Powerscourt sat down. The Chief Constable rose to his feet. Johnny Fitzgerald groaned aloud.
‘How right you are, Powerscourt, to tell us that it is not for you to decide whether to proceed with a prosecution in this case. You have failed miserably. You admit yourself that your discoveries would not stand up in a court of law. You can take your failure away with you and never return. We of the Lincolnshire constabulary shall not fail. It is for me, thank God, to decide whether to prosecute or not. I have no doubt that we shall be successful once we have collected enough witnesses. I repeat what I said before. Will you please give us the name of the girl you referred to as Helen? Come along now, you are not above the law.’
Powerscourt looked him in the eye. ‘I will not,’ he said firmly.
‘Skeggs!’ said the Chief Constable. ‘Prepare to make an arrest! I repeat, Powerscourt, for the last time, will you give to us the name of the girl you called Helen?’
Events intervened before Powerscourt had time to reply. There was a noise of heavy boots on the floorboards outside. A boy of fifteen or so burst into the room. His eyes were bloodshot and seemed to be staring right out of their sockets. His hair was wild. Tiny flecks of foam hovered at the corners of his mouth. He had a gun in his hand and was waving it about as if to shoot somebody at any moment. James Dymoke had come to join his brothers in the family conclave.
‘I’ve locked them both up, my guards, my jailers,’ he announced to the company. Charles was advancing across the room towards his brother. Henry and Edward looked frightened. Powerscourt realized that something and somebody completely unpredictable had entered the room. The irrational, maybe even the mad was standing less than ten feet away from him with a gun in his hand.
‘And I’ve got the keys of my room.’ James giggled and patted his jacket pocket. ‘I gather you’ve been discussing who killed my father and my brother,’ he carried on, the flecks of foam growing larger as he spoke. ‘Didn’t think to ask me. Pity, that. You’ve got it wrong. All wrong.’
At this point he pointed the gun at his eldest living brother. ‘You killed my father. You killed Richard too. You think I haven’t heard you talking to yourself when you thought nobody was listening, about what you’d do when you were Earl? All the pretty ladies you were going to have? All the nice food you were going to eat every day? Well, you’re not going to be able to have those thoughts any more. Not where you’re going. Not now.’ He fired at Henry. The bullet passed peacefully beyond Henry’s left side and ended up safely embedded in a stuffed peacock on the far side of the fireplace. James ran out of the room and hurtled down the stairs towards the lower floors. Charles, closely followed by Powerscourt, Johnny Fitzgerald and Constable Merrick, raced off in pursuit. They could hear the footsteps clattering down into the basement.
‘He’s going to the tunnels!’ shouted Charles. ‘He always loved those as a child.’
Powerscourt put a hand on Constable Merrick’s shoulder. The boy was just eighteen. This was no place for one so young, with a mother and father at home and a madman with a pistol up in front. ‘Constable!’ said Powerscourt. ‘Can you please go back and report to Inspector Blunden. Suggest to him that he puts a guard on the exits from this and any other tunnels it might lead to. Tell him – and this is most important – that nobody is to fire at the young man or threaten him in any way! Go now!’
Constable Merrick shot off. They were in the tunnel now, a red-brick construction that twisted its way under the house, scarcely higher than a man and with room abreast for just a couple of people at a time. James’ boots could be heard clearly further ahead. Drips of cold water fell from the ceiling. In the short corridors that opened off the main passage tens of tiny rats’ eyes peered in amazement at their visitors. Johnny Fitzgerald had snatched a torch from a shelf in the ante-room. Enormous shadows of a monstrous Powerscourt and an elongated Charles Dymoke were etched on the walls until Johnny turned it down.
