Death in a Scarlet Coat

by David Dickinson

  ‘Chukka Richardson?’ he said. ‘Damn fine polo player, Chukka, damn fine.’

  ‘The same,’ replied Powerscourt. ‘On a number of occasions we would be summoned to his quarters, my colleague and I. Either we would propose a scheme to the general, or he would propose a venture to us. Always he would make it very clear what he wanted done. But he never issued a direct order. Nothing was ever put down on paper.’

  Powerscourt looked closely at the Chief Constable to see if any light of understanding, even a glimmer, was visible. He saw nothing that pleased him. Bertram Willoughby-Lewis’ face was as blank as a sheet of fresh notepaper. ‘The general used to say that some damned fool in Whitehall might start asking questions if things were written down. He had a very low opinion of the damn fools in Whitehall, General Richardson. So we would carry out his orders. We never told him any of the details of the operations. He made it clear he never wanted to know. We went about our business. He stayed in his tent. The natives were confounded. Everybody was happy. The gentlemen of Whitehall would not have been happy but they were not there.’

  ‘That’s all very interesting, Powerscourt,’ said the Chief Constable, ‘always fond of a good story myself, but I don’t see what the North-West Frontier has to do with dead Candlesbys here in Lincolnshire. I say again, tell me about your secret source. There’s no time to waste, man. We need to press on.’

  God in heaven, thought Powerscourt. The Chief Constable was remarkably stupid, even for a military man.

  ‘The reason, my dear Chief Constable, why our military operations in India were so successful is that nobody knew about them. Nobody could get in the way.’ Meaning, people like you, he muttered to himself. ‘This secret source is so delicate that anybody interfering with it could destroy it completely. It must be left to work at its own pace and in its own way. I believe it will help us solve the mystery, but not if it is interfered with. It is like a watch that will function perfectly as long as nobody tinkers with the mechanism.’

  ‘Damn it, man, you are insubordinate. I demand to know.’

  ‘And I’, said Powerscourt with a smile, ‘refuse to tell you.’

  ‘I could have you arrested, damn it,’ spluttered the Chief Constable.

  ‘I don’t think you would find that very helpful,’ said Powerscourt. ‘You’d lose all access to the secret source that may solve the mystery.’

  A temporary pause in the confrontation came when a messenger hurried in to remind the Chief Constable that he had to return to Lincoln at once for a grand dinner with the dean and chapter of the cathedral. He picked up his papers and his cane and shuffled to the door.

  ‘Mark my words, Powerscourt, you haven’t heard the end of this.’

  Powerscourt was so incensed with the ridiculous man’s behaviour that he fired straight back. ‘Neither have you!’

  Blunden and Powerscourt did not speak until they were back in the Inspector’s office. ‘My God, my lord, I shouldn’t think anybody’s spoken to him like that in years. And thank you for taking the heat off me, my lord. I am most grateful.’

  ‘Think nothing of it, my friend. I am perfectly serious about this secret source. I wouldn’t have mentioned it except for the fact that anybody with half a brain would have left us to get on with it rather than strutting about demanding to know what it is. Stupid man!’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about this source, my lord,’ said Blunden. ‘I was thinking about it in there. I don’t want to know anything about it. I don’t want any names; I don’t want any information at all. That way I can tell the Chief Constable that I don’t know anything about it with a clear conscience.’

  ‘I think that’s sensible for the time being, actually, very sensible, if you don’t mind my saying so. No offence. I don’t think I’d tell the Chief Constable the time of day, if he asked me, after that display. Very well, Inspector, but there are a number of things I think you could have ready to go when I give you the word.’

  Powerscourt spoke for a couple of minutes. After he had finished, Blunden whistled softly and began making elaborate notes in his book in his finest copperplate.

  Lady Lucy hoped to speak to her husband before she set off for another session with the sick of Candlesby. She knew that he had been thinking of something he wanted her to do, but he had said he wanted more time to think about it. She was a couple of paces outside the hotel with an enormous basket on her arm, looking, she felt, rather like Little Red Riding Hood, when the Silver Ghost whispered into view.

