Death in a Scarlet Coat (22 page)

There was only one consoling thought in the Inspector’s heart that morning and she was called Emily and she was three years old, Emily Blunden. She would sit in her father’s lap and demand his total attention before serenading him with ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’, over and over again. The Inspector had impressed upon his wife the need to widen the repertoire, but, so far, ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ was all they were going to get.

The little garden outside Oliver Bell’s cottage was very tidy. Oliver Bell opened the door in a pair of dark blue
trousers
and an enormous sweater as if he was about to embark on a long sea voyage. He had a neat black beard and curly hair turning silver at the sides. He looked, Blunden thought,
like a self-contained sort of person, one who does not need all that much of the company of his fellow men.

‘Good morning, Inspector,’ said Bell. ‘I’ve been expecting you for some time now.’

The Inspector wondered if he had been derelict in the performance of his duty and would be sacked on his return to the police station.

‘I’m sure you can understand my position, Mr Bell.’ The Inspector had squeezed into a chair that was much too small for him. ‘Your father killed in a duel when you were small, your coming back here a year or so ago, revenge always a very clear motive for murder and you a military man too.’

‘I can fully see why you might regard me as a suspect, Inspector. In your job I would have done exactly the same. But I have to tell you that I have changed. I am no longer a soldier. I am a pacifist now, a Christian of sorts, a believer in the late writings of Leo Tolstoy and politicians like Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald. I am going to London to work for the Salvation Army when you are finished with me. I did not care to leave until I had spoken with you in case you thought I was guilty and was running away.’

‘Can you tell me where you were on the night of the great storm when Lord Candlesby was murdered, Mr Bell?’

‘I can indeed, Inspector. I was here apart from an hour spent with my nearest neighbour, a retired clergyman who thought his roof was about to collapse. I was with him for fifty or sixty minutes. I’m sure he would confirm that.’

‘Very well, Mr Bell, once I have confirmed that you will be free to leave. Just one other thing. Could I ask you couple of questions if I may?’

‘That’s what you people do,’ Bell replied, with a smile.

‘What made you change your mind? About the military, I mean. You had a very distinguished career in the army after all.’

Oliver Bell stared blankly at the Inspector as if he had travelled to some faraway veldt or a distant hill station in Rajasthan.

‘I killed too many people,’ he said finally. ‘Sorry if that sounds gruesome. I must have killed hundreds and
hundreds
of people in my time in the army. Most of the time you never see them, your victims I mean. Near the end I did see three people I’d shot that very morning. One had been shot in the chest and his blood was everywhere. One had been shot in the belly and his guts were hanging out over his stomach like something in a butcher’s shop. The third had been hit in the forehead and his brains were all over the others. Flies and other insects were all buzzing around for the feast. Man reduced to a treat for the smallest and least significant of God’s creatures. I only killed two people after that. Most of the time I aimed too high or too wide.’

‘I think you are a very brave man,’ said the Inspector. ‘My final question is this. Did you see or hear of anything round about the time of these murders that might help us find the killer?’

Oliver Bell thought for a moment. ‘Just one thing, Inspector, and it could be nothing. Early in the afternoon on the day of the great storm I’d come back from Lincoln on the train. I’d been to the cathedral to hear a talk about the cloisters. It always refreshes me, Lincoln Cathedral. Every time I go there I think we don’t deserve to be exposed to such beauty. Carlton Lawrence, the middle one of that
family
who had to sell up recently, he was coming out of the railway station. He looked rather nervous, as if he had just done something wrong or was about to do something he shouldn’t. He kept looking around him as if he didn’t want to be recognized. As I say, it could be nothing, Inspector.’

Oliver Bell watched the policeman go. I didn’t think that would be so easy, he said to himself. Much easier than I thought. He went inside and began to pack his bags.

