Death at the Jesus Hospital (10 page)

‘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.

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
.

All was not well in the Jesus Hospital in Marlow. The old gentlemen were restless and unsettled. The funeral of Abel Meredith had been delayed for some unaccountable reason. The residents of the almshouse liked funerals. Funerals reminded them that they at any rate were still alive. They liked singing the hymns like ‘Rock of Ages’ and ‘The Day Thou Gavest Lord Is Ended’. They weren’t quite so sure about the dead man being lowered into the ground but by that stage many of them were already thinking of the wake in the dining hall that the hospital organized for its own after a funeral, with special cakes and scones and
homemade
raspberry jam.

But what unsettled the old gentlemen even more, though they never mentioned it to anyone, not even their closest friends, was that they might be living with a murderer. And none of their rooms had locks. The authorities had decided long before that the ability to rush in and take a sick man to hospital without breaking doors down was essential. But here was the disadvantage of that policy. Number Nine or Number Fourteen or Number Eleven might rise in the night and kill once again, and nobody could stop them rushing in, knife or gun in hand. Freddie Butcher, Number Two, whose life had been spent on the railways rather than selling meat, had done considerable damage to his back trying to pull a sofa across his living room to a position right by the front
door so that any intruder would have to push past it to get to him. The general amount of conversation, usually gossip of one sort of another, had dropped. The only bright spot on the silkmen’s horizon was the arrival of a new regular at the Rose and Crown. This Johnny chap, they said to one another, had a fund of good stories and an inexhaustible supply of money for buying rounds of drinks. He didn’t seem very interested in the hospital, not even in the murder. He was one of those people who give the impression of always being cheerful. And once you were sitting in the corner table of the Rose and Crown, with a pint of the landlord’s best in your fist, you felt safe. Nobody was going to come and murder you there. So it was not surprising that some of the old
gentlemen
had taken to staying longer and longer in the pub, nor that they were so cheerful on their return that they might not have noticed whether they were being murdered or not.

Warden Monk was aware of these undercurrents swirling round his kingdom. He tried to reassure the old men that nobody was coming to kill them. In old days he might have asked Sir Peregrine to come down if he had a moment and give the old boys a pep talk. In these homilies Sir Peregrine always sounded like a house prefect instructing his charges to play up in the house football competition and get fit for the cross-country running championship. But Sir Peregrine did not have a moment and did not come. Those who did, and who came far too often for Monk’s liking, were the officers of the Buckinghamshire Constabulary who always lowered morale. Why do they keep coming, the old
gentlemen
would mutter to each other, unless they know that the murderer is here, is one of us, within these walls? One down, the old men muttered to themselves, nineteen to go.

Monk himself had other things on his mind. It was not surprising that Sergeant Peter Donaldson had been unable to find Abel Meredith’s will in the lawyers’ offices in Maidenhead or anywhere else. Monk had not one last will and testament of the late Abel Meredith, Number Twenty,
but two. The Authorized Version, as Monk referred to it, was in a secret place inside a floorboard in Monk’s bedroom. One of the many occupations he had had to leave in a hurry in an earlier life was that of carpenter, but his departure had not come before he had learnt a lot about the trade. People, especially the police, were great believers in the fact that criminals liked hiding things under the floorboards. Monk was a great believer in hiding things inside floorboards. His secret place could only be unlocked by pressing a whorl on the lower side of the board. Nobody looking at it, not even the most suspicious policeman, would have imagined that there was anything concealed inside. Like the wooden horse of Troy, Monk would say to himself, the most important parts are on the inside.

The other version of the will, the Revised Version, as Monk put it, was in the file marked Wills on a shelf on his office. This was one of those unusual wills, two pages long, where the second page only required a signature. Monk may have been a thief. But he was not greedy. He was, he would remind himself from time to time, a reasonable man. When engaged on will work he always took care to keep to the original intentions. Abel Meredith had left a large amount of money, well over two thousand pounds, a figure that would have sent Inspector Fletcher’s instincts into overtime. All of that been left to a brother in Saskatchewan in the original. In the new will Monk split the figure, half to the brother in Canada, half to ‘my good friend and counsellor, Thomas Monk, with thanks for all the help and advice rendered to me’. This was not the most valuable will created in Monk’s office. It was, in fact, the third most valuable. Once the funeral was over, he would take it to a rather grand solicitor in the West End who would launch it into the legal system.

