Death in a Scarlet Coat Read online

  So he had travelled to Lincolnshire by train. But now, as his cab carried him towards the Candlesby Arms, he knew that he would keep his secret as long as he could.

  He found Powerscourt and Lady Lucy having an earnest discussion in the private sitting room Drake had prepared for them. They were discussing a visit to a place called Ashby Puerorum.

  ‘Johnny!’ said Powerscourt, rising to greet his friend. ‘How very good to see you! How very good to have you on board for this case!’

  ‘Always glad to be of service,’ said Johnny, bowing low to his superior officer. ‘What can I do for the cause?’

  Powerscourt told him all the details of the case, the strange brothers, the rotting house, the mystery of the death of the previous Earl.

  ‘Do you have no idea at all how he died, Francis? Forgive me for saying such a thing, Lady Lucy, but we have seen one or two dead bodies in our time.’

  ‘No idea at all,’ said Powerscourt sadly. ‘But you will be pleased to hear, Johnny, that I have a special job I would like you to do.’

  Johnny Fitzgerald groaned slightly. ‘And what would that be, my friend?’

  ‘This man Hayward,’ Powerscourt began.

  ‘The one who escorted the body back on the horse?’

  ‘The very same, Johnny. Got it in one.’

  Suddenly Johnny Fitzgerald knew what was coming. ‘You want me to find him. Is that it?’

  Powerscourt nodded. Johnny Fitzgerald rose and began pacing round the room. ‘Why do I always get the really easy jobs, Francis? You know, drinking all night with the porters from the art galleries in Old Bond Street, rescuing Lady Lucy here from drowning in Compton Cathedral, travelling all the way to bloody Beaune in bloody Burgundy only to be sent straight back again on the next train? Life’s too soft with you, Francis, I’ve always thought so.’

  Powerscourt waited for the irony to subside. ‘Have you managed to find out anything about the family?’ asked Johnny. ‘Where he came from originally? Where the wife came from?’

  ‘I hate to heap more problems on your already overburdened shoulders, Johnny, but they’re not exactly helpful in the village over there. They won’t speak to me at all. I was hoping to ask Charles, the son who’s on our side, to make some inquiries. Come to think of it, I have to go and see him about now. He sent me a note this morning.’

  As Powerscourt set off for the Hall, Johnny turned to Lady Lucy. ‘I need to do some serious thinking, Lady Lucy,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it strange how suddenly thirst can strike a man. Maybe it’s the flat countryside all around here and the tang of the salt from the sea that does it. Lead me to the bar and the brain can get lubricated into action.’

  Charles was waiting for him at the stables where they had met before, talking earnestly to a dark brown horse with soulful eyes. Powerscourt noticed that his stammer virtually disappeared when he was talking to animals. Maybe it was only humans who interrupted his letters.

  ‘Lord P-p-powerscourt, how kind of you to call,’ he began. ‘The others have all gone out, frightening what little wildlife there is in these p-p-parts on their horses. I much p-p-prefer the horses when they’re in their stalls and you can have a decent conversation with them, don’t you?’

  ‘Is this one your favourite?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘This is Gladiator,’ said Charles. ‘Actually he’s the sixth or seventh Gladiator we’ve had here. The first one won a lot of famous races over a hundred years ago, the Oaks, the St Leger, that sort of thing. There’s a p-p-painting of him by that fellow Stubbs in the library. One of my ancestors almost b-b-bankrupted the estate dealing in horseflesh. But come, Lord P-powerscourt, I have things to tell you. And I can show you the house as my b-b-brothers are away.’

  They set off up the path towards the great house. Charles pointed a long slim finger out across the lake. ‘That’s the death vault, the mausoleum thing over there,’ he said. ‘All the dead are locked up in there. Do you know, they’ve each got a sort of shelf to lie on in their coffin. It’s like one of those very organized libraries, like the B-b-bodleian in Oxford. P-p-pull out a shelf and there’s a load of b-b-books. P-p-pull out a shelf here and there’s a corpse in its coffin.’

