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 Bergere 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 Bearnaise.
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
