Death in a Scarlet Coat Read online

  Barnabas Thorpe whipped another ancient key from his ring and unlocked the iron grille that had enclosed Candlesby’s coffin. The policemen pulled it out while Thorpe locked the gate once more. Then the undertaker supervised the transport out to the cart, the policemen and the undertaker himself acting as pallbearers.

  Dr Carey looked at his prey with an appreciative eye, anxious to get on with his work. As the cart moved off the coroner came to say goodbye to Powerscourt and the Inspector. He shook them both by the hand.

  ‘There, gentlemen, we have managed to secure what you wanted. I hope Carey’s results will be to your liking. I am going to announce the day for the inquest when he has finished his investigations tomorrow. I don’t like to call it beforehand in case any body parts have to be sent away for tests. A very good morning to you.’

  Inspector Blunden led the way to the hospital morgue the following morning. He had, as he pointed out ruefully to Powerscourt, been there far too many times before. There was the normal smell of hospital disinfectant. A couple of orderlies were cleaning the floor. They were taken to a small room to one side. A body was lying on a slab with a white sheet over its face but there was nobody else in the room. Dr Carey appeared after a moment or two, a large notebook in his left hand and an expensive-looking fountain pen in the other.

  ‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ he said cheerfully, placing notebook and pen on a small table in the corner. ‘This one didn’t take very long, hardly any time at all. Come, let me show you. You’re not squeamish about dead bodies, are you? I have to warn you that this one is absolutely disgusting.’

  Both men said they thought they would be able to cope. ‘Here goes,’ said Dr Carey, and pulled the sheet slowly back to about the level of the shoulder. It was one of the most revolting corpses Powerscourt had ever seen, and the battlefields of India and South Africa had been strewn with bodies hideously mutilated by the weapons of modern warfare. One side of Candlesby’s face had not been touched at all. The other had been battered, hit, smashed, thumped, over and over and over and over again. The skin had been reduced to pulp. The bones had been beaten into strange and grotesque shapes. The nose had virtually disappeared. There was dried blood everywhere, caked in lumps on his shoulder, lining his body as far as they could see. There was a sickly smell of dried blood and death and the faint overlay of the hospital anaesthetic.

  ‘You won’t be surprised to hear that this poor man did not die of natural causes. I have to say I am at a loss to say exactly how he did die. I mean, after a fairly limited spell of this battering his heart gave up so the actual cause of death was heart failure. As for the time of death, it is difficult if not impossible to estimate so long after the event, but I would hazard sometime between ten in the evening and four o’clock the following morning. So I can certainly answer the coroner’s question, Was this death by natural causes? No, it was not. You gentlemen have lots of experience looking at dead bodies. Have you ever seen anything like this before? This brutal battering on one side of the face only?’

  Neither man had seen anything like it. ‘Would he have been upright perhaps?’ Powerscout suggested. ‘Lashed to a pillar so his assailant or assailants could attack him with a spade or something like that?’

  ‘That’s good, Powerscourt. He was tied up to something. His hands and ankles have marks on them as though he had indeed been secured on to pillar or post or some such.’

  ‘You don’t suppose our murderer has a rather bizarre way of killing people?’ Inspector Blunden was rather hesitant. ‘I mean, suppose he gets his man tied up so he can’t move. Then he picks up his spade or his shovel or whatever it is. He gives one good whack to the man’s face. If he’s right-handed maybe it’s easier to batter him on one side only rather than go round to the other side where the blows may not be so effective.’

  ‘That’s clever, Inspector. It may even be right.’ Nathaniel Carey was nodding at Blunden. ‘But there is something else I have to tell you. Whatever killed him might not have been a spade or a shovel or anything like that though I could be wrong. I have no idea what killed him.’

  ‘Do you think you will be able to work it out – what killed him, I mean?’

  Dr Carey looked at the corpse again. ‘I’m not sure. I have preserved various sections of tissue which might tell us if certain other objects might have killed him. Beyond that, I can do nothing.’

