Death in a Scarlet Coat (5 page)

‘I like that story very much,’ said the Inspector. ‘Now then, my lord, what do you think we should do?’

‘Could we press right on and call on the new Earl this afternoon? We could say there are certain irregularities, something like that. I’m sure he should be our first port of call. Telephone? Telegraph?’

Blunden snorted. ‘They’ve only just got running water up there,’ he said. ‘No telegraph, no telephone, no electricity, no
motor cars; the place is still back in the Dark Ages. I could send a message saying we propose to call at eleven in the morning tomorrow. And that would give us an opportunity to make one or two inquiries ourselves, my lord. It seems to me that the key person to find is the man who escorted the horse and the body up that road. If he’s a servant they’ll have sworn him to silence. But there are one or two
members
of the hunt I know who will help us if I ask them. I don’t think the family would be able to silence all of them. And I’ll ask our people who know Candlesby village to make some discreet inquiries up there, not that they ever say much to officers of the law. That should give us a start.’

‘Could I be very forward, Inspector, and make a
suggestion
entirely outside my province? Feel free to tell me to jump in the lake. But before you do anything I think you should talk to your Chief Constable. I know he’s difficult but if you involve him right from the start then, in my long experience of wayward, unstable, unreliable or even insane commanding officers, he’ll be easier to manage. That’s all.’

Inspector Blunden looked closely at Powerscourt for a moment and then he laughed. ‘You’re absolutely right, my lord. There’s nothing to lose.’

He rose from his chair and adjusted his uniform carefully. ‘Could you bear to wait till I get back? Whole case may have been kicked into the long grass by then for all I know. Then you’d be on your own. But do you know, my lord, we haven’t known each other for long, but I’d much rather we were working together.’

Richard, the new Earl of Candlesby, was in a bad mood even before he received the note from the Inspector proposing a visit at eleven o’clock the following morning. He had now spent the past day and a half working on the accounts with his steward and discovered that his debts were larger than he thought, his income smaller than he expected, and the
threat of bankruptcy not yet very close but visible as a small dot on the far horizon, moving ever nearer fairly fast. The impending visit of some unknown private investigator and a Detective Inspector from Spalding left Richard worried. They could only be coming about his father’s death. Richard didn’t know what the penalty was for covering up your father’s murder but he thought it might be pretty bad. As he rehearsed the questions he might be asked in his mind he suddenly realized how great his peril was. He had covered up the death. Therefore he had something to hide. He had insisted on the false death certificate. Yet more proof that he had something to hide. And that something, he said to himself bitterly, could only be, in the eyes of the law, that I covered things up because I killed my father. This was even worse than he had feared.

He told his brothers about the visitors due the next day and summoned them to a meeting early that evening in what was known as the breakfast room. There was what had once been a fine circular English oak table of about 1840 and some paintings of Naples on the walls where the grime had not yet obliterated the views.

Henry and Edward were the first to arrive, their cheeks still bright from a long walk around the estate, arguing over which treasures they should be allowed to take from the house. Charles came last, protesting that the subject of the meeting had nothing to do with him. He hadn’t even been in the county at the time of the meeting of the hunt and the discovery of the body.

‘Do keep quiet, Charles,’ said Richard, writing something in a large red book on the table. ‘This is very serious. If we make a false move tomorrow, we’re done for. I’ve no idea who this Powerscourt person is, he’s described as a private investigator, whatever that means, and the Blunden man is the local Inspector for these parts. Now then, Henry and Edward, I think they’re going to concentrate on the arrival of the body. This is going to be like a parlour game but a
deadly serious one. I’m going to pretend to be the police Inspector, so be prepared to answer my questions.’

‘Charades! Dressing up!’ said Charles happily. ‘How simply divine! I do think we should dress up p-p-properly though. There are p-p-policemen’s uniforms in the b-box upstairs. Should I go and get them?’

‘Will you shut up, Charles! If I have to tell you again you will just have to leave. Henry, Edward, can you tell me when you first realized that there was something unusual about the horse coming up the drive?’

