Death in a Scarlet Coat

by David Dickinson

  ‘Who would?’

  ‘That, my love, is what we have yet to find out.’

  15

  Clueless in Cashel. Chaos in Cashel. Cashiered in Cashel. Johnny Fitzgerald was angry with himself for his failure to find Jack Hayward and his family. He had good reasons for thinking they might have come here to Cashel as it was where Mrs Hayward was born and her family, the O’Gradys, were still here at the stables that bore their name. Johnny cursed himself for being so obvious about seeking precise directions to their establishment. He had asked in the main pub in the town centre and again in the first farmhouse he came to on the Ballydoyle road. When he finally reached the O’Grady stables and farmhouse, it was as if they had been expecting him. The woman, who he presumed was Kathleen Hayward’s mother, was extremely polite. No, the Haywards were not here. Whatever could have given him that idea? It was years since they had been here and they certainly weren’t here now. Hadn’t he heard they were in England now? Was she protesting too much? Johnny could see that the farmhouse was large, three storeys tall, and that there were various outhouses and cottages dotted along the drive. If you wanted to hide a family of four, this was where you could do it.

  ‘Never mind, Mrs O’Grady,’ he said. ‘I’ll be getting out of your way now.’

  ‘So who was it that told you they were here? You couldn’t have come all this way without somebody telling you they were here, could you?’

  These were dangerous waters. ‘I should have told you at the beginning, Mrs O’Grady, I’m down here looking at some land between here and Kilkenny. I met a man in the pub there who said he’d heard that Jack Hayward, a man thought to be a genius with horses, was over staying with his in-laws. That’s why I came looking for him. I wanted to ask if some land I’m thinking of buying would be good for training horses.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know if he’s a genius or not,’ said Mrs O’Grady. ‘All I do know is that he’s definitely not here.’

  Johnny Fitzgerald suddenly wondered if women were better liars than men. He decided that they probably were, but he couldn’t hang around to inspect all the stables and the farmhouse. It was time to go.

  ‘Thank you very much for your time, Mrs O’Grady. I’m sorry to have been such a nuisance.’

  She watched him go, Mrs O’Grady, arms folded across her ample bosom, a look of defiance on her face. Johnny could almost feel her gaze boring into his back. He turned and waved at the bottom of the drive. Mrs O’Grady didn’t wave back.

  As he walked down the road, he decided that he would have to withdraw his forces. Retreat had never appealed very much to Johnny when he was in the army but he felt he had little choice here. He needed to lose himself in some larger place than Kilkenny or Cashel. He would write to his old commanding officer and ask for his advice.

  Two days later Powerscourt was walking by the sea again. He was feeling more and more frustrated at his lack of progress. There were, he had decided long ago, two places that were crucial to his inquiry. The first was the servants’ hall in the house itself. He felt sure that they all knew more than they were telling him, that a terrible secret was hidden away somewhere behind their eyes. At least they talked to him. In Candlesby village it was as if the entire population had taken the Mafia oath of omertà. They had all retired behind walls of silence. The hotel manager, Mr Drake, had told him that there was some terrible influenza sweeping through the village and that the first victims had already been buried.

  Behind him and behind the beach there stood a lone windmill, an elegant building, the six great sails inactive this afternoon. Far away on the sand a small black dot was advancing quite fast towards him. Powerscourt thought it was probably a bicycle. He was trying to think of a device that would bring Jack Hayward home to Candlesby. Always at the back of his mind now was the thought of the War Office and the authorities. What on earth did they want him to do this time? On the last occasion there had been information leaking out of one of the dreadnought shipyards. They were so secretive, these secret policemen, that they were reluctant to divulge the name of the yard. And when they did, all they gave him was a name, no information on who the suspects might be. Nearly three thousand people were involved in building the giant battleship. Just as Powerscourt thought he had identified the man responsible he himself was captured by German agents and held prisoner for over a week in a disused coal mine.

  When he looked behind him, he saw that the bicycle had almost closed the gap. Furthermore he could now see who was riding it. He stopped and waited for the young man to arrive.

