‘Did our phantom postman actually deliver any letters anywhere?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘Or was he just dressed in the uniform so people assumed he was a postman? I’ve always thought uniforms make people almost invisible. People notice the uniform rather the person inside it.’
‘Well, sir,’ said the real postman, ‘there’s a thing and no mistake. I checked in the headmaster’s office as they were locking up on my way here. Their mail arrived with me, not with the other bloke. I don’t think he can have delivered a thing.’
‘How would he have known where the bursar’s office was?’ Inspector Grime was writing busily in his notebook.
‘Well, sir, or sirs, that’s your department, not mine, I reckon. Maybe he was a part-time member of staff. Maybe he had worked here in the past and had a grudge against the bursar. Some grudge, mind you. Maybe he just rang them up and said he had a parcel to deliver and exactly where was the bursar’s office.’
‘You’d have made a good policeman, Mr Cameron,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I suppose we’ll have to interview everybody all over again to see if anybody else remembers noticing something. Those are all very intelligent questions, my friend. You’d have been a credit to the force.’
‘I was a policeman once, sir. It was some time ago now, mind you.’
‘What happened?’ said Grime, laying his pencil aside for a moment. ‘Did the force not agree with you?’
‘I think it was more that I didn’t agree with the force, sir. I had a truly terrible sergeant, you see. He was so horrible to his constables that two of us knocked him down, right in front of Kensington Town Hall. He was out cold, but I was out of the police.’
‘Do you miss it, police work?’ asked Powerscourt.
‘No, I don’t, sir. I don’t miss it at all. I felt sorry for the criminals most of the time. If I’d been as poor as some of them, I’d have gone round burgling rich people’s houses in Chelsea or Mayfair. Those people could afford to lose a thing or two. The poor bugger burglar, forgive my language, gentlemen, didn’t have enough money to feed his family most of the time.’
Inspector Grime had not smiled at all during the story of the sergeant felled in front of Kensington Town Hall. He looked as though he disapproved strongly of such behaviour.
‘Quite,’ he said, ‘quite. Now is there anything more you have to tell us? We mustn’t keep you from home too long.’
‘Don’t you worry about me, sir. Wife’s gone to her mother’s, thank God. Miserable cow.’ Powerscourt wondered which one the epithet belonged to, but thought it better not to ask. ‘I’m meeting a few friends at the Green Dragon the other side of Fakenham. But there is one thing, sir. I asked down the office if anybody had lost a uniform or had one stolen. Nobody has. So wherever our imposter got his kit from, it wasn’t from our place.’
‘We’ve kept you long enough,’ said Inspector Grime, frowning slightly. ‘Thank you so much for your information, it’s been most helpful.’
‘Bright chap, our postman,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Maybe he should have stayed in the police force after all.’
‘Didn’t care for the fellow very much myself,’ said Inspector Grime. ‘Bloody man might have knocked me down too.’
Joseph the manciple was making his final tour of the tables laid out for ‘The Silkworkers’ dinner that evening. A wine glass was out of position. A fish fork was aligned five per cent out of true. A salt cellar was too far away from its partner the pepper pot. These minutiae were meat and drink to Joseph who had been in charge of catering at Silkworkers Hall for over twenty years. He came originally from Ephesus but nobody could pronounce his surname. Simple Joseph he became and he was now as widely known in the City as the Prime Warden himself. He had taken one very important decision in his early years. He had watched as other, less scrupulous manciples in other livery companies helped themselves to their employers’ funds and their employers’ food and their employers’ drink. Most of these organizations, as Joseph well knew, were heavily stocked with accountants and bankers among their membership, well able to sniff out corruption at a couple of hundred paces. So Joseph confined himself to very small, some might have called them minute, helpings. By now he was a rich man, probably richer than some of the members. He asked prominent people for investment tips on a regular basis. This regular flow of inside information, he would tell anybody who queried his house and his lifestyle, was the basis of his fortune.
Joseph made a final check on the menus with their sketch of a chorus line from the Folies Bergère on the front page. Nine courses were displayed on the two inside pages, and the Silkworkers’ emblem, an enormous bale of bright red silk, festooned with pictures of the sailing ships and dhows and junks and steamships that brought the material to London’s docks from the East. A previous Prime Warden in the fifteenth century had once worked in the trade in Venice and a pretty gondola with a red-shirted gondolier plied his craft along the bottom of the emblem as if he was making his way down the Grand Canal itself, past the gothic palazzos towards the basin of St Mark.