  ‘The way I look at it is this, Dr Carey, my lord,’ Inspector Blunden said. ‘We wanted to know if the man died of natural causes. We now know he didn’t. He was murdered in a particularly horrible way. But now it’s murder we can make progress in our investigation. We can question every single person in that house down to the mice in the skirting boards. We can search every room in the place. We can break into Jack Hayward’s house if we have to and see if there are any clues in there as to where he’s gone. I believe we have to wait until after the murder verdict is revealed at the inquest but that won’t be long. We can begin our inquiries at last. The waiting’s over.’

  11

  Johnny Fitzgerald didn’t know much about The Turf. He could have told you that Charles the Second had a lot to do with establishing Newmarket as a centre for horse racing. He vaguely remembered somebody telling him about the great merits of Newmarket sausages. But when deciding on the best strategy for finding out if Jack Hayward and his family were here or not, he fell back on the tactics that had served him well in the past. He found the grandest public house and hotel in the place and inquired within for the name of a well-respected trainer.

  ‘Do you have horses you want to place here, is that what you’re about?’ said the landlord in a quiet spell between orders.

  ‘I’m looking for somebody, that’s what I’m doing. Man who used to work here years ago. Now, if you could tell me the trainer who would most likely know about who’s here and who’s not, I would be most grateful.’

  The landlord thought for a minute or two. ‘Bamford,’ he said, ‘Dick Bamford. He knows most of what goes on round here. Apple Tree Farm is where you’ll find him, on the Cambridge road.’

  Just one string of horses passed Johnny on his way to the farm. They were picking their way along the road as if they were used to better surfaces and wider horizons.

  Dick Bamford was slightly suspicious at first about Johnny’s mission. He had explained that he was working with one of England’s leading investigators and the Lincolnshire police. But when Bamford learned that it involved a case of what looked like murder, and that Jack Hayward had disappeared very shortly after the discovery of the body, he grew more suspicious still.

  ‘You’re not suggesting that Jack killed this Candlesby person, that he ran away before he was arrested, are you?’

  ‘No, I’m not, Mr Bamford,’ said Johnny. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t explain about the dead man straight away. I promise you, nobody thinks Jack Hayward killed anybody. We just think he left in such a hurry because he knew too much. Maybe he knew enough to put the new Lord Candlesby in the dock. You see, only three people saw the body. Jack was one. The doctor was another. The son was the third. The doctor is dead and Jack has disappeared. There’s only one person left around who has seen the corpse and knows what he died of and he says he never looked at the body at all. That’s the new Earl, the eldest son. They may have taken the corpse out of its mausoleum by now and a pathologist may have answered some of these questions, I don’t know. But can you see why we want to talk to Jack? It may be enough that we talk to him where he is at present so he won’t have to go back to Candlesby if he doesn’t want to. But unless I know where he is I can’t even speak to him.’

  ‘You give me your word’, said Bamford, ‘that you’re not going to have him arrested the moment you find him?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Well then, I have no more idea than you do of where he is but I think my wife might be able to give you a steer. She was very close to Jack’s wife when Jack worked for Laughton’s, the big trainer down the road, very successful fellow
. Bertha!’

  He gave an enormous yell which duly produced Bertha from the kitchen, wearing a dark blue apron and with flour in her hair.

  ‘You didn’t have to shout so loud, Dick. The cat has gone into hiding again. Sorry, I didn’t know we had company. Good afternoon.’

  ‘Johnny Fitzgerald,’ said Johnny, shaking a floury hand.

  ‘Mr Fitzgerald is looking for Jack Hayward, dear. He was caught up in a mysterious death which may well turn out to be murder. He’s left Candlesby Hall for the time being. And he departed in a hurry by all accounts, taking the wife and children with him. Mr Fitzgerald and his friends are keen to talk to him as he is one of the very few people to have seen the dead man.’

