Half an hour later Powerscourt went to look at Abel Meredith’s room before the police took the contents away. He remembered suddenly the instructions given to new entrants to the Royal Hospital Chelsea, that men could bring precious little with them for there was precious little room in their quarters, and that earthly possessions were not needed whether they were going on to heaven or to hell. Here Powerscourt found the clothes, the few books Abel Meredith had brought with him to what he must have thought would be his last resting place on earth. The inhabitants of these almshouses came here to live out their last days and their hosts would not welcome the prospect of wading through a mountain of personal belongings when the residents went to the cemetery and the grave. One thing did strike him. Most people, he thought, would have brought some mementoes of their past life with them, family photographs if they had any, letters from relatives or from a workplace, some keepsake left them in a relative’s will. There was none of that. Abel Meredith had arrived with a few spare shirts and trousers and a jacket and a few books and personal knick-knacks, but nothing else. It was as if he had deliberately obliterated most of his sixty-four years on earth. Had he something to hide? There were no official documents of any kind. There was, he noticed, no will to be found among his few papers. He wondered again about the strange marks on the dead man’s chest. One of the doctors in the hospital had talked of witchcraft, of strange African practices come to an unsuspecting Buckinghamshire. Powerscourt didn’t think that could be true, Africa was too far away. But if they weren’t African, where in God’s name had they come from? The mountains of Peru? The Gobi desert? The high passes of the Hindu Kush? He was lost.
Inspector Fletcher came to join him, clutching a telegram. It was another missive from Sir Peregrine and told him of another murder at a property linked to the Silkworkers Company, in Norfolk this time, another murder marked by the mysterious imprint of the thistle deeply embossed on the dead man’s chest. Powerscourt was ordered to go to the scene as soon as possible.
Allison’s School in Fakenham had been founded in the sixteenth century by Sir George Allison to replace a priory that had been abolished in the dissolution of the monasteries. Sir George endowed the school handsomely with a number of parishes in Norfolk and further properties in the City of London. The entire endowment was placed in the hands of the Silkworkers Company of London where it has remained to this day. There were over a hundred and fifty boys in the school, with the normal range of teaching and ancillary staff. The victim was the bursar. He was found in his office — pen in hand over a set of accounts on his table, strangled, with great purple weals on his neck — shortly after ten o’clock in the morning when he was due to attend a meeting with the headmaster concerning action against those parents who were late with their fees. His shirt had been ripped open to receive the imprint of the thistle that had disfigured the body of Abel Meredith at the Jesus Hospital in Marlow.
Roderick Gill, the bursar, was nearing retirement in his fifty-fifth year, with fifteen years’ service at the school. His office was on a long corridor that everybody in the school used, from the teachers to the most junior boy to the cleaning staff.
Powerscourt reflected on his train to Norfolk that the killer must have travelled this line yesterday, on his way to his second murder. Surely someone would have seen him. Or had the killer access to a large and powerful motor car which could have taken him to East Anglia with less chance of being spotted? He wondered if these two dates at the end of January carried any particular significance.
Another murder, another Inspector of police. Not for the first time Powerscourt wondered about the wisdom of having so many different police forces in the country. Surely these two cases must be linked. Yet two separate forces would conduct their own investigations, with the possibility of much information falling into the cracks between the two inquiries.
Allison’s School was in a state close to chaos. The porter at the front gate blamed the telephone. Mothers from near and far had heard of the murder and had come in person to seek assurances from the headmaster that their child was safe and should not be taken home immediately. Only a timely directive from the policeman on the case, Inspector William Grime, that all the boys were to remain in school until they had been questioned by members of his force, prevented a mass exodus. The queue to speak to the headmaster stretched for fifteen yards outside his office and out into the quadrangle. Powerscourt saw as his cab dropped him off that the mothers were growing more rather than less distraught. ‘There he was, that poor bursar man,’ he heard one of them say to her neighbour in the line, ‘sitting at his desk, and then, whoosh, he’s gone! Who’s to say the killer couldn’t do the same to my Georgie or any of the other boys? They still haven’t caught the murderer, you know. The brute’s still at large, waiting to kill again. He’s probably hiding in the grounds.’
