bright enough to see that if they talk to the staff it’s virtually the same as talking to Grime. The information will go straight to the police.’
‘I see,’ said Powerscourt.
‘I’m acutely conscious that the boys in my charge appear at the moment to be obstructing the police in their inquiries. That can’t be right. What do I do if Grime turns nasty and takes one or two of my pupils down to the police station?’
Powerscourt could see the serried ranks of parents lining up outside the headmaster’s study in the headmaster’s mind. He could hear the voices in the headmaster’s head.
‘I’m not going to stand for this, my son hauled off to the local police station!’
‘I’m taking my two boys home immediately, and they won’t be coming back!’
‘I’ve known our member of parliament for many years now. You’ll be hearing from him very soon!’
‘My sympathies, Headmaster,’ said Powerscourt, ‘you’re in a very difficult situation, and it’s not of your making.’
‘I’ve had three members of staff laid low by the influenza today. We’re going to have to rework the entire timetable.’
Something in what the headmaster said set off a train of thought in Powerscourt’s brain. It couldn’t work, could it? It would be too difficult to arrange, surely. Or would it? To hell with it, why not? There was nothing to lose.
‘Headmaster,’ he said, ‘a thought has just struck me which might, just might, help us out of some of our difficulties. It is rather a long shot and I don’t want to tell you about it until I have had time to think it through. Could I call you back inside the hour?’
‘Of course,’ said the headmaster. ‘I will wait by the telephone.’
Powerscourt shot back up the stairs to tell Lady Lucy the news. Then he put a proposition to her.
‘You can’t be serious, Francis.’
‘I am, my love, I am.’
‘Well,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘it’s very unusual. I don’t think such a thing is happening anywhere else.’
‘I’m sure it is. This is nineteen ten after all, not eighteen hundred and forty.’
‘In a way,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘I suppose it might be rather fun. I’m sure I could do it. Yes, Francis, yes, why not? I shall fulfil my duties in my earlier name of Mrs Hamilton.’
Powerscourt ran back down the stairs. ‘Headmaster,’ he said, ‘I have a proposition to put to you.’
The headmaster listened carefully to Powerscourt’s proposals. Then he laughed. ‘Splendid idea!’ he boomed down the phone as if he were addressing the parents on Speech Day. ‘I propose we put it into action on Monday, the day after tomorrow. A week’s service for a start, more if required.’
Thomas Monk, Warden of the Jesus Hospital in Marlow, was awake very early the next morning. Monk was a worried man. Eight of the old gentlemen had arrived in his office the day before and demanded their wills back. Monk had watched out of his window, fingering his pale blue cravat, as the octet marched in line out of the hospital and down the road to the solicitor’s offices. Monk still had three of their wills in his possession. He suspected that the owners of those wills had forgotten where they had put them. Any one of those old men could arrive at any time and demand their last will and testament. But that was not the full extent of his problems. Only one of the three wills he still had contained any money, and its owner, in Monk’s judgement, was not going to be around for very much longer. Experience at the hospital had left Monk a good judge of how long its members had left to go — if he could have taken odds on the life expectancy of the different inhabitants of the Jesus Hospital with the local bookkeeper in Maidenhead, he would certainly have done so.
The Warden’s principal concern had to do with the will of Number Twenty, Abel Meredith. This was the one with slightly over two thousand pounds, originally going to Meredith’s brother in Canada. His conversation with Henry Wood, Number Twelve, in which he had implied that half the money went to Canada, the rest to him, had led to Andrew Snow, Number Eighteen, remembering an earlier conversation with Meredith, in which he, Number Eighteen, was told all the money was going to the brother in Canada. And that had led directly to the old men requesting their wills back. All of them had voiced their concerns about Meredith’s will and where his legacy was going. He had said nothing, but he knew he had to do something. Otherwise the old men, led by that slippery Number Twelve, might complain to the Silkworkers Company in London.
