Death in a Scarlet Coat

by David Dickinson

  ‘I’m very pleased to hear it. Tell me, this is one of those questions people in my profession are always asking. Can you think of anybody locally who might have wanted Lord Candlesby dead?’

  ‘It’s easier to answer that question the other way round, Lord Powerscourt. Far more people wanted the wretched man dead than wanted him to stay alive. You’ll have heard about the duel and the adultery with the poor woman who walked into the sea and drowned herself. There are a number of other cuckolded husbands around but I wouldn’t want to give you their names as I only heard about them in confidence. There’s a farmer with land just north of Candlesby Hall who swears Candlesby poisoned his cattle. There’s a retired general not far from here who claims that Candlesby raped his daughter and refused to make any provision when the girl became pregnant. You may find somebody with a good word to say about him. If you do, please let me know at once.’

  Harold Lawrence pulled a watch rather ostentatiously from his waistcoat pocket. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must get on with the business of supervising this move. My wife has taken to her bed with nerves; it’s all so upsetting. If there’s any way I can help, please let me know.’

  With that he shepherded Powerscourt to the front door. One of the carts, drawn by a fine pair of horses, was gathering speed down the drive en route to the Lawrences’ new home. The last Powerscourt heard was another mighty bellow from the butler. ‘See here, you useless footmen, all the dining-room chairs were meant to be out here by now, ready to go on the next cart. So where the bloody hell are they?’

  Lady Lucy Powerscourt had finished the second of her lunch parties with the ladies of Lincolnshire. Another deputation was expected today at tea. During her time with Powerscourt she had volunteered on a number of occasions to eat for victory, to entertain various people whose only feature in common was that they might have something useful to add to her husband’s investigation. Lady Lucy found these bizarre social occasions more testing with the passing of time but she did what she saw as her duty.

  Mr Drake’s hotel was not ideal for ladies who lunch with delicate palates and sophisticated tastes. Its clientele was largely male, used to large helpings of meat and potatoes with enormous trifles and apple pies for pudding. Often they had spent the morning out of doors, farmers, vets, surveyors, blacksmiths, and they had worked up a healthy appetite. Lady Lucy had conferred at length with Mr Drake and his chef, a young man from Boston with high ambitions in the catering trade. Mr Drake said he could see Lady Lucy’s point, that the lunchtime offerings at the hotel were meant for healthy males with large appetites. But the ladies would eat it all, he assured her, and he said she might be surprised by the relish with which some of them disposed of the chef’s famous trifles. The prospect of more and more of these heavy meals filled Lady Lucy with dismay. She decided on one last try for different offerings on the menu at a meeting with hotel staff.

  ‘Fish?’ she said in an interrogative tone that did not expect an answer in the affirmative.

  ‘Fish?’ said the young chef from Boston reverently, his mind suddenly filled perhaps with the crab and the plaice and the Dover sole and the scallops he had prepared in his previous establishment.

  ‘Fish,’ said Mr Drake speculatively, ‘fish,’ spoken by one wondering if his kitchen has all the right equipment to cook the things and if there are enough fish knives and forks in the canteens of cutlery.

  ‘Fish,’ said Lady Lucy again. ‘Do you think we could get some fish on the menu?’

  ‘I’d be more than happy to order it and to cook it,’ said the chef, who secretly preferred cooking cod to roasting larger and larger cuts of the local beef. ‘We could use the same suppliers we had in Boston. They weren’t expensive.’

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Drake, ‘so be it. As far as the ladies lunching with Lady Lucy are concerned, let them not eat cake, let them eat fish instead.’

  After two days, Lady Lucy was to tell her husband later, there was already a pattern emerging. To begin with the ladies from Keys Toft and Toynton St Peter, Sausthorpe and Cumberthorpe would assume that they were not there to talk about the death of the Earl. Indeed not. Instead they would talk about the local weather or their children’s progress or forthcoming attractions in the county, hunt balls or charity recitals. But once Lady Lucy had diverted their attention to the mysterious death of the Earl of Candlesby, it was as if the floodgates had been opened. Of course he had been murdered, said one. Don’t be absurd, countered another, this is a modern country, people don’t go round killing each other in 1909, for heaven’s sake. A jealous husband, claimed a third, lured him to a lonely stretch of country and murdered him. When Lady Lucy inquired about who the jealous husband might be, the ladies laughed. There were, she was informed, so many to choose from.

