Death in a Scarlet Coat

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 amp; 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.’

‘What did you all think of this new arrangement? Were you happy with it?’

Barnabas Thorpe smiled. ‘Well, my lord, it works both ways, as one of the footmen put it. They might not be too pleased at seeing us moving around through the house, but we didn’t like looking at them any more than they liked looking at us. So it was all square if you like.’

‘What of your last employer, the Earl who’s just died? How did he rate in the eccentricity scale?’

Barnabas Thorpe paused. ‘I don’t like to say too much about him, my lord. Loyalty to one’s employers may be going out of fashion these days and I have no reason to keep quiet, none at all. But I still feel uncomfortable talking to you about him; I feel as though I’m letting him down even though he’s not here any more. What can I say? He was cruel to his children, he would damage any friendships he might have had, he was terrible about money. I don’t know how deeply he’d fallen into debt but in recent years we’ve had a parade of bank managers, insurance men, mortgage company men all trooping through the door.’

‘Could I ask you, Mr Thorpe, where the bank managers came from? Was it Louth? Or Lincoln?’

‘You could do a lot worse than talk to them, my lord. They’re not north of here, they’re south, in Boston. Lambert is the name of the manager person, Sebastian Lambert.’

‘Could I just ask you one last question, Mr Thorpe? You’ve been most co-operative, and I’m very grateful to you. Can you think of any person who might want to kill your late master? Or any reason somebody might have for killing him?’

‘The boys,’ Barnabas Thorpe said sadly, ‘the three eldest boys. The fourth one with the stutter isn’t like any of the others and the last one, poor soul, he isn’t right in the head.’

‘Have you ever seen James be violent? Fall into a rage where he might do anything?’ Powerscourt suddenly wondered if James had lost his temper completely and managed to beat his father around the face over and over again. Madmen, he remembered, sometimes discovered reserves of strength they didn’t know they had. Perhaps James had killed his father and the others had covered up for him. Perhaps they had all killed him, taking it in turns to shatter the side of his face with whatever instrument of darkness they had used. Stop it, he said to himself, you’re getting carried away.

‘Well, I have seen him violent, as a matter of fact, but only once. And the violence was against himself, not against another person.’

‘I am so grateful to you for your time, Mr Thorpe,’ said Powerscourt. ‘If anything else occurs to you, please get in touch. I shall be around the Hall quite a bit, I expect.’

Twenty minutes later he was reunited with the Inspector, who was carrying two medium-sized parcels. ‘One of these is for you, my lord, and the other one is for me. Candlesby fruit cake, baked to an ancient recipe of 1763 from this house, composed of ingredients largely grown on the estate. Very good they are too. I was given a trial run of one of them along with a cup of tea. Did you discover anything of interest, my lord?’

‘The butler was more forthcoming about the Earls of long ago than he was about the dead one from the other day. Traces of family loyalty still survive in spite of all the dreadful behaviour. He did say he thought the three eldest boys were the most likely to have done it.’

‘Did he indeed? Well, the women, apart from detailed information about the meals the late Earl and his family ate, had very little to say. Maybe they had cut out all the gossip because of me. I’ve investigated two crimes in grand houses now, my lord, and the one thing you can guarantee, in my experience, is that the servants know absolutely everything that is going on. They know about illicit sexual behaviour because they make the beds. They know what the mistress of the house is thinking because she often tells them when they’re brushing her hair. They know what’s preoccupying the gentlemen because they’re in attendance at the shoot as beaters or what have you and the grooms hear the tittle-tattle when the horses come back to the stables from the hunt or a ride. What the under footman knows at eleven o’clock, the parlourmaids know by lunchtime. What the butler knows by three o’clock is transmitted on at tea in the servants’ hall. But here the networks seem to have broken down. The housekeeper and the cook haven’t been here as long as the butler, my lord, and the one memorable thing they told me was about the menus. They’ve been the same since Victoria’s first Jubilee, apparently. Never changed since.’

‘And?’ said Powerscourt, eager for more.

‘Sorry, my lord, I don’t even need to look at my notes. Candlesby beef on Sunday, Candlesby lamb on Monday, Candlesby chicken on Tuesday, pork from the butcher on Wednesday, Candlesby venison on Thursday, Candlesby duck on Friday and fish from the fishmonger on Saturday.’

‘No pigs on the estate here?’ said Powerscourt.

‘No pigs, my lord.’

‘Are we talking lunch or dinner here, Inspector?’

‘This is dinner, my lord.’

‘What happens at lunchtime? I presume the system is so well set that it still goes on until somebody decides to change it.’

‘Lunchtime was cold meat with vegetables, or pies. I believe most of the meat from the evening would be turned into its own pie: venison pie, chicken pie and so on. The late Earl was particularly partial to venison pie, apparently.’

