Death in a Scarlet Coat (11 page)

Powerscourt felt he had just listened to a vital chapter in the social history of England called ‘The Slow Death of Deference’. Things would never be the same again. 

Sandy Temple, friend of Lady Lucy’s sister’s
daughter
Selina, was leafing his way through a number of old notebooks, filled with incomprehensible squiggles. Incomprehensible, that is, to people not inducted into the wonders of shorthand, an essential prerequisite for anybody who wanted to be a reporter for the parliamentary pages of
The Times
. Sandy was checking his old notes on proceedings since Lloyd George introduced his Budget in the House of Commons earlier that year. Since the furore over the Budget began Sandy had been keeping a diary. It covered every single day of the relevant proceedings in the Commons and in the country and would soon report on the Lords when the debate moved there. In the middle of the night, when everybody in his house was asleep, Sandy would dream of his diary being published when the battle was finished, a matter of public record rather like Daniel Defoe’s
Journal of the Plague Year
. Every politician of substance would have to read it. He would be promoted. He would be famous. But for now, in the daylight, he pulled down a large notebook with a dark red cover and looked through the pages.

‘Saturday October ninth, 1909,’ he read, ‘King’s Cross station, nine o’clock express to Newcastle and Edinburgh. On my way to hear Lloyd George deliver a great speech in Newcastle. Sir Francis Weygand from the Treasury told me earlier in the week that it would be important. And Lloyd
George himself is on this train! The same train as me! I saw him a few minutes ago striding up the platform with his cane accompanied by a couple of officials from the Treasury and a scared-looking little man from the railway. Three or four porters gave a ragged cheer as the Chancellor of the Exchequer went by.

‘I have been watching Lloyd George very carefully for months now. I feel I know him better than any other
politician
in the House. He has, I think, an immense talent for making himself unpopular, even hated by his enemies. David Lloyd George is, above all else, an outsider. He came to the Commons with no faction, no relations, no great estate, no cohorts of admirers stretching back to a shared past in the common rooms of Christ Church and Balliol and the dormitories of expensive prep schools in the Home Counties. He trades in a different currency, one of words and language. I think he is the most impressive orator in the country, less fluent than Asquith perhaps, but more natural, more passionate than Churchill. He knows how to talk to the working people of this country, a skill not learnt in the debating chamber of the Oxford Union.

‘Some of the gossip I have heard circulated in the Commons about Lloyd George could only come from his enemies. Rumours have swept around the Welshman for years, many of them, I am sure, invented by the Conservatives. The Palace of Westminster has frequently been awash with stories of extramarital affairs. His wife refuses to come and live in London, preferring to stay close to her roots and her family in north Wales. The goat, as he is sometimes referred to, hunts alone. Even in adultery, if the stories are correct, Lloyd George remains true to his
political
affiliations. He only ever misbehaves with the wives of Liberal MPs, never with the wives of Conservatives.

‘We are leaving Durham now, cathedral and castle
standing
proudly above the river. I wonder if Lloyd George has spent the journey preparing his speech. We should arrive
in Newcastle in less than fifteen minutes. I am more excited than I can say.’

‘Are you still engaged in that frightful profession of investigating?’

Lady Lucy’s great aunt Leticia was a formidable old
person
. She was extremely slim, almost emaciated, possibly due to the eccentric diet, and her distinguishing feature was an enormous bun of silvery white hair which followed the movements of her head like a guardsman’s bearskin. The first part of the conversation, before they sat down to the beetroot, had consisted of a microscopic investigation of Lady Lucy’s past and the precise location in the family tree of all her mother’s relations so that the exact degree of
consanguinity
could be established and pinned on an imaginary board, like a preserved butterfly. The relationship crossed over a number of cousins, some three or four times removed, and, thought Powerscourt, whose mind had been on other things, a great uncle who had emigrated to New Zealand but whose relations had come back to live in England, weary of sheep and Maoris. The vicar’s wife’s home-made wine, duly imported from the outhouses, had been rather a trial. Pressed to partake out of politeness, Powerscourt had
managed
to decant most of the ghastly beverage into a large pot full of herbs. He did not rate their survival chances very highly. Now the old battleaxe was moving in on him with her question about whether he was still investigating.

