‘I mean anything apart from the dead man, was there anything unusual about the furniture or the clothes or anything?’ Powerscourt was leaning close to Lancaster as he spoke.
‘I don’t think so.’ The young man sounded doubtful. The wind got up suddenly and a small wall of howling sand battered their eyes and faces. It would, felt Powerscourt, be the perfect cover for somebody with something to hide. Was this the moment for the lie?
‘You didn’t tidy anything away, or clear something up off the floor?’
‘How did you know, how did you know?’ Lancaster spoke very softly, and as he looked at Powerscourt, there was a terrible supplication in his eyes. Powerscourt was to wonder for weeks afterwards what it meant. For the moment, he remained silent. ‘There was a picture on the floor. It had been smashed into little tiny pieces. It must have taken a great deal of force to do it. It looked as if the murderer had swivelled the heel of his boot on the glass and the picture over and over again. It was as if there was as much hatred going into that as had gone into the murder itself.’
‘And could you tell whose picture it was?’ Powerscourt spoke slowly now.
‘Oh yes, you see that’s what must have made the murderer so cross, the fact that the image wouldn’t be reduced to a pulp. It was Prince Eddy’s fiancee, Princess May of Teck.’
‘And what did you do with the pieces?’
‘I – I tried to pick them all up,’ said Lancaster, his slim frame swaying in the wind. ‘I put them in my pocket and when everybody was busy, I took them into Sandringham Woods and threw them on to a pile of rubbish. Look here, you do believe me, don’t you?’
Powerscourt had no idea who to believe any more. But after his earlier mistake, he knew what he had to do. ‘Of course I believe you, Lord Lancaster.’ He put his arm round the young man. ‘Of course I do.’
As they drove back to Sandringham House Powerscourt asked about the other equerries and the pattern of their duties.
‘Ever since he became ill on his birthday there were six of us on duty round the clock, four hours at a time. On the day he died, I remember saying goodnight to him and then I was on duty from three to seven. There were nurses on duty on the same pattern but they had a different sitting-room to us.’
‘So when you came on duty at three, what were you told?’
‘The nurse told me Prince Eddy was sleeping and was not to be disturbed. It was only in the morning that I looked in to see if he wanted any breakfast or any cold drinks. That influenza makes people very thirsty.’
‘And who were the other equerries?’
‘Well, there was Harry Radclyffe, Charles Peveril, William Brockham, Lord Edward Gresham, Frederick Mortimer.’
‘And who was on duty just before you?’
‘That was Harry Radclyffe. The nurse said he’d gone off to bed when she told me Eddy was asleep.’
‘I see,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I think I may need to ask you some more questions later on, if you don’t mind.’
‘Not at all.’ Lancaster sounded relieved that the interrogation was over.
As they drove round the bend and in through the Norwich Gates, another of Shepstone’s bulletins had already appeared on the railings.
Sandringham, Monday evening.
The illness of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale continues to pursue a somewhat severe course, but His Royal Highness’ condition and strength are full.
Bartle Shepstone, Comptroller of the Household
A small crowd had gathered outside, including one or two men who were dressed for London, not for Norfolk. They had sharp inquisitive faces and were already asking questions of the local people.
Newspapermen, thought Powerscourt. They’re here already.
‘I am so sorry, Lord Powerscourt, that we should meet in such melancholy circumstances.’ Major Edwin Dawnay, officer commanding the bizarre collection of soldiery summoned by Sir Bartle Shepstone, was walking away from the front door of Sandringham House. ‘I have heard so much about your work in India.’
‘You are too kind, Major Dawnay, too kind. And the circumstances are indeed melancholy, if not macabre.’
Powerscourt shuddered slightly as he thought of the murderer alone in Prince Eddy’s room with the bleeding corpse, searching for the photograph of Princess May, stamping on it in a fit of frenzy as he tried to reduce it to rubble, the blood already flowing freely from the dead man’s veins, the glass on the picture shattering into smaller and smaller pieces as the onslaught went on. The dead man had not been safe in there. Even the photographs of the living had to be slaughtered too. ‘Your men have been very busy this afternoon, I understand.’