  The young man looked wistful suddenly. Powerscourt wondered if he was thinking of his own parents lying in their allotted position in Hawksmoor’s marble, waiting for the Last Trump.

  ‘I thought of going into the Church once, you know, Lord P-p-powerscourt. I thought about it quite seriously. I always thought I’d have liked the Communion Service. Raising the host high above the altar. That sense of expectation you get at Communion. Loads of incense. Richly coloured vestments, p-p-purple if I ever got as far as b-b-bishop.’

  ‘What made you change your mind?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘I was never quite sure I b-b-believed it enough, if you know what I mean. I used to have this dream of finishing a theology exam in Oxford one hot day in the summer term and a very old cleric with a vast b-b-beard collecting my p-p-papers and saying, “You don’t really b-b-believe any of this nonsense, do you?” I always woke up b-b-before I could give an answer.’

  They were now in the entrance to the Hall, a rather dark place in the basement lined with animal heads that had once grazed in the Candlesby grounds. ‘There used to be a p-p-proper way in,’ Charles told him, ‘p-p-pillars, a hall with high ceilings, family p-p-portraits, usually on horses, lining the walls. This entrance looks as though it was designed for the coal merchant or the man who comes to clean the chimneys. It’s too common for words.’

  ‘Why was it changed?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘If your ancestors were as mad as mine,’ said Charles sadly, ‘anything was p-p-possible. They could have put the kitchen on the roof or turned the house into a zoo. Small stuffed animals, b-b-birds in glass boxes, antlers, the whole cornucopia of dead creatures has always had a great appeal to my family. They must all have b-b-been deer or red kites or tawny eagles in a p-p-previous existence.’

  Charles led him round the house, pausing every now and again to point out some truly monumental piece of taxidermy or a picture where one of Gladiator’s ancestors could just be glimpsed through the accumulated grime on the surface of the painting.

  Powerscourt found himself in a strange world he would never forget. In his youth he had seen houses in Ireland where decay was taking over as the family income grew less and less and was eaten up by mortgages and jointures. But he had never encountered anything as bad as this. Here the paint was flaking off the ceilings, long strips of wallpaper hung off the walls. There was dry rot in the floorboards. Sections of rotting plaster had dropped from ceiling to floor and disintegrated into yet more dust. Lady Lucy was to point out when he went back to the hotel that his hair was turning white in places. There were antlers on the walls whose heads were falling off, one-eyed owls, foxes with no tails. One of the previous Earls had collected animals of all descriptions and these were rotting away in glass cases that lay about in most of the downstairs rooms. And Charles told Powerscourt about the Wicked Earl, who had gone on the Grand Tour and collected some of the bloodier and more sadistic Caravaggios.

  Time had stopped a long time before in Candlesby Hall. There was no electricity, no telephone, no motor car, no central heating, none of the conveniences associated with the modernity of 1909. If the Industrial Revolution had never touched great swathes of Lincolnshire, it had never even whispered its name in Candlesby Hall. Powerscourt thought the range in the kitchen might have been in use at the time of the French Revolution. The vicar in the next parish, an amateur historian of the medieval period, told him that the late Earl and his family were living in the seventeenth, or possibly the eighteenth century.

  It was a week before Powerscourt realized one of the strangest things of all about this strange house. All the servants, with four exceptions, were male. And the only women on the staff were all over fifty.

  PART TWO

  THE SPECIAL TRAIN

  An English peer of very ol
d title is desirous of marrying at once a very wealthy lady … If among your clients you know such a lady who is willing to purchase the rank of a peeress for £65,000 sterling, paid in cash to her future husband and who has sufficient wealth besides to keep up the rank of a peeress, I should be pleased if you would communicate with me.

  Daily Telegraph, 1901.

  Advert aimed at transatlantic market.

  8

  Johnny Fitzgerald stared at his full glass of beer for a long time. Lady Lucy had gone off to write to her children and would join him later. Johnny had spent a lot of time in his career with Powerscourt looking for people who had gone missing. Quite often they turned out to be dead. On at least two occasions they had turned out to be murderers. Only once, to the best of his knowledge, had he failed and he had always consoled himself with the thought that the individual concerned had gone missing on a ship and had probably fallen or been pushed over the side.

