That was when he had started drinking again, Orlando remembered. When he was with Imogen he didn’t need to drink at all. It was intoxicating enough just to be with her. His new captors from the tables of Monte Carlo had installed him in a sad little flat near Victoria station until they worked out where to send him. Orlando didn’t remember much about that time. He remembered starting one marathon drinking session three days before the wedding was due to take place. He started with wine, then brandy, then armagnac. Armagnac could make you forget, he decided. He did remember falling asleep on the steps outside St James’s, Piccadilly the night before Imogen’s wedding, an armagnac bottle half full inside his coat. A policeman had escorted him away. Orlando thought he had been sick through the railings of Green Park as he staggered back to his sordid quarters. Two days later, his captors had come for him – he was still drunk – and taken him away.
Ever since the start of his incarceration he had pleaded with his captors to let him write to Imogen. He could send a letter to her father’s house for forwarding to the new address. For weeks they had refused. And then, three days before, his chief captor, known to Orlando as the Sergeant Major, a great pirate of a man with an enormous brown beard, had brought him the news.
‘My masters,’ he always referred to them as ‘my masters’, ‘have agreed that you may write to the lady. They are pleased with you. And you may have drink this week-end. Only on Friday or Saturday, mind you. No more after that.’
Lord Francis Powerscourt was in a train, returning to Oxford. The note that summoned him had been cryptic. It asked him to meet Chief Inspector Wilson at an address on the Banbury Road in that city at twelve noon. Nothing more. Powerscourt wondered if this was the same Wilson he had met in an earlier investigation, a death by fire at Blackwater House. He smiled as he remembered the young fire investigator Joseph Hardy who had played such a prominent role in rescuing Lady Lucy from a Brighton hotel near the end of the inquiry.
Then he started thinking seriously about forgers. He hadn’t given the forger much consideration before. As his train pulled out of Didcot station, Powerscourt was joined by a very old lady, who refused all offers of assistance and eventually settled herself down in a corner of his compartment. The old lady took out a copy of An Outcast of the Islands and began to read, muttering to herself sometimes as if she was reading aloud. Conrad’s characters are a long way from Didcot, even from cosmopolitan Oxford, Powerscourt thought, returning to his forger. He realized suddenly, as he stared blankly at the passing countryside, that it would be easier, much easier, to find the needle in the proverbial haystack. Where was the forger? Was he in London? Was he somewhere in Europe, only coming to England to deposit his counterfeit goods? Was he attached to some great house with a history of paintings, increasing their holdings of Old Masters with forged art and forged terms of reference? Was he in the employ of one of the dealers, forging, as it were, to order? Was he forging purely for money, to become as rich as some of his subjects? Was he a frustrated contemporary artist, who turned to fakery as revenge on a hostile art market? Whoever he was, wherever he was, he realized as the train pulled into Oxford station, the man must have been trained somewhere. And that probably meant, if he were a home-grown forger, the Royal Academy. He would write to Sir Frederick immediately he returned to London.
There were a couple of policemen on guard outside the house in the Banbury Road when he arrived. The building was of recent construction, a solid red-brick edifice with a decent garden at the back.
‘Good morning, Lord Powerscourt. Very kind of you to come. You haven’t changed a bit, my lord.’
Chief Inspector Wilson was plumper now, the waist slightly larger, the hair considerably less. But his honest, worried face was still the same.
‘Chief Inspector,’ said Powerscourt, ‘how very good to see you again. You are well, I trust?’
Wilson led Powerscourt into the ground floor of the building. ‘I am well, my lord, but all is not well here at 55 Banbury Road. A young man has been murdered. Name of Jenkins, Thomas Jenkins, former fellow of Emmanuel College. He was garrotted, my lord. The same method of killing as in the murder of that man Montague in London. I read about that in the papers. I got in touch with Inspector Maxwell down there and he told me you were investigating the Montague murder, my lord.’
Powerscourt turned pale. Jenkins, who had been the closest friend of the late Christopher Montague, Jenkins who had walked him across Port Meadow for lunch at the Trout Inn, refusing to answer his questions.
‘Was he killed here, in this house?’ asked Powerscourt.
‘He was. Let me explain the layout here first of all, my lord.’ Chief Inspector Wilson advanced along the hallway. ‘This house belongs to the college. Three of its younger fellows live here. They take all their meals except breakfast at Emmanuel and do their teaching in rooms up there. This room here,’ Wilson opened a door to the left, ‘was Jenkins’ bedroom.’
The room was of a good size, windows opening out on to the Banbury Road, quite tidy. Powerscourt supposed that somebody must come to clear up.
‘This little room here,’ Wilson went on, ‘was a simple kitchen where the gentlemen could make tea and toast for themselves.’ Two cleaned cups were standing on the draining board.
‘Does the college servant remember washing these cups up, Chief Inspector?’
Powerscourt was back in Christopher Montague’s flat in Brompton Square with the clean wine glasses.
‘The servant, my lord, is emphatic that he did not wash up those cups. And he says that Mr Jenkins never washed up anything at all in his life. He just placed his dirty things in the kitchen.’
Powerscourt was wondering about a tidy murderer, a murderer who took the trouble to clean up wine glasses or teacups even after he had killed somebody. Did he have something to hide?
‘This room here,’ Wilson opened another door on to a large room with an ornate ceiling, looking out over the gardens at the back, ‘was his living room and his study combined.’
There was a large desk by the window, a wall full of bookshelves, a leather sofa and a couple of brown armchairs. Powerscourt noticed that the bookshelves, unlike those of Christopher Montague, were still full.
‘Thomas Jenkins was found by the desk here,’ the Chief Inspector went on, ‘sitting in his normal swivel chair. As I said, he’d been garrotted, my lord. There were great purple and black marks around his neck. The doctors think he must have been killed between four and seven o’clock yesterday afternoon.’
‘Who found him? Was anything found in the room?’ asked Powerscourt.
‘A college servant found him, round about nine o’clock yesterday evening. He was worried that Mr Jenkins hadn’t been down to evening hall at the college. He thought he might have been ill, so he looked in. And there he was, stone cold.’
Powerscourt walked over to the window and looked out into the garden. A couple of squirrels were climbing up a tree. A garden bench sat empty in a corner of the lawn. He pulled at the window frame. It shot up easily as if it were opened often.
‘Any evidence of how the murderer got into the house, Chief Inspector?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘Do either of the other two remember letting him in at all? Could he have climbed in through this window?’
‘The other two gentlemen are not here at present, my lord,’ said Chief Inspector Wilson wearily. ‘They are out of Oxford altogether, one in London, one in Germany, looking at medieval manuscripts, they say.’
‘God help him,’ said Powerscourt, peering down at the grass underneath the window. There was no sign of any footprints but the rain could have washed them away.
‘It’s the garrotting that troubles me,’ said Wilson. ‘Never come across it before. Not in these parts anyway.’ Powerscourt told Wilson about the article Christopher Montague was writing on fake paintings, about the gaps in the bookshelves, about his friendship with Mrs Rosalind Buckley.