Death in a Scarlet Coat (4 page)

Five days later Powerscourt received a letter from Lincolnshire written in a rather shaky hand.

‘Dear Lord Powerscourt,’ he read, ‘I wonder if I could ask a great favour of you. It concerns a recent action of mine as a doctor of medicine where I fear I have done the wrong thing. The matter is weighing very heavily on my mind. I do not wish to put the details in a letter, but I have to ask that you should come and call at the above address at your earliest convenience. I have recently contracted this terrible influenza and fear I may not be long for this world. I do so hope that you will be able to come before it is too late. Yours sincerely, Theodore Miller.’

‘My word, Lucy,’ he said, passing her the letter, ‘I’ve heard of deathbed repentances from villains and murderers before, but never from a doctor. It must be some sort of record.’

‘What are you going to do? Do you think this doctor is a mass murderer, wanting to tell you how many citizens of Lincolnshire he has done away with?’

‘We met the chap after the
Messiah
, at the hotel. Very old character with wispy white hair, if you remember. He seemed perfectly law-abiding to me. God knows what he’s been up to. He was very keen to take my address now I come to think about it. I’d better send him a telegram to say I’m coming and catch a train.’

By the middle of the afternoon Powerscourt was knocking on the door of the doctor’s Georgian villa on the outskirts of Candlesby. The house was large with an enormous garden and a tennis court at the back. The doctor was poorly today, the housekeeper Mrs Baines told him, worse than yesterday and worse than the day before. But, she went on, he had repeatedly asked if Lord Powerscourt was coming and that seemed to bring him some relief. She brought him up to a
room with great windows on the first floor where an elderly gentleman sitting up in bed in a red silk dressing gown and bright blue pyjamas was waiting to talk to him.

‘My dear Lord Powerscourt, how very kind of you to come all this way. Did my letter arrive today?’

‘It did.’

‘Then you have made admirable speed. Can you tell me one thing and then we can get down to business?’

Mrs Baines tucked the doctor firmly into his bedclothes and left the room, promising to bring tea in about half an hour. The doctor was deathly pale and a film of perspiration covered his forehead only minutes after the housekeeper had wiped it.

‘I have been making inquiries about you, Lord Powerscourt, and I discover that you have a most remarkable record. But tell me this. I learnt about some of your cases. The last one I came across was the Blickling wedding murder which ended up in the Old Bailey a couple of years back with one brother tried for the murder of another. Is there a more recent case which I have not heard about?’

He paused and panted, as if this speech had taken him close to the limits of endurance. He coughed for a moment or two and lay back on his pillows.

Powerscourt wondered briefly if the old man thought detectives resting between engagements were rather like doctors having a long gap between patients, that it meant their clients no longer trusted them.

‘There have been a couple of cases since then, doctor,’ said Powerscourt with a smile, ‘but I’m afraid I can’t talk about them. They were secret work, work for the government.’

‘I see,’ said the doctor, ‘secret work. That sounds very special.’

Powerscourt had no wish to linger in the shadows of government employment. It had been unpleasant enough while it lasted. ‘Perhaps you could tell me your problem, doctor, the one that brought me here.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said the doctor, wrestling briefly with one of his pillows. ‘Do you know, I’ve thought about this moment such a lot, and now I’m not sure how to begin.’

The doctor paused. Powerscourt waited.

‘It has to do with Lord Candlesby,’ the old man said finally, and another coughing fit struck him, longer than the last.

‘Which one?’ asked Powerscourt as gently as he could.

‘Sorry, my mind isn’t what it was. It has to do with the one who died while you were here the last time. For the
Messiah
.’

The doctor looked hopelessly at Powerscourt as if his will could pass on all the information he wanted. Still Powerscourt said nothing.

‘It has to do with the death certificate, you see.’ Powerscourt thought that had taken a great effort. He
suddenly
thought the matter might be speeded up if he started asking questions rather than imitating the Sphinx.

‘Perhaps you could just tell me, Dr Miller, how you first became involved?’

‘I was called to the stable block at Candlesby Hall round about nine thirty maybe ten o’clock in the morning. I didn’t see what had happened before, but apparently the
members
of the hunt were all gathered in front of the house. Candlesby himself was dead when I got there, carried up his drive on the back of his horse and covered with blankets.’ The doctor rested once more, his eyes closing for a moment as if to shut out the painful truth.

‘So you didn’t have to treat him in any way? There was nothing to be done?’

‘That’s right,’ said the doctor, looking slightly more
cheerful
now his story was properly under way. ‘He was dead all right, very dead.’

Powerscourt racked his brains to think what sins the
doctor
must have committed if he hadn’t had to treat Candlesby at all. Medical negligence seemed out of the question. But

‘The problem … the problem has to do with the death certificate.’

