‘So Roderick Gill was the leading man in the hostile party?’
‘He certainly was. He thought it most imprudent, an attempt by the authorities in the livery company to enrich themselves at the expense of future generations. Pure greed, he called it.’
‘I see,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Were there a lot of votes here in the school?’
‘Twelve. Myself and my deputy, the bursar and the other nine votes were spread out among the senior members of staff. Allison’s has always had a dozen votes, it goes back for years and years.’
‘Did they all oppose the plan?’
‘I’m terribly sorry, Powerscourt, I feel my obligations to the Silkworkers don’t allow me to answer that. I was in breach of covenant when we had our earlier discussion. I would prefer not to do that again.’
‘Do you know if Sir Peregrine and his friends were aware of some opposition here? Was there any attempt to change your minds?’
‘It’s curious you should ask that,’ said the headmaster, gathering his gown behind his back and strolling over to the window. ‘We were still waiting for Roderick’s final report on the affair. But I know he wrote to Sir Peregrine as a matter of politeness to let him know his views. The school, after all, is an important part of the role and responsibilities of the livery company. Gill told him, as I understand it, that he did not see how the Silkworkers’ duties to the school could be fulfilled if its assets were all sold off and distributed among the members. I think he actually asked if Sir Peregrine proposed to sell the school off as if it were a house on Lombard Street. But he was polite. He invited the Prime Warden to come and talk to us whenever he felt able to. He said it might help clear the air.’
‘How long ago was this, Headmaster?’
‘Five days ago. It was the first day of the snow. I met Gill on his way into town to post the letter in person, slipping and falling over as he went.’
Mrs Hamilton’s first class that day was with the Lower Sixth. She told the boys she was a temporary replacement for their normal French oral teacher who had a bad attack of influenza. She expected to be with them for a week, maybe more. Then she took the register in French and made a note by each name to remind herself who they were. Fettiplace Jones, red hair. Johnston, prominent nose. Jackson, curly brown hair. Kingham, very tall. She announced that she was going to speak French to them all the time. And she proposed that they should read together, each boy taking it in turns to read a page. She had brought the book with her and said they were going to start with ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, the opening story in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, translated into French the year before. Mrs Hamilton had tracked it down to a small bookshop in Bloomsbury specializing in French literature and translations the day before.
Ellis opened the bowling. ‘Pour Sherlock Holmes,’ he said examining every word very carefully as if it were a bomb and might go off at any moment, ‘elle est toujours La Femme.’ He staggered on to the end of the page and passed the book to his neighbour. As with most Englishmen, Mrs Hamilton reckoned, they probably understood about three quarters of it and could guess the rest, but she doubted if they could book themselves a hotel room in Brittany, let alone order supper.
Jackson was adequate, Smythe quite fluent if rather slow, which he was. David Lewis, the mimic, had a perfect accent and impeccable diction. His passage told how Dr Watson, returning home from a case via Baker Street, sees Holmes at the window of 221b and goes up to speak to him. Lewis told her, in almost perfect French, that he had been twice to France on holidays and had picked up his accent listening to the French middle-class discussing the food in hotel dining rooms.
The story moved on through the lesson with the King of Bohemia revealing his true identity and the mysterious Irene Adler making her presence felt. But it was not the woman in the story who fascinated the boys, it was the woman teaching them, here in their own classroom. Women at Allison’s made the beds, they cleaned the floors, they prepared most of the food and looked after the washing. What they had never done until this moment was teach, and look glamorous at the same time. Mrs Hamilton had wondered beforehand if she would remind most of them of their mothers. They were so starved of female company and so full of teenage energy that they saw her in quite a different light.
For Lady Lucy, of course, masquerading here in her earlier name of Hamilton, the object of the detective story was quite simple. After a couple of days, maybe even before the end of ‘Une Scandale en Bohème’, she could turn the conversation to murders generally. Had any of the boys been unfortunate enough to come across a murder? What, they had only recently had one right here in the school? Vraiment? Mon Dieu! Quel horreur! Maybe they would tell her something then, something they had not told the police or their teachers.
