Death at the Jesus Hospital (9 page)

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.