Death in a Scarlet Coat

by David Dickinson

  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.’

  ‘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 aft
ernoon? 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.

  5

  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.