trying to tell me that the whole case may revolve round a piece of paper over hundreds of years old written by some bloke who had just escaped the Black Death? And that the bloody thing may be a forgery?’
‘I am,’ said Powerscourt. ‘And there’s more. You will recall that stuff I just told you about there being a vote and that eight out of ten of the members had to approve any alterations to the rules?’
‘I do.’
‘Well, all of your old gentlemen have a vote. They have to become members of the Silkworkers Company when they sign up for the Jesus Hospital. Twenty votes is quite a lot. They could be more important than we think.’
‘Nineteen, actually,’ said Johnny indistinctly through a final mouthful of kedgeree. ‘Dead men don’t vote.’
‘Sorry,’ said Powerscourt.
‘For God’s sake, Francis, won’t you eat something? You’re making me nervous sitting there like a high court judge at the Old Bailey not having anything at all apart from a tiny slice of toast. Have a poached egg or two, in heaven’s name.’
Powerscourt began to work his way through the eggs dumped on his plate by his friend.
‘I suppose you want me to run this lot up the flagpole with the old boys,’ said Johnny, glancing at a very pretty young American lady at the next table whose husband was complaining loudly to the waiter about the coffee. ‘I wonder why they haven’t talked about it before. I don’t recall a single mention of it in all the time I’ve been marooned down here.’
‘Valuable work you’ve been doing, Johnny, valuable work.’ Powerscourt grinned at his friend. ‘I suspect they have all been sworn to silence, the old men. The one thing Sir Peregrine can’t have is publicity. His whole scheme might collapse once it got into the papers.’
Johnny stared silently at a couple of slices of ham. ‘I don’t think it’ll be any good asking them about it in the Rose and Crown,’ he said finally. ‘I’ll have to try them one at a time. The man Wood, Number Twelve, maybe that’s who I’ll start with. He’s got a pretty suspicious mind.’
‘One other thing, Johnny,’ said Powerscourt.
‘Oh yes?’ said his friend. ‘What is it now?’
‘Could you tell Inspector Fletcher about the codicil and all that? I’ve got to go back to London.’
‘Yes, yes, I’ll do that,’ said Johnny. ‘Don’t mind about me. Here I am abandoned on the island like that bloody woman from Crete whose name I can never remember. There was her bloody lover on his bloody boat, just visible from the shore, hull down on the horizon.’
‘Never mind, Johnny. At least the abandoned Ariadne was in the company of Bacchus, the god of wine. They tell me there’s some pretty good stuff in the cellars here. It’s said to come from the Elysian Fields themselves.’
Powerscourt found Inspector Miles Devereux in the council chamber of the Silkworkers Hall, a beautiful room where the inner circle of the company held their meetings.
‘If you’ve got to have a bloody office,’ Devereux drawled, ‘you may as well have it in a place like this.’ He waved a hand at the tall windows looking out over the Thames and a number of full-length Silkworker prime wardens lining the walls.
‘Look at this rogues’ gallery,’ he said, pointing at the paintings. ‘They look as though oysters wouldn’t melt in their mouths. I bet you they were as slippery as eels, mind you, lying about where the silk had come from, the precise location on the Silk Road, just like today, probably.’ Devereux scrabbled about in the papers in front of him and pulled out a couple of sheets.
‘I’m thinking of staying here,’ he said, ‘making this my permanent office. As long as we haven’t solved the case, that’ll be fine. Once we have been successful, a grateful company might leave me here as a thank you for services rendered. If you get bored you can always go downstairs and jump in the Thames or wait for some assassin to come and slit your throat.’
Powerscourt smiled. He thought boredom might be a permanent problem in the life and times of Miles Devereux.
‘Sorry for the waffle,’ Devereux said, sitting up straight in his chair. ‘This is an account of what happened at the grand dinner the other day. I don’t think there’s anything unusual except for the amount of Haut Brion they seem to have got through. I’ve checked with the company manciple and he assured me it was nineteen bottles of the stuff, most of them drunk by only five or six people. My papa would have approved of the Haut Brion, though never in those quantities.’