‘Alors, le papier ici,’ West Minor at the end was not one of the fluent ones, ‘est fabrique en Bohème! Et le monsieur qui a ecrit le petit mot, il est Allemand …’
Mrs Hamilton was quite pleased by her first lesson. David Lewis, the finest mimic in the school, couldn’t take his eyes off her. After school, he decided, his imagination working overtime, he would follow her home and find out where she lived.
Inspector Miles Devereux thought he would have liked to go to university. His two eldest brothers had managed it before the money ran out, one to the sedate quarters of Selwyn College, Cambridge, the other to more romantic pastures, Worcester College, Oxford, with its lake and its fifteenth-century monks’ cottages. As he made his way up Gower Street towards University College he wondered what it would be like to be a student right in the heart of London. William Burke had sent him the name of a Professor Wilson Claypole, an expert in the period around the Black Death, who had been one of the academics vouching for the authenticity of the Silkworkers codicil.
The Inspector expected some aged figure, dry as dust and dull as ditchwater, who would soon lose him in the intricacies of fourteenth-century script and idiosyncrasies of expression. Claypole, in fact, turned out to be only a few years older than he was. He wore a very smart suit and a Garrick Club tie. With his polished boots and expensive haircut he looked more like a society solicitor or a successful barrister than an academic.
‘Come in, come in,’ he said and waved Devereux to a chair. ‘Welcome to University College. We don’t have the ivy climbing up the walls and the ancient port maturing in the college cellars like they do at Oxford and Cambridge, but we like to think we’re more modern here, more in tune with the latest thinking and the latest scholarship. Now then, I haven’t got much time. I’ve got to be at the House of Lords in forty-five minutes. That codicil you’ve come to talk to me about, I perfectly understand why you’ve come. You can’t take somebody else’s word for it being genuine, you’ve got to come to the horse’s mouth. Which in this case, as it happens, is me! I am the horse!’ Professor Claypole snorted heartily at his quip.
‘I’m not an academic like yourself,’ said Devereux.
‘No indeed,’ said Claypole and laughed again.
‘But I would like to know how you’re sure it’s the real thing.’
‘Good question, Inspector. Let me try an example from your own field. When you charge a man with murder, are you always one hundred per cent sure he did it? Would you still arrest him if you were eighty-five per cent sure? Seventy-five per cent sure? You don’t have to reply to that question, by the way, I’m not sure I’d really like to know the answer. But with the codicil, of course, you can’t be absolutely certain either. Not with a thing that old. It’s not possible. There’s a man called Galt at St Andrews up there by the sea in Scotland who’s done a lot of work on fourteenth-century documents and their use of language. He’s certain it’s real. The thought behind the codicil, that emergency measures may be needed in the aftermath of the Black Death, that’s absolutely typical of the time. I’ve always thought it is impossible to overestimate the influence of the Black Death, your friends and family decimated, divine punishment arriving for your sins, never sure if you’re not going to w
ake up with nausea, vomiting, lumps all over your body. That, for me, was the most convincing aspect of the thing, the fact that the author, who was probably a lawyer of some sort, was so frightened by what had happened, so unsure of what the future might hold, that he thought his livery company should be prepared, should be ready to take whatever steps might be needed in the face of a second catastrophe, of God abandoning his people to their fate all over again, the last days coming to Threadneedle Street and London Wall. If you believed in God, and as far as we know most of them did, the Black Death must have seemed the Great Betrayal.’
‘Am I right in saying that the main opposition to your view comes from our friend in Cambridge?’ Devereux had heard about academics being rude about each other. This was the first time he had seen or heard it at close quarters.
‘Well, you could say our friend in Cambridge is the only opposition. I suspect he hasn’t even read Galt’s work, for a start. They’re quite restricted in their attitude to scholarship up there in the Fens. If it wasn’t invented in Cambridge, it doesn’t really exist. Tait’s main argument concerns who might benefit from it. That doesn’t carry as clear a message for me as the textual analysis of the wording. I think the benefit question is more or less irrelevant. Man’s barking up the wrong tree.’
