Death at the Jesus Hospital

4

It was the largest force Inspector Fletcher had ever commanded. It wasn’t a regiment or a battalion or even a company. His unit this January morning, he thought, remembering the books on military history he loved as a boy, was somewhere between a squad and a platoon. Apart from himself and his sergeant, he had eighteen men on parade outside the Jesus Hospital in Marlow. Three police stations in Maidenhead had been denuded of some of their officers to provide the manpower. Manoeuvres were to start shortly after eight o’clock when the last silkman had left his quarters and reported for breakfast in the dining hall.

As the clock above the little tower reached eight o’clock, the sergeant, on duty by the dining hall, waved an unobtrusive arm to his superior officer. The old men were all sitting down. The eighteen policemen marched into the almshouse. Each one had been assigned a particular room and the sergeant had one of his own. All had been briefed half an hour before at a specially convened assembly in the Maidenhead police station. They were searching, the Inspector informed them, for the murder weapon which had cut the dead man’s throat, and the strange instrument which might have made the marks on his chest. Inspector Fletcher had wondered long and hard about whether he should tell his little force about the stigmata, as he now referred to them. Eventually he decided that he had no choice. If his men didn’t know what they were looking for, how could they possibly find it? He swore the police constables to secrecy on this matter, assuring them that whoever mentioned a word about it, even to their own families, would have all his holiday entitlement cancelled for the foreseeable future. And they were also looking for papers, any private papers they could find. These, he told them, might be letters from family or friends, papers relating to their previous lives, wills, any memorabilia that might say where they had been and what they had done in earlier times. Each officer had a folder with the number of the room he was assigned to inscribed in large black letters. Inspector Fletcher had had enough of the confused memories of the over-seventies. Evidence, hard evidence was what he needed.

The old men were having a treat this morning. Fried eggs and bacon happened to be on the menu, a rare combination. This always improved morale. As they tucked into their portions, sauce bottles at the ready, the policemen slipped into their rooms and began the search. They pulled open the drawers, they checked the small cupboards, they emptied the pockets of any jackets left on a hanger, they knocked on the walls in the quest for hidden compartments and they checked underneath the threadbare carpets for any loose floorboards that might mask a treasure trove of hidden weaponry. They shook any books they could find to see if any documents were being concealed in the pages. They inspected the pictures on the walls and any photographs they could find, just as the Inspector had told them, taking the pictures out of the frames to see what might be lurking behind. They checked the stairs that led to the upper floors. Some of the folders filled up quickly. Others were less profitable, with only a couple of items being removed.

The Inspector reckoned that the time required to eat breakfast, even with the luxury of fried eggs and bacon, might not be enough for his purpose. The chaplain, also the curate of St Michael and All Angels in Marlow, had been pressed into the police service for the day. All the old men were to make their way to the chapel immediately after breakfast. Going back to their rooms was not allowed. They were to attend a special service for the feast day of St Thomas Aquinas which fell on the following day. The curate had preached on this subject before, having made a special study of the late St Thomas Aquinas and his theology at university. He was to preach until the sergeant opened the main door and nodded to him. At that point the silkmen were to sing a final hymn,

‘For all the saints who from their labours rest’. This, the chaplain assured the Inspector, had no fewer than eleven verses and if sung at a funereal pace as dictated by the organist of St Luke’s on the hospital piano, should last between five and ten minutes, ample time for his policemen to pick up their belongings and beat an orderly retreat.

The Inspector paced anxiously round the quadrangle. His sergeant conducted spot checks on the officers, ensuring that they were obeying orders. Eventually the sergeant blew on his whistle after the third verse and the eighteen policemen from Maidenhead were marched out of the hospital to carry their booty back to the station. It was just before half past nine. The Inspector had told nobody, not Monk, not any of the old men, about this morning’s exercise. He stayed behind to reassure the silkmen that their sacrifice was only temporary and that their possessions would be returned to them in due course. He did not specify, and the men did not think to ask, how long that might be. As recompense, he assured them, the police would be buying drinks for everybody at the Rose and Crown that evening between the hours of eight and nine. By eleven that morning Inspector Fletcher was back in his office. The spoils of war were laid out on his floor in numerical order from Number One to Number Twenty. Albert Fletcher hung his jacket behind his chair and set to work.

