Death in a Scarlet Coat

Book 10: Lord Francis Powerscourt

by David Dickinson

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

Instead of leading his riders to the hunt, the fifteenth Earl of Candlesby is found dead, his body wrapped in blankets atop his horse, a corner of his scarlet coat visible in the morning mist. Three people see the body. One dies. Another vanishes. Now only one man knows how he was killed. Lord Powerscourt is summoned to investigate the murder. Powerscourt uncovers a tangled web of jealousy, revenge, and hatred on a rundown estate where the father and his sons are equally dangerous. The fifteenth Earl has left a trail of dueling, theft, and adultery across the flatlands of Lincolnshire. It will take another murder and a perilous chase beneath the crumbling estate before Powerscourt unlocks the mystery.

Release date: March 15, 2011

Publisher: Soho Constable

Print pages: 352

Sample

It was very cold at nine o’clock on a breezy autumn morning in Lincolnshire. The mounted men and the handful of mounted women of the Candlesby Hunt were ranged round the forecourt of Candlesby Hall. Two outlying pavilions were connected to the wings of the main building by a couple of long walls with large niches left for statues of classical antiquity. As with so much of Candlesby Hall, ambition outran reality. Two hundred years after their creation the niches were still waiting for Cicero and Caesar, Pericles and Plato to drop in from Greece and Rome and grace the front of a gentleman’s house in the East of England. They were as empty today as they had been on the day they were created. The pavilions themselves were joined by a tall black railing with a grand opening in the centre.


The wind had abated since last night’s gales, but clouds of fallen leaves still swirled and eddied in the forecourt. Inside the square formed by the house and the pavilions was a circle of grass with a path round the edges and a broken fountain in the centre. Even in the gloom the hunters’ coats of scarlet and black and dark blue, with their cream and white breeches and stocks, made a brave show. The conversation was animated, men and women speculating about the forthcoming hunting season. One or two claimed to have spotted foxes trotting through the countryside in the weeks before. Latecomers were saying good morning to the hunt officials. The true aficionados were more excited than they would have cared to admit. They could hardly wait for the sheer delight of the hunt, the wind in your face, the rain in your hair, the sensation of speed as your horse raced after the scarlet coats at the front, the alarming moment when it left the ground to clear another hedge or wall, the cry of the huntsman’s horn, the shouts of your friends close by, on and on and on across the countryside with the fox smarter than the hunt today and only a handful of riders left in pursuit. It made the blood race, even to think about it.


People more interested in architecture than in hunting might have paused after a careful inspection of the great house behind them. On top of the front was a group of three statues. Only one had all its limbs and features intact. The others were suffering from various ailments – heads fallen off, arms left as stumps, stone staff of office broken at the hilt. The great pillars jutting out at the front of the house were no longer of uniform colour but stained with dark green and a dirty yellow as if they had some terminal disease. On the top floor, where the servants had their quarters, half a dozen windows were broken and remained unrepaired.


The Candlesby butler, old, white-haired and stooping over his tray, was moving through the crowd with his stirrup cup, a mixture of port laced with brandy to fortify the hunters against the cold. The master was not here yet. The master was often late. Cynics whispered that the master was not very good at getting up the morning after the night before. Nobody would have dared say such a thing to his face, for his temper was the most feared in the county, the violence of his language capable of reducing strong men to tears.

Three of his five sons were here today, turned out for the hunting field like everybody else: Richard, Lord Bourne, the name inherited by all Candlesby eldest sons, thirty years old, heir to Candlesby Hall and what remained of its estates, who had inherited so many of his father’s characteristics; Henry, the second son, three years younger than Richard, who had inherited most of his father’s vices and none of his virtues, if any of those had ever existed; and Edward, the third son, twenty-five years old, who seemed to be having trouble controlling his horse. An earlier Dymoke, the original family name, Sir Francis Dymoke, had been made an Earl by Charles the Second for services to flattery according to the cynics. He had taken the name of Candlesby in Lincolnshire for his earldom and his great house, originally built on lands given him by his King.