Joseph had borrowed a young French chef from the Savoy for the evening, and the smells of his cooking were already creeping out from the kitchens. Twenty-four members of the honourable company, twelve at the top table and six each at the two sides, were to take their places for the evening banquet. There were a dozen Santenay sous la Roche to accompany the fish course and six bottles of Chateau d’Yquem from the company cellars to adorn the sweet. With duck at the heart of the meal, two dozen of the finest Haut Brion had been presented for the feast as a thank you to his fellow silkmen from a newly elected member who had made a killing in Latin American railway shares.
Sir Peregrine Fishborne, Prime Warden of the Company, was the first to arrive. He liked to look at the freshly laid table with its crisp white linen and the tall candles and the priceless cutlery from the early eighteenth century. He liked looking at his distinguished predecessors who lined the walls. He liked thanking God that he had arrived at his present station with a lot more money than he had had when he started out as a clerk in an insurance office. He liked savouring in his mind the plan that he hoped would make him richer yet. Most of all, and this evening was no exception, he liked going down to the lower floor with a glass of white wine and standing by the great pillars, staring out at the dark waters of the Thames swirling and gurgling on its way to the sea, ready to ferry yet more wealth to the capital. If Sir Peregrine had been Italian in earlier times, his supporters club liked to say, he wouldn’t have been a merchant in bloody Venice, he’d have been the Doge himself, sailing out once a year to wed the sea with a ring in his golden barge. His companion on this occasion was his predecessor as Prime Warden, Sir Rufus Walcott, a former Lord Mayor of London, elected with Silkworker support, now Lord Lieutenant of Norfolk and a man who collected directorships as other people might collect Wedgwood china or old paintings.
When the pair returned, the members had all arrived. There was a lot of gossip about the Stock Exchange. A man in metals had been hammered that morning, unable to pay his debts. There had been a great deal of activity in North American stocks. The first course was carried in and Sir Peregrine said the customary grace in Latin. Sir Peregrine liked people to think he was virtually fluent in Latin.
Benedic nobis, Domine, et omnibus tuis donis, quae ex larga liberalitate tua sumpturi sumus, per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum. Deus est caritas. Qui manet in caritate manet in Deo et Deus in illo. Sit Deus in nobis, et nos maneamus in illo. Bless us, O Lord, and all your gifts, which through your great generosity we are about to receive, through Jesus Christ our Lord. God is love. He who abides in love abides in God and God in him. May God be in us and may we dwell in him.
They started with Beluga caviar and native and rock oysters, always a favourite in the City, followed by Pot au feu Henry IV – the shoulder, shank, rib and tail of beef braised all day and served in their broth with a blob of Béarnaise.
Joseph had wondered for a long time about whether he should serve a red
wine with the Pot au feu but thought that too rapid a change from white to red and back to white at this early stage of the evening might bring inebriation on even earlier than usual. Some of the senior members had waistlines virtually the same size as the King’s, and carrying them out of the building late in the evening to their cabs outside was a difficult process.
One of the new waiters stumbled and almost fell before recovering himself as he carried in the next course on its enormous silver salver, sole cardinale and whitebait, which was meant to be a choice of dishes but the younger members helped themselves cheerfully to both. Three courses down, only six to go, Joseph said to himself, as he supervised proceedings unobtrusively by the door into the kitchens. Sir Peregrine was boring his neighbours with a long lecture on the early history of the company. This was a regular feature of these occasions. Some men maintained that these great feasts were only held to give Sir Peregrine a captive audience for the longest possible time. He had reached the end of the fourteenth century when the next course arrived, chicken d’Albufera, in which the roasted bird is served in a sauce of boiled cream, triply reduced, with mushrooms and black truffles and quenelles of veal tongue and chicken.
A spirited debate had started at the end of the main table about the likely winners of the Eton and Harrow cricket match that year. Two of the members had children at the schools, who were likely to play for their respective elevens, and each man was claiming that his son’s team would be easy winners. A wager of twenty pounds was placed on the result. Joseph and his waiters were now bringing the bottles of Haut Brion to the table. There was a toast to the man who had provided it. Sir Rufus was holding forth to anyone who would listen about the size and beauty of the wool churches in Norfolk. Saddle of lamb with spring vegetables and parsley potatoes was one of the chef’s more conventional offerings that evening. Ordinary families in ordinary homes in ordinary parts of the capital might, just might, have been having the same thing. They would not, however, have been enjoying the course that followed, the chef’s signature dish.
