‘What is it about them that makes you so cross, William?’
Burke laughed. ‘I’ll tell you what a fellow told me a couple of years back. He belonged to these livery companies the way other people belong to clubs like the Garrick or the Carlton. He was a member of five or six of the things, maybe more, I can’t remember exactly. Do you know what he told me about them? I’ve always thought it rather sharp. He said they reminded him of school. I don’t know how many new public schools have opened in the last fifty years, the man went on. Heaps and heaps of them, all busy inventing ancient traditions as fast as they can to impress the parents. My man claimed each livery company was like a house in one of those new public schools. Wardens and so on are the prefects, fancy uniforms and so forth.’
Powerscourt had a sudden picture of one of the prefects at Allison’s: ‘Walk, don’t run in the corridor.’ At least, he thought, they had a couple of hundred years rather than a couple of decades to invent their past.
‘All the different houses,’ Burke went on, unaware that his brother-in-law had temporarily abandoned him in favour of school corridors, ‘get together every now and then to elect the head boy, except he’s now called the Lord Mayor of London. Most of the pupils going to these new public schools are first-generation buyers. If the fathers had been to one of the old foundations like Eton or Winchester, they’d probably have sent their sons there. Those places are stuffed out with the sons of old boys, for God’s sake. Same thing when the men from the new schools come to the City. First-generation buyers again, most of their families have no tradition of working here. These damned livery companies are like a home from home. Welcome back to your house at school. Welcome back to the uniforms. Welcome back to the school food and the dreadful puddings. Welcome back to the prefects. This is England in nineteen hundred and ten.’ William Burke looked at his watch.
‘I’m going to have to go in a minute, Francis,’ he said, standing up to check his clothes in the mirror. ‘I’ve left the most important bit till the end. The first thing is that many of these companies are rich, very rich. Their members have been leaving them land and houses and baskets and gloves and silk and gold and God knows what else in the City and elsewhere for centuries. They’re stuffed with money. What’s more, your lot, Honourable Company of the Ancient Mistery of Silkworkers, to give them their full title, are one of the richest of the lot. And,’ Burke brushed a speck of dust off his formal trousers with stripes down the sides, ‘there’s something very strange going on about the money and the Silkworkers. I can’t be precise and I wouldn’t want to give you wrong information, not with all these corpses with strange marks lying about the place, but I have feelers out. I may pick up some hard information at this dinner tonight. I haven’t finished with them yet.’
There was a knock at the door. A porter in dark trousers and a blazer marked on the pocket with Burke’s bank emblem of a flying eagle informed him that Mrs Burke was waiting for him downstairs.
‘There you are, William,’ said Powerscourt happily to his brother-in-law. ‘Even your porter is in a kind of livery. So are you, in a way, now I come to think about it. Can’t get away from them.’
Burke laughed and took his wife away to sup with the ghosts of those executed or murdered in the Tower, Anne Boleyn and Sir Walter Raleigh, Lady Jane Grey and the Earl of Essex.
‘Three corpses in ten days, Francis, that must be some sort of record, even for you.’
Powerscourt’s closest friend Johnny Fitzgerald was draped across a sofa in the Powerscourt house in Markham Square, clutching a glass of red wine firmly in his left hand. He had just returned from a research trip to southern France, working on his latest book on the birds of the Midi and the Auvergne. Two earlier volumes on birds of the British Isles had sold well.
‘Do you think that’s the end of the road, or do you expect more strange bodies to turn up next week?’
‘Johnny,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I’ll be honest with you. I haven’t a clue. I wish I knew. I really do. Part of the problem now is going to be travelling from here down to Marlow and then up to Norfolk all the time. You can’t do a great deal of detecting on a train or in the Silver Ghost.’
‘Let’s hope there aren’t any more murders, my love.’ Powerscourt’s wife, Lady Lucy, was making a close inspection of a catalogue in her lap that was filled with advertisements for antiquarian booksellers and their wares. She had been wondering if she should buy Francis a first edition of the works of John Donne as a birthday present.
‘Those poor old boys down there in Marlow,’ she went one, ‘they must be terrified. Nobody goes into an almshouse expecting to be murdered, do they? Certainly nobody we know. And the mothers of those boys at the school, they must be having a dreadful time, not sure if their children are alive or dead.’
‘I expect, Francis, that you will have some particularly disagreeable task for me to perform in the usual fashion?’ Johnny had been Powerscourt’s companion in arms in all his detection cases. ‘By the way,’ he held his glass up to the light and peered happily at the dark red wine, ‘this isn’t your usual tipple. Where does it come from? I’d like to order a case or two from your wine merchant.’
Powerscourt’s brain was far away, watching the waters swirl round the Silkworkers Hall. He wondered if the murderer had hidden in there all night. He wondered where the murderer was now and if he might have made his first mistake.
He smiled at his friend. ‘It’s Italian, that wine. You might be suspicious, I certainly was, about the lack of label but the new fellow at Berry Bros and Rudd said there was a reason for that. Printing press for the labels collapsed apparently, the Italians had forgotten to put any oil in it for months. Eyewitnesses said the noise of metal strangling metal was incredible, the sort of thing you might read about in H. G. Wells. And it went on and on until the machine was just a heap of bits of metal lying all over the floor and the dust so thick you could hardly see across the warehouse. Brunello di Montalcino, it’s called, Johnny. Comes from a place called Montalcino, south of Florence.’
Johnny Fitzgerald looked at his friend suspiciously. ‘That sounded like a rather long-winded way of avoiding telling me about some really horrible job you’ve got for me, something so distasteful that even you are scared of mentioning it.’
Powerscourt laughed. ‘Not true, Johnny, not true. I have, I must admit, been thinking for some time about where to deploy your talents to best advantage in this case. With the pupils of Allison’s School perhaps? Or their mothers? Silkworkers here in London? Maybe. But all the evidence seems to me to point in another direction. It is a choice between the young and the old. The place for you, Johnny, is in the Rose and Crown, High Street, Marlow. Your mission — you can see it as well as I do — is to make friends with the old boys. “That new chap is always buying people drinks, especially if they come from the hospital.” I’ve even booked you a room at the posh hotel, Johnny, just down the road.’
‘How long for?’ asked Johnny Fitzgerald, looking yet more suspicious.
‘A week or so in the first instance,’ said Powerscourt cheerfully. ‘We can always review the position in a couple of days.’
‘I see. Tell me this, Francis, do you want me to raise the subject of the murder straight away?’