Still the master did not appear. The officials and the field master and the whippers-in and the terrier men exchanged anxious glances. Some of the hunting party began peering in at the windows of the house to see if there was any sign of the master in there, checking the buttons on his coat perhaps, shouting at one or more of the servants. He had always been an eccentric master, John Dymoke, Earl of Candlesby, ever ready to change the hunting colours one year, or alter the dates of the opening and closing of the hunting season another. But nobody could remember a day when the master hadn’t done his duty to the hunt and led them out across the county in pursuit of the fox wherever the chase would lead, however many broken bones might be acquired along the way. Those with highly strung or nervous horses took them on little sorties around the circle of grass. The hounds were swarming about on the far side of the railings under the watchful eye of the huntsman, barking and yelping as they waited for the chase. The more adventurous spirits took a second or a third helping of the stirrup cup, saying it would help them over field and fence. A number of people were looking at their watches now. Some were thinking of abandoning the hunt and going home. If the master failed to turn up there would probably be a row about who should be the acting master that might go on all morning.


It was the butler with his tray of empty stirrup cups who saw him first, or thought he might be seeing him. From the forecourt of Candlesby Hall a road led out of the gates in the railing, and then straight as straight could be across hundreds and hundreds of Candlesby acres for well over a mile until the ground dipped down and the road was lost from view. Something was moving very slowly along this road, past the scattered branches blown down in the great storm the night before. It might have been just a horse, or it might have been a man walking beside a horse. A hunting bird followed the little procession, like a mourner at a funeral.


The butler whispered something into Richard’s ear and continued to peer down the road. Gradually the other members of the hunt began staring at the little procession advancing so slowly towards them. The huntsman appeared to think of blowing a message of some sort on his horn but thought better of it. There was definitely a horse, and the animal seemed to be carrying something fairly heavy. There was definitely a man, walking beside the horse, turning his cap round and round in his hand.

The riders began to back their horses up against the walls, blocking out the niches meant for the heroes of antiquity. Henry Dymoke suddenly noticed that the little parapet at the top of the pavilion to the right of the entrance was broken. He could just make out sections of broken pillar lying across each other. The hunt was growing apprehensive now. There was something uncomfortable in the little procession of horse and human making their way ever so slowly towards the great house. The butler made another round with the last of his stirrup cup. Nobody spoke, all eyes locked on the party coming toward them. There was definitely a package on the back of the horse, completely covered by a couple of blankets. There was, Henry Dymoke with his quick eyes noticed, something familiar about the shape on the horse. He knew, before anybody else, that it was his father’s body he was looking at, making its last melancholy progress back to the house where he had been born.


Even the short-sighted could make it out now, a horse with what looked like a body thrown across it, wrapped in blankets, accompanied by a middle-aged man twirling his cap in his free hand, advancing towards the neighing horses of the Candlesby Hunt and their apprehensive riders. The very sharp-sighted thought they could see the corner of a scarlet coat poking out underneath the blanket. The men and women of the hunt were mesmerized by the drama unfolding before them. It was as if they had been rendered incapable of movement. The only noise was the barking and howling of the hounds. When they were a hundred yards or so from the railings, man and horse stopped. The man gestured to Lord Bourne to come forward.

‘I’m terribly sorry, my lord, but that is your father wrapped up on that horse.’ Jack Hayward was senior groom at Candlesby, the man who held sway over the horses and their kingdom, one of the few people the Master was never rude to, admired as much for his horsemanship as for his common sense. He was speaking very quietly, almost whispering. ‘Don’t look at him now, for God’s sake, not in front of these people. It’s a terrible sight. I think you should send them all away, my lord, and then you could look at him in peace. I’ll take him over to the stables and then I’ll go and fetch the old doctor if he’s still with us.’


Richard nodded. How strange it felt, he thought. For so many years he had waited and hoped and dreamt about becoming an Earl, Lord Candlesby, master of Candlesby Hall and all its acres. A month after his thirtieth birthday he had come into his inheritance. Now the moment was here it was nothing like he had ever imagined. ‘Today’s hunting is cancelled,’ he said in a harsh voice when he was back where the hunt could hear him. ‘Please return to your homes. You will be informed about the next meet as soon as possible.’


Perhaps, he said to himself, as the hunt trotted off, I should have told them the truth. Then they would have something real to gossip about, rather than the fruits of their imaginations. For the Master of the Candlesby Hunt had come at last, not mounted on his horse, but wrapped across it in blankets like some vagrant found dead by the roadside.

 

Lord Francis Powerscourt had fallen in love. This was not the aching, all-consuming love of youth, or even the love to the last that parents have for their children. His wife Lady Lucy was a partner in his passion, and his children had to be restrained from showing their feelings when they encountered the object of his affections. For Powerscourt this was a love he had never known before. Some men fall in love with horse racing or hunting or cricket or fly fishing. He had fallen in love with a Ghost.