One hundred and fifty miles to the north-east the other Inspector in Powerscourt’s life was really rather pleased with himself. The two men were standing on the edge of the playing fields where the snowman was being erected. Grime refused to go back to the geography classroom if he could avoid it. He refused to talk anywhere in the school where small boys who ran as if in training for the next Olympic Games in Stockholm in two years’ time might appear round a corner at any minute and hear things they were not meant to know. The snowman, Powerscourt observed, was now higher than most of the junior members of the school. They had built small towers in the manner of building workers with their scaffolding and were adding to the figure with a selection of stolen shovels. The lake, one small boy had told Powerscourt solemnly, was not yet ready for skating. Pemberton Minor of the Upper Fourth had ventured across its frozen surface only for the ice to open and swallow him up. But for the timely intervention of a couple of gardeners, there would have been a great sadness in the Pemberton household. The soaked victim was now wrapped up in bed in the infirmary with a couple of hot water bottles for company.

‘How was your witness?’ inquired the Inspector.

Powerscourt took some time to reply. He had been thinking about his interview with Mrs Mitchell on his way to the school that morning and was surprised at how little she had told him. He wondered why she had not mentioned Gill’s anxieties in his last days.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I rather think she had the better of the encounter.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked the Inspector.

‘I don’t think she told me any actual lies,’ Powerscourt replied, staring out at the relays of Allison’s youth, totally focused on the task in hand, beginning to put a face on the snowman. They appeared to have laid their hands on a pipe and an ancient muffler of indeterminate colour to decorate their creation.

‘I think she left out quite a lot, I’m sure there are things she’s not telling me about. God knows what they are. Looking back on it, I may have been too gentle with her. It’s amazing what you can get away with if you look on the verge of tears all the time.’

‘Did she actually break down and cry all over you?’ asked Grime with horror.

‘No, she didn’t. But she did manage to convey the impression that it might happen at any time. I’d back women to be more devious than men in those circumstances any day of the week, wouldn’t you, Inspector?’

There was a mighty wail from the snowman party. Pipe and muffler had fallen out, pulling a great deal of snow that might have been the nose, forehead and mouth behind them. The snowman looked as though he had been shot in the face, white snow falling to the ground in place of the blood that might have come from a human.

‘Will you go and see Mrs Mitchell again, my lord? Do you think you might do better a second time?’

‘I did think of writing to her, but I suspect that would meet with even less success. She’d have all the time she wanted to compose her replies. I shall think about it. Now then, how were the postmen?’

‘Ah, my lord, I think there is progress in that direction. Only limited progress, mind you, but it’s something. You see, it would seem that my angelic choirboy may have been telling the truth. There may have been a postman in the corridor that morning, but he wasn’t a real one. It must have been somebody dressed up as a postman, but probably a bringer of death rather than the morning mail. The real postman who comes to the school on his rounds, Matthew Cameron, did visit the school as usual that morning. But he came at half past ten and was able to observe the confusion brought by Gill’s death. He’s sure there was no proper postman up here at the earlier time. He’s busy at the moment but he’s promised to come and see us on his way home.’

Inspector Fletcher and Sergeant Donaldson were nearly halfway through their folders with the paperwork from the Jesus Hospital. Fletcher had not been sure exactly what he would find — in some ways the early-morning raid had been a shot in the dark — but one aspect of the paperwork he found absolutely astonishing. They had looked through a lot of material they had expected to find, letters from family members in distant parts, some as far away as New Zealand and Nebraska. The old gentleman in Number Fourteen, Stephen Potter, was a great reader who seemed to belong to three public libraries. He had Conrad’s Lord Jim by his bedside, and recent volumes by Conan Doyle and Kipling on his shelf. Fletcher noted with interest that all these books were now overdue and Number Fourteen was going to have to pay a hefty fine when he returned the books to their libraries of origin. It was his sergeant, Peter Donaldson, a tall young man of about thirty with the largest moustache in the Maidenhead force, who first drew the startling fact to his attention.