‘What a dreadful routine.’

‘I don’t think I’m going to recommend it to Mrs Blunden, my lord. She’s a great believer in salads, the wife.’

‘No sustenance in salads, that’s what my father used to say. Never mind. Have you noticed something odd about the servants here, Inspector?’

‘I wouldn’t say I’ve had the time to do that yet, my lord. There’s a lot to think about round here.’

‘The curious thing about the servants at Candlesby Hall is that there aren’t any. Not in the conventional sense anyway. No parlourmaids, no ladies’ maids, no kitchen maids, no laundry maids, all of whom would be young and lively and frequent bait for resident younger sons, no young footmen, no young coachmen, no trainee gardeners. The minimum age of the staff here is about fifty years. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

Sandy Temple, friend of Lady Lucy’s sister’s daughter Selina, was sitting in the armchair by the side of the fire normally occupied by Lord Francis Powerscourt. He felt slightly guilty, Sandy, until he remembered Lady Lucy telling him and Selina that they were to treat the house as if it were their own and she hoped they would enjoy their brief spell together. Sandy usually came home in time for tea and went back to his own quarters after supper. But now was not a time for frivolity. Sandy had been asked for a political judgement by his immediate superior at The Times and he was determined to succeed.

On his lap was a large black book with ruled pages. On the floor beside his chair were a series of smaller notebooks that might have fitted in a pocket. These were the shorthand books he kept of the debates in the House of Commons and the House of Lords. In the black book was the voting record of the Lords on all the bills that had been sent up to them from the Commons in the present Parliament. Sandy was making a list of all those peers who had opposed government bills. Those who had voted against the Asquith government twice got two stars against their name and so on. The number of rebels grew longer with the passage of time. Soon there were some peers with five stars against their name, joined by other new recruits with only one.

‘Sandy, my love! How nice to see you! I’ve had such a tiresome afternoon at the V amp;A! I’ve ordered tea.’

‘Bear with me a moment, Selina. I’ve got to finish this off today.’

‘What is it?’ asked Selina, keen to be involved in the great work of journalism.

There was a silence while Sandy added yet more names to his list. This is how it will be, Selina thought suddenly, when we’re married, if we’re married. Some husbands spend their time deep in the form book or the cricket scores. Mine will be ensconced in the parliamentary reports in the newspapers. Sandy knelt down and picked up one of his shorthand notebooks.

‘I’m trying to work out, Selina, the likely size of the majority if the House of Lords throw out Lloyd George’s Budget.’

Selina had listened to enough conversations on the subject of Lloyd’s Budget to realize that this was very important. If pressed, she would have said that she thought this Budget had something to do with the poor and with big ships with a funny name but she wasn’t quite sure; politics had never really interested her very much.

‘I thought people said the Lords wouldn’t dare throw it out,’ she said, wondering how long this rather tiresome diversion was going to go on.

‘Selina, please,’ said Sandy, in an irritated voice, ‘I’ve got to add up four columns of figures in a moment. Could I ask you to keep quiet until I’ve done that? Please?’

Selina felt tempted to ask how long this was going to take but thought better of it. She watched as Sandy’s pen flew up and down the columns on his page. Even he was surprised by his figures. If you added together all those peers who had voted against one or more of the government’s bills when they reached the House of Lords, you would have not just a majority, but a landslide.

‘That’s it, Selina. I was fairly sure before I started. They’ve got a huge majority against the Budget, if they want to use it, the Conservative leadership in the Lords. It’ll be political dynamite. God knows who it might blow up, maybe the government, maybe the Lords. It could even backfire.’

Tea appeared at that moment and Selina busied herself with the role of hostess. ‘What are you going to do with the figures, Sandy?’ she asked.

‘These figures here about the potential size of the majority? I have to take them to my boss at The Times. I don’t know what he’s going to do with them. I’ve just got time to drink this cup of tea.’

‘I haven’t told you, Sandy, we’ve been invited to stay in Norfolk for the weekend. In a rather grand house too. I think Lady Walpole’s a friend of my mother’s; that’s where the invitation comes from.’

Selina was wishing she could lure Sandy over to sit beside her on the sofa. It would be much more cosy but she didn’t want to be interrupted by someone coming back for the tea things.

‘Will she be one of those hostesses who puts up lists of where everybody is sleeping?’ said Sandy. ‘A chap told me about all that the other day.’

‘I don’t think it would apply to us, anyway. You’ll be in the bachelors’ wing, I expect, and I may get a room on my own somewhere. We’ll have to wait and see.’

Sandy brushed a crumb or two off his jacket and started out for Westminster. He was just on the far side of the door when Selina called to him.

‘I’ve just thought of something, my love. She probably has a couple of peers who come for the weekend. Think about it. You’ll be able to ask them in person how they’re going to vote.’