Death in a Scarlet Coat

by David Dickinson

  How many guards were there on the train on its way south to King’s Cross?

  Powerscourt could hear the questions and answers like the distant responses of a church congregation at matins. He was making his way to the death train, as he had heard one of the young signalmen refer to it, down the main platform to the south, parked on a siding next to the main line. Two constables greeted him warmly. The very young one burst into speech.

  ‘Please, Lord Powerscourt, sir, could I come with you, sir, and watch you as you work? I’m Police Constable Andrew Merrick, sir, from Skegness, sir. Detective Inspector Blunden knows I want to be a detective, sir.’

  Powerscourt thought you could almost hear the words ‘when I grow up’ at the end of the sentence. The young man didn’t look much more than sixteen though he couldn’t be admitted into the Lincolnshire Constabulary until he was eighteen. The older representative of the law nodded benignly at his colleague.

  ‘There’s no harm in the boy, my lord,’ he said, ‘though he does get very excited about violent crime and murder and that’s a fact.’

  ‘Come along then,’ said Powerscourt, with a smile. ‘Let’s make our way to the carriage where he was killed.’

  There was a third policeman by the door into the compartment. He inspected Powerscourt briefly. ‘I’ve seen you up at the Hall with the Detective Inspector, sir. You must be Lord Powerscourt. I presume you want to see the murder carriage, sir.’ With that the policeman unlocked the door and turned on a light switch. The compartment was like a sitting room in a gentlemen’s club in London. Great red armchairs were scattered about the carriage with two little writing tables. At the far end from the policeman were a couple of doors to let the passengers in and out. Powerscourt saw that one of the chairs was totally out of position, parked right up against the side of the carriage. There were faint marks at the top of the chair and footprints etched deep into the carpet.

  ‘Was this where he was killed, my lord, sir?’ Young Andrew Merrick was whispering, his face pale against the harsh electric light.

  Powerscourt was down on the floor, looking ever so keenly at the various foot marks. ‘Yes, I think it is,’ he said. ‘Now then, young Andrew, come down here and look at these footprints. How many feet would you say there were? Four? Six? What do you think?’

  ‘Would I be right in thinking, my lord, that four would mean there were only two men here, the Earl and the murderer? But six would mean three men, the Earl, the murderer and his accomplice?’

  ‘We’ll make a Sherlock Holmes out of you before we’re finished,’ said Powerscourt. ‘You’re absolutely right. I think there were two killers here earlier today. You see, Andrew, it’s very hard, but not impossible, for one man to garrotte another on his own. You try creeping up behind me with an imaginary piece of wire in your hand.’

  There was a brief but conclusive struggle. Andrew was possibly over-anxious about killing such an eminent personage as Powerscourt. At any event he ended up on the floor.

  ‘Think of it like this, young Andrew.’ Powerscourt was brushing the dust off his suit.’ ‘If there are two of you, one man has to hold the victim’s arms still, probably behind his back. Then the other can proceed with the actual garrotting.’

  He stepped back from the area around the chairs and inspected the floor once more. ‘Don’t suppose our murdering friends will have left their piece of wire or whatever it was behind them.’ He moved away from the area where the struggle had taken place and stood looking at the door for a long time.

  ‘Lord Powerscourt, sir,’ young Andrew was back in the hunt, ‘do you think the killers stayed on the train all the way to London, sir? Wouldn’t it be a bit strange to have to spend the journey with a man you’d just killed?’

  ‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, ‘there are a number of possibilities. The door to the rest of the train was certainly locked. They could, as you say, have remained on the train all the way to King’s Cross. Or they could have killed him before the train left. Or they could have jumped off the train some place where it had slowed down. Whichever way it was done, it would seem likely that the killers were wearing the uniform of the Great Northern Railway.’

  Powerscourt put his hand to the door that led to the outside world. It opened easily. There were no clues as to whether somebody might have jumped out of it in the past twenty-four hours.