‘Where does this go, Charles?’ Powerscourt spoke as quietly as he could but his voice must have carried even so. The shot echoed down the tunnel and back again, bouncing off the walls and fading to an echo. Nobody knew where the bullet went. Powerscourt thought this was a very dangerous place to be. A bullet could ricochet off the walls for a long time, killing or wounding anybody who got in the way. Charles drew his hands into a fork and pointed further up the tunnel. To the right he pretended to be a horse, making hoof noises with his feet. The stables. To the left he whispered ‘Garden’ as quietly as he could. However hard they tried they were still making a lot of noise as they went, boots and shoes sounding loud as they hit the brick floor of the tunnel. An enormous ante-chamber appeared to the left. Charles took a long swig of an imaginary bottle. The cellars. Johnny Fitzgerald smiled. There was more water on the bottom now, a tiny rivulet flowing back towards the sculleries and the pantries beside the kitchen. James must have stopped to take a better shot. The bullet stuck this time in a gap between the bricks and did no damage. Three bullets gone. Powerscourt was counting, as he had counted the yards towards the spot where the old Earl’s body had been dumped. Charles made the tunnel sign again. It sounded as though James was running now. The noise grew distant.
‘He’ll be going to the garden and the lake,’ whispered Charles. ‘He used to hide down here pretending to be a Christian in the catacombs hiding from the Romans until a few years ago.’
Powerscourt decided not to point out that the said Christian had almost certainly been caught and thrown to the lions in the Colosseum.
They were at the junction now, the passage to the stables going uphill, the one to the garden sloping slightly down, as if towards the lake. Charles led them to the left. ‘Do you think he wants to kill us?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘Or is he just trying to get away from anyone coming after him?’
‘I don’t think he knows what he is doing,’ said Charles. ‘His mind’s gone. Poor boy.’
As if in confirmation there was a loud shout from further along. ‘Will you please go away?’ The voice was almost sobbing. ‘Please! Why can’t you leave me alone?’ A despairing fourth bullet was despatched down the tunnel but it got lost somewhere in the bends. This tunnel had slightly more water on the bottom. They were sloshing along now, water seeping over the sides of their shoes. On the walls bright green slime had taken over from the handsome red bricks nearer the house. Like the rest of the bloody place, Powerscourt thought, nobody’s bothered to maintain it in living memory.
Charles was pressing on. There was a bad smell now, coming from further up. ‘Way out’s near the compost heap,’ Charles whispered. ‘Nobody’s managed to move it since the tunnel was built.’ Extreme stress, Powerscourt suddenly realized, must be the best cure for stammerers ever invented. Maybe they could organize courses for the sufferers down here in the Candlesby tunnels, the stutterers pursued by mad people with pistols. Charles could lead the way.
Johnny Fitzgerald was waving his torch forward in confident arcs. ‘I think he’s gone, Francis; I think he’s out of the tunnel now.’ He turned the torch behind him for a moment. Ahead there was a very small pinprick of light. The smell was growing worse. A couple of rats, refugees from the compost perhaps, shot past them back down the tunnel. In the far distance they heard another shot, muffled by the earth and the bricks. ‘Damn and blast!’ said Powerscourt. ‘I hoped nobody was going to threaten him. It’ll only make him more dangerous.’ Five shots gone, Powerscourt said to himself. One left.
‘Let’s run,’ said Charles suddenly. ‘I’m sure he won’t be waiting to pick us off as we come out of the tunnel.’ Three pairs of pounding boots echoed back towards the stables and the cook’s private cupboards. The tunnel was lower here. Johnny Fitzgerald swore violently as he failed to duck enough and scraped his head on the roof. Charles was muttering to himself as he ran. Powerscourt thought he was saying the Lord’s Prayer over and over again. They shot out of the tunnel as if they had been fired from a cannon. No hostile bullets greeted them.
