Death in a Scarlet Coat

7

Lady Lucy Powerscourt was being driven north to the flatlands of Lincolnshire. Rhys, the Powerscourt butler and chauffeur, was driving as well as he always did, with no fuss but reaching quite remarkable speeds. Lady Lucy remembered him telling her recently that this car was just the latest form of transport he had driven. He had experienced every form of horse-drawn vehicle, from flies to broughams, known to man, camels in the deserts of Arabia, miserable animals in Rhys’s view, an elephant in northern India, a paddle steamer on the Mississippi. None of them, he maintained, could hold a candle to the Silver Ghost, a car of such restrained power it was as if you had your very own four-in-hand waiting under the bonnet to sweep you on to ever greater speeds.

Lady Lucy had fulfilled the instructions in Powerscourt’s telegram. With great difficulty, and the promise of two expensive lunches on her return to town, she had located an aunt, an aunt at a number of removes it had to be said, but an aunt nonetheless. This aunt, of unknown age, though Lady Lucy thought she must be well over seventy, lived at a place called Ashby Hall, in Ashby Puerorum not far from Candlesby in the Silver Ghost. Lady Lucy had already despatched a letter saying that she proposed to call, and to bring her consort with her. At least the aunt could look forward to inspecting Lady Lucy’s husband, whom she had never met. Indeed, Lady Lucy had some difficulty working out if the elderly aunt had ever met her either.

When she thought of her husband now, she felt rather concerned about his future. For as long as she had known him, her Francis had been involved in solving murders and mysteries of every sort: frauds in the art market, blackmail in the royal family, murder in an Inn of Court. There had been danger, one occasion indeed when he had been knocking quite loudly at death’s door and promised to stop investigating afterwards until Lucy agreed to absolve him from his promise. Then he had gone to St Petersburg, where she felt certain he had never told her how dangerous his adventures had been. Always, in all these cases, she knew but had never mentioned it, there was, for Francis, an element of a game, maybe a variant of the Great Game he had played out in India with the Russians. Solving the murder was like solving a puzzle or cracking a code. But it was no preparation for the secret work he had been asked to do in the past year or so by the government. This, Lady Lucy realized very quickly from watching her husband, was completely different. Murders, even when they crossed the path of the Tsar of Russia, usually involved one family or one extended family. Working for the authorities, as Francis always referred to his government employers, meant working for the whole country, millions and millions of people. Make a mistake in a murder inquiry and the wrong person might be convicted for the crime; make a mistake on government business and you could jeopardize the future security of your fellow countrymen. Francis said very little about his opponents, presumably investigators and policemen turned into spies by the other great powers, but Lady Lucy thought that on a number of occasions he had been as close to being frightened as she had ever seen him. These people take no prisoners, he had said to her once; they’d throw you over the side of the ship and leave you for the fishes without a second’s thought. And somehow, though Lady Lucy didn’t know how she knew it, they were going to come for him again, the authorities, and pressgang him into service once more for the good of his country. With all her heart she prayed the tocsin would not sound too soon.

James Roper topped up his glass and inspected his little audience.

‘By the middle of the last century,’ he began, ‘duelling had more or less disappeared. I’ve often wondered if it didn’t have to do with the decline in traditional values associated with owning land and the military and men of honour. It’s hard to imagine a couple of cotton manufacturers in Lancashire fighting a duel if one fellow said the other’s produce was a load of rubbish. They might try to put their opponent out of business, but it’s almost impossible to think of them squaring up to each other by the waste ground at the back of the mill first thing in the morning. But here,’ Roper waved his hands in the air for a moment, ‘well, this is Lincolnshire. Old values may last longer here. Or perhaps the locals don’t know any better.’

Rufus Kershaw restrained himself with difficulty from suggesting to his superior that he hurry on with the story. The message seemed to get through anyway.

‘As far as we know, the last Lord Candlesby never served in the military. There was no tradition of it in the family. There was, however, a tradition of horse breeding and horse racing that went back a long way. I believe there are a couple of Stubbses from centuries past gathering dust on the walls of the big house in the usual way. For this incident, we must be talking thirty or forty years ago, maybe even more.’

