Death in a Scarlet Coat (24 page)

‘It’s clever,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I have thought of it before now. Mind you, the pathologist said the wounds might not have been caused by a spade, but he wasn’t sure. Maybe the reason I haven’t done anything about it so far is the thought that finding four or five murderers would be four or five times as difficult as finding one.’

‘One last thing, Lord Powerscourt. I came back here because of Walter Savage. Is he still locked up in the jail? Can I go and see him? And what was he locked up for anyway? He’s perfectly harmless.’

‘It was the Inspector who locked up Walter Savage,’ said Powerscourt disloyally. ‘He thought he was withholding evidence about the night of the murder. Inspector Blunden felt a day or two in the cells might help his memory. But I think it’s all been cleared up now. Walter should be out of jail later today.’

‘Really?’ said Jack Hayward, staring hard at Powerscourt. ‘How very interesting. How convenient for Walter to come out today.’

Powerscourt said nothing.

Political London, Tory London, Conservative London,
Anti-Lloyd
George London was in ferment. The peers in the House of Lords had defied the will of the Liberal majority in the House of Commons, elected by millions of British
citizens, and thrown out the Liberal Budget by a huge
margin
. Everybody knew there was a natural Conservative superiority in numbers in the Lords, but this majority was huge, over two hundred and fifty. It was a landslide. It was a triumph for the anti-Lloyd George faction in the Upper House, who had brought down to the vote peers who had never been there before, peers who hadn’t attended since the time of the Boer War, peers who spent their time in peaceful enjoyment of what remained of their estates, peers who hated London and who hated politics but had been persuaded for a final turn-out to save their inheritance and enable their class to save the nation from itself.

The celebrations were being held in Wigmore House,
situated
between Grosvenor Square and Park Lane, the home of one of the leading rebels, Lord Wigmore, known to his friends as Wiggers, or, more simply, Wigs. It was a couple of days after the vote and a lot of thought had gone into the festivities.

Sandy Temple and his Selina had been given an invitation by Lord Winterton of Winterton Staithe, the man Sandy had talked politics with at the weekend house party in Norfolk. The two had met by chance in the lobby of the House of Lords and Winterton had whipped an invitation out of his pocket.

‘You’d better come to this,’ he told Sandy. ‘Celebratory party. May be closer to an orgy. Wiggers is always keen to lower the tone. Probably ought to be a wake.’

Now they were standing outside the front door at a
quarter
past eleven at night, Sandy in full evening dress, Selina in her most fashionable evening gown. Both felt rather nervous. A wall of sound, cheers, shouting, bands playing, champagne corks popping, poured out of the great house. They were greeted by a huge butler who must have been well over six foot six. Floating round, champagne bottles in hand, were more very tall servants, footmen in livery of
black and green, all over six feet. The entrance hall was high with a black and white marble floor, the walls adorned with Wigmores past, sitting proudly on enormous horses outside enormous houses. Sandy was to learn later that when Lord Wigmore left the army he took the largest sergeant majors, sergeants and privates he could find with him to man the barricades in different uniform in the various Wigmore properties across Britain. Taking a glass of champagne each, Selina and Sandy advanced into a huge central saloon, feeling and looking rather like the babes in the wood. A fountain in the centre of the vast room was sending bubbly liquid high into the air. Various young ladies who seemed to be drunk already were lying on the side of the fountain lapping up its contents.

‘So clever of Wiggers to get his champagne fountain working,’ one young fop observed to his friend. ‘They say it hasn’t worked since the party the family threw at the time of the Great Exhibition.’

‘Means you don’t have to worry about refills,’ said his friend, plunging his glass in the fountain and refilling it with champagne. ‘Such a bore having to look for those waiters with a bottle, don’t you think?’

‘The stuff in the bottles is meant to be better, Pol Roger or something like that. Can’t remember the name of this fountain stuff but a cousin told me it’s what they serve in the Lyons Corner House.’

