Death in a Scarlet Coat
Page 4
A fine rain began to fall as the procession made its way up the hill towards the mausoleum.
‘Didn’t think I’d come today,’ one mourner said to his neighbour at the rear of the party. ‘Still don’t know why I’m here, to tell you the truth.’
‘I know how you feel,’ said his companion. ‘I only came to make sure the old bastard was really dead. Got my tools in the back of the car ready to open the coffin up if it looks necessary, screwdrivers and things. Seems fairly certain he has left us, don’t you think?’
‘Pretty rum way to go,’ said the first mourner. ‘I wasn’t here that morning but a chap who was at the hunt told me Candlesby’s body was brought up to the house lying across his horse covered in blankets as if he was El Cid or some medieval warrior.’
His companion grunted. ‘Hardly anybody saw the body, that’s what I was told. Doubt if we’ve heard the end of it. So typical of the bloody man to go on causing trouble after he’s dead, don’t you think?’
‘Were you here when he did that railway swindle?’ The first mourner was in unforgiving mood. ‘Not sure whether it was him or his father, now I come to think about it. They bribed the railway surveyor and the railway lawyer to send the bloody railway not through my land or your land where it was supposed to go, but through their land, Candlesby land. Must have made a fortune, the bastards.’
The procession was now halfway towards the mausoleum. Charles Candlesby was keeping an eye on his younger brother.
‘How are you b-b-bearing up, James? Funerals can be quite b-b-beastly sometimes. Only if you care, mind you. Don’t suppose anyone minds at all about Father.’
‘I care,’ said the youngest Candlesby, and began to cry.
‘P-p-please don’t do that, it’ll start me off too. I care too, you know. The whole thing is too horrid for words.’
James took a series of deep breaths, as instructed by one of his doctors. The front of the procession was now filing into the great height of the mausoleum.
‘Have you b-b-been in here b-b-before?’ asked Charles.
James shook his head.
‘It’s quite special, really. If you ever wonder what the p-p-place the Delphic Oracle lived in was like, this is it. I always wonder if the architect had been to Greece and seen the real thing.’
The pallbearers were now lifting the coffin off the hearse and carrying it inside to be placed on a temporary stand while the vicar said a few prayers. Then it was carried down the stairs into the crypt where it was slid into one of the sixty-nine empty niches carved in the walls.
‘We meekly beseech thee, O Father, to raise us from the death of sin unto the life of righteousness; we may rest in him, as our hope is this our brother doth: and that at the general Resurrection in the last day, we may be found acceptable in thy sight; and receive that blessing which thy well-beloved son shall then pronounce saying, Come, ye blessed children of my Father, receive the kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world.’
As the priest’s last words echoed round the low walls of the crypt the pallbearers placed the coffin in its niche, closed the great iron door at the front of the vault and secured it with an enormous padlock. There was a brief moment of silence before they all filed out into the light of day and back down the hill. Richard, the new Earl of Candlesby, was wondering if he could choose which niche to occupy when his time came. Henry and Edward were wondering how soon they could get away to the inn on the outskirts of the village. James had decided to go to his apartment on the top floor where he lived with his medical attendant for a period of quiet. Charles had decided to talk to the neighbours who had come for the funeral. You could never tell, he said to himself, when a little bit of local gossip might not come in useful. The first mourner gave it as his opinion to his neighbour that the chances of the late Earl of Candlesby being received into the Kingdom of Heaven were so remote as to be inconceivable. He would rather, he went on, bet on the nag who pulled his milk churns winning the Grand National.
Five days later Powerscourt received a letter from Lincolnshire written in a rather shaky hand.
‘Dear Lord Powerscourt,’ he read, ‘I wonder if I could ask a great favour of you. It concerns a recent action of mine as a doctor of medicine where I fear I have done the wrong thing. The matter is weighing very heavily on my mind. I do not wish to put the details in a letter, but I have to ask that you should come and call at the above address at your earliest convenience. I have recently contracted this terrible influenza and fear I may not be long for this world. I do so hope that you will be able to come before it is too late. Yours sincerely, Theodore Miller.’
‘My word, Lucy,’ he said, passing her the letter, ‘I’ve heard of deathbed repentances from villains and murderers before, but never from a doctor. It must be some sort of record.’
‘What are you going to do? Do you think this doctor is a mass murderer, wanting to tell you how many citizens of Lincolnshire he has done away with?’
‘We met the chap after the Messiah, at the hotel. Very old character with wispy white hair, if you remember. He seemed perfectly law-abiding to me. God knows what he’s been up to. He was very keen to take my address now I come to think about it. I’d better send him a telegram to say I’m coming and catch a train.’
By the middle of the afternoon Powerscourt was knocking on the door of the doctor’s Georgian villa on the outskirts of Candlesby. The house was large with an enormous garden and a tennis court at the back. The doctor was poorly today, the housekeeper Mrs Baines told him, worse than yesterday and worse than the day before. But, she went on, he had repeatedly asked if Lord Powerscourt was coming and that seemed to bring him some relief. She brought him up to a room with great windows on the first floor where an elderly gentleman sitting up in bed in a red silk dressing gown and bright blue pyjamas was waiting to talk to him.
