Death in a Scarlet Coat (13 page)

‘You see, he was very independent, Jack,’ she continued. ‘I don’t think he’d have felt happy going somewhere he was told to go to; I don’t think he’d have felt his family were safe and secure.’

‘So where do you think I should be looking, Mrs Harrington?’

‘I don’t know. But I don’t think you’ll find him with any of the Candlesby relations.’

‘Which means I shall have to try his wife’s relations or his friends or places where he worked before.’

Daisy Harrington was frowning. ‘I do know where he worked before he came here,’ she said, ‘but I can’t remember the name of the trainer, I really can’t. It was in Newmarket, that’s all I can remember, you know, where lots of
racehorses
are bred and brought up. Jack used to tell me about those days sometimes.’

‘Thank you very much,’ said Johnny. ‘I’m most grateful. I shall set off for Newmarket.’

As he made his way out of the house Daisy Harrington’s voice followed him down the path. ‘I say, Mr Fitzgerald, why all this interest in a groom who’s disappeared? You don’t think the Earl had a stroke or a heart attack or
anything
like that, do you?’

She waited in vain for Johnny Fitzgerald to answer. ‘You think he was murdered, don’t you?’

Her voice followed him down the drive and round the corner at the bottom. Daisy Harrington stood very still at her door for some time, staring at her empty drive and listening to the silence of the late afternoon. 

There were sad signs of transience at the front of Lawrence House as Powerscourt arrived. A platoon of servants were carrying a selection of boxes, tea chests, portmanteaus, chairs, small tables and household bric-a-brac on to a couple of carts. Every now and then a plate or a glass or a bowl would escape from its container and smash to pieces on the ground, leading to fearful oaths and blood-curdling threats from the butler, who was conducting operations from the top of the steps wearing an enormous moustache and a magnificent red apron. A junior footman detached himself from his
moving
duties and brought Powerscourt to a drawing room at the back of the house, a splendid room with an elegant bay window looking out on a tennis court and a shrubbery. Even here the melancholy work of moving was proceeding. A rather nervous young housemaid was wrapping ornaments in newspaper and placing them carefully in a tea chest. Behind her two men were manoeuvring a long table out of the room. It seemed as though it could not fit through the opening but it was steered through with inches to spare on either side.

‘Lord Powerscourt, I presume.’ A tall white-haired man with a winning smile had come in and was shaking Powerscourt by the hand. ‘Lawrence, Harold Lawrence at your service. We’re moving, as you can see. We’ve got some men from Candlesby village in to help. It’s amazing how clever they are with their hands.’

‘How do you do, sir,’ said Powerscourt, noting the man’s very clear blue eyes and the lines across his forehead
growing
deeper with the passing years.

‘Grace,’ Lawrence turned to address the housemaid, ‘you may go now, and thank you for your good work.’

The maid curtsied and departed. ‘I have no idea if her work here was any good or not,’ Lawrence told Powerscourt, ‘but she looks so nervous all the time, poor girl; I’ve always thought it pays to be kind.’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said Powerscourt politely.

‘I see from your note that you are looking into the death of the late Lord Candlesby,’ said Harold Lawrence. ‘Would you permit me to ask a question or two before you question me, which I feel sure must be the purpose of your visit?’

‘Of course,’ Powerscourt replied, sensing that there might be steel here, lurking behind the good manners.

‘As I understand it, the official record of the Earl’s death said it was due to natural causes. Nobody has yet come
forward
to contradict that. And yet we have the local Detective Inspector, a man widely respected in these parts, still
making
inquiries among the hunt and the Candlesby villagers. And we have yourself, Lord Powerscourt. Inquiries have been made. You may have been discreet in your career, I’m sure you have been, but word gets out about your activities. Investigators like yourself do not stay in little places like this unless they are looking into cases of murder. I do feel we have a right to know. So which is it, Lord Powerscourt, murder or death by natural causes?’

‘Let me give you a truthful answer, Mr Lawrence, and I would ask you to keep it as close as you can. I believe the Earl was murdered. Until I have found the means to prove that, I have to pay lip service to the natural causes theory, even though I don’t think it’s true. There, does that satisfy you?’

‘Perfectly, Lord Powerscourt. Now I presume you want to ask me the usual questions about where we were on the day
of the murder and so on. On the night in question the whole family, all of us, were in London. We went to see a play and we stayed a couple of nights in White’s Hotel. I’m sure the people there will vouch for us if it should come to that.’

‘Was the play good?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘Well, it was interesting, I suppose, if you like industrial disputes all over the West End stage. The wife is very taken by that fellow Galsworthy and his book
The Man of Property
about a bounder called Soames Forsyte that came out a couple of years ago. This play at the Savoy called
Strife
was also by Galsworthy but there weren’t any Forsytes in it. I think the wife was disappointed. She had high hopes of Irene and Bosinney disgracing themselves behind a pillar.’

