or two,’ he went on, ‘Roderick Gill changed. He became a frightened man. He would stare anxiously at strangers when the two of us were walking into the town for a drink. I think, but I’m not sure, that he had been burning a lot of documents in the school incinerator and in the grate in his own rooms. Whether those were papers relating to his past or to the school or something else altogether I do not know.’

Two small boys kicking a football dashed past them on their way to the goal with the broken netting.

‘Roderick would wait for the post in the morning with a look almost of terror on his face. One of the English teachers said he knew the cooked breakfast in the staff dining room was bad, but that was no reason to be afraid of it. I know that Roderick had asked for, and been granted, the option of two weeks of compassionate leave to begin the Monday after next. He had refused to tell anybody, not the headmaster, not even me, his closest friend in Allison’s, where he proposed to go. And now this.’ Peabody waved his hand back in the general direction of the school. ‘All this fuss. Policemen. Anxious mothers. Special investigators from London. The headmaster fretting about the future of the school. All of this Roderick Gill would have found very hard to bear. Whatever it was he was afraid of,’ Peabody stopped and looked Powerscourt in the eye for the first time during their talk, ‘he never told me. He never told me what it was. Roderick Gill was a very frightened man in the last days of his life. Whatever or whoever it was he was frightened of, he was quite right to be terrified. They’ve got him in the end.’