relevant to the murder. Or is it?’
Powerscourt took another sip of his coffee. ‘It’s very unlikely that it is relevant, but it might be. I don’t think we should dismiss it altogether. If nothing else it might be a useful lever against Sir Peregrine. Now then, somebody has to talk to the wretched man, ask him what he was doing down there in Marlow late at night. Maybe we should talk to the chauffeur too. What do you say, Inspector Fletcher?’
Inspector Fletcher turned a bright shade of pink. ‘I’m happy to do that, my lord. The thing is’ — he paused and gathered his courage — ‘I don’t think he thought very highly of me when we met before. In fact he complained about me to my Chief Constable. I know he did.’
‘I think that’s commendable, your telling us that,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I really do. But don’t you see, we can turn that to our advantage. If I go and see him, it’ll put him on his guard. Same with Devereux here. But if it’s you, he won’t bother to put up his defences at all if he has a low opinion of you already. Much better from our point of view.’
Inspector Fletcher managed a small smile. ‘Right, my lord, I shall go and call on him tomorrow and see what he has to say for himself. I’ll take my sergeant for protection and moral support.’
‘Good man,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Now then, what do you think of this codicil business, gentlemen?’
‘Before we do that, my lord, I’ve just thought of something.’ Inspector Devereux looked excited all of a sudden. ‘Why don’t we just arrest Sir Peregrine now? He was on site at the Silkworkers Hall the night of the murder there. We only have his word for it that he left when he did. He was in the vicinity hours before the first murder. In both cases he had a very powerful motive for killing his victims, they stood between him and a fortune. I’m sure any jury would look kindly on such a prosecution, my lord.’
‘Maybe they would,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I have wondered myself if we shouldn’t arrest him. But I don’t think our case is strong enough. We have a possible motive, we have proximity to the deed itself, but we don’t have any hard evidence. Not yet at any rate. And if we picked him up now, London’s finest solicitors would be on our backs straight away. London’s finest barristers would be on parade at the Old Bailey. For the time being, I think we should consider the codicil. Inspector Fletcher, you have not been exposed in person to the academics who are arguing about the thing. What is your view of the matter?’
‘We don’t have much to do with codicils and livery companies down in Marlow, my lord,’ Fletcher began, and inspected his boots for a moment. ‘What strikes me as curious is the discrepancy in the payments. Twenty guineas for the man in Cambridge, five hundred for the man in London. That sounds pretty damned fishy, even in Buckinghamshire.’
‘Your man in Cambridge, Lord Powerscourt,’ said Devereux, ‘he said that the London fellow must be the forger with that sort of payment. Why on earth did Claypole tell me that in the first place? He didn’t have to, he didn’t have to say a word about it. “My financial affairs are private,” that sort of thing.’
‘Vanity?’ said Powerscourt. ‘He seems to have been pretty keen to tell you he had to be in the House of Lords very soon. Very clever people can get superiority complexes, they think they’re above everybody else. I’m very certain of one thing though. It makes a great hole in any possible defence for Sir Peregrine in court.’
‘How?’ said the two Inspectors, more or less in unison.
‘Suppose you are the counsel for the prosecution, gentlemen. You line up a little collection of these academics who gave their views on the codicil. Up comes Professor Number One, he does his stuff. “How much were you paid?” “Twenty guineas.” Professor Number Two, “How much were you paid?” “Twenty guineas.” Up comes Professor Number Three. “How much were you paid?” “Twenty guineas.” Now it’s Professor Wilson Claypole’s turn in the witness box. “How much were you paid?” “Five hundred guineas” “Five hundred guineas? Would you just like to repeat that figure, Professor Claypole, so the gentlemen of the jury can be in no doubt of it?” “Five hundred guineas.” With a skilful barrister the jury would be left in little doubt that Claypole was the forger.’
‘And once we know that Claypole was the forger,’ Miles Devereux was now walking up and down the room, ‘the whole codicil sideshow disappears. Sir Peregrine’s plans collapse like a pack of cards. The man’s a crook.’
‘He may be a crook,’ said Powerscourt, ‘but that doesn’t necessarily make him a murderer.’
