Death in a Scarlet Coat (30 page)

Powerscourt decided not to point out that the said Christian had almost certainly been caught and thrown to the lions in the Colosseum.

They were at the junction now, the passage to the stables going uphill, the one to the garden sloping slightly down, as if towards the lake. Charles led them to the left. ‘Do you think he wants to kill us?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘Or is he just trying to get away from anyone coming after him?’

‘I don’t think he knows what he is doing,’ said Charles. ‘His mind’s gone. Poor boy.’

As if in confirmation there was a loud shout from further along. ‘Will you please go away?’ The voice was almost sobbing. ‘Please! Why can’t you leave me alone?’ A
despairing
fourth bullet was despatched down the tunnel but it got lost somewhere in the bends. This tunnel had slightly more water on the bottom. They were sloshing along now, water seeping over the sides of their shoes. On the walls
bright green slime had taken over from the handsome red bricks nearer the house. Like the rest of the bloody place, Powerscourt thought, nobody’s bothered to maintain it in living memory.

Charles was pressing on. There was a bad smell now, coming from further up. ‘Way out’s near the compost heap,’ Charles whispered. ‘Nobody’s managed to move it since the tunnel was built.’ Extreme stress, Powerscourt
suddenly
realized, must be the best cure for stammerers ever invented. Maybe they could organize courses for the
sufferers
down here in the Candlesby tunnels, the stutterers pursued by mad people with pistols. Charles could lead the way.

Johnny Fitzgerald was waving his torch forward in
confident
arcs. ‘I think he’s gone, Francis; I think he’s out of the tunnel now.’ He turned the torch behind him for a moment. Ahead there was a very small pinprick of light. The smell was growing worse. A couple of rats, refugees from the compost perhaps, shot past them back down the tunnel. In the far distance they heard another shot, muffled by the earth and the bricks. ‘Damn and blast!’ said Powerscourt. ‘I hoped nobody was going to threaten him. It’ll only make him more dangerous.’ Five shots gone, Powerscourt said to himself. One left.

‘Let’s run,’ said Charles suddenly. ‘I’m sure he won’t be waiting to pick us off as we come out of the tunnel.’ Three pairs of pounding boots echoed back towards the stables and the cook’s private cupboards. The tunnel was lower here. Johnny Fitzgerald swore violently as he failed to duck enough and scraped his head on the roof. Charles was
muttering
to himself as he ran. Powerscourt thought he was saying the Lord’s Prayer over and over again. They shot out of the tunnel as if they had been fired from a cannon. No hostile bullets greeted them.

A group of people were lined up behind the tunnel entrance. The Chief Constable was in the front. ‘My God,’
muttered Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘the old fool thinks he’s back in command. God help us all.’ Behind the Chief Constable stood Skeggs, looking, Powerscourt thought, like a faithful hound waiting to pick up the dead birds, with Inspector Blunden and Constable Merrick stationed behind them. The reserves, expecting fresh orders. The two brothers seemed to be still in the house, awaiting developments. Between them and the lake James Dymoke was walking slowly towards the water. He seemed to be reciting poetry at the top of his voice, not concerned about the group of men behind him, many with pistols. He stopped once to pick up a piece of wood about the size of a walking stick and twirled it in the air.

‘Good to see you’ve arrived at last!’ said the Chief Constable. ‘No idea why it took you so long. Now then. We’re going to charge. Skeggs and me and the three of you. Like the cavalry. I’m in command, of course. I’ll give the orders. Take the madman from the rear. Take him off to the nearest asylum quick as we can. Now then, what are you waiting for? Fall in! Prepare to advance!’

Nobody moved. Johnny Fitzgerald whispered to Powerscourt that he was happy to knock the Chief Constable out. One blow should do it, he said. He’d been thinking of it all day. Powerscourt said it was Charles’ call, his land, his county, his brother.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Charles Dymoke. ‘If you charge he’ll turn and shoot. Somebody might get killed. Hold your peace. I’m going to talk to him.’

Charles set off towards his brother. James was now very close to the lake. A faint breeze was causing ripples on the surface. On an island in the middle a couple of herons watched the proceedings with care, their long necks turned towards the action. It began to rain.

‘James?’ Charles was only about ten feet behind his brother. James turned round. As he did so, the Chief Constable,
having
moved Blunden and Merrick into the front line, yelled, ‘Charge!’ and pointed his finger towards the lake as if he
was back in India, attacking the natives. What James saw was a group of five men charging towards him, some
waving
their pistols in the air. He must, Powerscourt decided, have thought they were coming to kill him.

James raced towards the lake. He plunged into the water as he had done before. Chief Inspector Skeggs knocked Charles to the ground as he hurtled past. James took the stick in his right hand and whirled it round his head a few times. Then he shouted as loud as he could. His voice must have carried back to the house.

The wooden stick, Excalibur, the sword of Arthur in James’ befuddled mind, floated away on the surface of the lake. ‘Tennyson,’ said Charles, scrambling to his feet, ‘
Idylls of the King
. I think he knows most of it by heart. He’ll have turned into Sir Bedevere or somebody by now. Better if it was Merlin but I doubt it.’