  Still he did not try his beer. Reviewing the little he knew about the disappearance of Jack Hayward, Johnny tried to work out the circumstances of his departure. The reason was clear enough. Either the Candlesbys wanted him out of the way or he had decided to take himself out of trouble for a while. And he had decided not to leave his wife or his children behind as possible hostages. But which was it? Surely he would not have taken his wife and children into the unknown, some destination with no house for them to live in and no job for him to keep the family going. Would a man like Jack Hayward have contacts of his own he could mobilize to provide hearth and home at a moment’s notice? Would his relations, not to put too fine a point on it, have the spare room or rooms to accommodate the Hayward ménage? And not just for a day, but for a week or a month or even longer? Johnny toyed with the idea of advertising for knowledge of Hayward’s whereabouts in The Field or Horse and Hound or Country Life, maybe all three. He could pretend to be a solicitor looking for Hayward to hand over an inheritance, maybe even a bequest from the late Earl though Johnny wasn’t sure the late Earl would have been in the business of leaving small bequests to his servants, however valuable they were.

  What about the other option, that the new Earl had persuaded or bribed him to leave? How much would it cost to keep and to house a family of four for an indefinite period of time? Or had there been a job he could go to? Had some friend or relation said to the late Earl that if he ever wanted to get rid of that groom of his, he, the friend or relation, would happily give him a job? Maybe one of the late Earl’s racing contacts would be happy to take in Hayward. Such people, Johnny said to himself, often have spare cottages at their disposal for extra stable staff or visiting jockeys. Or maybe it was a relation. Powerscourt hadn’t said anything about relations, probably because he didn’t know.

  One thing was certain. Jack Hayward knew more about the murder than anybody else alive except the murderer. He knew, or he had been told, where to find the body. He might have even known the person who told him. He knew what the injuries were. He had probably heard some of the bullying as the doctor was persuaded to sign the false death certificate.

  Johnny came back to where he had started. He could only think of two reasons for flight. One, that Jack was an honest man who did not wish to have to compromise his employer with the police. The other, that Richard Candlesby had bundled him off as fast as he could in case he told the truth. Had the son killed the father? Johnny didn’t know. As he took the first sip of his beer he reflected bitterly that words like needle and haystack were totally inadequate. Grain of sand, Johnny thought, grain of sand in the bloody Sahara Desert, all three and a half million square miles of it. He took another, larger draught.

  Charles Dymoke drew two chairs up to the window in the dining room, looking out over the park to the lake and its island. Powerscourt could hear a burrowing, scratching sound inside the wall to his left. The mice or the rats were continuing their lifelong assault on the fabric of the house.

  ‘I thought there was something you ought to know, Lord P-p-powerscourt,’ said Charles, going slightly red in the face as he struggled with his stammer. ‘A lawyer from London came to see Richard yesterday. Shifty sort of chap if you ask me. I caught his name as he came in. Mark Sowerby, of Hopkins P-p-pettigrew & Green, Solicitors of B-b-bedford Square.’

  ‘He’s not the normal family solicitor then?’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘No, no,’ said Charles, ‘they come from Lincoln and they’re all about as old as the cathedral.’

  ‘Did he come of his own accord? Or was he invited?’

  ‘I think he was invited. Something was said about him working for my father. How can I p-put it? If your house was full of a terrible smell, Sowerby looked like the man who would come to fix it.’

  ‘I see,’ said Powerscourt, watching a herd of deer trotting peacefully towards the clump of trees beside the lake. ‘I wonder what he came for.’

  ‘There’s something else I should tell you. I’ve been speaking to some of the servants. The night my father died, they say, somebody was heard coming back into the house about midnight, or a little earlier.’

  ‘Were they indeed?’ said Powerscourt. ‘How interesting. I don’t suppose anybody knows who it was?’

  ‘Afraid not, my lord. Could have been anybody.’

  ‘They didn’t hear any other noises as well? Horses’ hooves, that kind of thing?’

