‘Monk,’ he said to the Warden when he had regained his office, ‘what the hell is going on here? What’s this crisis you mentioned on the phone? Damn inconvenient having to trundle out into the back of beyond for some mess in this bloody hospital!’
‘There’s been a murder, sir,’ said Monk, standing to attention as he always did when talking to the Prime Warden.
‘Murder? Here? In Buckinghamshire? In the Jesus Hospital? Don’t be ridiculous.’ He turned to stare at the policeman. ‘And who the hell are you?’ he said, eyeing Inspector Fletcher as if he had just delivered the week’s coal.
‘Ah, hm, ah, I am the policeman assigned to the case.’ He paused as if he might have temporarily forgotten his name. ‘Albert Fletcher, hm, Inspector Albert Fletcher, at your service, sir.’
Sir Peregrine threw him another of his turn-a-man-to-stone-at-fifty-paces looks. ‘And what can you tell us about the dead man?’
There was another pause while the Inspector searched in his pockets for the vital notebook.
‘Well,’ he began, inspecting his handwriting carefully, ‘the dead man was called Meredith, Abel Meredith. Ah, hm, he died of a knife wound to the area between the pharynx and the larynx.’
‘Somebody cut his throat, you mean,’ snarled Sir Peregrine. ‘We’re in a bloody almshouse here, not a medical school, for Christ’s sake. What age was this unfortunate Meredith?’
‘Hm, ah,’ said the Inspector, ‘over sixty at least or he wouldn’t be here. Do you know how old he was, Warden?’
The Warden intervened immediately in case there was another salvo from Sir Peregrine.
‘Sixty-four, sir, that’s how old he was. Last birthday six weeks ago. He paid for a very fine drinking session in the back room of the Rose and Crown, Abel Meredith, I’ll give him that. One of the very few occasions he was known to pay for a round.’
‘I see,’ said Sir Peregrine in his most glacial voice. ‘Tell us if you would, Inspector, if you have identified any of the dead man’s enemies, maybe even arrested them. He’s been dead for some time, after all.’
Inspector Fletcher looked at Sir Peregrine more in sorrow than in anger. There was another of those pauses. ‘The old men aren’t making much sense at the moment, Sir Peregrine,’ he said at last. ‘It’s impossible to say at this stage if he had any enemies or who they might be.’
‘Course the man had enemies, you fool, he’s dead, isn’t he? One of his enemies must have killed him. I’d have thought even one of the swans on the bloody river could have worked that out by now. Christ Almighty!’
Inspector Fletcher was saved further thrusts from Sir Peregrine by the reappearance of Dr Ragg. Even before he was introduced, the doctor took a violent dislike to Sir Peregrine. There were many of his sort living in and around Marlow, often in sub-Palladian villas by the Thames. The doctor thought them arrogant, self-satisfied and smug, with little regard for their fellow men. He had even changed his golf club to escape their pomposity and their braying self-regard.
‘I’ll give you my report, gentlemen,’ Dr Ragg began, ‘and then I must be off on my rounds. In my judgement Abel Meredith was killed by a sharp knife being forced across his throat sometime between four and six o’clock this morning. The knife may have had an irregular and uneven blade like the kris knife often brought home by travellers and military men from Ceylon and the Malay Peninsula. Death will have been instantaneous. I fear he was probably awake at the time of the incident. That is all.’
‘Surely you must know something more than that, Doctor?’ Sir Peregrine felt he, too, would be in need of medical attention soon if the natives continued to infuriate him. ‘You’ve been poking about in the corpse’s innards for some time now, haven’t you? You must have found something out.’
‘Are you experienced in the examination of dead bodies, Sir Peregrine? I rather doubt it. We doctors are not obliged to reveal the secrets of our patients’ medical history, even the dead ones. So why don’t you write the insurance policies and I’ll write the medical reports.’
With that Dr Ragg closed his bag and headed off towards the nervous headaches and the insomnia of his morning rounds. He had not told the people in the Jesus Hospital anything about the strange mark on the dead man’s chest. It was such an unusual piece of information that gossip would start circulating along the river and through the City of London. Soon Abel Meredith would have been found dead with the imprint of fifty pineapples all over his body. He would tell Inspector Fletcher, of course, but only in the privacy of the police station. Dr Ragg had no idea what had caused the strange mark and even less idea what it might mean.