Edward Nathaniel, Earl of Candlesby, referred to by his detractors as the Wicked Earl, had been restored to the room
he created at the end of the eighteenth century. Powerscourt and the butler had brought him up two flights of stairs from his place on the dining-room wall next to the second Earl. Only Powerscourt had actually carried the portrait into the room. He was now ensconced on one of the two easels by the window. Powerscourt checked the various copies he had discovered and found that there were two pictures where Candlesby had painted himself as a copy of the Caravaggio original. One was of a saint often depicted in religious
paintings
. St Jerome is old and losing his hair. He is engaged in copying out the Vulgate, wearing a deep red robe as far as his waist. A skull and a candlestick and a mirror remind us that death is never far away, the very items that Powerscourt had discovered in the cupboard. Powerscourt suspected that Candlesby put the original painting on one easel and his own canvas on the other. When he had copied all the background, he had removed the original and aligned the large mirror on the easel in such a way that he could paint his own reflection on to the canvas. He was wearing the red robe Powerscourt had found in the cupboard, and the skull was nearby as it had been in the Caravaggio
version
. Unlike the real Caravaggio, there was little life and no energy in it. It was, Powerscourt thought, a poor thing.

But the others, what of the others? Did Candlesby know that Caravaggio used contemporary models from the street or the tavern or the house next door? Would they have told him that in those art galleries in Rome?

He rearranged the Caravaggio canvases once more and discovered that there was a clear sequence of paintings about Christ’s last days, the flagellation of Christ, Ecce Homo or Here is the Man, the crowning with thorns, all concerned with Jesus being scourged and shown to the multitude by Pontius Pilate.

Powerscourt found three copies by the former owner of the house. He stared at them for a long time. None of these men was Candlesby himself. The models being flogged
or crowned with thorns were all different people. Were they locals? Had Candlesby simply selected them from his labourers or his servants to act as models for his grisly hobby? Had he ordered them up here, beaten them or flogged them to the required degree and made them sit or stand or be twisted round a pillar, their wounds still
bleeding
so the paint would look fresh on the canvas? Christ in heaven.

Powerscourt staggered back from the Candlesby
paintings
and found himself in a dark corner with an enormous cupboard he had not seen before. He pulled very carefully at the door. It seemed to have been locked. Powerscourt vented his rage on the lower panels and kicked the door down. There were two smaller groups of paintings on
opposite
sides of the door panel. Leaning across the back of the cupboard was a tall piece of wood, eight or nine feet tall. He pulled it into the light. There was another shorter piece of wood joined to it about two-thirds of the way up. This shape had been used in the ancient states of Persia and Greece and Macedonia. It was employed widely in ancient Rome. Six thousand of Spartacus’s slaves were hung on them along the Appian Way after the end of the revolt. Jesus Christ ended his life on one of them. The object in the cupboard on the top floor of Candlesby Hall was a cross, the holiest, the best known, the most powerful symbol of the Christian faith on earth.

Two old people and one four-year-old child had already died from the influenza in the village of Candlesby when Lady Lucy Powerscourt went to help. She was careful at the beginning not to make any suggestions and not to put herself forward. She told the women of the village that she was happy to be useful in any way she could, whatever would be most helpful to them. The women with the sick families were short of time. When their parents and their
children were sick at the same time they were stretched to breaking point. So Lady Lucy found herself dividing her time between the very young and the very old. She read to the children, old stories from her childhood, stories she had told to her own children when they were the same age as the Candlesby ones. More stories were ordered, to be sent express from Hatchard’s in London. When the children were too hot, or delirious, she would stroke their faces and hold their hands and whisper softly to them. Sometimes when she thought they were on the verge of death she found it very hard not to break down.

The Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost was seen a lot in the
village
, carrying supplies, fetching medicines, ferrying the doctor to and fro. Lady Lucy had ordered provisions to be despatched from Mr Drake’s hotel, soup and fresh bread and roast chickens and fruit. Children who were only mildly afflicted by the influenza would be carried out to the great car with its gleaming silver bonnet, heavily wrapped up, and allowed to sit beside Rhys and inspect the controls for a couple of minutes. None of them had ever seen a motor car before. Every child in the village was promised a proper ride in the Ghost when they were better.

