Death in a Scarlet Coat Page 18

  Rachel Cameron stopped once more. She looked worn out suddenly by the terrible events she was describing.

  ‘You can stop for a while, if you’d like to,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘You could begin again when you are ready.’

  Mrs Cameron smiled wanly. ‘It’s all right. We’re nearly at the end now. I’ve often wondered if she had already decided what to do, as if she could only see one way out. She rushed into my house and found a copy of Tess of the D’Urbervilles. “I don’t know,” she said, “if I’m going to be like Tess or Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure. She kept repeating, “The President of the Immortals had finished his sport with Tess.” She was still repeating it when she left my kitchen to creep back to her own house. That was the last time I saw her alive. The letters didn’t come the next day. But they did come the day after that. And Flavia, consumed by now no doubt by love and guilt in equal measure, walks out into the sea and doesn’t come back. Sir Arthur went out of his mind for some time. He only really recovered when a friend from his days in the army took him away on a walking tour of the Scottish Highlands. They were away for about a month.’

  ‘Did he ever talk to you about Flavia?’

  ‘This is the real point of my story, Lady Powerscourt. One of the things that helped to make Sir Arthur better was deciding to find out who had sent the letters. His friend from the army was very keen on it, apparently. Know your enemies, or some such rubbish, was what he used to say. And so he came to see me. He wrote beforehand, all very proper. He may have been drinking less than he had before but he still managed to down a third of a bottle of whisky in the hour he was with me. It took some time before he got round to what he wanted to say – maybe that was why the scotch was needed in such quantities. He started looking at the carpet rather than at me. Then he said that he had employed a private detective to find out about the letters.

  ‘This is why I have come,’ he managed to say. ‘This detective person told me that he thought Candlesby sent the letters himself, in a desperate attempt to get Flavia to leave me. I couldn’t believe it at first. Seems unlikely, what? But you knew Flavia. You were her closest friend. Did she ever talk to you about the letters?’

  ‘Well, what was I to say? Would I be betraying my friend if I told him the truth? Would it send him back towards despair and larger doses of scotch if I told him? I think I must have delayed so long that he could have guessed what the answer was if he had been a sensitive man. But he wasn’t. I tried to decide whether it would be better for him to know the truth, or be left in ignorance. In the end I told him the truth.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He didn’t say anything at all, not for a while. He walked up and down the room for about ten minutes. Then he headed for the front door. As he was going he said, “The man’s a bastard, a complete bastard. I’m going to kill him.”’

  PART THREE

  CARAVAGGIO

  The bulk of the great fortunes are now in a highly liquid state. They do not consist of huge landed estates, vast parks and castles and all the rest of it.

  Arthur Balfour, 1909

  13

  Lord Francis Powerscourt was on his way to see the manager of Finch’s Bank in Boston, where the Candlesby accounts were held. The manager was not at all what he had expected. Gone were the sober suits and white shirts of the popular stereotype of bank manager. Sebastian Lambert’s suit looked as if it had come from Savile Row and the shirt and tie from one of Jermyn Street’s finest tailors. He was a round sort of bank manager, a tubby man about five feet nine inches tall with long sideburns and a neatly trimmed moustache. Every now and again he would remove his glasses and rub the lenses energetically on the bottom of his tie. He ushered Powerscourt to a seat by a table in his office, whose walls were covered with pictures of the Derby and the other great classics of the turf.

  ‘Never sure it’s a good idea to have these pictures on the walls,’ Lambert said. ‘People might think the bank is encouraging them to go to the races and gamble their money away. Bad for the prudent customer, bad for the Nonconformist conscience. Still, enough of this. You said in your letter, Lord Powerscourt, that you wished to discuss the financial affairs of the Candlesby family, with particular reference to the old Earl who has just been murdered rather than his successor who has also just been murdered.’

  ‘That is correct,’ said Powerscourt. ‘My concerns are with John, the previous Earl. I don’t think money or the lack of it had a great deal to do with his death, but knowledge of the financial situation does enable a person like me to take a more comprehensive view of the victim. Naturally, Mr Lambert, whatever you tell me will be treated in confidence.’