  ‘Lord Powerscourt, sir!’ Andrew Merrick panted, scarcely able to speak. Powerscourt thought he looked like a fish that had just been landed, panting its life away on the river bank. ‘It’s the jackets, my lord, they’ve been found, my lord, sir.’

  ‘Jackets? What jackets?’

  ‘The jackets of the two men who killed the Earl in the train, my lord.’

  ‘Hold on a moment, Andrew. Let’s take one thing at a time. How do you know that they are the jackets of the people on the train?’

  ‘Well, we don’t, not really, my lord. But the Inspector says you are to come at once, my lord, sir. Inspector Blunden wants some advice, so he does, sir.’

  Half an hour later Powerscourt was back at the police station. Two GNR jackets were draped across a couple of chairs on one side of Blunden’s office. Andrew Merrick stared at Powerscourt with a sort of ‘I told you so’ expression.

  ‘Where did you find them, Inspector?’

  ‘It wasn’t our people that found them, my lord. It was the local doctor, visiting the house of Sir Arthur Melville. He saw the side of one of them poking out from around the ornamental fountain. It would appear the unfortunate baronet may have reverted to the bottle, my lord. The doctor thought Sir Arthur might have been taking his clothes off in a fit of inebriation.’

  ‘Did this happen today, Inspector?’

  ‘No, my lord, it was early yesterday evening. The doctor dropped the jackets in on his way home.’

  ‘Did he see Sir Arthur? In person, I mean. Did he speak to him?’

  ‘No, my lord. He only spoke to the butler. There was nobody else about as far as he could see. The butler reported that the clothes must have been dumped in the middle of the previous night. Nobody saw or heard anything unusual.’

  ‘They never do,’ said Powerscourt, looking at his watch. It was nearly ten past five. Most drunks, in his experience, began their innings around lunchtime and carried on till close of play. Sir Arthur might still be just about compos mentis, even though he had talked of beginning to drink after breakfast.

  ‘One thing, my lord.’ Inspector Blunden looked at Powerscourt with a pleading air. ‘I’m sure you’ve thought about this. Is there any test or anything you know of that might establish whether these are the actual clothes the murderers wore, or are they just two uniforms that happened to have found their way to Sir Arthur Melville’s fountain?’

  ‘I have thought about it, Inspector, and the answer is no. Of course they might be the clothes we are looking for, but they might not be. I presume there isn’t any message in the pockets or anything saying “We are the killers’ jackets”, or anything like that?’

  ‘I rather thought that’s what you would say, my lord,’ said the Inspector sadly. ‘No, there is not.’

  Sir Arthur Melville reminded Powerscourt of a previous commanding officer who had fallen into the bottle for a week or so after failing to win promotion. After seven days he returned to normal as if nothing had happened. Only here it was the other way round.

  ‘Afternoon, maybe good evening by now,’ he said, as Powerscourt was shown into the same library looking out over the garden that he had been in before, but this time Sir Arthur had a half-full glass of neat scotch by his right hand.

  ‘Met you before, haven’t I? Powerscourt, Powerscroft, that what your name is? Powerscribe?’

  ‘Powerscourt, court, that’s me.’

  ‘Didn’t you have a wife with you
before, pretty wife, nice eyes?’

  ‘I did,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I do.’

  ‘Well, you’re a lucky man, with a nice wife. Very lucky.’

  Powerscourt thought the man was more drunk than he seemed. The eyes were red. The hands were steady but they always shook the day after, not on the evening of the whisky bottle.

  Sir Arthur stopped suddenly. Something had put him off his stroke but Powerscourt had no idea what it was. A tear formed in his left eye and rolled slowly down his cheek.

  ‘Wife,’ he said sadly, ‘wife, pretty wife. Used to have one of those. Not any more.’

  Powerscourt thought he spoke about the pretty wife as he might have talked about a favourite hunter.

