bones and organs crushed in a solid silver duck press, the resultant juice then reduced at the boil in a silver dish to produce a sauce for the meat, which the waiters irreverently called ‘bloody duck’s blood’. Sir Peregrine, his face growing redder as the room grew warmer, had reached the early stages of the Silkworkers in the Civil War. One of his victims wondered if he could feign a heart attack in order to escape. Sir Rufus, who had heard the history of the Silkworkers many times before, moved on from the churches to the beauty of the Broads.
The food grew quieter after the duck. Joseph could see the end in sight now. Sir Peregrine’s neighbours could not. Asparagus hollandaise, murderous for those afflicted by gout, who were well represented here, was followed by peach melba served in a hand-carved ice swan as big as a ten-year-old child. Canapes a la Diane, last but by no means least among the chef’s masterpieces, brought up the rear.
Joseph wondered, not for the first time, how their constitutions and their figures could stand it; then he remembered that in the summer many of these people went as a matter of course to Homburg or Marienbad to get rid of the accumulated excess, and then returned to start on another year’s course of rich living. Really, he thought, there was very little difference between Marienbad and the vomitorium of the Romans.
Sir Peregrine rose rather unsteadily to his feet and proposed the loyal toast. A selection of cigars was brought round the table. Men pushed their chairs back and stretched out their legs. It was just after half past ten. Joseph brought some more bottles of the Haut Brion to the table. It seemed to be more popular than the Chateau d’Yquem. Sir Peregrine had just sailed past the Glorious Revolution and was carrying the history of the Silkworkers into the reigns of the Georges. An argument had developed at the bottom of one of the side tables about whether there should be another election that year over the veto powers of the House of Lords.
The bells of the City churches rang for eleven. The more domesticated of the Silkworkers collected their coats and hats and headed for home, keen to return to their families while they were still in control of their faculties. By twelve only the two knights were left, still replenishing their glasses with Haut Brion. At one Sir Rufus decided on a farewell visit to the river one floor below. He declared that it was so peaceful that he wanted to spend a little time down there alone with his thoughts. Sir Peregrine, with over two hundred years of Silkworker history still to go, staggered off into the night.
Sir Rufus’s corpse, stabbed through the heart with the familiar stigmata on his chest, was found there early the next morning.
Inspector Grime brought Powerscourt news of the latest death over bacon and eggs the following morning. Police messages were despatched earlier than ones from the Silkworkers Hall after a feast. Powerscourt told the Inspector that he would have to return to London for this, the third body inside a very short time. This latest victim, Grime eyed his telegram suspiciously, was a rather grander personage than the first two, Sir Rufus Walcott, Lord Lieutenant of Norfolk, a prominent figure in the boards and directorships of the City of London and the predecessor of Sir Peregrine as Prime Warden of the Silkworkers Company. The cleaners, tidying up after the dinner the night before, had found Sir Rufus, a great stab wound in his chest, with the familiar marks of the thistle on his chest, at the top of the steps leading down to the water as if he was waiting for a boat to take him home. There was no sign of the murder weapon. Twenty-four people had attended the dinner the night before. Those that had been contacted so far recalled nothing unusual about the feast, apart from the rueful admission from two of the guests that they, and Sir Rufus, had partaken rather too freely of the Haut Brion during and after the food. And that, my lord, said Grime, folding away his telegram, is all I can tell you for the present.
That afternoon Powerscourt introduced himself to his third Inspector on the case. Miles Devereux was in his early thirties with a languid air and the remains of one of those cherubic faces that convinced people he must have been a choirboy in his youth. It was, he told Powerscourt sadly, his second murder of the year, with only a month gone. He took Powerscourt round the Silkworkers Hall and the place where the body had been found.
‘We think the killer probably came by boat,’ he said. ‘So many bloody boats go up and down this river, nobody would have taken any notice if another one went by with a murderer at the oars.’
‘How would they have known he would be here at that time of day?’ said Powerscourt. ‘In the other two cases with the strange marks, Inspector, the killer would have known where to find his victim. The man in the almshouse would have been in his place, the bursar at Allison’s School would have been in his office. How did they know this old boy was going to be here at one o’clock in the morning?’
‘Perhaps they sent him a message,’ said the Inspector thoughtfully.
‘Meet me by the water at one in the morning,’ suggested Powerscourt. ‘You’ll know who I am because I’ll have a large knife in my hand, waiting to stab you through the heart.’
5
At seven o’clock that evening Lord Francis Powerscourt was watching a man change his shirt. Powerscourt’s brother-in-law William Burke was a mighty power in the City of London, a banker who knew most of what was going on in his little kingdom. He was married to Powerscourt’s sister Mary and he was due at a formal dinner of his own in half an hour.
‘Damn it, Francis,’ he said, wrestling with his white shirt and white collar, ‘I can just about fit into this bloody thing. When Mary bought it for me last year it was never this tight.’
‘Perhaps it’s shrunk at the laundry,’ said Powerscourt tactfully. Burke grunted and continued his sartorial struggles with the buttons on his waistcoat. It, too, seemed to have shrunk slightly in the wash.
‘I shall just have to hold my breath half the bloody evening,’ Burke announced sadly, sorting out his tie in the mirror above the marble mantelpiece in his enormous office. Burke’s offices seemed to his brother-in-law to double in size about every four years. Powerscourt felt sure he would end up in a place about as large and as grand as Westminster Hall itself.
‘Odd, isn’t it,’ Burke said, slipping into his tailcoat, ‘your man from the Silkworkers goes to a formal dinner last night with the members and ends up a corpse. I’m off to a formal dinner tonight and I’m telling you what I know about livery companies. Shouldn’t think,’ he paused to look suspiciously at his black patent leather court shoes as if they might be short of polish, ‘there’ll be many murderers where I’m going, Tower of London too forbidding, I’d have thought. Now then, Francis, we haven’t much time. Mary’s coming to meet me downstairs in her latest evening gown in half an hour.’
Burke pulled his waistcoat and his jacket down and lowered himself carefully into an armchair by his fire. ‘Don’t want any damned buttons popping this early in the evening. Livery companies, Francis, you wrote to me asking about livery companies. Your victims in this case, you told me, all have connections with the Silkworkers Company. I presume you know about their history already. In general terms, I mean. You don’t know yet if they were killed because they were members of the company or if they just happened to belong to it. Am I right so far, Francis?’
‘You are,’ said Powerscourt.
‘I don’t care for the bloody livery companies myself,’ said Burke, giving his left shoe a firm rub with his handkerchief. ‘God knows how many have asked me to join them over the years. I’ve always refused. You see, I’m as fond of tradition as the next man, but traditions need to have some purpose, in my view. Bloody monarchy, it may be old, but it’s still useful. Same with the House of Lords, even now. Bank of England, bloody ancient institution, but it still has a function. But tell me this, Francis, what is the point of the Honourable Company of Basketworkers? Glove-makers? Honourable Company of Needlemakers, for God’s sake? I doubt if any of the members has made a glove or a basket or a bloody needle in the last hundred years.’
‘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.
