Death in a Scarlet Coat

by David Dickinson

  Then there was Powerscourt. Inspector Blunden was very fond of Powerscourt and was glad he was on board. But he did find him difficult on occasion. Blunden’s brain ticked over like on old grandfather clock. Steady. Reliable. Unchanging. The time on its face was always right. Powerscourt’s brain on the other hand, the Inspector felt, was not like that at all. It was mercurial, it darted about, it jumped around. Inspector Blunden doubted if a Powerscourt clock would ever tell the right time. It would look very pretty as some clocks did, but as a timekeeper it would be all over the place. In some ways Powerscourt reminded him of a boy he had known at school. He was no good at the steady subjects, Albert Parker, but he was entranced by history and the romance of old buildings and battles and glory long ago. ‘Show him a castle,’ the history master had once said, ‘and there’ll be a princess locked up in the tower and a sword stuck in a rock that only the once and future King can pull out. Overdeveloped historical imagination, that’s what it is.’ Inspector Blunden knew in his bones that Powerscourt would have one brilliant flash of intuition – the Inspector preferred to call it guesswork – and the case would be over.

  There was only one consoling thought in the Inspector’s heart that morning and she was called Emily and she was three years old, Emily Blunden. She would sit in her father’s lap and demand his total attention before serenading him with ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’, over and over again. The Inspector had impressed upon his wife the need to widen the repertoire, but, so far, ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ was all they were going to get.

  The little garden outside Oliver Bell’s cottage was very tidy. Oliver Bell opened the door in a pair of dark blue trousers and an enormous sweater as if he was about to embark on a long sea voyage. He had a neat black beard and curly hair turning silver at the sides. He looked, Blunden thought, like a self-contained sort of person, one who does not need all that much of the company of his fellow men.

  ‘Good morning, Inspector,’ said Bell. ‘I’ve been expecting you for some time now.’

  The Inspector wondered if he had been derelict in the performance of his duty and would be sacked on his return to the police station.

  ‘I’m sure you can understand my position, Mr Bell.’ The Inspector had squeezed into a chair that was much too small for him. ‘Your father killed in a duel when you were small, your coming back here a year or so ago, revenge always a very clear motive for murder and you a military man too.’

  ‘I can fully see why you might regard me as a suspect, Inspector. In your job I would have done exactly the same. But I have to tell you that I have changed. I am no longer a soldier. I am a pacifist now, a Christian of sorts, a believer in the late writings of Leo Tolstoy and politicians like Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald. I am going to London to work for the Salvation Army when you are finished with me. I did not care to leave until I had spoken with you in case you thought I was guilty and was running away.’

  ‘Can you tell me where you were on the night of the great storm when Lord Candlesby was murdered, Mr Bell?’

  ‘I can indeed, Inspector. I was here apart from an hour spent with my nearest neighbour, a retired clergyman who thought his roof was about to collapse. I was with him for fifty or sixty minutes. I’m sure he would confirm that.’

  ‘Very well, Mr Bell, once I have confirmed that you will be free to leave. Just one other thing. Could I ask you couple of questions if I may?’

  ‘That’s what you people do,’ Bell replied, with a smile.

  ‘What made you change your mind? About the military, I mean. You had a very distinguished career in the army after all.’

  Oliver Bell stared blankly at the Inspector as if he had travelled to some faraway veldt or a distant hill station in Rajasthan.

  ‘I killed too many people,’ he said finally. ‘Sorry if that sounds gruesome. I must have killed hundreds and hundreds of people in my time in the army. Most of the time you never see them, your victims I mean. Near the end I did see three people I’d shot that very morning. One had been shot in the chest and his blood was everywhere. One had been shot in the belly and his guts were hanging out over his stomach like something in a butcher’s shop. The third had been hit in the forehead and his brains were all over the others. Flies and other insects were all buzzing around for the feast. Man reduced to a treat for the smallest and least significant of God’s creatures. I only killed two people after that. Most of the time I aimed too high or too wide.’

  ‘I think you are a very brave man,’ said the Inspector. ‘My final question is this. Did you see or hear of anything round about the time of these murders that might help us find the killer?’

  Oliver Bell thought for a moment. ‘Just one thing, Inspector, and it could be nothing. Early in the afternoon on the day of the great storm I’d come back from Lincoln on the train. I’d been to the cathedral to hear a talk about the cloisters. It always refreshes me, Lincoln Cathedral. Every time I go there I think we don’t deserve to be exposed to such beauty. Carlton Lawrence, the middle one of that family who had to sell up recently, he was coming out of the railway station. He looked rather nervous, as if he had just done something wrong or was about to do something he shouldn’t. He kept looking around him as if he didn’t want to be recognized. As I say, it could be nothing, Inspector.’

  Oliver Bell watched the policeman go. I didn’t think that would be so easy, he said to himself. Much easier than I thought. He went inside and began to pack his bags.

