Death and the Jubilee lfp-2 Read online

  The young man shook his head.

  ‘I’m sure you would get it if you had time to think. It is “The Song of the Black Eagle” which von Treitschke himself composed after France declared war on Prussia in 1870.’ Munster began to hum softly.

  ‘Come sons of Germany,

  Show your martial might . . .’

  Karl Schmidt joined in, smiling with pride.

  ‘Forward to the battlefleld,

  Forward to Glory.

  At the sign of the Black Eagle

  Germany shall rise again.’

  ‘Hush,’ said Munster, ‘we mustn’t get carried away, even with the Treitschke song. The society is called the Black Eagle. Every new member receives a ring like this one so he can recognize other members if necessary.’

  He pulled a silver ring off his finger. It had no inscription on it. Karl Schmidt looked puzzled.

  ‘Look on the inside. If you look carefully you will see a very small black eagle, just waiting on the inside, waiting to fly away in the cause of a greater Germany.’

  The young man sighed. Munster waited. It was for Schmidt to make the next move. ‘I think – no, I am sure,’ he said, ‘that I would like to join. But I am not sure how I can be of service.’

  ‘You never know who may or may not be able to serve,’ said Munster severely. ‘That is for the senior members to decide. Sometimes people may have to wait for years before they find themselves in a position to do their duty. But tell me, what is your profession? Are you a student here at the university?’

  ‘I wish I was,’ said Karl sadly. ‘I’m a clerk at the Potsdamer Bank just round the corner.’

  ‘You work in a bank? You know how the banking business works?’ Von Munster sounded eager, very eager.

  ‘I don’t know all of it yet,’ said Karl Schmidt apologetically, ‘but I am learning. And my English is quite good now. The bank pays for me to go to evening classes.’

  ‘My friend, my friend,’ Munster was smiling now and seized the young man’s hand, ‘tonight or tomorrow we shall introduce you into the society. We shall all sing “The Song of the Black Eagle” together. Singing it together, the new recruit and the senior members, that is very important. And then, in a little while, it may be that we have some very important work for you. Work of which von Treitschke himself would be proud!’

  ‘Work here in Berlin? Inside the Potsdamer Bank?’ Karl looked puzzled again.

  ‘No, not in Berlin’ said Munster. He sounded very serious indeed. ‘In London.’

  Part One

  Ordeal by Water

  1

  They came across London Bridge like an army on the march, regiments of men and a few platoons of women, swept forward by the press behind them. They were a sullen army, an army going to a siege perhaps, or a battle they didn’t think they could win. Behind them the roar of the steam engines and the shrieking of whistles heralded the arrival of reinforcements as train after train deposited its carriages into the station.

  To the left and right of the army was the river, two hundred and fifty yards wide at this point, full of ships from every corner of the world. Shouts of the lightermen and the sailors added to the noise. Ahead lay their destination, the City of London, which swallowed up nearly three hundred thousand people every day in its eternal quest for business. Junior clerks with shiny black coats and frayed collars dreamed of better days to come. Stockbrokers with perfectly fitting frock-coats hoped for fresh commissions and extravagant customers. Merchants in all the strange substances the City dealt in, cork and vanilla, lead spelter and tallow, linseed oil and bristles, prayed that prices would get firmer.

  All this silent army were coming to worship at the twin gods of the City, Money and the Market. Money was cold. Money was the yellow cakes of gold in the vaults of the Bank of England a couple of hundred yards ahead of them. Money was the bills of exchange the bankers and merchants had despatched across the five continents, the fine wrapping paper that enclosed English domination of the world’s trade. Money was to be counted in banking halls and insurance companies and discount houses, the daily traffic measured out line by line and figure by figure in the great ledgers which stored its passing.

