Death at the Jesus Hospital

3

Powerscourt found Inspector Grime staring wearily at a large map of North America on the wall of the geography classroom. Grime was grey haired now, with lines etched on his face and on his forehead. He had the air of a man who had seen as much as he wanted of crime and most other human activities. He was one of those unfortunate people who give the impression that they really enjoy being miserable.

Powerscourt told him of his conversation with Peabody and the fear that had gripped Roderick Gill in his last days.

‘Peabody?’ he said. ‘That the one who teaches maths and wears those strong glasses? It’s a wonder he can read his own equations when he writes them on the blackboard.’

‘The same,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I’m sure some schools wouldn’t employ him because he looks so scruffy. Bad example to the pupils, that sort of thing. Shoes polished, blazer middle button fastened, tie straight, that’s what they like.’

‘That’s as may be,’ said the Inspector, ‘but the boys say he’s a brilliant teacher, especially with the ones who don’t like mathematics. Anyway, he’s told you more about the dead man than I’ve learnt from these boys all afternoon. Only thing we’re sure of is that Bursar Gill died somewhere between eight and nine thirty in the morning. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that corridor where his office was. It’s the main thoroughfare of the school, with classrooms and offices off it, including the dining hall at one end and the chapel off a side corridor at the other.’

‘Would there be lots of boys moving about between those times?’ Powerscourt asked.

‘Breakfast is at eight o’clock, my lord. By about twenty past lots of them are going back to their dayrooms or their studies to get the books they need for morning lessons. By a quarter to nine they all charge up the corridor again for morning prayers. By nine o’clock they’re back in it again en route to the first lesson. Somebody must have seen something.’ The Inspector gave an aged globe a vigorous shove and the continents of the world whizzed round on their axis. ‘They’re so young, these boys, and so innocent most of them, even the older ones, they leave you feeling quite exhausted and very old, very old indeed.’

‘What did they tell you?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘Well, I don’t know if somebody told them to say as little as possible or not. It certainly sounded like it. I’ve heard burglars in Norwich in my time who were more forthcoming than some of these lads. Basically, they didn’t know the bursar at all. He didn’t teach them, he didn’t do any coaching at games. They hardly ever saw him. The only thing they knew about him was that he had dismissed the previous head cook for overspending his budget and fiddling the figures. The new man, apparently, is terrible. One cheeky monkey suggested one of the boys might have killed him because the food is now so bad they’re hungry all the time. A couple of them said he looked worried. One of the senior years said Gill had been spotted in the town drowning his sorrows in The Poacher’s Catch with the maths teacher Peabody. He didn’t say how he came by this information, mind you. The rogue must have been skulking in the public bar — the staff here use the lounge, always have.’ The Inspector gave the globe another spin. ‘I’ll have to interview the rest of them tomorrow and maybe the next day, though I don’t have much hope of anything very useful. The headmaster insisted I interview every single pupil, probably so they can tell their parents. You’ll be wanting to see the body, my lord, down at the hospital in the town.’

Powerscourt wondered how many years these maps had been on the walls. The colours were going. Central Canada, he observed, had faded to a dull pink while the two coastlines at opposite ends of the country were still red. ‘Have you ever seen anything like that mark on his chest before, Inspector?’

‘I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,’ replied Inspector Grime, ‘not even up here in the wilds of Norfolk.’

Later that evening Powerscourt met the headmaster in his study. Davies had his feet on his desk and was nursing a very large glass of whisky.

‘I don’t normally drink in the term time at all, but that governors’ meeting was terrible,’ he said, grimacing at the memory. ‘They virtually accused me of having carried out the murder. There’s one very old governor who was at the school about the beginning of the last century, and he’s been on the governing body for years, certainly far longer than I’ve been headmaster here. Discipline, he always goes on about discipline. In his day, I expect, a boy was flogged for anything at all, shoelaces not properly tied, running in the corridor, that sort of thing. He claimed lack of discipline caused the bursar’s death, though he couldn’t explain how.’

Powerscourt saw that the headmaster’s study was more or less what you would expect in a place like this. There was an enormous desk, virtually guaranteed to intimidate nervous new teachers or schoolboy criminals. The walls were lined with school photographs. There was an oar from the First Trinity Boat Club, the rowing arm of Trinity College, Cambridge, behind the headmaster’s desk. Powerscourt noticed that a recently appointed bishop of the Church of England and a junior member of the cabinet had rowed on the Cam with the headmaster. There were bookshelves, one shelf full of a volume called The Future of the Public Schools, written by the headmaster himself. A selection of vicious-looking canes were prominently displayed next to the oar to strike fear into the hearts of malefactors.

