Death in a Scarlet Coat (17 page)

Mr Jones looked closely at the young policeman. He hadn’t finished yet.

‘As I said before, sir, would they have wanted to stay in the carriage all that time with a corpse, sir, Lord Powerscourt, sir?’

‘I was just coming to that,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Mr Jones, you must know this line better than anybody. Are there any stretches where you have to slow down, so that a man could jump out without killing himself?’

‘Before I answer that, my lord, can I ask why they didn’t just tip the body out of the door once they had killed him?’

‘My answer to that, Mr Jones, is that I don’t know. Maybe they thought the body might be discovered before the train reached London and a hue and cry would begin sooner than they would have wanted. Though why they should refrain from throwing the dead man out of the carriage and then throw themselves out of it I have no idea. But come, Mr Jones, are there places where the jumping could have been done?’

Archibald Jones took a long time fiddling with his pipe and getting it to draw. ‘I have been thinking about your requirements while we talked,’ he began. ‘The obvious place to jump would be as we draw close to King’s Cross. There are always red signals there for no apparent reason. But you would have to work out the likelihood of meeting a train coming the other way. You could very easily get yourself killed. The other train might be on you before you knew it was there. There is another place you might jump, on the northern outskirts of Peterborough. The problem there is that the track runs along very close to rows of terraced houses. I don’t think you would be in much danger of being killed by a train coming the other way, but the chances of being seen would be considerable. Two men in the uniform of the Great Northern Railway could cause quite a stir. So I don’t think Peterborough would be the answer.’

Jones the driver drew hard on his pipe and blew a great cloud of smoke across the compartment. Just like one of his engines, Powerscourt thought. Maybe he’s going to get under way in a minute.

‘There is just one place where I think it might be possible,’ Jones went on, ‘and that’s on the way into Spalding. Before
the town, while you’re still in open country, there’s a
cutting
with thick grass and brambles and weeds and loads of blackberries in the autumn. You could throw yourself into that and hope the grass and general undergrowth would check your fall. There’s a road into the town a hundred yards away.’

‘And you wouldn’t be overlooked?’

‘No, sir.’

‘What speed would the train be travelling at?’ asked Powerscourt, suddenly remembering some hazardous leaps in the past with Johnny Fitzgerald.

‘I should think about ten to twelve miles an hour, my lord.’

‘Could you take me there in the morning? In this train with the same carriages?’

‘I’m sure I could, my lord. I’ll just have to clear it with the stationmaster in the morning.’

Powerscourt felt a tugging on his arm and a low but insistent cough.

Young Andrew was not to be denied. ‘Lord Powerscourt, sir, Mr Jones, sir, what about the door? I was told it was closed when the train reached London. How did they close the door after they’d jumped out of it?’

Powerscourt strode over to the door. Before he reached it Jones gave him the answer.

‘It opens outwards, my lord, the door, I mean.’

Powerscourt flung open the door and stared at the railway lines of the Great Northern Railway, a few stray carriages dotted about the tracks. A dull murmur could be heard coming from the stationmaster’s office as the interviews went on. He thought about a trial jump but realized that it wouldn’t tell him anything. Stationary leaps were just not the same.

Twenty minutes later he was conferring with Inspector Blunden.

‘I’ll get all these interviews typed up in the morning, my lord,’ said Blunden. ‘It would seem from what you learnt
and what one or two people here said, that two people entered the Candlesby carriage at some point before the train left the station. Can’t think how they persuaded him to let them stay. They may have had keys. Anyway, once the train left the station, I would say, they killed him.’

‘We won’t know about the jump until tomorrow,’ said Powerscourt. ‘But do you suppose they knew the line well enough to decide where to jump? And were they staff
members
of the Great North Railway? Or were they impostors? And if so, where did they get the uniforms? And, more important, how did they know where to jump off?’

‘I’m going to ask the stationmaster to inquire about the uniforms tomorrow. And he said, my lord, that it’s perfectly fine to take the train down the line tomorrow, but he can’t let it go until half past two in the afternoon. He muttered something about signals.’