  ‘See here,’ said Powerscourt, whipping out a notebook and making drawings of the position of the chairs where the struggle had occurred, ‘I want you to go back to the waiting room and the stationmaster’s office where the interviews are taking place. I want you to bring back the man who drove this train to London and the senior guard on the special train. Quick now, as quick as you can.’

  ‘Yes, sir, Lord Powerscourt, sir.’

  Five minutes later young Andrew was back. ‘Mr Jones, the driver, sir. Mr Smith, sir, the senior guard, sir.’ Both were in their early thirties, Jones painfully thin, Smith more corpulent as if he partook liberally of the various meals on offer to his richer travellers. Both looked to Powerscourt as if they would be steady under fire.

  ‘Thank you both very much for coming over,’ Powerscourt began. ‘This shouldn’t take very long although I may want you to do something for us in the morning. Now then, Mr Smith, how many guards did you have on the special train this morning?’

  ‘Two, sir, and myself. Even that was probably too many. There were only three passengers on the train.’

  ‘And were your two men in this carriage at any time before and during the journey?’

  ‘No, sir, they were not. We had strict instructions to leave the gentleman in here – Lord somebody or other, wasn’t he? – on his own.’

  ‘So not even at the beginning of the journey, before the train actually left, were there any people other than the dead man in here as far as you know?’

  Smith looked puzzled. ‘No, sir, there were not.’

  ‘Let me tell you, gentlemen, and I would ask you to keep this under your hats for the present, there must have been two people in here, probably at the start. They may have been wearing GNR uniform so as not to attract attention. I suspect they entered the carriage by the door on the opposite side of the platform where the train would shield them from view. If there’s a problem with how they got in there’s an even bigger problem with how they got out. Mr Smith, you didn’t see another two guards in uniform get off the train at King’s Cross, did you?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Could they have slipped off the train without being seen?’

  ‘It’s possible, sir, just possible. We have to clear everything away as soon as the train has arrived – plates, glasses, cups and so on. That’s why the guards are usually the last people to leave the train.’

  ‘Excuse me, sir, Lord Powerscourt, sir,’ – young Andrew was joining the grown-ups, – ‘wouldn’t they have killed the Earl near the start of the journey? Otherwise he could have called for assistance, or tried to escape into another carriage, sir.’

  Mr Jones looked closely at the young policeman. He hadn’t finished yet.

  ‘As I said before, sir, would they have wanted to stay in the carriage all that time with a corpse, sir, Lord Powerscourt, sir?’

  ‘I was just coming to that,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Mr Jones, you must know this line better than anybody. Are there any stretches where you have to slow down, so that a man could jump out without killing himself?’

  ‘Before I answer that, my lord, can I ask why they didn’t just tip the body out of the door once they had killed him?’

  ‘My answer to that, Mr Jones, is that I don’t know. Maybe they thought the body might be discovered before the train reached London and a hue and cry would begin sooner than they would have wanted. Though why they should refrain from throwing the dead man out of the carriage and then throw themselves out of it I have no idea. But come, Mr Jones, are there places where the jumping could have been done?’

  Archibald Jones took a long time fiddling with h
is pipe and getting it to draw. ‘I have been thinking about your requirements while we talked,’ he began. ‘The obvious place to jump would be as we draw close to King’s Cross. There are always red signals there for no apparent reason. But you would have to work out the likelihood of meeting a train coming the other way. You could very easily get yourself killed. The other train might be on you before you knew it was there. There is another place you might jump, on the northern outskirts of Peterborough. The problem there is that the track runs along very close to rows of terraced houses. I don’t think you would be in much danger of being killed by a train coming the other way, but the chances of being seen would be considerable. Two men in the uniform of the Great Northern Railway could cause quite a stir. So I don’t think Peterborough would be the answer.’

  Jones the driver drew hard on his pipe and blew a great cloud of smoke across the compartment. Just like one of his engines, Powerscourt thought. Maybe he’s going to get under way in a minute.