Roper paused for a moment and stared deep into his brandy decanter as if some magical properties were contained within, or a djinn might be about to pop out of it. ‘They say he always had a good eye for a horse, the late Earl. And he liked riding them himself, even though he might have done better with a professional jockey. One day, years ago, he was riding his own horse called Romulus in a race down at Fakenham. Odds of twelve to one. Candlesby wins all right but he has to give his horse a terrible whipping to get past a horse called WG who came second. This is where the trouble started.’ Roper took a long draught of his medicine and carried on. ‘WG’s owner, not, alas, the great cricketer, but a respectable local farmer called Bell, told Candlesby in front of the crowd that he had broken all the moral rules of racing by whipping his horse like that. It was reported that blood was dripping from the animal’s flanks in the winner’s enclosure. It wasn’t worthy of a gentleman, the farmer said. Now, of course, there’s nothing more likely to arouse an Earl than to be told he’s not a gentleman. There’s not much else they can lay claim to these days after all. “Are you saying I’m not a gentleman?” asks Candlesby. “I most certainly am,” says Farmer Bell. “Pistols or swords?” says Candlesby. “Pistols,” says the farmer, who isn’t quite sure what’s going on. The next morning, very early, they meet by arrangement at a clearing by the river. The farmer fires wide on purpose. Candlesby shoots Bell through the heart and the farmer is pronounced dead within minutes.

‘He had a son, the farmer, a little boy called Oliver,’ James Roper was virtually whispering now, ‘believed to be two or three years old at the time of the duel. His mother married again and the new family went out to Australia. Oliver joined the British Army and served for over twenty years.’

‘Do we know where he is now, this Oliver?’ Powerscourt thought something terrible was coming.

‘Oliver Bell? He’s back here now,’ said Roper. ‘He’s taken a little house near Old Bolingbroke Castle not far from here.’

‘And there’s something else,’ Roper went on. ‘They say he trained as a marksman when he was with the military. They say he was one of the best shots in the British Army.’

‘I see,’ said Powerscourt, still unsure how Lord Candlesby died. Could it have been through multiple gunshot wounds? He didn’t think so but at this stage you couldn’t rule it out. You couldn’t rule anything out. ‘I mustn’t trouble you much longer, gentlemen. Do you have any more runners and riders in the Candlesby Murder Stakes?’

‘This last one is my suggestion,’ said Rufus Kershaw. ‘I came across the details of it some time ago. I’ll be brief, my lord. Many years ago the great contractors were bringing the railway through this county. If the line ran through your land you could become very rich. Not quite as rich as you would with high quality coal, but pretty good all the same. Rapallo or San Remo for your Riviera villa, maybe, rather than the more expensive Cannes or Monte Carlo. The estate next to Candlesby’s was owned by a family called Lawrence who had lived in Lawrence House for hundreds of years. They were sure they had won the contract, these Lawrences. Surveyors and people with strange instruments had been wandering all over their land for weeks. Lawyers were discussing the finer points of the financial settlement and compensation for the disruption during construction, that sort of thing. Then at the very last moment, the Lawrences lost the contract. Candlesby got it instead, whether by bribery or blackmail or intimidation nobody knows. To this day the Lawrences have complained about it. For decades they’ve been telling anybody who would listen that they were robbed by Lord Candlesby. It’s not fair, they say. He should never have been allowed to get away with it. There should be a law against this sort of thing. On and on they’ve gone for over thirty years about how they were cheated out of tens and tens of thousands of pounds.’

‘I don’t suppose you see our paper and the other local papers down there in London, my lord.’ Roper tossed back the remains of his tumbler and waved his hand airily towards a glass-fronted bookcase which contained bound copies of his newspaper. ‘If you had, you would have seen a series of advertisements over recent months. They were for the sale of the entire Lawrence estate, including the house and all its outbuildings.

‘That auction was three weeks ago. The property was sold for just over half of what was asked for it. We have known for years in these parts of the extent and scale of the decline in our agriculture: falling rents, falling income from produce, falling prices for agriculture-related property. This is the worst we have seen since things began to go wrong.’

‘They have a new tune now, of course, these Lawrences,’ Rufus Kershaw went on. ‘If they hadn’t been cheated out of the railway money, they wouldn’t have lost their estate and their house. Let’s all feel sorry for the Lawrences! Death to the new Lord Candlesby!’

Powerscourt wondered if a great loss all those years ago could lead to murder now. ‘There’s just one last thing to do with this story,’ said Rufus. ‘The old boy, the old Mr Lawrence, the one who lost the railway deal, has not been well recently. When the price was so low at the auction he took to his bed and died two days later. He was over ninety years old, mind you. You won’t be surprised to hear his descendants blame the Candlesbys for his death. If he hadn’t been cheated out of the railway money, they claim, he wouldn’t have had to sell up and deprive his descendants of what should have been their rightful inheritance.’