The social life had broken down most severely for the old, most of them female. In normal times their daughters would come to call, or their grandchildren, or their nephews or nieces. They would eat with the rest of the family in the house of one of their children. Now the mothers who cooked had their hands full with sick children, the
grandchildren
were laid low by the influenza and the neighbours were either confined to bed themselves or on nursing duty elsewhere. Lady Lucy would call on as many as she could find time for, making endless cups of tea, bringing bowls of soup or fresh chicken sandwiches. They were shy of her at first, the old ladies of Candlesby, but they soon realized that, though the externals of their lives were so very different, the central core was the same: children, husbands, family, home.
After a couple of days Lady Lucy would ask them about the men they had loved, the men they had married, the men they wished they had married, the men they wished they had never seen. The stronger of them would smile and ask her the same questions back. Some of the old ladies were rambling at the height of the influenza, their minds
wandering
, their speech virtually unintelligible. Lady Lucy stroked their hands just the same and made more tea. It was only later that she realized some of the things she was hearing might not just be the ramblings of the very sick. Was the key to the mystery of Candlesby Hall being revealed to her in small and unconnected batches as the diseased and the dying referred unwittingly in their ravings to things they would never have mentioned when they were well?

Powerscourt was now very angry indeed. He had pulled out the cross and found various marks in various places he did not like at all. In both lots of paintings, Caravaggios and Candlesbys, there was one disciple crucified upright and one crucified upside down. There was Christ being laid in the tomb, a dead Saviour who looked very dead indeed. Had Candlesby waited for a corpse to paint that particular scene? Surely he couldn’t have killed the man just to have a model for the painting. Had he stolen the corpse from the undertakers? There were various severed heads he didn’t care for either, quite apart from Judith with the head of Holofernes. There was Salome with the head of John the Baptist, David with the head of Goliath, both particularly bloody and realistic, blood dripping artistically from the severed necks, eyes staring in astonishment that death dared take them out of the frames of their lives.

Powerscourt’s brain was reeling now. He didn’t know what to believe. At best, you could assume that the old Earl had rented various locals to model for his imitations of the Caravaggios he had bought on the Grand Tour. But
there were other, darker possibilities. The models might have been abused or beaten up or scourged or had their heads cut off. People of all sorts had told him that the Candlesbys were eccentric, that they beat their children, that they refused to speak to their sons and daughters and communicated only by letter, that children could be thrown out for not standing up when their father came into the room. This older Candlesby was undoubtedly of that
tradition
. Powerscourt suddenly remembered the butler and indeed Charles Candlesby himself refusing to come into the Caravaggio chamber. What did these Candlesbys think their fellow men were for? They were to be exploited, robbed, used, whatever the masters wanted. For the masters owned the servants and the tenants and the farm labourers as they might own a cart or a horse or a field or a house. They were just one more possession to be used at will.

God knows what rumours had circulated in times gone by. Maybe a William had gone up to the house to model for a holy painting and never returned. An Albert came back with the most terrible weals on his back, so weak and in so much pain he could hardly speak. A Peter said he had been hung upside down on a cross and left for hours. As he bundled the pictures and the props back into the cupboards a terrible thought struck Powerscourt. Maybe these weren’t stories or myths of the Candlesby past. Maybe they were all true.

Powerscourt’s brain was reeling as he rushed down the three flights of stairs from the top floor of Candlesby Hall. Some flying creature, possibly a bat, brushed his face as he sped past. Other demons rattled through his brain as he tried to make sense of the awful sights up there, looking out over the lake and the Candlesby fields. He managed to leave the house without having to speak to a single living soul and walked at top speed round the edges of the park. The deer watched him from afar, their lives largely peaceful, their great trusting eyes untroubled by the ghosts of
flagellation
and martyrdom from long ago. When he reached the hotel he found Lady Lucy sitting by the window in their room, staring sadly out at the bare trees and the flat landscape.

‘Oh, Francis!’ She rushed into his arms. ‘Thank God you’ve come. It’s very sad down there in the village. I don’t know if they’re going to come through.’