‘Don’t think very much of this lot, actually,’ said Powerscourt’s third police officer. Detective Inspector
Miles Devereux was wearing a cream shirt and a very
old-fashioned
suit that might have belonged to his father. ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ he told Powerscourt, ‘but I am the tenth of eleven sons. No jokes about cricket or
football
teams, please, absolutely not. Family may be numerous, family funds are not. By the time they got round to deciding what to do with me, I had, I still have, now I think of it, brothers in almost every conceivable occupation. I have brothers who can sell you a house, look after your money, train your racehorse, christen, marry and bury you though not all at the same time. There’s one who farms in Argentina and one who runs enormous ranches in Canada. There’s one who will buy your antique books and sell them on at an enormous profit, and another who claims to be opening the wines of Italy up to new markets in Britain, though the family say he merely opens the bottles. There are, I fear, even more of them. So I decided to do something different and join the police force. It’s quite fun, really, especially when you get a tasty one like this case here. But all this stuff here,’ he waved a languid hand at the strange collection of objects on the table, ‘contents of Sir Rufus’s pockets, pretty dull, I’d say, wouldn’t you? Why are we always so keen to have a look at these things? I’ve never known. It’s not as though the murderer is going to pop his calling card into a waistcoat pocket, is it?’

Powerscourt smiled. Behind the slightly dreamy exterior he suspected Devereux had a sharp brain. He looked young to have risen to Detective Inspector. In one pile on the table in Cannon Row police station were the items he dismissed, a collection of keys, coins, currency notes, a wallet, a letter from his bank telling him he had two hundred and
sixty-three
pounds in his account, two tickets for the opera from three days before, a large unopened white handkerchief and a receipt from Simpsons in the Strand.

‘Do you know, Powerscourt, they always put me on to these kinds of cases now. Rich people’s murders, all that
sort of stuff. Here am I, longing for some tasty gang violence in the East End and I end up yet again with death from Debrett’s. It’s really not fair. What do you think of this other lot?’ He pointed to a rather larger heap of miscellaneous rubbish. ‘This lot is the stuff found all over the Silkworkers Hall that day by the good Mrs Robinson, cleaning lady and occasional waitress. She kept it especially for us.’ A long pianist’s finger stirred up the random bits of paper. Powerscourt thought cigarette packets or cigarette stubs, tickets or parts of tickets seemed to be the most frequent objects in this display, bus tickets, underground tickets, train tickets.

‘One section about football results from last week’s
Times
,’ said Devereux, stirring the mixture slowly, as if it were a sauce. ‘Our man may have been a Tottenham fan as they won five nil. Two empty beer bottles from Messrs Young’s and Company of Wandsworth, a couple of unpaid bills, one return ticket from Hastings and one from somewhere ending in “be”, two brown leaves and a menu from last night’s dinner. They seem to have done themselves pretty well, don’t you think, Lord Powerscourt? Any of these bits and pieces ring a bell with you?’

‘Nothing unusual that I can see, nothing unusual at all.’

‘Well, we’ll keep them safe for now. Let me tell you what I have set in train so far,’ said the Inspector. ‘My men are calling on all those who attended the dinner last night. By this evening we should have a reasonable picture of what went on. The chef and the waiters should be here in an hour or so. I have an appointment this afternoon with a senior doctor at Barts round the corner. I am going to ask him about the strange marks on the body, or bodies I should say after what you told me earlier. I do have a theory about the marks though I’m sure it’s probably wrong.’

‘What is that?’