  The Market was different. If Money was cold, the Market was mercurial. She was like a spirit that flew across Leadenhall Street and Crooked Friars, across Bishopsgate and Bengal Court, turning in the air and changing her mind as she travelled across her City. Some older heads in the great banking houses said she could be like a volcano, erupting with terrible force to shake the very foundations of finance. There were many who claimed to know the Market’s moods, when she would change her mind, when she would grow sullen and petulant, when she would dance in delight across the Stock Exchange and bring sudden wealth with floods of speculation about gold or diamonds found in distant parts of the world. The optimists believed the Market was always going to smile on them. She did not. The cautious and the prudent believed she was a fickle mistress, never to be wholly trusted. Their fortunes might have grown more slowly than the optimists, but they were never wiped out.

  A sudden scream cut through the silent meditations of the marching army. Towards the further bank a tall young man was yelling and pointing to something in the water, his face unnaturally white against the black of his clothes.

  ‘There! Look there, for the love of God!’

  He pointed at something bobbing about in the water, bumping against the side of one of the ships moored on the City side of the river. Behind the young man there was a hurrying forward as the slow march transformed itself into double quick time. ‘Look! It’s a body, by the side of the ship, there!’

  All around him brokers and merchants and commission agents pushed forward to peer into the water. Two sailors of foreign extraction appeared on deck and stared uncomprehendingly at the crowd.

  ‘There’s a corpse in the river! There’s a corpse in the river!’ The phrase spread quickly back across the bridge. Within three minutes word would reach the incoming passengers in London Bridge station. Within five minutes it would flash past Wellington’s statue and reach the portals of the Royal Exchange.

  The tall young man stretched even further forward towards the murky waters of the Thames.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ he shouted. He fell backwards into the crowd and fainted away into the amazed arms of a fat and prosperous old gentleman who was surprised at how light he was.

  The young man was the first to see that the body had no head, and that the hands had been cut off. A grisly stump of neck, clotted yellow and black, was inching its way towards the further shore.

  Murder had come to the City at half-past eight on a Thursday morning.

  Throughout the day rumour was King. Rumour, of course, was usually King in the temples of finance: rumours of revolutions and defaults in South America, rumours of unrest and instability in Russia, and, most frequent and most unsettling of all, rumours of changes in interest rates. But on this day one question and one question only dominated all conversations. Who was the dead man? Where had he come from? Why did he have no head and no hands? At lunchtime in the chop houses and the private dining rooms it reached its crescendo.

  The tall thin young man, Albert Morris, was a hero for twenty-four hours. Revived by brandy and water in the partners’ room of the private banking house where he earned his daily bread, he told his story over and over again. He told it to his colleagues, he told it to his friends, he told it eagerly to the newspapermen who laid siege to his bank until he was delivered up to them.

  The first rumour, believed to have come originally from the Baltic Exchange, was that the corpse was a Russian princeling, a relative of the Tsar himself, murdered by those foul revolutionaries, the body transported from St Petersburg to London and thrown over the side. The head, said the Baltic Exchange, had been removed so the Russian authorities would never know he had been murdered, thus forestalling any of those fearful reprisals for which the Tsar’s secret police were famous.

  Nonsense,
came the counter-rumour from one of the great discount houses. The corpse was not a Russian, he was French. He was a wine merchant from Burgundy who had been carrying on an affair with another man’s wife. The cuckolded husband, the discount house version went on fancifully, unable to avail himself of the service of the official guillotine, had chopped off the head which had looked at his wife and the hands which had caressed her body. The corpse had been packed in with a consignment of Burgundy’s finest and thrown into the river.

  The last, and most ominous, rumour came from Home Rails on the Stock Exchange. This was the rumour that struck most terror into the small, but growing, female population of the City. Jack the Ripper is back, claimed Home Rails. They nearly caught him when he went for all those loose women in the East End. Now he’s going for men. This is only the beginning. More decapitated males were to be expected, dumped in the docks or carried upstream towards Westminster. Beware the Ripper!