The charging party stopped at the edge of the water. James was up to his neck. Charles had reached the edge. Powerscourt and Fitzgerald watched, some ten feet away.

‘Stop!’ said James. ‘Stop! All of you! And you, Charles! This is it! This is the end!’ With that he pulled the gun from his pocket, placed it in his mouth and pulled the trigger. The explosion echoed round the lake. After a minute where he seemed to totter very slowly from side to side, James Dymoke fell into the water. A small red ring formed round the place where his body had been. The ripples stretched back towards the shore and out to the island. Charles dived into the water but he had little hope.

‘I’ll have to get Jack Hayward to pull him out,’ he said sadly as he returned to dry land. ‘He always knows what to do in these situations.’ Jack Hayward, Powerscourt thought, always at hand to retrieve the body of a dead Candlesby, young or old.

The military party had dissolved with James’s death. Inspector Blunden and Constable Merrick were
trudging
slowly towards the house. The Chief Constable was addressing the faithful Skeggs.

‘If only Powerscourt and his friends had done what they were told,’ he said, ‘everything would have been fine.’

‘Everything would not be fine.’ Charles Dymoke had a vicious tone in his voice now, water dripping down his shirt and his jacket. ‘If you hadn’t indulged your taste for petty heroics with that ludicrous charge, my brother wouldn’t have felt threatened. He might still be alive. You stupid, stupid man. Get off our land now! Get out of our house! Go on, before I put the dogs on you!’

The Chief Constable slunk away, muttering something about the merits of military discipline no longer being taught properly in schools. Charles went to stand in front of Powerscourt. He looked extremely young.

‘Nobody knew …’ He began to cry, very quietly. ‘Nobody knew about it but me. James didn’t have more than a month or two to live. The disease had taken over. The worst thing is,’ the tears were coming faster now, ‘I said to the doctors that they should tell him. How long he had left, I mean. If I hadn’t done that, he wouldn’t have known he was dying. He wouldn’t have killed himself.’ Powerscourt gathered the young man into his arms and held him very tight for a very long time.

Lady Lucy was waiting for him when Powerscourt returned to the hotel an hour or two later. He told her about the death of James and the latest lunacies of the Chief Constable. ‘I’ve
got a confession to make, Francis,’ she said. Powerscourt wondered what was coming. ‘When the Chief Constable was going on and on about the secret source I suddenly thought it wouldn’t take very long to identify Lucy, Lucy Carter, I mean. So I left the saloon and drove down to the village. I put her lying down on the back seat in case
anybody
saw us and brought her back to the hotel.’

‘Where is she now?’ said Powerscourt.

‘Mr Drake has found her a room here nobody knows about. She’s fast asleep up there now. I told her mother Lucy could act as my maid if she needs to stay away for a while.’

‘Let me just recap a moment here, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt with a smile. ‘You went from the Hall to the village to the hotel in the Ghost? That’s right, isn’t it?’

Lady Lucy nodded. ‘I did,’ she said proudly. ‘It’s not all that difficult, driving, once you have got used to it.’

Powerscourt and Lady Lucy went back to London after the third funeral. The Chief Constable tried to bring a case against every male in Candlesby Village but failed at the committal hearing, where the judge threw the case out and criticized the prosecution for wasting the court’s time with nonsensical claims. Charles Augustus Pugh, retained by Powerscourt for the defence, shared a bottle of
champagne
with him afterwards. The following week the Home Secretary announced that the Chief Constable had resigned, on health grounds. Johnny Fitzgerald announced that they had probably taken him off to the nearest asylum.

Henry, now Lord Candlesby, began a programme of
serious
retrenchment at the Hall. It was, he said, a nonsense to be living with that much debt and he set about reducing it in a sober and responsible fashion. People said he was a changed man.

Powerscourt always remembered the case of the
murdered
Earls as having to do with Charles, who was neither murdered nor the murderer, but now a frequent guest at the Powerscourt house in Markham Square. Charles had stood with Powerscourt on the strip of land between the lake and the mausoleum at Candlesby Hall after James’ funeral shortly before Christmas and quoted Shakespeare. His stammer seemed to be gone for ever, banished by the terrible events at his home. ‘Let us hope’, he said, ‘that “Our
revels now are ended.” Three corpses should be enough for anybody.

‘I think my father strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage, you know, Lord Powerscourt. The candles flickered for a little time. I always loved him so much, you know, even though he was such a terrible man. I have thought since his death that it was appropriate that he, of all people, was wearing those clothes the night he was killed. All his life he was a hunter, a hunter of women, a hunter of money, a hunter of fowl and foxes, a hunter after power and the gratification of his own desires. How right therefore that he should be dressed as Master of the Hunt and meet his death in a scarlet coat.’

Titles in the series

(listed in order of publication)

Goodnight Sweet Prince

Death and the Jubilee

Death of an Old Master

Death of a Chancellor

Death Called to the Bar

Death on the Nevskii Prospekt

Death on the Holy Mountain

Death of a Pilgrim

Death of a Wine Merchant

Death in a Scarlet Coat