  Now the drink seemed to be taking over. ‘Anniver,’ he began. He seemed to be having trouble with the words. ‘Anniverse, anniversey, anniversary. Wife. Today, a year ago.’ The tears were rolling down his cheeks now. ‘This day last year she took some of my pills and walked out into the sea. Never came back.’

  He paused again and looked imploringly at Powerscourt as if he might have the power to bring her back to life. Powerscourt wondered if Sir Authur had got the date of the anniversary right. He looked incapable of remembering anything in his present state.

  ‘Hstaton, no, that’s not right.’ He paused to search what was still working in his brain. ‘Hunstanton.’ The tears were turning into a flood now. ‘That’s where they found her. Found what was left of her, I mean. Bloody fish. Bloody salt water. Bloody engine on the coastguard’s boat cutting half her leg off.’ Sir Arthur stopped to take a Goliath-sized gulp of his scotch. Powerscourt saw with astonishment that the glass was no longer half full. There was nothing left. ‘It’s no better, you know. Year later. Whole damned year later. No better, no better at all.’ He paused and concentrated hard on refilling his glass, almost to the top this time. ‘Time the great healer, people tell you; what a load of rubbish. Wounds will heal – I remember some bloody padre telling me that after the funeral. Wounds don’t heal. They get worse. They suppurate. They rot your insides away. Do you know that, Powerscliff?’

  Powerscourt was feeling desperately sorry for the man. He popped out to alert the butler that he was going now and to invite Sir Arthur to lunch at the Candlesby Arms the following day if he was well enough. As he passed the library with the ornamental fountain outside, he heard a plaintive cry like Polyphemus in his cave after he lost his eye.

  ‘Where are you, Powers, Powerscribe, Powerscart? Dammit, man, I seem to have forgotten your name.’

  Everything seemed normal as Powerscourt made his way up to his rooms in the hotel. Their suite was three-quarters of the way up a long corridor on the first floor. As he turned into it, he noticed that there was a package of sorts lying on the ground as if it had just been dropped on to the carpet. As he drew closer and took his key out his pocket, he saw that there were two pairs of dark trousers and a couple of jackets. They both carried the legend ‘Great Northern Railway’.

  Powerscourt picked them up and carried them in. Lady Lucy was sitting by the window.

  ‘Francis!’ She rose and gave him a kiss. ‘How very nice to see you. What are these clothes doing here, my love? Do they need washing?’

  ‘Well may you ask, Lucy. They were dumped right outside our door when I came up just now.’

  Lady Lucy held one of the jackets up at arm’s length as if it might be an unexploded bomb. ‘These aren’t the ones those men were wearing on the special train, are they?’

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine, my love. We’d better have a look in the pockets.’

  The only item of interest they found was a ticket from Spalding to London King’s Cross whose date seemed to have been blacked out.

  ‘That might have been for the day of the murder, Lucy. I don’t know if you need tickets for special trains or not. I’m sure the Inspector will know.’

  ‘Do you think the murderers wore these clothes, Francis?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ said Powerscourt firmly. ‘I think somebody is playing games with us, that’s all. There was another pair of identical jackets dumped outside Sir Arthur Melville’s fountain last night. Sir Arthur was so drunk he would not have recognized the intruder even if he had been the Prime Minister himself. Come to think of it, Lucy, I’m not sure I like the fact that the jacket people know which one is our room. Maybe I should talk to Mr Drake about it all. Nobody will have seen anything, nobody will have heard anything. All will be perfectly normal.’

  ‘Francis, I want to ask you a favour.’

  ‘Please do, my love.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll have heard about this terrible influenza down in the village. Some of the servants have stopped coming to work in case they infect everybody up here as well. The poor mothers are terribly over-stretched. They’ve got husbands to look after and their other children as well as the ones who are sick. Sometimes the husbands are taken ill too and there’s scarcely any money coming in. I was going to go down, if you approve, and see what I could do to help. Buy them food or medicines in the Ghost, help with the nursing, do whatever I can.’

  She paused and took her husband’s hand. ‘I wouldn’t want to do anything that might undermine your investigation, of course.’