A grou
p of people were lined up behind the tunnel entrance. The Chief Constable was in the front. ‘My God,’ muttered Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘the old fool thinks he’s back in command. God help us all.’ Behind the Chief Constable stood Skeggs, looking, Powerscourt thought, like a faithful hound waiting to pick up the dead birds, with Inspector Blunden and Constable Merrick stationed behind them. The reserves, expecting fresh orders. The two brothers seemed to be still in the house, awaiting developments. Between them and the lake James Dymoke was walking slowly towards the water. He seemed to be reciting poetry at the top of his voice, not concerned about the group of men behind him, many with pistols. He stopped once to pick up a piece of wood about the size of a walking stick and twirled it in the air.
‘Good to see you’ve arrived at last!’ said the Chief Constable. ‘No idea why it took you so long. Now then. We’re going to charge. Skeggs and me and the three of you. Like the cavalry. I’m in command, of course. I’ll give the orders. Take the madman from the rear. Take him off to the nearest asylum quick as we can. Now then, what are you waiting for? Fall in! Prepare to advance!’
Nobody moved. Johnny Fitzgerald whispered to Powerscourt that he was happy to knock the Chief Constable out. One blow should do it, he said. He’d been thinking of it all day. Powerscourt said it was Charles’ call, his land, his county, his brother.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Charles Dymoke. ‘If you charge he’ll turn and shoot. Somebody might get killed. Hold your peace. I’m going to talk to him.’
Charles set off towards his brother. James was now very close to the lake. A faint breeze was causing ripples on the surface. On an island in the middle a couple of herons watched the proceedings with care, their long necks turned towards the action. It began to rain.
‘James?’ Charles was only about ten feet behind his brother. James turned round. As he did so, the Chief Constable, having moved Blunden and Merrick into the front line, yelled, ‘Charge!’ and pointed his finger towards the lake as if he was back in India, attacking the natives. What James saw was a group of five men charging towards him, some waving their pistols in the air. He must, Powerscourt decided, have thought they were coming to kill him.
James raced towards the lake. He plunged into the water as he had done before. Chief Inspector Skeggs knocked Charles to the ground as he hurtled past. James took the stick in his right hand and whirled it round his head a few times. Then he shouted as loud as he could. His voice must have carried back to the house.
‘Then with both hands I flung him, wheeling him;
But when I looked again, behold an arm,
Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,
That caught him by the hilt, and brandished him
Three times, and drew him under in the mere.’
The wooden stick, Excalibur, the sword of Arthur in James’ befuddled mind, floated away on the surface of the lake. ‘Tennyson,’ said Charles, scrambling to his feet, ‘Idylls of the King. I think he knows most of it by heart. He’ll have turned into Sir Bedevere or somebody by now. Better if it was Merlin but I doubt it.’
The charging party stopped at the edge of the water. James was up to his neck. Charles had reached the edge. Powerscourt and Fitzgerald watched, some ten feet away.
‘Stop!’ said James. ‘Stop! All of you! And you, Charles! This is it! This is the end!’ With that he pulled the gun from his pocket, placed it in his mouth and pulled the trigger. The explosion echoed round the lake. After a minute where he seemed to totter very slowly from side to side, James Dymoke fell into the water. A small red ring formed round the place where his body had been. The ripples stretched back towards the shore and out to the island. Charles dived into the water but he had little hope.
‘I’ll have to get Jack Hayward to pull him out,’ he said sadly as he returned to dry land. ‘He always knows what to do in these situations.’ Jack Hayward, Powerscourt thought, always at hand to retrieve the body of a dead Candlesby, young or old.
The military party had dissolved with James’s death. Inspector Blunden and Constable Merrick were trudging slowly towards the house. The Chief Constable was addressing the faithful Skeggs.
‘If only Powerscourt and his friends had done what they were told,’ he said, ‘everything would have been fine.’
‘Everything would not be fine.’ Charles Dymoke had a vicious tone in his voice now, water dripping down his shirt and his jacket. ‘If you hadn’t indulged your taste for petty heroics with that ludicrous charge, my brother wouldn’t have felt threatened. He might still be alive. You stupid, stupid man. Get off our land now! Get out of our house! Go on, before I put the dogs on you!’