‘Yes they have, and a pretty good fist they have made of things so far,’ Dawnay replied. ‘But come, Lord Powerscourt, there must be a reason why you have brought me away from the house.’
‘There is,’ said Powerscourt, pausing at the top of the great gravel drive. The light was fading fast now. The snow felt crunchy underfoot. Powerscourt drew the Major behind a hedge. A small creature of the Sandringham undergrowth shot out beneath their feet and disappeared into the white wastes beyond. ‘I would like to draw your attention to the roof, Major Dawnay.’
‘The roof?’ Dawnay wondered inwardly if the man was losing his wits. It was a perfectly normal roof, the Royal Standard of the Prince of Wales faintly visible from the flagpole.
‘Count five windows to the left of the main entrance. Go up one. That is the room in which the unfortunate Prince was murdered.’
Dawnay counted the windows, still uncertain of the sanity of his companion. ‘You mean the window with the stone surround, rather than the normal red brick? With a little ornamental crest on top of it?’
An early owl hooted far off in the distance. The bells of Dersingham church tolled the hour of five.
‘Just so,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Now it is my belief that the window was not fastened shut on the night of the murder. You may well ask why it was left like that in temperatures like these, but sufferers from influenza or whatever it was have been known to do strange things. I wonder if the murderer could have climbed over the roof, dropped down the side of the house, opened the window, murdered Prince Eddy, and escaped the way he came.’
‘God bless my soul!’ said Major Dawnay.
‘Let us walk round to the other side of the house and see where he might have started from. Do you have any good climbers in your party, Major?’
We can clean up a dead body. We can set a bloodstained room to rights, thought Dawnay. Now this Irish peer wants to know if we are also trained as mountaineers or cat burglars.
The two men were looking at the back of the house, where the light was slightly better. ‘I would draw your attention,’ Powerscourt pointed with one of those long fingers that had so fascinated Lady Lucy Hamilton, ‘to the second floor, just to the right of the flagpole. There are at least six windows along there. That is the general area that our mountaineer might have set out from.’
‘You mean the equerries’ quarters?’ Major Dawnay was aghast.
‘Major Dawnay, you and I are trained in the arts of discretion, of remaining silent and not telling what we know. It is, unfortunately, at the heart and core of our professional lives. It was because I knew that I could trust you absolutely that we are here.’ Powerscourt was whispering now as a couple of dim figures could be seen walking towards the main entrance. ‘Do you have any climbers?’
This is not a man who is going to give up easily, thought Dawnay. If he ever gives up at all. He could sense a steely determination in his companion, concealed in company by the rattle of repartee or a languid charm.
‘As a matter of fact, we do. I think we have two. But I presume that for your purposes you only want one?’
‘Correct. Now, I think that it might be rather difficult to attempt the traverse from one of those rooms themselves.’
Dawnay didn’t like to think of what might happen to any intruder, creeping through one of the equerries’ rooms in the sm
all hours of the morning, only to vanish out of the window into the night and the roofs above. He doubted if they would get out alive.
‘But if we look further along this side of the house. Four or five windows along there is a small door, leading to the lawn. Do you have it? I think our climbing friend might start his expedition from there, don’t you? There seem to be lots of handholds and things. I don’t know if he would bring ropes and climbing gear like that?’
‘Ropes?’ Dawnay was thinking hard, his eyes measuring distances and elevations in the gloom. ‘It’s hardly the main face of the Matterhorn. But I should think ropes might be necessary, yes. But look here, Powerscourt, I am assuming that the person who may have climbed over the roof a couple of nights ago had time to do a certain amount of reconnaissance by day. He’d have wandered round the place, perhaps looking at the roof from a distance with a small telescope or something similar?’
‘I am sure that is the case,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Would you rather the scaling of Sandringham took place tomorrow night and not tonight? To give your man time to check out the task beforehand?’