  ‘There’s a whole list of possibilities,’ said Mrs Devine from Keys Toft happily.

  ‘I know this sounds unlikely,’ Lady Folkingham entered the lists, ‘but I think it was the vicar myself.’

  ‘Which vicar?’ chorused the ladies, as if all the vicars in Lincolnshire were known to be murderers.

  ‘The one from Alford, of course.’ Lady Folkingham stuck to her guns. ‘Candlesby came to morning service there every Sunday for three months. I know as that’s our local church. And he was always eyeing up the vicar’s gorgeous wife – tall, willowy sort of a person with long blonde hair. Our butler swears he saw them once coming out of the most expensive hotel in Louth, looking as if they’d been up to something very naughty. And that vicar has a terrible temper. You should hear the way he shouts at the children in Sunday school.’

  ‘You’re not telling me, Bertha Folkingham, that the vicar went halfway across the county to kill the Earl,’ said Mrs Stanhope from Toynton St Peter. ‘Vicars don’t do that sort of thing. Their superiors like the Dean and Chapter at the cathedral would have them drummed out of the Church.’

  ‘But think what a perfect protection it would be, being a vicar.’ Lady Folkingham wasn’t going to retreat in the face of hostile fire. ‘Nobody’s going to suspect you for a moment. It’s an ideal way to commit a murder, if you ask me.’

  ‘I don’t believe that vicar did it,’ said the Honourable Mildred Grenfell from Cumberthorpe. ‘I think that was all a blind, going to church in Alford, designed to put everybody off the scent. Don’t you remember the wife of the vicar in Wainfleet All Saints, the one who went away last year very suddenly? Tall woman who looked as if she might have been a chorus girl in her younger days.’

  Lady Lucy reflected that charity did not run very strongly through the veins of the ladies of Lincolnshire.

  ‘I do remember her,’ said Mrs Stanhope, ‘flighty piece she was too; she attracted men like a water carrier in the desert. They flocked to her, poor fools. But what does her disappearance – wasn’t she called Hardy, Tabitha Hardy or something like that – what does that have to do with Candlesby’s death?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what it has to do with Candlesby’s death,’ said a quiet woman called Mrs Morton from Skegness who hadn’t spoken yet. ‘I was told – in confidence, mind you, so I would ask you all to respect that – that she was carrying on with the Candlesby man. She was always going up to the Hall on the grounds that she liked looking at the deer. I don’t think they were the only stag she encountered up there, if you follow me. The vicar finds out. There’s a terrible scene with the wife. Candlesby refuses to have her living with him up at the Hall; maybe he did have some residual sense of the social proprieties, though I find that hard to believe. She goes away, nobody knows where. There is, for a while, a great murmuring in the parish of Wainfleet All Saints. No saintly behaviour is to be found except, maybe, from the vicar. Where is the vicar’s wife? Is she dead? Nobody knew then about her links with Candlesby or it would be even worse. Is she coming back? Eventually somebody from the Church hierarchy, probably the Dean of Lincoln, he always likes telling people off, instructed the parishioners to keep quiet. But think of the vicar! Think how he must have been feeling!�
�� The pinched, mouse-like features of Mrs Morton from Skegness grew especially animated at this point. ‘His life is ruined. His career may never recover from the taint of being abandoned by his wife. Alone with his newly acquired housekeeper – who happens to be the worst cook in the east of England – he grows bitter. His betrayal, by the wife, and even more by Candlesby, gnaws away at him. He grows obsessive. And in the end,’ Mrs Morton leaned back in her chair at this point with a flourish of her arms, ‘his emotions and his obsessions take him over. He kills Candlesby in a fit of rage. It will be one of your husband’s finest achievements, Lady Powerscourt, to bring this murdering vicar to book.’

