Death at the Jesus Hospital

5

At seven o’clock that evening Lord Francis Powerscourt was watching a man change his shirt. Powerscourt’s brother-in-law William Burke was a mighty power in the City of London, a banker who knew most of what was going on in his little kingdom. He was married to Powerscourt’s sister Mary and he was due at a formal dinner of his own in half an hour.

‘Damn it, Francis,’ he said, wrestling with his white shirt and white collar, ‘I can just about fit into this bloody thing. When Mary bought it for me last year it was never this tight.’

‘Perhaps it’s shrunk at the laundry,’ said Powerscourt tactfully. Burke grunted and continued his sartorial struggles with the buttons on his waistcoat. It, too, seemed to have shrunk slightly in the wash.

‘I shall just have to hold my breath half the bloody evening,’ Burke announced sadly, sorting out his tie in the mirror above the marble mantelpiece in his enormous office. Burke’s offices seemed to his brother-in-law to double in size about every four years. Powerscourt felt sure he would end up in a place about as large and as grand as Westminster Hall itself.

‘Odd, isn’t it,’ Burke said, slipping into his tailcoat, ‘your man from the Silkworkers goes to a formal dinner last night with the members and ends up a corpse. I’m off to a formal dinner tonight and I’m telling you what I know about livery companies. Shouldn’t think,’ he paused to look suspiciously at his black patent leather court shoes as if they might be short of polish, ‘there’ll be many murderers where I’m going, Tower of London too forbidding, I’d have thought. Now then, Francis, we haven’t much time. Mary’s coming to meet me downstairs in her latest evening gown in half an hour.’

Burke pulled his waistcoat and his jacket down and lowered himself carefully into an armchair by his fire. ‘Don’t want any damned buttons popping this early in the evening. Livery companies, Francis, you wrote to me asking about livery companies. Your victims in this case, you told me, all have connections with the Silkworkers Company. I presume you know about their history already. In general terms, I mean. You don’t know yet if they were killed because they were members of the company or if they just happened to belong to it. Am I right so far, Francis?’

‘You are,’ said Powerscourt.

‘I don’t care for the bloody livery companies myself,’ said Burke, giving his left shoe a firm rub with his handkerchief. ‘God knows how many have asked me to join them over the years. I’ve always refused. You see, I’m as fond of tradition as the next man, but traditions need to have some purpose, in my view. Bloody monarchy, it may be old, but it’s still useful. Same with the House of Lords, even now. Bank of England, bloody ancient institution, but it still has a function. But tell me this, Francis, what is the point of the Honourable Company of Basketworkers? Glove-makers? Honourable Company of Needlemakers, for God’s sake? I doubt if any of the members has made a glove or a basket or a bloody needle in the last hundred years.’

‘What is it about them that makes you so cross, William?’

Burke laughed. ‘I’ll tell you what a fellow told me a couple of years back. He belonged to these livery companies the way other people belong to clubs like the Garrick or the Carlton. He was a member of five or six of the things, maybe more, I can’t remember exactly. Do you know what he told me about them? I’ve always thought it rather sharp. He said they reminded him of school. I don’t know how many new public schools have opened in the last fifty years, the man went on. Heaps and heaps of them, all busy inventing ancient traditions as fast as they can to impress the parents. My man claimed each livery company was like a house in one of those new public schools. Wardens and so on are the prefects, fancy uniforms and so forth.’

Powerscourt had a sudden picture of one of the prefects at Allison’s: ‘Walk, don’t run in the corridor.’ At least, he thought, they had a couple of hundred years rather than a couple of decades to invent their past.

‘All the different houses,’ Burke went on, unaware that his brother-in-law had temporarily abandoned him in favour of school corridors, ‘get together every now and then to elect the head boy, except he’s now called the Lord Mayor of London. Most of the pupils going to these new public schools are first-generation buyers. If the fathers had been to one of the old foundations like Eton or Winchester, they’d probably have sent their sons there. Those places are stuffed out with the sons of old boys, for God’s sake. Same thing when the men from the new schools come to the City. First-generation buyers again, most of their families have no tradition of working here. These damned livery companies are like a home from home. Welcome back to your house at school. Welcome back to the uniforms. Welcome back to the school food and the dreadful puddings. Welcome back to the prefects. This is England in nineteen hundred and ten.’ William Burke looked at his watch.