‘I am very grateful to you gentlemen,’ said Powerscourt, smiling at the two journalists. ‘You have been most generous with your time. And what a splendid gallery of suspects!’

Rufus Kershaw smiled rather grimly back. ‘As we said, my lord, as we said. This is Lincolnshire.’

Richard, the new Lord Candlesby, peered down the long corridor that led to the library in his great house. The corridor was empty. He closed the door. He locked it. Then he began to pace up and down. The Candlesby library had not escaped the general decay eating away at the fabric of the building. One bay where the books were stored had the wallpaper peeling off the walls. Damp had penetrated the bindings of some of the older leather-bound volumes and reached the pages where unauthorized water marks told of the steady advance of the rain that came in through the hole in the roof.

Richard stopped suddenly three-quarters of the way up the room. There was a scurrying noise as if a battalion of mice or rats were on the march in the wainscoting. He coughed. Then he took a deep breath. ‘My lords,’ he began in rather a hesitant fashion. That’s no good, he said to himself, I sound as if I’m applying to clean the windows or perform some menial task. He tried again. ‘My lords,’ he said and paused again. Surely that was too loud. He hadn’t come to shout at these people or to tell them off. A third time. Confident, but slightly reverential, he told himself. That should surely suffice.

The new Earl had hidden himself away in the library to practise his maiden speech in the House of Lords. Only that morning a letter had arrived suggesting he get in touch with some official or other to fix a date for his installation. Neither of his two younger brothers had ever seen him in the library. Indeed Edward wasn’t exactly sure where it was. Richard made his way to a section labelled ‘History’ at the far end of the room, looking out across the overgrown vegetable garden. Some of these modern books, he remembered, must have come with a young tutor fresh down from Oxford who had been hired to improve their minds some years ago. Nobody paid any attention to his lessons. The three brothers talked all the way through at the top of their voices. If asked to do some homework, on the changes effected by Henry the Eighth for instance, they would write detailed queries about the various places and positions in which the King had enjoyed his wives and mistresses. If the tutor tried to have a peaceful walk through the woods on the estate, they would taunt him from their horses. If he went for a swim in the lake they would make off with his clothes. In the end, he cracked and fled to the sanctuary of a girls’ school where he hoped – in vain as it happened – that the behaviour might be better and the quest for learning not totally extinguished.

Richard tried, and failed, to remember the tutor’s name. He plucked out a book by a man called Edmund Burke. Dimly, he recalled the tutor prattling on about this fellow. He opened a page at random, looking for a quotation to embellish his first oration in the Palace of Westminster.

‘All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.’

That’s all very well, the new Earl said to himself, but I’m not in favour of compromise and barter at this time. Total, uncompromising, unyielding opposition to Lloyd George’s Budget, that was his policy. No room there for compromise and barter, no sir.

He moved along the shelf. Disraeli, he saw. He recalled his grandfather talking endlessly about Disraeli. Maybe he’d be better than that Burke chap. Then he noticed that Disraeli had written some novels. That put a black mark against him in Richard’s book. Men should not write such things. If they had to be written, surely it was a job for a woman. Far better that they should not be written at all.

‘His temper, naturally morose,’ Richard read, ‘has become licentiously peevish. Crossed in his Cabinet, he insults the House of Lords and plagues the most eminent of his colleagues with the crabbed malice of a maundering witch.’ Richard wasn’t altogether sure what maundering meant, but it was clear that this Disraeli was a good man for invective. The original target of his bile, apparently, was a Lord Aberdeen but Richard wondered if he couldn’t use it against Lloyd George. He wrote Disraeli’s words down in his book.

Gladstone, he spotted next. The grandfather who talked about Disraeli had also talked about Gladstone. Some ancient memory stirred in Richard’s mind. Something told him Gladstone and Disraeli had not been the best of friends.

‘It is upon those who say’, he read, ‘that it is necessary to exclude forty-nine fiftieths of the working classes from the vote to show cause, and I venture to say that every man who is not presumably incapacitated by some consideration of personal unfitness or of political danger, is morally entitled to come within the pale of the Constitution.’