‘I am sure that would be more realistic. We wouldn’t want to have to explain why one of my men died climbing the walls of Sandringham, would we, Lord Powerscourt?’ Dawnay was rubbing his hands together now to keep warm, the noise of his palms lost in the night air. ‘Shall we say two o’clock in the morning? And I presume that you do not wish me to mention this to a single living soul?’
‘Two o’clock would be excellent. And I fear that silence would be even better. And the silence must include everybody.’
‘Even Shepstone?’
‘Even Shepstone’. Powerscourt’s voice sounded very cold. Where does he go in his mind, Dawnay wondered as they trudged back to the main entrance, what ghastly journeys does his imagination take him on? For he could see now that the key to the whole investigation lay in Powerscourt’s head as he formed and reformed pieces of a blood-red jigsaw puzzle in his brain.
The Times, Tuesday, 12th January 1892
The Influenza
The Illness of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale
The announcement of the serious illness of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale caused universal regret yesterday, and this was shown by the large number of inquiries made at Sandringham House. In addition to personal inquiries, messages were received to such an extent as to tax to the utmost the powers of the private telegraph at Sandringham. With regard to the origin of the Duke’s illness, it is stated that after returning in Monday of last week from the funeral of Prince Victor of Hohenhoe, he did not feel well, but he went out shooting on Wednesday, and it is feared that he then aggravated his disposition. On Thursday he remained at Sandringham House all day, but the symptoms were not to be distinguished from an ordinary cold. He was worse on Friday and indeed felt so unwell that he did not leave his room and was not present at the birthday dinner given in his honour. On Saturday it was deemed necessary to call in the advice of Dr Laking, who, with Dr Broadbent, had been in attendance during the serious illness of Prince George of Wales. Throughout the whole of Saturday and Sunday the Duke suffered considerably from a severe attack of influenza, accompanied by pneumonia, but the doctors were able to report that his strength was ‘well maintained’.
‘Foreigners, bloody foreigners!’ Lord Johnny Fitzgerald was lying once more on the sofa in the sitting-room at King’s Lynn. Powerscourt noted that he had two large tankards of beer waiting patiently by his right hand. William McKenzie had a pot of tea and a plate of biscuits.
‘We’re all bloody foreigners round here,’ Fitzgerald went on, in pained tones. ‘I’m a bloody foreigner. You’re a bloody foreigner, Francis. William’s a bloody foreigner. In this part of the world you’re a foreigner if you come from Peterborough, for God’s sake. They look at you all the time. They stare at you as though you had two heads. If you buy something in a shop the rest of the natives all fall silent in case you’re an enemy agent.’
‘It must have its advantages, surely,’ Powerscourt laughed. ‘If we are all marked men, then other strangers must have been spotted here before us.’
‘Indeed they have.’ Lord Johnny took a refreshingly large gulp of beer and wiped the foam from his chin. ‘Which brings me to my report.’ He lay back on the sofa and gazed at the ceiling. A large spider had escaped the attentions of the parlourmaids and was preparing an elaborate mesh for its victims. ‘Russians first. Those servants at Sandringham were right. There has been a party of Russians in the neighbourhood. But I’m sorry to have to report that they are extremely respectable Russians.’ Fitzgerald sounded as though he had difficulty in grasping the possibility of Russians being respectable.
‘There are six of them,’ he went on. It’s the same as the equerries, thought Powerscourt suddenly. Six of the best. Six good men and true. Half a dozen. Half a jury.
‘They come from St Petersburg,’ Fitzgerald went on, ‘from some Institute of Science and Technology at the university there. They’re led by a certain Professor Ivan Romitsev. His two assistants are called Dimitry Vatutin and Nikolai Dekanozov. Didn’t I do well remembering that lot?’ He looked around for applause and wonderment.
‘The other three gentlemen – please don’t ask me to remember their bloody names but I do have them written down somewhere – are technicians. All of this little band are concerned with advanced forms of printing. They are trying to modernize the facilities in some great industrial complex at a place called Vyborg in St Petersburg. They came by sea. They went to a big new plant at Peterborough to look at the new machines they have there, which were, I believe, imported from America. They are on their way to see more printing machines in Colchester and in London.’