  ‘There is just one place where I think it might be possible,’ Jones went on, ‘and that’s on the way into Spalding. Before the town, while you’re still in open country, there’s a cutting with thick grass and brambles and weeds and loads of blackberries in the autumn. You could throw yourself into that and hope the grass and general undergrowth would check your fall. There’s a road into the town a hundred yards away.’

  ‘And you wouldn’t be overlooked?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘What speed would the train be travelling at?’ asked Powerscourt, suddenly remembering some hazardous leaps in the past with Johnny Fitzgerald.

  ‘I should think about ten to twelve miles an hour, my lord.’

  ‘Could you take me there in the morning? In this train with the same carriages?’

  ‘I’m sure I could, my lord. I’ll just have to clear it with the stationmaster in the morning.’

  Powerscourt felt a tugging on his arm and a low but insistent cough.

  Young Andrew was not to be denied. ‘Lord Powerscourt, sir, Mr Jones, sir, what about the door? I was told it was closed when the train reached London. How did they close the door after they’d jumped out of it?’

  Powerscourt strode over to the door. Before he reached it Jones gave him the answer.

  ‘It opens outwards, my lord, the door, I mean.’

  Powerscourt flung open the door and stared at the railway lines of the Great Northern Railway, a few stray carriages dotted about the tracks. A dull murmur could be heard coming from the stationmaster’s office as the interviews went on. He thought about a trial jump but realized that it wouldn’t tell him anything. Stationary leaps were just not the same.

  Twenty minutes later he was conferring with Inspector Blunden.

  ‘I’ll get all these interviews typed up in the morning, my lord,’ said Blunden. ‘It would seem from what you learnt and what one or two people here said, that two people entered the Candlesby carriage at some point before the train left the station. Can’t think how they persuaded him to let them stay. They may have had keys. Anyway, once the train left the station, I would say, they killed him.’

  ‘We won’t know about the jump until tomorrow,’ said Powerscourt. ‘But do you suppose they knew the line well enough to decide where to jump? And were they staff members of the Great North Railway? Or were they impostors? And if so, where did they get the uniforms? And, more important, how did they know where to jump off?’

  ‘I’m going to ask the stationmaster to inquire about the uniforms tomorrow. And he said, my lord, that it’s perfectly fine to take the train down the line tomorrow, but he can’t let it go until half past two in the afternoon. He muttered something about signals.’

  ‘Half past two would be fine,’ said Powerscourt. ‘May I take young Andrew with me? He might make a better fist of jumping into the undergrowth than me. Did anybody who noticed the two fake guards mention what age they might be? If they were over fifty I can’t see them leaping out of trains.’

  ‘There were two people’, said the Inspector, checking his notebook, ‘who noticed them, or thought they might have noticed them. But they made no comment at all on how old they might have been.’

  Lady Lucy had been persisting loyally with her Lincolnshire ladies’ lunches. They had, she felt, become rather a strain. There had been one where all the guests combined to claim a vicar as the murderer. Other candidates had been denounced, a Justice of the Peace, Lincolnshire’s biggest landowner, a doctor who was widely suspected of murdering his patients. Her guest on this day had insisted on coming alone. Rachel Cameron was a tall good-looking woman of about forty years of age with dark brown hair and a bossy manner. She made interesting but inconsequential small talk until they had finished the fish. When the waiter had cleared the plates away she made her move. She leaned forward in her chair and fixed Lady Lucy with a conspiratorial stare.

  ‘Lady Powerscourt, I’m sure you must have heard some pretty incredible stories about the murder of Lord Candlesby. The women in these parts don’t have enough to do, so gossip and fantasy take the place of charity work or improving the lives of one’s tenants.’ She made it sound as if she, Rachel Cameron, lived on a higher plane than the ladies of Horncastle or Ingoldmells. ‘I’m sure you will have heard of the terrible fate of Lady Flavia Melville last summer.’

  ‘The poor woman who was having an affair with the Earl and committed suicide after their love letters were sent to her husband?’

