‘I have heard that there may be changes afoot in the world of the Silkworkers,’ said Powerscourt. He had told the Inspector about the death of Abel Meredith but nobody else. Sometimes he wondered if this policy of closed boxes was the right one. ‘Have they affected you here, Headmaster?’
‘You’re damned well-informed about our livery company, Powerscourt, if I may say so. I would ask you to treat what I’m about to say in confidence. We’re not meant to talk to anybody about it.’ Powerscourt thought Davies must sound like this when talking to junior members of staff, slightly superior, slightly supercilious. ‘The changes relate to the increase in value of the endowments since they were first bequeathed. Some land near the Mansion House, for instance, would be worth infinitely more now than it was back in the fourteenth century. There’s talk about having a vote among the membership about what to do. Oddly enough, that was part of Roderick Gill’s responsibilities. He was preparing a report for me on the implications of the changes for the school and whether we should support them. It was due next week as a matter of fact.’
‘Do you know if he had written it? If it was finished and ready to go?’ Powerscourt wondered if one of Grime’s constables would have appreciated the significance of such a document, stacked away in his office with the annual reports and the quarterly financial projections.
‘I don’t, as a matter of fact. I rather suspect Roderick would have been against any change in the current arrangements. He was that sort of man. I think it’s all very clever and rather cunning myself.’
‘In what way?’
‘Well,’ said the headmaster, finally restoring his legs to ground level from the vast expanse of his desk, ‘suppose you’re the Prime Warden of the Silkworkers. You’ve got these almshouses to keep up, and these schools and the pension payments to the old boys. You’ve got this vast property portfolio all over the City of London and the richer counties of southern England. And you think there’s going to be a war. First thing to go when the guns go off will be the value of property. Your little empire will be worth far less than it was, the rents will tumble, it will be difficult to sell places. So liquidate it all now and come back to the market when the prices are depressed later on. Stash it all away for the time being in America or Canada or somewhere your bankers tell you it’s safe.’ The headmaster refilled his glass with a very small helping of whisky. ‘Clever, don’t you think? Of course you can’t say what you’re about, you can’t say why you’re really doing it. People would say you were mad or unpatriotic, or greedy or something like that. This is only my theory, you understand.’
For the second time in less than a week Powerscourt resolved to talk to his banker brother-in-law William Burke as soon as possible.
Silence fell in the headmaster’s study. Some night bird was calling urgently outside the windows. A very modern clock, there to keep the headmaster punctual, was ticking at the corner of the desk. Powerscourt could just make out the inscription: ‘To John Davies with thanks for five years of excellent work, from the headmaster and staff of Rugby School.’
‘There is one thing I should tell you about Roderick Gill.’ The headmaster gathered the ends of his gown behind him and began pacing up and down his command post. ‘I don’t suppose Peabody told you anything about the women, did he?’ he asked with the air of one who expects the answer no.
‘Not a word,’ replied Powerscourt.
The headmaster stopped by his curtains and drew them back a couple of feet. Outside it was very dark, with a few lights burning over in the masters’ quarters.
‘This isn’t easy for me,’ Davies continued. ‘The thing is, Roderick Gill was notorious for having affairs with married women. They were always over forty, for some reason. Maybe he liked them older or more experienced, who knows. Maybe the younger ones wouldn’t have him. Maybe their husbands would be less violent. He never carried on with the few wives we have here, it was always with women in the town. Roderick was a church warden and later treasurer of Saint Peter and Paul in Fakenham. It’s got a bloody great tower and they say they stored gunpowder in there during the Civil War. Anyway, Gill’s position at the church was his base camp for getting to know the women of the parish. Some of the more cynical members of the congregation used to refer to him as the Groper in the Vestry, I gather. I don’t know if he launched any assaults in the precincts of the church itself – I rather doubt it. But there it is, or rather was. It had been going on for years now.’
‘Thank you for telling me,’ said Powerscourt, as the headmaster strode back to his desk. ‘It can’t have been easy for you. And forgive me for asking, but do you know the names of any of his conquests in the last few years?’
‘I do know there was somebody on the books fairly recently. They were seen coming out of a hotel in Brandon last summer, I think it was. Mrs Mitchell, the lady was called, Hilda Mitchell. Early forties, very pretty, I was told, her husband away a lot on business. He was a mason, specializing in restoring old buildings like churches or manor houses, so he was away a lot. I don’t know if it’s still going on.’
Powerscourt suddenly wondered if he should match the headmaster’s confidence about the private life of Roderick Gill with an account of the strange marks on his chest. But he preferred not to. He didn’t think it would help. He wondered if he was right in his reticence.
‘Could I ask you a final question, Lord Powerscourt?’ The headmaster was bringing the meeting to a close. Perhaps there are a couple more meetings scheduled after I go, Powerscourt thought, head of Classics asking for two more hours a week for Latin classes, head of woodwork complaining that the boys kept stealing the screwdrivers. ‘I know it must be very difficult to know, but can you give me any idea how long it will be before you find the murderer and the case is closed down? It’s going to be rather like a siege here, you see. It will be difficult for people to concentrate on what they’re at Allison’s for, teaching and learning, with the police on the prowl and so on.’