‘I just wonder if they weren’t all suffering from some strange disease that produces that pattern. A number of
those tropical diseases can bring on some very unusual symptoms, people changing colour, or marks appearing all over their skin, that sort of thing.’

‘It’s certainly possible,’ said Powerscourt tactfully. ‘Perhaps the medical gentlemen will be able to help.’ Privately he was less certain. The only thing all three corpses had in common, as far as he knew, apart from the strange marks, was membership or connection with the Silkworkers Company.

‘I should like to be present when you talk to the chef and the waiters, if I may,’ he continued, ‘and I, too, have an appointment this afternoon, though with a man of finance rather than medicine.’

Powerscourt told the Inspector about his inquiries with William Burke about the livery company and the suspicion that something untoward might be going on.

Inspector Grime of the Norfolk Constabulary was not, by nature, a cheerful man. That was not his way. On this day he was, once more, not cheerful. But he would have said that affairs were moving in a not wholly unsatisfactory fashion in the case of the bursar. Grime had now finished his interviews with the pupils of Allison’s School. No more would he have to stare at those maps in the geography classroom and the countries of the world ready to spin for him in their globes at the touch of a finger. He suspected that the headmaster would have some other form of torture ready for him to do with the boys. No woman had fallen for Inspector Grime’s particular temperament since the death of his wife some years before. There was no Mrs Grime at home waiting for him at the end of the day with pots of tea and warm scones. There had been no little Grimes to delight a parent’s life. As a result he eyed small boys, even larger boys, with the same suspicion he brought to the rest of the human race, the same lack of charity. It was, he had said
to himself often enough, precisely that lack of charity that had brought him success in the business of detection and solving crimes. If you thought all the witnesses were lying and potential criminals, you were bound to be proved right some of the time.

The particular development that was lightening his burdens this afternoon was to do with the postman, or rather the one who had pretended to be a postman. He had arranged with the postal authorities and the headmaster for a real postman, dressed in the proper uniform, to visit the school the following morning at exactly the same time as the visit on the day of the murder. This mailman would retrace the steps of his criminal predecessor in every particular, ending up with a phoney delivery in the bursar’s room. Only the headmaster knew about the plan. If word got out, Grime believed, the fevered imaginations of the younger children might get the better of them. Morning prayers would start the day’s work at Allison’s School shortly after the visit. The headmaster would ask if anybody
remembered
anything about the day of the murder and the visit of the postman. He, Inspector Grime, would have to attend the assembly, which he would have avoided at all costs under normal circumstances. The combination of boys and prayers and singing would have been too much for him. But on this occasion the prize might be great, another opening into the strange death of Roderick Gill.

There was another reason for the Inspector’s mood. He had never been as excited as Powerscourt about the strange marks on the dead man’s chest. Fancy stuff, he thought, but it might have nothing to do with the murder. Gill’s affair with Mrs Hilda Mitchell, the Inspector felt sure, was a more promising field of inquiry than livery companies and unusual anatomical details. And that very morning he had received intelligence from York where Mr Mitchell was believed to be carrying out restoration work on the minster, as he had on an earlier occasion two years before. A local
sergeant had called on the dean for confirmation of his
presence.
Jude Mitchell, master stonemason, the policeman was told, had indeed been employed at the minster for work on the statues in the crossing. But he had completed his part of the restoration a week ago and left. He was due to return in a week’s time to begin a programme of repair in the chapter house. The landlady in his rooms confirmed his departure and his date of return. Nobody knew where Jude Mitchell, cuckolded husband of Roderick Gill’s mistress, Hilda, had gone. But he had left the place where he was supposed to be three days before the murder.

Warden Monk had made a mistake. He knew it the minute he stopped talking. He did not know how damaging it might be. The old men were still restless, suspicious that one of their number might be a murderer, upset over the delay in the funeral arrangements, troubled by the visits of the Buckinghamshire Constabulary. Monk, resplendent today in a brand-new green cravat, had been having a conversation after lunch in the hall with Henry Wood, Number Twelve, about the dead man before the silkmen went off for their afternoon rest.