millionaire or mad English lord who locks himself up in his hall or his grange to spend his waking hours on the collection of Lepidoptera or the stuffing of small furry animals?
Not many people alive had known the man before he acquired his eye patch and his nickname. Once he realized how useful it was to be known in this way he only used his real name when it was absolutely necessary. Friends, who were few, colleagues who were largely frightened, enemies who were numerous, all referred to him as Eye Patch because they did not know what he was christened. Some people wondered if his women or his mistresses addressed him as Eye Patch even in the most intimate of circumstances.
The wound that led to the patch had happened decades before. The circumstances also left him with a slight limp in his left leg. The man wondered often in the early years of his disfigurement if it wouldn’t have been better to have lost a leg rather than an eye if he had to lose something. He would much rather have become Long John Silver than Eye Patch but there it was. The present version of his patch, handmade by the finest tailors, was of a dull grey, which its wearer thought the most unobtrusive in his small collection. He had a black one he wore when he wanted to frighten people. There was a dark red one he wore when he wanted to impress a lady. Eye patches, he had found, had a strange fascination for the opposite sex. They always wanted to know how he came by it, if there was any hope of sight ever returning. The man would smile, refuse to answer any questions, and maintain the veil of secrecy. Over the years he had decided that his red eye patch was blessed with considerable aphrodisiac qualities. He rarely failed to conquer. He resisted the many attempts by his valet to order him a new one.
Outside, the moon passed behind a cloud. There was a faint hint of silver on the water. Eye Patch had come to this place with a mission. He was pleased with his progress so far. Very few people knew he was here. Very few people knew who he was. Groceries were delivered to his staff. No local had crossed his door. He never went out, except at night to visit his yacht, and then he wrapped so many scarves round his face that he was unrecognizable. He took a long last look at the sleeping town which looked as though God himself might have tucked it up in bed. As he climbed the stairs to his bedroom above, the man smiled as he thought of his red eye patch. It seemed to him a very long time since he had worn it. When the business was finished he would see if its seductive charms still worked. He looked out at the sea once more before he closed his bedroom curtains. His yacht was still there, the easiest means of escape if that should become necessary. She was swaying slightly in a midnight breeze. The man could not see the name painted in bold letters on the side but he knew it was there. The yacht was called Morning Glory.
PART TWO
6
All was not well in the Jesus Hospital in Marlow. The old gentlemen were restless and unsettled. The funeral of Abel Meredith had been delayed for some unaccountable reason. The residents of the almshouse liked funerals. Funerals reminded them that they at any rate were still alive. They liked singing the hymns like ‘Rock of Ages’ and ‘The Day Thou Gavest Lord Is Ended’. They weren’t quite so sure about the dead man being lowered into the ground but by that stage many of them were already thinking of the wake in the dining hall that the hospital organized for its own after a funeral, with special cakes and scones and homemade raspberry jam.
But what unsettled the old gentlemen even more, though they never mentioned it to anyone, not even their closest friends, was that they might be living with a murderer. And none of their rooms had locks. The authorities had decided long before that the ability to rush in and take a sick man to hospital without breaking doors down was essential. But here was the disadvantage of that policy. Number Nine or Number Fourteen or Number Eleven might rise in the night and kill once again, and nobody could stop them rushing in, knife or gun in hand. Freddie Butcher, Number Two, whose life had been spent on the railways rather than selling meat, had done considerable damage to his back trying to pull a sofa across his living room to a position right by the front door so that any intruder would have to push past it to get to him. The general amount of conversation, usually gossip of one sort of another, had dropped. The only bright spot on the silkmen’s horizon was the arrival of a new regular at the Rose and Crown. This Johnny chap, they said to one another, had a fund of good stories and an inexhaustible supply of money for buying rounds of drinks. He didn’t seem very interested in the hospital, not even in the murder. He was one of those people who give the impression of always being cheerful. And once you were sitting in the corner table of the Rose and Crown, with a pint of the landlord’s best in your fist, you felt safe. Nobody was going to come and murder you there. So it was not surprising that some of the old gentlemen had taken to staying longer and longer in the pub, nor that they were so cheerful on their return that they might not have noticed whether they were being murdered or not.
Warden Monk was aware of these undercurrents swirling round his kingdom. He tried to reassure the old men that nobody was coming to kill them. In old days he might have asked Sir Peregrine to come down if he had a moment and give the old boys a pep talk. In these homilies Sir Peregrine always sounded like a house prefect instructing his charges to play up in the house football competition and get fit for the cross-country running championship. But Sir Peregrine did not have a moment and did not come. Those who did, and who came far too often for Monk’s liking, were the officers of the Buckinghamshire Constabulary who always lowered morale. Why do they keep coming, the old gentlemen would mutter to each other, unless they know that the murderer is here, is one of us, within these walls? One down, the old men muttered to themselves, nineteen to go.
Monk himself had other things on his mind. It was not surprising that Sergeant Peter Donaldson had been unable to find Abel Meredith’s will in the lawyers’ offices in Maidenhead or anywhere else. Monk had not one last will and testament of the late Abel Meredith, Number Twenty, but two. The Authorized Version, as Monk referred to it, was in a secret place inside a floorboard in Monk’s bedroom. One of the many occupations he had had to leave in a hurry in an earlier life was that of carpenter, but his departure had not come before he had learnt a lot about the trade. People, especially the police, were great believers in the fact that criminals liked hiding things under the floorboards. Monk was a great believer in hiding things inside floorboards. His secret place could only be unlocked by pressing a whorl on the lower side of the board. Nobody looking at it, not even the most suspicious policeman, would have imagined that there was anything concealed inside. Like the wooden horse of Troy, Monk would say to himself, the most important parts are on the inside.
The other version of the will, the Revised Version, as Monk put it, was in the file marked Wills on a shelf on his office. This was one of those unusual wills, two pages long, where the second page only required a signature. Monk may have been a thief. But he was not greedy. He was, he would remind himself from time to time, a reasonable man. When engaged on will work he always took care to keep to the original intentions. Abel Meredith had left a large amount of money, well over two thousand pounds, a figure that would have sent Inspector Fletcher’s instincts into overtime. All of that been left to a brother in Saskatchewan in the original. In the new will Monk split the figure, half to the brother in Canada, half to ‘my good friend and counsellor, Thomas Monk, with thanks for all the help and advice rendered to me’. This was not the most valuable will created in Monk’s office. It was, in fact, the third most valuable. Once the funeral was over, he would take it to a rather grand solicitor in the West End who would launch it into the legal system.
‘Don’t think very much of this lot, actually,’ said Powerscourt’s third police officer. Detective Inspector Miles Devereux was wearing a cream shirt and a very old-fashioned suit that might have belonged to his father. ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ he told Powerscourt, ‘but I am the tenth of eleven sons. No jokes about cricket or football teams, please, absolutely not. Family may be numerous, family funds are not. By the time they got round to deciding what to do with me, I had, I still have, now I think of it, brothers in almost every conceivable occupation. I have brothers who can sell you a house, look after your money, train your racehorse, christen, marry and bury you though not all at the same time. There’s one who farms in Argentina and one who runs enormous ranches in Canada. There’s one who will buy your antique books and sell them on at an enormous profit, and another who claims to be opening the wines of Italy up to new markets in Britain, though the family say he merely opens the bottles. There are, I fear, even more of them. So I decided to do something different and join the police force. It’s
