opened the main door and nodded to him. At that point the silkmen were to sing a final hymn,
‘For all the saints who from their labours rest’. This, the chaplain assured the Inspector, had no fewer than eleven verses and if sung at a funereal pace as dictated by the organist of St Luke’s on the hospital piano, should last between five and ten minutes, ample time for his policemen to pick up their belongings and beat an orderly retreat.
The Inspector paced anxiously round the quadrangle. His sergeant conducted spot checks on the officers, ensuring that they were obeying orders. Eventually the sergeant blew on his whistle after the third verse and the eighteen policemen from Maidenhead were marched out of the hospital to carry their booty back to the station. It was just before half past nine. The Inspector had told nobody, not Monk, not any of the old men, about this morning’s exercise. He stayed behind to reassure the silkmen that their sacrifice was only temporary and that their possessions would be returned to them in due course. He did not specify, and the men did not think to ask, how long that might be. As recompense, he assured them, the police would be buying drinks for everybody at the Rose and Crown that evening between the hours of eight and nine. By eleven that morning Inspector Fletcher was back in his office. The spoils of war were laid out on his floor in numerical order from Number One to Number Twenty. Albert Fletcher hung his jacket behind his chair and set to work.
One hundred and fifty miles to the north-east the other Inspector in Powerscourt’s life was really rather pleased with himself. The two men were standing on the edge of the playing fields where the snowman was being erected. Grime refused to go back to the geography classroom if he could avoid it. He refused to talk anywhere in the school where small boys who ran as if in training for the next Olympic Games in Stockholm in two years’ time might appear round a corner at any minute and hear things they were not meant to know. The snowman, Powerscourt observed, was now higher than most of the junior members of the school. They had built small towers in the manner of building workers with their scaffolding and were adding to the figure with a selection of stolen shovels. The lake, one small boy had told Powerscourt solemnly, was not yet ready for skating. Pemberton Minor of the Upper Fourth had ventured across its frozen surface only for the ice to open and swallow him up. But for the timely intervention of a couple of gardeners, there would have been a great sadness in the Pemberton household. The soaked victim was now wrapped up in bed in the infirmary with a couple of hot water bottles for company.
‘How was your witness?’ inquired the Inspector.
Powerscourt took some time to reply. He had been thinking about his interview with Mrs Mitchell on his way to the school that morning and was surprised at how little she had told him. He wondered why she had not mentioned Gill’s anxieties in his last days.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I rather think she had the better of the encounter.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked the Inspector.
‘I don’t think she told me any actual lies,’ Powerscourt replied, staring out at the relays of Allison’s youth, totally focused on the task in hand, beginning to put a face on the snowman. They appeared to have laid their hands on a pipe and an ancient muffler of indeterminate colour to decorate their creation.
‘I think she left out quite a lot, I’m sure there are things she’s not telling me about. God knows what they are. Looking back on it, I may have been too gentle with her. It’s amazing what you can get away with if you look on the verge of tears all the time.’
‘Did she actually break down and cry all over you?’ asked Grime with horror.
‘No, she didn’t. But she did manage to convey the impression that it might happen at any time. I’d back women to be more devious than men in those circumstances any day of the week, wouldn’t you, Inspector?’
There was a mighty wail from the snowman party. Pipe and muffler had fallen out, pulling a great deal of snow that might have been the nose, forehead and mouth behind them. The snowman looked as though he had been shot in the face, white snow falling to the ground in place of the blood that might have come from a human.
‘Will you go and see Mrs Mitchell again, my lord? Do you think you might do better a second time?’
‘I did think of writing to her, but I suspect that would meet with even less success. She’d have all the time she wanted to compose her replies. I shall think about it. Now then, how were the postmen?’
‘Ah, my lord, I think there is progress in that direction. Only limited progress, mind you, but it’s something. You see, it would seem that my angelic choirboy may have been telling the truth. There may have been a postman in the corridor that morning, but he wasn’t a real one. It must have been somebody dressed up as a postman, but probably a bringer of death rather than the morning mail. The real postman who comes to the school on his rounds, Matthew Cameron, did visit the school as usual that morning. But he came at half past ten and was able to observe the confusion brought by Gill’s death. He’s sure there was no proper postman up here at the earlier time. He’s busy at the moment but he’s promised to come and see us on his way home.’
Inspector Fletcher and Sergeant Donaldson were nearly halfway through their folders with the paperwork from the Jesus Hospital. Fletcher had not been sure exactly what he would find — in some ways the early-morning raid had been a shot in the dark — but one aspect of the paperwork he found absolutely astonishing. They had looked through a lot of material they had expected to find, letters from family members in distant parts, some as far away as New Zealand and Nebraska. The old gentleman in Number Fourteen, Stephen Potter, was a great reader who seemed to belong to three public libraries. He had Conrad’s Lord Jim by his bedside, and recent volumes by Conan Doyle and Kipling on his shelf. Fletcher noted with interest that all these books were now overdue and Number Fourteen was going to have to pay a hefty fine when he returned the books to their libraries of origin. It was his sergeant, Peter Donaldson, a tall young man of about thirty with the largest moustache in the Maidenhead force, who first drew the startling fact to his attention.
‘Could I make a comment, sir?’ said Donaldson, whose parents had always pressed on him from the earliest age the virtues of politeness and cleanliness. One or two of the older Inspectors had been known to complain that Donaldson always smelt like a bar of soap first thing in the morning.
‘Of course,’ replied Fletcher, turning an ancient bible upside down and shaking it vigorously. Three old pieces of paper fell to the floor.
‘Well, sir, we’ve been through eight or nine of these folders so far. And four of them have quite a lot of money tucked away in banks or building societies, nearly four thousand pounds in one case, with the account books hidden in the man’s atlas between the maps of Paraguay and Brazil. But there aren’t any wills. You’d have thought that if they were that careful with money they’d have been bound to make a will, wouldn’t you?’
‘Ah, hm, well, you would, that’s quite right. How very odd. Maybe their last wills and testaments are with their solicitors.’ Inspector Fletcher paused again. Sergeant Donaldson had worked out long before how his superior officer’s mind worked. He knew what was coming.
‘When we’ve finished with this lot, Sergeant, perhaps you could call on the relevant offices, banks, solicitors and so on, and make inquiries. You’d better try Reading after you’re through with Maidenhead.’
‘Of course, sir.’
It was dark when the real postman arrived at Allison’s School. The snowman seemed to glow slightly in the reflected light from the great windows. Pemberton Minor in the infirmary was making a quick recovery, pleading with matron for more pieces of cake after his tea. Cake in the school was a luxury only offered to recovering invalids. The postman, a cheerful Cockney called William Cameron, long exiled to East Anglia, showed them his normal rounds.
‘We do a rough sort out of the post beforehand, sir. Headmaster’s mail gets delivered to his secretary’s office, masters’ mail to the common room, boys’ mail to the porter’s lodge, registrar and bursar’s mail to their offices in that long corridor. Bursar Gill, sir, he always had a lot of post, parents paying their bills, that sort of thing, I suppose.’
‘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