‘Peabody says Gill was frightened in the last few weeks of his life. Did you notice that too, Headmaster?’

It was just like being in the army, Powerscourt remembered. You called a man by his title, not by his name, as if function was the sole criterion in addressing your fellow man.

‘I thought he looked a bit under the weather. But remember, Powerscourt, there are a lot of people to look after here. I’m not the matron or the father confessor to the staff or anybody else.’

‘May I ask you a difficult question, Headmaster? I apologize for troubling you but time is important in murder cases. What precisely was the link between the school and the Silkworkers Company down in London?’

‘I wish they’d stay in London, those people, and not come up here and give me a hard time during governors’ meetings,’ the headmaster said wearily. ‘The Silkworkers look after the endowments of the school. Always have, always will, I expect. The chairman of the board of governors is always one of theirs, as are four of the other school governors. It’s like one of those cabinets packed with the prime minister’s relations in Lord Salisbury’s time. The family, or in our case the Silkworkers, call the shots. It would be very difficult to push through a policy they didn’t approve of. Silkworkers appointed me, they’ll probably appoint my successor.’

‘I have heard that there may be changes afoot in the world of the Silkworkers,’ said Powerscourt. He had told the Inspector about the death of Abel Meredith but nobody else. Sometimes he wondered if this policy of closed boxes was the right one. ‘Have they affected you here, Headmaster?’

‘You’re damned well-informed about our livery company, Powerscourt, if I may say so. I would ask you to treat what I’m about to say in confidence. We’re not meant to talk to anybody about it.’ Powerscourt thought Davies must sound like this when talking to junior members of staff, slightly superior, slightly supercilious. ‘The changes relate to the increase in value of the endowments since they were first bequeathed. Some land near the Mansion House, for instance, would be worth infinitely more now than it was back in the fourteenth century. There’s talk about having a vote among the membership about what to do. Oddly enough, that was part of Roderick Gill’s responsibilities. He was preparing a report for me on the implications of the changes for the school and whether we should support them. It was due next week as a matter of fact.’

‘Do you know if he had written it? If it was finished and ready to go?’ Powerscourt wondered if one of Grime’s constables would have appreciated the significance of such a document, stacked away in his office with the annual reports and the quarterly financial projections.

‘I don’t, as a matter of fact. I rather suspect Roderick would have been against any change in the current arrangements. He was that sort of man. I think it’s all very clever and rather cunning myself.’

‘In what way?’

‘Well,’ said the headmaster, finally restoring his legs to ground level from the vast expanse of his desk, ‘suppose you’re the Prime Warden of the Silkworkers. You’ve got these almshouses to keep up, and these schools and the pension payments to the old boys. You’ve got this vast property portfolio all over the City of London and the richer counties of southern England. And you think there’s going to be a war. First thing to go when the guns go off will be the value of property. Your little empire will be worth far less than it was, the rents will tumble, it will be difficult to sell places. So liquidate it all now and come back to the market when the prices are depressed later on. Stash it all away for the time being in America or Canada or somewhere your bankers tell you it’s safe.’ The headmaster refilled his glass with a very small helping of whisky. ‘Clever, don’t you think? Of course you can’t say what you’re about, you can’t say why you’re really doing it. People would say you were mad or unpatriotic, or greedy or something like that. This is only my theory, you understand.’

For the second time in less than a week Powerscourt resolved to talk to his banker brother-in-law William Burke as soon as possible.

Silence fell in the headmaster’s study. Some night bird was calling urgently outside the windows. A very modern clock, there to keep the headmaster punctual, was ticking at the corner of the desk. Powerscourt could just make out the inscription: ‘To John Davies with thanks for five years of excellent work, from the headmaster and staff of Rugby School.’

‘There is one thing I should tell you about Roderick Gill.’ The headmaster gathered the ends of his gown behind him and began pacing up and down his command post. ‘I don’t suppose Peabody told you anything about the women, did he?’ he asked with the air of one who expects the answer no.

‘Not a word,’ replied Powerscourt.

The headmaster stopped by his curtains and drew them back a couple of feet. Outside it was very dark, with a few lights burning over in the masters’ quarters.

