Death at the Jesus Hospital (26 page)

Powerscourt left the knobkerries with the doctor at the Maidenhead Hospital who had examined Abel Meredith, with a request that he telephone Powerscourt as soon as he
had reached a decision. There was something at the back of his mind that he couldn’t quite retrieve, something he thought was important. He tried to remember which of the three murders it concerned. Not the Jesus Hospital, he felt sure. Not the murder in the Silkworkers Hall. It had to be something to do with Roderick Gill up at Fakenham. But what? With the boys running up and down the corridor? With Blackbeard himself, sidling into Gill’s office and
killing
him? With Gill’s papers in their box files lined up by the wall? Hold on a minute. It certainly had to do with Gill and with Gill’s maths teacher friend whose name he could not for the moment remember, but who had told him as they patrolled the school grounds that Gill had been
frightened
of something in the days before he died. The teacher had never discovered what had frightened him, but the merry widow, who regularly entertained her friend from the church, might know. Powerscourt grabbed his coat and fled into Markham Square, looking for a taxi to take him to Liverpool Street Station and north to Fakenham.

‘Did you say your name was Lord Francis Powerscourt? And that you are an investigator with our policemen?’ Mrs Maud Lewis was inspecting her visitor from London as if he might just have landed in an extraterrestrial vehicle on the edge of her garden.

‘I did, Mrs Lewis.’

‘And are you really a lord? I mean Lord isn’t just some unusual Christian name your parents gave you when you were born?’

‘I’m a real lord, I’m afraid, Mrs Lewis. But I’m what’s called an Irish peer because the family estates were there. I don’t have the right to sit in the House of Lords. Just as well probably, with all the trouble up there at the moment.’

‘Goodness me, how very exciting. I don’t think I’ve ever had a lord, even one who couldn’t sit in the House of Lords,
in my humble abode before! And we never had anybody like that in the house when we lived near Birmingham. I don’t think they do lords in Birmingham. Lord Powerscourt, should I call you Lord Powerscourt or Powerscourt or just Lord?’

‘Lord Powerscourt would be fine, Mrs Lewis, don’t worry about it.’ By this stage they had reached the drawing room, with a fire and a couple of dogs asleep on the hearth. Mrs Lewis showed Powerscourt into a chair on the left of the fire.

‘That’s where dear Roderick used to sit, in that very chair. He never sat anywhere else. Such a lot of trouble everybody seems to be having trying to find the murderer.’ Mrs Lewis produced a deep blue handkerchief and began to dab at her eyes. Powerscourt began to fear for the worst.

‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, Mrs Lewis.’

‘About the chair where dear Roderick used to sit?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Powerscourt, ‘more about his state of mind in the weeks leading up to his death.’

‘Forgive me for interrupting, Lord Powerscourt, but I
normally
partake of a little refreshment at this time of day. Sherry, sweet sherry, naturally. Could I interest you in a glass?’

Powerscourt wondered suddenly if she and the late Roderick Gill spent their evenings taking refreshment of one sort or another.

‘That’s very kind, but no thanks.’

Mrs Lewis made her way to a drinks cabinet by the
window
and came back clutching what looked to Powerscourt to be one of the largest sherry glasses he had ever seen. She settled back into her chair and beamed at her visitor.

‘Sorry, Lord Powerscourt, for the interruption. Horace – he was my first – used to say I was incapable of sitting still for any length of time. Forgive me. You were saying about Roderick?’

‘I was wondering about his state of mind in the weeks before his death, actually, Mrs Lewis. Whether he was upset or depressed, that sort of thing.’

‘That’s a very good question, Lord Powerscourt. He was, I’m not sure if I would call it depressed, he was certainly upset. A woman can usually tell these things, particularly with their loved ones. I thought it had something to do with the church accounts actually, he’d been worried about those in the past. But it wasn’t, it was something even more serious.’

‘What was it, Mrs Lewis? Did he tell you?’

‘Well, at first I thought it had to do with that other woman he used to consort with, the one married to the stonemason who’s disappeared. I saw her looking at my Roderick in church one Sunday and it was so brazen you couldn’t believe it. You could not believe it. She was practically lying down on the ground in front of him. But it wasn’t that, or I don’t think it was that.’

Powerscourt thought Mrs Lewis must have some pretty good intelligence sources if she knew all about the other woman. He was beginning to see what Horace, her first, meant when he said that she was incapable of sitting still. It wasn’t so much a physical sitting still, but a mental one.

‘So what was it, Mrs Lewis?’

There was an uncharacteristic pause. For a second Powerscourt wondered if the woman might be ill.