  ‘I hardly think it’s likely that some poor children from Candlesby village have been going round the county killing people, Lucy, especially if they’re confined to bed with this dreadful influenza. You must do what think is best. Do you have enough money for now?’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘I’m just going to talk to Mr Drake about sheets and things. I’m sure those poor children will recover better in clean linen.’

  ‘I’ll come with you to speak to George Drake, my love. I want to ask him about these jackets and the strange letter. I have a feeling he may know something about it all.’

  Powerscourt was walking over to Candlesby Hall. He wanted to have a talk with Charles and he wanted to ask him a favour. The question had been troubling him for days now. He didn’t know if it had anything to do with his investigation. If he was honest with himself he suspected it might not, it had all happened so long ago. He wondered, yet again, about his summons to see the authorities and what it might bring. Maybe, he said crossly to himself, I won’t even have the time to take Lucy away for a holiday when the case was over. He tried to think of somewhere warm on this November afternoon. He wondered what the weather would be like in Sicily. He had always wanted to see Palermo, much more beautiful than Naples, his next-door neighbour in Markham Square had told him, rotting Baroque churches falling down all over the city. Sanctified and consecrated Candlesby Halls, he said to himself, staring across at the crumbling facade and the one-armed statuary on the roof. The great house managed to look even more bedraggled in the damp and the wet than it had in the late autumn sunshine.

  He heard voices over in the stable block, or rather, he thought, a single voice.

  ‘Lord P-p-powerscourt,’ said the unmistakable voice, ‘how very good to see you. I’ve got important news for you.’

  ‘Please tell me, Charles. Good to see you too.’

  The young man drew him deeper into the stables where not even the horses could have heard them.

  ‘On the night of the first murder, one of the servants says he saw lights on over in the village.’

  ‘How many lights, Charles? When was this? Twelve? Two, three o’clock in the morning? And who was the person who told you?’

  ‘More than one, light I mean, not p-p-person. And somewhere between twelve and one, my informant thought. B-b-but I p-p-romised not to tell who told me.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Do you believe them?’

  ‘I do, my lord. I’m quite sure of it.’

  ‘Why would the villagers be putting lights on in the middle of the night? What on earth was going on? Could your informant hear any voices?’

  ‘I wasn’t here that night. I was still in London, my lord. B-b-but everybody says there was a t
errible storm. Maybe their roofs were leaking.’

  ‘Well, that’s interesting, most interesting,’ said Powerscourt. Another fifty or sixty suspects had just arrived. ‘Now then, Charles, I want to ask you a favour.’

  ‘I’m sure we can help,’ said Charles. ‘What is it?’

  Powerscourt felt ever so slightly embarrassed as he told him. ‘I want to see the room with the Caravaggios.’

  Charles Candlesby whistled to himself. ‘I don’t think anybody’s b-b-been in there since Earl Edward died. They say he used to haunt the upper floors at night in the winter, wearing his nightclothes and carrying Goliath’s head in his hand like in one of the p-p-paintings he b-b-brought b-back to the Caravaggio room.’

  ‘Good God!’ said Powerscourt. He knew he would never say so in polite society but part of him did actually believe in ghosts, even ones carrying giants’ heads under their arms. ‘Is he still at large, this chap? Perhaps he is David, not a Dymoke at all, though how King David of the Israelites could end up in England, I don’t quite know.’

  ‘Nobody has seen him since Mary the p-parlourmaid,’ said Charles, ‘and that was round about the time of the Chartist riots, my lord, a long time ago. There are terrible stories about those times, Lord P-p-powerscourt. P-p-people coming home from here covered in blood. Marks on their necks sometimes. Or left hanging upside down.’

  ‘God bless my soul,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Now then, do you know who has the keys?’

  Charles Candlesby thought for a moment. ‘Well,’ he said, finally, ‘the p-p-person who should have them is Thorpe the b-b-butler. I’ve never seen inside that room, my lord and I’m not sure I want to do so now either.’

  ‘Well,’ said Powerscourt diplomatically, ‘why don’t you come with me and you can decide when we get there.’