‘I’ve heard a lot, Mr Lawrence, about the relations between your family and the late Lord Candlesby. Perhaps you could you tell me about it in your own words. Rumour and gossip, as you well know, have a habit of distorting or exaggerating the facts with these sort of events.’

‘I don’t think there’s any exaggeration at all,’ said Lawrence sadly. ‘I really don’t like talking about it very much. Our family were going to get the benefit of the railways running through our land all those years ago. Candlesby managed to make off with the contract instead. He grew rich, or he should have grown rich. We got poor. We’re in no position to survive this agricultural depression in our present state, so we’re cutting back. Smaller house, fewer acres, that sort of thing. It finished my father off, as you probably know, but I don’t think he was long for this world anyway. He’d not been well for some time. There, is that what you need to know?’

Another loud crash from the front of the house indicated a falling down rather than a cutting back of the Lawrence property. There was a tremendous bellow from the butler in his red apron. ‘What on earth are you doing? You stupid stupid man!’

‘Tell me, Mr Lawrence, and I apologize in advance if
this is a difficult question to answer. Ignore it if you wish, I would fully understand. In some families, the dislike, maybe even the hatred for a man who has behaved like Candlesby abates over time, it grows less as the memory fades. But with others, the anger grows inside the family like a tumour. As the years pass it does not grow less, it grows greater so that the hatred for the perpetrator can be as strong, if not stronger, forty or fifty years on as it was at the start.’

Powerscourt looked closely at Harold Lawrence as he made his reply. ‘I don’t think anything of that sort has
happened
here,’ he said. ‘It was all a very long time ago. I don’t think any of us think about it from one month to the next.’

‘I’m very pleased to hear it. Tell me, this is one of those questions people in my profession are always asking. Can you think of anybody locally who might have wanted Lord Candlesby dead?’

‘It’s easier to answer that question the other way round, Lord Powerscourt. Far more people wanted the wretched man dead than wanted him to stay alive. You’ll have heard about the duel and the adultery with the poor woman who walked into the sea and drowned herself. There are a number of other cuckolded husbands around but I wouldn’t want to give you their names as I only heard about them in confidence. There’s a farmer with land just north of Candlesby Hall who swears Candlesby poisoned his cattle. There’s a retired general not far from here who claims that Candlesby raped his daughter and refused to make any provision when the girl became pregnant. You may find somebody with a good word to say about him. If you do, please let me know at once.’

Harold Lawrence pulled a watch rather ostentatiously from his waistcoat pocket. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must get on with the business of supervising this move. My wife has taken to her bed with nerves; it’s all so upsetting. If there’s any way I can help, please let me know.’

With that he shepherded Powerscourt to the front door. One of the carts, drawn by a fine pair of horses, was
gathering
speed down the drive en route to the Lawrences’ new home. The last Powerscourt heard was another mighty bellow from the butler. ‘See here, you useless footmen, all the dining-room chairs were meant to be out here by now, ready to go on the next cart. So where the bloody hell are they?’

Lady Lucy Powerscourt had finished the second of her lunch parties with the ladies of Lincolnshire. Another
deputation
was expected today at tea. During her time with Powerscourt she had volunteered on a number of occasions to eat for victory, to entertain various people whose only feature in common was that they might have something useful to add to her husband’s investigation. Lady Lucy found these bizarre social occasions more testing with the passing of time but she did what she saw as her duty.

Mr Drake’s hotel was not ideal for ladies who lunch with delicate palates and sophisticated tastes. Its clientele was largely male, used to large helpings of meat and potatoes with enormous trifles and apple pies for pudding. Often they had spent the morning out of doors, farmers, vets, surveyors, blacksmiths, and they had worked up a healthy appetite. Lady Lucy had conferred at length with Mr Drake and his chef, a young man from Boston with high ambitions in the catering trade. Mr Drake said he could see Lady Lucy’s point, that the lunchtime offerings at the hotel were meant for healthy males with large appetites. But the ladies would eat it all, he assured her, and he said she might be surprised by the relish with which some of them disposed of the chef’s famous trifles. The prospect of more and more of these heavy meals filled Lady Lucy with dismay. She decided on one last try for different offerings on the menu at a meeting with hotel staff.

‘Fish?’ she said in an interrogative tone that did not expect an answer in the affirmative.

‘Fish?’ said the young chef from Boston reverently, his mind suddenly filled perhaps with the crab and the plaice and the Dover sole and the scallops he had prepared in his previous establishment.

‘Fish,’ said Mr Drake speculatively, ‘fish,’ spoken by one wondering if his kitchen has all the right equipment to cook the things and if there are enough fish knives and forks in the canteens of cutlery.

‘Fish,’ said Lady Lucy again. ‘Do you think we could get some fish on the menu?’