‘Half past two would be fine,’ said Powerscourt. ‘May I take young Andrew with me? He might make a better fist of jumping into the undergrowth than me. Did anybody who noticed the two fake guards mention what age they might be? If they were over fifty I can’t see them leaping out of trains.’

‘There were two people’, said the Inspector, checking his notebook, ‘who noticed them, or thought they might have noticed them. But they made no comment at all on how old they might have been.’

Lady Lucy had been persisting loyally with her Lincolnshire ladies’ lunches. They had, she felt, become rather a strain. There had been one where all the guests combined to claim a vicar as the murderer. Other candidates had been denounced, a Justice of the Peace, Lincolnshire’s biggest landowner, a doctor who was widely suspected of
murdering
his patients. Her guest on this day had insisted on
coming
alone. Rachel Cameron was a tall good-looking woman
of about forty years of age with dark brown hair and a bossy manner. She made interesting but inconsequential small talk until they had finished the fish. When the waiter had cleared the plates away she made her move. She leaned forward in her chair and fixed Lady Lucy with a conspiratorial stare.

‘Lady Powerscourt, I’m sure you must have heard some pretty incredible stories about the murder of Lord Candlesby. The women in these parts don’t have enough to do, so gossip and fantasy take the place of charity work or improving the lives of one’s tenants.’ She made it sound as if she, Rachel Cameron, lived on a higher plane than the ladies of Horncastle or Ingoldmells. ‘I’m sure you will have heard of the terrible fate of Lady Flavia Melville last summer.’

‘The poor woman who was having an affair with the Earl and committed suicide after their love letters were sent to her husband?’

Mrs Cameron nodded. ‘I happen to know rather a lot about that affair. You see, I was very close to Flavia Melville, as she became after her marriage. I think I was probably her only friend in the county. It must have been so strange, living here surrounded by these philistines after a German university town. She used to say that the conversations were so different. She had replaced the pursuit of knowledge with the pursuit of the fox.’

Mrs Cameron paused for a moment. Lady Lucy said
nothing
. ‘Her husband was perfectly polite, perfectly pleasant. But that was all there was. You know how you wonder with some people if the public persona is a facade, an invented personality? Flavia was deceived by the English customs. She once told me her husband’s good manners were a facade hiding an abyss, that there was nothing behind them, nothing at all. It was, she said, like being married to a clothes horse that could speak a few stock phrases, nothing more. I think Sir Arthur began to irritate her intensely after about six months of marriage. I remember her coming to my house one day in the spring and walking up and down
the garden saying, “What am I to do?” over and over again. I don’t suppose many married women begin affairs out of exasperation with their husbands; perhaps they do. John was so very different from her husband. Decisive, arrogant, determined to take what he wanted without paying any bills, and I don’t mean the bills you can settle with money. I don’t think he treated her very well – he didn’t know how. That might have been part of the appeal. For some people being beaten up, literally or metaphorically, can be very attractive.’

She paused again. ‘You do understand what I’m saying, Lady Powerscourt? I’m not just talking to myself?’

‘Not at all, certainly not,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Please
continue
.’ They waited for the waiter to refill their glasses with Mr Drake’s finest Quincy.

‘She changed so much during the months of their affair. She hadn’t seemed particularly attractive before. People said Sir Arthur must have been pretty desperate to marry her. But now she glowed. She radiated a devil-may-care kind of happiness. I often thought Sir Arthur must realize something was going on but he didn’t, or if he did he wasn’t saying.’

She took a sip of her wine. ‘Now we come to the end,’ she said. ‘I have never told anybody what I am about to tell you now, Lady Powerscourt. Most of it Flavia told me, some of it on a midnight trip to my house which lasted until the dawn and the little birds began chirping in the garden. Candlesby wanted her to go and live with him. He was desperate for her to do so. Flavia said she needed time. Candlesby was completely besotted. He refused to let the matter drop. This stalemate lasted a week. Then the letters started.