Richard read it once. Then he read it again. Then he began to get angry. This was worse than bloody Lloyd George. This was like some demented person from the Labour Party who had recently arrived in Parliament. He remembered seeing a photograph in one of the magazines of a disagreeable-looking Socialist with a very vulgar moustache called Ramsay Madconald. This sounded like his sort of thinking. Hold on a minute, though, Richard said to himself. This Gladstone was a Liberal, not some bearded revolutionary from the trade union movement or the rougher parts of Scotland. He read the passage again. Within the pale of the Constitution. Votes for everybody, that’s what the man was saying. Votes for the junior footmen. Votes for the laundrymaids. Votes for the under gardeners. Votes for the parlourmaids. It was monstrous. Richard leaned forward and tried to open a window. It was a long time since it had been opened. At last he succeeded. He seized the Gladstone book in his right hand and hurled it with all his force into the wilderness that had once been a vegetable garden. It landed next to the spot where the cabbages had formerly met the runner beans. Quite soon the greenery swallowed Gladstone up and he returned to the natural state he had left so long ago.

Richard was delighted with the demise of the former Prime Minister. He didn’t think their lordships would approve if he were to hurl some volume of Lloyd George’s speeches across the Chamber. But he began pacing up and down once more. After half an hour he reached the end of his first sentence. He felt rather pleased with himself. He’d got off to a good start.

Johnny Fitzgerald had a secret. He hadn’t told anybody about it, not even his closest friend, Powerscourt. He felt rather embarrassed by the whole thing. The truth was, that unlike all members of the Powerscourt tribe who had travelled in the Silver Ghost, Johnny didn’t like motor cars at all. They made him nervous. When they raced along a stretch of good road at considerable speed he was actually frightened. This, from a man who had fought with conspicuous bravery in all his many battles. When the Ghost whispered its way along the crowded streets of London, Johnny always thought they were going to crash or run over some innocent pedestrian. There was more. There was worse. The very motion of the Ghost made him feel sick. After half an hour of driving he would begin to feel uneasy, queasy, rather like, he thought, the sensation people described when they spoke of seasickness. Johnny had sailed thousands of miles back and forth from England to India and had never once been seasick.

So he had travelled to Lincolnshire by train. But now, as his cab carried him towards the Candlesby Arms, he knew that he would keep his secret as long as he could.

He found Powerscourt and Lady Lucy having an earnest discussion in the private sitting room Drake had prepared for them. They were discussing a visit to a place called Ashby Puerorum.

‘Johnny!’ said Powerscourt, rising to greet his friend. ‘How very good to see you! How very good to have you on board for this case!’

‘Always glad to be of service,’ said Johnny, bowing low to his superior officer. ‘What can I do for the cause?’

Powerscourt told him all the details of the case, the strange brothers, the rotting house, the mystery of the death of the previous Earl.

‘Do you have no idea at all how he died, Francis? Forgive me for saying such a thing, Lady Lucy, but we have seen one or two dead bodies in our time.’

‘No idea at all,’ said Powerscourt sadly. ‘But you will be pleased to hear, Johnny, that I have a special job I would like you to do.’

Johnny Fitzgerald groaned slightly. ‘And what would that be, my friend?’

‘This man Hayward,’ Powerscourt began.

‘The one who escorted the body back on the horse?’

‘The very same, Johnny. Got it in one.’

Suddenly Johnny Fitzgerald knew what was coming. ‘You want me to find him. Is that it?’

Powerscourt nodded. Johnny Fitzgerald rose and began pacing round the room. ‘Why do I always get the really easy jobs, Francis? You know, drinking all night with the porters from the art galleries in Old Bond Street, rescuing Lady Lucy here from drowning in Compton Cathedral, travelling all the way to bloody Beaune in bloody Burgundy only to be sent straight back again on the next train? Life’s too soft with you, Francis, I’ve always thought so.’

Powerscourt waited for the irony to subside. ‘Have you managed to find out anything about the family?’ asked Johnny. ‘Where he came from originally? Where the wife came from?’

‘I hate to heap more problems on your already overburdened shoulders, Johnny, but they’re not exactly helpful in the village over there. They won’t speak to me at all. I was hoping to ask Charles, the son who’s on our side, to make some inquiries. Come to think of it, I have to go and see him about now. He sent me a note this morning.’

As Powerscourt set off for the Hall, Johnny turned to Lady Lucy. ‘I need to do some serious thinking, Lady Lucy,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it strange how suddenly thirst can strike a man. Maybe it’s the flat countryside all around here and the tang of the salt from the sea that does it. Lead me to the bar and the brain can get lubricated into action.’

Charles was waiting for him at the stables where they had met before, talking earnestly to a dark brown horse with soulful eyes. Powerscourt noticed that his stammer virtually disappeared when he was talking to animals. Maybe it was only humans who interrupted his letters.