Powerscourt was quite relieved to have been relegated to ‘and so on’.
‘I wish I could help you there, Headmaster, but I would not wish to give you false comfort. It could take a week. We could still be here by Easter. The timetables of murderers and of those who would catch them are outside your control as they are outside mine. If you can steel yourself to prepare for a long haul, that would be for the best. I’m sorry I can’t be more hopeful. You have been very frank with me and I’m most grateful.’
That night Powerscourt had a strange dream. He thought when he awoke that it might have had something to do with the globes and the maps in the geography classroom. He was standing on top of a great sand dune in the middle of a vast desert. Down below him was an enormous plain of sand, completely empty, not even a small oasis or a solitary palm tree to be seen. To his left and right the landscape was the same, sand, hills of sand, plains of sand, seas of sand, nothing but sand. He suspected he might be in Saudi Arabia or one of those Middle Eastern countries. When he looked more closely at the plain below he saw to his horror that the sand had been blown into a particular pattern. It was exactly the same as the strange patterns on the dead men’s chests, as if a giant thistle of Brobdingnagian proportions had been pressed into the sand. It seemed to go on for miles in all directions. When he looked closer, shading his eyes from the pitiless sun above, he saw a small figure marching resolutely towards the centre of the thistle. He was not dressed in white robes as you might have expected in this landscape, but in a three-piece suit and bowler hat that looked as though they might have come from a fashionable tailor in London’s Jermyn Street. As he stared down, Powerscourt realized something stranger yet. It was if the sands were shifting under the man’s feet. For march on as he might, he was making no progress towards the centre, no progress at all. The centre of the thistle remained as far away as ever. He was never going to reach it.
Shortly after eight o’clock the next morning Powerscourt met Inspector Grime outside the main entrance to the school. Over
from their left came the enormous racket of one hundred and fifty boys eating their breakfasts at the same time. In front of the buildings a severe frost had turned the playing fields almost white.
‘No more murders in the night anyway,’ said the Inspector morosely. ‘I suppose our man’s got clean away by now, damn his eyes. Hospital first for you, my lord. Ask for Dr Pike, as in fish, he’s expecting you. Then we’ve left the bursar’s quarters exactly as they were before he died for you, before we start taking things away. The headmaster wants his office papers and the ones in his room left where they are now. Count yourself lucky, my lord. I’ve got the three youngest classes to talk to this morning. One at a time, for God’s sake. Might as well listen to the birds on the marshes as this lot. All those maps and globes in that room get me down. I always hated geography when I was at school, the teacher used to steal our pencils when he thought we weren’t looking. Never mind. I’ll see you later this morning. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. God help us all.’
The boys were being released from breakfast, charging down the corridors to find their books for early lessons. A tall boy of about eighteen in a striped blazer, who Powerscourt thought must be a prefect, was shouting at them. ‘How many times do I have to tell you! Walk, don’t run in the corridor!’
The hospital was new, the paint still fresh, the walls not marked by the passage of too many trolleys. Dr Pike was a young man of about thirty who told Powerscourt cheerfully that he had no idea about the marks on the chest, that death must have been almost instantaneous, and that the murderer must have had very strong arms. Death, he said, must have happened between the hours of eight and nine thirty. To Powerscourt’s surprise he inquired about Inspector Grime.
‘How is the good Inspector these days? Is he still as miserable and morose as ever? He came here last year to investigate some nasty thefts from the dispensary and we almost kept him in he was so gloomy. Might have cheered him up, a week or so on the mental ward with people even more disturbed than he is.’
‘Since you ask,’ Powerscourt replied with a smile, ‘I’d have to report that there appears to be little change in the patient’s condition. Barometer permanently set to miserable, as far as I can see. He seems a capable officer, mind you.’
‘Oh, he is. He cleared up our burglary very quickly. Send him my regards anyway. Tell him we often think of him up here at the hospital.’
The late bursar’s rooms were on the top floor of the new building. He had a large sitting room and a tiny bedroom at the back. Powerscourt saw that one long wall was entirely covered with files. Bursar Gill, it appeared, had been a careful man. Looking closer, Powerscourt discovered that Gill had been one of those people who never threw anything away, the years marching across the wall to end in the year 1909. In this universe of files, 1910 had not yet begun. Not for him the annual cull of useless papers, sorted into the good and the useless between Christmas and the New Year. The earliest file went back to 1855 when Gill was seven years old. There were papers relating to his early schooling, even a report or two from a well-known prep school near Oxford, ‘very quiet in class’, ‘shows promise in mathematics’, ‘poor grasp of Greek grammar’. But then there was a gap in the files. From 1865 to 1880 there was nothing at all. Powerscourt wondered if these were the files that Gill had been burning in his last days, some in the college incinerator, some in his own grate. Perhaps he had simply changed his mind about filing, a young man with better and more interesting things to do with his time than pushing pieces of paper into folders. Perhaps he had spent his entire life in those years pursuing women over forty.
