Death in a Scarlet Coat

17

Powerscourt’s brain was reeling as he rushed down the three flights of stairs from the top floor of Candlesby Hall. Some flying creature, possibly a bat, brushed his face as he sped past. Other demons rattled through his brain as he tried to make sense of the awful sights up there, looking out over the lake and the Candlesby fields. He managed to leave the house without having to speak to a single living soul and walked at top speed round the edges of the park. The deer watched him from afar, their lives largely peaceful, their great trusting eyes untroubled by the ghosts of flagellation and martyrdom from long ago. When he reached the hotel he found Lady Lucy sitting by the window in their room, staring sadly out at the bare trees and the flat landscape.

‘Oh, Francis!’ She rushed into his arms. ‘Thank God you’ve come. It’s very sad down there in the village. I don’t know if they’re going to come through.’

‘Are all of them ill?’ asked Powerscourt. He had already resolved not to tell Lady Lucy about the terrible things in the Caravaggio room.

‘Well, not all of them. I should say about a quarter of the able-bodied men, slightly less for the women, thank God. It’s the children and the old people who are worst affected. I feel for them all, you know, Francis. Not that I’d ever say anything, there’s too much to do with the watching by the bedsides and stroking their foreheads or wiping their faces and trying to speak comforting things to them. You’d think you wouldn’t feel so bad with the old ladies. They’ve had their time in a way, they’ve got married and brought up their children and done whatever women do in a village like that. Some of them seem ready to go, you know. But others are fighting for life. Even when they’re tossing and turning in their rickety beds you can still catch a look that says, I’m not going to go yet, not if I can help it.

‘The worst thing with the children is that they don’t know what’s happening to them. Oh, they’ll listen to the stories we tell them and manage a little smile from time to time. But for a lot of the day they just look hurt and confused. They’ve never been ill in their lives so far, not seriously ill I mean, and it’s terrible for them. Why can’t they get out of bed and cause trouble as they usually do? Why can’t they go out and run about in the fields? Why are they stuck in these beds, the sweat pouring off their bodies and the coughs racking their little chests? Nobody told them these were the rules.’

‘I’m sure you are a great comfort to them, Lucy. I must leave you for a few minutes. I have a naughty plan to bring Jack Hayward back. I must bring Blunden on board and then we can send a telegram.’

Lady Lucy watched him go. She knew that she would continue with her nursing in Candlesby village until the influenza had passed. She didn’t tell her husband about the ravings of the elderly ladies.

Powerscourt found Inspector Blunden in cheerful mood, making copperplate doodles at his desk.

‘I’m feeling more cheerful about the case, my lord. God knows why. There’s no reason for it, but I just feel we’re going to win through.’

‘Let me try to enlist your support in a stratagem that would bring Jack Hayward back. I don’t think you’ll like it one little bit, but think of the prize, the man who brought the corpse back, the man who saw the battered face, the man who left the scene at record speed.’

‘Tell me the plan then,’ said the Inspector.

‘You will remember me telling you how close Jack Hayward was to Walter Savage. They were close for twenty years. Hayward asked Savage to pray for him when he was leaving.’

Suddenly the Inspector rose from his chair and paced up and down the room. His face broke out into a rather wicked grin. ‘I think I’ve got it, my lord! It’s certainly devious, extremely devious, but I’m sure it would work. We arrest Savage and lock him up on some trumped-up charge. Then we send a telegram to your friend Johnny Fitzgerald announcing that Savage is in prison. Hayward hurries home to save his friend. How’s that?’

‘Spot on, Inspector, spot on.’

‘Right,’ said Blunden. ‘I’m on my way to Candlesby Hall to pick up Savage. He should be locked up within the hour. You can send the telegram now if you like, my lord.’

Johnny Fitzgerald was growing weary of the bars and public houses of Limerick. He had spent many hours in their smoke-filled snugs, listening to the stories of the old men and the complaints of the farmers, all of them blessed with an unquenchable thirst for Guinness and the more powerful draughts of John Jameson.

So it was a relief early one evening when the hotel manager gave Johnny a telegram. He handed it over with the air of one who is certain that it contains bad news for the recipient, imminent arrest perhaps, or instant deportation to the colonies. Johnny read it in his room. Powerscourt, he saw, had not spared himself in the words department. Not for him the normal compression, the minimum of letters employed in the expensive business of the despatch of telegrams. Johnny remembered a military bookkeeper in India, the Skinflint of Darjeeling as he was known, telling Powerscourt that he didn’t have to send out messages as if he were writing the principal leading article in The Times.