‘I’m trying to remember exactly what Roderick said, Lord Powerscourt. I think there was a letter that caused the problem. It came from so long ago, he told me, that he had virtually forgotten about it. And that was all he said. He tried to keep up his spirits. He talked of going away for a while but he wasn’t definite. I could never work out if I was included in his plans for going away and so on but I never got an answer, not a satisfactory one anyway. It was all very strange.’

‘Did he show you the letter? Were you able to read it?’

Mrs Lewis shook her head sadly. ‘I never saw it.’ Powerscourt wondered about the collection of files and written material all over Roderick Gill’s office at the school.
He hoped they had not been disturbed. He wondered about the papers that had been burnt.

‘Do you keep a diary at all, Mrs Lewis? I wonder if that might jog your memory.’

‘How very clever of you, Lord Powerscourt. I do have a diary. I’ll just go and fetch it from the morning room.’

Powerscourt wondered how to proceed in the affair of the diary. Should he ask if he could take it away, as an important piece of evidence to be returned later? Or should he ask her to read the relevant excerpts?

They were pink, the diaries, two of them, each with a great bow on the front. ‘Here we are, Lord Powerscourt. I thought you should have last year’s as well. How nice to think that one’s diaries are an important piece of evidence in a murder trial! You will let me have them back, won’t you? Will you change your mind about that glass of sweet sherry now?’

Powerscourt arranged with the headmaster’s office that he could come to inspect Gill’s papers first thing the following morning. He arranged to see Inspector Grime in an hour. He proposed to fill in the time with an inspection of the pink diaries and their contents in his hotel room. He decided his life would not be the poorer if he omitted all the entries before the entry of Roderick Gill.

Powerscourt wondered what the secret of Roderick Gill’s success with women might be. He suspected he flattered them, he made them feel better about themselves so they thought better of him.

He’s off the mark now, Powerscourt said to himself. I wonder if she knows what she’s getting herself into. He skimmed some more dates and found an interesting entry.

There were a number of further entries about his visits with triple exclamation marks. And in one case, four.

Powerscourt flicked on to the days before Gill’s death in the diary.

Some unpleasantness, Powerscourt thought, I’ll say there was some unpleasantness, enough unpleasantness to kill him. Not long to go now.

Powerscourt put down the second volume of diaries, most of whose pages were still awaiting further entries. He felt he would be intruding on private grief if he read any more. Just before he went to meet Inspector Grime he asked the hotel reception if they could put him through to his home telephone number. Rhys, the Powerscourt butler-cum-chauffeur, greeted him in his normal telephone manner, that of one welcoming a colleague back from the dead, and put Lady Lucy on the line.

‘Francis,’ she said, ‘how good to talk to you. Listen, there’s been a development. The doctor in Maidenhead called about half an hour ago. He’s going to get a second opinion tomorrow, but he’s virtually certain that a knobkerrie, similar to the ones you sent him, was the weapon used to make those marks on the dead men’s chests.’

‘Did he really, Lucy? Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum. That’s very interesting, very interesting indeed.’

Powerscourt felt cheerful as he sat down for an early evening drink with Inspector Grime. He hadn’t found the actual murder weapon but he knew now what had caused the marks on the dead men’s chests. He could suggest that there might be some sort of a link between a battle in Africa thirty-one years previously and the deaths of three people in southern England, all members of the Silkworkers Company. He would have been the first to admit that he had, at present, no clue at all about the possible links between the battle, the knobkerrie and the livery company but there were many avenues left to explore.

Inspector Grime listened to Powerscourt’s ideas with little enthusiasm. He had never put much faith in the theory that the marks were the key to the investigation. Now he felt they were all going to be dragged down an alleyway with little hope of success. He didn’t mention any of his misgivings but Powerscourt felt them emerging from Grime’s body language and general suspicions like a hand signal.

‘I suppose we’ll have to go through all those papers again, the ones in his room and his office.’ Grime sounded even more melancholy than usual this evening.

‘I’m afraid so,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I could do it on my own, you know, if you’ve got better things to do.’

‘That’s kind of you, my lord, but the fact is that the investigation up here is stalled. We still haven’t found the
stonemason, but he’s due to report back to York Minster any day now.’

‘What happened about the two Lewis boys and their lies about the chess match?’

This time, Powerscourt thought, Inspector Grime definitely cheered up. ‘It was only when I threatened to tell their mother what was going on that I got the truth out of them. I said I was going to inform Mrs Lewis that her sons had been arrested in a homosexual brothel. You remember Sir Peregrine and his masseuse in that hotel on the Thames? Well, it seems that something similar was going on in Montague Lewis’s house. They were entertaining a former servant girl of theirs called Nellie and her friend Matilda. They eventually admitted that the discussions were horizontal rather than vertical, if you follow me. The girls confirmed it, though they refused to say if they had been paid which makes me suspect that they probably were. But we couldn’t hold on to them for that. The stonemason is hot favourite now, unless, of course, we find out more about this letter that frightened the bursar.’