  ‘Hop in,’ said a familiar voice, ‘and I’ll take you down. I’ve just had a set-to with that stupid Chief Constable. Bloody fool threatened to have me arrested.’

  ‘That would have been a first,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘first time you’d have been arrested, I mean, rather than you arresting the murderer. It might have been rather interesting, Francis, the inside of a cell, that sort of thing, prison food, those fashionable prison clothes.’

  Powerscourt laughed. ‘I’ll tell you about it later, my love. If the men in uniform should come to take me away, Lucy, send word to Charles Augustus Pugh to get here as fast as he can and have me sprung from the jail. And send word to Rosebery as well. Former Prime Ministers are always good to have on board in a crisis. I think the Chief Constable might not be happy in a very short time. Anyway, I’ve always wondered what prison food is like. Seriously, Lucy, this is what I want to suggest with your old ladies. We have just a small collection of words or phrases from their ramblings so far that might be relevant. I cannot emphasize enough that you must exercise your own judgement about what I’m suggesting. If you hear one of those words again or a different word that you think might be relevant, try asking a question. Where did the money come from? Why is the sail important, that sort of thing. I simply don’t know enough to imagine what their response might be. You must feel your way, Lucy. If you think it’s not working, just back off.’

  A crowd of Candlesby children had gathered round the Silver Ghost as it purred into the village. They gave a ragged cheer when Lady Lucy got out. She was already a heroine to them. Powerscourt opened up the bonnet and showed the children the engine. One small boy wanted to know how it worked. Powerscourt had to confess that he didn’t know. He said he didn’t know how a horse worked either. But he promised to send Rhys, the butler cum chauffeur, the next time. Rhys knew how the Silver Ghost worked. He knew how horses worked too. Rhys had piles of motoring magazines by his bed at home. He rather missed them up here in Lincolnshire.

  Lady Lucy was taken in hand by the two ladies who organized the nursing in Candlesby village. They were known to her as Maggie and Mary and didn’t appear to have any surnames. The young ones were nearly all recovered, they told her; only one little girl was left on the danger list. But three new old ladies had been taken sick, and one of them was already very ill indeed. Lady Lucy was taken first to see Will, the little boy she had entertained with the cat story. He gave her a big hug when she came in and asked after Christopher and Juliet. Lady Lucy had told him about her twins, who were more or less the same age. Will told her the doctor had said he could get up for an hour the next day. Will was looking forward to that. Then she was taken to Bertha, the old lady who was very ill. Her bedroom was so small there was scarcely room for another grown-up. Lady Lucy perched on the edge of the bed and mopped the old lady’s face. She was sweating profusely and muttering into her pillow. ‘No shoes,’ Lady Lucy heard two or three times. She had resolved to write everything down now in case Francis could find a meaning where she couldn’t. Bertha dozed off for a minute or two, holding desperately on to Lady Lucy’s hand. When she woke up she looked briefly at her visitor and sank back on the pillow. Lady Lucy had noticed that none of the old ladies ever had more than one pillow. Strange sounds came from Bertha now that might have been muffled screams. She tossed about as if her life depended upon it. ‘Wind,’ she said suddenly, ‘great wind.’ A pause and then she said, ‘Poor Lucy, poor Lucy.’ Lady Lucy thought it generous of the old lady to sympa
thize with her in her hours of nursing. ‘Men,’ Bertha said now, ‘men.’

  Lady Lucy thought that she might try a question.

  ‘Which men, Bertha?’ She spoke very softly and stroked the old lady’s forehead once more. It was burning hot. ‘Which men?’ she tried again. The old lady began to speak. ‘Men,’ she said, ‘men.’ Lady Lucy kept quiet now. It didn’t seem as if the questions were going to work. She would try again later. Bertha was now deeply asleep, snoring vigorously. Lady looked at the sheets that had seen better days, at the dirt ingrained on the floorboards and the accumulated grime on the walls and on the small window that looked out over the main street. Cleanliness is next to godliness, she remembered some grown-up telling her when she was small. Well, God should come down here and clean the whole village. He could probably do it in a minute or less if he set his mind to it, Lady Lucy thought. As the night fell the old lady began muttering again. ‘Shoes,’ she said, and ‘Wind.’ Only by leaning very close could Lady Lucy hear the other words, ‘Pay the doctor, pay the doctor,’ over and over again.