‘This isn’t easy for me,’ Davies continued. ‘The thing is, Roderick Gill was notorious for having affairs with married women. They were always over forty, for some reason. Maybe he liked them older or more experienced, who knows. Maybe the younger ones wouldn’t have him. Maybe their husbands would be less violent. He never carried on with the few wives we have here, it was always with women in the town. Roderick was a church warden and later treasurer of Saint Peter and Paul in Fakenham. It’s got a bloody great tower and they say they stored gunpowder in there during the Civil War. Anyway, Gill’s position at the church was his base camp for getting to know the women of the parish. Some of the more cynical members of the congregation used to refer to him as the Groper in the Vestry, I gather. I don’t know if he launched any assaults in the precincts of the church itself — I rather doubt it. But there it is, or rather was. It had been going on for years now.’

‘Thank you for telling me,’ said Powerscourt, as the headmaster strode back to his desk. ‘It can’t have been easy for you. And forgive me for asking, but do you know the names of any of his conquests in the last few years?’

‘I do know there was somebody on the books fairly recently. They were seen coming out of a hotel in Brandon last summer, I think it was. Mrs Mitchell, the lady was called, Hilda Mitchell. Early forties, very pretty, I was told, her husband away a lot on business. He was a mason, specializing in restoring old buildings like churches or manor houses, so he was away a lot. I don’t know if it’s still going on.’

Powerscourt suddenly wondered if he should match the headmaster’s confidence about the private life of Roderick Gill with an account of the strange marks on his chest. But he preferred not to. He didn’t think it would help. He wondered if he was right in his reticence.

‘Could I ask you a final question, Lord Powerscourt?’ The headmaster was bringing the meeting to a close. Perhaps there are a couple more meetings scheduled after I go, Powerscourt thought, head of Classics asking for two more hours a week for Latin classes, head of woodwork complaining that the boys kept stealing the screwdrivers. ‘I know it must be very difficult to know, but can you give me any idea how long it will be before you find the murderer and the case is closed down? It’s going to be rather like a siege here, you see. It will be difficult for people to concentrate on what they’re at Allison’s for, teaching and learning, with the police on the prowl and so on.’

Powerscourt was quite relieved to have been relegated to ‘and so on’.

‘I wish I could help you there, Headmaster, but I would not wish to give you false comfort. It could take a week. We could still be here by Easter. The timetables of murderers and of those who would catch them are outside your control as they are outside mine. If you can steel yourself to prepare for a long haul, that would be for the best. I’m sorry I can’t be more hopeful. You have been very frank with me and I’m most grateful.’

That night Powerscourt had a strange dream. He thought when he awoke that it might have had something to do with the globes and the maps in the geography classroom. He was standing on top of a great sand dune in the middle of a vast desert. Down below him was an enormous plain of sand, completely empty, not even a small oasis or a solitary palm tree to be seen. To his left and right the landscape was the same, sand, hills of sand, plains of sand, seas of sand, nothing but sand. He suspected he might be in Saudi Arabia or one of those Middle Eastern countries. When he looked more closely at the plain below he saw to his horror that the sand had been blown into a particular pattern. It was exactly the same as the strange patterns on the dead men’s chests, as if a giant thistle of Brobdingnagian proportions had been pressed into the sand. It seemed to go on for miles in all directions. When he looked closer, shading his eyes from the pitiless sun above, he saw a small figure marching resolutely towards the centre of the thistle. He was not dressed in white robes as you might have expected in this landscape, but in a three-piece suit and bowler hat that looked as though they might have come from a fashionable tailor in London’s Jermyn Street. As he stared down, Powerscourt realized something stranger yet. It was if the sands were shifting under the man’s feet. For march on as he might, he was making no progress towards the centre, no progress at all. The centre of the thistle remained as far away as ever. He was never going to reach it.

Shortly after eight o’clock the next morning Powerscourt met Inspector Grime outside the main entrance to the school. Over from their left came the enormous racket of one hundred and fifty boys eating their breakfasts at the same time. In front of the buildings a severe frost had turned the playing fields almost white.

