Death in a Scarlet Coat

19

Inspector Blunden was back behind his desk. Powerscourt and Constable Merrick were seated on either side of the round table in the centre of the room.

‘I’ve put out a general alert for Bell,’ said the policeman, ‘ports, railway stations, and such hotels as we can reach. I often wonder how anybody was apprehended before the invention of the telegraph.’

Constable Andrew Merrick, emboldened perhaps by his previous success with Oliver Bell and his non-existent alibi, was holding his hand up as if he was back at school.

‘Well, Constable Merrick, what do you have to say for yourself now?’ Blunden felt he couldn’t be too harsh with the lad after his good work.

‘Sir, my lord, you asked me to think about how we might find out more about the movements of the middle Mr Lawrence, sir, Carlton Lawrence, the one reportedly seen at the railway station, sir.’

‘What of it?’ said Blunden. ‘I’m not sure how much credence we can attach to that evidence now. Maybe Bell was trying to throw mud in our eyes.’

‘Well, sir, my lord, we could ask at the station. Ask if anybody else saw Mr Lawrence, I mean.’

‘Very good, young man. We’ll make a detective of you yet. But that wasn’t what you were going to say before, was it?’

‘No, sir, my lord. That was about Mr Lawrence. I was going to suggest the photographer’s shop, sir, my lord.’

‘The photographer’s shop?’

‘Yes, sir, my lord. You see, there was a big wedding last year.’

‘Wedding? Photographer’s shop? What is going on here?’

Constable Merrick had turned a deep shade of red. Even the two deep breaths taken very slowly failed him on this occasion.

Powerscourt coughed what he hoped was a diplomatic cough. He had no idea how much his comment was about to infuriate the Inspector.

‘If I could make a suggestion, Inspector. What I think our friend is trying to say is this. There was a big wedding in the Lawrence family last year. Maybe it was a member of our Mr Lawrence’s family, his son or daughter perhaps, more likely a grandchild. There will probably be photographs of the occasion taken by the local man. With luck we will be able to find a photo of Mr Lawrence from the photographers or the newspapers to aid in his identification in London and elsewhere. Would that be right, Constable?’

‘Yes, sir, my lord.’ Merrick was nodding like a puppet. ‘It was a daughter, sir. Mr Lawrence’s granddaughter.’

How typical of Powerscourt, the Inspector said to himself. Put two and two together and make five. How very irritating. He consoled himself with the thought that Powerscourt wouldn’t be any use in the second row of a rugby scrum.

‘Well then,’ the Inspector said, ‘you’d better get off to the photographer’s and the railway station. Let’s hope you have good luck.’

‘Sir, my lord.’ Constable Merrick had his hand up again. Powerscourt felt, looking at him with affection, that the young man had spent far more time at school than he had in the police service. Putting his hand up must still seem the natural thing to do.

‘It’s about going to London, sir. I’ve never been to London, sir.’

‘If you think, Constable Merrick, that I am sending you to London you are out of your mind.’ Blunden’s brain filled with possible disasters: Constable Merrick lost in the capital, unable to find his way home, Constable Merrick taken and sold into slavery, Constable Merrick seized and put to work in some terrible factory, Constable Merrick incarcerated for ever in the Marshalsea.

‘I wasn’t thinking of that, sir, my lord, I was only wondering if I could go with whoever does make the journey, my lord, sir. To be of assistance, sir.’

‘You get off to the photographer’s and the railway station now, there’s a good boy.’

Merrick trotted off. Powerscourt, unaware how annoyed his last intervention had made the Inspector, tried again.

‘I have a suggestion to make about London, Inspector. My companion in arms Johnny Fitzgerald is here now. He went to Ireland to bring Jack Hayward back, you will recall. He’s not doing anything in particular at the moment. He would be the perfect person to go to London and make inquiries. Maybe he could take Constable Merrick with him. I’m sure they’d make a formidable pair.’

The Inspector laughed. ‘Excellent plan, Lord Powerscourt. Let’s do it.’ He couldn’t get the rugby question out of his mind. ‘Tell me, Lord Powerscourt, did you ever play rugby in your younger days?’