  ‘That wouldn’t be the old Earl of Candlesby, would it, the dead man, I mean, Mr Fitzgerald?’

  ‘It would, I’m afraid,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid at all. Rejoice, rejoice. He was one of the worst men in England. Jack Hayward’s wife has written to me many times with details of his crimes. She’ll be so pleased.’

  ‘I was hoping, Mrs Bamford,’ said Johnny, keen to draw the conversation back to where he wanted it to go, ‘that you might be able to help us in terms of where Jack Hayward would have taken his wife and family. I think it would have to be somewhere he could find work, and somewhere he could feel safe if anybody came looking for him. Do you have any ideas?’

  Mrs Bamford looked doubtful. ‘I don’t remember having any conversations with Kathleen, that’s the wife, about where they might go in an emergency.’

  ‘What about her family? Where did she come from?’

  ‘She was Irish, I’m sure of that. Now you’re going to ask me which part, aren’t you? Hold on a moment, let me think.’

  Mrs Bamford went over to the window and stared at a corner of the stables. She went and looked at a small painting on the wall which showed a string of horses out for their morning gallop.

  ‘Kathleen gave me this picture,’ she said. ‘Her people have something to do with horses, breeding them, training them, riding them, I can’t remember. But there’s a name on the picture somewhere. Here it is: O’Grady Stables, Cashel. Cashel’s got a rock in it, I remember them telling us about it at school, though whether it’s a sweet like Brighton rock or a great stone thing sticking up into the sky I don’t know. Cashel, that’s where she came from, Kathleen O’Grady as she was before she married Jack. Maybe that’s where you should head for, Mr Fitzgerald.’

  Johnny thought there was something biblical about the name. Rock of Cashel. Rock of Ages. Maybe the Haywards were hiding themselves in it.

  Three days after the inquest with its verdict of unlawful killing, Powerscourt and Detective Inspector Blunden were on their way back to the Hall. The inquest had been regularly interrupted by Mark Sowerby, the late Earl of Candlesby’s man of business from Hopkins Pettigrew & Green of Bedford Square. Sowerby had tried to establish that the exhumation from the Candlesby mausoleum had been unlawful because the family had not been consulted. The coroner informed him politely that he, as coroner, had full authority to order exhumations in cases of this kind. Sowerby’s next assault had been to claim that as the exhumation had clearly been unlawful the inquest had no right to issue a verdict other than that of death by natural causes as signed off by Dr Miller at the time of death. Dr Carey, making notes in a large red notebook, was biding his time. When summoned to give his evidence he took care to give the most graphic description he could of the injuries delivered to the dead man’s body. His description of the dried blood and crushed bone left one or two of the ladies in the court looking rather pale. Mark Sowerby made one last stand on behalf of his clients, still protesting that the inquest was unlawful and that therefore its verdict could not stand. By this stage the coroner’s patience was exhausted.

  ‘Mr Sowerby, you have tried my good temper long enough. Your ignorance of the law relating to inquests and exhumations is equalled only by your inability or your unwillingness to listen to the evidence. I do not see why this court should be troubled by your vexatious interruptions and your false disquisitions on the law. Gentlemen,’ the coroner nodded to two policemen at the side of the court, ‘take him away.’

  Powerscourt and the Inspector had decided to divide their forces. The two principal powers among the Candlesby staff, they had decided, were likely to be the butler and the housekeeper. Powerscourt would take the butler and Blunden, who prided himself on his abilities with female witnesses, would interview the housekeeper. Blunden had also secured the consolation prize of the cook.

  Nobody on the staff is young here, Powerscourt said to himself, as he was shown into the butler’s room on the ground floor, next to where the silver was kept and across the way from the cellars. A couple of grandmothers, their arms piled high with clean sheets, passed him in the corridor like members of the chorus in some Greek tragedy. He remembered the steward and his melancholy account of his time here. Barnabas Thorpe the butler was well over seventy years old. He still had a fine head of hair, even if it had turned white, but his cheeks looked as though they had fallen in and his brown eyes looked sad all the time, as if they had seen enough.