‘I am as a matter of fact,’ said Powerscourt, smiling politely at his new relation.

‘How dreadful for you all. It’s no profession for a
gentleman
, prying into people’s lives and accusing them of
murdering
their wives or husbands.’

Powerscourt didn’t reply. He could see Lady Lucy making some elaborate hand signs to him but he couldn’t work out what they meant.

‘Do you have a special celebration the day these
miscreants
are found guilty? Do you go out to celebrate at the Ritz?’

‘Of course,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Champagne all round.’

There were more hand signs from Lady Lucy across the table.

‘And what do you do’, the old lady stared at Powerscourt as she spoke, the silver bun quivering slightly with
suppressed
emotion, ‘on the day the criminals you have unmasked are hanged for their crimes and wickedness?’

‘That depends’, said Powerscourt gravely, ‘on
whereabouts
the ceremony takes place. If it’s out of London, in Lewes or Lincoln for instance, there’s not a lot we can do apart from opening the champagne at the appointed hour. But if it’s in town, Pentonville perhaps or Wormwood Scrubs, that sort of thing, we usually take a picnic basket and have a feast outside the prison. Lobster seems to go down very well on these occasions. If you listen very
carefully
at exactly eight o’clock in the morning you can
sometimes
hear the trapdoor opening and a scream or two as the chap is left dangling. That’s always good fun. Quite a crowd sometimes, so you can’t always hear the drop.’

The silver bun was rock steady now, the hair on special parade duty.

‘What happens if you get the wrong person? Eh? Lord Powerscourt? Eh? What do you do then?’ The old lady leant forward to press home her advantage and shook her finger at Powerscourt.

‘Since you ask, I don’t think I have got the wrong man or woman yet.’ He began counting on his fingers. ‘Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, all clear rounds so far. They
usually
own up in the end, you know; sometimes they tell you where you might have got something a tiny bit wrong. Can’t always score a hundred out of hundred, after all.’

‘Woman, did I hear you say? Do you send them off to meet their maker at the end of a length of rope too? How barbaric! And you dare to call yourself a gentleman!’

‘If you were shot through the heart or strangled by expert hands, I don’t think it would make much difference whether the perpetrator was male or female. You’d be dead just the same.’

‘And I suppose you rejoice in equal measure if it’s a woman or a man who’s being hanged. Heartless, heartless man!’

‘Of course,’ said Powerscourt. ‘There’s always a time to rejoice over the sinner who repenteth and you can’t do much more repenting than by being actually hanged by the neck till you are dead. I do have one new scheme up my sleeve but I think it will only work in London.’

Great Aunt Leticia shuddered. ‘And what is that, pray?’ Lady Lucy was making further signals, reminding her
husband
of a conductor trying to quieten his orchestra.

‘It’s like this,’ said Powerscourt, leaning forward to
establish
better contact with the old lady. ‘The Metropolitan Police have their own photographers now. They’re expert in photographing dead people so everyone will know what their injuries looked like after the corpse has been lowered into the ground in its coffin. I’ve arranged that they’re going to send me prints of all the best shots they take so I can hang them up on my walls.’

‘What do you mean, the best shots?’ asked the old lady suspiciously, peering at Powerscourt as if he came from another planet.

‘Well, only the most gruesome ones, naturally, faces
covered
with blood, arms hanging off, bullet holes in the chest, noses blown away, that sort of thing. It’ll be most amusing!’

‘Francis, Francis, do give over,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Can’t you see, Great Aunt, he’s making all this stuff up. He’s been teasing you with his exaggerations for the past five minutes, maybe more. Not a word of this is true, not a word!’

‘Is that so, young man?’ The old lady peered at him closely once more. ‘That none of what you have been
saying
is true?’

‘It’s all fiction,’ said Powerscourt happily, ‘every single word of it, though I did rather like the bit about the lobster. I’m sorry if it upset you.’

The old lady snorted. ‘Well,’ she said, and the faintest suspicion of a smile flickered across her emaciated features, ‘it was all most convincing. Now then, we’d better move on to talk about the death of Lord Candlesby. I presume that’s why you are here.’