  ‘Thank you for saying that,’ said Lambert, stretching out his legs. ‘Where should I begin?’ He seemed to derive inspiration from a very close finish in a classic horse race behind Powerscourt’s head, where a grey horse was just beginning to pull ahead of a brown one.

  ‘Let me begin with an observation about our aristocratic friends engaged in agriculture. They are not very intelligent. One man who got out of land completely and went on to make a fortune on the Stock Exchange put it something like this: “In Year One,” my man said, “they’re all growing wheat. In the end there’s too much wheat on the market. So prices fall. The people who were into beef or dairy did well because there wasn’t enough on the market so prices went up. Now then, in Year Two,” my chap was well into his stride by now, “the farming fraternity all get out of wheat and into beef or dairy or whatever did well the year before. The same thing happens, of course. Too much beef or too much dairy means low prices. If they’d stuck to wheat they’d have made a killing, as most of their brethren had bailed out of it. Year Three, they all plunge back into wheat because of the high prices in Year Two and the same process kicks off all over again.”’

  ‘Did that happen to the Candlesbys? Were they numbered with the five wise virgins or the five foolish ones who brought no extra oil for their lamps?’

  Sebastian Lambert laughed and rubbed his glasses vigorously on the end of his tie. ‘I’m afraid that the estate managers fare no better than their masters when it comes to working out how to make money out of farming these days. You know as well as I do, Lord Powerscourt, that the decline in agriculture has been going on for a generation or more now. Hardly anybody escapes. Lower rents, lower value for the land, imported produce from all over the world putting more downward pressure on prices – it’s a spiral that never stops. If the big farmers in these parts ask for my advice I often tell them to get out, sell up while they can, cash in their assets before they have to mortgage themselves to the hilt to pay the bills or pay the interest. The Candlesbys’ – he waved an elegant arm in a circle in front of him – ‘are in debt up to their eyeballs. The late Earl would not be told. He would insist on all the trimmings that prevailed in better times when his father was alive. Too many servants, too expensive a diet, too many fine clarets at the highest prices, too many racehorses at even higher prices in days gone by. There may be faster ways to lose money than owning racehorses, Lord Powerscourt, but I’m damned if I know what they are. There are two mortgages on the house worth over fifty thousand pounds. And remember that while the price you get for your corn may go down, the interest payments tend to remain the same. There are further loans and mortgages on various bits of the land for another forty-five thousand so the total is almost in six figures. The late Earl was thinking of taking out further mortgages to help him pay the interest on the existing ones. It’s all pretty desperate. I can’t see how they are going to get out of it, really. They might be able to sell the land and the house for more than the debts but I doubt it. There are so many families in similar situations at the present time.’

  ‘Does this mean’, said Powerscourt, ‘that the new Earl, should I say the new new Earl – we’re now on the second new Earl in no time at all – inherits nothing? Only mortgages and minuses on the family accounts?’

  ‘Correct, my lord. If your parents haven’t told
you, it must come as a terrible shock when your father dies and you inherit a mountain of debts.’

  Perhaps, Powerscourt thought to himself, the Candlesby financial position was such that you would want to keep the incumbent alive at all costs. Far better for them to be responsible for the debts.

  ‘I am most grateful to you, Mr Lambert,’ he said. ‘I must go now. I have an appointment very soon to jump out of a train.’

  ‘What interesting lives you investigators lead,’ said Lambert with a smile, taking a final rub at his glasses. ‘Let me wish you a safe jump.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Powerscourt, ‘thank you very much. Can I ask you a question?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘These racing pictures here,’ Powerscourt waved his hand expansively round the walls, ‘something tells me they don’t all belong to the bank. I think most of them are yours. Would I be right?’

  Sebastian Lambert gave a rueful grin. ‘You are absolutely right, Lord Powerscourt. I don’t think I want to know how you worked it out.’

  ‘And do you go to the races yourself, Mr Lambert?’