  The man charged, for now, with the responsibility of finding out the truth about the headless and handless corpse was sitting in his tiny office at Cannon Street police station. He was suffering, he knew, from his normal feelings of irritation and anger as he looked at his younger colleague.

  Inspector William Burroughs was in his late forties. He was a stocky man with a small rather straggly moustache and tired brown eyes. Earlier in his career he had been involved in a successful murder investigation, and the reputation of being good with cases involving sudden death had stuck with him. But Burroughs knew that had been a fluke. An unexpected confession had solved the crime, not his detective skills. He had told his wife this many times, and as many times she had instructed him not to tell his superiors.

  There are men who look good in uniform, men who carry it off well, men who can appear like peacocks on parade. Burroughs was not one of those. There always seemed to be a button undone, trousers not sitting properly, a tie adrift at the neck. His sergeant, on the other hand, always looked immaculate, like his bloody mother had washed and ironed him five minutes before, as Burroughs liked to tell himself. Sergeant Cork was still gleaming in his pristine state at half-past twelve on the morning when the body was found.

  A couple of sailors had propelled the corpse gently towards the riverbank with a boathook. Inspector Burroughs had supervised the landing, blankets at the ready to cover the dead man. He had ridden with it to the morgue at St Bartholomew’s Hospital and delivered it into the care of the doctors. They had promised him a preliminary report by the end of the day.

  ‘We should be able to tell you how long he had been in the water, maybe how long ago he was killed,’ the young doctor had assured him. ‘Please don’t expect us to be able to help you with any clues as to who he might have been.’

  ‘Right, Sergeant Cork,’ said Burroughs, ‘we may as well start somewhere. I want you to go round or telephone all the police stations in the area and see if they have any missing persons on file.

  ‘And there’s one very unfortunate thing about this case, I can tell you. Very unfortunate. Just think what the newspapers are going to make of it. Headless man floating by London Bridge. Not just no head, no hands either. They’ll be all over it for weeks. And if the poor bloody police can’t find out who the man was, then we’ll be for it too. Look at those incompetent detectives, the journalists will say, they can’t even solve a murder right in the heart of the City. The newspapers will be out for our blood.’

  ‘Are we sure it was a murder, sir?’ Sergeant Cork had never been involved in such a prestigious inquiry before.

  ‘You don’t suppose he cut his head off when he had no hands left, do you? Or do you think he cut off his head first and then sawed his wrists off himself?’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right sir.’ Cork hastened to the telephone room. ‘I’ll get started on these inquiries.’

  And please, please, the Inspector thought to himself, just once, get yourself a bit untidy.

  2

  Lord Francis Powerscourt had turned into a horse. He was trotting slowly along his hall in Markham Square in Chelsea, making clip-clop noises with his tongue and his back teeth. He had practised these in his bath and tested them out to his own satisfaction on his wife Lady Lucy.

  ‘Clip-clop, Clip-clop,’ said Powerscourt, negotiating his way past a Regency table outside the dining room. Now, he knew, was the time for a strategic decision. Should he go into the dining room and make a round of the chairs, pausing possibly to look at the grass outside the window? Or should he essay the more dangerous, but possibly more entertaining journey up the stairs to the first or the second or even the third floor?

  Lord Francis Powerscourt was one of the most successful detectives in England. He had learned his craft in Army Intelligence in India and transferred the skills learnt there to solving murders and mysteries at home. He was in his forties now, the black curly hair still intact, the blue eyes continuing to inspect the world with the same detachment and irony as before.

  ‘Hold on tight, hold on very tight,’ said Powerscourt, as he began a slow ascent of the stairs. He could feel two small hands hanging on very tightly to his collar. Thomas Powerscourt was four years old, born a year after his parents’ wedding in 1892. Wandering about upstairs was Thomas’s sister, Olivia, who could now tell the world that she was two.

  On the wide first-floor landing Powerscourt broke into a trot.