The Chief Constable slunk away, muttering something about the merits of military discipline no longer being taught properly in schools. Charles went to stand in front of Powerscourt. He looked extremely young.
‘Nobody knew …’ He began to cry, very quietly. ‘Nobody knew about it but me. James didn’t have more than a month or two to live. The disease had taken over. The worst thing is,’ the tears were coming faster now, ‘I said to the doctors that they should tell him. How long he had left, I mean. If I hadn’t done that, he wouldn’t have known he was dying. He wouldn’t have killed himself.’ Powerscourt gathered the young man into his arms and held him very tight for a very long time.
Lady Lucy was waiting for him when Powerscourt returned to the hotel an hour or two later. He told her about the death of James and the latest lunacies of the Chief Constable. ‘I’ve got a confession to make, Francis,’ she said. Powerscourt wondered what was coming. ‘When the Chief Constable was going on and on about the secret source I suddenly thought it wouldn’t take very long to identify Lucy, Lucy Carter, I mean. So I left the saloon and drove down to the village. I put her lying down on the back seat in case anybody saw us and brought her back to the hotel.’
‘Where is she now?’ said Powerscourt.
‘Mr Drake has found her a room here nobody knows about. She’s fast asleep up there now. I told her mother Lucy could act as my maid if she needs to stay away for a while.’
‘Let me just recap a moment here, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt with a smile. ‘You went from the Hall to the village to the hotel in the Ghost? That’s right, isn’t it?’
Lady Lucy nodded. ‘I did,’ she said proudly. ‘It’s not all that difficult, driving, once you have got used to it.’
EPILOGUE
Powerscourt and Lady Lucy went back to London after the third funeral. The Chief Constable tried to bring a case against every male in Candlesby Village but failed at the committal hearing, where the judge threw the case out and criticized the prosecution for wasting the court’s time with nonsensical claims. Charles Augustus Pugh, retained by Powerscourt for the defence, shared a bottle of champagne with him afterwards. The following week the Home Secretary announced that the Chief Constable had resigned, on health grounds. Johnny Fitzgerald announced that they had probably taken him off to the nearest asylum.
Henry, now Lord Candlesby, began a programme of serious retrenchment at the Hall. It was, he said, a nonsense to be living with that much debt and he set about reducing it in a sober and responsible fashion. People said he was a changed man.
Powerscourt always remembered the case of the murdered Earls as having to do with Charles, who was neither murdered nor the murderer, but now a frequent guest at the Powerscourt house in Markham Square. Charles had stood with Powerscourt on the strip of land between the lake and the mausoleum at Candlesby Hall after James’ funeral shortly before Christmas and quoted Shakespeare. His stammer seemed to be gone for ever, banished by the terrible events at his home. ‘Let us hope’, he said, ‘that “Our revels now are ended.” Three corpses should be enough for anybody.
‘Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.’
‘I think my father strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage, you know, Lord Powerscourt. The candles flickered for a little time. I always loved him so much, you know, even though he was such a terrible man. I have thought since his death that it was appropriate that he, of all people, was wearing those clothes the night he was killed. All his life he was a hunter, a hunter of women, a hunter of money, a hunter of fowl and foxes, a hunter after power and the gratification of his own desires. How right therefore that he should be dressed as Master of the Hunt and meet his death in a scarlet coat.’
By the Same Author
Titles in the series
(listed in order of publication)
Goodnight Sweet Prince
Death and the Jubilee
Death of an Old Master
Death of a Chancellor
Death Called to the Bar
Death on the Nevskii Prospekt
Death on the Holy Mountain
Death of a Pilgrim
Death of a Wine Merchant
Death in a Scarlet Coat
Copyright
Constable & Robinson Ltd
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London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the UK by Constable, an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2011
First US edition published by SohoConstable, an imprint of Soho Press, 2011
Soho Press, Inc.
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New York, NY 10003
www.sohopress.com
Death in a Scarlet Coat Page 32