Death in a Scarlet Coat Read online

  ‘For the present, my lord, I think you should see them.’ Sowerby thought his client was worried about incriminating himself. ‘If they really come at you time after time, trying to find inconsistencies in your story, then you can accuse them of harassment. And, of course, don’t forget that you can call on me or one of my colleagues to come and sit in on the interviews. Won’t do the police any harm to have to wait until we get here.’

  As Sowerby was driven away he was observed from the stables by Charles, who had overheard the introductions up at the Hall. ‘B-b-bloody lawyer,’ he said softly to the nearest horse. ‘I’ll have to tell Lord P-p-powerscourt all about him.’

  ‘So how is the Palace of Westminster these days?’ Lady Lucy was entertaining her cousin’s daughter Selina and her young man Sandy, who worked for The Times, to tea in Markham Square.

  ‘I think it manages to rub along all right, Lady Powerscourt,’ said the young man, sipping politely at his Earl Grey. ‘It’s never completely quiet, mind you, or else there would be nothing for me and my colleagues to write about.’

  ‘I took Sandy shopping this morning, Aunt Lucy,’ said Selina. ‘I advised him on a couple of shirts.’

  Lady Lucy was not at all sure of the propriety in polite society about young ladies advising young gentlemen on the purchase of clothes. At least it had been shirts. It could have been worse, much worse. Indeed, Lady Lucy, so relaxed with her own children, found the whole business of being an aunt rather difficult. She felt that she asked far too many questions about where the girl had been and with whom she had been consorting, but some of the young men hanging around the great London art galleries thought that rules were there to be broken and that manners only existed to be flouted.

  Sandy looked rather embarrassed about the shirt-buying expedition. Not for the first time Lady Lucy wondered if Selina wasn’t too forward, too pushy. She thought Sandy seemed to be quite a shy young man and might prefer a quieter sort of girl. She had mentioned this thought to her husband, who told her not to be ridiculous, that Sandy was perfectly capable of looking after his own interests and wouldn’t continue his liaison with Selina if he didn’t want to.

  ‘I tell you something that will interest your husband as well as yourself, Lady Powerscourt.’ She rather approved the addition of ‘as well as yourself’ to the sentence. It showed Sandy thought pretty fast.

  ‘And what might that be?’ she said, smiling.

  ‘You remember the Earl who died up there in Lincolnshire the other day? The one whose death is being investigated by your husband?’

  ‘The Earl of Candlesby,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘and what a strange way to go. Do you have any special information you’d like to pass on to my husband?’

  ‘I think it’s more interesting to me than it will be to him,’ said Sandy, ‘but let me tell you about it anyway. The old Earl, the dead one, he never set foot in the House of Lords in his life. There are backwoodsmen and backwoodsmen in that place if you follow me. Sometimes the Whips can drag some of them kicking and screaming down to the Palace of Westminster to vote in an important division. But the real backwoodsmen won’t even do that. It’s a mark of shame to them ever to go to London to vote at all. So they sit in their remote castles and their leaking houses until they die. My information concerns the new Earl, whose name is Richard.’

  ‘And what does this Richard propose to do?’ asked Selina, feeling that she had been left out of the conversation for too long.

  ‘He’s going to take his seat in the House of Lords as soon as he is allowed. And then he’s going to join the fight against Lloyd George and his Budget. I’ve bored everybody rigid with my stories about the battle between the government and the House of Lords about this Budget, but the Conservatives in the Lords are delighted to have a new recruit and one who isn’t too old. Youth is always at a premium in the House of Lords. You know, people who can stand up unaided, walk without sticks, eat with their own teeth, that sort of thing.’

  ‘How do you know this, Sandy?’ asked Lady Lucy.

  ‘It’s quite simple really. People sometimes think reporters are far smarter than they really are. I wrote to him, and he wrote back. That’s all. He sounded very excited about joining the House of Lords.’

  ‘You make it sound as if he was joining the Garrick Club or the Carlton or one of those places,’ said Selina.

  ‘I’m not sure there’s that much difference, really – institutional smell of cooking and carbolic and floor polish, awful school food all round,’ said Sandy. ‘The House of Lords is very similar to the Garrick or the Carlton. Lots of old boys asleep in the library after lunch. Terrible hunting prints all over the walls.’