  ‘Faster, Papa, faster!’ cried the little boy, beating on his shoulder with a small determined fist. ‘Faster, horse, faster!’

  The horse was growing weary now and anxious for the human consolations of tea and biscuits downstairs. Coming down, Powerscourt remembered, was always a more dangerous manoeuvre than going up. His passenger was in danger of falling down right over his head and tumbling head over heels to the marble floor below. After a slow, almost funereal trot down the stairs, Powerscourt speeded up along the hall just as the doorbell rang. The maid opened the door before he could resume his human form. He found himself staring into a pair of very brightly polished black boots. Above the boots were sharply pressed trousers. Above the trousers was a uniform jacket resplendent with shining buttons. Above the jacket were a pair of enormous moustaches and a helmet. A policeman’s helmet.

  ‘Good morning, sir. Would you be Lord Francis Powerscourt?’ said the thin slit underneath the moustaches.

  ‘I would, Constable, I would.’ Powerscourt laughed happily. ‘Forgive me while I return to human form.’

  Thomas Powerscourt began to cry, quietly at first and then with huge quaking sobs that racked his little frame.

  ‘What’s the matter, Thomas?’ said his father, smiling an apologetic parental smile at the constable. ‘What’s the matter?’

  Thomas was not telling. His face was wet with tears and a small wet hand rubbed against his father’s trousers.

  ‘They can take on for no reason at all,’ began the constable, about to relate the story of the three children of his wife’s sister who bolted the minute he entered the room.

  ‘He’s a p’liceman,’ said Thomas accurately, pointing a grubby finger at the representative of law and order.

  ‘That’s right, Thomas. The gentleman here is a policeman.’

  ‘P’licemen catch bad people and put them in prison,’ sobbed the boy.

  Suddenly Powerscourt could sense the anxiety, but before he could speak his son was holding desperately on to his trousers and shouting as loud as he could.

  ‘P’liceman won’t take my Papa away!’ He held on as if his life, or Powerscourt’s life, depended on it.

  Powerscourt bent down and picked him up. The constable coughed apologetically. ‘I have a message from the Commissioner,’ he began.

  The little boy clung ever tighter to his father’s neck, tears trickling down a collar that had been immaculate but a few minutes before. The Commissioner seemed to Thomas to be an even bigger, even more hostile form of policeman trying to take his Papa away to the cells or to prison. He didn’t know what a Commissioner was, but it sounded
pretty frightening to Thomas.

  The constable ploughed bravely on. ‘He would like to see you at once, sir,’ he said. ‘He would like to give you a cup of tea and then he will send you straight back again. I think he wants to take your advice.’

  Powerscourt smiled. ‘Thank you, Constable. I have often met with the Commissioner, or rather with his predecessor. I should be delighted to come with you.’

  Lady Lucy appeared suddenly by his side. ‘Good morning, Constable,’ she said with her most graceful smile. ‘So Francis is going to take tea with the Commissioner? I’m sure that will be delightful. And, Francis, you can tell Thomas and me all about it when you get back.’

  She whisked Thomas away from his father’s shoulder and began whispering to the little boy. As Powerscourt and the constable closed the door, Thomas was able to manage a small but tear-free wave.

  Forty miles away an old man and a pony were waiting outside the stables of the great house. Samuel Parker had worked in these stables for nearly fifty years. He had risen in a series of slow promotions from apprentice undergroom to Head of Stables. His employers had given him a little cottage on the estate to have until he died. But today Samuel was a very worried man.

  The house was almost closed down. The younger members had gone back to their great house in Mayfair, leaving the old man and his sister alone on the top floor, except for some servants in the basement. Every day, at ten o’clock in the morning, Old Mr Harrison would come to meet Samuel and the pony by the stables. Together they would make a circuit of the lake. Sometimes the old man would bring letters or papers from the bank with him to read on the way. Then Samuel would strap a small portable chair and table on to the pony and they would wait while their master attended to his business.