Death in a Scarlet Coat

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 anything. 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.

Powerscourt was wondering if the two men had been killed because they were Candlesbys or because of some other more personal reason. He wondered if this was some long-forgotten curse or family skeleton risen from the rich land of Lincolnshire to harass the family. Two of the other brothers were there, Edward and Charles. The unfortunate James, last seen being rescued from the waters of the lake by his brother, had remained in his rooms ever since. The servants said that he sat or rather crouched by the fire wrapped in an enormous dressing gown and talked to himself.

‘Isn’t it odd, my lord,’ Charles Candlesby was walking back down the hill with Powerscourt, ‘how you can find you don’t really like your relations? I never felt sad for my father though I thought I should. And I feel nothing at all for my brother. Am I a really b-bad p-p-person?’

Powerscourt smiled. ‘I don’t think so. You’d be surprised how many people feel the same way as you do about their relations. It’s just that people don’t really like to talk about it.’

‘Is that so? The only one of my b-b-brothers I really love is James and he’s still not very well.’

‘Did Richard have any enemies, Charles? Anybody who might have disliked him enough to kill him?’

‘Well,’ said Charles, ‘most of the servants disliked him. He was so rude to them. His p-p-problem was that he never went to school. He was b-b-brought up here. The tutors could never control him. So he got more and more arrogant. Candlesbys rule the world.’

Powerscourt doubted if a home education necessarily qualified you for death in a special train. He was haunted every day in this case by the memories of the two human heads, the first with one side of his face battered to pulp by some unknown instrument, the other with that dark purple weal round the neck and eyes that stared out of the head.

‘Then there are the villagers,’ Charles went on. ‘They weren’t fond of my b-brother at all. When he was b-b-bored Richard used to go down there and swagger round a bit. You remember, Lord P-p-powerscourt, I said I would ask around down there about the night my father was killed? Well, nobody would speak to me at all. They all clammed up. Do you think that’s strange?’

‘I do, as a matter of fact,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Look here, young Charles, I have a question for you. The room with the Caravaggios that your ancestor brought back from the Grand Tour, is it still there?’

‘It is. I’ve always been too frightened to go in to see it, gory b-b-bodies and sweaty Neapolitan locals hanging Christ on the cross. Legend says the p-p-place is haunted. Ghosts are said to come out of the walls, day and night.’

‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, ‘it’s strange, possibly the strangest thing in this very strange house. Wasn’t the man who collected the paintings and then locked them away known as the Wicked Earl?’

‘He was,’ said Charles. ‘Somebody told me when I was small that he was the wickedest Earl of the lot. Just think how wicked he must have b-b-been!’

Selina Hamilton and Sandy Temple were taking a morning walk in the grounds of Woodlands, the house in Norfolk where they were spending the weekend. Sandy had discovered that love could be as exciting as politics and Selina was now a devotee of the country house practice of leaving lists of the sleeping arrangements pinned up on a noticeboard outside the dining room.

The company was diverse. There was an American financier called Wright whose main claim to fame was that he had just equipped a house in Surrey with thirty-two bedrooms, eleven bathrooms, a private theatre, three lakes and, most wondrous of all, an underwater billiard room enclosed in glass so you could actually watch the fish swimming in the lake as you prepared to make your stroke. The American financier never tired of telling whoever would listen about his house and his underwater room, the only aquatic site, he would say, pulling on an enormous cigar, apart from a transatlantic liner, where you could watch the waters as you potted your red.

There was a man who owned a chain of grocery shops who had been elevated to the House of Lords by the previous King. Sandy Temple felt sure money must have changed hands to lubricate this transaction, the King having too little of it and the shopkeeper too much.

There was a strange tall thin man called Burroughs who hardly ever spoke but who was believed to be the finest shot in England. There was Sir Arthur Cholmondley Smith, whose young and pretty wife was rumoured to have been first spotted by her current husband upon the music hall stage. There was Lord Winterton of Winterton Staithe, widely believed to be Norfolk’s richest man, a proposition he did not argue with.

And there was a rich widow, Mrs Kennedy Miller, whose husband had made a large fortune manufacturing women’s underclothing, a task he took so seriously that it killed him. His former wife was known to be in pursuit of a new husband with a more agreeable occupation and a milder temperament. Selina thought she was too obvious in expressing interest in the local unattached males her hostess might care to invite to dinner.