‘Candlesby, twenty-sixth of November,’ he read. ‘Dear Johnny.’ God in heaven, Fitzgerald said to himself, who the hell ever put the date and Dear Johnny in a telegram? ‘I bring news from the front. Inspector Blunden has arrested the steward of Candlesby, Walter Savage, in connection with the murder of the two Earls. He is at present in Spalding jail. Savage has repeatedly expressed the wish that Jack Hayward was there to help him in his hour of need. You will know what to do. Lucy sends her love. Hope to see you soon in these wretched flatlands by the sea. Francis.’

As he sped off towards Cashel Johnny wondered if Savage really had been arrested or if this was some ploy to drag an unwilling Hayward back across the Irish Sea. He suspected, from his knowledge of Powerscourt, that it was a ploy, but that the steward Savage really was locked up in Spalding jail along with the drunks and the poachers and the cattle thieves.

A couple of hours later he was knocking once again on the front door of the house where he had been thrown out less than a week before.

‘It’s you again,’ said the farmer’s wife. ‘The devil finds work for idle hands, so he does now. What in God’s name do you want this time? I told you, Jack Hatward, or whatever he’s called, isn’t here.’

‘We are faced with a grave situation now, madam,’ said Johnny, trying to sound as serious as his old headmaster at school. ‘I will not beat about the bush. Time is short. You tell Jack Hayward that one of his greatest friends over the water in Candlesby has been arrested for murder. His name is Savage, Walter Savage. Have you got that? He is at present locked up in Spalding jail with the other lawbreakers of Lincolnshire. He is asking for Jack to come to his assistance. He seems to think Jack could secure his release. I cannot foretell the future, madam, but if Jack does not come this unfortunate man Savage could end up being taken from the court where he has been found guilty and hanged by the neck until he is dead. You tell Jack Hayward that. I shall come back in half an hour. Good day to you.’

With that he strode off and found solace in the Kilkenny Arms two hundred yards away. Here, he thanked God, none of the natives spoke to him at all. He had long suspected that he would be accosted some day in one of these Irish pubs by people claiming to have survived the famine and demanding compensation in liquid form.

The woman’s attitude was very different when he came back. ‘You’d better come in,’ she said, closing the door quickly. She showed him into a small sitting room adorned with ghoulish paintings of the Stations of the Cross. Johnny could hear a lot of talking in the passageway outside but he couldn’t catch the words. In the distance, upstairs perhaps, he could hear a child crying.

‘Who the hell are you?’ The man was of normal height, clean shaven with curly black hair and an air of authority about him. Johnny wondered if he had the same influence on humans as he did on horses.

Johnny rose and shook him by the hand. ‘Jack Hayward?’ he said. The man nodded. ‘My name is Fitzgerald, Johnny Fitzgerald. I work with a private investigator called Powerscourt, Lord Francis Powerscourt. We are investigating the murders of the past two Earls of Candlesby with the Lincolnshire police.’

‘Murders?’ said Jack Hayward. ‘Has there been another one?’

‘I’m afraid there has. Richard the heir was on his way to take his place in the House of Lords when he was garrotted on his train.’

‘Great God. I didn’t know. They don’t put much Lincolnshire news in the papers round here.’

‘It’s Walter Savage we’re concerned about here, Mr Hayward. He thinks you can help secure his release from prison.’

‘I once visited a man in Spalding jail,’ said Jack Hayward thoughtfully. ‘They thought he had been stealing horses but he hadn’t. But tell me this, how do I know you’re telling the truth? This could be some terrible trick.’

Johnny had realized on his journey that he could show Hayward Powerscourt’s telegram. Probably his friend had written it with that in mind. He handed it over. ‘Inspector Blunden is the chief investigating officer. Lady Lucy is Powerscourt’s wife.’

Jack Hayward read it very quickly. He stared at Johnny for a moment. ‘All right. Dammit, I’ll come. I don’t want to come but I don’t think that I have much choice. I can’t let Walter down. If this is a trick, you’ll have to pay for it. I’m not going to bring the wife or the children with me. They’ll be safer here. I gather there is an outbreak of influenza in Candlesby village.’ He stared at the Stations of the Cross for a moment. ‘I’ll just go and tell the wife and gather a few things. I should be ready to go in fifteen minutes.’