  Lady Lucy was about to reply when the conversation was interrupted by a slight coughing noise at the door. It was Rhys, the Powerscourt butler, recently promoted to chauffeur in the Silver Ghost. Rhys always coughed before entering a room.

  ‘Telegram, my lady,’ he said, in a voice that might have been announcing the death of the sovereign.

  ‘Need your help,’ she read. ‘Not often I ask this. Maybe first time. Could be record.’ Do get on with it, Francis, she said to herself with a smile. ‘Do you have any relations in south Lincolnshire? Preferably grand ones who know Earls etc. When found, please come to Candlesby Arms. New cook. Better food. Bring Ghost. Bring JF. Bring Rhys. Love, Francis.’

  Translating this, Lucy realized the main thing her husband wanted, apart from herself and the car and Johnny Fitzgerald, was a way into county society in the area round Candlesby. Her relations, and distant bells were already ringing in her mind about a second cousin married to a baronet who lived in a manor house near Great Steeping, would not have to provide entertainment or any of the delights of society. Wittingly or unwittingly, their job would be to provide Lucy and her husband with murder suspects.

  Inspector Blunden reported to Powerscourt the following morning that there was still no decision from the Chief Constable about applying for an exhumation. ‘This is so typical of the man, my lord,’ the Inspector reported. ‘He’ll have been sidetracked by some other crime somewhere else. I’ve heard there was a great robbery at the Bishop’s Palace up in Lincoln in the past few days. He’s probably showing himself off up there, getting in the way of the investigating officers, poking his way around in the private rooms and throwing his weight around with the Dean and Chapter. What I don’t understand, my lord, is how he ever managed to win a battle. He couldn’t have kept his concentration for long enough. He’d have wanted to bring the cavalry back before they’d even reached the front.’

  Powerscourt smiled. ‘You will remember, I’m sure, Inspector, the story of Nelson raising the telescope to his blind eye at the battle of Copenhagen so he couldn’t read the signal that told him to end the fighting. He went on, as you know, to win the engagement. Battles are mostly won in spite of, rather than because of, the orders of the commanders. I seem to recall that the Chief Constable only fought one battle and he only won that because the natives ran away before a shot was fired.’

  ‘To listen to him,’ said the Inspector sourly, ‘you’d think he’d been successful at Blenheim and Talavera and Gettysburg and one or two more. Only a day or so to go before the King invites him to have a triumph through the streets of London.’

  ‘Are you going to hold off making inquiries until there is some definite news about the exhumation?’

  ‘Yes and no, my lord. I’m not going to make any inquiries into a possible murder. But I am going to make inquiries into the disappearing Jack Hayward and his family. If we could find that man and talk to him properly we’d be a long way to solving the mystery, if you ask me.’

  ‘Good luck in your inquiries, Inspector,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I’m just going on a fishing expedition to Horncastle. To see the editor and chief reporter of the Horncastle Standard. Maybe they can provide us with a couple of murder suspects.’

  Powerscourt’s first impression of James Roper, the editor of the Horncastle Standard, was that he had
one of the longest beards he had ever seen. It was black and very thick and seemed to be an even more massive structure than the one sported by the earlier Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury. He looked to be in his middle forties with bloodshot eyes and a right hand almost permanently wrapped round a tumbler full of a pale brown liquid which Powerscourt presumed to be brandy.

  ‘Care to join me?’ he boomed, shaking Powerscourt vigorously by the hand. ‘Medicinal, you know. Doctor man recommends brandy in small but regular doses. Never asked me when I start, mind you. He might think’ – Roper checked a large clock on the wall – ‘that ten to twelve is a little soon into the gallops. Never mind. Let me introduce young Rufus here, our chief reporter, Rufus Kershaw.’

  Rufus was certainly young. Powerscourt didn’t think this slip of a lad could be more than twenty-five, his slim features, lack of a beard and clear brown eyes a mighty contrast to his superior.

  ‘Please don’t look at me like that, Lord Powerscourt,’ the young man said with a smile. ‘I am nearly twenty-six years old, you know. And I have been a reporter on this paper for the past nine years. That’s a very long time, nine years. And it’s amazing how much more people will tell me because they think they’re only talking to a boy.’