  Edward Nathaniel, Earl of Candlesby, referred to by his detractors as the Wicked Earl, had been restored to the room he created at the end of the eighteenth century. Powerscourt and the butler had brought him up two flights of stairs from his place on the dining-room wall next to the second Earl. Only Powerscourt had actually carried the portrait into the room. He was now ensconced on one of the two easels by the window. Powerscourt checked the various copies he had discovered and found that there were two pictures where Candlesby had painted himself as a copy of the Caravaggio original. One was of a saint often depicted in religious paintings. St Jerome is old and losing his hair. He is engaged in copying out the Vulgate, wearing a deep red robe as far as his waist. A skull and a candlestick and a mirror remind us that death is never far away, the very items that Powerscourt had discovered in the cupboard. Powerscourt suspected that Candlesby put the original painting on one easel and his own canvas on the other. When he had copied all the background, he had removed the original and aligned the large mirror on the easel in such a way that he could paint his own reflection on to the canvas. He was wearing the red robe Powerscourt had found in the cupboard, and the skull was nearby as it had been in the Caravaggio version. Unlike the real Caravaggio, there was little life and no energy in it. It was, Powerscourt thought, a poor thing.

  But the others, what of the others? Did Candlesby know that Caravaggio used contemporary models from the street or the tavern or the house next door? Would they have told him that in those art galleries in Rome?

  He rearranged the Caravaggio canvases once more and discovered that there was a clear sequence of paintings about Christ’s last days, the flagellation of Christ, Ecce Homo or Here is the Man, the crowning with thorns, all concerned with Jesus being scourged and shown to the multitude by Pontius Pilate.

  Powerscourt found three copies by the former owner of the house. He stared at them for a long time. None of these men was Candlesby himself. The models being flogged or crowned with thorns were all different people. Were they locals? Had Candlesby simply selected them from his labourers or his servants to act as models for his grisly hobby? Had he ordered them up here, beaten them or flogged them to the required degree and made them sit or stand or be twisted round a pillar, their wounds still bleeding so the paint would look fresh on the canvas? Christ in heaven.

  Powerscourt staggered back from the Candlesby paintings and found himself in a dark corner with an enormous cupboard he had not seen before. He pulled very carefully at the door. It seemed to have been locked. Powerscourt ve
nted his rage on the lower panels and kicked the door down. There were two smaller groups of paintings on opposite sides of the door panel. Leaning across the back of the cupboard was a tall piece of wood, eight or nine feet tall. He pulled it into the light. There was another shorter piece of wood joined to it about two-thirds of the way up. This shape had been used in the ancient states of Persia and Greece and Macedonia. It was employed widely in ancient Rome. Six thousand of Spartacus’s slaves were hung on them along the Appian Way after the end of the revolt. Jesus Christ ended his life on one of them. The object in the cupboard on the top floor of Candlesby Hall was a cross, the holiest, the best known, the most powerful symbol of the Christian faith on earth.

  Two old people and one four-year-old child had already died from the influenza in the village of Candlesby when Lady Lucy Powerscourt went to help. She was careful at the beginning not to make any suggestions and not to put herself forward. She told the women of the village that she was happy to be useful in any way she could, whatever would be most helpful to them. The women with the sick families were short of time. When their parents and their children were sick at the same time they were stretched to breaking point. So Lady Lucy found herself dividing her time between the very young and the very old. She read to the children, old stories from her childhood, stories she had told to her own children when they were the same age as the Candlesby ones. More stories were ordered, to be sent express from Hatchard’s in London. When the children were too hot, or delirious, she would stroke their faces and hold their hands and whisper softly to them. Sometimes when she thought they were on the verge of death she found it very hard not to break down.

  The Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost was seen a lot in the village, carrying supplies, fetching medicines, ferrying the doctor to and fro. Lady Lucy had ordered provisions to be despatched from Mr Drake’s hotel, soup and fresh bread and roast chickens and fruit. Children who were only mildly afflicted by the influenza would be carried out to the great car with its gleaming silver bonnet, heavily wrapped up, and allowed to sit beside Rhys and inspect the controls for a couple of minutes. None of them had ever seen a motor car before. Every child in the village was promised a proper ride in the Ghost when they were better.

  The social life had broken down most severely for the old, most of them female. In normal times their daughters would come to call, or their grandchildren, or their nephews or nieces. They would eat with the rest of the family in the house of one of their children. Now the mothers who cooked had their hands full with sick children, the grandchildren were laid low by the influenza and the neighbours were either confined to bed themselves or on nursing duty elsewhere. Lady Lucy would call on as many as she could find time for, making endless cups of tea, bringing bowls of soup or fresh chicken sandwiches. They were shy of her at first, the old ladies of Candlesby, but they soon realized that, though the externals of their lives were so very different, the central core was the same: children, husbands, family, home. After a couple of days Lady Lucy would ask them about the men they had loved, the men they had married, the men they wished they had married, the men they wished they had never seen. The stronger of them would smile and ask her the same questions back. Some of the old ladies were rambling at the height of the influenza, their minds wandering, their speech virtually unintelligible. Lady Lucy stroked their hands just the same and made more tea. It was only later that she realized some of the things she was hearing might not just be the ramblings of the very sick. Was the key to the mystery of Candlesby Hall being revealed to her in small and unconnected batches as the diseased and the dying referred unwittingly in their ravings to things they would never have mentioned when they were well?