  The bank manager looked carefully at the glass panels on his door to make sure nobody could hear him. ‘Well,’ he whispered, ‘I do, as a matter of fact. But I have to go quite a long way away from here. I don’t think the bank and some of the customers would approve if the manager was seen placing a large wager on the two thirty at Lincoln. So I travel south to Epsom or Sandown Park. I once went as far as Exeter, God help me.’

  ‘Disguise?’ said Powerscourt hopefully. ‘False beard, limp, strange clothes, that sort of thing?’

  ‘Alas, no. I don’t go round like Sherlock Holmes pretending to be a washerwoman or whoever it was. And could I remind you of one relevant fact, Lord Powerscourt? That last bit of information about the races, that’s confidential, that is. Highly confidential.’

  Powerscourt found Detective Inspector Blunden reading rather sadly through a pile of interview notes. ‘There’s a set of these for you over there, my lord. It’s remarkable how little twenty or twenty-five people are able to tell you about the morning of a murder. Apart from the fact that two people thought they saw two men, height, hair colour, weight, age all unnoticed, going into the special train, that’s about it. Hours and hours spent interviewing; we might as well have passed yesterday evening reading the railway timetables. God in heaven.’

  ‘Has any information come out about GNR uniforms, Inspector? About where the people who work here get theirs, for instance?’

  ‘That’s not going to bring any joy to your heart, my lord. There are a lot of seasonal staff employed on the railway in the summer so the company keeps a good supply of the trousers and shirts and so on at one of the big clothes shops in the town. And nobody’s been in there in the past month buying any uniforms. I went to see them myself while you were with the bank manager. It’s all bad today.’

  ‘I tell you what,’ said Powerscourt, ‘why don’t you join us on a little expedition? Let’s take a special train in the direction of Spalding. Let’s pretend to murder an Earl in the early stages of the trip. Let’s jump out of the door of the moving train when it is doing ten to twelve miles an hour at a cutting just outside the town. Remember, if you’re the last man, to close the train door behind you when you go, or all our theories have turned to dust. And if it doesn’t work the first time around we have to ask the good Mr Jones, the man who drove the train yesterday, to go into reverse and do it again. What do you say?’

  The Inspector smiled. Powerscourt was always surprised how a spot of danger could cheer some men up. ‘I’d be delighted, my lord. Much better than reading any more of this stuff.’

  At a quarter past two there was an impromptu conference in the special train: Powerscourt, Inspector Blunden, Archibald Jones the driver and young Andrew Merrick, almost too overawed by his superior officer to speak.

  ‘I’ve been giving this matter some thought, so I have, gentlemen,’ said Jones the driver. ‘We have one problem to do with how you know when to jump. I propose to give two short hoots when we are less than a minute from the cutting. When I reach it I’m going to give one continuous hoot, so just go at that stage. I’m not sure there’ll be enough time for all three of you to jump. Somebody may have to be left behind.’

  Andrew Merrick knew where his duty lay. He might be younger, he might be fitter, he might be nearer in years to the murderers than his superiors – none of that mattered.

  ‘I’ll come third,’ he said. ‘I’ll jump, of course, if I can.’

  ‘You remember what I said yesterday, my lord? A cutting, with long grass and brambles and general undergrowth. The hooter will tell you when to go.’

  ‘Please, sir, Lord Powerscourt, sir, Inspector Blunden, sir, I have been conducting experiments around the station this morning.’

  ‘And?’ said the Inspector, who had come across young Andrew Merrick before.

  ‘It’s the door, sirs. I think it might be quite difficult to close it and jump at the same time.’

  ‘Aha,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I may have the advantage of you all here. I have actually jumped off a moving train and closed the door. It was difficult but not impossible.’

  ‘Whereabouts was this, my lord?’ Jones was fascinated to meet a veteran jumper out of moving trains.

  ‘It was in Northern India, in Kashmir actually. There were some other people on the train who didn’t want me to leave it alive so it seemed a better bet to jump.’

