‘No, I did not.’
‘Could the killer have come in yesterday evening,’ said Inspector Fletcher, ‘and spent the night in the hall or the chapel?’
‘Well, he could, but I don’t think we’d find any trace of him. The hall is locked overnight, the chapel left open in case religion overcomes the old men in the night. The chapel was cleaned early this morning at seven o’clock before the body was discovered. And the old men have been tramping all over both hall and chapel since then.’
Inspector Fletcher paused. Another line of inquiry seemed to have been blocked off. Before he had a chance to say any more, there was a shout from a constable on the grass outside.
‘Inspector, sir! You’re to come at once, sir! We’ve got a visitor!’
Fletcher groaned. Visitors on occasions like this at the very start of an investigation usually meant trouble. Sometimes they were superior officers, keen to carp and criticize. On this occasion, as he told his wife that evening, it was much worse than that.
The third visitor to the Jesus Hospital that morning arrived just before twelve o’clock. Those residents comforting themselves from the shock of murder in the morning and, what was worse in their book, murder before breakfast, looked out of their windows and saw an enormous motor car arrive and a tall portly gentleman with white hair and a black walking stick climb out and knock imperiously on Thomas Monk’s door. This was Sir Peregrine Fishborne, Prime Warden of the Silkworkers, come to inspect the crisis in his kingdom. He was well known in the City of London, Sir Peregrine, for his speed in the despatch of business and his position as head of one of the foremost insurance companies in the country.
‘Monk,’ he said to the Warden when he had regained his office, ‘what the hell is going on here? What’s this crisis you mentioned on the phone? Damn inconvenient having to trundle out into the back of beyond for some mess in this bloody hospital!’
‘There’s been a murder, sir,’ said Monk, standing to attention as he always did when talking to the Prime Warden.
‘Murder? Here? In Buckinghamshire? In the Jesus Hospital? Don’t be ridiculous.’ He turned to stare at the policeman. ‘And who the hell are you?’ he said, eyeing Inspector Fletcher as if he had just delivered the week’s coal.
‘Ah, hm, ah, I am the policeman assigned to the case.’ He paused as if he might have temporarily forgotten his name. ‘Albert Fletcher, hm, Inspector Albert Fletcher, at your service, sir.’
Sir Peregrine threw him another of his turn-a-man-to-stone-at-fifty-paces looks. ‘And what can you tell us about the dead man?’
There was another pause while the Inspector searched in his pockets for the vital notebook.
‘Well,’ he began, inspecting his handwriting carefully, ‘the dead man was called Meredith, Abel Meredith. Ah, hm, he died of a knife wound to the area between the pharynx and the larynx.’
‘Somebody cut his throat, you mean,’ snarled Sir Peregrine. ‘We’re in a bloody almshouse here, not a medical school, for Christ’s sake. What age was this unfortunate Meredith?’
‘Hm, ah,’ said the Inspector, ‘over sixty at least or he wouldn’t be here. Do you know how old he was, Warden?’
The Warden intervened immediately in case there was another salvo from Sir Peregrine.
‘Sixty-four, sir, that’s how old he was. Last birthday six weeks ago. He paid for a very fine drinking session in the back room of the Rose and Crown, Abel Meredith, I’ll give him that. One of the very few occasions he was known to pay for a round.’
‘I see,’ said Sir Peregrine in his most glacial voice. ‘Tell us if you would, Inspector, if you have identified any of the dead man’s enemies, maybe even arrested them. He’s been dead for some time, after all.’
Inspector Fletcher looked at Sir Peregrine more in sorrow than in anger. There was another of those pauses. ‘The old men aren’t making much sense at the moment, Sir Peregrine,’ he said at last. ‘It’s impossible to say at this stage if he had any enemies or who they might be.’
‘Course the man had enemies, you fool, he’s dead, isn’t he? One of his enemies must have killed him. I’d have thought even one of the swans on the bloody river could have worked that out by now. Christ Almighty!’
Inspector Fletcher was saved further thrusts from Sir Peregrine by the reappearance of Dr Ragg. Even before he was introduced, the doctor took a violent dislike to Sir Peregrine. There were many of his sort living in and around Marlow, often in sub-Palladian villas by the Thames. The doctor thought them arrogant, self-satisfied and smug, with little regard for their fellow men. He had even changed his golf club to escape their pomposity and their braying self-regard.
‘I’ll give you my report, gentlemen,’ Dr Ragg began, ‘and then I must be off on my rounds. In my judgement Abel Meredith was killed by a sharp knife being forced across his throat sometime between four and six o’clock this morning. The knife may have had an irregular and uneven blade like the kris knife often brought home by travellers and military men from Ceylon and the Malay Peninsula. Death will have been instantaneous. I fear he was probably awake at the time of the incident. That is all.’
‘Surely you must know something more than that, Doctor?’ Sir Peregrine felt he, too, would be in need of medical attention soon if the natives continued to infuriate him. ‘You’ve been poking about in the corpse’s innards for some time now, haven’t you? You must have found something out.’
‘Are you experienced in the examination of dead bodies, Sir Peregrine? I rather doubt it. We doctors are not obliged to reveal the secrets of our patients’ medical history, even the dead ones. So why don’t you write the insurance policies and I’ll write the medical reports.’
With that Dr Ragg closed his bag and headed off towards the nervous headaches and the insomnia of his morning rounds. He had not told the people in the Jesus Hospital anything about the strange mark on the dead man’s chest. It was such an unusual piece of information that gossip would start circulating along the river and through the City of London. Soon Abel Meredith would have been found dead with the imprint of fifty pineapples all over his body. He would tell Inspector Fletcher, of course, but only in the privacy of the police station. Dr Ragg had no idea what had caused the strange mark and even less idea what it might mean.
Sir Peregrine, meanwhile, was metaphorically pawing the ground as one of his potential victims fled the field. He made mental notes on the key players he had met this morning who were involved in the bizarre death of Abel Meredith. The doctor? Barely competent, in his view, but he had tangled too often with the medical profession in the past and failed to get his way. Better to leave Theophilus Ragg in peace. Thomas Monk, the Warden? Another incompetent, in Sir Peregrine’s opinion. Why was it so difficult to get hold of sensible men once you were out of London? It was as if there was a whole world of inefficiency clogging up the nation beyond the City walls, a world stretching west to Bristol and north to the people Sir Peregrine had always referred to as the Caledonians in the wilder parts of Scotland. His fiercest wrath, however, was reserved for Inspector Albert Fletcher. That officer of the law had marked Sir Peregrine down from the beginning as a man to beware of, a man who could damage your career through his contacts in high places, and who would take pleasure in doing so. As a result the pauses were slightly longer than usual, the mental reservations sounded like incompetence, the gaps before speech the mark of an idiot. Something would have to be done. Sir Peregrine looked at his watch. Already he had spent far too much time down here among this human dross.
‘Telephone!’ he barked.
‘That’s a telephone over there on the table,’ said the Warden, pointing helpfully to the instrument.
‘I know what a telephone looks like, you fool. There are hundreds of them in my offices in London. Now get out while I use it.’
Sir Peregrine could not raise the person he sought, which added fuel to his fury. Listening at the keyhole, Thomas Monk smiled. Anything that irritated the Prime Warden of the Silkworkers Company was music to his ears. Sir Peregrine was leaving a message for his personal assistant, a young man called Arthur Onslow, with a distinguished career at Eton, a first-class honours degree in Classics from King’s College, Cambridge, and three years in the Blues and Royals, now in his second year as guard dog to Sir Peregrine, as he described it to his friends. It was a pity that he was a younger son for his father was widely believed to own half of Leicestershire.