Forty-five minutes later Johnny was waiting with Jack Hayward for the express to Dublin. He had just despatched a telegram to Powerscourt. He had made it as short as possible. ‘Hayward Redux’, it said. Jack Hayward was coming home.

Back in Candlesby Hall the normal routines of life that had held for the past twenty or thirty years were breaking down. For Henry and Edward there was a great gap left by the absence of their tyrannical father, killed in a manner as yet unknown, and their eldest brother, garrotted in his special train on his special day. Henry was now the Earl of Candlesby, and his younger brother Edward was seized with jealousy at the caprices of birth. Why should he lose out just because he had been born a couple of years later? He might not have been bastard like Edmund in King Lear, but he felt the unfairness just as deeply. They made desultory plans for what they would do when the murders were cleared up. They would sell the house and the estate, a happy dream, until the steward told Henry the full facts of the financial situation. They dreamt on, their fantasies fuelled by drink. They would go and live in London – a life of glittering prizes where they would be welcomed as heirs to one of the great titles of the kingdom. They would go to Paris and sink into the voluptuous luxury of the most sophisticated city in Europe. They would go to California and start a new life in the new world.

Then catastrophe struck. They had both noticed – they had believed from their earliest years in the quantity rather quality school of wine consumption – that the bottles Barnabas Thorpe the butler brought up each morning were tasting worse and worse. They set forth on an expedition to the cellar, a great dark underground chamber in the basement near the kitchen surrounded by a rabbit warren of store rooms and pantries and the tunnel that led to the stable block. Neither brother had ever seen the kitchen or the wine cellar before. Each had a candle in his hand. They stared in disbelief at row after row of empty wine racks labelled Claret and Burgundy and Hock and Chablis and Port. Only in the far corner where the shadows and the dust were deepest was there a small section with bottles still in their place. There was no label, no indication of any kind as to where this stuff came from. This underground cave, as the French called their cellars, which had once held thousands of bottles to quench the thirst of Candlesbys past, was virtually empty. And when they spoke to Thorpe the butler about ordering fresh supplies from the family wine merchants, his reply distressed them as much if not more than the deaths of their father and brother.

‘I’m afraid that will not be possible at present, my lord,’ he had said in his most mournful voice.

‘Why not?’ said Henry, trying to sound like an Earl.

‘I tried to replenish our supplies very recently, my lord. The wine merchants said that would not be possible. The wine here has been bought on credit for the past ten years. The firm are not prepared to extend any more until things settle down.’

‘Bastards,’ said Henry and Edward in unison. ‘Things settle down? What does that mean?’ Henry carried on.

‘It means, my lord, that we shall not be able to order anything at all until one of two things happens, or possibly both.’

Henry raised an eyebrow. ‘Like what?’

‘The first is that the recent difficulties here’ – a well-trained butler’s finest euphemism for murder – ‘are cleared up.’

‘And the second?’

‘The second is simpler. No more wine will be sent until somebody pays the bill.’

On the top floor, on the opposite side of the house to the Caravaggio room, things were not much better in the apartment where James lived with his attendant. James had not been seen much since the day when he marched into the lake and was only saved by the intervention of his brother Charles. The youngest of the Candlesbys, the one his elder brothers referred to as ‘not right in the head’ in their charitable moments and ‘stark staring mad’ in their normal moments, seemed to be deteriorating. He ran a high fever much of the time and had to be confined to bed, complaining of the cold in spite of a great fire roaring in the grate. When he got up James would sit huddled in an armchair wrapped in blankets and stare endlessly at the flames. When he spoke he did not make much sense, talking of storms and lightning and the wrath of God. Charles was his constant companion. His younger brother had an insatiable appetite for information about the murders. Which horse, he would ask, for like Charles he was a great lover of horses, had carried his father back from his death? What colour was the special train? How many niches were left in the mausoleum? Charles answered all his questions as best he could. He had no idea of the shape of the disease that was destroying his brother and even less idea of what form it might take in the future. But if love could have cured, James Candlesby would have taken up his bed and walked. Unlike the rest of his family Charles loved his brother very deeply and prayed against hope for his recovery.