  Mrs Cameron nodded. ‘I happen to know rather a lot about that affair. You see, I was very close to Flavia Melville, as she became after her marriage. I think I was probably her only friend in the county. It must have been so strange, living here surrounded by these philistines after a German university town. She used to say that the conversations were so different. She had replaced the pursuit of knowledge with the pursuit of the fox.’

  Mrs Cameron paused for a moment. Lady Lucy said nothing. ‘Her husband was perfectly polite, perfectly pleasant. But that was all there was. You know how you wonder with some people if the public persona is a facade, an invented personality? Flavia was deceived by the English customs. She once told me her husband’s good manners were a facade hiding an abyss, that there was nothing behind them, nothing at all. It was, she said, like being married to a clothes horse that could speak a few stock phrases, nothing more. I think Sir Arthur began to irritate her intensely after about six months of marriage. I remember her coming to my house one day in the spring and walking up and down the garden saying, “What am I to do?” over and over again. I don’t suppose many married women begin affairs out of exasperation with their husbands; perhaps they do. John was so very different from her husband. Decisive, arrogant, determined to take what he wanted without paying any bills, and I don’t mean the bills you can settle with money. I don’t think he treated her very well – he didn’t know how. That might have been part of the appeal. For some people being beaten up, literally or metaphorically, can be very attractive.’

  She paused again. ‘You do understand what I’m saying, Lady Powerscourt? I’m not just talking to myself?’

  ‘Not at all, certainly not,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Please continue.’ They waited for the waiter to refill their glasses with Mr Drake’s finest Quincy.

  ‘She changed so much during the months of their affair. She hadn’t seemed particularly attractive before. People said Sir Arthur must have been pretty desperate to marry her. But now she glowed. She radiated a devil-may-care kind of happiness. I often thought Sir Arthur must realize something was going on but he didn’t, or if he did he wasn’t saying.’

  She took a sip of her wine. ‘Now we come to the end,’ she said. ‘I have never told anybody what I am about to tell you now, Lady Powerscourt. Most of it Flavia told me, some of it on a midnight trip to my house which lasted until the dawn and the little birds began chirping in the garden. Candlesby wanted her to go and live with him. He was desperate for her to do so. Flavia said she needed time. Candlesby was completely beso
tted. He refused to let the matter drop. This stalemate lasted a week. Then the letters started.

  ‘One day somebody sends Flavia copies of half the love letters she’s ever written to John, Lord Candlesby. The next day they send copies of half of the letters he’s sent to her to John. There was a pause in the letters the third day. But on the fourth day the somebody, presumably the same somebody, sends all the love letters, all hers to him, all his to her, to Sir Arthur. It was terrible. People have always thought the servants can’t have approved of her affair; people said that the servants knew where the letters were kept so they made copies and took a terrible revenge. But that was not the case. This is the secret at the heart of the tragedy that only a couple of people know. It’s so terrible it’s hard to believe.’

  For a moment Mrs Cameron looked as though she might break down in the midst of her narrative but she steadied herself.

  ‘Candlesby wouldn’t take no for an answer. He was determined to bring her to Candlesby Hall as his mistress if she wouldn’t divorce Sir Arthur and marry him. And this is the worst part. This is why she came to see me in the middle of the night after another row with her lover. She told me that it was John who sent the first two lots of love letters. This was before the whole lot were sent to Sir Arthur. He told her he would send them all to Sir Arthur if she didn’t agree to leave him. You could see the twisted logic behind it all. If Sir Arthur found out about the affair through these letters then he might throw her out. Why not avoid the distress by leaving anyway? What she had always found upsetting was the difference in the letters. The ones he sent to her might have been to his estate manager or the butler, filled with details of arrangements and the dates of meetings. The ones she had written to him on the other hand were passionate outpourings about the happiness he had brought her and how she couldn’t wait to see him again. Even Sir Arthur, she said, sitting on a bench by the lake in our garden at three o’clock in the morning, even he would realize that this was a woman he did not know, one who had never spoken to him in those terms or spun so many words of love.’