That night Powerscourt had a strange dream. He was alone, in military uniform, in some vast open country he did not recognize. From his time with Military Intelligence he thought it might be South Africa. About a hundred yards behind him were a group of about fifty native warriors. They were dressed for combat wearing only their loincloths. Their bodies glistened in the sunlight. In one hand, he saw, they were carrying assegais, the deadly spears they used to stab their opponents to death at close quarters. They were singing some terrible battle cry which throbbed and throbbed until you felt it might be about to enter your bloodstream. Every now and then one of the warriors would raise his spear and utter some blood-curdling war cry. Powerscourt’s companions seemed to have melted away. Perhaps they had
already been picked off and were lying on the harsh ground waiting for the vultures. He had two loaded pistols in his jacket, each with six rounds. He doubted if he would be able to find the time to reload once they were upon him. He would be surrounded, stabbed to death in a country a long way from home. When the war cries sounded again, closer this time, much closer, he woke up.

‘Why don’t I take his sitting room, if you take the office?’ Inspector Grime seemed to be in a better frame of mind the next morning, as they walked up the drive to the school.

‘Thank you,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I looked at those files in his rooms before, but I might have missed something.’ They were entering the long corridor where the fake postman had made his way to Roderick Gill’s small office. Powerscourt was struck again by the noise. Lady Lucy had mentioned it too, at its worst, she said, when all the pupils were moving about at the same time. Twenty or thirty, she said, would be bearable but once it gets over a hundred it’s impossible.

The headmaster strode into view and the boys parted in front of him like the waters of the Red Sea. ‘Morning, gentlemen, I wish you luck in your quest today.’ Quest, thought Powerscourt. Bloody man must think we’re looking for the Holy Grail.

Powerscourt thought that he might have got the better of the deal. He remembered Gill’s room as being packed with papers, including that strange gap where a couple of decades seemed to have disappeared. But when he applied himself to Gill’s office after the head porter opened it up for him, he realized that things were no better here. You can’t jump about on these sorts of paper chases, he told himself. Even if some stupendous attack of boredom threatens to overwhelm you, you cannot abandon your post and jump ahead to another file further down the line. One step at a time. The files here were in the bottom two shelves of Gill’s
desk, and lined up on a long shelf behind it. He began with the bottom drawer. It was concerned entirely with catering. Powerscourt remembered that one of the junior boys had complained about the bursar because he had sacked the previous head cook who at least provided edible food, unlike his successor who was, the boy claimed, trying to poison them all.

When he got the hang of Gill’s filing system, Powerscourt could see why the man before had been fired. Considerable sums of money had been abstracted from the funds provided for the catering and had simply disappeared. It was impossible to prove theft from the figures, but the assumption was unavoidable. The next drawer dealt with the ancillary staff, the porters, the cleaners, the ladies who made the beds, the gardeners. Powerscourt thought these people were all paid less than they would be in London. The first four files on the wall all dealt with the teaching staff, recruitment, contracts and pensions, records of their annual meetings with the headmaster. One whole file dealt with the recruitment of the present head. Reading through the way the process was handled, Powerscourt thought that the Silkworkers held the key to the appointment. Then there were six files dealing with the pupils, going back for a period of some ten years. Powerscourt read them all in case there was some earlier pupil who had left with a grudge against Roderick Gill, but he found nothing. After a break outside the main entrance, he returned to the remaining paperwork, all of which had to do with the Silkworkers. Gill had done a great deal of research, with accounts of the foundation and constitution of the livery company. He remembered that Gill was working on a report about the proposed changes to the constitution of the Silkworkers Company but he did not find it here. The last contained detailed accounts of the working of the sick bay and the appointment of matrons. He realized that he had thought he would find a letter somewhere in here. Grime, virtually
certain they were on a wild goose chase, had probably found nothing in Gill’s room either or he would have come to tell him. Damn, damn, damn, Powerscourt thought to himself, where is the bloody letter? Where has it gone? Was there a letter at all? There had to be a letter, he told himself, or else a visit to make Gill so jumpy. And of those two, a letter was much more likely. He made his way round to the headmaster’s office to see if there was a copy of Gill’s report on the possible changes to the constitution of the Silkworkers Company. There was not.

Inspector Grime, he discovered, had also found nothing. The investigation appeared to be stuck. Just before eleven o’clock, he made his way round to Mrs Lewis’s house to return the diaries. He had already copied the relevant passages into his notebook. He found her dressed from head to toe in black.