Powerscourt remembered that the Inspector had been a mighty power in the world of the scrum and the line-out and the rolling maul.

‘I did, as a matter of fact.’

‘And where did you play?’

‘Why,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I played in the centre.’

Bloody typical, the Inspector said to himself. I should have guessed. Centre, a bloody centre, one of those irritating people who could see a gap in the opponents’ defence and be through it before anyone knew they had gone. Centres could pass through the eye of the proverbial needle. Clever players, centres. Tries under the posts. Glory boys. The darlings of the women.

Lady Lucy was walking back to the hotel that evening after another day of nursing. Will, the little boy she had entertained with the cat story, was on the mend. He would try to sit up in bed now and give her a hug when she came in to see him. One of the rambling old ladies had gone to meet her maker. The other two remained, still talking nonsense in their delirium, but letting slip every now and then just one word which Lady Lucy thought might be significant for her husband’s inquiry. She had added another that very evening, another small brick, perhaps, for her husband to build a wall of evidence that might solve the mystery. ‘Sail’. What ‘sail’ meant Lady Lucy had no idea but she added it to her list. She would have to tell Francis about it soon.

‘Good evening to you, Lady P-p-powerscourt. I trust I see you well?’

Charles Dymoke was wearing a long cloak that reached down to his feet and a dark grey Russian hat. He looked like a Cossack on patrol out in the steppes.

‘Charles!’ said Lady Lucy. ‘How very nice to see you. What takes you to the village late at night?’

‘I have heard about your nursing activities, Lady P-p-powerscourt. They are going to make you a saint soon. I was delivering a b-b-basket of vegetables, and arranging for some wood to be brought over tomorrow.’

‘Noblesse still obliges then, Charles? That’s very good of you.’

‘The vicar, who does not go to Candlesby village in case he gets ill and leaves the village without a p-p-priest, says I am the first one of my family in five hundred years to care for the p-p-poor. He tells me my p-p-predecessor was called Charles the Fair. He was hanged at B-b-boston Assizes eventually, though not for helping the p-p-poor. But tell me, how is it with your husband?’

Charles did not like to mention Lady Lucy’s husband’s sojourn in the Caravaggio room. He suspected she had not been told about it.

‘Francis?’ said Lady Lucy with a smile. ‘He is well. He is anxious to find the answers in the case, of course.’

‘Can you tell him I have some news for him? I went to see Walter Savage the steward when he came out of prison today. Something very odd about that arrest. I must p-p-pass on what he said to Lord P-p-powerscourt.’

‘Why don’t you come for breakfast tomorrow and tell him then?’

‘Do they have p-p-porridge? My old nanny always s-s-said I had to have p-p-porridge.’

‘They do, Charles. And ham and eggs and kidneys and tomatoes and things.’

‘I hate kidneys,’ said the young man from Candlesby Hall, ‘but I’ll come for the p-p-porridge.’

Andrew Merrick received confirmation from three different sources that Carlton Lawrence had indeed been seen at the railway station at the time specified by Oliver Bell. Now he was off on his travels.

Johnny Fitzgerald tried to tell the young man all he knew about London on the train down to the capital. He told him that the great majority of the people who lived in the city were very poor, that the better off and the rich were scattered across the city in clusters, in Mayfair and Belgravia and Chelsea in the West End, in Hampstead and Highgate in the north, in Blackheath and Dulwich in the south-east, in Richmond and Wimbledon in the south-west. The prospect of visiting the Tower of London or Buckingham Palace or the Houses of Parliament left Constable Merrick cold. There was only one place he felt he had to see this time, he told Johnny. And where was that? Scotland Yard, Andrew replied, if there was time. If the police force was to be his profession then he had to see the headquarters. Surely, he pointed out, a devout Catholic would go to St Peter’s if he was in Rome.