Edward and Henry mumbled different answers that made very little sense. Richard took his brothers over the ground again, eventually writing down answers for them to learn before the policeman arrived the following morning. Charles’s only other contribution met with little sympathy.

‘If Father was wearing his scarlet coat,’ he asked, ‘why did p-p-people try to hide it under the b-b-blankets? It was very p-p-pretty, that coat. He looked very handsome in it.’

As Richard went to bed that night he realized that the chances of his brothers putting their feet in it were
considerable
and that he should keep Charles out of sight at all times. He had, after all, not been present at the vital hours. Most of all he wondered which of them hated him enough to betray him to the authorities.

Powerscourt spent the afternoon and early evening at the doctor’s house. But the doctor was asleep, or in a coma, it was hard to say which, and he confined himself to long conversations with Mrs Baines. As housekeeper, nurse or companion she had served all over Lincolnshire but her
particular
expertise was with the county families, Candlesbys included. She collected them, male or female, young or old, in their last moments, he quickly realized, as other people might collect moths or butterflies. She told him that
reclusiveness
seemed to run in the Candlesby family every other
generation. One Earl communicated with his children and servants only by letter and another one once spent four and a half months without talking to a single soul. There was yet another who banished his daughter without a penny because she was smoking when he entered the room.

Most of all she told him about the one known to this day in the village as the Wicked Earl. Nobody remembered very much about him any more, or the manner of his wickedness, but Mrs Baines’ grandmother had told her hair-raising stories when she was small.

‘He went off to Italy, this Candlesby, Edward I think he was called, on that Grand Tour where the young men went to Italy and picked up a lot of unpleasant diseases in the big Italian cities. I’m trying to remember the painter he was interested in, Cara something, Carabaldi? No, he was a soldier who liked biscuits, wasn’t he?’

‘Caravaggio?’ Powerscourt suggested in his mildest tones.

‘That’s the one,’ said Mrs Baines triumphantly. ‘Well, they say he wasn’t as expensive as some of the other painters, so our Edward spent a long time in Rome and Naples and other places buying up as many pictures of his as he could. Most of the paintings ordered up were religious but that didn’t bother the Cara man. Apparently he painted those female saints like they’d have their clothes off in half an hour if the price was right. And the other thing with the Cara man, apparently, he liked violence. Heads of John the Baptist or the dead Goliath, he could dash those off for you half a dozen at a time. Judith and Holofernes from the Bible, her with a great curved knife or sword and him with the blood pouring out of his neck, that went down well with our boy. Flagellations, whips and lashes on bare flesh were a speciality of the house.

‘Eventually,’ she went on, ‘the wicked Edward brought them all home, all his treasures and all his Caras. He put the paintings in a great room at the back of the house on the top floor. He had it sealed up so that only he had a key. And
then, this is what they say, Lord Powerscourt, he began to copy the paintings. Like the Cara man he could only paint from life, with real models. And so he tried to reproduce the works of the Cara man. As time passed the people in the house got used to these pretty young men coming in to be painted as Cupid or that David who killed Goliath. I’ve been told there were a lot of bloody crucifixion pictures brought back from Rome and Naples as well but nobody knows if Lord Edward ever went in for painting Our Lord on the cross with the nails and the vinegar and the thieves on either side.’

Mrs Baines paused at this point to ask if Powerscourt would like more tea or some of her special fruit cake. He declined.

‘I must check on the doctor in a moment – I can’t stay here all day gossiping to you – but there is one thing you must remember about Edward and his Cara man, whatever he was called. Isn’t it awful, I’ve forgotten the painter’s name already. The room’s still there, the room with the paintings. In his will Edward stipulated that the room should remain locked for ever in his memory, Edward’s that is, not the Cara man, and that he would leave no record of where he had put the key. One theory says it is handed down from one butler to another; we don’t know. Everybody thinks he threw it in the lake but I’m not so sure. I’ll be back in a moment, Lord Powerscourt, but if you have to get away don’t wait for me to come down again.’