Sir Peregrine, meanwhile, was metaphorically pawing the ground as one of his potential victims fled the field. He made mental notes on the key players he had met this morning who were involved in the bizarre death of Abel Meredith. The doctor? Barely competent, in his view, but he had tangled too often with the medical profession in the past and failed to get his way. Better to leave Theophilus Ragg in peace. Thomas Monk, the Warden? Another incompetent, in Sir Peregrine’s opinion. Why was it so difficult to get hold of sensible men once you were out of London? It was as if there was a whole world of inefficiency clogging up the nation beyond the City walls, a world stretching west to Bristol and north to the people Sir Peregrine had always referred to as the Caledonians in the wilder parts of Scotland. His fiercest wrath, however, was reserved for Inspector Albert Fletcher. That officer of the law had marked Sir Peregrine down from the beginning as a man to beware of, a man who could damage your career through his contacts in high places, and who would take pleasure in doing so. As a result the pauses were slightly longer than usual, the mental reservations sounded like incompetence, the gaps before speech the mark of an idiot. Something would have to be done. Sir Peregrine looked at his watch. Already he had spent far too much time down here among this human dross.
‘Telephone!’ he barked.
‘That’s a telephone over there on the table,’ said the Warden, pointing helpfully to the instrument.
‘I know what a telephone looks like, you fool. There are hundreds of them in my offices in London. Now get out while I use it.’
Sir Peregrine could not raise the person he sought, which added fuel to his fury. Listening at the keyhole, Thomas Monk smiled. Anything that irritated the Prime Warden of the Silkworkers Company was music to his ears. Sir Peregrine was leaving a message for his personal assistant, a young man called Arthur Onslow, with a distinguished career at Eton, a first-class honours degree in Classics from King’s College, Cambridge, and three years in the Blues and Royals, now in his second year as guard dog to Sir Peregrine, as he described it to his friends. It was a pity that he was a younger son for his father was widely believed to own half of Leicestershire.
‘Onslow. See me in my office. One hour from now. Don’t be late,’ barked Sir Peregrine, leaving Monk’s cramped quarters and heading back to his enormous motor car. It was the Inspector’s pauses, his hesitations, that raised Sir Peregrine’s heart rate to what Dr Ragg would have regarded as dangerous levels.
‘Damn Fletcher, damn him to hell!’ Sir Peregrine muttered as his vast car rumbled back into the suburbs of London. ‘I’ll break that man if it’s the last thing I do. Inspector Fletcher indeed!’ All through his career in finance Sir Peregrine had preached the benefits of private enterprise, of individuals looking after themselves rather than expecting the state to do it for them. Old age pensions, public money for the unemployed, schools funded by the taxpayer, all of these, in his view, were unnecessary intrusions by government into areas where people should look after themselves. Private enterprise, his private enterprise, was looking after those old men in the Jesus Hospital. Maybe even the police could be done away with, Sir Peregrine reflected as his limousine passed St Paul’s Cathedral, and replaced by a force of citizen constabulary. Inspector Fletcher and all the other Inspector Fletchers, thousands of them, in the Prime Warden’s view, could be thrown out like old pairs of sheets. The money saved could be given to the wealth-creators of the nation, the deserving rich as he had called them to great applause at a City dinner the week before. At any event, he resolved to find himself an investigator of his own, the finest man in London to look into the death of Abel Meredith. That was the commission he had in mind for young Onslow at his desk in the temple of finance back in Bishopsgate. A detective of his own. The finest available in the capital.
Inspector Fletcher sighed as he returned to his interviews with the old men. He found to his horror that the first person he had talked to, Albert Jardine, the oldest resident of the Jesus Hospital, aged eighty-four years, born a decade before Victoria came to the throne, had forgotten that he had ever spoken to the Inspector. This Albert was generally known as Number One, as he lived in almshouse Number One. Abel Meredith was Number Twenty. For some reason the old men found it easier to remember numbers than names. Number One had no memory at all of a conversation that had taken place only two or three hours before. The Inspector made a note in his book. This was one resident who would never make it to the courtroom if the case came to trial. Jack Miller, Number Three,
