Death at the Jesus Hospital

by David Dickinson

  ‘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, Franci
s?’ 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.

  ‘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.

  The newspapers, as you well know, Sir Henry, have not yet heard of the disfigurements to the dead bodies. Coverage in the Press has been muted so far. I would, however, be failing in my duty if I did not draw your attention to the possibility, nay, in my opinion, the near certainty, that this intelligence will leak out into the public domain and will do so very soon. In my judgement there are a number of developments likely to follow from such a revelation.

  One, there will be a massive hue and cry and general frenzy in the newspapers of every stripe. Nothing succeeds in terms of raising circulation and increasing advertising rates like scandal and sensation. Three dead bodies with stigmata of an unusual kind rate high in the ledgers of scandal and sensation. We are having a fairly quiet time at present in terms of major political developments. The public have grown tired of the rows between the Commons and the Lords. They are even more tired of the depressing number of strikes and
the growing popularity of industrial action. They may even – would that it were so – be growing tired of rumours of foreign wars. There is, as you well know, Minister, nothing the newspapers like more than real murder mysteries. All the present one lacks is a female element, some suspicion of adultery or foreign adventuresses. If no such facts come to light, we may be sure that the newspapers will invent them.

  Two, in the light of the eventualities referred to in the previous section, I should draw your attention to the likely reaction in the House of Commons. The only thing – and I know you share this view – worse than the baying of the newspaper columns is the hypocrisy and self-advertisement of various backbenchers who will attempt to get their names in the Press by asking ridiculous questions. Why is the Government not doing more to catch the culprits? How is it that the Home Secretary allowed this foreign criminal – in the minds of many, if not most newspapers, all murders are committed by foreigners – into our country and slaughter our fellow citizens?

  Three, if the news emerges, as per section one, above, the most damaging charge that can be levelled at the Government is the accusation of waste and duplication. Why do we have three separate police forces investigating the murders, which are so clearly linked and the work of a foreign gang? Why should we, as taxpayers and ratepayers, have to bear the expenses of three senior detectives and their teams when one would do? Why does the Government not take control of the matter and put the investigation into the hands of one of the Metropolitan Police’s most senior officers who will, by definition, have more experience of murder inquiries than the inexperienced of Marlow and the novices of Norfolk?