  This time she met no Charles Candlesby on her way home. Powerscourt wrote all the words down in his own notebook.

  George Drake, manager of the Candlesby Arms, was a very worried man. He had checked the barometer in his reception area five times that morning. The message was bad. There was going to be another storm. One of his porters, a man who had lived with Candlesby weather for over sixty years, man and boy, prophesied that it would be worse than the last one. So George Drake toured the breakfast tables in the dining room, warning his guests what was to come and asking them to make sure that all their windows were securely fastened. At one of his tables, the one by the window, he had different news to impart first.

  ‘Lord Powerscourt, Lady Powerscourt, Johnny Fitzgerald, you will remember the strange message with the even stranger spelling delivered to you here some days ago? And the GNR jackets dumped in the corridor outside your room? That is all sorted out now. The practical joker has been told that if he ever tries anything like that in my hotel again he will be fired. Immediately. You can regard the matter as closed.’

  ‘Very good, Mr Drake. Thank you for clearing that up. Now what of this weather? Is it going to be bad?’

  George Drake nodded. ‘Oh, yes, very bad.’

  The news was greeted with great interest.

  ‘Another storm then? A bad one?’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, pausing briefly in the demolition of a kipper.

  ‘Probably worse than the last one,’ said George Drake, moving off to spread more bad news.

  ‘How interesting, how very interesting,’ said Powerscourt, in the middle of a poached egg.

  ‘Do you think we should, Francis?’ said Johnny.

  ‘I’m sure of it, certain.’

  ‘Should we go now, or wait till it’s really got going?’

  ‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I think we should finish our breakfast first. We can take the Ghost the first part of the way.’

  ‘I’ll bring my stuff,’ said Johnny, referring to the strange collection of implements that enabled him to gain entrance to most of the locked doors in the kingdom. ‘Just in case.’

  Lady Lucy had often seen her husband and Johnny Fitzgerald finish each other’s sentences but this display of telepathy was new. They seemed to be reading each other’s minds. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ she said, ‘but do you mind telling me what you are thinking of doing? I’m rather in the dark here.’

  Powerscourt smiled. ‘Sorry, Lucy. I should have thought it was obvious. The first murder was committed in the middle of a great storm. We are going to retrace the last journey of the victim in the middle of this one. We should certainly be able to see more than he could.’

  ‘Well,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘just make sure you don’t get yourselves killed.’

  21

  Powerscourt and Johnny Fitzgerald set off shortly after nine o’clock. They were both wrapped up against the rain like Egyptian mummies with hats from Jermyn Street. Johnny Fitzgerald had a great stick to beat off any wild animals they might encounter. The left the Silver Ghost by the gate lodges and joined the road that Jack Hayward had taken early in the morning with Lord Candlesby dead on the back of his horse. They turned left, away from the stables and the house.

  The wind was growing louder and angrier by the minute, howling and shrieking as it rushed around the landscape. Powerscourt had already lost his hat once; Johnny had a hand firmly wedged on top of his. The rain was lashing down, dripping from their faces on to the tops of their collars. The land was pasture here as far as the eye could see, grazing for Candlesby cows and Candlesby sheep. The sea was a mile or two to the right. Powerscourt remembered Charles telling him that from the bottom of the drive the land was theirs, as far as the eye could see in all directions. And still the family was burdened with a mountain of debt.

  ‘My God, Francis, this is pretty hard pounding,’ shouted Johnny Fitzgerald.

  ‘Four hundred yards,’ Powerscourt yelled at his friend, ‘four hundred yards from the end of the drive to the place where Jack Hayward found the body.’ He paused to negotiate a particularly vicious gust of wind.

  ‘I’ll count the yards, Johnny. You’ve always had trouble getting beyond sixty-five.’

  ‘That’s not fair, Francis and you know it,’ said Johnny, shaking a fist at his friend. Powerscourt was counting his paces on his fingers now, trying not to lose the number. A couple of trees loomed up in front of them, like stragglers left behind by a retreating army. One hundred and sixty-seven. Pausing behind one of them Johnny announced that they were no bloody use as a shelter against the storm. They were making very slow progress, bent over against the force of the wind. Two hundred and fifteen.