‘No more murders in the night anyway,’ said the Inspector morosely. ‘I suppose our man’s got clean away by now, damn his eyes. Hospital first for you, my lord. Ask for Dr Pike, as in fish, he’s expecting you. Then we’ve left the bursar’s quarters exactly as they were before he died for you, before we start taking things away. The headmaster wants his office papers and the ones in his room left where they are now. Count yourself lucky, my lord. I’ve got the three youngest classes to talk to this morning. One at a time, for God’s sake. Might as well listen to the birds on the marshes as this lot. All those maps and globes in that room get me down. I always hated geography when I was at school, the teacher used to steal our pencils when he thought we weren’t looking. Never mind. I’ll see you later this morning. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. God help us all.’

The boys were being released from breakfast, charging down the corridors to find their books for early lessons. A tall boy of about eighteen in a striped blazer, who Powerscourt thought must be a prefect, was shouting at them. ‘How many times do I have to tell you! Walk, don’t run in the corridor!’

The hospital was new, the paint still fresh, the walls not marked by the passage of too many trolleys. Dr Pike was a young man of about thirty who told Powerscourt cheerfully that he had no idea about the marks on the chest, that death must have been almost instantaneous, and that the murderer must have had very strong arms. Death, he said, must have happened between the hours of eight and nine thirty. To Powerscourt’s surprise he inquired about Inspector Grime.

‘How is the good Inspector these days? Is he still as miserable and morose as ever? He came here last year to investigate some nasty thefts from the dispensary and we almost kept him in he was so gloomy. Might have cheered him up, a week or so on the mental ward with people even more disturbed than he is.’

‘Since you ask,’ Powerscourt replied with a smile, ‘I’d have to report that there appears to be little change in the patient’s condition. Barometer permanently set to miserable, as far as I can see. He seems a capable officer, mind you.’

‘Oh, he is. He cleared up our burglary very quickly. Send him my regards anyway. Tell him we often think of him up here at the hospital.’

The late bursar’s rooms were on the top floor of the new building. He had a large sitting room and a tiny bedroom at the back. Powerscourt saw that one long wall was entirely covered with files. Bursar Gill, it appeared, had been a careful man. Looking closer, Powerscourt discovered that Gill had been one of those people who never threw anything away, the years marching across the wall to end in the year 1909. In this universe of files, 1910 had not yet begun. Not for him the annual cull of useless papers, sorted into the good and the useless between Christmas and the New Year. The earliest file went back to 1855 when Gill was seven years old. There were papers relating to his early schooling, even a report or two from a well-known prep school near Oxford, ‘very quiet in class’, ‘shows promise in mathematics ’, ‘poor grasp of Greek grammar’. But then there was a gap in the files. From 1865 to 1880 there was nothing at all. Powerscourt wondered if these were the files that Gill had been burning in his last days, some in the college incinerator, some in his own grate. Perhaps he had simply changed his mind about filing, a young man with better and more interesting things to do with his time than pushing pieces of paper into folders. Perhaps he had spent his entire life in those years pursuing women over forty.

In the years that followed there was a file a year, sometimes two. They showed that Gill had worked for years for a firm of accountants in London before coming to Norfolk. His years at Allison’s were thoroughly covered, though Powerscourt noticed that the subject matter was always in the public sphere, details of the estimates for the new buildings put up around the turn of the century, records of the annual financial performance of the school, separate sections for his role as the treasurer at the church. But of correspondence with ladies, under or over forty, there was no trace at all. Of anything that might have made him fearful in his last days there was no sign either. Powerscourt looked closely at the bottom of the grate in case the remains of any documents were still to be found among the ash but there was nothing. He wondered if Gill had a secret hiding place somewhere in this room where compromising or frightening letters might be found. He decided to ask Inspector Grime’s men to test the room for such a place. Grime could authorize that in a murder hunt. He, Powerscourt, could not.

When he discussed it with the Inspector at break time that morning he found the policeman in unusually cheerful mood. ‘It might be nothing, it probably is,’ he said to Powerscourt, walking slowly along the front of the dormitory block, ‘but one of those young hooligans said something very interesting to me this morning. I’ve heard all sorts of rubbish. You’d think they had better things to do with their time than read the works of Sexton Blake, but no. Most of the boys had theories that were wildly improbable. But just this one lad, fourteen years old, looking exactly like the choirboy he is, gave me a very interesting snippet. It was the postman, he said. What was the postman doing there that early in the corridor where Roderick Gill’s office was? Postmen don’t usually arrive till mid-morning break. And he thought, but he wasn’t sure, that this wasn’t the usual postman. Now here, my lord, here is where he becomes a credible witness, young Ewart Jenkins. When I asked him how the postman was different, taller, shorter, fatter, that sort of thing, he said he couldn’t answer, he couldn’t be sure. If I went on making suggestions, he said, he would get confused. He was sure about what he had told me, but no more. I’m going to talk to the postal people once I’ve finished with the lower forms. One of their senior men lives a couple of doors from me.’