‘My dear Lord Powerscourt, how very kind of you to come all this way. Did my letter arrive today?’
‘It did.’
‘Then you have made admirable speed. Can you tell me one thing and then we can get down to business?’
Mrs Baines tucked the doctor firmly into his bedclothes and left the room, promising to bring tea in about half an hour. The doctor was deathly pale and a film of perspiration covered his forehead only minutes after the housekeeper had wiped it.
‘I have been making inquiries about you, Lord Powerscourt, and I discover that you have a most remarkable record. But tell me this. I learnt about some of your cases. The last one I came across was the Blickling wedding murder which ended up in the Old Bailey a couple of years back with one brother tried for the murder of another. Is there a more recent case which I have not heard about?’
He paused and panted, as if this speech had taken him close to the limits of endurance. He coughed for a moment or two and lay back on his pillows.
Powerscourt wondered briefly if the old man thought detectives resting between engagements were rather like doctors having a long gap between patients, that it meant their clients no longer trusted them.
‘There have been a couple of cases since then, doctor,’ said Powerscourt with a smile, ‘but I’m afraid I can’t talk about them. They were secret work, work for the government.’
‘I see,’ said the doctor, ‘secret work. That sounds very special.’
Powerscourt had no wish to linger in the shadows of government employment. It had been unpleasant enough while it lasted. ‘Perhaps you could tell me your problem, doctor, the one that brought me here.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said the doctor, wrestling briefly with one of his pillows. ‘Do you know, I’ve thought about this moment such a lot, and now I’m not sure how to begin.’
The doctor paused. Powerscourt waited.
‘It has to do with Lord Candlesby,’ the old man said finally, and another coughing fit struck him, longer than the last.
‘Which one?’ asked Powerscourt as gently as he could.
‘Sorry, my mind isn’t what it was. It has
to do with the one who died while you were here the last time. For the Messiah.’
The doctor looked hopelessly at Powerscourt as if his will could pass on all the information he wanted. Still Powerscourt said nothing.
‘It has to do with the death certificate, you see.’ Powerscourt thought that had taken a great effort. He suddenly thought the matter might be speeded up if he started asking questions rather than imitating the Sphinx.
‘Perhaps you could just tell me, Dr Miller, how you first became involved?’
‘I was called to the stable block at Candlesby Hall round about nine thirty maybe ten o’clock in the morning. I didn’t see what had happened before, but apparently the members of the hunt were all gathered in front of the house. Candlesby himself was dead when I got there, carried up his drive on the back of his horse and covered with blankets.’ The doctor rested once more, his eyes closing for a moment as if to shut out the painful truth.
‘So you didn’t have to treat him in any way? There was nothing to be done?’
‘That’s right,’ said the doctor, looking slightly more cheerful now his story was properly under way. ‘He was dead all right, very dead.’
Powerscourt racked his brains to think what sins the doctor must have committed if he hadn’t had to treat Candlesby at all. Medical negligence seemed out of the question. But
something very serious must have happened to bring him all the way from London. ‘The problem … the problem has to do with the death certificate.’
‘What did you put on the death certificate, doctor?’
Temporary relief for Dr Miller was provided by the arrival of tea. Mrs Baines looked sternly at Powerscourt as she poured two cups. ‘I don’t think you should be tiring the doctor out too much, Lord Powerscourt. I’ll be back in half an hour and then you must let him rest for a while. You can always come back later on or first thing in the morning.’
The doctor refused a scone and a slice of Mrs Baines’ home-made chocolate cake. Powerscourt succumbed.
‘They were all on at me about the death certificate,’ the doctor said as the housekeeper sped out of the room, closing the door firmly behind her.
‘Sorry, who were they?’ said Powerscourt indistinctly through a mouthful of chocolate cake.
‘Sorry,’ said the doctor. ‘The three eldest brothers were on at me.’
‘You’ve lost me,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Could we just go back to where we were before tea? What did you put on the death certificate, Dr Miller?’
There was that beseeching look again. Powerscourt noticed that the doctor’s body was shaking beneath the bedclothes in irregular spasms. He suddenly stared at a print of Venice on his wall, boats swirling round the basin of St Mark, the Doge’s Palace and the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore keeping watch over the waterway. He was whispering now.
‘They made me say – oh, how I wish I’d never agreed to it – they made me say the Earl had died of natural causes.’ Another coughing fit, a fit of remorse maybe, consumed him. Powerscourt thought suddenly that it wasn’t youth, but age, that grows pale and spectre thin and dies.
‘And he hadn’t? Died of natural causes, I mean? Is that right?’ Powerscourt thought he could see the whole thing now. It’s my damned profession, he said to himself. If I weren’t a bloody investigator I wouldn’t be rushing to conclusions so fast.
The doctor nodded miserably.
