But what unsettled the old gentlemen even more, though they never mentioned it to anyone, not even their closest friends, was that they might be living with a murderer. And none of their rooms had locks. The authorities had decided long before that the ability to rush in and take a sick man to hospital without breaking doors down was essential. But here was the disadvantage of that policy. Number Nine or Number Fourteen or Number Eleven might rise in the night and kill once again, and nobody could stop them rushing in, knife or gun in hand. Freddie Butcher, Number Two, whose life had been spent on the railways rather than selling meat, had done considerable damage to his back trying to pull a sofa across his living room to a position right by the front door so that any intruder would have to push past it to get to him. The general amount of conversation, usually gossip of one sort of another, had dropped. The only bright spot on the silkmen’s horizon was the arrival of a new regular at the Rose and Crown. This Johnny chap, they said to one another, had a fund of good stories and an inexhaustible supply of money for buying rounds of drinks. He didn’t seem very interested in the hospital, not even in the murder. He was one of those people who give the impression of always being cheerful. And once you were sitting in the corner table of the Rose and Crown, with a pint of the landlord’s best in your fist, you felt safe. Nobody was going to come and murder you there. So it was not surprising that some of the old gentlemen had taken to staying longer and longer in the pub, nor that they were so cheerful on their return that they might not have noticed whether they were being murdered or not.
Warden Monk was aware of these undercurrents swirling round his kingdom. He tried to reassure the old men that nobody was coming to kill them. In old days he might have asked Sir Peregrine to come down if he had a moment and give the old boys a pep talk. In these homilies Sir Peregrine always sounded like a house prefect instructing his charges to play up in the house football competition and get fit for the cross-country running championship. But Sir Peregrine did not have a moment and did not come. Those who did, and who came far too often for Monk’s liking, were the officers of the Buckinghamshire Constabulary who always lowered morale. Why do they keep coming, the old gentlemen would mutter to each other, unless they know that the murderer is here, is one of us, within these walls? One down, the old men muttered to themselves, nineteen to go.
Monk himself had other things on his mind. It was not surprising that Sergeant Peter Donaldson had been unable to find Abel Meredith’s will in the lawyers’ offices in Maidenhead or anywhere else. Monk had not one last will and testament of the late Abel Meredith, Number Twenty, but two. The Authorized Version, as Monk referred to it, was in a secret place inside a floorboard in Monk’s bedroom. One of the many occupations he had had to leave in a hurry in an earlier life was that of carpenter, but his departure had not come before he had learnt a lot about the trade. People, especially the police, were great believers in the fact that criminals liked hiding things under the floorboards. Monk was a great believer in hiding things inside floorboards. His secret place could only be unlocked by pressing a whorl on the lower side of the board. Nobody looking at it, not even the most suspicious policeman, would have imagined that there was anything concealed inside. Like the wooden horse of Troy, Monk would say to himself, the most important parts are on the inside.
The other version of the will, the Revised Version, as Monk put it, was in the file marked Wills on a shelf on his office. This was one of those unusual wills, two pages long, where the second page only required a signature. Monk may have been a thief. But he was not greedy. He was, he would remind himself from time to time, a reasonable man. When engaged on will work he always took care to keep to the original intentions. Abel Meredith had left a large amount of money, well over two thousand pounds, a figure that would have sent Inspector Fletcher’s instincts into overtime. All of that been left to a brother in Saskatchewan in the original. In the new will Monk split the figure, half to the brother in Canada, half to ‘my good friend and counsellor, Thomas Monk, with thanks for all the help and advice rendered to me’. This was not the most valuable will created in Monk’s office. It was, in fact, the third most valuable. Once the funeral was over, he would take it to a rather grand solicitor in the West End who would launch it into the legal system.
‘Don’t think very much of this lot, actually,’ said Powerscourt’s third police officer. Detective Inspector Miles Devereux was wearing a cream shirt and a very old-fashioned suit that might have belonged to his father. ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ he told Powerscourt, ‘but I am the tenth of eleven sons. No jokes about cricket or football teams, please, absolutely not. Family may be numerous, family funds are not. By the time they got round to deciding what to do with me, I had, I still have, now I think of it, brothers in almost every conceivable occupation. I have brothers who can sell you a house, look after your money, train your racehorse, christen, marry and bury you though not all at the same time. There’s one who farms in Argentina and one who runs enormous ranches in Canada. There’s one who will buy your antique books and sell them on at an enormous profit, and another who claims to be opening the wines of Italy up to new markets in Britain, though the family say he merely opens the bottles. There are, I fear, even more of them. So I decided to do something different and join the police force. It’s quite fun, really, especially when you get a tasty one like this case here. But all this stuff here,’ he waved a languid hand at the strange collection of objects on the table, ‘contents of Sir Rufus’s pockets, pretty dull, I’d say, wouldn’t you? Why are we always so keen to have a look at these things? I’ve never known. It’s not as though the murderer is going to pop his calling card into a waistcoat pocket, is it?’
Powerscourt smiled. Behind the slightly dreamy exterior he suspected Devereux had a sharp brain. He looked young to have risen to Detective Inspector. In one pile on the table in Cannon Row police station were the items he dismissed, a collection of keys, coins, currency notes, a wallet, a letter from his bank telling him he had two hundred and sixty-three pounds in his account, two tickets for the opera from three days before, a large unopened white handkerchief and a receipt from Simpsons in the Strand.
‘Do you know, Powerscourt, they always put me on to these kinds of cases now. Rich people’s murders, all that sort of stuff. Here am I, longing for some tasty gang violence in the East End and I end up yet again with death from Debrett’s. It’s really not fair. What do you think of this other lot?’ He pointed to a rather larger heap of miscellaneous rubbish. ‘This lot is the stuff found all over the Silkworkers Hall that day by the good Mrs Robinson, cleaning lady and occasional waitress. She kept it especially for us.’ A long pianist’s finger stirred up the random bits of paper. Powerscourt thought cigarette packets or cigarette stubs, tickets or parts of tickets seemed to be the most frequent objects in this display, bus tickets, underground tickets, train tickets.
‘One section about football results from last week’s Times,’ said Devereux, stirring the mixture slowly, as if it were a sauce. ‘Our man may have been a Tottenham fan as they won five nil. Two empty beer bottles from Messrs Young’s and Company of Wandsworth, a couple of unpaid bills, one return ticket from Hastings and one from somewhere ending in “be”, two brown leaves and a menu from last night’s dinner. They seem to have done themselves pretty well, don’t you think, Lord Powerscourt? Any of these bits and pieces ring a bell with you?’