Shortly before lunch it began to snow. It fell quickly, settling on the roofs of the red brick buildings, obliterating the grass on the playing fields. Out in the Wild West beyond the football pitches a junior gardener reported that the lake was frozen. If the weather went on like this for a day or two, he said, the ice might be firm enough for skating. With the snow came a bitter wind that blew the snow into drifts up against the school windows and rendered the headmaster’s car virtually invisible just outside the front door. One of the younger science teachers brought out a series of sticks he had used in years gone by. He got the boys to place them in different places around the school and to write down in their notebooks the height of the snow on all the days it remained. The teacher believed this would teach his pupils the value of experiments and the proper collection of data.

The weather put the headmaster in a remarkably good mood. He observed with glee to his deputy, a very boring man who had been teaching the same history syllabus for over thirty years — at this point in the school year, towards the end of January, it was time to kill Cromwell off for the senior forms and move on to the Restoration — that at least those wretched mothers would not be turning out to complain in the same numbers. He so hoped, he said, with a singular lack of Christian charity, that they would be bloody well snowed in for days, if not weeks.

In the lunch break smaller boys began construction of a vast snowman which Powerscourt thought was going to be on the same scale as the Statue of Liberty on Ellis Island in New York. Elder boys organized snowball fights. The prefects in their striped blazers tried to look superior, gazing with lofty indifference on the activities of their younger brothers and schoolfellows as if they, the prefects, had put away these childish things years before.

Powerscourt wondered if the snow made the business of detection easier or more difficult and decided it made no difference at all. That afternoon, while the Inspector departed to talk to the Royal Mail, he proposed to call on the late Roderick Gill’s mistress. The Inspector was delighted Powerscourt had taken on this particular assignment.

‘Fact is, my lord,’ he said, neatly dodging a long-distance snowball sent his way by the finest fielder in the First Eleven, ‘I think you’ll do that much better than I would. I’m actually not sure I could bring myself to start asking questions about her affair with Gill, if that’s the right way to put it. I’d be too embarrassed.’

‘I’m afraid I’ve had these kinds of conversations before,’ said Powerscourt. ‘They’re not too bad as long as you keep the whole thing as matter-of-fact as possible. Don’t even think of mentioning the word love. It would only set them off.’

‘Good God! How absolutely frightful for you. I’ll be much happier with the postmen.’

Twenty minutes later Powerscourt was walking up the Cromer Road to Mrs Mitchell’s house just beyond the postbox. The snow was still falling, the countryside almost obliterated by its thick white coat. The house was a two-storey cottage with a thatched roof and ancient windows. Mrs Mitchell, when she answered the door, was not ancient at all. Powerscourt thought she looked much younger than the forty years assigned to her by the headmaster. She was blonde with soft blue eyes, her figure almost totally concealed behind a large blue apron dotted with bunny rabbits.

‘Please forgive me,’ she said, pointing to her apron, when Powerscourt had made his introductions. ‘I was just making a cake for the children’s tea. They’ll be so excited about the snow.’

Powerscourt had timed his arrival for the gap after lunch before any children might be home from their lessons. Mrs Mitchell showed him into a small chair by the fire.

‘I expect you’ve come about Roddy,’ she began. ‘The vicar told me about his death yesterday. It’s terrible, just terrible, he was such a kind man.’

‘Please forgive me, Mrs Mitchell, if I have to ask some difficult questions. I’m afraid death and murder have no respect for people’s history or their emotional lives. Could I ask when you first became friends?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘Not the particular day, just the time of year.’ Avoid the ‘l’ word at all costs, he reminded himself again. Friendship was a much duller word, but useful on occasions.

‘It must have been two years ago,’ she replied, ‘round about the time of the Harvest Festival. I always help out in St Peter and Paul round about then and Roddy was in the church a lot, working on the accounts. He had to present them to the parish council the week after.’

‘So the friendship developed in the weeks and months after that service?’ said Powerscourt, wondering what would happen if he had asked when they became close.

‘Well, yes,’ Mrs Mitchell said, blushing slightly. ‘It would have been about the middle of December. Jude, my husband, was away a lot around then, working at York Minster.’