‘I’m going to have to go in a minute, Francis,’ he said, standing up to check his clothes in the mirror. ‘I’ve left the most important bit till the end. The first thing is that many of these companies are rich, very rich. Their members have been leaving them land and houses and baskets and gloves and silk and gold and God knows what else in the City and elsewhere for centuries. They’re stuffed with money. What’s more, your lot, Honourable Company of the Ancient Mistery of Silkworkers, to give them their full title, are one of the richest of the lot. And,’ Burke brushed a speck of dust off his formal trousers with stripes down the sides, ‘there’s something very strange going on about the money and the Silkworkers. I can’t be precise and I wouldn’t want to give you wrong information, not with all these corpses with strange marks lying about the place, but I have feelers out. I may pick up some hard information at this dinner tonight. I haven’t finished with them yet.’

There was a knock at the door. A porter in dark trousers and a blazer marked on the pocket with Burke’s bank emblem of a flying eagle informed him that Mrs Burke was waiting for him downstairs.

‘There you are, William,’ said Powerscourt happily to his brother-in-law. ‘Even your porter is in a kind of livery. So are you, in a way, now I come to think about it. Can’t get away from them.’

Burke laughed and took his wife away to sup with the ghosts of those executed or murdered in the Tower, Anne Boleyn and Sir Walter Raleigh, Lady Jane Grey and the Earl of Essex.

‘Three corpses in ten days, Francis, that must be some sort of record, even for you.’

Powerscourt’s closest friend Johnny Fitzgerald was draped across a sofa in the Powerscourt house in Markham Square, clutching a glass of red wine firmly in his left hand. He had just returned from a research trip to southern France, working on his latest book on the birds of the Midi and the Auvergne. Two earlier volumes on birds of the British Isles had sold well.

‘Do you think that’s the end of the road, or do you expect more strange bodies to turn up next week?’

‘Johnny,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I’ll be honest with you. I haven’t a clue. I wish I knew. I really do. Part of the problem now is going to be travelling from here down to Marlow and then up to Norfolk all the time. You can’t do a great deal of detecting on a train or in the Silver Ghost.’

‘Let’s hope there aren’t any more murders, my love.’ Powerscourt’s wife, Lady Lucy, was making a close inspection of a catalogue in her lap that was filled with advertisements for antiquarian booksellers and their wares. She had been wondering if she should buy Francis a first edition of the works of John Donne as a birthday present.

‘Those poor old boys down there in Marlow,’ she went one, ‘they must be terrified. Nobody goes into an almshouse expecting to be murdered, do they? Certainly nobody we know. And the mothers of those boys at the school, they must be having a dreadful time, not sure if their children are alive or dead.’

‘I expect, Francis, that you will have some particularly disagreeable task for me to perform in the usual fashion?’ Johnny had been Powerscourt’s companion in arms in all his detection cases. ‘By the way,’ he held his glass up to the light and peered happily at the dark red wine, ‘this isn’t your usual tipple. Where does it come from? I’d like to order a case or two from your wine merchant.’

Powerscourt’s brain was far away, watching the waters swirl round the Silkworkers Hall. He wondered if the murderer had hidden in there all night. He wondered where the murderer was now and if he might have made his first mistake.

He smiled at his friend. ‘It’s Italian, that wine. You might be suspicious, I certainly was, about the lack of label but the new fellow at Berry Bros and Rudd said there was a reason for that. Printing press for the labels collapsed apparently, the Italians had forgotten to put any oil in it for months. Eyewitnesses said the noise of metal strangling metal was incredible, the sort of thing you might read about in H. G. Wells. And it went on and on until the machine was just a heap of bits of metal lying all over the floor and the dust so thick you could hardly see across the warehouse. Brunello di Montalcino, it’s called, Johnny. Comes from a place called Montalcino, south of Florence.’

Johnny Fitzgerald looked at his friend suspiciously. ‘That sounded like a rather long-winded way of avoiding telling me about some really horrible job you’ve got for me, something so distasteful that even you are scared of mentioning it.’

Powerscourt laughed. ‘Not true, Johnny, not true. I have, I must admit, been thinking for some time about where to deploy your talents to best advantage in this case. With the pupils of Allison’s School perhaps? Or their mothers? Silkworkers here in London? Maybe. But all the evidence seems to me to point in another direction. It is a choice between the young and the old. The place for you, Johnny, is in the Rose and Crown, High Street, Marlow. Your mission — you can see it as well as I do — is to make friends with the old boys. “That new chap is always buying people drinks, especially if they come from the hospital.” I’ve even booked you a room at the posh hotel, Johnny, just down the road.’

