that corridor first thing in the morning, even if you were disguised as a postman. They must have been known by sight to some of the pupils from the time they spent around the town with their mother. But I’m not ruling anything out just yet. I just need to find out what they were up to that evening.’
‘Something to do with women, perhaps,’ said Inspector Devereux darkly. ‘Maybe they were having a joint massage with the fair Frankie. I can’t see her being too particular about the clientele if the money was right.’
Inspector Grime bent down to tie up a shoelace. ‘I know what I’ll do,’ he said. ‘I’m going back to that cell right now. I’ve tried this before and it usually works. I should have thought of it before.’
‘What are you going to tell them? That you suspect them of consorting with prostitutes? Seducing young women beneath the age of consent?’
‘Worse than that, Devereux, much worse. I’ll give them an hour to make up their minds. If they don’t tell, their mother will be notified that they’ve been arrested.’
‘On what grounds?’
‘I shall tell them that as they are so reluctant to admit what they were doing, I shall inform their mother that they are being held under suspicion after being arrested in a brothel. A homosexual brothel. That might do the trick.’
A letter from Paris had arrived for Powerscourt. Lady Lucy watched him open it at the breakfast table.
‘It’s from my friend, Monsieur Olivier Brouzet,’ he told her, munching absent-mindedly on a piece of toast.
My dear Powerscourt,
Please forgive me for not replying sooner to your inquiries about the unfortunate man at the Jesus Hospital. Urgent business brought me back to Paris in rather a hurry. I have spoken to the superior officer of the man you mentioned, Colonel Arbuthnot. I have also involved one of our agents in Berlin. The dead man, Meredith, made four trips to Hamburg in the last few years, always staying in the same hotel. He was a courier, taking messages from his masters in London to their people in the field. He was not a spy. The idea that the Germans might have turned him into a double agent is nonsense. The colonel was trying to lead you up the garden path there. In short, I doubt very much if his activities in the murky waters of intelligence had anything to do with his death.
With best wishes,
Yours sincerely,
Olivier Brouzet
Powerscourt handed the letter over. ‘Another door closes, my love.’
‘What do you think this bit means, Francis?’ said Lady Lucy after she finished reading the letter. “I have also involved one of our agents in Berlin.” What sort of agent would know in this level of detail about somebody else’s secret service?’
‘There’s only one thing it can mean, Lucy. The French must have an agent inside the German intelligence outfit. That’s the only place they could have confirmed their information.’
‘Great God,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Do you think we have an agent in there in Berlin too? Do the Germans have a spy inside our outfit?’
Powerscourt smiled. ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised.’
PART FOUR
17
‘Lord Powerscourt, delighted to meet you.’ Colonel Somerset White had a head shaped like an egg with a few wisps of hair above the ears. He had a solid moustache and a red complexion as if he spent a lot of time out of doors. The Oaks was a modern house, looking, Powerscourt thought, as if its owner might have designed it himself after a long spell in the Deep South of the United States. A great veranda ran round the building as if the inhabitants of Buckinghamshire needed deep shade for half the year.
‘How is my friend Smith Dorrien?’ he inquired. ‘Temper under control, eh?’
‘I’m not sure I’d go that far,’ said Powerscourt. ‘One fellow seemed to be getting well roasted before I went in and there was another man being trussed for the oven as I left.’
‘Dear me,’ said Somerset White. ‘He should be more careful, he really should. The pity of it is that he’s done more than anybody to improve the lot of the ordinary soldier. It’s the officers he has the rows with.’
‘He was very helpful to me,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Now then, let me tell you what my business is about.’ For the second time that day Powerscourt went through the catalogue of murders, the list of suspects, the marks on the bodies that he was now beginning to suspect might have been inflicted by knobkerries from the Zulu wars.
‘We’d better go over to the barn, Lord Powerscourt. I think I’ve got a couple of them over there. I just hope we’ll be able to find them.’
Powerscourt wondered what conditions in the barn-cum-museum would be like if their owner was unsure about finding his exhibits.
The first section of Somerset White’s building was all order and neatness, row upon row of ancient swords and shields and lances and daggers, all neatly lined up on trestle tables down one side of the barn. Each item had a label in White’s spidery hand beside it. Along the other side were pistols, guns, flintlocks, blunderbusses, Baker rifles from Wellington’s time, even, to Powerscourt’s great delight, an early version of Congreve’s rockets from the Peninsular Wars which usually caused more panic in the companies of their owners with their boomerang flight path than they did in the ranks of their enemies. Once more the labels bore witness to hours and hours of research, with a description of the firepower of each weapon, its probable date of construction and a list of the battles where they would have been used.
In the middle of the barn there was a rough partition with a door in the centre. On the far side it was chaos. There was a great pile of stuff in the centre of the floor, weapons of every shape and size, bits of uniforms, regimental colours, small pieces of artillery, curved swords, straight swords, krises and tulwars from Ceylon and India. And that was just the surface. God only knew, Powerscourt thought, what was underneath.
‘Sorry about this,’ said Somerset White. ‘You need to understand how I collect all this stuff. Auctions maybe in provincial towns, never in London, house sales where the owners sell everything in the place after a death, a few advertisements in the local newspapers in places near Aldershot and Camberley. Our ancestors were a pretty rapacious lot. I don’t know if you were aware of that, Lord Powerscourt. Sometimes I have thought that there must have been some enormous emporium by the quayside, Harrods International perhaps, or Harrods India, where the victorious officers and men could buy up booty to take home with them. The raw material, if you like, for a triumph, not through the streets and temples of Rome, but at the Limes or the Old Rectory in Bracknell or Pangbourne. Anyway, if you keep records of annual deaths in The Times, you can work out that more people die in the time between October and April than they do in the rest of the year. Pretty obvious, I should say. So that’s when I do my collecting, attending the auctions and so on. In the summer I sort it all out so I can display the stuff on the shelves. I’ve got a sword and gun man from the Wallace Collection up in London who comes down to give me a hand with the dates.’ Somerset White paused and wiped his hand on the side of his trousers. Powerscourt wondered what was going to happen next.
White grabbed a couple of aprons from a hook on the back of the door. ‘You’d better put this on,’ he said. ‘It’s amazing how much dirt and dust these old weapons collect on their journeys here. Now then, this what I always say to myself on these occasions, rummage, rummage!’
With that White got down on his hands and knees and began riffling through the heap of assorted weaponry in front of him. A collection of tunics, sashes, spears and cutlasses began forming another pile to his left. Powerscourt, on the opposite side of the mound of weapons, began to do the same.
‘It’s amazing the stuff people hang on to,’ said White, pausing briefly to examine a long straight spear with a lethal blade. ‘Do you know, I’ve got three white shirts worn by Charles the First on the morning of his execution at