The headmaster of Allison’s School was a worried man. Even now, many days after the murder, no boy had come forward with any details of the fake postman who had arrived in the school to strangle its bursar. The boys had been invited to speak to Inspector Grime after the second visit. None had done so. The headmaster had tried speaking, in confidence, to the boys he considered most influential with their schoolfellows. Nothing had happened. He had enlisted the help of the local bishop, the Bishop of Norwich. That mighty churchman had preached an eloquent sermon on the theme of render unto Cesar the things that are Caesar’s and render unto God the things that are God’s from St Matthew’s Gospel. He spoke of the obligations on Christians to pay their taxes, to support the civil authorities, to be law-abiding citizens. The headmaster thought at the time that short of telling the boys to tell what they had seen on either of those days, the bishop had done all he could to persuade some boys, impressed by the weighty presence of a prince of the Church among them, to tell what they knew. The bishop’s message fell on stony ground. Now the headmaster’s last hope lay in the slender figure of Lady Lucy Powerscourt, pretending to be Mrs Hamilton, the French language teacher. The headmaster had little hope in that direction.
That evening Inspector Grime, at Powerscourt’s suggestion, was taking dinner with Lady Lucy at the Crown Hotel in Fakenham. The Inspector was wearing his best suit for the occasion. But he, like the headmaster, was in despair. He was not making any progress, he told her sadly. His principal suspect, Jude the stonemason, seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth. The boys of Allison’s School would tell him nothing. His Chief Constable was making ominous noises, threatening, so Grime had heard on the grapevine, to take him off the case altogether. When Lady Lucy moved the conversation on to Inspector Grime himself, a sad picture emerged. His wife had died some years before. There had been no children. He had his aged mother living with him and her memory had gone, she was liable to wander off into the fields or on to the main road if she was not watched twenty-four hours a day. The Inspector paid a woman to look after the old lady when he was at work. At weekends he did it himself. It was, he said, running his fingers through the remains of his dark hair, getting him down. Lady Lucy listened with a sympathetic ear and congratulated the Inspector on caring for his mother. Apart from expressions of sympathy, she felt there was little she could do. To tell Inspector Grime about her one tiny glimmer of good news would, she thought, give him false hope and, perhaps, false optimism. The boy who had followed her to the hotel might be sufficiently besotted to tell her something important. But she would certainly tell Francis when he came the following day. The tiny glimmer would come, if it was going to come, the following afternoon shortly after four o’clock.
Inspector Fletcher checked once more the polish on his boots. He fiddled yet again with his tie. He and Sergeant Donaldson were in the reception of Sir Peregrine’s vast headquarters in the City of London. Teams of secretaries and stenographers and dark-coated financiers hurried in and out of the building with an air of great purpose. Sergeant Donaldson thought to himself that he much preferred the quiet backwater of Maidenhead where the police knew most of the people and life passed by at a much slower pace. Here everything moved so quickly.
Earlier that day the policemen had received a valuable piece of ammunition for their interview with Sir Peregrine. Warden Monk had replied to their messages and presented himself at the police station. Yes, he admitted readily enough, he had been seeing Sir Peregrine at the hotel, late the other evening. He had met him there before at that time. It was, he said belligerently, a free country, wasn’t it? A man could go where he wanted and talk with whomever he wanted, couldn’t he? As far as he, Thomas Monk, was aware, there weren’t any laws against any of that, were there? Not yet at any rate. He and Sir Peregrine had been discussing Jesus Hospital business. No, he did not want to tell the officers exactly what had been discussed. That was private. Both Inspector Fletcher and his sergeant were sure that Monk was hiding something, but they could not tell what it was. Inspector Fletcher felt sure that news of the interview would reach Sir Peregrine long before he and Sergeant Donaldson crossed the portals of his domain. Not for the first time he cursed the invention of the telegraph.
A tall slim young lady in a fashionable trailing skirt brought them up to Sir Peregrine’s office on the top floor. The room was huge, with spectacular views over the City of London. Many of these captains of industry filled their walls with hunting prints or views of English cathedrals. Sir Peregrine’s walls were hung with battles. Before he sat down, Inspector Fletcher caught a glimpse of a sweaty Leonidas holding the pass at Thermopylae.
‘Thank you, Miss Davis,’ boomed Sir Peregrine, as the young lady ushered the policemen on to a couple of chairs. ‘Tea, Miss Davis.’ She had almost reached the door when the qualification came, ‘For one.’
Bloody rude, thought Inspector Fletcher. Bloody rude.