Inspector Devereux had one last card to play. He wasn’t hopeful about it. ‘Tell me, Professor, and remember you are speaking to an ignorant outsider here, what are the financial arrangements in matters like this? Do you get paid for the consultations and so on?’
Claypole laughed again. ‘Of course we do, Inspector, of course we do. I never thought I’d be advising a rising police Inspector about the ways of the world but here we are!’
‘How much?’ said Devereux, and there was something about his tone that made the professor wonder if he had underestimated the man from Scotland Yard.
‘Well, we fixed the fee up beforehand, before I’d done any work.’
‘How much?’ said Devereux, suspecting suddenly that there might be a gold seam lurking here.
‘Five hundred guineas for me, if you must know. I charge rather like a Harley Street doctor. And one thousand guineas for the College Development Fund. That’ll be most useful. And I’d be most grateful if you wouldn’t bandy those figures about, Inspector. I’ve got my reputation to think of.’
‘Of course,’ said Devereux. ‘I’m most grateful for your time and I wouldn’t want to keep you from your appointment at the House of Lords. I’m afraid we policemen do not have the resources to pay for information. A very good day to you, sir.’
As he made his way back to his office, Inspector Miles Devereux wondered what a good barrister would make of the figures. Who benefits indeed, he said to himself. He resolved to send a telegram as soon as he reached his office. He felt Powerscourt would be very interested in the five hundred guineas.
The sun was shining in Cambridge as Powerscourt made his way to Trinity College and the rooms of Selwyn Augustus Tait. Sunshine in February was not what he remembered from his time here, usually cold, damp, strands of fog swirling round you as you made your way up King’s Parade. Tait had rooms next to the chapel in Trinity Great Court, the largest quadrangle in either Oxford or Cambridge.
‘Damn it, man, no point being indoors in the sunshine at this time of year. Let’s go for a walk. We can talk as we go and have some coffee on the way.’
Tait led the way past the Master’s Lodge, which Powerscourt even in his undergraduate days had thought was far too imposing to be called a mere lodge, as if it were a hunting or shooting outpost, past the Hall into New Court and over the Garret Hostel Lane Bridge. He was wearing a three-piece suit with a cream shirt but he was not one of those men who fit comfortably into their clothes. Selwyn Augustus Tait was not a virtual scarecrow like the Allison’s teacher Peabody, but he gave the impression that none of his clothes fitted him properly.
‘Bloody codicil,’ said Tait. ‘Sorry you’ve had to flog all the way out here for me to tell you it’s a fake. Well, it is. There are many strange things about academics, odd dress, eccentric mannerisms, terrible shoes. Historians are probably the worst. What you have to remember about medieval historians, Powerscourt, is that there are precious few documents, hardly any original pieces of evidence. It’s not as bad as ancient history, mind you. If you set your mind to it, you could probably read all the original sources for most of classical Greek history in less than a fortnight.’
Powerscourt smiled. He had been reading history here all those years ago, enveloped in the embrace of the colleges and the beauty of the river where they were now facing the Back Lawn of King’s where the famous chapel was flanked by the classical elegance of the Gibbs Building.
‘So what happens to all these medieval historians when a new piece of evidence, or what seems to be a new piece of evidence, turns up?’ Tait was rubbing his hands together as he walked. ‘They go wild with excitement. Judgement goes out of the window. There are just two questions you have to ask yourself. One, is there anything else like it in the surviving stuff we do have? These livery companies were a form of self-defence in a way, but they will all have known what the others were doing. If one company was incorporating a get-out clause from their constitution, then the likelihood is that some of the others would too. But nobody did. I’m not saying that’s conclusive, mind you, but it’s significant.’
Tait stopped to look at the herd of cows who lived in these fields on the far side of the river from the colleges.