Powerscourt made his way back to the hotel, his mind reeling with images of bloodthirsty Caravaggios, the broken flesh, the bleeding neck, the crown of thorns being forced on to a bloodied head, being reproduced by a mad Earl in a vast palace in the wilds of Lincolnshire. 

Richard, the new Earl, was up very early the next morning. A weak sun illuminated his inheritance. He checked the homework he had given his two brothers the night before. He stood at the great windows in the saloon, which had once been the main entrance to the house, and watched the deer trotting peacefully along by the lake. Where his right hand rested by the window he noticed that the paint had almost completely faded from the upper part of the shutters. What had once been a cream colour had now been reduced to a smudgy brown.

His brothers ate an enormous breakfast in the dining room. He, Richard, was too nervous to eat. If things went wrong today, there could be a great deal of trouble. He had taken the precaution the afternoon before of writing to his father’s lawyers in London requesting a visit. ‘Bunch of crooks really,’ – he remembered his father’s verdict on Hopkins Pettigrew & Green, HP & G for short – ‘lawyers are meant to interpret law for the authorities; HP & G see their job as protecting the individual from the authorities and the law. No matter what crimes you commit – child snatching, robbery, fraud, embezzlement, the normal weaknesses of the aristocracy – they’ll see it as their job to get you off. Probably do the same for murder, I shouldn’t wonder.’

Between half past eight and half past nine Richard put Edward and Henry through their paces. He stopped well
before the visit of the policeman and the investigator in case his pupils became so over-rehearsed that they sounded like automata. He arranged a space for the meeting in the saloon and opened a couple of windows so that anybody walking outside, or sitting on a bench, might just be able to hear what was being said on the floor above. If they cared to listen, of course.

Detective Inspector Blunden had secured a small carriage from the police pool to take himself and Powerscourt to Candlesby Hall.

‘I have bad news, my lord,’ were his first words after the morning pleasantries were over. Powerscourt raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

‘You will remember we talked about a man, or the man, who brought the horse and the corpse up to the Hall on the day of the death?’

‘I do, of course,’ said Powerscourt.

‘My contacts in the hunt told me yesterday that the man was called Jack Hayward, senior groom to the household, widely respected by all for his tact and his knowledge of horses.’

‘And?’ said Powerscourt.

‘It’s just this, my lord. Jack Hayward has vanished off the face of the earth. Nobody can remember seeing him after that day when he brought his dead master up to his house on the back of his horse.’

‘What sort of age was the fellow?’ asked Powerscourt, wondering suddenly if he had another murder on his hands. ‘Did he have a wife, children, that sort of thing?’

‘I was told he was about forty, my lord. His wife wasn’t local, though they say she was one of the prettiest women in the village,’ replied the Inspector, ‘and there were or there are two children, a boy of eight and a girl of six. All gone.’

‘Has anybody been inside the house?’ Powerscourt was feeling seriously alarmed now. ‘I mean, are things left so that it looks as if the Haywards are coming back? Or has everything been removed?’

‘Nobody knows, my lord. The house is well locked up and nobody’s thought to break down the door. What do you think happened?’

‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, cursing himself yet again for his ability to reduce any given problem into a series of numbered points, ‘possibility number one is they have all been murdered. I would have thought it more likely, mind you, that the killer would only dispose of Mr Hayward and leave the wife and children alone. Possibility number two is that Hayward, aware of the tricky position he was in,
finding
or being sent for to collect the dead body of his master, bringing it up the road, observing, perhaps, the bullying of the doctor, decided for all their sakes to clear off and take his family with him. Maybe he wanted to keep out of trouble. Maybe they have fled to some of his relations or to some of hers. The third possibility, and perhaps the most likely one, is that somebody has bribed them or bullied them into going away until all this blows over. And I suspect there is only one candidate for that and we both know who it is.’

‘The new Earl,’ said the Inspector. ‘Look, my lord, in a minute or two we should be able to see the house. I feel sure that we must be on the route Jack Hayward took with the horse the day of the murder. There’s a fork in the road back there where one branch leads off towards the coast. The other one goes back to the main entrance a couple of miles behind us on the Spalding Road.’