‘Good day to you, Lord Powerscourt,’ she trilled. ‘How can I be of assistance to you this morning?’

‘I’ve brought your diaries back,’ said Powerscourt. As a final throw of the dice he asked one last question, with little hope of success. ‘Did Mr Gill leave any papers here, a file or anything like that?’

She looked at him slowly. Then she turned pale. ‘My goodness, my mind must be going. I’ve completely forgotten about it. Yes, he did. Roderick said that if anything happened to him I was to give it to the headmaster. Aren’t I hopeless, forgetting all about it!’

‘Could I have a look? I could drop it down to the head’s office when I’ve seen what it says.’

Powerscourt was ushered into the chair by the fire once more. Mrs Lewis returned with a slim grey folder. Powerscourt looked through the pages. This was the long-awaited report on the Silkworkers, eight pages of closely reasoned argument, all of it hostile to the proposed changes. Hiding behind the last page was a letter, two pages long. There was no address and no date at the top.

There was no name and no signature at the bottom. A letter possibly sent by a madman who didn’t say where he was or who he was, but who promised revenge. Powerscourt was inclined to believe every word of it. He took his leave of Mrs Lewis. The file containing the report he delivered to the headmaster’s office. The letter he put in his pocket.

‘You’ll find the Records Office in that big building on the right, looking rather like a barn, sir.’ Johnny Fitzgerald had been dispatched to Brecon to inspect the records of
the 1st and 24th Regiments of Foot, part of which had been involved in the disaster at Isandlwana. Here, Powerscourt had assured him, he should find records of those who lived and those who perished in the battle. He wasn’t surprised to see the building, set apart from the main block, like an isolation ward in a fever hospital. Real military men, and Johnny knew all about them from his years in the Intelligence Corps with Powerscourt in India and South Africa, didn’t think records had anything to do with soldiering, not real soldiering. It was women’s work, but if you had to find men to do it, then you could be sure, Johnny reminded himself, that the unfit, the undesirable and the useless would be despatched to serve there, sad captains who couldn’t control their men, privates who couldn’t shoot straight or couldn’t shoot at all, corporals with drink problems.

Johnny saw a long series of shelves laden with files. He mentioned the request he had telephoned about yesterday, that he wished to inspect the records of the men who had fought at Isandlwana from the 1st and 24
^th
Regiment of Foot.

‘Never heard of the First or the Twenty-fourth Regiment of Foot,’ said the surly-looking corporal who seemed to be the keeper of the records. ‘This is the South Wales Borderers here. You’ve come to the wrong place.’

‘No, I haven’t,’ said Johnny, smiling at the repulsive little man. ‘It is you who are mistaken. The First and the Twenty-fourth, previously known as the Warwickshires, were amalgamated into the South Wales Borderers by some fool in the War Office about thirty years ago. Now, I rang up yesterday to ask somebody to look out those files for me. Has that been done?’

‘How many times do I have to tell you, we have no feet here, with or without numbers. Just Borderers.’

‘God in heaven, man,’ Johnny’s voice had turned very cold, ‘how many times do I have to tell you that they’re the same thing?’

‘What’s going on here?’ A fat old captain was advancing slowly towards them, clutching a glass of what Johnny thought looked like malt whisky. ‘Who’s shouting at my men? Who the devil are you?’

‘Fitzgerald, Captain, formerly Major Fitzgerald, over ten years in the Intelligence Corps with Lord Francis Powerscourt, India and South Africa.’

‘I see.’ The little man sounded slightly more amenable now. ‘And what is your business here, may I ask?’

‘You may indeed, Captain,’ Johnny had decided to call the man Captain as often as he could. ‘I am here on the suggestion of General Smith Dorrien, GOC Aldershot, to look at the records showing who died and who survived at the battle of Isandlwana. The general, as you know, was one of the few who lived to tell the tale. I telephoned yesterday, asking for the relevant papers to be prepared. Your colleague the corporal seems not to have understood that, Captain.’

‘Wait here, please.’ The captain drained his glass and took the corporal off into the interior of the building. Johnny thought you could go mad in one of these places, surrounded by the records of the fallen like some Egyptian priest with the Book of the Dead. He wondered how different the atmosphere would be in the Officers’ Mess. He checked that he had his pocket book with him containing all the names Powerscourt thought he might find in one list or the other. After fifteen minutes the fat captain reappeared.

‘My apologies, Mr Fitzgerald, there has been a misunderstanding here. We have the documents for you in the study area. Please come this way.’

The corporal resumed his position at the entrance. Johnny and the captain made their way down passages lined with innumerable files to a small area with a couple of tables and a fire. Johnny wondered if this was where the captain came to enjoy his solitary whiskies. He sat down.