‘Could I make a comment, sir?’ said Donaldson, whose parents had always pressed on him from the earliest age the virtues of politeness and cleanliness. One or two of the older Inspectors had been known to complain that Donaldson always smelt like a bar of soap first thing in the morning.

‘Of course,’ replied Fletcher, turning an ancient bible upside down and shaking it vigorously. Three old pieces of paper fell to the floor.

‘Well, sir, we’ve been through eight or nine of these folders so far. And four of them have quite a lot of money tucked away in banks or building societies, nearly four thousand pounds in one case, with the account books hidden in the man’s atlas between the maps of Paraguay and Brazil. But there aren’t any wills. You’d have thought that if they were that careful with money they’d have been bound to make a will, wouldn’t you?’

‘Ah, hm, well, you would, that’s quite right. How very odd. Maybe their last wills and testaments are with their solicitors.’ Inspector Fletcher paused again. Sergeant Donaldson had worked out long before how his superior officer’s mind worked. He knew what was coming.

‘When we’ve finished with this lot, Sergeant, perhaps you could call on the relevant offices, banks, solicitors and so on, and make inquiries. You’d better try Reading after you’re through with Maidenhead.’

‘Of course, sir.’

It was dark when the real postman arrived at Allison’s School. The snowman seemed to glow slightly in the reflected light from the great windows. Pemberton Minor in the infirmary was making a quick recovery, pleading with matron for more pieces of cake after his tea. Cake in the school was a luxury only offered to recovering invalids. The postman, a cheerful Cockney called William Cameron, long exiled to East Anglia, showed them his normal rounds.

‘We do a rough sort out of the post beforehand, sir. Headmaster’s mail gets delivered to his secretary’s office, masters’ mail to the common room, boys’ mail to the porter’s lodge, registrar and bursar’s mail to their offices in that long corridor. Bursar Gill, sir, he always had a lot of post, parents paying their bills, that sort of thing, I suppose.’

‘Did our phantom postman actually deliver any letters anywhere?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘Or was he just dressed in the uniform so people assumed he was a postman? I’ve always thought uniforms make people almost invisible. People notice the uniform rather the person inside it.’

‘Well, sir,’ said the real postman, ‘there’s a thing and no mistake. I checked in the headmaster’s office as they were locking up on my way here. Their mail arrived with me, not with the other bloke. I don’t think he can have delivered a thing.’

‘How would he have known where the bursar’s office was?’ Inspector Grime was writing busily in his notebook.

‘Well, sir, or sirs, that’s your department, not mine, I reckon. Maybe he was a part-time member of staff. Maybe he had worked here in the past and had a grudge against the bursar. Some grudge, mind you. Maybe he just rang them up and said he had a parcel to deliver and exactly where was the bursar’s office.’

‘You’d have made a good policeman, Mr Cameron,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I suppose we’ll have to interview everybody all over again to see if anybody else remembers noticing something. Those are all very intelligent questions, my friend. You’d have been a credit to the force.’

‘I was a policeman once, sir. It was some time ago now, mind you.’

‘What happened?’ said Grime, laying his pencil aside for a moment. ‘Did the force not agree with you?’

‘I think it was more that I didn’t agree with the force, sir. I had a truly terrible sergeant, you see. He was so horrible to his constables that two of us knocked him down, right in front of Kensington Town Hall. He was out cold, but I was out of the police.’