Some of the boys were in lessons, though Powerscourt doubted if they would learn very much on this day. Others were talking to the policemen in a geography classroom made over to the constabulary. Some of the younger boys, Powerscourt was told later, reported sightings of a bearded man climbing over the chapel roof early that morning; others mentioned a tramp who looked remarkably like the headmaster, who had taken to hiding round the back of the cricket pavilion. The boys had not yet learnt, Powerscourt was glad to discover, of the strange mark left imprinted over the dead man’s heart.
It was late that afternoon before some sort of order was restored to the headmaster’s quarters. John Davies, the headmaster, had agreed to brief a group of mothers every morning in the main hotel in the town. He had secured, he told Powerscourt, an undertaking that no boys would be withdrawn until the police were satisfied with their collection of evidence. Inspector Grime had apparently indicated that that day might be some way away. The police had no wish for potential witnesses to be dispersed across central and southern England. Leaning back in his chair, Davies told Powerscourt that the affair could close the school down unless the murder was solved quickly. One mother taking her son away, he reckoned, could be dismissed as eccentric, two could probably be finessed as over-cautious, but let three go and the trickle could become a flood. Headmaster Davies was in his early fifties, brown hair beginning to turn grey above his ears. Years of power over classrooms and colleagues had left him with authority stamped on his face, a Roman consul in the glory years of the Republic perhaps, or a viceory of some far- flung outpost of Empire.
‘This is every headmaster’s nightmare, Lord Powerscourt, some out-of-the-way event like an outbreak of an infectious disease or a murder that makes the parents wonder if their child is safe. Stopping them taking their children away becomes like Canute trying to halt the incoming tide. I’ve just about managed it so far, but the water is lapping round my ankles and swirling round my calves at the back. God, I’ll be glad when all this is over and we can get back to serious problems like Form Three’s appalling French and the lack of a decent goalkeeper for the football team. You and I know perfectly well, Lord Powerscourt, that seventeen-year-old boys are quite capable of looking after themselves. But devoted mothers would not see the matter in those terms. Once the drip turned into a stream, Allison’s School could be empty in a matter of days. And think,’ he said finally, rising from his desk to prowl around his office, ‘think of the effect it’s going to have on recruitment for future years. Send your child to Allison’s where members of staff are throttled in their offices. Send your son to a school where the bursar is killed in broad daylight. Welcome to the murder class.’
The headmaster sent Powerscourt on his way, saying that he had called an emergency meeting of the governors, some of whom were on the evening train from London. He recommended him to the bursar’s closest friend in the school, a maths teacher called Joshua Peabody.
The maths teacher wore some of the strongest glasses Powerscourt had ever seen. The poor man, he thought, must be nearly blind. Receding hair, shirt buttons fastened out of line and a general air of absent- mindedness gave Peabody the appearance of a professor of some abstract subject like linguistics or Indo-Arabic languages, whose wife has recently left him. Powerscourt wondered what the boys thought of him.
Peabody led Powerscourt out of the school on to a path that circled the football pitches and took them some distance away from the main buildings. Only when they were well out of earshot did he speak.
‘This is a terrible business,’ he began, kicking a punctured football into the long grass, ‘terrible. I can scarcely believe it, even now. It’s so unfair that it should happen to Roderick.’
‘Perhaps you could tell me about him. It always helps.’
‘Well, I don’t know anything at all about his early life, where he was born, where he went to school, that sort of thing. He never talked about growing up, not to me, at any rate. I only got to know him when I joined the staff here nine years ago. He was never the heart and soul of the staffroom, Roderick, if you know what I mean. Maybe we teachers are always a little uneasy in the company of bursars, I don’t know. I do know that he took his job very seriously. The headmaster was fond of saying that if all the teachers kept their books as well as the bursar, his life would be much easier.’
‘So how did you become friends?’ asked Powerscourt, noting that the net at the back of the football pitch needed mending, another item of expenditure to be recorded in the bursar’s ledgers.