‘One day somebody sends Flavia copies of half the love letters she’s ever written to John, Lord Candlesby. The next day they send copies of half of the letters he’s sent to her to John. There was a pause in the letters the third day. But on the fourth day the somebody, presumably the same
somebody, sends all the love letters, all hers to him, all his to her, to Sir Arthur. It was terrible. People have always thought the servants can’t have approved of her affair; people said that the servants knew where the letters were kept so they made copies and took a terrible revenge. But that was not the case. This is the secret at the heart of the tragedy that only a couple of people know. It’s so terrible it’s hard to believe.’

For a moment Mrs Cameron looked as though she might break down in the midst of her narrative but she steadied herself.

‘Candlesby wouldn’t take no for an answer. He was
determined
to bring her to Candlesby Hall as his mistress if she wouldn’t divorce Sir Arthur and marry him. And this is the worst part. This is why she came to see me in the middle of the night after another row with her lover. She told me that it was John who sent the first two lots of love letters. This was before the whole lot were sent to Sir Arthur. He told her he would send them all to Sir Arthur if she didn’t agree to leave him. You could see the twisted logic behind it all. If Sir Arthur found out about the affair through these letters then he might throw her out. Why not avoid the distress by leaving anyway? What she had always found upsetting was the difference in the letters. The ones he sent to her might have been to his estate manager or the butler, filled with details of arrangements and the dates of
meetings
. The ones she had written to him on the other hand were passionate outpourings about the happiness he had brought her and how she couldn’t wait to see him again. Even Sir Arthur, she said, sitting on a bench by the lake in our garden at three o’clock in the morning, even he would realize that this was a woman he did not know, one who had never spoken to him in those terms or spun so many words of love.’

Rachel Cameron stopped once more. She looked worn out suddenly by the terrible events she was describing.

‘You can stop for a while, if you’d like to,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘You could begin again when you are ready.’

Mrs Cameron smiled wanly. ‘It’s all right. We’re nearly at the end now. I’ve often wondered if she had already decided what to do, as if she could only see one way out. She rushed into my house and found a copy of
Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
“I don’t know,” she said, “if I’m going to be like Tess or Sue Bridehead in
Jude the Obscure.
She kept repeating, “The President of the Immortals had finished his sport with Tess.” She was still repeating it when she left my kitchen to creep back to her own house. That was the last time I saw her alive. The letters didn’t come the next day. But they did come the day after that. And Flavia, consumed by now no doubt by love and guilt in equal measure, walks out into the sea and doesn’t come back. Sir Arthur went out of his mind for some time. He only really recovered when a friend from his days in the army took him away on a walking tour of the Scottish Highlands. They were away for about a month.’

‘Did he ever talk to you about Flavia?’

‘This is the real point of my story, Lady Powerscourt. One of the things that helped to make Sir Arthur better was deciding to find out who had sent the letters. His friend from the army was very keen on it, apparently. Know your enemies, or some such rubbish, was what he used to say. And so he came to see me. He wrote beforehand, all very proper. He may have been drinking less than he had before but he still managed to down a third of a bottle of whisky in the hour he was with me. It took some time before he got round to what he wanted to say – maybe that was why the scotch was needed in such quantities. He started looking at the carpet rather than at me. Then he said that he had employed a private detective to find out about the letters.

‘This is why I have come,’ he managed to say. ‘This
detective
person told me that he thought Candlesby sent the letters himself, in a desperate attempt to get Flavia to leave me. I couldn’t believe it at first. Seems unlikely, what? But
you knew Flavia. You were her closest friend. Did she ever talk to you about the letters?’

‘Well, what was I to say? Would I be betraying my friend if I told him the truth? Would it send him back towards despair and larger doses of scotch if I told him? I think I must have delayed so long that he could have guessed what the answer was if he had been a sensitive man. But he wasn’t. I tried to decide whether it would be better for him to know the truth, or be left in ignorance. In the end I told him the truth.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He didn’t say anything at all, not for a while. He walked up and down the room for about ten minutes. Then he headed for the front door. As he was going he said, “The man’s a bastard, a complete bastard. I’m going to kill him.”’