  There was a brief silence. The topic of murdering vicars seemed to have run its course. Lady Lucy made a mental note of the sections of the conversation she would report to her Francis. The ladies moved on to an abstract discussion of whether murder was more prevalent in the aristocracy than in the working classes. There was a surprising consensus that it was more common among the aristocracy.

  James Candlesby, the youngest son who lived alone with his nurse at the top of the Hall, had not been well for some days. At first this took the form of wandering round the house on his own in the middle of the night, disturbing the mice and the rats and upsetting the bats in the basement. His nurse had sent word to the asylum outside Lincoln where the doctor who had been looking after him for some years was based. Dr Wilson, in spite of the entreaties of James’s eldest brothers, had refused to admit him as a patient in the asylum. He would only grow worse there, he said. He believed, Dr Wilson, that James’s eccentricities could be accommodated perfectly easily in the enormous house, especially if he was accompanied by a trained nurse.

  This afternoon James’s eyes were unusually bright and he was unable to settle anywhere, moving from chair to sofa to standing by the window for a few seconds and looking at the view. Something, in the nurse’s view, was about to happen, and it did, in a way the nurse had never seen before. Lying on the floor and refusing to get up had once been the favourite. Then there had been days when James curled himself up into a ball and stayed under a table in the corner of the room. Sometimes there had been shouting – not any particular word, just a general shout that came across in the same inchoate fashion as the roar of a great crowd at a football match.

  James went to a cupboard in the corridor outside his sitting room and pulled out a very large brush. He held it out in front of him as though it were a cross and he was the person carrying it in some religious procession.

  ‘Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war,’ he sang, making his way slowly down the corridor,

  ‘With the cross of Jesus going on before.

  Christ the Royal Master leads against the foe,

  Forward into battle see his banners go!’

  He seemed to have forgotten the chorus. He was walking very deliberately, as if he was in a procession. He passed a glass case full of stuffed birds and started down the stairs.

  ‘At the sign of triumph Satan’s host doth flee,

  On then, Christian soldiers, on to victory!

  Hell’s foundations quiver at the shout of praise,

  Brothers lift your voices, loud your anthems raise.’

  He was on the second-floor landing now, where most of the bedrooms were situated. The nurse hurried down the stairs after him. James continued down towards the ground floor and the basement, passing a racehorse whose front features were still visible but whose hindquarters and rump had been overcome by the advance of the Candlesby grime.

  ‘Like a mighty army moves the church of God;

  Brothers, we are treading where the saints have trod.

  We are not divided, all one body we,

  One in hope and doctrine, one in charity.’

  As he reached the first floor, his elder brother Edward stuck his head out of the drawing room. ‘For God’s sake, you stupid lunatic,’ he said, ‘what on earth do you think you are doing? You’re madder than usual today, even for you.’

  James made no reply. His eyes appeared to be fixed on some distant goal. Perhaps he thought he was a crusader from centuries past come to fight with the armies of Saladin in front of the walls of Jerusalem. Perhaps he was a recruit to Cromwell’s New Model Army in the Civil War, dragged from field and barn to learn the arts of war before the battlefield at Naseby.

  ‘Crowns and thrones may perish, kingdoms rise and wane,

  But the Church of Jesus constant will remain.

  Gates of hell can never gainst that Church prevail;

  We have Christ’s own promise and that cannot fail.’

  The mention of Christ’s promise seemed to give James extra strength. He held the broomstick ever firmer as if he were escorting an archbishop to his stall in Canterbury Cathedral. He was down the stairs into the lower floor and out of the door into the outside world. There was no hesitation. He turned sharply to the left and began marching purposefully towards the lake. Henry and Edward both stuck their heads out of the saloon windows one floor up.

  ‘Why don’t you go and drown yourself, you mad person?’

  ‘Put us all out of our misery, you stupid lunatic. Go straight into the water! Don’t turn round! Don’t bother coming back!’

  With that the two brothers collapsed in hysterical laughter. James did not stop. He was quite close to the water’s edge now. Charles had heard a noise where he was in the stables and began running as fast as he could towards the lake. James was on the edge of the water, marching straight on. The brothers were yelling out the chorus as an act of encouragement.

