It was just like being in the army, Powerscourt remembered. You called a man by his title, not by his name, as if function was the sole criterion in addressing your fellow man.
‘I thought he looked a bit under the weather. But remember, Powerscourt, there are a lot of people to look after here. I’m not the matron or the father confessor to the staff or anybody else.’
‘May I ask you a difficult question, Headmaster? I apologize for troubling you but time is important in murder cases. What precisely was the link between the school and the Silkworkers Company down in London?’
‘I wish they’d stay in London, those people, and not come up here and give me a hard time during governors’ meetings,’ the headmaster said wearily. ‘The Silkworkers look after the endowments of the school. Always have, always will, I expect. The chairman of the board of governors is always one of theirs, as are four of the other school governors. It’s like one of those cabinets packed with the prime minister’s relations in Lord Salisbury’s time. The family, or in our case the Silkworkers, call the shots. It would be very difficult to push through a policy they didn’t approve of. Silkworkers appointed me, they’ll probably appoint my successor.’
‘I have heard that there may be changes afoot in the world of the Silkworkers,’ said Powerscourt. He had told the Inspector about the death of Abel Meredith but nobody else. Sometimes he wondered if this policy of closed boxes was the right one. ‘Have they affected you here, Headmaster?’
‘You’re damned well-informed about our livery company, Powerscourt, if I may say so. I would ask you to treat what I’m about to say in confidence. We’re not meant to talk to anybody about it.’ Powerscourt thought Davies must sound like this when talking to junior members of staff, slightly superior, slightly supercilious. ‘The changes relate to the increase in value of the endowments since they were first bequeathed. Some land near the Mansion House, for instance, would be worth infinitely more now than it was back in the fourteenth century. There’s talk about having a vote among the membership about what to do. Oddly enough, that was part of Roderick Gill’s responsibilities. He was preparing a report for me on the implications of the changes for the school and whether we should support them. It was due next week as a matter of fact.’
‘Do you know if he had written it? If it was finished and ready to go?’ Powerscourt wondered if one of Grime’s constables would have appreciated the significance of such a document, stacked away in his office with the annual reports and the quarterly financial projections.
‘I don’t, as a matter of fact. I rather suspect Roderick would have been against any change in the current arrangements. He was that sort of man. I think it’s all very clever and rather cunning myself.’
‘In what way?’
‘Well,’ said the headmaster, finally restoring his legs to ground level from the vast expanse of his desk, ‘suppose you’re the Prime Warden of the Silkworkers. You’ve got these almshouses to keep up, and these schools and the pension payments to the old boys. You’ve got this vast property portfolio all over the City of London and the richer counties of southern England. And you think there’s going to be a war. First thing to go when the guns go off will be the value of property. Your little empire will be worth far less than it was, the rents will tumble, it will be difficult to sell places. So liquidate it all now and come back to the market when the prices are depressed later on. Stash it all away for the time being in America or Canada or somewhere your bankers tell you it’s safe.’ The headmaster refilled his glass with a very small helping of whisky. ‘Clever, don’t you think? Of course you can’t say what you’re about, you can’t say why you’re really doing it. People would say you were mad or unpatriotic, or greedy or something like that. This is only my theory, you understand.’
For the second time in less than a week Powerscourt resolved to talk to his banker brother-in-law William Burke as soon as possible.
Silence fell in the headmaster’s study. Some night bird was calling urgently outside the windows. A very modern clock, there to keep the headmaster punctual, was ticking at the corner of the desk. Powerscourt could just make out the inscription: ‘To John Davies with thanks for five years of excellent work, from the headmaster and staff of Rugby School.’
‘There is one thing I should tell you about Roderick Gill.’ The headmaster gathered the ends of his gown behind him and began pacing up and down his command post. ‘I don’t suppose Peabody told you anything about the women, did he?’ he asked with the air of one who expects the answer no.
‘Not a word,’ replied Powerscourt.