‘Just like the cows,’ he said with a laugh, ‘medieval historians, chewing a cud that’s six hundred years old all day. The other thing is much more important. Who benefits? The Prime Warden benefits. All his chums in the inner council or whatever it’s called, benefit. The ordinary members are thrown a few scraps. It’s a fraud, quite a clever fraud, but a fraud nonetheless.’
‘Who do you think did it, the fraud, I mean?’
They had now reached the café in the Silver Street basin, lined with bedraggled punts waiting for the summer, and were taking coffee at a corner table looking out over the water.
‘Hard to tell,’ Tait replied. ‘Not too difficult to find some academic who’d cook the whole thing up for money. Maybe they found somebody in Europe nobody here has ever heard of. I’m sure some of the dons back in Trinity haven’t left the college in years. Nobody might have heard of the fellow.’
A totally new thought suddenly struck Powerscourt. ‘Can I ask you another question, Professor? I’ve only just thought of it and it may be complete nonsense.’
‘Of course,’ said Tait, ‘fire ahead.’
‘One thing that’s always puzzled me is why the bar is set so high, if you like. Why did eighty per cent of the Silkworkers have to approve of the changes before they could be carried out? Why not fifty per cent or even sixty?’
‘Good point,’ said Tait. ‘Those livery companies were always keen to carry the membership along with them, unanimity in face of the foe, that sort of thing.’
‘But surely,’ said Powerscourt, ‘the eighty per cent is still very high. Let’s just try standing the whole thing on its head, if I may. Suppose it is genuine. And suppose that the point of the codicil is not to enable the authorities to sell everything off and make loads of money, but the opposite. The bar is set so high to make the thing virtually impossible. Nobody would ever get eighty per cent of the votes. The codicil, on this theory, becomes not the means of enriching the Prime Warden and his friends, but the opposite. It’s designed to make it impossible. The assets will remain locked together. Nobody will ever get a large enough majority to steal them.’
Tait paused and inspected the ducks circling round the punts in the Silver Street basin. Powerscourt thought he could almost see Tait’s brain working, little grey cells marching at top speed across his cranium, cerebral lights flashing at each other like the dials on the bridge of a ship.
‘My God, that’s smart, Powerscourt. Very smart. Wish I’d thought of it myself. But your the
ory, elegant though it is, depends on the codicil being genuine. I still believe it to be fake. I’ll think about it, mind you, and let you know if I change my mind.’
‘One last thing,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Can I ask you about money?’
‘Do you mean, did the Silkworkers offer me a fee for my opinion? Well, yes, they did. But I didn’t take it. It didn’t seem right when I was saying the whole thing was rubbish.’
‘Might I ask how much they were offering?’
‘You may indeed. They were offering twenty guineas which was quite generous for such a job. Why are you so interested in the money side of things if I may ask?’
‘Of course you may. Did you know that a man called Claypole, Wilson Claypole, also gave advice on the codicil?’
‘That man from University College? How much was he paid?’
‘He was paid,’ Powerscourt paused for a moment for effect, ‘the princely sum of five hundred guineas with a thousand going to the College Development Fund.’
Selwyn Augustus Tait laughed. ‘That’s it, Powerscourt. You need look no further. You’ve found your forger. Why, for five hundred guineas I might have forged the bloody thing myself!’
Inspector Albert Fletcher would have had little time for theorizing academics in London or Cambridge or anywhere else. In his hand he had what he believed was the most important piece of evidence discovered so far in this case. His house-to-house search of the wider environs of Marlow had produced one piece of real value, discovered by Constable Jack Perkins. Initially, an informant who lived close to the Elysian Fields Hotel reported a very large black car going down the road to the hotel late in the evening before the murder. Further investigations with the night porter revealed to Perkins that the car and its occupants were regular visitors. Sir Peregrine Fishbone had been in the hotel that evening. He had a meeting with a person or persons unknown. His chauffeur had been waiting in the car.
Death at the Jesus Hospital Page 14