‘Are all of them ill?’ asked Powerscourt. He had already resolved not to tell Lady Lucy about the terrible things in the Caravaggio room.

‘Well, not all of them. I should say about a quarter of the able-bodied men, slightly less for the women, thank God. It’s the children and the old people who are worst affected. I feel for them all, you know, Francis. Not that I’d ever say anything, there’s too much to do with the watching by the
bedsides and stroking their foreheads or wiping their faces and trying to speak comforting things to them. You’d think you wouldn’t feel so bad with the old ladies. They’ve had their time in a way, they’ve got married and brought up their children and done whatever women do in a village like that. Some of them seem ready to go, you know. But others are fighting for life. Even when they’re tossing and turning in their rickety beds you can still catch a look that says, I’m not going to go yet, not if I can help it.

‘The worst thing with the children is that they don’t know what’s happening to them. Oh, they’ll listen to the stories we tell them and manage a little smile from time to time. But for a lot of the day they just look hurt and confused. They’ve never been ill in their lives so far, not seriously ill I mean, and it’s terrible for them. Why can’t they get out of bed and cause trouble as they usually do? Why can’t they go out and run about in the fields? Why are they stuck in these beds, the sweat pouring off their bodies and the coughs racking their little chests? Nobody told them these were the rules.’

‘I’m sure you are a great comfort to them, Lucy. I must leave you for a few minutes. I have a naughty plan to bring Jack Hayward back. I must bring Blunden on board and then we can send a telegram.’

Lady Lucy watched him go. She knew that she would continue with her nursing in Candlesby village until the influenza had passed. She didn’t tell her husband about the ravings of the elderly ladies.

Powerscourt found Inspector Blunden in cheerful mood, making copperplate doodles at his desk.

‘I’m feeling more cheerful about the case, my lord. God knows why. There’s no reason for it, but I just feel we’re going to win through.’

‘Let me try to enlist your support in a stratagem that
would bring Jack Hayward back. I don’t think you’ll like it one little bit, but think of the prize, the man who brought the corpse back, the man who saw the battered face, the man who left the scene at record speed.’

‘Tell me the plan then,’ said the Inspector.

‘You will remember me telling you how close Jack Hayward was to Walter Savage. They were close for twenty years. Hayward asked Savage to pray for him when he was leaving.’

Suddenly the Inspector rose from his chair and paced up and down the room. His face broke out into a rather wicked grin. ‘I think I’ve got it, my lord! It’s certainly
devious
, extremely devious, but I’m sure it would work. We arrest Savage and lock him up on some trumped-up charge. Then we send a telegram to your friend Johnny Fitzgerald announcing that Savage is in prison. Hayward hurries home to save his friend. How’s that?’

‘Spot on, Inspector, spot on.’

‘Right,’ said Blunden. ‘I’m on my way to Candlesby Hall to pick up Savage. He should be locked up within the hour. You can send the telegram now if you like, my lord.’

Johnny Fitzgerald was growing weary of the bars and
public
houses of Limerick. He had spent many hours in their smoke-filled snugs, listening to the stories of the old men and the complaints of the farmers, all of them blessed with an unquenchable thirst for Guinness and the more powerful draughts of John Jameson.

So it was a relief early one evening when the hotel manager gave Johnny a telegram. He handed it over with the air of one who is certain that it contains bad news for the recipient, imminent arrest perhaps, or instant deportation to the colonies. Johnny read it in his room. Powerscourt, he saw, had not spared himself in the words department. Not for him the normal compression, the
minimum of letters employed in the expensive business of the despatch of telegrams. Johnny remembered a military bookkeeper in India, the Skinflint of Darjeeling as he was known, telling Powerscourt that he didn’t have to send out messages as if he were writing the principal leading article in
The Times.

‘Candlesby, twenty-sixth of November,’ he read. ‘Dear Johnny.’ God in heaven, Fitzgerald said to himself, who the hell ever put the date and Dear Johnny in a telegram? ‘I bring news from the front. Inspector Blunden has arrested the steward of Candlesby, Walter Savage, in connection with the murder of the two Earls. He is at present in Spalding jail. Savage has repeatedly expressed the wish that Jack Hayward was there to help him in his hour of need. You will know what to do. Lucy sends her love. Hope to see you soon in these wretched flatlands by the sea. Francis.’