The headmaster stopped by his curtains and drew them back a couple of feet. Outside it was very dark, with a few lights burning over in the masters’ quarters.
‘This isn’t easy for me,’ Davies continued. ‘The thing is, Roderick Gill was notorious for having affairs with married women. They were always over forty, for some reason. Maybe he liked them older or more experienced, who knows. Maybe the younger ones wouldn’t have him. Maybe their husbands would be less violent. He never carried on with the few wives we have here, it was always with women in the town. Roderick was a church warden and later treasurer of Saint Peter and Paul in Fakenham. It’s got a bloody great tower and they say they stored gunpowder in there during the Civil War. Anyway, Gill’s position at the church was his base camp for getting to know the women of the parish. Some of the more cynical members of the congregation used to refer to him as the Groper in the Vestry, I gather. I don’t know if he launched any assaults in the precincts of the church itself — I rather doubt it. But there it is, or rather was. It had been going on for years now.’
‘Thank you for telling me,’ said Powerscourt, as the headmaster strode back to his desk. ‘It can’t have been easy for you. And forgive me for asking, but do you know the names of any of his conquests in the last few years?’
‘I do know there was somebody on the books fairly recently. They were seen coming out of a hotel in Brandon last summer, I think it was. Mrs Mitchell, the lady was called, Hilda Mitchell. Early forties, very pretty, I was told, her husband away a lot on business. He was a mason, specializing in restoring old buildings like churches or manor houses, so he was away a lot. I don’t know if it’s still going on.’
Powerscourt suddenly wondered if he should match the headmaster’s confidence about the private life of Roderick Gill with an account of the strange marks on his chest. But he preferred not to. He didn’t think it would help. He wondered if he was right in his reticence.
‘Could I ask you a final question, Lord Powerscourt?’ The headmaster was bringing the meeting to a close. Perhaps there are a couple more meetings scheduled after I go, Powerscourt thought, head of Classics asking for two more hours a week for Latin classes, head of woodwork complaining that the boys kept stealing the screwdrivers. ‘I know it must be very difficult to know, but can you give me any idea how long it will be before you find the murderer and the case is closed down? It’s going to be rather like a siege here, you see. It will be difficult for people to concentrate on what they’re at Allison’s for, teaching and learning, with the police on the prowl and so on.’
Powerscourt was quite relieved to have been relegated to ‘and so on’.
‘I wish I could help you there, Headmaster, but I would not wish to give you false comfort. It could take a week. We could still be here by Easter. The timetables of murderers and of those who would catch them are outside your control as they are outside mine. If you can steel yourself to prepare for a long haul, that would be for the best. I’m sorry I can’t be more hopeful. You have been very frank with me and I’m most grateful.’
That night Powerscourt had a strange dream. He thought when he awoke that it might have had something to do with the globes and the maps in the geography classroom. He was standing on top of a great sand dune in the middle of a vast desert. Down below him was an enormous plain of sand, completely empty, not even a small oasis or a solitary palm tree to be seen. To his left and right the landscape was the same, sand, hills of sand, plains of sand, seas of sand, nothing but sand. He suspected he might be in Saudi Arabia or one of those Middle Eastern countries. When he looked more closely at the plain below he saw to his horror that the sand had been blown into a particular pattern. It was exactly the same as the strange patterns on the dead men’s chests, as if a giant thistle of Brobdingnagian proportions had been pressed into the sand. It seemed to go on for miles in all directions. When he looked closer, shading his eyes from the pitiless sun above, he saw a small figure marching resolutely towards the centre of the thistle. He was not dressed in white robes as you might have expected in this landscape, but in a three-piece suit and bowler hat that looked as though they might have come from a fashionable tailor in London’s Jermyn Street. As he stared down, Powerscourt realized something stranger yet. It was if the sands were shifting under the man’s feet. For march on as he might, he was making no progress towards the centre, no progress at all. The centre of the thistle remained as far away as ever. He was never going to reach it.