As their carriage took them up the mild incline Powerscourt saw the house sliding into view. Chimneys and a flagpole first, then a top storey, a middle storey, then one slightly raised above ground level and presumably basement quarters for the servants and the staff below. Everywhere the stone was discoloured, cracked in places,
the grass in the grounds around the side of the house unkempt and unmown. Roses that once trailed round two sides of the house had gone wild, looping over and round and under each other in a glorious chaos of disorder.

They could see the great circle of grass in front of the house now, the gates in the centre of the railings, the two pavilions connected to the main body of the house by walls with niches where the horses of the hunt had stood and pawed the ground such a short time ago.

‘If you look over to the left, my lord,’ the Inspector had not been here before but was recreating events from the information he had been given, ‘that must be the stable block where Jack Hayward took the horse with the corpse. The point where he turned off must be very close to where we are now.’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said Powerscourt, staring intently at the house where a face had just been withdrawn from a window on the first floor.

‘Could I make one suggestion about these interviews?’

‘Please do,’ replied the Inspector.

‘I propose we interview them one at a time, rather than all in a body. And I suggest that you take the lead in all the interviews and ask what you want. I’ll just chip in when you’ve finished. I think that should make it more formal.’

‘Just as you say, my lord. I’ll be happy to go along with that.’

Detective Inspector Blunden jumped out of the carriage, closely followed by Powerscourt, and he pulled vigorously on the doorbell of Candlesby Hall.

Mrs Baines had scarcely left her post by the doctor’s bedside all through the evening. One visitor had called to see him quite late but he had departed in rather a cross mood,
saying
that he couldn’t get any sense out of the doctor at all and would come back the following afternoon. In vain did
Mrs Baines suggest that the morning was the best, if not the only time the doctor might be lucid. The visitor had other appointments in the morning.

The doctor drifted off to sleep, shortly after eleven o’clock. He might, in Mrs Baines’ limited knowledge, be in a coma; she couldn’t be sure. What she did know was that there was very little anybody could do for Theodore Miller in his present state. She could make him comfortable and keep him warm and clean until the end. And she didn’t think the end was very far off now. She resolved to ring the other doctor, as the older citizens always referred to the upstart newcomer Dr Campbell, at seven o’clock in the morning.

She had lost count of the number of these vigils she had kept now, Bertha Baines, vigils with members of her own family, four of whom she had watched over into the next world, vigils with people who had employed her, she now realized, so they would not leave this world alone, terrible vigils with sick children whose parents had asked her to help out and found they were too busy with their other children or too exhausted to keep watch on their little ones as they slipped away, vigils with friends and neighbours who sent for Bertha because she was known to be good at that sort of thing.

She supposed watching over people as they died had become as much a part of her now as her other work as a nurse or a housekeeper. Just before midnight she went upstairs to sit with the doctor, fortified by an enormous pot of tea clad in three separate tea cosies, and a plate of biscuits. The doctor was always fond of a biscuit when he was well. Mrs Baines looked at him carefully as she began her vigil. She wiped the beads of sweat from his brow. He seemed comfortable with his blankets and his pillows. His breathing was regular but shallow. His hands wandered about over the bedclothes every now and then and Bertha seized one and held it in her own. The doctor looked content. How
often had she looked in on these scenes. How often had she thought the patient was secure in their hold on life only for them to slip away a moment later. Truly, she had thought on many occasions with the terminally ill, it must be as hard to die sometimes as it is to stay alive.

Shortly before three o’clock in the morning, when her reservoir of tea was almost exhausted, she thought Dr Miller had stopped breathing, he seemed so still. Leaning forward she realized that his breath, though fainter than before, was still going. Just before dawn she plumped up his pillows once more, mopped his brow, tiptoed downstairs and came back with her
Book of Common Prayer
. She had checked years before with the vicar, who assured her it was perfectly all right to read the Lord’s Prayer and the Catechism and the Collect of the Day aloud to her patients. ‘Our Father, which art in Heaven, Hallowed be thy name …’ She held one of the doctor’s hands as she spoke the prayer. There was a very slight rustling in the bed as if Dr Miller might be on the verge of waking up, but it came to nothing.

