Powerscourt thought a diversion was needed. ‘William,’ he began, ‘I think it must be sitting in this chair where that other fellow sat. Have you any decent claret in the house?’
Burke laughed. ‘I’ll order some now, Francis. We could have the same wine as the professor had.’
Burke stopped halfway across the room and stared at his brother-in-law. ‘My God, Francis, how stupid of me. I’ve forgotten to tell you one of the most important facts of all about recent events at the Silkworkers.’
‘What was that?’
‘How could I be so foolish! There was a lot of opposition to Sir Peregrine and his friends in the Silkworkers. Can you guess who the leader of the opposition was?’
‘I have no idea, William.’
‘I’ll tell you who it was,’ said Burke. ‘It was the man recently found dead at the top of the steps leading down to the river in Silkworkers Hall with the strange mark on his chest. Sir Rufus Walcott, he was the leader of the opposition.’
One hundred and twenty miles away Detective Inspector Grime of the Norfolk Constabulary was a very angry man. He had been waiting all day for one of the boys of Allison’s School to come and speak to him about the visit of the phoney postman on the day of the murder of the school bursar Roderick Gill. That morning a real postman had retraced what they thought must have been the steps of the killer. The headmaster had addressed the pupils at the end of morning assembly before lessons began.
‘Good morning, boys,’ he had said, sweeping his black gown behind him as he spoke. ‘I know that you will all be as anxious as I am to clear up the recent murder in our midst. This morning I appeal for your help. Less than an hour ago the postal authorities and the police repeated the journey through our school of the murderer who came disguised as a postman. If this second visit by a real postman sparked any memories in your minds of that earlier, fatal trip, perhaps you would be so kind as to speak to Inspector Grime on my left here. He will be in the Officers’ Training Corps office for the rest of the day. Please see him if there is anything you remember, anything at all.’
The boys filed out and headed for their classrooms. Many of them stared rather insolently at the policeman as they passed him on their way out. Inspector Grime had made few friends among the schoolboy population of Allison’s. He had spoken to them all by now. His bored manner did not impress. With one or two of them he had been downright rude. As the pupils settled into their desks to begin their day’s work, the word began to be passed round. It was started by a rather intelligent young man in the Fifth Form who proclaimed to all and sundry that he wanted to be an anarchist when he grew up. ‘Don’t speak to the policeman. Pass it on,’ he wrote and tore the page out of his notebook. He handed it to his neighbour. Inside ten minutes every boy in the room had read it. When the pupils changed classes at the end of the first lesson, those in on the secret told the colleagues they passed in the corridor. The would-be anarchist’s note was still travelling by the time of morning break at eleven. Within five minutes of that starting, every single boy in the school had received the message. The policy of non-cooperation with the civil authorities had been established in a little over two hours.
Inspector Grime sat in his temporary office surrounded by literature about the Officers’ Training Corps and a succession of military photographs on the wall. Boy soldiers from Allison’s marching past the front of the building. Boy soldiers at camp in some dreary part of Norfolk near the sea. Boy soldiers standing steady on parade beneath the Union flag. The headmaster had assured him that the witnesses would probably come during morning break. They did not. The headmaster then revised his opinion and informed Inspector Grime that the boys would come to him during the lunch hour. They did not. After lessons closed for the day the headmaster felt sure that this was the time for the boys to come forward. He asked his deputy if he had heard anything on the school grapevine about the boys’ attitude to the police Inspector. The deputy had no intelligence to offer. By now the headmaster was seriously worried. Were the boys in his care obstructing the course of justice? He found it impossible to believe that they had not noticed anything that morning. He wondered if there might be another way of getting them to talk.
Detective Inspector Grime was livid. He had read through all his notes on the case so far. He had learnt from one of the OTC handbooks how to dismantle and clean a rifle. He had read about making progress in open country and through difficult terrain, which was certainly where he felt he was now. Worse was to come. His sergeant arrived shortly before five o’clock to tell him of a message from the Dean of York, who had promised to make further inquiries about the whereabouts of one Jude Mitchell, cuckolded husband of the mistress of the dead man. The dean and his people had toiled all day for many days and caught nothing. Mitchell was nowhere to be found. They had cast their nets as far afield as Beverley to the east and Lichfield to the south and Ripon to the north, all minster or cathedral cities where a mason like Mitchell might have been able to take on temporary work. He was nowhere to be found.
‘Damn it, Sergeant,’ said Grime to his subordinate, ‘where the hell is the wretched man? You can’t just disappear like this. Not nowadays.’ The sergeant resisted the temptation to say that Mitchell appeared to have done precisely that. ‘Give me a moment, will you?’ the Inspector went on. ‘You can take this back and send it off. I’d better send a telegram with the latest news, or rather lack of it, to Lord Francis bloody Powerscourt. Damn the man and his fancy theories!’
Had Inspector Grime been a more sympathetic officer, one that boys might be happy to speak to about what they had seen, he would have heard some things that were not all that important to his investigation. But some sensible boys would have told him that the man was of average height. Others would have told him that the man seemed to be in his middle thirties. Others again would have told of a thick black beard. But one boy had information that would have made the Inspector and Powerscourt very interested indeed. This was a boy called Lewis, David Lewis, who was in his first year in the Sixth Form. Lewis was the best mimic in the school. He could impersonate his headmaster, his housemaster and the chaplain perfectly. When his friends persuaded him, he would deliver wickedly accurate sermons from the chaplain late at night, standing at the end of his bed in the dormitory with his dressing gown acting as cassock. On another famous occasion in Allison’s legend he had rung the headmaster, purporting to be his housemaster, about some detentions which were subsequently cancelled and caused a rift between the two schoolmasters which had not been healed to this day.
The phoney postman had bumped into Lewis on the morning of his murder run and had apologized. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he had said and continued on his way. Lewis probably had the most acute ear in the school. The accent, he declared to his friends, was not English, the man was a foreigner. He was not American either, said David Lewis, having spent six months in Washington three years before. Quite where the phoney postman did come from he could not be sure.
That night the overtaxed men of the Metropolitan Police had another burden added to their load. Word, their sergeants and inspectors informed them, had come from the very top. They were to be on guard all night at various properties and almshouses belonging to the Silkworkers Company. The danger, they were told, could come from the inside with the inmates trying to kill each other or from the outside with unknown villains come to murder the residents. Two constables stood in the doorways of grand houses in the City owned by the Silkworkers.
PC James Jones, five years off retirement, spent the night inside and outside the Hospice of the Holy Trinity in Blackheath. He told his wife of long standing he thought it had to do with German spy rings operating in the City of London. PC Albert Smith, who had been married for eight days, was on patrol at the Hospice of St Michael in Richmond. He said to his new wife as he left that he might be away all night, but that he would be at home all day the next day and he didn’t expect to be that tired. PC John Walsh, on duty at the Jesus Hospital in Haringey, made himself conspicuous by pacing noisily up and down the little quadrangle. He believed that a gang of thieves were intent on stealing the hospice’s magnificent collection of silver which they left carelessly on display in a cabinet with no lock. That at any rate was the view of his sergeant who had made representations about the silver in the past but to no avail. And PC Walter Buchan, at six feet five inches the tallest officer among them, kept vigil over the old men in the Almshouse of St John the Divine in Clerkenwell. He had told his wife before he set off that the world had gone stark raving mad.