the Banqueting House. I’ve got four pairs of boots as worn by Lord Cardigan at the charge of the Light Brigade. And I’ve got five nightshirts as worn by Admiral Nelson during his time with Lady Hamilton. Not exactly sure he’d have bothered with nightshirts myself.’
‘Colonel,’ said Powerscourt, his right arm deep into his vast heap of stuff, ‘you don’t, I suppose, have any idea where your knobkerries might be? I mean, can you remember when you bought them and where they might be in our treasure trove?’
‘I haven’t a clue,’ said Somerset White cheerfully. ‘If I’d known where the bloody things were, we wouldn’t have had to embark on this fishing expedition, would we?’
Powerscourt reflected bitterly that it was like fishing without bait. He felt his hand touching the hilt of a sword. Pulling firmly, he drew the weapon out of the pile. It was like no sword he had ever seen. It had a short blade. One side had been cut away in sections so that a row of serrated indentations like irregular teeth ran down the blade to the tip.
‘What in God’s name is this contraption, Colonel?’ said Powerscourt, waving the object above his head like some demented warrior from long ago.
‘Do you know,’ said the colonel, sitting on the floor rather than rising to his feet, ‘that’s only the second one of those things I have ever seen. It’s Italian, I think, and it’s called a sword breaker. Your enemy’s sword would be destroyed in the teeth. All you’d have to do would be to finish him off. It’s as if you’ve disarmed your opponent, effectively.’
Powerscourt put it to one side and plunged back into the pile. He had decided to try a new policy now. Rather than going straight into the section in front of him, he decided that a better approach might be to open everything up, to scoop out great swathes of weaponry until the top resembled the surface of a volcano, a shallow shape like a dish, that enabled you to see much more of the assorted memorabilia. He was just sitting back to enjoy his new creation when there was a shout of triumph to his left.
‘I told you there were a couple of the bloody things here!’ said Colonel Somerset White, pulling out a pair of sticks with thistle-shaped markings on the circular ball at the top. ‘This one has twice as many spikes or studs as the other one, not sure what that means for your corpses. But you’d better have these, Powerscourt, as you said, you’ll need them for the medical men to pronounce one way or another.’
‘Can you remember where you got them, Colonel? Something might come back to you if they’re a fairly recent purchase.’
Somerset White got slowly to his feet. He looked as though he might have trouble with his back. He took off his apron very slowly.
‘I think I’ve got it. They were at an auction in Basingstoke, property of a Major Digby Holmes, who had recently passed away. The auctioneer, I remember now, said the knobkerries had come back with the major from the Zulu wars. Mind you, bloody auctioneers would say anything to sell you things. I’ve had one or two real disasters from dodgy auctioneers. Maybe Major Holmes fought in that battle with the unpronounceable name you were telling me about. Never fought in Africa myself, even managed to avoid the Boer War. Served in India all my time. Enough of this. I expect you want to be on your way with our little friends here, Lord Powerscourt. If I can help in any other way, please let me know.’
‘Thank you so much, Colonel, there is one thing. Does the Major leave a widow behind him, or was he single at the end?’
‘There is a widow, a Mrs Laetitia Holmes, I believe. They said at the auctioneers that she’d been wanting to throw out all her husband’s military stuff for years. His end was an opportunity not to be missed.’
Johnny Fitzgerald was beginning to think he had been abandoned, rather in the fashion of Robinson Crusoe. True, the rather louche purlieus of the Elysian Fields, illuminated from time to time by the visitations of Frankie the masseuse on missions of mercy to Sir Peregrine, were more than comfortable, certainly better than Crusoe’s island. Johnny had noticed that Frankie carried a large handbag on occasions, filled, he presumed, with the instruments of torture of the masseuse’s trade. He still spent a number of evenings in the Rose and Crown entertaining the old men of the Jesus Hospital. He had continued his policy of lunching the silkmen one at a time and it was on one of those occasions, on a bleak day in Buckinghamshire with the rain lashing against the windows of the hotel, that he hit the jackpot.
He was entertaining Freddy Butcher, Number Two, a cheerful little man who had once been a bus driver by trade and had family connections with the Silkworkers. Number Two was cleanshaven with a great red mark down the right-hand side of his face. One section of informed opinion in the almshouse said that he had crashed his bus on the Clerkenwell Road, killing a couple of elderly passengers. The other view was that he had been caught misbehaving with the wife of a well-known criminal who had set about his face with a knuckleduster.
By this stage the first bottle of Pomerol had come to an end, and Johnny, who had only had a couple of glasses, ordered a refill. Something told Johnny that Number Two wasn’t used to this amount of alcohol at lunchtime. Maybe he would let slip something important. Johnny poured him another glass. Two plates of roast duck arrived, groaning with apple sauce and roast potatoes and parsnips.
‘I’ve felt for some time,’ said Johnny, ‘for all the convivial evenings in the pub, that people are holding back on me. There’s something they’re not telling me. If somebody would tell me, maybe the mystery would clear up and you could all be left in peace.’ Johnny had been a foot soldier in the great demonstration to the Maidenhead police station, reasoning that there needed to be somebody able bodied present in case one the old boys had a heart attack or keeled over from some other ailment. In the event the old boys had cut quite a dash, marching the last hundred yards in their best uniforms, attracting a good deal of public sympathy for their efforts and an article in the local newspaper.
It was the red wine that did for Freddy Butcher, Number Two, and possibly for Number Four, Bill Smith, known as Smithy, as well.
‘You’re quite right, of course,’ said Number Two, holding up his glass for a refill. ‘We have been holding something back.’
Johnny waited for a forkful of duck and parsnip to go down.
‘There was a feud, you see, it had been going on for months.’
Johnny remained silent, hoping for more intelligence.
‘Number Four and Number Twenty, the man who was killed, they had been at each other’s throats, you see.’
‘What was it about?’
‘Well, nobody knew for certain, I think it had to do with something in Number Twenty’s past. I think he may have told Smithy about whatever it was and Number Four took against Number Twenty from then on. Number Four was forever telling anybody who would listen that Number Twenty was a bloody coward.’
‘When was the last time they fell out?’ asked Johnny.
‘The day before Number Twenty was killed actually. This time they had the row in the middle of the quadrangle, nearly coming to blows.’
‘Did anybody hear what they were saying?’
‘Oh yes. It seems odd now, but that Abel Meredith, Number Twenty, was shouting at Number Four, “if you call me a coward once more, I’m bloody well going to kill you, so I am.”’
‘Wrong way round,’ said Johnny
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Well, it wasn’t Number Twenty who did the killing. He was the victim, wasn’t he? What happened then?’
‘What happened then?’ Number Two, Freddy Butcher, who had been making his way pretty steadily down the second bottle, sounded suddenly as though the drink might have got the better of him. Then he seemed to get a second wind, cheered on by another large draught of the Pomerol. ‘Well, Warden Monk came out of his office wearing his best blue cravat and told them to shut up. He said that if there were any more rows like that, he would have them thrown out of the hospital, dumped outside the front door with their belongings in a paper bag. He sounded as though he meant it too.’
‘How very interesting,’ said Johnny. ‘Did Warden Monk also tell you all not to mention the row to the police or anybody else?’
‘How did you know that? He did, as a matter of fact. He said that anybody who told the police would also be thrown out, dumped by the front gate and the rest of it, complete with possessions in a paper bag. It’s a pretty