‘How long for?’ asked Johnny Fitzgerald, looking yet more suspicious.

‘A week or so in the first instance,’ said Powerscourt cheerfully. ‘We can always review the position in a couple of days.’

‘I see. Tell me this, Francis, do you want me to raise the subject of the murder straight away?’

‘Absolutely not. I want you to talk about anything other than sudden death to begin with. I want you to encircle them from a distance, if you know what I mean.’

Johnny stomped off for a dinner with his publisher. Powerscourt looked over at Lady Lucy. She had closed her catalogue. Tomorrow, she had decided, she would go and buy this John Donne. It would give Francis so much pleasure. She had felt rather lost as the men had sat here and made their plans.

‘My love,’ said Powerscourt, who knew better than anybody the vital role his wife had played in so many of his investigations, ‘you mustn’t think you have been left out of this inquiry. Nothing could be further from the truth.’ He stroked her hair.

‘What do you want me to do, Francis?’ she asked.

‘For the moment I want you, like that Scottish regiment, to keep watch and to pray. You are what one great commander described as the most important of his forces in the lead-up to a battle. Think of Napoleon’s reserve, the Imperial Guard who never lost a battle till they met their Waterloo. Just for now, Lucy, you are the reinforcements who will carry the day, like Napoleon’s reserve.’

Sergeant Peter Donaldson of the Maidenhead force was feeling great sympathy with his counterpart from The Pirates of Penzance who complained that ‘a policeman’s lot is not a happy one’. The sergeant had seen the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta at an amateur performance by the Buckinghamshire Police Drama Group and Choir the year before and some of the arias had stuck in his brain. At this moment the sergeant was leaving the offices of Hook, Hawthorne and Brewster, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths, at the end of Reading High Street. This was the tenth firm of solicitors he had visited in the town that day, and he had learnt nothing to his advantage in any of them. Well might he produce his credentials, well might he stress the importance of this part of the murder inquiry, well might he kowtow as best he could to the arrogant solicitors who confronted him, but they repeatedly assured him that they could not help. None of the names of the men with no wills from the Jesus Hospital, Marlow, meant anything to them. ‘It’s not natural,’ he remembered his Inspector saying to him. ‘Twelve out of the twenty with no will? I simply don’t believe it.’

There were different ways of saying no, the sergeant said to himself, remembering the various members of the legal profession he had met that day. Some of them brought out their ledgers and showed him their lists of the clients they did have, the day they were taken on, the dates of any important transactions in their affairs. But most of them just took a cursory look in a file and said, ‘No, we’ve never heard of any of these people. Good day to you, Sergeant. If anything happens, of course we’ll be in touch.’ And all of them treated him with disdain, as if he’d come to clean the windows, the sergeant said to himself bitterly. He thought of the look he could expect on his Inspector’s face when he reported that he had toiled all afternoon and caught nothing. The Inspector had a pained expression he put on at moments of difficulty and setback, a look that said you’ve let me down. How could you. I’m so disappointed.

But late this afternoon, as Sergeant Donaldson came back to Maidenhead to make his final inquiries, and the shopkeepers and businessmen began to shut up their stores and their offices, he was wrong. Inspector Fletcher was not disappointed when the sergeant told him the news. He hardly took any notice. His eyes were bright and he began walking up and down his office, smacking one fist into another.

‘There’s another one, Sergeant! Another dead body with the strange markings! That makes three of them! It’s the biggest case we may ever see. Three murders, one after another! And the most important one right here on our doorstep!’

Fletcher stopped suddenly and looked at his sergeant. He might have a hangdog expression when he was being told bad news. Fletcher’s own superior officer, Detective Chief Inspector Galway, did not care for such niceties. He shouted at people. Some of his officers reported that they were sure he was on the verge of knocking them down.

‘I do hope,’ the Inspector said, with the elation draining slowly out of his face, as he realized what might happen next, ‘that they don’t take the case away from us. They might give it to somebody senior. Or they might bring somebody in from London. I do hope they don’t. This may be the biggest case I’ll ever see. If I don’t get promotion after this, Sergeant, then I never will.’