‘Do you miss it, police work?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘No, I don’t, sir. I don’t miss it at all. I felt sorry for the criminals most of the time. If I’d been as poor as some of them, I’d have gone round burgling rich people’s houses in Chelsea or Mayfair. Those people could afford to lose a thing or two. The poor bugger burglar, forgive my language, gentlemen, didn’t have enough money to feed his family most of the time.’

Inspector Grime had not smiled at all during the story of the sergeant felled in front of Kensington Town Hall. He looked as though he disapproved strongly of such behaviour.

‘Quite,’ he said, ‘quite. Now is there anything more you have to tell us? We mustn’t keep you from home too long.’

‘Don’t you worry about me, sir. Wife’s gone to her mother’s, thank God. Miserable cow.’ Powerscourt wondered which one the epithet belonged to, but thought it better not to ask. ‘I’m meeting a few friends at the Green Dragon the other side of Fakenham. But there is one thing, sir. I asked down the office if anybody had lost a uniform or had one stolen. Nobody has. So wherever our imposter got his kit from, it wasn’t from our place.’

‘We’ve kept you long enough,’ said Inspector Grime, frowning slightly. ‘Thank you so much for your information, it’s been most helpful.’

‘Bright chap, our postman,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Maybe he should have stayed in the police force after all.’

‘Didn’t care for the fellow very much myself,’ said Inspector Grime. ‘Bloody man might have knocked me down too.’

Joseph the manciple was making his final tour of the tables laid out for ‘The Silkworkers’ dinner that evening. A wine glass was out of position. A fish fork was aligned five per cent out of true. A salt cellar was too far away from its partner the pepper pot. These minutiae were meat and drink to Joseph who had been in charge of catering at Silkworkers Hall for over twenty years. He came originally from Ephesus but nobody could pronounce his surname. Simple Joseph he became and he was now as widely known in the City as the Prime Warden himself. He had taken one very important decision in his early years. He had watched as other, less scrupulous manciples in other livery companies helped themselves to their employers’ funds and their employers’ food and their employers’ drink. Most of these organizations, as Joseph well knew, were heavily stocked with accountants and bankers among their membership, well able to sniff out corruption at a couple of hundred paces. So Joseph confined himself to very small, some might have called them minute, helpings. By now he was a rich man, probably richer than some of the members. He asked prominent people for investment tips on a regular basis. This regular flow of inside information, he would tell anybody who queried his house and his lifestyle, was the basis of his fortune.

Joseph made a final check on the menus with their sketch of a chorus line from the Folies Bergere on the front page. Nine courses were displayed on the two inside pages, and the Silkworkers’ emblem, an enormous bale of bright red silk, festooned with pictures of the sailing ships and dhows and junks and steamships that brought the material to London’s docks from the East. A previous Prime Warden in the fifteenth century had once worked in the trade in Venice and a pretty gondola with a red-shirted gondolier plied his craft along the bottom of the emblem as if he was making his way down the Grand Canal itself, past the gothic palazzos towards the basin of St Mark.

Joseph had borrowed a young French chef from the Savoy for the evening, and the smells of his cooking were already creeping out from the kitchens. Twenty-four members of the honourable company, twelve at the top table and six each at the two sides, were to take their places for the evening banquet. There were a dozen Santenay sous la Roche to accompany the fish course and six bottles of Chateau d’Yquem from the company cellars to adorn the sweet. With duck at the heart of the meal, two dozen of the finest Haut Brion had been presented for the feast as a thank you to his fellow silkmen from a newly elected member who had made a killing in Latin American railway shares.