‘What did you put on the death certificate, doctor?’

Temporary relief for Dr Miller was provided by the arrival of tea. Mrs Baines looked sternly at Powerscourt as she poured two cups. ‘I don’t think you should be tiring the doctor out too much, Lord Powerscourt. I’ll be back in half an hour and then you must let him rest for a while. You can always come back later on or first thing in the morning.’

The doctor refused a scone and a slice of Mrs Baines’ home-made chocolate cake. Powerscourt succumbed.

‘They were all on at me about the death certificate,’ the doctor said as the housekeeper sped out of the room, closing the door firmly behind her.

‘Sorry, who were they?’ said Powerscourt indistinctly through a mouthful of chocolate cake.

‘Sorry,’ said the doctor. ‘The three eldest brothers were on at me.’

‘You’ve lost me,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Could we just go back to where we were before tea? What did you put on the death certificate, Dr Miller?’

There was that beseeching look again. Powerscourt noticed that the doctor’s body was shaking beneath the bedclothes in irregular spasms. He suddenly stared at a print of Venice on his wall, boats swirling round the basin of St Mark, the Doge’s Palace and the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore keeping watch over the waterway. He was
whispering
now.

‘They made me say – oh, how I wish I’d never agreed to it – they made me say the Earl had died of natural causes.’ Another coughing fit, a fit of remorse maybe, consumed him. Powerscourt thought suddenly that it wasn’t youth, but age, that grows pale and spectre thin and dies.

‘And he hadn’t? Died of natural causes, I mean? Is that right?’ Powerscourt thought he could see the whole thing now. It’s my damned profession, he said to himself. If I weren’t a bloody investigator I wouldn’t be rushing to conclusions so fast.

The doctor nodded miserably.

‘So Lord Candlesby died of unnatural causes then. Was he murdered? Had somebody killed him? And was that why the sons were so keen for you to put natural causes as the cause of death?’

The doctor nodded again. The Venetians in their gondolas and their sailing boats seemed to be bringing little comfort now. 

‘How was he killed, doctor? You must have had a good look at him.’

‘I can’t tell you that, Lord Powerscourt. They made me swear to keep that secret.’

‘This isn’t a case of a sprained wrist or ingrowing toenails, Dr Miller. We’re talking about the most serious crime on the statute books of England.’

‘I know, I know, but I can’t tell you that. They made me swear.’

Dr Miller coughed violently, spasms shaking his body. Powerscourt took a hasty look at his watch. There were only minutes left before the dragon of a housekeeper was to return.

‘Let me recap if I may, doctor. The hunt was meeting at Candlesby Hall. Before they could start – am I right? – the body was brought up, laid across a horse and covered in blankets.’ The doctor nodded. ‘The corpse is then diverted into the stables away from prying eyes. You are summoned. I presume you inspect the dead man. Then the brothers force you to say he died of natural causes before there is any possibility of a post-mortem and a scandal that will fill the national press for days. Is that right?’

The doctor nodded once more.

‘So who brought the body up to the house? And how many people knew about the real cause of Candlesby’s death?’

Suddenly a light seemed to go out in the doctor’s system. He sank back on his pillows, eyes closed. Powerscourt pulled a black notebook from his pocket and began
writing
as fast as he could. If he was to make any sense of this strange affair he needed something more concrete than the ramblings of a dying doctor.

‘I, Dr Theodore Miller,’ the words sped from Powerscourt’s pen, ‘do hereby declare that on October the eighth, 1909, I signed a false death certificate. I said that the Earl of Candlesby had died of natural causes. He had not. He was murdered by a person or persons unknown.’

The housekeeper swept back into the room. Dr Miller woke up from his reverie. He smiled at Powerscourt.

‘Please forgive me, Mrs Baines, I beg you to grant us a
little
more time. Lord Powerscourt and I have nearly finished discussing our business. This business is the most important thing I have to settle before I die. Don’t make that face, please, I know I haven’t long to go. I am a doctor after all.’

‘Very well,’ said Mrs Baines, ‘but not too long now, or you’ll be sorry.’ And with a menacing look at Powerscourt she left the room once more.

‘You know, Lord Powerscourt, it’s a pleasure to talk with an educated and cultivated man like yourself. Most of my friends are dead now, and not many people come to see me these days.’

Powerscourt leant forward towards the bed with his notebook.

‘I’ll sign that for you in a moment, whatever it is,’ the
doctor
went on. ‘When you get to my age,’ he continued, ‘the past comes in on you like the tide. It just washes away what happened recently, last month, the day before yesterday. I can feel my memory going, you know. Trying to recall what happened a week ago is like trying to pull up a bucket from a well with no bottom to it. Sometimes I think I’m going right back to the beginning. I thought I remembered
sitting
up in my pram in my parents’ garden the other night.
Maybe at the very end we just go right back to where we came in.’