  ‘Now then, my lord,’ Roper was refilling his glass with great care from an enormous decanter, ‘may I ask what is the purpose of your visit here?’

  ‘It is very simple,’ said Powerscourt, ‘but could I ask first of all that our conversation is off the record for now? It may be that the position will change over time – we shall see. Let me explain what brings me to Lincolnshire. I have been asked to look into the death of the last Lord Candlesby. Sorry to sound obstructive but are you gentlemen happy to be off the record for the present?’

  There was a short glance and a quick nod between the newspapermen.

  ‘We have a story about that affair ready to appear in our next edition tomorrow,’ said Roper. ‘Young Rufus here had better tell you about it; he wrote the story after all. And assume that we are all off the record.’

  ‘I had heard you were here, my lord,’ said Rufus. ‘I bumped into one of Inspector Blunden’s men on the way to interview one of the hunt officials. I think they told me more than they told him, mind you, seeing I’ve talked to most of them a couple of times or more in the past few years.’

  Powerscourt felt his card was being marked, very delicately, but marked all the same. He smiled at the young man.

  ‘Did you draw any conclusions from your interviews, Mr Kershaw? Anything firm? Anything meaningful?’

  ‘My very first boss, my lord, was forever asking if certain stories would make “a meaningful piece”,’ the young man said. ‘It makes me smile to this day to think of the phrase.’ He paused for a moment and whipped a notebook out of his pocket. ‘I think it’s all very clear, this story, up to a certain point. There’s the hunt milling around the front of Candlesby Hall. There are the servants handing round the stirrup cup, little conversations full of hope for the new hunting season. The Master is late but the Master is often late. It is cold and the breath of horses and hunters is making vapour trails in the air.’

  Powerscourt wondered if the last phrase would get past the sub-editor’s pen.

  ‘So far, so good. Then the picture grows dimmer. There is a horse, led by the chief groom, Jack Hayward, with a body across it. The body is covered with a couple of blankets. Quite soon, I don’t yet know how soon, everybody gathers that the corpse is that of the Master of the Hunt and Earl of Candlesby. The death party turn off into the stables. Beyond that nothing is clear. The doctor is summoned. Jack Hayward and his family disappear the next day or the day after. Various outsiders begin to appear: yourself, my lord, the Chief Constable, a shady legal gentleman from a firm of solicitors in Bedford Square. The cabbie who drove him from the station to the Hall told me that, my lord. Man gave the cabbie his card in case he ever needed the best legal advice. Silly man! Most of the local cabbies go to Campbell Moreton & Marsh in the High Street here. Cheaper than Bedford Square, I’m sure.’

  ‘Does your article come to any conclusions, Mr Kershaw?’ Powerscourt observed out of the corner of his eye that a giant’s refill was being poured very carefully into the editor’s glass.

  ‘Please call me Rufus,’ said the young man. ‘I feel very old if you call me Mr Kershaw. No, I most certainly did not come to any conclusions for the simple reason that I didn’t have any. I still don’t have any. Do you, my lord? Have any conclusions, I mean?’

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ said Powerscourt. ‘May I ask you, were you aware that Dr Miller, the doctor in attendance on the dead man, is also dead? Mind you, he was very old.’

  ‘Do you think there was anything suspicious about his demise?’ So far the editor’s brain seemed untouched by his brandy intake.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Powerscourt, ‘but let me try to move our conversation in a slightly different direction, if I may. I have been asked to investigate the death of the late Lord Candlesby. The person who asked me is certain it was murder. Therefore, I ask myself, is there anything in the man’s past that could have led to his death? So I come to ask you gentlemen for your advice and counsel.’

  Rufus Kershaw wrote something very suddenly in his book. The editor lifted his gaze from his decanter to Powerscourt’s face.

