‘Thank you so much, Colonel, there is one thing. Does the Major leave a widow behind him, or was he single at the end?’
‘There is a widow, a Mrs Laetitia Holmes, I believe. They said at the auctioneers that she’d been wanting to throw out all her husband’s military stuff for years. His end was an opportunity not to be missed.’
Johnny Fitzgerald was beginning to think he had been abandoned, rather in the fashion of Robinson Crusoe. True, the rather louche purlieus of the Elysian Fields, illuminated from time to time by the visitations of Frankie the masseuse on missions of mercy to Sir Peregrine, were more than comfortable, certainly better than Crusoe’s island. Johnny had noticed that Frankie carried a large handbag on occasions, filled, he presumed, with the instruments of torture of the masseuse’s trade. He still spent a number of evenings in the Rose and Crown entertaining the old men of the Jesus Hospital. He had continued his policy of lunching the silkmen one at a time and it was on one of those occasions, on a bleak day in Buckinghamshire with the rain lashing against the windows of the hotel, that he hit the jackpot.
He was entertaining Freddy Butcher, Number Two, a cheerful little man who had once been a bus driver by trade and had family connections with the Silkworkers. Number Two was cleanshaven with a great red mark down the right-hand side of his face. One section of informed opinion in the almshouse said that he had crashed his bus on the Clerkenwell Road, killing a couple of elderly passengers. The other view was that he had been caught misbehaving with the wife of a well-known criminal who had set about his face with a knuckleduster.
By this stage the first bottle of Pomerol had come to an end, and Johnny, who had only had a couple of glasses, ordered a refill. Something told Johnny that Number Two wasn’t used to this amount of alcohol at lunchtime. Maybe he would let slip something important. Johnny poured him another glass. Two plates of roast duck arrived, groaning with apple sauce and roast potatoes and parsnips.
‘I’ve felt for some time,’ said Johnny, ‘for all the convivial evenings in the pub, that people are holding back on me. There’s something they’re not telling me. If somebody would tell me, maybe the mystery would clear up and you could all be left in peace.’ Johnny had been a foot soldier in the great demonstration to the Maidenhead police station, reasoning that there needed to be somebody able bodied present in case one the old boys had a heart attack or keeled over from some other ailment. In the event the old boys had cut quite a dash, marching the last hundred yards in their best uniforms, attracting a good deal of public sympathy for their efforts and an article in the local newspaper.
It was the red wine that did for Freddy Butcher, Number Two, and possibly for Number Four, Bill Smith, known as Smithy, as well.
‘You’re quite right, of course,’ said Number Two, holding up his glass for a refill. ‘We have been holding something back.’
Johnny waited for a forkful of duck and parsnip to go down.
‘There was a feud, you see, it had been going on for months.’
Johnny remained silent, hoping for more intelligence.
‘Number Four and Number Twenty, the man who was killed, they had been at each other’s throats, you see.’
‘What was it about?’
‘Well, nobody knew for certain, I think it had to do with something in Number Twenty’s past. I think he may have told Smithy about whatever it was and Number Four took against Number Twenty from then on. Number Four was forever telling anybody who would listen that Number Twenty was a bloody coward.’
‘When was the last time they fell out?’ asked Johnny.
‘The day before Number Twenty was killed actually. This time they had the row in the middle of the quadrangle, nearly coming to blows.’
‘Did anybody hear what they were saying?’
‘Oh yes. It seems odd now, but that Abel Meredith, Number Twenty, was shouting at Number Four, “if you call me a coward once more, I’m bloody well going to kill you, so I am.”’
‘Wrong way round,’ said Johnny
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Well, it wasn’t Number Twenty who did the killing. He was the victim, wasn’t he? What happened then?’
‘What happened then?’ Number Two, Freddy Butcher, who had been making his way pretty steadily down the second bottle, sounded suddenly as though the drink might have got the better of him. Then he seemed to get a second wind, cheered on by another large draught of the Pomerol. ‘Well, Warden Monk came out of his office wearing his best blue cravat and told them to shut up. He said that if there were any more rows like that, he would have them thrown out of the hospital, dumped outside the front door with their belongings in a paper bag. He sounded as though he meant it too.’
‘How very interesting,’ said Johnny. ‘Did Warden Monk also tell you all not to mention the row to the police or anybody else?’
‘How did you know that? He did, as a matter of fact. He said that anybody who told the police would also be thrown out, dumped by the front gate and the rest of it, complete with possessions in a paper bag. It’s a pretty powerful threat, Johnny. Most of us don’t have anywhere else to go. That’s why we ended up in the Jesus Hospital in the first place.’
‘And nobody knows any more about what they were arguing about?’
‘No. You know what it’s like in these places, Johnny. If anybody heard any more detail, every single person in the hospital would have known all about it before you could brew a cup of tea.’
When Johnny had seen his guest off the premises after a large helping of apple pie and a glass of calvados, he took a taxi to Maidenhead police station. He thought Inspector Fletcher would be keen to hear his news.
Powerscourt left the knobkerries with the doctor at the Maidenhead Hospital who had examined Abel Meredith, with a request that he telephone Powerscourt as soon as he had reached a decision. There was something at the back of his mind that he couldn’t quite retrieve, something he thought was important. He tried to remember which of the three murders it concerned. Not the Jesus Hospital, he felt sure. Not the murder in the Silkworkers Hall. It had to be something to do with Roderick Gill up at Fakenham. But what? With the boys running up and down the corridor? With Blackbeard himself, sidling into Gill’s office and killing him? With Gill’s papers in their box files lined up by the wall? Hold on a minute. It certainly had to do with Gill and with Gill’s maths teacher friend whose name he could not for the moment remember, but who had told him as they patrolled the school grounds that Gill had been frightened of something in the days before he died. The teacher had never discovered what had frightened him, but the merry widow, who regularly entertained her friend from the church, might know. Powerscourt grabbed his coat and fled into Markham Square, looking for a taxi to take him to Liverpool Street Station and north to Fakenham.
‘Did you say your name was Lord Francis Powerscourt? And that you are an investigator with our policemen?’ Mrs Maud Lewis was inspecting her visitor from London as if he might just have landed in an extraterrestrial vehicle on the edge of her garden.
‘I did, Mrs Lewis.’
‘And are you really a lord? I mean Lord isn’t just some unusual Christian name your parents gave you when you were born?’
‘I’m a real lord, I’m afraid, Mrs Lewis. But I’m what’s called an Irish peer because the family estates were there. I don’t have the right to sit in the House of Lords. Just as well probably, with all the trouble up there at the moment.’
‘Goodness me, how very exciting. I don’t think I’ve ever had a lord, even one who couldn’t sit in the House of Lords, in my humble abode before! And we never had anybody like that in the house when we lived near Birmingham. I don’t think they do lords in Birmingham. Lord Powerscourt, should I call you Lord Powerscourt or Powerscourt or just Lord?’
‘Lord Powerscourt would be fine, Mrs Lewis, don’t worry about it.’ By this stage they had reached the drawing room, with a fire and a couple of dogs asleep on the hearth. Mrs Lewis showed Powerscourt into a chair on the left of the fire.