Powerscourt glanced through the paper. There was little of interest there. He told the Inspector about the Silkworkers codicil and its implications.
Devereux whistled and began pacing about the room. ‘This is like something out of a penny dreadful,’ he said. ‘And Sir Rufus Walcott was the leader of the opposition inside the company? Fascinating.’
Eventually Miles Devereux sat down on the edge of his desk and voiced a concern that had been in Powerscourt’s mind since the previous evening. ‘I say, Lord Powerscourt. This could be the motive for all the murders. Suppose there was opposition to the changes at the Jesus Hospital as well as in the livery company itself. Suppose there was more opposition at Allison’s School up there in Norfolk. Three places where the supporters of Sir Peregrine or indeed Sir Peregrine himself might have had a motive for murder. Maybe they said they were going to make it public, or write to The Times or their MP or something like that. There is one further possible consequence.’ He stopped suddenly and stared at Powerscourt. ‘This might mean that the strange marks on the bodies are a diversion, that they were stamped on the victims to draw attention away from the true motive, greed or preservation of your own position, whatever you might want to call it. Sir Peregrine had in his possession whatever strange instrument caused the marks. Either he or his accomplices then stamped it on the victims, hoping we would all be sidetracked away from the real murderer. Which, in a way, we have been.’
‘Exactly so,’ said Powerscourt, nodding at the young man. He had been surprised that Johnny Fitzgerald hadn’t reached the same conclusion an hour so earlier. Maybe the Elysian cellars had befuddled his wits.
‘However,’ said Miles Devereux, ‘this, as my superior officer would say, is speculation, little better than guesswork. Guesswork, he says about three times a week, never won a conviction at the Bailey. Is it time to interview Sir Peregrine yet, do you think?’
‘I think it’s too soon. I must be off in a moment. I have to tell our friends in Fakenham about the latest developments. Before we talk to Sir Peregrine I think we need to talk to the experts about that codicil. I don’t think we should rely on my brother-in-law’s view of the thing, even if he has talked to the man who thinks it’s a fake. I’m going to ask him to send you the names of the principal experts who thought it was genuine. I’ll call on the man from Cambridge on my way back from Norfolk. I’m not sure we’ll end up any the wiser, but we’ve got to do it.’
‘I say, what fun,’ said Inspector Miles Devereux, rising from his chair and dancing a little jig in front of a sixteenth-century prime warden dressed from head to toe in black. ‘I wouldn’t dare say it to my fellow policemen, Lord Powerscourt, but I can say it you. Black Death! Ancient codicils! Murder most foul! What fun! What tremendous fun!’
Inspector Albert Fletcher, the officer in charge of the investigation into the death in the Jesus Hospital, was a worried man. Even the news of the Silkworkers codicil did little to cheer him up. He could see that there was at last a motive, a clear motive, but the thought of fourteenth-century documents and clever modern forgers filled him with gloom. He had so far failed to solve his first murder case. He was not living up to his promise, the bright future so many had predicted for him. Nothing he had tried so far seemed to have yielded very much. He summoned his sergeant and gave more instructions.
‘I know we’ve asked house to house for anything strange or any strange persons seen on the morning of the murder,’ Inspector Fletcher began. ‘I think I got the times wrong. And the ring around the hospital was probably too small. I want you to get all the men you can find and begin house-to-house inquiries in a five-mile radius of the hospital. And ask about the two days before the incident as well as the morning of death, could you? Some visiting murderer could have hidden himself away down there in those boathouses. Look sharp about it now.’
The sergeant always knew when his master was in a bad mood. It was pointless to raise any objections. He saluted smartly and left the room as fast as he could. Inspectors, he said to himself, bloody inspectors. Surely they could remember their own trials and tribulations when they were mere sergeants. Begging for uniformed men from their superiors to take part in what the superiors would regard as ridiculous fancies was one of the most difficult things in a sergeant’s life. And the keeper of these good men and true, one Superintendent Maurice Trotter, had a very pretty daughter who sang in the sergeant’s church choir. He was thinking of striking up a conversation with her