‘So Lord Candlesby died of unnatural causes then. Was he murdered? Had somebody killed him? And was that why the sons were so keen for you to put natural causes as the cause of death?’
The doctor nodded again. The Venetians in their gondolas and their sailing boats seemed to be bringing little comfort now.
4
‘How was he killed, doctor? You must have had a good look at him.’
‘I can’t tell you that, Lord Powerscourt. They made me swear to keep that secret.’
‘This isn’t a case of a sprained wrist or ingrowing toenails, Dr Miller. We’re talking about the most serious crime on the statute books of England.’
‘I know, I know, but I can’t tell you that. They made me swear.’
Dr Miller coughed violently, spasms shaking his body. Powerscourt took a hasty look at his watch. There were only minutes left before the dragon of a housekeeper was to return.
‘Let me recap if I may, doctor. The hunt was meeting at Candlesby Hall. Before they could start – am I right? – the body was brought up, laid across a horse and covered in blankets.’ The doctor nodded. ‘The corpse is then diverted into the stables away from prying eyes. You are summoned. I presume you inspect the dead man. Then the brothers force you to say he died of natural causes before there is any possibility of a post-mortem and a scandal that will fill the national press for days. Is that right?’
The doctor nodded once more.
‘So who brought the body up to the house? And how many people knew about the real cause of Candlesby’s death?’
Suddenly a light seemed to go out in the doctor’s system. He sank back on his pillows, eyes closed. Powerscourt pulled a black notebook from his pocket and began writing as fast as he could. If he was to make any sense of this strange affair he needed something more concrete than the ramblings of a dying doctor.
‘I, Dr Theodore Miller,’ the words sped from Powerscourt’s pen, ‘do hereby declare that on October the eighth, 1909, I signed a false death certificate. I said that the Earl of Candlesby had died of natural causes. He had not. He was murdered by a person or persons unknown.’
The housekeeper swept back into the room. Dr Miller woke up from his reverie. He smiled at Powerscourt.
‘Please forgive me, Mrs Baines, I beg you to grant us a little more time. Lord Powerscourt and I have nearly finished discussing our business. This business is the most important thing I have to settle before I die. Don’t make that face, please, I know I haven’t long to go. I am a doctor after all.’
‘Very well,’ said Mrs Baines, ‘but not too long now, or you’ll be sorry.’ And with a menacing look at Powerscourt she left the room once more.
‘You know, Lord Powerscourt, it’s a pleasure to talk with an educated and cultivated man like yourself. Most of my friends are dead now, and not many people come to see me these days.’
Powerscourt leant forward towards the bed with his notebook.
‘I’ll sign that for you in a moment, whatever it is,’ the doctor went on. ‘When you get to my age,’ he continued, ‘the past comes in on you like the tide. It just washes away what happened recently, last month, the day before yesterday. I can feel my memory going, you know. Trying to recall what happened a week ago is like trying to pull up a bucket from a well with no bottom to it. Sometimes I think I’m going right back to the beginning. I thought I remembered sitting up in my pram in my parents’ garden the other night. Maybe at the very end we just go right back to where we came in.’
‘That’s very interesting,’ Powerscourt began, but the doctor interrupted him. The beads of sweat were back on his forehead, glistening like dew, and another coughing fit seized him.
‘I know, I know,’ the doctor said at last, ‘you want me to sign this piece of paper.’
He fished about in his bedclothes and put on a pair of very thick spectacles. His face had turned paler yet.
‘This seems satisfactory,’ he said at last and signed it. ‘You must do what you have to do with this document.’ He stopped suddenly as if a great thought had come to him close to the end.
‘Lord Powerscourt,’ he said, ‘will you look into this matter for me? Will you investigate the Candlesby death on my behalf? Think of this as a last commission from a dying man. I shall remember your efforts in my will. It would please me greatly if I could think that my sins are being sorted out. I would not die with such a heavy burden on my shoulders.’
Powerscourt smiled. ‘I should be delighted to accept your commission, doctor. Now, I feel it is time to rest. I fear Mrs Baines will be upon us again at any moment.’
Powerscourt took himself for a long walk on his journey from the doctor’s house to Mr Drake’s hotel where he was to spend the night. This must be one of the most unusual cases he had ever undertaken, commissioned to solve a murder by a doctor who had lied on the death certificate. He was passing the back entrance to Candlesby Hall now, a pair of gate lodges with smoke rising from the chimneys, a prospect of farmland, and a herd of deer in the distance but no sight of the house itself. He was trying to work out what to do. As far as he could tell there were only two people, apart from the murderer, who had seen the dead Earl and must have some idea of what had killed him. But when he considered his own position he was not sure how to proceed. Officially, the death certificate said death by natural causes. If the two people who knew the truth refused to speak, sworn, presumably, to silence in the manner of the doctor, then all he had was a page in a notebook, handwritten, not even typed, which he suspected would have little purchase in the English legal system. If there was no agreement that there had been a murder at all, how could he investigate it? Anybody ill disposed to his efforts, the new Lord Candlesby for instance, could make life very difficult.