The newspapers’ reaction to the three murders was proof that the really important news is what happens closest to home. Distant earthquakes, plagues in countries with unpronounceable names, civil wars in far-off lands like Kurdistan, failed to make it into print in local organs of opinion like the Reading Chronicle or the Norwich Evening News. Both of these papers carried banner headlines, ‘Murder in the Almshouse’ for Marlow, and ‘Public School Murder’ in Fakenham. The last of the three, Sir Rufus by the Silkworkers’ steps, merited a small article on an inside page of the local papers in London. None of the reporters who wrote the stories mentioned the strange marks on the dead men’s chests. So far the police had managed to conceal that information in all three cases. Nobody knew how long the line would hold, or how many days it would be before a policeman would sell the information to a journalist who would have a scoop on his hands.

One of the very few people apart from Powerscourt and the forces of law and order to know of the stigmata was Sir Fitzroy Robinson Buller, Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, regularly described by insiders in the Civil Service as Whitehall’s head prefect. Sir Fitzroy had been watching over the Home Office’s wide powers which included supervision of the police and the criminal justice system for many years. In that time he had developed, as he liked to confide in his fellow permanent secretaries over a regular lunch at the Athenaeum, a Nose For Trouble. In his long career he had divided his political masters, the Home Secretaries of the day, into four different types. There were those who listened to his advice and were too stupid to understand it. There were those who listened to his advice but were too frightened to do anything about it. There were those — ‘Too many, alas, too many,’ he would confide to his lunchtime companions over the port — who didn’t even listen to his advice at all. And there was a rump party, far too small a body in Sir Fitzroy’s view, who listened to his counsel and did something about it. The Permanent Secretary still had an open mind about the current incumbent of the great office he served, Herbert Gladstone, youngest son of the legendary Prime Minister. Once he had listened and acted decisively. Once he had listened and done nothing at all. Sir Fitzroy was too seasoned and too wily an operator to think that his advice on this current matter could be decisive in the formation of his judgement. Never or impossible were not words that should pass from a permanent secretary’s lips. Salvation should surely be available to ministers as it was to the many sinners of London. Looking out at St James’s Park, with the nannies wheeling their charges round the lake and the birds poised and ready for action in the bare trees, he composed his memorandum to his master.

‘Dear Home Secretary,’ he began, ‘I do not need to remind you of the gravity of the current situation regarding the three very recent murders where the bodies have been disfigured in a particularly distasteful fashion.’

Sir Fitzroy was reluctant to mention the precise details of the disfigurement. One of the reasons for his long tenure at the Home Office was his refusal to trust anybody completely. Home Secretaries, he said to himself, have been known to leave their red boxes in the backs of London taxis. One particular box had managed to travel successfully all the way to Edinburgh in the luggage rack, its owner having left the train at Grantham. Like many public servants, Sir Fitzroy had a total horror of what might happen in his world if the public were to find out what was really going on. Secrecy, in his view, was the lubricating oil of government, a vital weapon in the long war against disorder and democracy.

The newspapers, as you well know, Sir Henry, have not yet heard of the disfigurements to the dead bodies. Coverage in the Press has been muted so far. I would, however, be failing in my duty if I did not draw your attention to the possibility, nay, in my opinion, the near certainty, that this intelligence will leak out into the public domain and will do so very soon. In my judgement there are a number of developments likely to follow from such a revelation.

One, there will be a massive hue and cry and general frenzy in the newspapers of every stripe. Nothing succeeds in terms of raising circulation and increasing advertising rates like scandal and sensation. Three dead bodies with stigmata of an unusual kind rate high in the ledgers of scandal and sensation. We are having a fairly quiet time at present in terms of major political developments. The public have grown tired of the rows between the Commons and the Lords. They are even more tired of the depressing number of strikes and the growing popularity of industrial action. They may even — would that it were so — be growing tired of rumours of foreign wars. There is, as you well know, Minister, nothing the newspapers like more than real murder mysteries. All the present one lacks is a female element, some suspicion of adultery or foreign adventuresses. If no such facts come to light, we may be sure that the newspapers will invent them.

Two, in the light of the eventualities referred to in the previous section, I should draw your attention to the likely reaction in the House of Commons. The only thing — and I know you share this view — worse than the baying of the newspaper columns is the hypocrisy and self-advertisement of various backbenchers who will attempt to get their names in the Press by asking ridiculous questions. Why is the Government not doing more to catch the culprits? How is it that the Home Secretary allowed this foreign criminal — in the minds of many, if not most newspapers, all murders are committed by foreigners — into our country and slaughter our fellow citizens?