‘Just put on your best policeman’s brain, Andrew, and tell me what you think of this. Ever since Francis’ – Andrew Merrick had worked out long ago that Francis was Powerscourt, though he was amazed the man had a Christian name at all, since he, Andrew had always thought of him as Lord Powerscourt as if Lord was his first name – ‘told me what the old man Harold Lawrence said about the trip to London, I’ve always thought there was something odd about it. So does Francis. Most of the family, certainly all the ones from Lincolnshire, were on this expedition. Old boy Lawrence told Francis about it very deliberately, as if it was something he’d been told to say. And then he mentioned both the hotel, White’s, where they stayed, and the theatre, the Savoy, where they saw the play. Harold did not mention that his son Carlton peeled off somewhere in the middle and went back to Candlesby. But why? And why did the old boy not mention it to Francis?’

‘Maybe the old boy forgot about Carlton, sir. Maybe he didn’t even know he’d gone.’

‘It’s possible. But think about it. If he had mentioned a hotel but with no name and a theatre with no name we could never have checked anything at all. London has too many hotels and too many theatres.’

‘Maybe they had worked out that we would come and ask for the names of the hotel and the theatre. Maybe that was the whole point of the trip to London, to give themselves an alibi.’

‘I don’t like it,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald darkly. ‘I don’t like it one little bit.’

Twenty minutes later they were inside White’s Hotel, one of the newest and grandest in the capital. A short walk across an enormous entrance hall and halfway down a long corridor lined with hunting prints led them to a door labelled General Manager, James Thomas. The bearer of the title was remarkably young, scarcely over thirty, Johnny thought. He heard their request for information very seriously and without interruption, making a few notes with a gold pen in a small black notebook.

‘A murder case,’ he said quietly, ‘and the key events all some time ago. I do hope none of our guests were involved. Now then, I am going to send for the people most likely to have had dealings with these Lawrences.’ He rang a small bell and a very young man with ginger hair appeared, dressed in the regulation white shirt and dark red uniform. Johnny thought he might be even younger than Constable Merrick, if such a thing were possible.

‘Tom,’ said the hotel manager, ‘can you bring the following people here to my office: the reservations manager with his ledgers for the last couple of months, the head waiter who was on duty on the evening of Wednesday the sixth and Thursday the seventh of October together with the waiter who served the Lawrences those two evenings, the same for the waiter at breakfast the following morning, the chambermaid who made up their rooms and the head porter who was on duty the evenings they were here. He may remember ordering a cab.’

Tom duly departed. ‘Can he remember all that, your young man Tom?’ asked Johnny incredulously. ‘Without taking a note?’

‘He can remember a lot more than that,’ the hotel manager smiled. ‘He has what they call a photographic memory and great ability in mathematics. He’s more than helpful with the accounts. Tom came to us from Hoxton, where his father is a successful bookmaker. Maybe that has something to do with it. I have just engaged a tutor to see how great his potential is. If he is as promising as we think, I hope to persuade the directors to pay for him to be educated up to the point where he can go to university.’

Constable Merrick was having one of the best days of his life. He was to give his parents a limited account of the hotel personnel: the bent old man with a tiny white beard and a twinkle in his eye who divulged the facts about the Lawrence reservations; the waiters, one French with a moustache, one Italian with a beard, at dinner and at breakfast who reported them as a perfectly normal family; the chambermaid who had made up their beds and reported that all the beds the Lawrences were meant to be in had been slept in on both nights; the head porter who had indeed booked them a cab. All had recognized the Lawrences from the wedding photograph. All, except the head porter, recognized the middle Mr Lawrence as being present on all occasions, though the head porter who had ordered the cab couldn’t be sure as it was dark. The one curious thing was the booking. That had originally been made for the Wednesday night only. The rooms were booked some six days before. Then the second night was added the day the party arrived. Constable Merrick wrote it all down, wishing he had young Tom’s powers of recall.

James Thomas brought them to a quiet corner of the reception area when the evidence had been presented and ordered them some coffee. ‘You may wish to think about what the staff just told you. With most people this kind of detail can take a while to sink in. And you may well think of one or two other people you wish to talk to or a question you wish to ask. Just come back and knock on my door if you do.’

