Death in a Scarlet Coat (20 page)

‘It’s the devil, Lucy, the very devil.’

With that Powerscourt began walking away from Skegness. He stared out into the North Sea, moderate breakers pounding on to the beach. In his mind’s eye he could see the great dockyards of Britain from Portsmouth to Glasgow filled with thousands and thousands of men
building
dreadnoughts, the new super battleships that rendered almost all previous warships redundant. Across the North Sea from where he was standing, in Kiel and Hamburg, in Danzig and Bremen, their German counterparts also had their giant cranes and the enormous guns that made up the German dreadnought fleet. Sometime soon they must meet in the dark waters of the North Sea in an engagement that
could decide the course of the war in a single afternoon. He thought of the terrible photographs of the dead and the wounded after the critical battles of the American Civil War like Antietam and Gettysburg, long lines of men with one leg shuffling around the inadequate hospitals. Across the plains of Europe Powerscourt saw whole armies rising out of the earth like dragon’s teeth, men clad for battle in grey and khaki and dark blue carrying rifles, Germans and French, English and Dutch, Russians and Italians. Rumbling behind them he could hear the thunder of the artillery and the crash of the exploding shells, the screams of the wounded and the dying, the rumble of innumerable trolleys along the corridors of innumerable hospitals that tended the innumerable victims.

He turned to face his wife. There were tears in his eyes. ‘Sorry, Lucy,’ he said, ‘my mind was just taken over by a vision of war. I think it was worse than any of those horrific visions of hell in Hieronymus Bosch with the tortures and the torments.’

‘Don’t worry, my love.’ Lady Lucy was keen to change her husband’s mood as quickly as she could. ‘It may be nothing. The War Office people, the authorities, as you refer to them, may only want to clear up some details from work you did before. There could be nothing in it.’

‘If that was the case,’ said her husband, a terrible land battle still pounding away in his brain, ‘they’d have asked for the details in the letter.’

‘Well, it can’t be urgent,’ Lady Lucy pressed on, ‘or they’d have ordered you to come straight away.’

‘I don’t think that’s necessarily true either,’ said Powerscourt. ‘They wouldn’t want to draw attention to themselves by pulling me off this case.’

‘Francis,’ said Lucy sternly, sounding as if she was talking to a naughty twin back in Markham Square, ‘I don’t like it when you go all negative like this. It isn’t good for you. I know you aren’t looking forward to going back, as it were,
but you’ve got to finish this case first. And you aren’t going to do that by moping about on the beach thinking about battleships or whatever it was you were thinking about just now. Let’s be practical. I think we should go and see this Melville man right now. It won’t matter if we’re a bit early. One of my ladies said he is drunk all the time anyway. And you’re not to make yourself depressed thinking about things you don’t know anything about like this latest message from the War Office.’

Lady Lucy stared at her husband, hoping she hadn’t overdone the criticism. But he was smiling at her.

‘You’re quite right, of course, Lucy; you usually are. How fortunate I am to be married to such a sensible person. I shall concentrate on the matter in hand.’ He kissed her gently on the top of her head. But when she looked at him surreptitiously a few moments later, she could see that he was still staring out to sea, looking, she thought, like some shipwrecked mariner scanning the horizon for the sails of rescue.

Sir Arthur Melville’s Elizabethan house had been there for so long now that it looked as if it had been folded into the landscape. There was a small ornamental fountain at the front with a couple of peacocks on parade. Sir Arthur, the butler announced, would receive them in the library. Powerscourt expected some grand linenfold room with ancient bookshelves groaning with leatherbound volumes from centuries past. In fact the shelves looked as if they had only been put up the week before and they were filled with the great novels from the previous century: Dickens and Trollope and George Eliot and Conrad from Britain, Stendhal and Balzac and Flaubert from France, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy from Russia.

‘Sold the other library, don’t you know,’ Sir Arthur said after the introductions. ‘Old one, full of old books. Unhappy
memories, you see. Late wife used to like reading and
writing
her letters in there next to some damned history of the Roman Revolution.’

Powerscourt and Lady Lucy nodded as if selling old libraries was an everyday practice.

‘Got a damned good price for them, mind you. Some American fellow bought the lot. Think they’re somewhere in New York by now, Manhattan I think he said.’

One of the peacocks had drawn up very close to the
window
as if it wanted to join in the conversation, inspecting them in a most superior fashion.

‘Look here, I know why you’ve come. You said so in your letter.’ Sir Arthur scrabbled about among the papers on his desk but failed to find the relevant correspondence. ‘Never mind. I say, you do know what happened here, don’t you, Flavia killing herself and so on? I don’t have to tell you about that all over again, do I?’

Powerscourt noticed that at the mention of his late wife’s name he looked like a man being whipped in the face.

‘Certainly not,’ said Powerscourt. ‘There’s no need to drag all that up again. We’re more interested in how you’ve been coping since.’

‘It must have been terrible for you, Sir Arthur,’ put in Lady Lucy with a sympathetic smile.

‘Well, I don’t know. You see, I’ve never been very bright, I’ll be perfectly honest with you. All those sums and
translating
bits of Greek at school, I couldn’t cope with any of that. Once you realize you can’t do it, that it’s not for you, there’s no point worrying about it. So I joined the army. I wouldn’t be the first person to tell you that you don’t have to be very bright to follow the colours. But I quite enjoyed army life. My first commanding officer warned me that I wouldn’t rise up very far there either, never make Major, let alone Colonel, that sort of thing. He said they wouldn’t trust me in command of a flock of sheep – those were his very words.’

Sir Arthur laughed. ‘I told the fellow I didn’t mind. So I had years and years in the army. When I saw how difficult it was to command troops in battle, my goodness, what a strain, I felt quite happy where I was.’