‘That’s very interesting,’ Powerscourt began, but the
doctor
interrupted him. The beads of sweat were back on his forehead, glistening like dew, and another coughing fit seized him.

‘I know, I know,’ the doctor said at last, ‘you want me to sign this piece of paper.’

He fished about in his bedclothes and put on a pair of very thick spectacles. His face had turned paler yet.

‘This seems satisfactory,’ he said at last and signed it. ‘You must do what you have to do with this document.’ He stopped suddenly as if a great thought had come to him close to the end.

‘Lord Powerscourt,’ he said, ‘will you look into this
matter
for me? Will you investigate the Candlesby death on my behalf? Think of this as a last commission from a dying man. I shall remember your efforts in my will. It would please me greatly if I could think that my sins are being sorted out. I would not die with such a heavy burden on my shoulders.’

Powerscourt smiled. ‘I should be delighted to accept your commission, doctor. Now, I feel it is time to rest. I fear Mrs Baines will be upon us again at any moment.’

The doctor sank back on his pillows once more. Inside a couple of minutes he was asleep. The sweat was still there on his forehead, his colour was still deathly pale, but a slight smile played about his face as if he were happier now. Powerscourt tiptoed slowly from the room, wondering if the doctor was back in his pram once more, or playing in his parents’ garden in the sunshine.

Powerscourt took himself for a long walk on his journey from the doctor’s house to Mr Drake’s hotel where he was to spend the night. This must be one of the most unusual
cases he had ever undertaken, commissioned to solve a murder by a doctor who had lied on the death certificate. He was passing the back entrance to Candlesby Hall now, a pair of gate lodges with smoke rising from the chimneys, a prospect of farmland, and a herd of deer in the distance but no sight of the house itself. He was trying to work out what to do. As far as he could tell there were only two people, apart from the murderer, who had seen the dead Earl and must have some idea of what had killed him. But when he considered his own position he was not sure how to proceed. Officially, the death certificate said death by natural causes. If the two people who knew the truth refused to speak, sworn, presumably, to silence in the
manner
of the doctor, then all he had was a page in a notebook, handwritten, not even typed, which he suspected would have little purchase in the English legal system. If there was no agreement that there had been a murder at all, how could he investigate it? Anybody ill disposed to his efforts, the new Lord Candlesby for instance, could make life very difficult.

There was only one way forward. He would have to throw himself on the mercy of the Lincolnshire Constabulary. In his experience, if you told the police what you were doing at the beginning of an inquiry, they would as a rule bend over backwards to be helpful. Bring them in late and they would be surly and suspicious and occasionally obstructive. He asked George Drake the hotel manager that evening for the name of a sympathetic senior detective who
operated
in those parts. Detective Inspector William Blunden, he was told, based at Spalding, was his man. A message was sent saying that Powerscourt proposed to call on him at eleven o’clock the following morning. If George Drake had any curiosity about Powerscourt asking for guidance about senior detectives he didn’t show it. He didn’t
mention
it to anybody, not even to his wife. If Powerscourt was in trouble and had to confess his sins to a senior
policeman, then he, George Drake, was not going to start any rumours.

Detective Inspector Blunden was a big man. A small child might have described him as a giant. He was over six feet three inches tall with powerful shoulders and massive hands. He looked, the Detective Inspector, as if he might have played rugby seriously, probably as a second row
forward
, and a couple of cups and a photograph on the side of his desk confirmed his sporting past. His eyes were not those of a leader of the pack, however; they were light brown and rather gentle. It was these soft eyes indeed that constituted his chief appeal for the girl who later became his wife.

‘Good morning, Lord Powerscourt,’ said the Detective Inspector, rising from his desk to shake Powerscourt by the hand. ‘What a privilege to meet you!’

‘Thank you so much for your time, Inspector. I’m sure you must be very busy.’

‘Something tells me, my lord, that I may be even busier when I have heard what you have got to say.’

Blunden had been wondering before this meeting what a leading investigator from London could want from a
provincial
policeman in one of England’s more obscure counties. The wall of silence constructed around the death of the Earl of Candlesby was so effective that it never crossed his mind that Candlesby Hall and its last master might be at the centre of Powerscourt’s story.

Powerscourt told him everything: the breakdown of his car, his and Lady Lucy’s emergency singing role at the
Messiah,
the meeting with Dr Miller, the summons to see him on his sickbed, the details of the day of the death. Or murder, he said, realizing he was now authorized to say that by the doctor’s note.