  ‘Very good of you to talk to me, Mr Thorpe,’ Powerscourt began cheerfully. ‘Tell me, how long have you been here now?’

  The old man was counting on his fingers, working out the years of his servitude. ‘Sixty-two years I’ve been here now, my lord. I came in 1847 when I was fourteen years old as a trainee footman.’

  ‘So you’re seventy-six now. That’s about time to be thinking of retiring, surely.’

  ‘I don’t hold with this here retiring business, my lord. My father went on working till he was eighty-five, when he dropped down in his dairy, and my uncle went on till he was ninety-one. There’s something about the Candlesby air, I reckon. It’s the absence of all them modern things like motor cars and central heating and that electricity wiring, that’s what keeps us going if you ask me.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Powerscourt, wondering how to proceed with this veteran of domestic service, a Methuselah in a frock coat. ‘Perhaps you could tell us a little about the first two Lord Candlesbys you served before we move on to the one who’s just died.’

  ‘It’s odd, my lord. People tell you when you’re younger that you can remember things that happened a long time ago much better as you grow older, and you don’t quite believe them. But it’s true, the further back I go the clearer things seem in my mind. The old Earl, the one I served when I first came here, he was a good man. He was happily married, he cared about the estate, the whole agricultural business hadn’t started to go wrong. Maybe it’s because I was so young – I wasn’t yet twenty when he died – but the sun seemed to be always shining. His youngest daughter got married in that time and the celebrations went on for days – dinners for all the tenants, dancing, presents for the girls. It was magic. He dropped down dead one afternoon, that Earl, and the place was never the same again.’

  ‘Would you have said that he was eccentric, that he had some strange characteristics at all?’

  ‘I know what you’re getting at, my lord. There was plenty before him that were odd, like the one who went to Italy and came back with all those paintings that are still locked up in the top room by the back staircase. My first Earl, the old Earl, as I always call him, he was a Richard too, like the present one. The thing about him was that he wasn’t eccentric. In this family, pardon me for saying so, my lord, he was odd because he wasn’t odd, if you follow me. The next one, Edward he was, well, he started all right. It looked as though he would follow in his father’s footsteps. Then some of the family failings began to click in. You could watch it happening: slightly eccentric at the beginning of the decade, very eccentric by the end of it, virtually off his head five years later.’

  ‘What form did it take, this eccentricity, Mr Thorpe?’

  ‘Well, there’s a family failing for becoming recluses. Like those hermits who lived on top of pillars, my lord
. They stop talking to people. They stop talking to each other. By the end the Edward one was communicating with the staff by letter. God knows how he communicated with the wife and children. And then there was the estate. In earlier times all the area round the house was given over to the deer, a lovely herd there used to be here, and lovely venison on the table too. They were banished. All the area where the deer had been was allowed to go back to nature so the wildlife could flourish. And why was the wildlife allowed to flourish? So it could be caught and stuffed, my lord. At one point we had a taxidermist from Lincoln come to live here for six months a year while he saw to the dead creatures from the estate. Then there were the catalogues from all the taxidermists within a hundred miles offering everything from stuffed llamas to wildebeest. You’ll have seen all these glass cases clogging up the house; we had to throw out a whole lot more after that Edward died. His attention was so given over to all this nonsense that he didn’t look after anything else.’

  ‘I can see that this must have made life difficult for you all,’ said Powerscourt. ‘How did it affect your day-to-day routines?’

  ‘Well, my lord, it was often very difficult when you had no contact with the man at all. And then, just before he turned fifty, there was something else. I think he’d read about some house down in Sussex having tunnels running underneath it which meant that the people in the big house would see even less of the servants – the footmen and the housemaids would be moving about underground. So we had to have tunnels too. There’s one that goes from the kitchen area to the stables, and another that goes from the gardens to the area on the right of the house. No more under gardeners bringing flowers to the house across the lawn.’