‘Fulfil now, o Lord, the desires and petitions of thy
servants
as may be most expedient for them: granting us in this world knowledge of thy truth and in the world to come life everlasting.’

Looking at him, the deathly pallor, the deep wrinkles on his face and on the backs of his hands, Mrs Baines thought the doctor was much closer to life everlasting than he was to knowledge of God’s truth.

At seven she tiptoed downstairs to telephone Dr Campbell. He said he would be over straight away. They always come quicker for their own, Mrs Baines said to
herself
crossly, remembering a nine-hour wait by the bedside of a dying child before the doctor appeared and then the child going before he had time to open his bag.

The doctor took Dr Miller’s pulse and checked his
breathing
and all the other futile things doctors do by the bedsides of those they know are passing away. Their performance
becomes a ritual to give comfort to the living rather than the dying.

‘It could be any time, Mrs Baines,’ he said finally, ‘or he could linger on till tomorrow. I don’t think he will wake again but I could be wrong. You have nothing to reproach yourself with – you have looked after him very well. Don’t worry, Mrs Baines, I’ll see myself out. Your place is here, I feel. Not long to go now.’

At half past ten the breathing became very shallow. Just after eleven Dr Miller breathed his last. Mrs Baines made sure he was gone and then she cried. She always cried when they left her. Then she went downstairs to send for all the people she had to involve now: the police and the undertakers and the solicitor. She made some more tea. She knew that Dr Miller had written a very short note to the lawyer early yesterday evening. She remembered suddenly the visitor from the evening before who wanted to call in the afternoon. Strange, Mrs Baines said to herself, he seemed a well-spoken man, the doctor’s visitor, but he never left his name.

Detective Inspector Blunden firmly but politely rebuffed all Lord Candlesby’s proposals after they had been escorted into the saloon on the first floor. The three eldest brothers were waiting there. On the way up Powerscourt’s eye had fallen on a ceramic pig with only three legs and a stag on the walls whose left eye had fallen out. He was astonished at the general air of chaos the Candlesbys seemed to live in.

‘Lord Powerscourt and I’, Blunden said, ‘are looking into possible irregularities concerning the death of the previous Earl.’

Very sorry, but no, it would not be convenient to interview all three brothers together even if that might be quicker. Afraid it would not suit to question the two younger
brothers
Henry and Edward at the same time. Very much regret,
but it would not be possible to interview the new Lord Candlesby first, before his brothers.

‘Dammit, Constable, or whatever you’re called,’ Richard was beginning to lose his temper, ‘this is not satisfactory. This is my house and I make the rules round here.’

‘That’s as maybe,’ replied Blunden firmly, ‘but I represent the law. I ask the questions round here and I talk to people in the order I want.’

‘And my colleague here’, said Powerscourt in his most emollient voice, ‘is a Detective Inspector, not a constable. Just thought we should get our facts straight.’

‘Now then,’ said Blunden, ‘could we talk to Lord Henry first of all, if we could?’

The second brother shuffled over and draped
himself
across a chair by the window. The other two had disappeared.

‘Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to us,’ said Blunden pleasantly. ‘Could I ask you to cast your mind back to the morning of the hunt? Friday October the eighth, I believe it was.’

‘Of course,’ said Henry.

‘Can you recall’, asked Blunden, observing with
amazement
that Powerscourt was busily writing notes of the interview in a large notebook, ‘at what point or at what time you realized that a body on a horse was coming towards the house?’

‘I don’t know about the time,’ said Henry doubtfully. ‘I do know the stirrup cup was almost finished. Pity that, it was a cold morning.’ He laughed nervously.

‘Let me repeat the question. Can you remember when exactly you realized that a horse with something draped across it was coming up the road towards the house?’

‘I think it must have been when Richard – my brother – went down to meet Jack Hayward. He is the chief groom and he had brought the horse with the body. Richard diverted the horse towards the stables. Everybody else went
home. My brother Edward and I went back to the house. It was only later that Richard told us Papa was the dead man on the back of the horse.’