The two young men drifted off, arm in arm. Sandy, who was as interested in the architecture as he was in the guests, observed that there was a series of huge rooms opening off this central atrium, dining room, drawing room, study, Old Masters room. They were hailed by Lord Winterton.

‘Good to see you both,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I’ve been to a party like this one in my life. It’s victory but I think
underneath
most people know it’s a hollow victory, maybe even a Pyrrhic victory when you think you’ve won but you’ve
actually lost. It won’t last. At some point the Commons will come looking for revenge. But for now, eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.’

An enormous cheer went up from what might have been the drawing room. ‘Some damn fool lord in there’, said Winterton, ‘stands on a table every now and then and calls on the company to drink Lloyd George’s health. Never fails to get them going. Chap just moves round from room to room.’

On the top floor a detachment of Parisian whores were plying their trade energetically in the servants’ bedrooms. They had been imported specially from Paris for the
occasion
and reckoned they would make more money in this one night than they had in the previous two years. The queue stretched down the stairs. Cheers would ring out every time a young man, usually fastening the buttons on his military uniform, made his way down the stairs and cleared a path for the next candidate.

Lord Winterton led Sandy and Selina down to the
bottom
end of the great saloon. A huge marquee turned into a ballroom had been erected running from the end of the house down into the garden with artificial grass
replacing
the wet lawns en route to the high wall at the end. Winterton pointed out the shooting range way over to the left. ‘Wigmore’s changed the look of the targets for this evening. No more of those boring circles in different colours tonight. Now you can shoot at the face of Lloyd George on the left and Asquith on the right. Our host has had to replace them twice already they tell me, the targets shot to pieces.’

They had reached the lake now. Two imitation Venetian gondolas with closed compartments amidships were
drifting
slowly across the water towards the island in the centre. The noises coming out of one of them showed that they were fulfilling the same function they did on the waters of the basin of St Mark.

Behind the island was an enormous bonfire. ‘Two o’clock,’ said Winterton, ‘Wiggers is going to make a speech. I wonder if we should try the dancing in the meantime.’ London’s finest band was working its way through the waltzes of Strauss. Wigmore had apparently given orders that he wanted only waltzes on this night. The musicians were playing them faster and faster. A couple of handsome aristocrats took Selina off to the dance floor. Sandy thought the dancers were more abandoned than he had ever seen at a great party like this. Deep down, really deep down, perhaps they know, he thought. Tonight we dance. This morning we dance. At dawn we dance. Tomorrow our downfall begins.

Shortly before two a strange cart began to make its way towards the bonfire. There seemed to be some objects in the bottom but it was hard to make out what they were. The cart, Lord Winterton observed to nobody in particular, looked exactly like a tumbril, the conveyance used to
transport
the French aristocrats to the guillotine in the days of the Revolution and the Terror.

The band played on. The people inside the gondolas showed no sign of coming out. The traffic up in the servants’ quarters showed no sign of abating. But everybody else began to assemble round the bonfire, some holding bottles of champagne. To the left and right of the revellers the other great houses of Grosvenor Square and Park Lane stood dark and silent in the night. To the front, Hyde Park stretched out across a sleeping London towards Kensington and Notting Hill. The tumbril, pulled by two tall footmen, came to a stop at the side of the bonfire. In front of it two more footmen carried a large table and a set of steps. The crowd back at the dance floor began to open out like the waters of the Red Sea. A dark-haired aristocrat, dressed in the robes of a hereditary peer of the House of Lords, was making his way towards the bonfire.

‘Go for it, Wiggers!’

‘You tell them, Wigs!’

‘Hurrah for Wigmore!’