  ‘Right, gentlemen, I think it’s time to go.’ Driver Jones began moving off towards his cab. ‘If all goes well I shall reverse back down the line to the cutting and pick you up. If all does not go well I can still pick you up and we can try once more. I think we have enough time on the lines for three jumps before the next train arrives.’

  A few moments later they watched the tell-tale signs as smoke began drifting past the window. Inspector Blunden began a series of stretching exercises he used to perform on the rugby fields of the Midlands. Andrew Merrick peered out of the window and tried to appear nonchalant. They were out of the town now, the train building up speed as it drove through the lush fields between Boston and Spalding.

  Powerscourt felt nervous, almost frightened. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t jumped out of trains before. But he felt irritated now to be risking limb if not life on the case of two of the most unpleasant human beings he had ever come across. Murderers, in his experience, were not usually totally evil people. They all shared one fatal flaw, of course, depriving one or more of their fellow citizens of life, but they could also be clever or charming or witty. None of those adjectives could be used in conjunction with the Dymoke family.

  Time to stop this introspection, Powerscourt said to himself and began touching his toes. The Inspector was leading the way to the carriage doors with Powerscourt behind him and the young man in third place, hopping anxiously from foot to foot. In the distance on their right they could just see the outskirts of Spalding. Above them a hovering bird was circling in the sky, looking for its prey. There were two short blasts on the train hooter. Inspector Blunden grasped the door handle firmly in his right hand.

  ‘Good luck, my lord!’

  Powerscourt smiled. One long continuous blast. They could feel the train slowing down. Inspector Blunden opened the door and jumped towards the cutting. Powerscourt had already decided that he would close the door behind him, thus ensuring that young Andrew would not have the chance to jump out of the train and break his legs. Powerscourt knew what he had to do. A few years before, he and Lady Lucy had gone to St Moritz to walk in the mountains and watch the skiing for the weekend. Bend your knees, he said to himself as he stepped on to the little rung just below the point where the door joined the carriage. Bend your arms. Grab the door in your right hand. Jump as hard as you can. Swing the door closed behind you. Wait for the landing. Everything happens so fast. Now he was rolling forward along the cutting, the brambles cutting his face. But he was safe. He hadn’t broken anyth
ing. Looking back, he just had time to see that the door was properly closed before the train turned a corner and vanished from view. Inspector Blunden was rubbing an ankle a few yards away.

  ‘You seem to have made a better fist of it than me, my lord,’ he said ruefully, continuing his massage programme.

  ‘I only remembered just before I jumped’, said Powerscourt, ‘that it’s better for some reason to jump upwards rather than straight out, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘Well, I don’t suppose I’ll be doing it again for a while,’ said Blunden, tottering slowly to his feet. ‘We do know one thing now we didn’t before. The two men, if there were two men who boarded the train at Boston, could have garrotted the Earl once they were out of the station and then jumped off the train just here. I don’t suppose they’d have torn off their uniforms here and dumped them in the long grass. I’d better send a search party out once we get back to the station.’

  ‘There is one thing we may have forgotten, though, Inspector.’ Powerscourt was climbing to the top of the cutting, looking for their return train back to the station.

  ‘What’s that, my lord?’

  ‘It’s this,’ said Powerscourt, waving happily at the sight of Jones leaning out of his driver’s car. ‘If the killers did murder the Earl and jump out here, either they were regular users of the line, or else they were employees of the railway who could easily have obtained access to the special train to garrotte Lord Candlesby. And they would certainly have known where to jump.’

  Five days later another melancholy party made their way from the Hall up to the Candlesby mausoleum on its hill. Richard was laid to rest in the next niche to his father. There were now sixty-seven empty niches left. Powerscourt calculated that if the death rate were maintained at the current level there would be standing room only in the death chamber in a couple of years’ time. There were fewer mourners than there had been for the first funeral. Maybe Richard hadn’t had as much time to collect enemies as his father. Certainly there were none of those mourners who had come to make sure the hated Earl was actually dead and buried.