The porters performed their arabesques across the carpet, with trays and cake holders and glasses. The clientele wandered in and looked as if they owned the place. Dotted about the huge room, usually in corners, were enormous potted plants with flowers of green and red.

‘Let’s pretend, young Andrew, that the purpose of this trip was to provide an alibi for somebody, almost certainly Carlton Lawrence, the middle one. Why did they add an extra day to their stay in the hotel? What made them change their mind? Something in London? Something in Lincolnshire? And what was Carlton Lawrence doing back in Boston station on the Thursday? How do we find out if our man could have got back to London in time to sleep in his hotel bed?’

‘I’ve thought of that one, sir. Somebody else could have slept in their bed for half the night and Carlton could have slept there for the other half. But I’ve got the train times. I took them down in the station while we were waiting for the express earlier today.’

Constable Merrick consulted his notes and appeared to be carrying out some powerful calculations in his head. ‘How about this, sir? There’s a train from London to Boston that arrives at three ten. There’s a train from Lincoln to Boston that comes in at three fifteen – Oliver Bell could have seen Carlton Lawrence at the station while one got on and the other got off. There’s a train back to London, leaving Boston at four fifteen, arriving at eight thirty. That’s pretty slow – it must have stopped everywhere. So he could have done it, gone up and down to London, I mean, our man Carlton Lawrence. But why would he want to go back to Boston or Candlesby for an hour or so? And another thing, sir. We don’t have any definite proof that Carlton Lawrence came back to White’s at all. Various witnesses, including Oliver Bell, report seeing him at the station. Nobody reports him leaving Boston on a London train.’

Johnny had a different thought. It was a question for hotel manager James Thomas. Had the Lawrences received any telegrams while they were staying at the Ritz? Yes, they had, came the answer: just one, at five fifteen on the first evening, despatched from Boston, Lincolnshire.

Their last request at White’s Hotel was for a further word with the head porter about the Thursday evening. Johnny showed the Lawrence photographs once more. ‘I know it’s a long time ago,’ he began, ‘but do you remember Mr Carlton Lawrence, this gentleman here, coming into the hotel on his own during the evening?’

There was a pause while the head porter scanned through his memory. Johnny Fitzgerald and Constable Merrick waited patiently. An ordinary porter walked past them with a small briefcase in his hand.

‘That’s it!’ said the head porter. ‘He was carrying a briefcase, rather larger than the one that’s just gone by. Your gentleman, Carlton Lawrence I think you said he was called, came into the hotel about a quarter to nine in the evening in question, the Thursday, I’m sure of it. He went out again about five minutes later without the briefcase. He must have dropped it off in his room.’

John Galsworthy’s Strife was still playing at the Savoy Theatre. The staff, accustomed perhaps to watching detective plays on the stage, were quick to grasp the nature of their inquiries.

One usher reported that she had taken the Lawrences into the theatre and directed them to their box on the first floor. Another remembered bringing them the programmes and making sure they were comfortable.

She was able to recognize about half the party from the photographs. She said her memory for people wasn’t as good as some of the girls who could recall faces they had shown to their seats the year before, but she thought there had been one empty seat in the box at the start of the play. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought all the seats were full at the end. That was all. Carlton Lawrence, when pointed out in the photograph, could have been there or he could not. She couldn’t be sure. That was all she had to say.

Forty minutes later Johnny and Constable Merrick were ensconced in the Powerscourt drawing room in Markham Square. Powerscourt had insisted they use his house as a base during their time in London.

‘I have no idea what I think after today, young Andrew.’ Johnny had found a bottle of Beaune hiding in a Powerscourt cupboard. ‘Tell me when you reckon it’s wide of the mark.’