‘I’d be more than happy to order it and to cook it,’ said the chef, who secretly preferred cooking cod to roasting larger and larger cuts of the local beef. ‘We could use the same suppliers we had in Boston. They weren’t expensive.’

‘Well,’ said Mr Drake, ‘so be it. As far as the ladies
lunching
with Lady Lucy are concerned, let them not eat cake, let them eat fish instead.’

After two days, Lady Lucy was to tell her husband later, there was already a pattern emerging. To begin with the ladies from Keys Toft and Toynton St Peter, Sausthorpe and Cumberthorpe would assume that they were not there to talk about the death of the Earl. Indeed not. Instead they would talk about the local weather or their children’s progress or forthcoming attractions in the county, hunt balls or charity recitals. But once Lady Lucy had diverted their attention to the mysterious death of the Earl of Candlesby, it was as if the floodgates had been opened. Of course he had been murdered, said one. Don’t be absurd, countered another, this is a modern country, people don’t go round
killing
each other in 1909, for heaven’s sake. A jealous husband, claimed a third, lured him to a lonely stretch of country and murdered him. When Lady Lucy inquired about who the jealous husband might be, the ladies laughed. There were, she was informed, so many to choose from.

‘There’s a whole list of possibilities,’ said Mrs Devine from Keys Toft happily.

‘I know this sounds unlikely,’ Lady Folkingham entered the lists, ‘but I think it was the vicar myself.’

‘Which vicar?’ chorused the ladies, as if all the vicars in Lincolnshire were known to be murderers.

‘The one from Alford, of course.’ Lady Folkingham stuck to her guns. ‘Candlesby came to morning service there every Sunday for three months. I know as that’s our local church. And he was always eyeing up the vicar’s gorgeous wife – tall, willowy sort of a person with long blonde hair. Our butler swears he saw them once coming out of the most expensive hotel in Louth, looking as if they’d been up to something very naughty. And that vicar has a terrible temper. You should hear the way he shouts at the children in Sunday school.’

‘You’re not telling me, Bertha Folkingham, that the vicar went halfway across the county to kill the Earl,’ said Mrs Stanhope from Toynton St Peter. ‘Vicars don’t do that sort of thing. Their superiors like the Dean and Chapter at the cathedral would have them drummed out of the Church.’

‘But think what a perfect protection it would be, being a vicar.’ Lady Folkingham wasn’t going to retreat in the face of hostile fire. ‘Nobody’s going to suspect you for a moment. It’s an ideal way to commit a murder, if you ask me.’

‘I don’t believe that vicar did it,’ said the Honourable Mildred Grenfell from Cumberthorpe. ‘I think that was all a blind, going to church in Alford, designed to put everybody off the scent. Don’t you remember the wife of the vicar in Wainfleet All Saints, the one who went away last year very suddenly? Tall woman who looked as if she might have been a chorus girl in her younger days.’

Lady Lucy reflected that charity did not run very strongly through the veins of the ladies of Lincolnshire.

‘I do remember her,’ said Mrs Stanhope, ‘flighty piece she was too; she attracted men like a water carrier in the
desert. They flocked to her, poor fools. But what does her disappearance – wasn’t she called Hardy, Tabitha Hardy or something like that – what does that have to do with Candlesby’s death?’

‘I’ll tell you what it has to do with Candlesby’s death,’ said a quiet woman called Mrs Morton from Skegness who hadn’t spoken yet. ‘I was told – in confidence, mind you, so I would ask you all to respect that – that she was carrying on with the Candlesby man. She was always going up to the Hall on the grounds that she liked looking at the deer. I don’t think they were the only stag she encountered up there, if you follow me. The vicar finds out. There’s a terrible scene with the wife. Candlesby refuses to have her living with him up at the Hall; maybe he did have some residual sense of the social proprieties, though I find that hard to believe. She goes away, nobody knows where. There is, for a while, a great murmuring in the parish of Wainfleet All Saints. No saintly behaviour is to be found except, maybe, from the vicar. Where is the vicar’s wife? Is she dead? Nobody knew then about her links with Candlesby or it would be even worse. Is she coming back? Eventually somebody from the Church hierarchy, probably the Dean of Lincoln, he always likes telling people off, instructed the parishioners to keep quiet. But think of the vicar! Think how he must have been feeling!’ The pinched, mouse-like features of Mrs Morton from Skegness grew especially animated at this point. ‘His life is ruined. His career may never recover from the taint of being abandoned by his wife. Alone with his newly acquired housekeeper – who happens to be the worst cook in the east of England – he grows bitter. His betrayal, by the wife, and even more by Candlesby, gnaws away at him. He grows obsessive. And in the end,’ Mrs Morton leaned back in her chair at this point with a flourish of her arms, ‘his emotions and his obsessions take him over. He kills Candlesby in a fit of rage. It will be one of your husband’s finest achievements, Lady Powerscourt, to bring this murdering vicar to book.’