‘Lord P-p-powerscourt, how kind of you to call,’ he began. ‘The others have all gone out, frightening what little wildlife there is in these p-p-parts on their horses. I much p-p-prefer the horses when they’re in their stalls and you can have a decent conversation with them, don’t you?’

‘Is this one your favourite?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘This is Gladiator,’ said Charles. ‘Actually he’s the sixth or seventh Gladiator we’ve had here. The first one won a lot of famous races over a hundred years ago, the Oaks, the St Leger, that sort of thing. There’s a p-p-painting of him by that fellow Stubbs in the library. One of my ancestors almost b-b-bankrupted the estate dealing in horseflesh. But come, Lord P-powerscourt, I have things to tell you. And I can show you the house as my b-b-brothers are away.’

They set off up the path towards the great house. Charles pointed a long slim finger out across the lake. ‘That’s the death vault, the mausoleum thing over there,’ he said. ‘All the dead are locked up in there. Do you know, they’ve each got a sort of shelf to lie on in their coffin. It’s like one of those very organized libraries, like the B-b-bodleian in Oxford. P-p-pull out a shelf and there’s a load of b-b-books. P-p-pull out a shelf here and there’s a corpse in its coffin.’

The young man looked wistful suddenly. Powerscourt wondered if he was thinking of his own parents lying in their allotted position in Hawksmoor’s marble, waiting for the Last Trump.

‘I thought of going into the Church once, you know, Lord P-p-powerscourt. I thought about it quite seriously. I always thought I’d have liked the Communion Service. Raising the host high above the altar. That sense of expectation you get at Communion. Loads of incense. Richly coloured vestments, p-p-purple if I ever got as far as b-b-bishop.’

‘What made you change your mind?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘I was never quite sure I b-b-believed it enough, if you know what I mean. I used to have this dream of finishing a theology exam in Oxford one hot day in the summer term and a very old cleric with a vast b-b-beard collecting my p-p-papers and saying, “You don’t really b-b-believe any of this nonsense, do you?” I always woke up b-b-before I could give an answer.’

They were now in the entrance to the Hall, a rather dark place in the basement lined with animal heads that had once grazed in the Candlesby grounds. ‘There used to be a p-p-proper way in,’ Charles told him, ‘p-p-pillars, a hall with high ceilings, family p-p-portraits, usually on horses, lining the walls. This entrance looks as though it was designed for the coal merchant or the man who comes to clean the chimneys. It’s too common for words.’

‘Why was it changed?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘If your ancestors were as mad as mine,’ said Charles sadly, ‘anything was p-p-possible. They could have put the kitchen on the roof or turned the house into a zoo. Small stuffed animals, b-b-birds in glass boxes, antlers, the whole cornucopia of dead creatures has always had a great appeal to my family. They must all have b-b-been deer or red kites or tawny eagles in a p-p-previous existence.’

Charles led him round the house, pausing every now and again to point out some truly monumental piece of taxidermy or a picture where one of Gladiator’s ancestors could just be glimpsed through the accumulated grime on the surface of the painting.

Powerscourt found himself in a strange world he would never forget. In his youth he had seen houses in Ireland where decay was taking over as the family income grew less and less and was eaten up by mortgages and jointures. But he had never encountered anything as bad as this. Here the paint was flaking off the ceilings, long strips of wallpaper hung off the walls. There was dry rot in the floorboards. Sections of rotting plaster had dropped from ceiling to floor and disintegrated into yet more dust. Lady Lucy was to point out when he went back to the hotel that his hair was turning white in places. There were antlers on the walls whose heads were falling off, one-eyed owls, foxes with no tails. One of the previous Earls had collected animals of all descriptions and these were rotting away in glass cases that lay about in most of the downstairs rooms. And Charles told Powerscourt about the Wicked Earl, who had gone on the Grand Tour and collected some of the bloodier and more sadistic Caravaggios.

Time had stopped a long time before in Candlesby Hall. There was no electricity, no telephone, no motor car, no central heating, none of the conveniences associated with the modernity of 1909. If the Industrial Revolution had never touched great swathes of Lincolnshire, it had never even whispered its name in Candlesby Hall. Powerscourt thought the range in the kitchen might have been in use at the time of the French Revolution. The vicar in the next parish, an amateur historian of the medieval period, told him that the late Earl and his family were living in the seventeenth, or possibly the eighteenth century.

It was a week before Powerscourt realized one of the strangest things of all about this strange house. All the servants, with four exceptions, were male. And the only women on the staff were all over fifty.