In the years that followed there was a file a year, sometimes two. They showed that Gill had worked for years for a firm of accountants in London before coming to Norfolk. His years at Allison’s were thoroughly covered, though Powerscourt noticed that the subject matter was always in the public sphere, details of the estimates for the new buildings put up around the turn of the century, records of the annual financial performance of the school, separate sections for his role as the treasurer at the church. But of correspondence with ladies, under or over forty, there was no trace at all. Of anything that might have made him fearful in his last days there was no sign either. Powerscourt looked closely at the bottom of the grate in case the remains of any documents were still to be found among the ash but there was nothing. He wondered if Gill had a secret hiding place somewhere in this room where compromising or frightening letters might be found. He decided to ask Inspector Grime’s men to test the room for such a place. Grime could authorize that in a murder hunt. He, Powerscourt, could not.
When he discussed it with the Inspector at break time that morning he found the policeman in unusually cheerful mood. ‘It might be nothing, it probably is,’ he said to Powerscourt, walking slowly along the front of the dormitory block, ‘but one of those young hooligans said something very interesting to me this morning. I’ve heard all sorts of rubbish. You’d think they had better things to do with their time than read the works of Sexton Blake, but no. Most of the boys had theories that were wildly improbable. But just this one lad, fourteen years old, looking exactly like the choirboy he is, gave me a very interesting snippet. It was the postman, he said. What was the postman doing there that early in the corridor where Roderick Gill’s office was? Postmen don’t usually arrive till mid-morning break. And he thought, but he wasn’t sure, that this wasn’t the usual postman. Now here, my lord, here is where he becomes a credible witness, young Ewart Jenkins. When I asked him how the postman was different, taller, shorter, fatter, that sort of thing, he said he couldn’t answer, he couldn’t be sure. If I went on making suggestions, he said, he would get confused. He was sure about what he had told me, but no more. I’m going to talk to the postal people once I’ve finished with the lower forms. One of their senior men lives a couple of doors from me.’
Shortly before lunch it began to snow. It fell quickly, settling on the roofs of the red brick buildings, obliterating the grass on the playing fields. Out in the Wild West beyond the football pitches a junior gardener reported that the lake was frozen. If the weather went on like this for a day or two, he said, the ice might be firm enough for skating. With the snow came a bitter wind that blew the snow into drifts up against the school windows and rendered the headmaster’s car virtually invisible just outside the front door. One of the younger science teachers brought out a series of sticks he had used in years gone by. He got the boys to place them in different places around the school and to write down in their notebooks the height of the snow on all the days it remained. The teacher believed this would teach his pupils the value of experiments and the proper collection of data.
The weather put the headmaster in a remarkably good mood. He observed with glee to his deputy, a very boring man who had been teaching the same history syllabus for over thirty years – at this point in the school year, towards the end of January, it was time to kill Cromwell off for the senior forms and move on to the Restoration – that at least those wretched mothers would not be turning out to complain in the same numbers. He so hoped, he said, with a singular lack of Christian charity, that they would be bloody well snowed in for days, if not weeks.
In the lunch break smaller boys began construction of a vast snowman which Powerscourt thought was going to be on the same scale as the Statue of Liberty on Ellis Island in New York. Elder boys organized snowball fights. The prefects in their striped blazers tried to look superior, gazing with lofty indifference on the activities of their younger brothers and schoolfellows as if they, the prefects, had put away these childish things years before.
Powerscourt wondered if the snow made the business of detection easier or more difficult and decided it made no difference at all. That afternoon, while the Inspector departed to talk to the Royal Mail, he proposed to call on the late Roderick Gill’s mistress. The Inspector was delighted Powerscourt had taken on this particular assignment.
‘Fact is, my lord,’ he said, neatly dodging
a long-distance snowball sent his way by the finest fielder in the First Eleven, ‘I think you’ll do that much better than I would. I’m actually not sure I could bring myself to start asking questions about her affair with Gill, if that’s the right way to put it. I’d be too embarrassed.’
‘I’m afraid I’ve had these kinds of conversations before,’ said Powerscourt. ‘They’re not too bad as long as you keep the whole thing as matter-of-fact as possible. Don’t even think of mentioning the word love. It would only set them off.’
‘Good God! How absolutely frightful for you. I’ll be much happier with the postmen.’
Twenty minutes later Powerscourt was walking up the Cromer Road to Mrs Mitchell’s house just beyond the postbox. The snow was still falling, the countryside almost obliterated by its thick white coat. The house was a two-storey cottage with a thatched roof and ancient windows. Mrs Mitchell, when she answered the door, was not ancient at all. Powerscourt thought she looked much younger than the forty years assigned to her by the headmaster. She was blonde with soft blue eyes, her figure almost totally concealed behind a large blue apron dotted with bunny rabbits.
‘Please forgive me,’ she said, pointing to her apron, when Powerscourt had made his introductions. ‘I was just making a cake for the children’s tea. They’ll be so excited about the snow.’
Death at the Jesus Hospital Page 5