  ‘Francis?’ shouted Johnny.

  ‘Yes?’ Powerscourt yelled back.

  ‘Can you speak?’

  ‘Three hundred and five. Hold on a minute,’ roared Powerscourt, concentrating on his fingers and the steps of his boots. They were climbing very slowly up a little hill which seemed to go on for a long time. Lincolnshire is meant to be flat, Powerscourt said to himself, but it’s only flat in parts. Four hundred. They weren’t even at the top of the hill yet. They couldn’t see very far in front of them, the rain was so thick. ‘Somewhere round here it must have been’, Powerscourt announced at the top of his voice, ‘that the body was dumped.’

  ‘They didn’t exactly put up a memorial to the fellow,’ bellowed Johnny, surveying the empty landscape. ‘Not a sign to be seen.’

  ‘What were you going to say back there, Johnny?’ Powerscourt had turned to face his friend.

  ‘What I was going to say was this,’ Johnny bawled into the tempest. ‘Suppose you are our aristocratic friend who’s now the corpse. Here you are in the middle of this frightful storm. You’re struggling through it in the dark. You may be on a horse, you probably are, but even so it’s not exactly a bed of roses, is it? What keeps you going? What on earth, in these godforsaken parts, are you going to find that makes your journey worthwhile? Answer me that, Francis.’

  ‘God knows,’ cried Powerscourt, pausing to inspect the landscape from the top of the hill. There seemed to be a small bay off to their right, spray rising in great billows along the little pier. Powerscourt thought he could hear the noise of the sea, mingling with the louder noise of the storm. There was a slight tang in the air.

  ‘Is that the sea over there?’ yelled Johnny. ‘You don’t think somebody was waiting for him in a boat, do you?’

  ‘I’m not sure, I don’t think so.’

  They both bent forward into the wind. Johnny announced that he had a bloody leak in one of his bloody boots and his bloody sock had turned into a bloody sponge. They were making their way up another little hill.

  ‘Who was that bloke in Shakespeare who wandered round in a bloody great storm, Francis?’

  ‘You’re showing a distressing lack of respect, Johnny. I presume you’re referring to King Lear.’

  ‘That’s
the fellow. Lear. King Lear, they called him.’ An enormous gust of wind stopped Johnny in his tracks. ‘And didn’t he have some other chap with him? Some sort of funny man?’

  ‘I think’, Powerscourt shouted into the gale, ‘that your English teacher has a lot to answer for. Lear’s companion was the Fool.’

  ‘Told you he was a funny man,’ yelled Johnny triumphantly. ‘They were on a heath somewhere, weren’t they? Hampstead Heath probably – that’d be a good place for a King. Something tells me, Francis, that your man Lear was mad. Left his wits in his daughter’s house. Ranted on all over Hampstead Heath in the storm with the Fool telling jokes.’

  ‘Something like that,’ shouted Powerscourt, reluctant to be drawn into detailed exegesis of Shakespeare’s tragedies in the midst of a typhoon. But Johnny’s memories seemed to be flooding back.

  ‘There was another daft old bugger, wasn’t there, Francis, in that play? Not on Hampstead Heath with the mad King, I think. Worcester, Foster, Bicester he was called, something like that.’

  ‘Gloucester,’ shouted Powerscourt, ‘Duke of Gloucester, Johnny.’

  ‘Gloucester. That’s my boy,’ bellowed Johnny happily, bending over to empty the rain from the brim of his hat. ‘He was really mad, I think. Didn’t his enemies pull his eyes out?’

  ‘Afraid so.’

  ‘Just what I told you, Francis. What a pair they must have been, one old and mad and chuntering on about his lost kingdom; the other one blind as a bat and ranting on about whatever he ranted on about. It’s a wonder they weren’t both locked up in an asylum, it really is. Do you know what my English master used to say about that play, Francis?’

  ‘No idea, Johnny, no idea at all.’

  ‘He used to say that it was all topsy-turvy. The Fool was wise, Lear could only understand when he was mad, Gloucester could only see when he was blind. Something like that.’