As he sped off towards Cashel Johnny wondered if Savage really had been arrested or if this was some ploy to drag an unwilling Hayward back across the Irish Sea. He suspected, from his knowledge of Powerscourt, that it was a ploy, but that the steward Savage really was locked up in Spalding jail along with the drunks and the poachers and the cattle thieves.

A couple of hours later he was knocking once again on the front door of the house where he had been thrown out less than a week before.

‘It’s you again,’ said the farmer’s wife. ‘The devil finds work for idle hands, so he does now. What in God’s name do you want this time? I told you, Jack Hatward, or
whatever
he’s called, isn’t here.’

‘We are faced with a grave situation now, madam,’ said Johnny, trying to sound as serious as his old headmaster at school. ‘I will not beat about the bush. Time is short. You tell Jack Hayward that one of his greatest friends over the water in Candlesby has been arrested for murder. His name is Savage, Walter Savage. Have you got that? He is at present
locked up in Spalding jail with the other lawbreakers of Lincolnshire. He is asking for Jack to come to his assistance. He seems to think Jack could secure his release. I cannot foretell the future, madam, but if Jack does not come this unfortunate man Savage could end up being taken from the court where he has been found guilty and hanged by the neck until he is dead. You tell Jack Hayward that. I shall come back in half an hour. Good day to you.’

With that he strode off and found solace in the Kilkenny Arms two hundred yards away. Here, he thanked God, none of the natives spoke to him at all. He had long suspected that he would be accosted some day in one of these Irish pubs by people claiming to have survived the famine and demanding compensation in liquid form.

The woman’s attitude was very different when he came back. ‘You’d better come in,’ she said, closing the door quickly. She showed him into a small sitting room adorned with ghoulish paintings of the Stations of the Cross. Johnny could hear a lot of talking in the passageway outside but he couldn’t catch the words. In the distance, upstairs perhaps, he could hear a child crying.

‘Who the hell are you?’ The man was of normal height, clean shaven with curly black hair and an air of authority about him. Johnny wondered if he had the same influence on humans as he did on horses.

Johnny rose and shook him by the hand. ‘Jack Hayward?’ he said. The man nodded. ‘My name is Fitzgerald, Johnny Fitzgerald. I work with a private investigator called Powerscourt, Lord Francis Powerscourt. We are
investigating
the murders of the past two Earls of Candlesby with the Lincolnshire police.’

‘Murders?’ said Jack Hayward. ‘Has there been another one?’

‘I’m afraid there has. Richard the heir was on his way to take his place in the House of Lords when he was garrotted on his train.’

‘Great God. I didn’t know. They don’t put much Lincolnshire news in the papers round here.’

‘It’s Walter Savage we’re concerned about here, Mr Hayward. He thinks you can help secure his release from prison.’

‘I once visited a man in Spalding jail,’ said Jack Hayward thoughtfully. ‘They thought he had been stealing horses but he hadn’t. But tell me this, how do I know you’re telling the truth? This could be some terrible trick.’

Johnny had realized on his journey that he could show Hayward Powerscourt’s telegram. Probably his friend had written it with that in mind. He handed it over. ‘Inspector Blunden is the chief investigating officer. Lady Lucy is Powerscourt’s wife.’

Jack Hayward read it very quickly. He stared at Johnny for a moment. ‘All right. Dammit, I’ll come. I don’t want to come but I don’t think that I have much choice. I can’t let Walter down. If this is a trick, you’ll have to pay for it. I’m not going to bring the wife or the children with me. They’ll be safer here. I gather there is an outbreak of influenza in Candlesby village.’ He stared at the Stations of the Cross for a moment. ‘I’ll just go and tell the wife and gather a few things. I should be ready to go in fifteen minutes.’