‘Your expertise and your local knowledge would be most welcome,’ said Powerscourt.

‘Most welcome indeed,’ echoed Lady Lucy. The beetroot confection had been cleared away and a golden dish of rhubarb crumble was now being served.

‘When you think about that horrible man’s death, the remarkable thing about it is not that it happened but that it hadn’t happened years before. I expect you’ve heard about the man he killed in a duel, and the woman he had an affair with who committed suicide?’

Powerscourt nodded. ‘I believe’, Great Aunt Leticia continued, ‘that those were only the hors d’oeuvres of his crimes.’ Powerscourt found himself wondering what sort of hors d’oeuvres you could provide based only on
beetroot
and realized he couldn’t find an answer. ‘There were other affairs, other members of the gentry whose wives he seduced. But I think we have to look elsewhere for his killer or killers.’

‘And where do you think that might be?’ Powerscourt asked.

‘Why,’ the old lady gave a toss of her head like a racehorse in the paddock before a race, ‘in his own home, of course.’ She looked round triumphantly at her little audience. ‘Let me give you my reasons. Many of the domestic staff at Candlesby Hall don’t stay very long. Some of them have scarcely time to unpack their trunks before they are thrown out or flee of their own accord. I have employed three
footmen
who walked out or were forced to depart in the past
few years. There never seem to be many female staff in the place, for reasons I do not know. But these footmen told terrible stories about the man’s cruelty. The servants were merely kicked or punched or knocked down. The children when younger were beaten, systematically, sadistically and far too often. Beatings never stopped until they were in tears or bleeding or both. Beatings would start for no reason at all: a door left open, a shirt button unfastened. If they had all misbehaved, windows broken by footballs, that sort of thing, they were beaten in relays, and when he had got to the end that dreadful man would go back to the first one in line and thrash them all over again. Some of those teachers in the great public schools claim that occasional beatings are good for a boy’s character. I don’t believe that for a moment. Beatings on the Candlesby scale must have a terrible effect on their natures. Is this a father’s love, a parent’s devotion, the cane whistling down on you over and over again?’

‘You don’t imagine’, said an appalled Lady Lucy, ‘that he was still doing it? They’re all too old, those children, surely. The elder ones are all grown up; they could probably have knocked him out without too much trouble.’

‘Oh, he stopped with the eldest ones,’ she said. ‘One of the footmen who left him five years ago told me that. He may have carried on with the little one, the one who’s not quite right in the head. That’s probably a good reason for a ferocious beating, if you’re Candlesby, the fact that the poor boy’s out of his wits.’

‘I’m sure it’s more than possible,’ said Powerscourt, ‘but don’t you think the sons might have done something about it by now?’

‘Good point, Lord Powerscourt, good point. I have thought about that,’ said the great aunt. ‘Maybe the
beatings
were like seed corn – they have taken time to grow. Something else may have come along, some later piece of cruelty, to light the fire.’

‘If he beat the youngest one,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘that might have been enough to set them off.’

‘You mustn’t think those three eldest children are in any way virtuous or kind or well brought up. My footmen reported that they were wild, feral almost, savage, perfectly capable of murdering anybody. All except the fourth one and he’s got such a terrible stutter people have left the room sometimes before he’s finished a sentence, and the last one who’s not right in the head.’

‘I see,’ said Powerscourt, wondering again how the late Earl had been killed, what the telltale marks on his body were. Had the three eldest brothers lured their father away to some remote spot and killed him in some spectacularly horrible way? Had they then left a note for Jack Hayward to find him? Powerscourt didn’t think that explanation felt right.

‘Great Aunt,’ Lady Lucy was bringing the party to a close, ‘we have to go now. Francis has a meeting with the police. But you must come and see us at our hotel. Why don’t you come for tea a week today? We could bring you up to date with the latest news.’

‘I tell you what I will do, my dear. Much better than tea. I’ll organize a series of lunches for you to host at your hotel. You can meet the ladies of Lincolnshire and hear what
gossip
has to say about mysterious deaths at Candlesby Hall.’