Johnny took an unusually small sip, for him, and began. ‘Let’s assume the whole thing’s an alibi. The only person it can be an alibi for is Carlton Lawrence, son of old man Lawrence whose estate was sold recently. Originally it must have been for the Wednesday, the first day of their stay in London. Then it has to be put back a day. Maybe Carlton would have gone back to Boston station on the Wednesday if the date hadn’t been changed. Quite what it is or was an alibi for we don’t know. Most likely it’s the murder. But he couldn’t have murdered Lord Candlesby because he was back in London by then on the Thursday. You can look at his appearance at Boston station on the Thursday in one of two ways. Either he was very unlucky to be seen, or, and this is the more devious option, he went in order to be seen. Maybe he was hanging about the place for quite a while in order that somebody would recognize him and tell the police later.’

‘But if he wanted an alibi, sir, surely it would have been for something happening in Lincolnshire rather than in London. Otherwise why go to London at all? On the other hand why go back to Boston station if it’s in that area that you want to establish an alibi? It doesn’t make sense, sir.’

‘Why do you think Carlton Lawrence went back to Boston?’ Johnny Fitzgerald thought he could hear noises coming from the upper floors.

‘Could it have been a woman, sir? Maybe Mr Lawrence had promised to bring a mistress some enormous great jewel like a diamond?’

‘In that case why didn’t he bring the woman with him? Or make a separate trip? We don’t even know if he was married.’

‘He must have been married, sir; it was his daughter’s wedding in the photographs. Maybe we’re looking at it the wrong way round, sir.’ Constable Andrew Merrick was feeling extraordinarily grown up, conducting conversations involving mistresses and extravagant jewellery in one of Chelsea’s most fashionable squares. ‘He could have been bringing something from London to Candlesby, or he could have been bringing something from Candlesby to London, sir, some legal documents perhaps, that they had forgotten to bring with them. They might have had legal business in London about the sale of their estate.’

‘What was in the briefcase, do you think, young Andrew?’ Johnny Fitzgerald was swirling his wine round in his glass like an expert sommelier.

‘Legal documents, as I said, sir? Money? Maybe he owed some people a lot of money over the forthcoming sale of the estate.’

‘My head’s beginning to hurt,’ said Johnny, ‘and it’s not this wine.’

Screams could be heard dimly from above, followed by a lot of shouting.

‘What’s going on, sir?’ asked Andrew. ‘It sounds as if somebody is being tortured on the upper floors.’

‘Quite right,’ said Johnny. ‘Two people are being tortured. They’re five years old and they’re being put in the bath. That’s what all the fuss is about. I’m their godfather, God help them. I’d better go and say hello in a minute.’

Andrew Merrick thought of Powerscourt and Lady Lucy having children as another astonishing event, like Powerscourt having a Christian name. Surely, he had thought, such exalted beings didn’t go round having children like everyone else, even if they were twins.

‘How about this,’ said Johnny, now about a third of the way down the bottle. ‘Alibi literally means being somewhere else. Or that’s what I think it means. When would you need an alibi for the first murder in this case? As far as we know, you would need it for sometime in the small hours of the morning or even later. On the first day our man is definitely in White’s Hotel, miles away from the murder scene. On the second day, the day of the storm and the murder, he is probably back in White’s, still miles away from the murder scene. Why did they go to such trouble to establish an alibi?’

Constable Merrick had only had one tiny sip of his wine. He thought it was delicious. I’m going to turn into an alcoholic, he said to himself, just like my granny said.

‘I’m not convinced about the second day,’ said Constable Merrick. ‘Maybe Carlton has a twin, or a brother who looks like him. Maybe he was introduced into the party the second day. Remember, the person who served them all breakfast in the morning wasn’t the same person who served their dinner the night before. The staff would assume that the breakfast one was the same as the dinner one when it could be a completely different person altogether. It seems possible to me that Carlton Lawrence was just unlucky. He arranged for the substitute to take his place. He shoots off to Lincolnshire. He kills old Candlesby. Then he hides up until the party come home.’

There was a hesitant sort of knock at the door.

‘Ah, Mary Muriel – she looks after the children, Andrew – how nice to see you. Do come in. May I introduce Constable Andrew Merrick, from Lincolnshire? How are the little ones?’

Mary Muriel smiled. ‘They’re much the same,’ she said, ‘only older. I won’t come in, sir. The fact is that they are asking for you to come and tell them a story now they’re in bed. I don’t know how they found out you were here, sir, but they certainly know it now.’