‘Did you expect to get married after you left the army, Sir Arthur?’

‘Well, that’s the rum thing, if you follow me. There was I, not very bright as I say, getting on in years, set in my ways, not much of a clue what to do with women, then along comes Flavia, previously married to some university
chappie
, bursting with brains, Flavia, I mean, and she marries me. Well, I mean to say. I don’t think I understood very much about women before we were married. I understand even less now. What did she see in that Candlesby person? Did she like him because he was such a cad? I just don’t understand.’

‘I don’t think we will gain very much by going down that road, Sir Arthur,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Tell me, when it was all over, how did you feel about Candlesby? You could have been excused for feeling bitter towards him, if not more.’

‘I suppose you mean did I hate him enough to kill him? I did hate him enough to kill him. But I rather fell into the bottle, if you’ll forgive me for saying such a thing. I hit the bloody bottle in rather a big way, actually, starting after breakfast and continuing until lights out. There is one
problem
with all that. If you’ve got through a bottle and a half of claret before lunchtime, you’re not going to be in a very fit state to go off and kill people. You’d fall off your horse for a start. I think I may have sat by the edge of the fountain and told the world how I was going to be avenged on him. I do have one thing to report though. I always managed to get upstairs last thing at night. No servants ever had to help me to bed. Army code was very strict about that sort of thing. Bad form for an officer to get too tight to walk. Bad for discipline; the men would lose all respect.’

Lady Lucy waved a hand in the general direction of the
desk. ‘Forgive me, Sir Arthur, but are you laying off the drink today because we’re here?’

‘Not so, Lady Powerscourt, not so! I haven’t had a drink now for thirty-three days and fourteen hours precisely.’ Sir Arthur checked his watch as if it had been designed to show the length of his sobriety.

‘That’s very impressive,’ said Powerscourt. ‘But it does lead me to one important difference between drunk and sober. You said before you were not well enough to ride a horse in your drinking days. Now in the time of sobriety you would be perfectly capable of riding over to Candlesby Hall in the middle of the night and killing the Earl. Is that not so?’

Sir Arthur laughed. ‘Good try, Powerscourt. But I didn’t ride over there. I didn’t kill the Earl. You see, I have almost stopped thinking about the Earl, especially now he’s dead. He doesn’t matter any more. In any case I hope to be away from here fairly soon.’

‘Are you planning to leave your beautiful house, Sir Arthur?’ said Lady Lucy.

‘I am, I am.’ Sir Arthur suddenly sounded like a small child with a birthday present. He pulled a large box file from a drawer and began pulling out piles of newspaper cuttings, hotel brochures, travel books, pages pulled out of newspapers. ‘Look at this lot! The American who bought my library offered to buy the house as well. He said he planned to transport it brick by brick and chimney by chimney to some place called West Egg on Long Island Sound, wherever that is. Offered me heaps and heaps of money. Maybe I should have said yes, but I thought the house should stay here. I’ve thought about Paris, I’ve thought about the Riviera, I’ve thought about Sicily. Must be bloody hot in Sicily in the summer, I should think. Always been fond of the heat. But in the end I decided against all of them.’

‘Why?’ said the Powerscourts, almost in unison.

‘Comes back to what I was saying before, you see. The only subject worse than sums for me at school was
foreign
languages. French, Latin, Greek, that sort of thing. Completely foreign to me, they were, what? My papa sent me to Paris for a month when I was eighteen to learn the bloody language. I might as well have been turned deaf and dumb. Couldn’t even order a beer in a café at the end of it. Just about managed to secure the services of a porter at the station to help with my luggage when I went home. Even then, I had to use sign language. So I thought I’d better stay here.’

‘Have you decided where you want to go, Sir Arthur?’ asked Lady Lucy.

‘I think so,’ he replied. ‘Cornwall. A house close to the water. Gulls squawking. Walks on the cliff. Royal Navy sailing past every now and then. Reassuring fellows in those circumstances, the navy. Friendly natives who speak English. I’m going down in ten days’ time to have a look, as a matter of fact.’

‘We wish you the best of luck,’ said Lady Lucy.

‘And thank you so much for your time,’ said her husband.

Sir Arthur must have had some invisible means of
communicating
with his staff because the butler appeared at the door to show them out. They left him pulling on a pair of spectacles and opening a large envelope which said ‘Polperro’ in very large letters on the front.

‘Well, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy as the Silver Ghost
whispered
its way back to the Candlesby Arms, ‘what do you think? Was Sir Arthur telling the truth?’

‘I think he probably was,’ said Powerscourt, ‘but you have to be very careful with these people who claim to have no brains.’

‘What do you mean, my love?’

‘Well,’ said her husband, ‘I knew lots of people like him at school. The teachers told them they were stupid, they told themselves they were stupid and forgot all about it.
Plenty of sport for them, dead fish, dead stags, dead grouse, dead woodcock – you didn’t need a great deal in the way of brains to do all that. Fifteen years later you discover that these people have all made fortunes in the City of London, rich as Croesus some of them. Must take a different kind of brain to do that. Zero marks for French and nought in mathematics doesn’t seem to matter.’

‘So do you think Sir Arthur could have done it?’

Powerscourt paused to hoot at a carriage in front which was perched right in the middle of the road and travelling at about five miles an hour. The driver waved happily as they passed.

‘I don’t think Sir Arthur could have done it, Lucy. And I’ll tell you why. One of the many mysteries we can’t answer about this case is just how the old Earl was killed. Blow after blow with some blunt instrument to one side of the face requires a certain amount of imagination. I don’t think Sir Arthur would be capable of it.’

‘Who would?’

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

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.