James liked being read to, rather like the sick children in the village being cared for by Lady Lucy Powerscourt. He preferred poems to prose. He liked some of the more bloodthirsty passages in the Iliad when Hector’s body is dragged around the walls of Troy. Shelley’s ‘I weep for Adonais – he is dead’ was a great favourite. So was Milton’s Lycidas and Tennyson’s In Memoriam and John Donne’s sonnet about the conquest of Death:

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,

And Death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die!

James would clap his hands together on the bedspread and cheer at Byron’s lines about the night before Waterloo:

… the unreturning brave, – alas!

Ere evening to be trodden like the grass

Which now beneath them, but above shall grow

In its next verdure, when this fiery mass

Of living valour, rolling on the foe

And burning with high hope, shall moulder cold and low.

It was the poetry about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and the Lady of the Lake that entranced him most of all. He preferred Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur to the more effusive outpourings of Tennyson. The sword in the stone, the sword being thrown in the lake by Sir Bedevere were like a tonic to him.

Searching for a modern Merlin, Charles sent for the doctor. The medical man pronounced himself defeated by James’ illness. He promised to return with a wiser colleague. When he did, there was then a very long examination of James and a whole host of questions about his mental state. The doctors retired to an empty schoolroom with faded maps on the wall and upturned desks lying about the floor, surrounded by the broken globes of a broken world. Eventually they sent for Charles and talked to him for half an hour. They were going back to speak with James in a moment, they said. They had just one question. Should James be told the truth about his condition?

Charles looked round the room, filled with memories of irregular Latin verbs and the details of the Wars of the Roses where early Dymokes had backed the wrong side just as they had in the Civil Wars. His eyes filled with tears.

‘Tell him,’ he said. ‘Yes, I think that would be for the best. Tell him the truth.’

Inspector Blunden was seated at his desk in the police station at nine o’clock in the morning. He was doodling again on a clean page of a large police notebook. A series of Ls rolled out across the page. Along with thirty-seven other little boys and girls the Inspector had been taught to read and write in the village school by Mrs Rickards, a formidable woman with unorthodox but highly effective means of imparting knowledge to her charges. The ornate Blunden copperplate was one result of her endeavours. Then he left a space and added a row of Cs a few lines further down he added a number of JHs with a question mark at the end. The Inspector was preparing a rather unusual list of the tasks he had to perform that day. L was for Lawrence and the odd story from Oliver Bell that he had been seen behaving strangely at the railway station the day of the first murder. The C was for the clergyman who could establish Bell’s alibi. The JH referred to Jack Hayward and the question of whether he had been found.

Constable Andrew Merrick reported for duty, his uniform cleaned and pressed by his mother, the shirt still a little too big in the collar, the trouser legs turned up but only recognizably by those who knew abut such matters.

‘Sir!’ said Merrick, looking, Blunden thought, like a puppy waiting for some kind soul to throw it a bone.

‘Now then, young Merrick, I have a job for you this morning.’

‘Sir!’

‘We need to ensure that Oliver Bell’s alibi for the night of the first murder is watertight. You know that cottage where he lived near Old Bolingbroke Castle?’

‘Sir!’

Inspector Blunden wished the young man would stop saying Sir like that but discipline should not be slighted.

‘According to Bell, he went to help a retired clergyman living in a nearby cottage. The man was old and thought his cottage was being damaged in the storm.’

‘Sir!’

‘Find this clergyman and take a statement confirming the story. Or take a different story if Bell’s version is not true.’

‘Sir!’

‘Please stop saying sir like that, Merrick; you’re beginning to sound like one of those machines at the funfairs which speak when you put your money in.’

‘Sir! Sorry, sir. What happens if he’s not there, the clergyman, I mean, sir?’

‘Well, you go looking for him, don’t you? The local church, maybe he’s gone to say his prayers. The local shop, maybe he’s gone to buy some groceries. You know the form, Merrick. You’ve been in the force nearly three months now.’

‘Yes, Inspector Blunden.’

The young man turned to go. The Inspector placed a tick beside the letter C in his notebook. He was a kindly man, the Inspector, in spite of an occasionally gruff exterior, and he believed very strongly that he had a duty to bring on the young constables in his charge.

‘And here’s something for you to think about on your way, young man. You remember I told you the crucial bit of Bell’s evidence about the middle Lawrence, Carlton Lawrence, not the old chap, at the railway station? How do we find out that he wasn’t in London or at the theatre in London like his father said? And what was he doing back here?’

Andrew Merrick succeeded with great difficulty in not saying Sir. He managed ‘Yes, Inspector Blunden,’ and fled to the comfort of his official bicycle.