‘They have their own sources of information, those twins,’ said Johnny darkly, ‘floorboards, banisters, walls.’

He found Christopher and Juliet in bed, well tucked up, but not losing the power of speech just yet.

‘Johnny!’ they shouted in unison.

‘Story! Story! Toad! Toad! Poop-poop! Poop-poop!’

For what seemed like an eternity Johnny Fitzgerald had been reading the twins The Wind in the Willows. He was now, he thought, on the third reading and the twins showed no signs of tiring. He sometimes wondered what the record was for completed readings of the entire book and hoped that the winners received autographed first editions. The arrival of The Wind in the Willows had coincided with the arrival of the Powerscourt motor car and various extracts could be heard being shouted from the back seat by the twins when they were travelling in the rear. A respectable middle-aged lady, walking quietly along the King’s Road in Chelsea, Johnny had been told, had looked most put out when pursued by yells of ‘Washerwoman! A washerwoman!’ coming from the back of a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost. Johnny remembered there had been trouble the previous time he had read this particular passage. The twins had become overexcited. It was impossible to calm them down. Powerscourt had had to come upstairs and read them some spectacularly boring bits of the Authorized Version of the Bible with list after list of who begat whom and with no fighting at all.

The twins loved everything about The Wind in the Willows, but they especially liked the last battle between Toad and his friends, the Rat, the Mole and the Badger, and the forces of darkness, the stoats and the weasels and the ferrets who had taken over Toad’s ancestral home, Toad Hall. Johnny, on his last reading, had left it at the point where the Toad party, led by Badger, has advanced into the Hall by means of a secret tunnel.

‘Settle down, settle down,’ said Johnny, suddenly realizing that he might possess a secret weapon in the calming-down department one floor below in the drawing room. He sat on the corner of Christopher’s bed and eyed them gravely.

‘Let us begin,’ he said. Johnny always started like that:

‘The Badger drew himself up, took a firm grip of his stick with both paws, glanced round at his comrades, and cried -

“The hour is come! Follow me!”

And flung the door open wide.

My!

What a squealing and a squeaking and a screeching filled the air!’

‘Aaah! Help! Yaroo! Look out! Whoops!’

In full voice, Johnny reckoned, Christopher and Juliet would have a good chance of bringing down the walls of Jericho.

After three more pages, with the twins now in uproar, he tiptoed out of the door and shot down the stairs.

‘Constable Merrick,’ he said, panting slightly, ‘duty calls. There is a danger of a serious breach of public order one floor up. You are to proceed upstairs at once and sort it out. I recommend most strongly that you wear your helmet!’

‘Sir!’ Constable Merrick had performed this sort of duty at home before now. He had younger brothers and sisters himself. By now the impactof his uniform had dissolved completely. He was not the master but a figure of fun in his own house.

Here in Markham Square, however, he felt, things might be different. He climbed the stairs as noisily as he could, fixing his helmet to his head as he went. Outside the twins’ door he paused and coughed. As he went in he took out a pencil and a notebook and inspected the twins with great severity.

‘Now then,’ he began.

He did not have to say more. Unknown to him, and unknown to Johnny, an enormous policeman with a huge helmet had told the twins off one day in the park recently for digging up the flowers. His helmet had made an indelible impression. Now the twins were underneath the bedclothes, pulling blankets and sheets over themselves as fast as possible before he could make a single note. He stood by the door for a moment, humming to himself. The peace of sleep seemed to be stealing over Christopher and Juliet.

For weeks afterwards Constable Merrick’s ghost haunted the house. Nurse Mary Muriel would warn her charges that she thought she heard the policeman’s footsteps on the stairs. They would fall into bed immediately. Powerscourt was to say afterwards that Constable Merrick had been able to do what few could perform in their lifetime. He could keep the twins quiet. He had achieved a sort of eternal life up there with the schoolroom and the boxes of dressing-up clothes and the broken toys on the nursery floor of Markham Square.