‘Absolutely not. I want you to talk about anything other than sudden death to begin with. I want you to encircle them from a distance, if you know what I mean.’
Johnny stomped off for a dinner with his publisher. Powerscourt looked over at Lady Lucy. She had closed her catalogue. Tomorrow, she had decided, she would go and buy this John Donne. It would give Francis so much pleasure. She had felt rather lost as the men had sat here and made their plans.
‘My love,’ said Powerscourt, who knew better than anybody the vital role his wife had played in so many of his investigations, ‘you mustn’t think you have been left out of this inquiry. Nothing could be further from the truth.’ He stroked her hair.
‘What do you want me to do, Francis?’ she asked.
‘For the moment I want you, like that Scottish regiment, to keep watch and to pray. You are what one great commander described as the most important of his forces in the lead-up to a battle. Think of Napoleon’s reserve, the Imperial Guard who never lost a battle till they met their Waterloo. Just for now, Lucy, you are the reinforcements who will carry the day, like Napoleon’s reserve.’
Sergeant Peter Donaldson of the Maidenhead force was feeling great sympathy with his counterpart from The Pirates of Penzance who complained that ‘a policeman’s lot is not a happy one’. The sergeant had seen the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta at an amateur performance by the Buckinghamshire Police Drama Group and Choir the year before and some of the arias had stuck in his brain. At this moment the sergeant was leaving the offices of Hook, Hawthorne and Brewster, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths, at the end of Reading High Street. This was the tenth firm of solicitors he had visited in the town that day, and he had learnt nothing to his advantage in any of them. Well might he produce his credentials, well might he stress the importance of this part of the murder inquiry, well might he kowtow as best he could to the arrogant solicitors who confronted him, but they repeatedly assured him that they could not help. None of the names of the men with no wills from the Jesus Hospital, Marlow, meant anything to them. ‘It’s not natural,’ he remembered his Inspector saying to him. ‘Twelve out of the twenty with no will? I simply don’t believe it.’
There were different ways of saying no, the sergeant said to himself, remembering the various members of the legal profession he had met that day. Some of them brought out their ledgers and showed him their lists of the clients they did have, the day they were taken on, the dates of any important transactions in their affairs. But most of them just took a cursory look in a file and said, ‘No, we’ve never heard of any of these people. Good day to you, Sergeant. If anything happens, of course we’ll be in touch.’ And all of them treated him with disdain, as if he’d come to clean the windows, the sergeant said to himself bitterly. He thought of the look he could expect on his Inspector’s face when he reported that he had toiled all afternoon and caught nothing. The Inspector had a pained expression he put on at moments of difficulty and setback, a look that said you’ve let me down. How could you. I’m so disappointed.
But late this afternoon, as Sergeant Donaldson came back to Maidenhead to make his final inquiries, and the shopkeepers and businessmen began to shut up their stores and their offices, he was wrong. Inspector Fletcher was not disappointed when the sergeant told him the news. He hardly took any notice. His eyes were bright and he began walking up and down his office, smacking one fist into another.
‘There’s another one, Sergeant! Another dead body with the strange markings! That makes three of them! It’s the biggest case we may ever see. Three murders, one after another! And the most important one right here on our doorstep!’
Fletcher stopped suddenly and looked at his sergeant. He might have a hangdog expression when he was being told bad news. Fletcher’s own superior officer, Detective Chief Inspector Galway, did not care for such niceties. He shouted at people. Some of his officers reported that they were sure he was on the verge of knocking them down.
‘I do hope,’ the Inspector said, with the elation draining slowly out of his face, as he realized what might happen next, ‘that they don’t take the case away from us. They might give it to somebody senior. Or they might bring somebody in from London. I do hope they don’t. This may be the biggest case I’ll ever see. If I don’t get promotion after this, Sergeant, then I never will.’
The newspapers’ reaction to the three murders was proof that the really important news is what happens closest to home. Distant earthquakes, plagues in countries with unpronounceable names, civil wars in far-off lands like Kurdistan, failed to make it into print in local organs of opinion like the Reading Chronicle or the Norwich Evening News. Both of these papers carried banner headlines, ‘Murder in the Almshouse’ for Marlow, and ‘Public School Murder’ in Fakenham. The last of the three, Sir Rufus by the Silkworkers’ steps, merited a small article on an inside page of the local papers in London. None of the reporters who wrote the stories mentioned the strange marks on the dead men’s chests. So far the police had managed to conceal that information in all three cases. Nobody knew how long the line would hold, or how many days it would be before a policeman would sell the information to a journalist who would have a scoop on his hands.
One of the very few people apart from Powerscourt and the forces of law and order to know of the stigmata was Sir Fitzroy Robinson Buller, Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, regularly described by insiders in the Civil Service as Whitehall’s head prefect. Sir Fitzroy had been watching over the Home Office’s wide powers which included supervision of the police and the criminal justice system for many years. In that time he had developed, as he liked to confide in his fellow permanent secretaries over a regular lunch at the Athenaeum, a Nose For Trouble. In his long career he had divided his political masters, the Home Secretaries of the day, into four different types. There were those who listened to his advice and were too stupid to understand it. There were those who listened to his advice but were too frightened to do anything about it. There were those — ‘Too many, alas, too many,’ he would confide to his lunchtime companions over the port — who didn’t even listen to his advice at all. And there was a rump party, far too small a body in Sir Fitzroy’s view, who listened to his counsel and did something about it. The Permanent Secretary still had an open mind about the current incumbent of the great office he served, Herbert Gladstone, youngest son of the legendary Prime Minister. Once he had listened and acted decisively. Once he had listened and done nothing at all. Sir Fitzroy was too seasoned and too wily an operator to think that his advice on this current matter could be decisive in the formation of his judgement. Never or impossible were not words that should pass from a permanent secretary’s lips. Salvation should surely be available to ministers as it was to the many sinners of London. Looking out at St James’s Park, with the nannies wheeling their charges round the lake and the birds poised and ready for action in the bare trees, he composed his memorandum to his master.
‘Dear Home Secretary,’ he began, ‘I do not need to remind you of the gravity of the current situation regarding the three very recent murders where the bodies have been disfigured in a particularly distasteful fashion.’
Sir Fitzroy was reluctant to mention the precise details of the disfigurement. One of the reasons for his long tenure at the Home Office was his refusal to trust anybody completely. Home Secretaries, he said to himself, have been known to leave their red boxes in the backs of London taxis. One particular box had managed to travel successfully all the way to Edinburgh in the luggage rack, its owner having left the train at Grantham. Like many public servants, Sir Fitzroy had a total horror of what might happen in his world if the public were to find out what was really going on. Secrecy, in his view, was the lubricating oil of government, a vital weapon in the long war against disorder and democracy.