Pressed Rouen ducklings, in which six birds, killed specially for the occasion in France, were roasted and their bones and organs crushed in a solid silver duck press, the resultant juice then reduced at the boil in a silver dish to produce a sauce for the meat, which the waiters irreverently called ‘bloody duck’s blood’. Sir Peregrine, his face growing redder as the room grew warmer, had reached the early stages of the Silkworkers in the Civil War. One of his victims wondered if he could feign a heart attack in order to escape. Sir Rufus, who had heard the history of the Silkworkers many times before, moved on from the churches to the beauty of the Broads.
The food grew quieter after the duck. Joseph could see the end in sight now. Sir Peregrine’s neighbours could not. Asparagus hollandaise, murderous for those afflicted by gout, who were well represented here, was followed by peach melba served in a hand-carved ice swan as big as a ten-year-old child. Canapés à la Diane, last but by no means least among the chef’s masterpieces, brought up the rear.
Joseph wondered, not for the first time, how their constitutions and their figures could stand it; then he remembered that in the summer many of these people went as a matter of course to Homburg or Marienbad to get rid of the accumulated excess, and then returned to start on another year’s course of rich living. Really, he thought, there was very little difference between Marienbad and the vomitorium of the Romans.
Sir Peregrine rose rather unsteadily to his feet and proposed the loyal toast. A selection of cigars was brought round the table. Men pushed their chairs back and stretched out their legs. It was just after half past ten. Joseph brought some more bottles of the Haut Brion to the table. It seemed to be more popular than the Chateau d’Yquem. Sir Peregrine had just sailed past the Glorious Revolution and was carrying the history of the Silkworkers into the reigns of the Georges. An argument had developed at the bottom of one of the side tables about whether there should be another election that year over the veto powers of the House of Lords.
The bells of the City churches rang for eleven. The more domesticated of the Silkworkers collected their coats and hats and headed for home, keen to return to their families while they were still in control of their faculties. By twelve only the two knights were left, still replenishing their glasses with Haut Brion. At one Sir Rufus decided on a farewell visit to the river one floor below. He declared that it was so peaceful that he wanted to spend a little time down there alone with his thoughts. Sir Peregrine, with over two hundred years of Silkworker history still to go, staggered off into the night.
Sir Rufus’s corpse, stabbed through the heart with the familiar stigmata on his chest, was found there early the next morning.
Inspector Grime brought Powerscourt news of the latest death over bacon and eggs the following morning. Police messages were despatched earlier than ones from the Silkworkers Hall after a feast. Powerscourt told the Inspector that he would have to return to London for this, the third body inside a very short time. This latest victim, Grime eyed his telegram suspiciously, was a rather grander personage than the first two, Sir Rufus Walcott, Lord Lieutenant of Norfolk, a prominent figure in the boards and directorships of the City of London and the predecessor of Sir Peregrine as Prime Warden of the Silkworkers Company. The cleaners, tidying up after the dinner the night before, had found Sir Rufus, a great stab wound in his chest, with the familiar marks of the thistle on his chest, at the top of the steps leading down to the water as if he was waiting for a boat to take him home. There was no sign of the murder weapon. Twenty-four people had attended the dinner the night before. Those that had been contacted so far recalled nothing unusual about the feast, apart from the rueful admission from two of the guests that they, and Sir Rufus, had partaken rather too freely of the Haut Brion during and after the food. And that, my lord, said Grime, folding away his telegram, is all I can tell you for the present.
That afternoon Powerscourt introduced himself to his third Inspector on the case. Miles Devereux was in his early thirties with a languid air and the remains of one of those cherubic faces that convinced people he must have been a choirboy in his youth. It was, he told Powerscourt sadly, his second murder of the year, with only a month gone. He took Powerscourt round the Silkworkers Hall and the place where the body had been found.
‘We think the killer probably came by boat,’ he said. ‘So many bloody boats go up and down this river, nobody would have taken any notice if another one went by with a murderer at the oars.’
‘How would they have known he would be here at that time of day?’ said Powerscourt. ‘In the other two cases with the strange marks, Inspector, the killer would have known where to find his victim. The man in the almshouse would have been in his place, the bursar at Allison’s School would have been in his office. How did they know this old boy was going to be here at one o’clock in the morning?’
‘Perhaps they sent him a message,’ said the Inspector thoughtfully.
‘Meet me by the water at one in the morning,’ suggested Powerscourt. ‘You’ll know who I am because I’ll have a large knife in my hand, waiting to stab you through the heart.’
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, sorti
ng 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.’
Death at the Jesus Hospital Page 7