Sir Peregrine Fishborne, Prime Warden of the Company, was the first to arrive. He liked to look at the freshly laid table with its crisp white linen and the tall candles and the priceless cutlery from the early eighteenth century. He liked looking at his distinguished predecessors who lined the walls. He liked thanking God that he had arrived at his present station with a lot more money than he had had when he started out as a clerk in an insurance office. He liked savouring in his mind the plan that he hoped would make him richer yet. Most of all, and this evening was no exception, he liked going down to the lower floor with a glass of white wine and standing by the great pillars, staring out at the dark waters of the Thames swirling and gurgling on its way to the sea, ready to ferry yet more wealth to the capital. If Sir Peregrine had been Italian in earlier times, his supporters club liked to say, he wouldn’t have been a merchant in bloody Venice, he’d have been the Doge himself, sailing out once a year to wed the sea with a ring in his golden barge. His companion on this occasion was his predecessor as Prime Warden, Sir Rufus Walcott, a former Lord Mayor of London, elected with Silkworker support, now Lord Lieutenant of Norfolk and a man who collected directorships as other people might collect Wedgwood china or old paintings.

When the pair returned, the members had all arrived. There was a lot of gossip about the Stock Exchange. A man in metals had been hammered that morning, unable to pay his debts. There had been a great deal of activity in North American stocks. The first course was carried in and Sir Peregrine said the customary grace in Latin. Sir Peregrine liked people to think he was virtually fluent in Latin.

Benedic nobis, Domine, et omnibus tuis donis, quae ex larga liberalitate tua sumpturi sumus, per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum. Deus est caritas. Qui manet in caritate manet in Deo et Deus in illo. Sit Deus in nobis, et nos maneamus in illo. Bless us, O Lord, and all your gifts, which through your great generosity we are about to receive, through Jesus Christ our Lord. God is love. He who abides in love abides in God and God in him. May God be in us and may we dwell in him.

They started with Beluga caviar and native and rock oysters, always a favourite in the City, followed by Pot au feu Henry IV — the shoulder, shank, rib and tail of beef braised all day and served in their broth with a blob of Bearnaise.

Joseph had wondered for a long time about whether he should serve a red wine with the Pot au feu but thought that too rapid a change from white to red and back to white at this early stage of the evening might bring inebriation on even earlier than usual. Some of the senior members had waistlines virtually the same size as the King’s, and carrying them out of the building late in the evening to their cabs outside was a difficult process.

One of the new waiters stumbled and almost fell before recovering himself as he carried in the next course on its enormous silver salver, sole cardinale and whitebait, which was meant to be a choice of dishes but the younger members helped themselves cheerfully to both. Three courses down, only six to go, Joseph said to himself, as he supervised proceedings unobtrusively by the door into the kitchens. Sir Peregrine was boring his neighbours with a long lecture on the early history of the company. This was a regular feature of these occasions. Some men maintained that these great feasts were only held to give Sir Peregrine a captive audience for the longest possible time. He had reached the end of the fourteenth century when the next course arrived, chicken d’Albufera, in which the roasted bird is served in a sauce of boiled cream, triply reduced, with mushrooms and black truffles and quenelles of veal tongue and chicken.

A spirited debate had started at the end of the main table about the likely winners of the Eton and Harrow cricket match that year. Two of the members had children at the schools, who were likely to play for their respective elevens, and each man was claiming that his son’s team would be easy winners. A wager of twenty pounds was placed on the result. Joseph and his waiters were now bringing the bottles of Haut Brion to the table. There was a toast to the man who had provided it. Sir Rufus was holding forth to anyone who would listen about the size and beauty of the wool churches in Norfolk. Saddle of lamb with spring vegetables and parsley potatoes was one of the chef’s more conventional offerings that evening. Ordinary families in ordinary homes in ordinary parts of the capital might, just might, have been having the same thing. They would not, however, have been enjoying the course that followed, the chef’s signature dish.

Pressed Rouen ducklings, in which six birds, killed specially for the occasion in France, were roasted and their bones and organs crushed in a solid silver duck press, the resultant juice then reduced at the boil in a silver dish to produce a sauce for the meat, which the waiters irreverently called ‘bloody duck’s blood’. Sir Peregrine, his face growing redder as the room grew warmer, had reached the early stages of the Silkworkers in the Civil War. One of his victims wondered if he could feign a heart attack in order to escape. Sir Rufus, who had heard the history of the Silkworkers many times before, moved on from the churches to the beauty of the Broads.