  ‘Not as far as I know,’ said Charles, wondering if he had discovered his true profession at last as a detective. Maybe Powerscourt could give him lessons. ‘One last thing,’ he went on, ‘I nearly forgot. Jack Hayward, the groom who found the b-b-body, left in the dark when nobody could see him. A neighbour said hello to him about four in the afternoon; next morning the house was b-b-boarded up.’

  ‘Well done, young man,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Do the village people speak to you then? They wouldn’t speak to me at all.’

  ‘Some of them do,’ said Charles. ‘Would you like me to see what I can find out down there?’

  ‘Yes please,’ said Powerscourt. ‘That would be most helpful. I’m very grateful. And I tell you something else, Charles. I would like to talk to the servants here. Where would be the best place to do that? Would they feel most at ease talking to me in their own quarters here, or up at the hotel?’

  ‘Here, I should think. I’ll let you know when my b-b-brothers are away again, shall I?’

  ‘Please do,’ said Powerscourt. ‘That could be very useful. And there’s the steward, Mr Savage. Could he come to see me at the hotel in the morning? I wouldn’t want him put in a compromising position by being seen talking to me up here.’

  As Charles walked him back down towards the stables Powerscourt was delighted with one small success. He had his very own spy in the enemy ranks, a human equivalent of the wooden horse that might yet lead to the destruction of his opponents.

  Lady Lucy stared in despair at the letter. It was covered with the smallest handwriting she had ever seen. She knew from the notepaper headed Church House, Ashby Puerorum, that it must have come from her aunt but for the present she had no idea what it said. A spider’s hand would have been more legible. Eventually she borrowed a magnifying glass from the hotel staff and began, very slowly, to decipher the message. The first few lines seemed to be full of the conventional pleasantries welcoming her to Lincolnshire and hoping the family were well. In the third paragraph Lady Lucy came across a word that she thought was luncheon. Before the intervention of the full stop she discerned the word tomorrow. For a moment she was filled with panic. Then she read on. ‘I hope you will not find the dietary requirements here too restrictive. A long period of experimentation has convinced me that conventional menus are wasteful and unhealthy, leading to distemper, bile and progressive decay of the body tissue.’

  Francis is going to love this, said Lady Lucy to herself. He had always taken a perverse delight in eccentrics of every sort. She saw a word underlined several times. After multiple adjustments of the glass she discovered that the word was beetroot. God in heaven. �
��I find that beetroot’, Lady Lucy read on, ‘is admirably suited to be the mainstay of any sensible eating regimen. My staff have successfully grown some of the little-known varieties, Bull’s Blood, Boltardy and Cheltenham Green Top. I have given over most of my garden to beetroot cultivation. Out of season I have devised a system of storage in the ample cellars beneath my house. It can be soup or broth – beetroot and potato pie is very nourishing as is fried beetroot with hardboiled eggs. My own particular favourite is beetroot fritters served with toast and horseradish purée.’

  Well, thought Lady Lucy, lunch is certainly going to be interesting. There was more. ‘I am afraid I am also unconventional in the question of sweet courses. The usual offerings of today, heavy in sugar and flour and custard and lashings of unhealthy cream, will soon lead to the extinction of the nation’s manhood and moral fibre, washed away in a sea of suet, and guarantee our defeat in the forthcoming war with Germany.’ Maybe beetroot provides prophetic powers when taken in enormous quantities, Lady Lucy said to herself. Maybe it rots the brain. ‘In earlier times,’ the old lady continued, ‘I fortified myself in the final course with berries, blackberries, bilberries, raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, redcurrants, all grown and preserved in my gardens and greenhouses. As the decades passed,’ how long has all this been going on, Lady Lucy muttered to herself, ‘I found the tastes of these fruits growing pale on my palate. I am sure they were healthy – indeed one of the teachers at the school next door claimed I could have survived a voyage to the South Seas on such a diet – but I had grown weary. Rhubarb, a food as delicious as beetroot, and with just as many culinary possibilities, has replaced them on my table. Again, I am self-sufficient in the supply of the produce.’ Lady Lucy thought that the gardener or gardeners of Church House must have a pretty tedious existence.