Lord Richard Peregrine Octavius Wigmore, one of the principal architects of the defeat of the Budget, was moving down his grounds to address his people. Sandy was right in front of the bonfire, standing close to Winterton. Selina was still being whirled round the dance floor by a handsome hussar with a scar on his left cheek, oblivious to bonfires and high politics. One of the footmen held the stairs steady while Wigmore climbed on to his table. You could never tell what a lot of champagne might do to a man, even if he was a lord. Wigmore tottered uncertainly towards the very front of the table. The two footmen appeared by his side as if by magic. Good servants will support their masters at all times and in all places. He banged his foot on the table. Gradually the crowd fell silent.

Wigmore raised his hands to the crowd. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he began, ‘before I say a few words, I think we should give thanks to those who made this evening possible. I hope you will agree with me that our manner of giving thanks fits perfectly with their contributions to this occasion. Let us give thanks for the Welsh wizard’s greatest friend in politics, President of the Board of Trade, Winston Churchill!’

Two of the enormous footmen pulled a guy, like those seen on Bonfire Night, out of the tumbril. The face of Churchill, at once babyish and devious, glowered from the top. The footmen held it aloft for a second or two to be inspected by the crowd. Then they hurled it into the bonfire where it flared up immediately. Sandy thought it must have been treated with petrol.

‘Our esteemed Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith!’ In went the incumbent of Number Ten Downing Street, the flames catching hold of the hairs on his head. Once again there were huge cheers from the crowd.

‘Finally, the man we have to thank for this evening and
this celebration, our revered Chancellor, David Lloyd George!’

The loudest shouts so far shot up into the night sky of London where the stars were clear and bright. ‘Lloyd George! Burn him, burn him!’ the crowd shouted, waving their fists in the air. This went on for some time. Indeed Sandy thought it could have gone on for ever if Wigmore hadn’t called it off.

‘My friends,’ he went on, ‘I have been reading my history books to find a precedent for what has just happened in our great capital. It took me a long time. Marlborough’s triumphs, Wellington’s many victories over the French, even Nelson at Trafalgar did not seem appropriate to what the Lords did two days ago. I think we have to go back further than that and I think we have to take our greatest playwright with us.’ He paused. Sandy Temple, who had heard him often in the House of Lords, thought he was more eloquent in his own back garden than he had ever been speaking from the red benches.

He spoke very quietly when he resumed.

‘“This day is called the Feast of Crispian.”’ Silence had fallen over the great crowd. Even the revellers in the
gondolas
held their peace. ‘At Agincourt a small, dispirited English force defeated a larger, better equipped army of Frenchmen. The underdog triumphed as it did today. The people who bore the brunt of the fighting would never forget it.

All across the grass, from one end of the garden to the
other, the revellers linked arms and swayed slowly in the night air. Wigmore was still speaking softly, resisting the temptations of the battlefield shout.

Lord Wigmore looked round his audience, still swaying like flowers in a spring breeze.

‘The band will cease playing at six o’clock. But I
propose
that we round off our evening in a fitting manner. Love of country, love of England underpinned
everything
we did today. Let us therefore all sing the National Anthem.’

For some reason the huge crowd took it fairly fast, unlike the funereal pace it was normally sung at. Sandy Temple thought they made it sound like the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’. As the crowd began to drift home he found that Selina was still dancing, her head resting on the shoulder of another young officer. Suddenly Sandy made an important discovery. This, he realized, was the world Selina wanted to live in, the world of London high society, of powerful men and powerful women, of salons and luncheon parties and extravagant dinners where politicians rubbed shoulders with great financiers and newspaper magnates and the new class of millionaires. She wanted to be a chatelaine in these high-flying gatherings. But for him? Sandy knew they were not for him, these evenings. At best he would be a sardonic observer. He would never belong. There could be no point in marrying Selina. They would only make each other unhappy. He took a last look at her waltzing in ecstasy round the floor and walked on through the atrium and out of the front door into the pale light of dawn filling the Mayfair morning. He would write to her this evening. Like
Theseus, he had abandoned his Ariadne on the island,
dancing
the dances of the transported with the god Dionysus himself. All Sandy had to do now was to remember to change the sails.