James liked being read to, rather like the sick children in the village being cared for by Lady Lucy Powerscourt. He preferred poems to prose. He liked some of the more bloodthirsty passages in the Iliad when Hector’s body is dragged around the walls of Troy. Shelley’s ‘I weep for Adonais – he is dead’ was a great favourite. So was Milton’s Lycidas and Tennyson’s In Memoriam and John Donne’s sonnet about the conquest of Death:
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die!
James would clap his hands together on the bedspread and cheer at Byron’s lines about the night before Waterloo:
… the unreturning brave, – alas!
Ere evening to be trodden like the grass
Which now beneath them, but above shall grow
In its next verdure, when this fiery mass
Of living valour, rolling on the foe
And burning with high hope, shall moulder cold and low.
It was the poetry about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and the Lady of the Lake that entranced him most of all. He preferred Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur to the more effusive outpourings of Tennyson. The sword in the stone, the sword being thrown in the lake by Sir Bedevere were like a tonic to him.
Searching for a modern Merlin, Charles sent for the doctor. The medical man pronounced himself defeated by James’ illness. He promised to return with a wiser colleague. When he did, there was then a very long examination of James and a whole host of questions about his mental state. The doctors retired to an empty schoolroom with faded maps on the wall and upturned desks lying about the floor, surrounded by the broken globes of a broken world. Eventually they sent for Charles and talked to him for half an hour. They were going back to speak with James in a moment, they said. They had just one question. Should James be told the truth about his condition?
Charles looked round the room, filled with memories of irregular Latin verbs and the details of the Wars of the Roses where early Dymokes had backed the wrong side just as they had in the Civil Wars. His eyes filled with tears.
‘Tell him,’ he said. ‘Yes, I think that would be for the best. Tell him the truth.’
Inspector Blunden was seated at his desk in the police station at nine o’clock in the morning. He was doodling again on a clean page of a large police notebook. A series of Ls rolled out across the page. Along with thirty-seven other little boys and girls the Inspector had been taught to read and write in the village school by Mrs Rickards, a formidable woman with unorthodox but highly effective means of imparting knowledge to her charges. The ornate Blunden copperplate was one result of her endeavours. Then he left a space and added a row of Cs a few lines further down he added a number of JHs with a question mark at the end. The Inspector was preparing a rather unusual list of the tasks he had to perform that day. L was for Lawrence and the odd story from Oliver Bell that he had been seen behaving strangely at the railway station the day of the first murder. The C was for the clergyman who could establish Bell’s alibi. The JH referred to Jack Hayward and the question of whether he had been found.
Constable Andrew Merrick reported for duty, his uniform cleaned and pressed by his mother, the shirt still a little too big in the collar, the trouser legs turned up but only recognizably by those who knew abut such matters.
‘Sir!’ said Merrick, looking, Blunden thought, like a puppy waiting for some kind soul to throw it a bone.
‘Now then, young Merrick, I have a job for you this morning.’
‘Sir!’
‘We need to ensure that Oliver Bell’s alibi for the night of the first murder is watertight. You know that cottage where he lived near Old Bolingbroke Castle?’
‘Sir!’
Inspector Blunden wished the young man would stop saying Sir like that but discipline should not be slighted.
‘According to Bell, he went to help a retired clergyman living in a nearby cottage. The man was old and thought his cottage was being damaged in the storm.’
‘Sir!’
‘Find this clergyman and take a statement confirming the story. Or take a different story if Bell’s version is not true.’
‘Sir!’
‘Please stop saying sir like that, Merrick; you’re beginning to sound like one of those machines at the funfairs which speak when you put your money in.’
‘Sir! Sorry, sir. What happens if he’s not there, the clergyman, I mean, sir?’
‘Well, you go looking for him, don’t you? The local church, maybe he’s gone to say his prayers. The local shop, maybe he’s gone to buy some groceries. You know the form, Merrick. You’ve been in the force nearly three months now.’
‘Yes, Inspector Blunden.’
The young man turned to go. The Inspector placed a tick beside the letter C in his notebook. He was a kindly man, the Inspector, in spite of an occasionally gruff exterior, and he believed very strongly that he had a duty to bring on the young constables in his charge.
‘And here’s something for you to think about on your way, young man. You remember I told you the crucial bit of Bell’s evidence about the middle Lawrence, Carlton Lawrence, not the old chap, at the railway station? How do we find out that he wasn’t in London or at the theatre in London like his father said? And what was he doing back here?’
Andrew Merrick succeeded with great difficulty in not saying Sir. He managed ‘Yes, Inspector Blunden,’ and fled to the comfort of his official bicycle.
A cheerful ‘Good morning, Constable Merrick’ announced to the policeman that Powerscourt was on his way. A moment later he showed himself in and announced his purpose straight away.
‘My dear Inspector Blunden,’ he began, ‘you find me in good spirits. Banish dull care, let a man’s fancy roam free, that’s what I say. The Ghost awaits without, ready to ferry us to the Candlesby Arms where a vital witness awaits us, Jack Hayward, freshly returned from the land of my fathers.’
‘My lord, this is tremendous news. When did he get here, Jack Hayward, I mean?’
‘Late last night,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I was going to call you but I thought Mrs Blunden and Miss Blunden might not care for a visitation at such an hour. Forgive me, I took it upon myself to put him up in the hotel, Inspector. His own quarters in the village are still locked up and somehow I did not want him to be seen there just yet.’
‘The knowledge of his return might alarm the murderer, you mean,’ said the Inspector, collecting a couple of pens and his smaller notebook.
‘Indeed,’ said Powerscourt, fastening on his driving gloves before the short journey to the hotel. ‘I don’t think you’ve had the pleasure of a ride in my splendid motor car,’ he went on, opening the door for the Inspector. ‘Please be my guest.’