‘I’ll give you the sequence of events on that morning in time order, if I may, Inspector. I got them in bits from
the doctor yesterday and I don’t have very much detail. The hunt was meeting in front of the house. They were getting ready to move off. Then they saw a horse with
something
that later transpired to be a corpse across it coming up that long drive that leads to the Hall. There must have been somebody leading the horse unless the animal knew its way home but I’m damned if I know who it was. The horse and the corpse are diverted into the stables away from prying eyes. The doctor is summoned; he doesn’t live far away. He is bullied into agreeing to sign a death certificate saying the late Earl died from natural cases. Only he didn’t. He was murdered, but that death certificate meant there was no question of a post-mortem or anything like that.’ He handed over his notebook opened at the page with the doctor’s statement.

‘Well,’ said Detective Inspector Blunden, ‘this is a pretty kettle of fish and no mistake. One murdered Earl, but we don’t know where he had gone to be murdered, if you see what I mean. Presumably one of the sons could have gone out and killed him and got back to the Hall before daybreak. And, if there was someone with the body, which seems most likely, how did they know where to find him? And the most difficult questions are something else again. The false death certificate. The lack of a post-mortem. How might we get round them?’

‘I’m not sure’, said Powerscourt, ‘where the law would stand on this. There is one official death certificate, saying death by natural causes, signed by the good Dr Miller. There is a different account of events, also signed by the good Dr Miller, to say the first one was wrong and the poor man was murdered by person or persons unknown.’

‘There is one thing that has just occurred to me, my lord,’ said Inspector Blunden, twiddling a pencil in his enormous hands. ‘Those injuries, to the dead man, I mean, they must have been pretty horrendous, don’t you think? That might have accounted for the diversion into the stables.’

‘It’s possible,’ Powerscourt replied, ‘but it might just be the natural reluctance of the family to have all the members of the hunt come to peer at the corpse.’

‘Unless we get a post-mortem we’re not going to know how the Earl was killed. Unless we know how he was killed, my lord, we’ve precious little to go on to investigate a charge of murder. I’ve never had to ask for an exhumation before, but if the family want to keep the murder a secret I’m sure they could make life very difficult for us.’

‘You can hear the lawyers now, Inspector,’ said Powerscourt, a vision of his barrister friend Charles Augustus Pugh
floating
into his mind. ‘“Which should we believe, my lord, the official death certificate, properly signed by the doctor when he was still in good health, or this scribbled entry in a cheap notebook, the bulk of the testimony not even in the doctor’s hand? The formal record of a man passing away, carried out according to custom and tradition, or the ramblings of a sick man close to his deathbed dictated to an investigator who hasn’t investigated a case for nearly two years and was obviously desperate for a commission. I submit, my lord, that this appeal for an exhumation is vexatious and should be dismissed.”’

‘We’ve got another problem here,’ said the Inspector with feeling. ‘It’s one unique to this county and it won’t go away.’

‘Really?’ said Powerscourt, wondering what particular plague had struck the first-born of Lincolnshire.

‘I shouldn’t be saying this, my lord, but you are in the nature of an outsider here. The problem is our new Chief Constable. He’s not been here long. He knows less about police work than my daughter and she’s only three years old. He interferes. He asks for information about cases before anybody’s been charged. It wouldn’t matter if his interventions were sensible or even rational. They’re not. One of my fellow Inspectors firmly believes that he takes cases home to his wife for her to decide what he should do. Only trouble is, she’s even more stupid than he is. And
because he’s ex-army he’s big on smart uniforms and
polished
boots and all that sort of thing.’

‘What’s his name, this new fellow?’

‘Willoughby-Lewis, my lord, Bertram Willoughby-Lewis to be precise. Ex-Indian Army, ex-Major General. They say his brother’s a top official in the Home Office. Maybe that’s how he got the job.’

‘Bertram? You did say Bertram, didn’t you?’ said Powerscourt, a smile spreading across his features. ‘Thin cove, big moustache, very high-pitched voice not perfectly suited to delivering parade ground commands, yes?’

Detective Inspector Blunden looked confused. ‘That’s right, my lord, you’ve got him to a tee. Have you met him?’

‘I think I have, as a matter of fact,’ said Powerscourt. ‘My friend Johnny Fitzgerald and I were stationed close by the man once during our time in India, but never under his command. Johnny could imitate the Willoughby-Lewis voice perfectly. He once managed to reroute an entire day’s march for the Willoughby-Lewis troops by ringing their adjutants late in the day in his best Willoughby-Lewis accents and giving them new orders. There was the most magnificent confusion, especially when all the adjutants told the Major General that they had only followed the new orders because he had telephoned them in person. The only man who worked out what had happened was our commanding officer. God knows how he found out but he sent Johnny and me away on a trip for ten days to keep us out of the way.’