‘Quite so,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I’m not concerned with the nature of your relationship with the bursar, Mrs Mitchell, but I would like to know about Mr Gill’s state of mind in the weeks before he died.’

‘It’s so strange hearing you call him Mr Gill,’ she said. ‘He was always Roddy to me.’

‘What did the vicar say about the manner of his death, may I ask?’

She gazed into the fire. Outside on the window sill an angry robin was staring at them, as if it blamed them for the snow. ‘He told me Roddy had been murdered,’ she said finally, ‘by a person or persons unknown, as he put it. What a terrible phrase. So impersonal.’

Powerscourt supposed the information must have reached the vicar via the headmaster.

‘Well, I’m afraid he was, murdered, I mean. That’s why it’s important we know about his state of mind.’ Powerscourt was speaking as gently as he knew how. He suspected Mrs Mitchell might burst into tears at any minute and he would have to leave. ‘One of his colleagues told me he was worried about something in the last weeks,’ he went on.

‘I couldn’t say,’ she said ‘All the time I knew him he was a very calm person. He was like a sailing ship that never had to adjust the sails, if you know what I mean. Things might change around him but he stayed the same, calm and quiet and matter-of-fact.’

‘Just what you would expect from somebody who trained as an accountant,’ said Powerscourt. ‘But you didn’t notice any changes in the weeks before he died?’

Mrs Mitchell looked into the fire once more. ‘I don’t know,’ she said at last. ‘He didn’t tell me. And I hadn’t been seeing as much of Roddy as I used to, these last three or four months. He was so busy on the history of the relations between the Silkworkers and the school and trying to work out if the changes were going to help Allison’s or not. But I do remember him saying that the past never leaves you alone, never.’

Powerscourt wondered about the missing years in the filing system on the shelves of Gill’s room. ‘Did he talk to you about his earlier life at all, about growing up, being a young man, that sort of thing?’

‘No, he didn’t, Lord Powerscourt. Oh dear, you must think I’m a terrible witness, unable to answer so many of your questions. He never talked to me about any previous women in his time either. It was as if,’ she paused for a moment, ‘as if I was the first woman in his life. That’s how it seemed to me at the time, anyway. Thinking about it now, I’m sure I wasn’t the first one, not by a long chalk. But I’m not complaining. I can’t make a fuss about the times when I didn’t know him.’

‘How very sensible,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Did he ever tell you if he had been married before? Before he knew you, I mean?’

‘No he didn’t, he didn’t tell me. He could have been married fifty times for all I knew about it.’

‘Forgive me, Mrs Mitchell, I suspect you may have had this thought yourself since you heard of his death. Do you think some relationship in his past may have had something to do with his murder?’

‘Some jealous husband, do you mean, who had just learnt about an earlier affair, risen out of the past like the avenging angel? I have wondered about that, Lord Powerscourt, of course I have. Yet again I don’t have an answer for you.’

Powerscourt thought she was on the brink of tears. ‘You have been very honest with me, Mrs Mitchell, and I am grateful. I doubt if many people could have been as frank in your circumstances. One last question, if I could, and then I’ll leave you alone. How would you describe Roderick Gill, Mrs Mitchell? What was his character?’

‘My Roddy?’ She smiled across at him. ‘Well, he was calm. He was gentle. He was the same on a Thursday as he was on the Monday. I don’t think you could say that about many people. Like many men concerned with money, so the bank manager told me when Jude and I were in danger of falling into debt, he was very good with other people’s money and no good at all with his own. He was always complaining about being about to run out of cash, his salary for that month all gone and so forth. He was very generous to me, always buying me presents. He was always careful only to come when the children would be out or at school, in case they said something to their father.’ She paused. ‘I don’t think that’s all there was to him,’ she said sadly. ‘He wasn’t eloquent, he wasn’t funny, but he was very gentle and very kind.’

She stopped once more and Powerscourt felt she was very close to tears now.

‘Thank you so much,’ he said, rising out of his chair by the other side of the fire. ‘I’ve taken up enough of your time. You’ve been most helpful. Could I just ask, if you think of anything else that might help, please get in touch. The school will know where to find me.’

Hilda Mitchell showed him to the door. ‘Even if I do,’ she said very softly, ‘think of something, I mean, it’s not going to bring him back. Nothing’s going to bring him back now, is it, Lord Powerscourt? I shall never see Roddy again.’