Inspector Fletcher had not been told he was coming. Neither had Monk the Warden. Neither had the old men. So Powerscourt’s first moments in the Jesus Hospital were spent showing parts of his letter of commission and generally persuading them that he was a bona fide investigator.
‘I’m not surprised you’re here, mind you,’ said the Inspector after a call to his superiors at Maidenhead had convinced him Powerscourt was genuine, ‘I don’t think Sir Peregrine cared for me at all.’
‘Never mind,’ said Powerscourt cheerfully. ‘He’ll think differently when you’ve solved the murder.’
Fletcher told Powerscourt all he knew about the case over a hasty lunch at the Rose and Crown. It was an old coaching inn, the Rose and Crown. The front was festooned with red and white roses, appropriate to the origins of the name, in spring and summer. The back room with its eight small tables was the destination of choice for the old men of the Jesus Hospital, its walls and faded curtains stained with centuries of smoke. Powerscourt wanted to know if he could see the body and the room where Abel Meredith had lived.
‘What do you know of livery companies, my lord?’ asked Fletcher. ‘We don’t have any of those things in Maidenhead or Taplow or Pinkneys Green. One or two of the old men drone on about them and I don’t understand it.’
‘I doubt if I know much more than you do, Inspector. They’re very old, going back to the fourteenth century, those sort of times. To start with they were guilds, defensive guilds, if you like, formed to look after the common concerns of brewers or bakers or fishmongers, or silkworkers, who banded together to look after their own particular interests. They had special uniforms and great halls where they held their feasts and so on. Most important,’ he paused to digest a portion of the local steak and kidney pie, ‘they are now rich, very rich. Many of the members left property to their company in their wills. Number Sixteen Lombard Street might have been worth five or six pounds in thirteen ninety, it’s worth a lot more now. Hundreds and hundreds of times more, I should think.’
Powerscourt took himself to the Maidenhead Hospital immediately after lunch. The Inspector had telephoned before they went to the Rose and Crown to ensure that the body was not moved yet. Powerscourt introduced himself and his mission to the old attendant. He thought, as he often did when looking at corpses, how quickly life moved out of people. A moment before they had been alive with fluent features and eyes and faces that expressed their emotions. Then they were transformed into something you could have found on a butcher’s slab.
He looked for a long time at the marks above the heart. ‘Have you seen anything like these before?’ he asked the elderly attendant who looked as though he had been a curator of corpses since the Crimean War, if not before.
‘Nope, I have not, my lord. Neither has any doctor in this hospital. You know what they’re like, doctors, with the new and the unexpected, they’ve flocked down here, peering at the mark and prodding at it like they’ve never seen a dead body before. One of them said it was the sign of some African witch doctor, stamped on the bodies of the dead to improve their passage to the next world. I ask you. We don’t have no Africans or no witch doctors in Marlow, not even over in Reading, if you ask me.’
Powerscourt stared again at the thistle-like marks on the body.
‘Were you here when they undressed him?’ he asked.
‘I was indeed,’ said the attendant, casting a quick glance at the corpse.
‘I was wondering,’ said Powerscourt, ‘not that it’s any use for the investigation, but I was wondering if the mark above the heart was put there before or after he was killed. Was it knife first? Or the other way round?’
‘The shirt wasn’t buttoned up, my lord. Not when they brought him here, anyway. Dr Ragg noticed that, I remember. I’m not sure what the order was, my lord. It would be easier to kill him first, pull back the shirt and then put the mark on him. He couldn’t put up a fight if he was dead.’
Powerscourt started work on a drawing of the mark in his notebook.
‘Hold on, my lord, this might be helpful. One of our young doctors is going to send an article to the medical journals to see if anybody can identify the mark. He was very good with his pencil, so he was.’ The old man opened a drawer in the table and pulled out a bundle of three or four drawings of the strange marks. ‘Perhaps you would like to have one or two of these, my lord. It might be useful.’
‘That’s so much better than my effort, I’m more than grateful to you.’ Powerscourt gave the old man half a crown and hurried on his way.
Inspector Fletcher was looking forward to Powerscourt’s return. As he continued his interviews with the old men of the Jesus Hospital, he had encountered a pair who were so confused they left his head spinning. Numbers Nine and Ten insisted on being interviewed together. Otherwise, they said, they would get in a muddle. They brought a whole new line of evidence into the investigation. Johnny Johnston, Number Nine, had spent his working life in the post office. Peter Baker, Number Ten, had been a clerk in the City.
‘Of course it must have to do with the Silkworkers Company, the death,’ said Number Nine.
‘Stands to reason,’ said Number Ten.
‘Improved terms and conditions of residence, that’s what they said. They’d paint my place from top to bottom and it hasn’t had a lick of paint in years. You’ve got to look behind the picture to see all the walls were white to start with. Everything else is dirty grey now.’
‘That’s one way of looking at it,’ said Peter Baker, Number Ten. ‘The other people say there won’t be any money left to keep up the hospital. We’ll be thrown out and the place will be sold for rich people’s houses.’ He paused and peered out of the window. ‘Thrown out,’ he repeated, ‘thrown out. Where would we go?’
‘But there’s them that say they can’t do that. Throw us out, I mean. The statues — no, they’re not statues, are they? What’s the word?’
‘Statutes?’ offered Numbered Ten.
‘Statutes, that sounds right,’ Johnny Johnston, Number Nine, went on. ‘They say they can’t throw us out. If they sell this place they have to build us another, that’s what that man in the grey suit told us.’
‘Hold on a moment,’ said the Inspector. ‘Could we just take this from the beginning. You’re not saying that the hospital is going to be closed, are you? It’s been going for nearly four hundred years.’
‘Sold,’ said Number Ten. ‘Turned into luxury houses. People like living in luxury houses in Marlow, people with plenty of money, I mean. We’re not meant to talk about this, Inspector, we’ve all been sworn to secrecy. But it’s a great worry and that’s a fact.’
‘It only gets sold if one lot of Silkworkers have their way.’ Johnny Johnston, Number Nine was scowling at the very idea that the hospital might be sold. ‘That man with the big moustache didn’t think it could happen.’
‘But the other fellow, the thin lawyer man with the long face and the monocle from Chancery Lane, he said it was going to happen anyway.’
‘Didn’t moustache man say there had to be a vote? The vote that Warden Monk is so keen on?’
‘Gentlemen, please.’ Inspector Fletcher put down his notebook. ‘Am I right in saying that there is a discussion going on in the Silkworkers Company about the future of the Jesus Hospital? And that one group wants to sell it and the other doesn’t? And somehow or other there is to be a vote on the matter, here in the hospital?’