Inspector Grime’s sergeant, a young man called Peter Morris, had nurtured hopes of becoming a draughtsman or an artist before being claimed by the more mundane appeal of the police force. This was his first murder inquiry. But he liked to keep his hand in when he could. He had constructed for his Inspector a great chart which stood proudly on one wall of Grime’s office. It was a timeline, with the days before and after the murder marked in different colours. Black, in harmony with his beard, marked the suspect’s movements. Blackbeard, as all the policemen referred to him now, first appeared in the chart on the day before the murder. He had arrived in the town at seven o’clock in the evening on a train from King’s Lynn. The policemen noted glumly that he had arrived in the dark. Then he seemed to disappear. No bar or hotel or bed and breakfast establishment remembered such a man. The black entry appeared again the following morning, entering the school and killing its bursar early in the morning. Then he vanished once more.
The Inspector and his sergeant were having a conference by the chart the morning after Sir Peregrine’s night visitor arrived at the Elysian Fields. ‘Right,’ said Inspector Grime, ‘we’ve had seventy replies so far and this is all that stands up. Is that right, Sergeant?’
‘I’m afraid it is, sir. I think some members of the public are too ready to offer help. We’ve had reports of all sorts of men with black beards but most of them were the wrong age or the wrong height. Some more reports should come in today, sir.’
Inspector Grime snorted. He had had such high hopes when the original description was provided by the sixth-former David Lewis. Now it seemed to be turning to dust in his hands. ‘Where did the bugger sleep, for God’s sake? Are there any empty houses or cottages he could have used? He can’t have disappeared between seven in the evening one day and eight o’clock in the morning the day after, can he?’
‘I’ve got people checking on all the empty dwellings, sir, to see if any of them might have been occupied. I don’t have the answers yet. Could I make a suggestion, sir?’
‘If you must,’ said Grime whose reluctance to listen to subordinates made him unpopular with his men.
‘I tried this the other day, sir, on my way home. If you skip over the fence at the side of the school football fields you could be in Allison’s School grounds without anybody knowing you were there. There are all kinds of outbuildings there, cricket pavilions, football changing rooms, a couple of barns, a great shed full of mowing machines and things. I checked with the school, sir, and they say they don’t bother to lock them at night. Blackbeard could have spent the night in there. There’s running water in some of them so he could have washed and things like that. It’s possible, sir.’
Inspector Grime snorted once again. ‘That’s as maybe. But how did the bugger get away? Nobody saw him getting on to a train out of Fakenham the next morning. I doubt very much if he would have wanted to hang around just after he’d killed the bursar. And he must have dumped the postman ’s uniform somewhere along the way.’
‘He could have dumped the uniform anywhere as he was getting away,’ said the sergeant.
‘So how do you suggest he got away then?’ The Inspector repeated his question. ‘Did he have supernatural powers, do you suppose?’
Inspector Grime’s sarcasm was as unpopular as his dislike of suggestions. Sergeant Morris just carried on.
‘He could have walked, sir.’
‘Walked? Where could the man have walked to, for God’s sake?’
‘Norwich, sir, perhaps.’ The sergeant noticed that his Inspector was turning red and reaching in his pockets for his pipe, usually a bad sign. ‘I know it’s a long way but you’d be much less visible there with all those people in the railway station. He could have gone anywhere from Norwich, sir, as you well know.’
‘Would you like to take over the entire investigation, Sergeant? Use your vast experience in murder cases to solve the mystery of the vanishing Blackbeard?’
‘Certainly not, sir, but could I just make one last suggestion and then I’ll keep quiet. I’ve got the highest respect for your position and your experience, sir, as you know.’ Sergeant Morris was well aware that the Inspector had to write a report on his conduct in the next ten days. More or less continuous helpings of humble pie were usually required at this point. Sergeant Morris thought yet again about requesting a transfer to a different part of the county.
‘Let’s hear it, if I must.’
‘Well, sir, I’m sure you must have thought of this already. You’ve got so much more experience than me. But suppose this Blackbeard is our man. He travels up here from we know not where, could be anywhere in the country. That suggests to me that the motive, the reasons behind Gill’s death, may have nothing to do with the school, or the Silkworkers or his affair with the married woman and the disappearing stonemason husband. The motive might lie elsewhere.’
Inspector Grime blew out an enormous mouthful of smoke. The tobacco was relaxing him.
‘That’s perfectly possible,’ he said. ‘It’s equally possible that Blackbeard was a hired killer. You can pick up people like that in London very cheaply these days, a hitman who’ll kill somebody for a couple of hundred pounds. The real murderer could still be local, but he could be a man who has decided to hire Blackbeard to hide his own identity.’
‘Do you believe that, sir?’
‘Do you know, Sergeant, I’m not sure what I believe any more.’
Inspector Miles Devereux had removed his feet from the desk and hooted with laughter when Johnny Fitzgerald telephoned with the news about overnight visitors at the Elysian Fields. He asked Johnny to see if the visitor was coming back to London by train. If so, once Johnny told Devereux the time of the train, she could be intercepted at the London end. Inspector Devereux looked forward to questioning her.
But his main concern that morning was with the two principal characters in his section of the investigation, Sir Peregrine Fishborne who was very much alive and Sir Rufus Walcott who was very much dead. He had decided two days before that he needed more information about them, about their past, about anything that happened some time before that might give rise to sudden death years later. Two of his brightest men had been given the task of finding as much as they could about the life stories of the dead man and the one who had succeeded him as Prime Warden of the Silkworkers Company.
‘It’s all very conventional,’ said David Lawrence, the constable assigned to Sir Peregrine. ‘I started in Who’s Who, that’s not much use really, a whole lot stuff about his progress through the livery company. I talked to a couple of reporters who write about the City, sir, and they said his life only got interesting with this row about the Silkworkers and the codicil. He’s well connected, Sir Peregrine, one cousin on the board of one of the big banks, another runs a shipping company, a third is a big noise in Lloyd’s the insurers. You could, one of these reporters said, coast along quite happily in the slipstream of those relations if you kept your nose clean and played your cards right. Sir Peregrine’s chairman of a middling sized insurance company, plenty of money, but not as much as the other members of the family. The other reporter thought this was what started him off on the codicil and the selling off of the assets. He has to keep up with Cousin Rupert at the bank and Cousin Jeremy at the shipping and Cousin Nigel in Lloyd’s.’
‘Would Sir Peregrine become richer than the others if he sold off the assets?’ asked Devereux, thinking perhaps of his own family where the brothers proliferated but the assets had long since disappeared.
‘Richer, probably,’ said Constable Lawrence, ‘but I didn’t ask that question, so that’s a guess.’
‘And what of Sir Rufus?’ Inspector Devereux was hoping for better things from his second sleuth, Constable Conrad.
‘He’s pretty conventional too,’ said Conrad who was, at twenty-two years of age, the youngest member of Devereux’s team. ‘There is one curious thing about him, sir, and that’s his entry in Who’s Who.’