Three, if the news emerges, as per section one, above, the most damaging charge that can be levelled at the Government is the accusation of waste and duplication. Why do we have three separate police forces investigating the murders, which are so clearly linked and the work of a foreign gang? Why should we, as taxpayers and ratepayers, have to bear the expenses of three senior detectives and their teams when one would do? Why does the Government not take control of the matter and put the investigation into the hands of one of the Metropolitan Police’s most senior officers who will, by definition, have more experience of murder inquiries than the inexperienced of Marlow and the novices of Norfolk?

Four, I fear that the Department is about to face a most difficult decision. You are caught, Minister, to use a phrase too readily invoked, I fear, by my colleagues, caught between Scylla and Charybdis. Refuse the pleas for a single man and the newspapers will hound you for taking the wrong decision. Appoint a single man who fails to solve the mystery and the newspapers will hound you for taking the wrong decision. Consistency has never been a necessary feature of the behaviour of the Press. Opportunism is all.

Sir Fitzroy paused at this point and read his memorandum back to himself. There were, he knew, many of his colleagues who would give firm advice at this point to follow a particular course of action. It was known at the Athenaeum lunch club as making the minister’s mind up for him. But that was not Sir Fitzroy’s way. It was not for him to tell his minister what to do. Not this time anyway, with such a delicate issue. His job was to marshal the arguments for and against, to make sure that the minister was fully informed about the options involved. Anything more definite, as he used to say in his introductory lecture to new recruits to the Civil Service, would be a usurpation of the functions of government.

The man they called Eye Patch stood motionless behind his curtains and stared out to sea. It was half an hour short of midnight and nothing moved on the streets and the seafront of the little town. The moon was nearly full and if he looked closely he could see the small collection of yachts moored in the harbour. The largest and most mysterious was his own. He could, had he so fancied, have looked at her through the finest telescope money could buy, permanently sited up in the top floor of his huge house, but he couldn’t be bothered to climb two flights of stairs. There were no lights on in the drawing room looking out over the waters. The man disliked the thought of being overlooked. He valued security above all else. Why else should he hide himself away like a reclusive millionaire or mad English lord who locks himself up in his hall or his grange to spend his waking hours on the collection of Lepidoptera or the stuffing of small furry animals?

Not many people alive had known the man before he acquired his eye patch and his nickname. Once he realized how useful it was to be known in this way he only used his real name when it was absolutely necessary. Friends, who were few, colleagues who were largely frightened, enemies who were numerous, all referred to him as Eye Patch because they did not know what he was christened. Some people wondered if his women or his mistresses addressed him as Eye Patch even in the most intimate of circumstances.

The wound that led to the patch had happened decades before. The circumstances also left him with a slight limp in his left leg. The man wondered often in the early years of his disfigurement if it wouldn’t have been better to have lost a leg rather than an eye if he had to lose something. He would much rather have become Long John Silver than Eye Patch but there it was. The present version of his patch, handmade by the finest tailors, was of a dull grey, which its wearer thought the most unobtrusive in his small collection. He had a black one he wore when he wanted to frighten people. There was a dark red one he wore when he wanted to impress a lady. Eye patches, he had found, had a strange fascination for the opposite sex. They always wanted to know how he came by it, if there was any hope of sight ever returning. The man would smile, refuse to answer any questions, and maintain the veil of secrecy. Over the years he had decided that his red eye patch was blessed with considerable aphrodisiac qualities. He rarely failed to conquer. He resisted the many attempts by his valet to order him a new one.

Outside, the moon passed behind a cloud. There was a faint hint of silver on the water. Eye Patch had come to this place with a mission. He was pleased with his progress so far. Very few people knew he was here. Very few people knew who he was. Groceries were delivered to his staff. No local had crossed his door. He never went out, except at night to visit his yacht, and then he wrapped so many scarves round his face that he was unrecognizable. He took a long last look at the sleeping town which looked as though God himself might have tucked it up in bed. As he climbed the stairs to his bedroom above, the man smiled as he thought of his red eye patch. It seemed to him a very long time since he had worn it. When the business was finished he would see if its seductive charms still worked. He looked out at the sea once more before he closed his bedroom curtains. His yacht was still there, the easiest means of escape if that should become necessary. She was swaying slightly in a midnight breeze. The man could not see the name painted in bold letters on the side but he knew it was there. The yacht was called Morning Glory.