‘How come they were spotted in Sandringham, Johnny?’
‘I’m coming to that. Will you let me finish my report now?’ In protest at the interruption, Lord Johnny took another giant’s mouthful of his beer.
‘They are all loyal subjects of the Czar, this lot. They planned their journey so they could have a look at Sandringham on their travels. Isn’t the Czar’s wife, Mrs Czar or whatever they call her, isn’t she related to Alexandra up at the big house? Once they heard there was a royal palace, as they thought, in the neighbourhood, they had to go and see it. I think these Russians expected some enormous structure like those huge palaces and things they have in St Petersburg. Summer Palaces. Winter Palaces. Do they have Spring and Autumn Palaces too? Maybe Sandringham was the British Winter Palace. If you’re a Russian, that is.
‘I have to tell you, Francis,’ Johnny laughed as he remembered his Russians, ‘they were very disappointed when they saw Sandringham. That isn’t a palace, they said as their carriage brought them up to the main gates to have a look. It’s far too small. It’s more like a big dacha, a sort of summer house in the country. I don’t suppose you’d better include that in your report to the Private Secretary and the Comptroller General of the Household, Francis. Not a palace at all. Far too small.’
‘Could you imagine, Johnny, in your wildest dreams that any of these gentlemen from the Institute of Science and Technology could be a secret agent, a revolutionary? Looking at printing machines by day, devouring anarchists’ manuals by night?’
‘No. Absolutely not. I got very drunk with these Russians the other evening. That is to say, they got very drunk, I got a little bit drunk. And I think they are as innocent as our own printers over there in Peterborough.
‘There are also some Irish in the neighbourhood.’ Lord Johnny continued his report. ‘And I don’t mean you and I, Francis. There are five Irish in a party of workmen extending the telegraph lines north and west of Sandringham.’
Telegraph lines, thought Powerscourt. In his lifetime he had seen the steady advance of these wooden posts across the length and breadth of Britain, like some enormous army being dressed across the parade ground of a nation, linked not by arm to shoulder, but by roll upon roll of wire. ‘Be not afraid,’ he thought with Prospero, ‘the isle
is full of noises’. Messages of joy and despair were whispered along the uncomprehending cables. Births, marriages, deaths. He wondered if his brother-in-law the canny Mr William Burke had investments in telegraph pole companies or wire manufactories. Almost certainly he had. There were other inventions, stranger still. Voices, human voices, being carried down the lines. New vehicles that relied not on horses but on engines for power. Some brave new world – he went back to Miranda in The Tempest – is being born at the end of our century. No more the Age of Reason. No more the Age of Enlightenment. Welcome to the Age of the Machines.
‘Francis, hello-oh, hello-oh. Are you there?’ Lord Johnny had known Powerscourt for so long he had grown accustomed to these temporary leaves of absence. Compassionate leave, he always thought. The poor bugger’s brain has run away with him again.
‘Of course, of course.’ Powerscourt wondered if he shouldn’t join William McKenzie in a pot of tea. ‘The Irish, you were saying.’
‘I have talked to them too, of course. And I’ve got their names. They all play for the same cricket team in Skibereen. Can cricketers be revolutionaries, do you think?’
‘Charles Stewart Parnell,’ said Powerscourt, ‘God rest his soul, was the captain of the County Wicklow cricket team. But I don’t suppose he’d be classed as a revolutionary, do you think?’
‘Not quite, not quite.’ Fitzgerald started on his second tankard of beer. ‘Anyway, I don’t think any of these characters is our man. They work so bloody hard on those poles, drive them into the ground, make them straight, up you go to fix the wire on top, next one, please, hurry up there, – those foremen are slave drivers, I tell you – that they wouldn’t have the energy left to wander round the countryside in the middle of the night with a butcher’s knife in their pocket.’
‘That’s a clean bill of health for the Russians and the Irish, then.’ Powerscourt didn’t sound surprised. ‘You have done well, Johnny, you must have been working very hard. I am very grateful to you, as always.’
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