  ‘Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war,

  With the cross of Jesus going on before.’

  They sang it over and over, falling into helpless laughter from time to time as they watched their brother advancing further into the water.

  ‘Why can’t you go in after him?’ yelled Charles to the nurse.

  ‘I can’t swim,’ replied the man.

  Almost up to his neck now, James was still singing. Charles pulled off his jacket and charged into the lake. There seemed to be a struggle. Indeed it looked as if Charles might have knocked his brother out to make it easier to drag him away from the water. With the nurse arriving to help in shallower waters they managed to pull him ashore. The brush was still held firmly in his hands. They began to drag him across the grass towards the house in case he made another dash into the lake. When James came round a few minutes later he looked at them both very carefully. Then he burst into tears. From the first-floor window still came the chorus:

  ‘Onward Christian soldiers marching as to war,

  With the cross of Jesus going on before.’

  ‘God help sailors on a night like this.’ Detective Inspector Blunden was speaking to Powerscourt as the two men stood on the steps of the Candlesby mausoleum at ten to three in the morning. It had been raining hard since early evening and a wind had now got up, blowing in from the sea. Three of the Inspector’s junior police constables were shielding their lamps against the storm. The clouds cleared over the moon every now and then to reveal the lake and the solid bulk of the house behind it like a great liner untroubled by the weather.

  ‘Ten minutes to go,’ said Powerscourt. The exhumation of the Earl of Candlesby was due to begin in precisely ten minutes. A small procession could be seen making its way up the hill towards the mausoleum.

  ‘What about the key?’ said Powerscourt suddenly, all too aware that if the new Earl had his way they would never get into the mausoleum at all.

  ‘The coroner has that in hand,’ said Blunden, pulling his cloak tighter around his shoulders. ‘I think he gave out some pretty fierce warnings about disobeying an instrument of the law. The butler is to bring it at the appointed time.’

  A tall man, wrapped in an enormous cloak, materialized out of the darkness.

  ‘Carey,’ he said, ‘Nathaniel Carey, pathologist, at your service.’

  As Powerscourt made the introductions another bedraggled figure joine
d them. The vicar who conducted the service of interment had come back to see the body removed. Later on he would have to inter the body once again. He nodded gravely to the other members of the melancholy party.

  ‘Where are you going to conduct your examination, Dr Carey?’ Powerscourt was whispering out of respect for the dead.

  ‘They’ve made a room at the morgue in the hospital available for me. I hope to start first thing in the morning. Shouldn’t take long. I mean, was the bloody man murdered or not? That shouldn’t be too difficult to establish. Feel free to drop in around eleven. I should have something for you by then.’

  Another group was advancing towards the mausoleum, led by the Candlesby butler carrying a powerful light. Behind him came the coroner, shrouded in a vast cloak, and the man from the undertakers who had supervised the burial, leading a cart drawn by two horses.

  ‘Well,’ said the coroner, ‘all present and correct. I’m sure Thorpe can open up for us.’

  Thorpe, the Candlesby butler, had on his belt one of the biggest bunches of keys Powerscourt had ever seen. Surely there were more keys on it than there were rooms in Candlesby Hall. The butler didn’t hesitate for a moment. One quick glance down and a very large key, totally black, was inserted into the main door of the mausoleum. Within a minute the party were inside, the three policemen forming up around them with the lamps. The light shot across the great columns that reached up to the dome, flickering and fading as it went, dancing briefly across human faces. Their boots echoed off the marble floor. High up at the top of the building the bats were squeaking an ineffectual protest at this invasion under cover of darkness.

  The coroner led the way downstairs to the vault. Some of the flagstones here were wet with damp. Powerscourt suddenly realized that in one sense they were fortunate. Sliding the coffin out of its niche down here would be much easier than digging it up from an ordinary grave in a cemetery on a night like this: the need to construct some sort of awning so nobody could see what was happening, the spades clogged with wet earth, the strain of pulling the coffin out of the ground, the constant rain and the howling of the wind.