The food grew quieter after the duck. Joseph could see the end in sight now. Sir Peregrine’s neighbours could not. Asparagus hollandaise, murderous for those afflicted by gout, who were well represented here, was followed by peach melba served in a hand-carved ice swan as big as a ten-year-old child. Canapes a la Diane, last but by no means least among the chef’s masterpieces, brought up the rear.

Joseph wondered, not for the first time, how their constitutions and their figures could stand it; then he remembered that in the summer many of these people went as a matter of course to Homburg or Marienbad to get rid of the accumulated excess, and then returned to start on another year’s course of rich living. Really, he thought, there was very little difference between Marienbad and the vomitorium of the Romans.

Sir Peregrine rose rather unsteadily to his feet and proposed the loyal toast. A selection of cigars was brought round the table. Men pushed their chairs back and stretched out their legs. It was just after half past ten. Joseph brought some more bottles of the Haut Brion to the table. It seemed to be more popular than the Chateau d’Yquem. Sir Peregrine had just sailed past the Glorious Revolution and was carrying the history of the Silkworkers into the reigns of the Georges. An argument had developed at the bottom of one of the side tables about whether there should be another election that year over the veto powers of the House of Lords.

The bells of the City churches rang for eleven. The more domesticated of the Silkworkers collected their coats and hats and headed for home, keen to return to their families while they were still in control of their faculties. By twelve only the two knights were left, still replenishing their glasses with Haut Brion. At one Sir Rufus decided on a farewell visit to the river one floor below. He declared that it was so peaceful that he wanted to spend a little time down there alone with his thoughts. Sir Peregrine, with over two hundred years of Silkworker history still to go, staggered off into the night.

Sir Rufus’s corpse, stabbed through the heart with the familiar stigmata on his chest, was found there early the next morning.

Inspector Grime brought Powerscourt news of the latest death over bacon and eggs the following morning. Police messages were despatched earlier than ones from the Silkworkers Hall after a feast. Powerscourt told the Inspector that he would have to return to London for this, the third body inside a very short time. This latest victim, Grime eyed his telegram suspiciously, was a rather grander personage than the first two, Sir Rufus Walcott, Lord Lieutenant of Norfolk, a prominent figure in the boards and directorships of the City of London and the predecessor of Sir Peregrine as Prime Warden of the Silkworkers Company. The cleaners, tidying up after the dinner the night before, had found Sir Rufus, a great stab wound in his chest, with the familiar marks of the thistle on his chest, at the top of the steps leading down to the water as if he was waiting for a boat to take him home. There was no sign of the murder weapon. Twenty-four people had attended the dinner the night before. Those that had been contacted so far recalled nothing unusual about the feast, apart from the rueful admission from two of the guests that they, and Sir Rufus, had partaken rather too freely of the Haut Brion during and after the food. And that, my lord, said Grime, folding away his telegram, is all I can tell you for the present.

That afternoon Powerscourt introduced himself to his third Inspector on the case. Miles Devereux was in his early thirties with a languid air and the remains of one of those cherubic faces that convinced people he must have been a choirboy in his youth. It was, he told Powerscourt sadly, his second murder of the year, with only a month gone. He took Powerscourt round the Silkworkers Hall and the place where the body had been found.

‘We think the killer probably came by boat,’ he said. ‘So many bloody boats go up and down this river, nobody would have taken any notice if another one went by with a murderer at the oars.’

‘How would they have known he would be here at that time of day?’ said Powerscourt. ‘In the other two cases with the strange marks, Inspector, the killer would have known where to find his victim. The man in the almshouse would have been in his place, the bursar at Allison’s School would have been in his office. How did they know this old boy was going to be here at one o’clock in the morning?’

‘Perhaps they sent him a message,’ said the Inspector thoughtfully.

‘Meet me by the water at one in the morning,’ suggested Powerscourt. ‘You’ll know who I am because I’ll have a large knife in my hand, waiting to stab you through the heart.’