  Powerscourt was now very angry indeed. He had pulled out the cross and found various marks in various places he did not like at all. In both lots of paintings, Caravaggios and Candlesbys, there was one disciple crucified upright and one crucified upside down. There was Christ being laid in the tomb, a dead Saviour who looked very dead indeed. Had Candlesby waited for a corpse to paint that particular scene? Surely he couldn’t have killed the man just to have a model for the painting. Had he stolen the corpse from the undertakers? There were various severed heads he didn’t care for either, quite apart from Judith with the head of Holofernes. There was Salome with the head of John the Baptist, David with the head of Goliath, both particularly bloody and realistic, blood dripping artistically from the severed necks, eyes staring in astonishment that death dared take them out of the frames of their lives.

  Powerscourt’s brain was reeling now. He didn’t know what to believe. At best, you could assume that the old Earl had rented various locals to model for his imitations of the Caravaggios he had bought on the Grand Tour. But there were other, darker possibilities. The models might have been abused or beaten up or scourged or had their heads cut off. People of all sorts had told him that the Candlesbys were eccentric, that they beat their children, that they refused to speak to their sons and daughters and communicated only by letter, that children could be thrown out for not standing up when their father came into the room. This older Candlesby was undoubtedly of that tradition. Powerscourt suddenly remembered the butler and indeed Charles Candlesby himself refusing to come into the Caravaggio chamber. What did these Candlesbys think their fellow men were for? They were to be exploited, robbed, used, whatever the masters wanted. For the masters owned the servants and the tenants and the farm labourers as they might own a cart or a horse or a field or a house. They were just one more possession to be used at will.

  God knows what rumours had circulated in times gone by. Maybe a William had gone up to the house to model for a holy painting and never returned. An Albert came back with the most terrible weals on his back, so weak and in so much pain he could hardly speak. A Peter said he had been hung upside down on a cross and left for hours. As he bundled the pictures and the props back into the cupboards a terrible thought struck Powerscourt. Maybe these weren’t stories or myths of the Candlesby past. Maybe they were all true.

  17

  Powerscourt’s brain was reeling as he rushed down the three flights of stairs from the top floor of Candlesby Hall. Some flying creature, possibly a bat, brushed his face as he sped past. Other demons rattled through his brain as he tried to make sense of the awful sights up there, looking out over the lake and the Candlesby fields. He managed to leave the house without having to speak to a single living soul and walked at top speed round the edges of the park. The deer watched him from afar, their lives largely peaceful, their great trusting eyes untroubled by the ghosts of flagellation and martyrdom from long ago. When he reached the hotel he found Lady Lucy sitting by the window in their room, staring sadly out at the bare trees and the flat landscape.

  ‘Oh, Francis!’ She rushed into his arms. ‘Thank God you’ve come. It’s very sad down there in the village. I don’t know if they’re going to come through.’

  ‘Are all of them ill?’ asked Powerscourt. He had already resolved not to tell Lady Lucy about the terrible things in the Caravaggio room.

  ‘Well, not all of them. I should say about a quarter of the able-bodied men, slightly less for the women, thank God. It’s the children and the old people who are worst affected. I feel for them all, you know, Francis. Not that I’d ever say anything, there’s too much to do with the watching by the bedsides and stroking their foreheads or wiping their faces and trying to speak comforting things to them. You’d think you wouldn’t feel so bad with the old ladies. They’ve had their time in a way, they’ve got married and brought up their children and done whatever women do in a village like that. Some of them seem ready to go, you know. But others are fighting for life. Even when they’re tossing and turning in their rickety beds you can still catch a look that says, I’m not going to go yet, not if I can help it.

  ‘The worst thing with the children is that they don’t know what’s happening to them. Oh, they’ll listen to the stories we tell them and manage a little smile from time to time. But
for a lot of the day they just look hurt and confused. They’ve never been ill in their lives so far, not seriously ill I mean, and it’s terrible for them. Why can’t they get out of bed and cause trouble as they usually do? Why can’t they go out and run about in the fields? Why are they stuck in these beds, the sweat pouring off their bodies and the coughs racking their little chests? Nobody told them these were the rules.’

  ‘I’m sure you are a great comfort to them, Lucy. I must leave you for a few minutes. I have a naughty plan to bring Jack Hayward back. I must bring Blunden on board and then we can send a telegram.’

  Lady Lucy watched him go. She knew that she would continue with her nursing in Candlesby village until the influenza had passed. She didn’t tell her husband about the ravings of the elderly ladies.

  Powerscourt found Inspector Blunden in cheerful mood, making copperplate doodles at his desk.

  ‘I’m feeling more cheerful about the case, my lord. God knows why. There’s no reason for it, but I just feel we’re going to win through.’

  ‘Let me try to enlist your support in a stratagem that would bring Jack Hayward back. I don’t think you’ll like it one little bit, but think of the prize, the man who brought the corpse back, the man who saw the battered face, the man who left the scene at record speed.’