Forty-five minutes later Johnny was waiting with Jack Hayward for the express to Dublin. He had just despatched a telegram to Powerscourt. He had made it as short as possible. ‘Hayward Redux’, it said. Jack Hayward was coming home.

Back in Candlesby Hall the normal routines of life that had held for the past twenty or thirty years were breaking down. For Henry and Edward there was a great gap left by the absence of their tyrannical father, killed in a manner as yet unknown, and their eldest brother, garrotted in his special train on his special day. Henry was now the Earl of Candlesby, and his younger brother Edward was seized
with jealousy at the caprices of birth. Why should he lose out just because he had been born a couple of years later? He might not have been bastard like Edmund in
King Lear,
but he felt the unfairness just as deeply. They made
desultory
plans for what they would do when the murders were cleared up. They would sell the house and the estate, a happy dream, until the steward told Henry the full facts of the financial situation. They dreamt on, their fantasies fuelled by drink. They would go and live in London – a life of glittering prizes where they would be welcomed as heirs to one of the great titles of the kingdom. They would go to Paris and sink into the voluptuous luxury of the most sophisticated city in Europe. They would go to California and start a new life in the new world.

Then catastrophe struck. They had both noticed – they had believed from their earliest years in the quantity rather quality school of wine consumption – that the bottles Barnabas Thorpe the butler brought up each morning were tasting worse and worse. They set forth on an expedition to the cellar, a great dark underground chamber in the basement near the kitchen surrounded by a rabbit warren of store rooms and pantries and the tunnel that led to the stable block. Neither brother had ever seen the kitchen or the wine cellar before. Each had a candle in his hand. They stared in disbelief at row after row of empty wine racks labelled Claret and Burgundy and Hock and Chablis and Port. Only in the far corner where the shadows and the dust were deepest was there a small section with bottles still in their place. There was no label, no indication of any kind as to where this stuff came from. This underground cave, as the French called their cellars, which had once held thousands of bottles to quench the thirst of Candlesbys past, was virtually empty. And when they spoke to Thorpe the butler about ordering fresh supplies from the family wine merchants, his reply distressed them as much if not more than the deaths of their father and brother.

‘I’m afraid that will not be possible at present, my lord,’ he had said in his most mournful voice.

‘Why not?’ said Henry, trying to sound like an Earl.

‘I tried to replenish our supplies very recently, my lord. The wine merchants said that would not be possible. The wine here has been bought on credit for the past ten years. The firm are not prepared to extend any more until things settle down.’

‘Bastards,’ said Henry and Edward in unison. ‘Things settle down? What does that mean?’ Henry carried on.

‘It means, my lord, that we shall not be able to order anything at all until one of two things happens, or possibly both.’

Henry raised an eyebrow. ‘Like what?’

‘The first is that the recent difficulties here’ – a
well-trained
butler’s finest euphemism for murder – ‘are cleared up.’

‘And the second?’

‘The second is simpler. No more wine will be sent until somebody pays the bill.’

On the top floor, on the opposite side of the house to the Caravaggio room, things were not much better in the apartment where James lived with his attendant. James had not been seen much since the day when he marched into the lake and was only saved by the intervention of his brother Charles. The youngest of the Candlesbys, the one his elder brothers referred to as ‘not right in the head’ in their charitable moments and ‘stark staring mad’ in their normal moments, seemed to be deteriorating. He ran a high fever much of the time and had to be confined to bed, complaining of the cold in spite of a great fire roaring in the grate. When he got up James would sit huddled in an
armchair
wrapped in blankets and stare endlessly at the flames. When he spoke he did not make much sense, talking of storms and lightning and the wrath of God. Charles was his constant companion. His younger brother had an insatiable
appetite for information about the murders. Which horse, he would ask, for like Charles he was a great lover of horses, had carried his father back from his death? What colour was the special train? How many niches were left in the mausoleum? Charles answered all his questions as best he could. He had no idea of the shape of the disease that was destroying his brother and even less idea of what form it might take in the future. But if love could have cured, James Candlesby would have taken up his bed and walked. Unlike the rest of his family Charles loved his brother very deeply and prayed against hope for his recovery.