A cheerful ‘Good morning, Constable Merrick’ announced to the policeman that Powerscourt was on his way. A moment later he showed himself in and announced his purpose straight away.

‘My dear Inspector Blunden,’ he began, ‘you find me in good spirits. Banish dull care, let a man’s fancy roam free, that’s what I say. The Ghost awaits without, ready to ferry us to the Candlesby Arms where a vital witness awaits us, Jack Hayward, freshly returned from the land of my fathers.’

‘My lord, this is tremendous news. When did he get here, Jack Hayward, I mean?’

‘Late last night,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I was going to call you but I thought Mrs Blunden and Miss Blunden might not care for a visitation at such an hour. Forgive me, I took it upon myself to put him up in the hotel, Inspector. His own quarters in the village are still locked up and somehow I did not want him to be seen there just yet.’

‘The knowledge of his return might alarm the murderer, you mean,’ said the Inspector, collecting a couple of pens and his smaller notebook.

‘Indeed,’ said Powerscourt, fastening on his driving gloves before the short journey to the hotel. ‘I don’t think you’ve had the pleasure of a ride in my splendid motor car,’ he went on, opening the door for the Inspector. ‘Please be my guest.’

Jack Hayward had been placed in one of the outlying wings of the hotel, away from the main concourse where anybody from the locality might have noticed him. Johnny Fitzgerald, in the unusual role of warder, acted as custodian of Hayward’s health from the next-door room.

Inspector Blunden took charge of the situation. Jack Hayward’s room was large with a window looking out over the garden. There was a little table with four chairs where the three of them sat. Hayward was wearing dark blue trousers, a crisp white shirt and a smart jacket, looking, Powerscourt thought, as if he were going to bid for a couple of horses at the Newmarket sales.

‘Now then, Mr Hayward, I think it’s better if we talk to you here, if you don’t mind. It’s a bit more public down at the police station, or in the more open parts of this hotel. I haven’t told Walter Savage you’re here yet, but I hope you’ll be able to see him this afternoon if things go well. So, if you’re comfortable, let us begin.’

If there was one thing Lady Lucy Powerscourt thought they needed in Candlesby village, it was soap in various forms. Soap to clean their front doors, soap to clean their kitchens properly, soap to clean the bedrooms and the bathrooms. Not that she would, for a moment, have accused the women of the village of being slatternly. She knew only too well now how hard they worked, how little spare time there was, if any, how the welfare of their husbands and the children and their own parents was always uppermost in their minds. But a little more cleanliness, she felt, would have been like another moat, another defensive rampart against the slow siege of the disease.

Some of the children were slightly better this morning. Some were worse. One little boy called Will was thought to be at death’s door. Lady Lucy sat by his bedside and watched as he tossed and turned, his forehead burning, a deep frown on his emaciated face. She mopped his brow and held his hand. It was very hot to the touch. His mother flitted in and said she had to see her own mother across the street. ‘A generation above me, and a generation below me,’ she wailed, ‘both about to go on the same day!’

She added that Will had always been fascinated by the Hall and was very fond of cats before she left for another sickbed.

Lady Lucy looked around the room. There were four other beds in it but none of those children were present. Will had been left alone with the strange lady the children called Liddy Lucy as if Liddy were another Christian name. There were no books in the room, so there could be no favourite stories about cats. She thought for a moment and began a long and complicated tale about a cat who visited Candlesby Hall. The sick boy was only awake part of the time but he would still remember bits of it when he told stories to children of his own.

Eventually one of the waitresses from the Candlesby Arms appeared with fresh vegetable soup for everybody. The little boy managed a few mouthfuls before he fell asleep, whispering to Lady Lucy before he went, ‘Can we have some more story later?’

That afternoon, while Will dozed, she was back with the old ladies. The three she spent time with, in adjacent houses, were all very ill, rambling and muttering as they tossed on their beds. There was no demand for tea. Lady Lucy held their hands and stroked their foreheads and did what she could to make them comfortable. But it was on this occasion that she began to note down, on a clean page in her diary, the words that came up over and over again. ‘That girl’, ‘all that money’, ‘deserved it, all of it’, ‘never seen so much money’, ‘storm’. Lady Lucy had no idea what the words meant but she thought it might be important. When she had collected more evidence, she said to herself, she would talk to her husband about it.