  ‘Now I see, Lord Powerscourt, now I see what you have come for. Well, I’m sure we can give you a few clues. Rufus, could you begin with the most recent story that might be relevant?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I presume you are referring to the suicide of Lady Flavia Melville last summer. This, my lord, was a most frustrating story. You may think it is difficult to find out the truth about the body that joins the hunt. Well, it was even more difficult with this one. There is, I think, one rule that used to hold but no longer does. Its day may have passed already, I don’t know. Certainly I don’t think it’ll last another ten years. And this rule is that servants don’t talk. They may talk to the police in confidence but they won’t appear in court in case they lose their job or their house or their farm or all three together. In the Lady Melville case they must have said something but who it was or to whom it was said we still don’t know. I have to tell you, my lord, that I am trying my hand at fictional short stories. I have had two published so far in The Strand Magazine and I hope for further success in the future. But I firmly believe that my account of the Lady Melville affair still owes more to fiction than to fact.’

  ‘Bestir yourself with the bloody story, Rufus,’ growled his editor. ‘Some of us have to go to press later on.’

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ said the young man. He paused for a moment or two before he resumed. ‘Not far from here, between Candlesby Hall and the coast at Skegness, lies the estate of Sir Arthur Melville, Baronet, with a fine Elizabethan manor house and many thousands of acres. Last summer he would have been fifty-seven years old. They say, how shall I put it, my lord, that he was never at the top of the class, Sir Arthur. He spent many years in the military before rising to the rank of captain, but beyond that, he never progressed. Anyway, back to this fairy story mansion of his. Last Easter he brought a bride home at last, a widow in her early thirties called Mrs Flavia von Humboldt, previously married to a German philosophy professor in Tübingen who dropped down dead in the university library next to the complete works of Aristotle. History does not recall what kind of existence she led in the confines of her German university – Kant and Nietzsche for lunch perhaps and Hobbes and Locke for supper – but it cannot have been proper preparation for life in Lincolnshire. She grew bored. Her eyes began to stray. Perhaps the fifty-seven-year-old was equally ill equipped for married life on England’s east coast. After all, the hill station and the club and the punkah wallah do not translate happily to Lincolnshire. Anyway Flavia began a passionate affair with Lord Candlesby. They did not seem to care who knew. Discretion went out of the window along with common sense. The husband did not know. He thought they were riding together or insp
ecting horses when they were, in fact, engaged on other, rather more private recreations. All through the summer it went on, and into the autumn.

  ‘They forgot one thing, the lovers, or they ignored it, and it probably did for them in the end. Because of her married name, von Humboldt, the locals thought she was German. Well might she tell all and sundry that she was christened Flavia Witherspoon in Margate, they didn’t believe her. People on this side of the country, my lord, are even more hostile to the Germans than they would be in Cornwall or the south-west.’

  ‘Why is that?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘Closer, that’s why. I mean the Germans are closer. They could reach Skegness a damn sight quicker than they could invade Weston Super Mare. Anyway, the precise timetable gets a bit vague at this point but the sequence of events seems to go as follows. One day somebody sends Flavia copies of half the love letters she’s ever written to John, Lord Candlesby. The next day they send him copies of half the letters he’s sent to her. People say she was distraught and that Lord Candlesby told her to keep calm. Nothing happened in the letter-sending department on the third day. But on the fourth day the somebody, presumably the same somebody, probably a servant, sends all the love letters, all hers to him, all his to her, to Sir Arthur. They were timed to coincide with breakfast. It was said Sir Arthur swept a whole sideboard of dishes on to the floor in one single movement – kidneys, eggs, bacon, mushrooms, tomatoes, black pudding, fried bread, kedgeree, kippers, all felled by a baronet’s fury. When she tried to apologize he told her that he was going to ruin her reputation by dragging her through the divorce courts. Even an Indian untouchable, he shouted at her, wouldn’t go near her when he’d finished with her. Then he shouted some more insults after her – no better than a Whitechapel whore, Jack the Ripper too good for her, that sort of stuff. Sometime that afternoon she took an overdose of her husband’s sleeping pills. She knew where they were. Then she walked into the sea. Her body was washed up weeks later near Hunstanton. Poor Sir Arthur! Married, cuckolded and widowed inside a year. People say that he blames Lord Candlesby for everything, leading his wife astray, disgracing her till she had to commit suicide. Sometimes, it is reported, but I have no means of knowing if it’s true, he can be heard late at night in his cups, shouting from his balustrade that he’ll kill that Candlesby one of these days, you see if he doesn’t.’