him during the lunch hour. They did not. After lessons closed for the day the headmaster felt sure that this was the time for the boys to come forward. He asked his deputy if he had heard anything on the school grapevine about the boys’ attitude to the police Inspector. The deputy had no intelligence to offer. By now the headmaster was seriously worried. Were the boys in his care obstructing the course of justice? He found it impossible to believe that they had not noticed anything that morning. He wondered if there might be another way of getting them to talk.
Detective Inspector Grime was livid. He had read through all his notes on the case so far. He had learnt from one of the OTC handbooks how to dismantle and clean a rifle. He had read about making progress in open country and through difficult terrain, which was certainly where he felt he was now. Worse was to come. His sergeant arrived shortly before five o’clock to tell him of a message from the Dean of York, who had promised to make further inquiries about the whereabouts of one Jude Mitchell, cuckolded husband of the mistress of the dead man. The dean and his people had toiled all day for many days and caught nothing. Mitchell was nowhere to be found. They had cast their nets as far afield as Beverley to the east and Lichfield to the south and Ripon to the north, all minster or cathedral cities where a mason like Mitchell might have been able to take on temporary work. He was nowhere to be found.
‘Damn it, Sergeant,’ said Grime to his subordinate, ‘where the hell is the wretched man? You can’t just disappear like this. Not nowadays.’ The sergeant resisted the temptation to say that Mitchell appeared to have done precisely that. ‘Give me a moment, will you?’ the Inspector went on. ‘You can take this back and send it off. I’d better send a telegram with the latest news, or rather lack of it, to Lord Francis bloody Powerscourt. Damn the man and his fancy theories!’
Had Inspector Grime been a more sympathetic officer, one that boys might be happy to speak to about what they had seen, he would have heard some things that were not all that important to his investigation. But some sensible boys would have told him that the man was of average height. Others would have told him that the man seemed to be in his middle thirties. Others again would have told of a thick black beard. But one boy had information that would have made the Inspector and Powerscourt very interested indeed. This was a boy called Lewis, David Lewis, who was in his first year in the Sixth Form. Lewis was the best mimic in the school. He could impersonate his headmaster, his housemaster and the chaplain perfectly. When his friends persuaded him, he would deliver wickedly accurate sermons from the chaplain late at night, standing at the end of his bed in the dormitory with his dressing gown acting as cassock. On another famous occasion in Allison’s legend he had rung the headmaster, purporting to be his housemaster, about some detentions which were subsequently cancelled and caused a rift between the two schoolmasters which had not been healed to this day.
The phoney postman had bumped into Lewis on the morning of his murder run and had apologized. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he had said and continued on his way. Lewis probably had the most acute ear in the school. The accent, he declared to his friends, was not English, the man was a foreigner. He was not American either, said David Lewis, having spent six months in Washington three years before. Quite where the phoney postman did come from he could not be sure.
That night the overtaxed men of the Metropolitan Police had another burden added to their load. Word, their sergeants and inspectors informed them, had come from the very top. They were to be on guard all night at various properties and almshouses belonging to the Silkworkers Company. The danger, they were told, could come from the inside with the inmates trying to kill each other or from the outside with unknown villains come to murder the residents. Two constables stood in the doorways of grand houses in the City owned by the Silkworkers.
PC James Jones, five years off retirement, spent the night inside and outside the Hospice of the Holy Trinity in Blackheath. He told his wife of long standing he thought it had to do with German spy rings operating in the City of London. PC Albert Smith, who had been married for eight days, was on patrol at the Hospice of St Michael in Richmond. He said to his new wife as he left that he might be away all night, but that he would be at home all day the next day and he didn’t expect to be that tired. PC John Walsh, on duty at the Jesus Hospital in Haringey, made himself conspicuous by pacing noisily up and down the little quadrangle. He believed that a gang of thieves were intent on stealing the hospice’s magnificent collection of silver which they left carelessly on display in a cabinet with no lock. That at any rate was the view of his sergeant who had made representations about the silver in the past but to no avail. And PC Walter Buchan, at six feet five inches the tallest officer among them, kept vigil over the old men in the Almshouse of St John the Divine in Clerkenwell. He had told his wife before he set off that the world had gone stark raving mad.
The following morning Sir Fitzroy Robinson Buller, Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, sent another memorandum to his master. He reminded the minister about his earlier message about the three murders and hoped the Home Secretary would soon be in a position to deliver an authoritative judgement. In the meantime he described the measures taken around the various properties belonging to the Silkworkers. If the government were pressed in parliament or in the newspapers about what they were doing in these cases, the Home Secretary could now point out that all necessary steps were being taken to safeguard the public.
8
There were two telegrams for Powerscourt the morning after the police watch began. One was from Johnny Fitzgerald with the latest news from Marlow and the old gentlemen’s wills. The other came from Inspector Grime, and Powerscourt could feel the disappointment and the frustration behind the words about the total lack of information from the boys of Allison’s.
‘Damn it, Lucy,’ he said, stretching out on the sofa in front of the fire, ‘I feel like some military commander miles and miles from the front who has to communicate with his generals by runner or by telegram. Don’t think Napoleon had to go in for this sort of thing. By the time I have taken one lot of information on board, another lot comes in from elsewhere which changes the picture altogether. I suppose I’ll just have to get used to it.’
‘I’m sure you’ll get to the bottom of it, my love,’ said Lady Lucy, used to these moments of doubt in the course of her husband’s investigations. ‘I do think the news about Sir Peregrine and the Silkworkers is fascinating, Francis. Do you think he just wants to make off with the money?’
‘I know he’s been using the argument about the Germans all over the place. The headmaster man up in Norfolk told me about that one. I’ve been investigating things for so long now, Lucy, I always think the worst of everybody. So in my opinion the whole case may be about Sir Peregrine getting his hands on the money.’
There was a discreet cough at the door. Rhys, the Powerscourt butler, always coughed to announce his arrival when he had to make an unexpected appearance.
‘Telephone, my lord.’ Rhys usually sounded as if he had just come from or was just about to go to a funeral. ‘From Norfolk, my lord. The headmaster of Allison’s, my lord.’
Powerscourt shot down the stairs to the room looking out over the square that he used as a study. It was gloomy outside, the rain rattling against the windows in Markham Square.
‘Headmaster,’ he said, ‘how nice to hear from you. How are things up there in Norfolk?’
‘My apologies for ringing you at home, Lord Powerscourt. I need some advice.’
‘Fire ahead,’ said Powerscourt cheerfully.
‘Yesterday morning we had a real postman retrace the steps of the murderer up the long corridor in the school. At the same time as the earlier visit, of course. I appealed to the boys at assembly, very soon after the visit, to report anything they had seen on the day of the death to Inspector Grime. I told them he would be in the OTC room all day.’
‘And?’ asked Powerscourt.
‘That’s just it,’ replied the headmaster. ‘There is no and. Nobody came forward. The Inspector waited all day and nothing happened. He was very cross by the time he left, I can tell you.’
‘Do you think the boys knew something but didn’t want to tell? Or that they hadn’t seen anything at all?’
‘Damn it, Lord Powerscourt, about fifty or sixty boys must have seen the phoney postman that morning. If they were properly awake — and many may not have been — they must have realized that this was not the normal time for the man with the mail to arrive. And I suspect that they may have taken against the policeman. He can be a bit surly at times, Inspector Grime.’
‘Could you or your colleagues talk to the boys individually? Would that work?’
‘I don’t think they would talk to us either. They’ll have decided en masse not to talk to the policeman. They’re