‘Honestly, Sandy,’ she had said, ‘she may as well hang up a sign on her front saying “Available” like those boys with the sandwich boards you see in Oxford Street. I think it’s just vulgar!’

Over in the woods to their left there was a sudden rattle of gunfire, as a shooting party from the house tried their luck with the local birds.

‘You don’t mind missing the shooting, Sandy, do you?’

‘I loathe shooting, Selina, as you well know.’

‘Have you had any luck yet with asking these lords how they are going to vote on the Budget?’

Sandy laughed. ‘One down, one to go. I engaged our grocer lord in conversation yesterday evening.’

‘Lord Hudder of Huddersfield?’ asked Selina. ‘That was quick work.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t say the conversation went all that well. Not to begin with, at any rate. Even now, after all his success, there’s something about Lord Hudder that makes you think you’re in a grocer’s shop. It’s as if he’s wearing his apron all the time. He’s imprinted the manner of the man behind the counter on his personality. You think he’s going to ask if you want the bacon thickly sliced or the ham cut thin. Anyway, I asked Lord Hudder straight out how he was going to vote. He looked at me as if he thought I was insane. “What a ridiculous question,” he said. “I always vote the same way. Approve the annual accounts and the other recommendations of the board. No need to say any more. Can’t have the ordinary bloody shareholders saying anything, can we? Always complaining about the price of bananas in the shops or some ridiculous thing.”’

‘“No, sir, that wasn’t what I meant at all,” I carried on.’ Another, longer, salvo rang out from deeper into the trees. A lone woodcock, possibly sole survivor of the carnage, flew overhead, aiming for a place of greater safety further south. “It’s the Budget, Lord Hodder, the vote on the Budget.”

‘Our new noble Lord grew quite cross about now, Selina. “Don’t be ridiculous, young man. Don’t vote on the bloody Budget. Not in any of my companies. People will be asking for democracy next, for Christ’s sake. Budget’s a matter for the board, always has been.” I’m terribly sorry, my lord, I said, I haven’t made myself clear. I was interested in how you intend to vote in the House of Lords about approving Lloyd George’s Budget or not.’

‘“Lloyd George’s Budget? House of Lords? Why didn’t you say so? Tell you the truth,” Lord Hudder poured himself another enormous glass of port at this point, Selina, “I’m not quite sure exactly where the House of Lords is. Is it inside Buckingham Palace? Bloody place is big enough, for God’s sake. You see, I got a letter from somebody or other telling me I’d been made a peer of the realm and what did I want to be called. I wrote back and said I’d like to be called Lord Hudder of Huddersfield and the wife can be Lady Hudder – she does like a title, our Mildred. But since then, nothing. It’s like somebody tells you you’ve been left a heap of shares in a relative’s will and then forgets to invite you to the annual general meeting. Is this vote a bit like a company annual general meeting? Confirm the board of directors in place? Increase the dividend? That sort of thing?” At this point, Selina, I felt I should give up. But the noble lord wasn’t giving up.’

‘“I think I’ve got it,” he says, downing the rest of his port. “Is this Budget thing the government’s annual general meeting about the money, the taxes and all that sort of stuff?” I pointed out that there were various increases in taxation, taxes on development land, increases in death duties to pay for more dreadnoughts and welfare payments like old age pensions. “Sounds jolly good to me,” Lord Hudder said cheerfully, the port beginning to take effect perhaps. “I like dreadnoughts. Kill lots of Germans. Death duties damned good thing too. No point in leaving your children lots of money. They’ll only spend it, not earn it. Much better for them to have to make their own living. You just let me know when the vote is and where this House of Lords is and I’ll go down there and support this Lloyd George fellow. Vote to keep him and the other directors in place. That’ll be a good day’s work.”’

‘The Conservatives won’t be pleased if he does that,’ said Selina. ‘Why make a rich businessman a peer if he votes with the other side?’

‘I just wonder if he’ll do it,’ said Sandy, staring upwards at another clump of refugee birds fleeing the scene, ‘vote with Asquith and Lloyd George. He won’t be a popular boy, that’s for sure.’

‘Sandy,’ said Selina, grabbing him by the hand, ‘I’m sure they will all have gone out for the shooting and the servants will have finished cleaning the rooms by now. Why don’t we just take a little trip back to the house?’