The inmates of the Jesus Hospital eased the pains of their days at the Rose and Crown, famed for its barmaid and the smoke. Monk had never visited the place, feeling it would be beneath him to be seen drinking in the same place as the residents of the almshouse. Five minutes’ walk in the opposite direction was the Duke of Clarence, a place that was pretending not be a pub at all, but some sort of superior watering hole for people coming for boat rides on the Thames or going for lunch or dinner at the expensive hotel on the island up the road. Even the public bar in the Duke of Clarence looked as though it might contain a couple of stockbrokers from the City. It was here, the previous evening, over two pints of mild and bitter, that Monk formulated his plan for the next morning.
Breakfast was nearly over in the Jesus Hospital. The tomato ketchup and the HP sauce had been sprayed over pairs of sausages and a helping of fried bread this morning, accompanied by what the old men thought were two rather mean rashers of bacon. As the meal came to an end and the last cups of tea were passed round, the Warden came in and knocked on the table nearest the door for quiet.
‘Gentlemen!’ he said. ‘Silkmen, forgive me for interrupting your breakfast, but I felt I had to speak to you on a matter of some urgency.’ Monk was speaking quite slowly and very loudly for the benefit of his audience. ‘Yesterday a number of you came to see and asked, very properly, if you could have your wills back. I agreed, as I should, to these requests. But some of you also voiced concerns about the will of our late colleague Abel Meredith, Number Twenty. Maybe I am wrong here but I felt that there was an implication that I might have tampered with this will in some way. Nothing could be further from the truth.’
Monk paused at this point and gazed round the old men. He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a couple of pieces of paper. ‘This is Abel Meredith’s will. I am going to hand it round so you can all read it. Whatever you might have thought, you will see that all the money goes to his brother in Canada.’ With that, Monk handed the documents to Jack Miller, Number Three, and sat down. This was indeed the original will. This was part of the plan Monk had concocted in the Duke of Clarence the evening before. Monk thanked God he had kept the earlier version hidden inside his special floorboard.
It took some time for the papers to be passed round the company. Spectacles had to be found. Meredith’s writing was not of the clearest and often needed decoding by a neighbour. The strain of reading through such a paper, surrounded by your fellows in the hospital, made some of the silkmen so nervous they had to stop for a rest in the middle of it. Those who had read it fidgeted uneasily in their chairs, keen to escape into the quadrangle outside for a good gossip about its contents. After nearly an hour they were finished. Number Three, Jack Miller, gave the will back to Monk.
‘Thank you very much for your time, gentlemen,’ he said and walked out of the dining room. As he strode back to his office he smiled as he thought of the second part of the plan concocted on his mild and bitter in the Duke of Clarence. This was going to be his revenge on the Jesus Hospital. The original would go back into its floorboard. The will he would send to the London solicitors, however, would be the one he had forged some time earlier, the one that left half the money to the brother and the other half to him. Monk knew how long the legal niceties could take. Correspondence to and fro from Saskatchewan might add a couple of months to the timescale, particularly if the Canadian lawyers, like so many in England, were partners in the well-known firm of Slow and Bideawhile. It might be a year or more before the thing was settled. And by then some of the old men would have forgotten. And the others would be dead.
The silkmen of the Jesus Hospital may have drunk in the Rose and Crown, Thomas Monk may have patronized the Duke of Clarence, but Johnny Fitzgerald was staying in the expensive hotel on the island in the river a quarter of a mile from Marlow. The new owners originally wanted to call it the Champs Elysees after the great thoroughfare in Paris. They settled for the Elysian Fields instead, a name they thought brought a touch of glamour, a suggestion of divine food and wine and maybe a faint hint of naughtiness, Turkish belly dancers perhaps, or girls imported from the Moulin Rouge.
Lord Francis Powerscourt left home early to take breakfast with Johnny Fitzgerald. He planned to visit all his key players in one day to tell them about the Silkworkers codicil, for this, he thought, put the whole case in a different light.
‘Good God, Francis,’ said Johnny, pausing in his progress through a small mountain of kedgeree, ‘you’re not