More precisely a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, first produced by Mr Royce the year before and sold to him by Mr Rolls for a king’s ransom, a ransom his brother-in-law and chief financial adviser Mr Burke told him he could afford after some successful share dealing in America. The Ghost could seat four or five people comfortably. It had a great shiny silver bonnet and a cream body with red leather upholstery and a hood you could take off in the summer. A mighty horn warned passers-by of your arrival and two powerful headlights illuminated the Ghost’s passage in the dark. Its top speed, a fact which so delighted the Powerscourt twins, Christopher and Juliet, that they had to be told the figure every time they climbed into the back seat, was sixty-five miles per hour. Why, the Ghost was as fast as a train! As it happened, Powerscourt’s great friend Johnny Fitzgerald had bought the twins a new book the previous Christmas called The Wind in the Willows, about a group of animals who live by the side of a river and a toad who develops an unhappy obsession with motor cars. Sometimes, when they were in the back seat, Christopher and Juliet Powerscourt would serenade their father with the toad’s battle cry of ‘Poop-Poop!’ Johnny Fitzgerald never tired of reading them the final chapter, which contained a great battle between the four animals and their enemies the Wild Wooders, marauding bands of stoats and ferrets and weasels.


So here he was, Lucy at his side, bowling happily along the road that led past Candlesby towards the cathedral city of Lincoln. Neither Rat nor Toad nor Badger could have helped Powerscourt at this moment. He was not driving particularly fast, he seldom did, but as the car went over a humpbacked bridge he was not ready for the sharp left-hand turn on the far side and the front of the car sank slowly into the ditch, making a nasty mechanical noise as it went. Lady Lucy, he discovered, was unhurt. They decided to walk to the nearest town or village, which Powerscourt thought couldn’t be very far away.


 

At Candlesby Hall three sons of the dead man, a corner of his bloodied scarlet coat still visible, blankets draped across his face, set about the doctor. The last Earl was still in the stables where his body had been taken. The medical man, Dr Miller, had just arrived. He was well past retirement age and had a frail appearance now, like one of his elderly patients. There were only wisps remaining of what had been a fine head of white hair. His teeth were not what they had once been either, leading him to tell his housekeeper that he was particularly fond of dishes like soup and scrambled eggs. His eyes were the worst affected by the ravages of time, but a pair of thick glasses left him still capable of reading.


The three sons crowded round the doctor. Richard, the eldest, had a great shock of red hair like the hair that could be inspected on the portraits of his ancestors inside the house; Henry, the second son, was extremely tall and thin; Edward was short and tubby. Charles, the fourth son, was believed to be in London and had been summoned home. James, the youngest, was in his rooms, not invited out for this melancholy interview. Richard had refused to allow any of his brothers to take a last glance at their father.


‘I’m the head of the family now, I’ll have you know, and I forbid you to look at him. I absolutely forbid it.’ Richard did not trust Henry or Edward not to let something out in their cups or in the taverns of Spilsby close by.

‘Now then, Dr Miller,’ he began, ‘I should like to remind you of the amount you owe this family. I’m referring, of course, to things more valuable than money, debts of obligation, favours that have to be repaid.’


‘Hear, hear,’ said his brothers, advancing still closer towards the doctor. They might not see eye to eye with Richard about very much, but on questions of family honour they hunted like a pack of hounds.


‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ said the doctor, shaking his head sadly. ‘What is it you want me to do?’

‘That’s better,’ said Richard grimly, ‘that’s more like it. I want you to say on the death certificate that my father died of natural causes. It was a heart attack or a stroke that killed him, whichever you think will be the most convincing.’

‘But that wouldn’t be the truth,’ said the doctor in a puzzled tone. ‘You, Richard, saw the body and the condition it was in. You’re asking me to lie about the death of one of my patients.’


Richard nodded to his brothers. They moved closer to the doctor, Henry bending down a great distance to pick up a pitchfork lying on the ground.

‘What about that wrong diagnosis you gave on the butler here a couple of years back? The medicine you prescribed bloody nearly killed him.’


‘You’re asking me to break the doctor’s oath of loyalty to his profession. I’ve kept the Hippocratic oath for nearly fifty years and I’m not going to break it now.’

‘Damn your Hippocratic oath!’ Richard was growing angry, his face turning the same colour as his hair. ‘You’re just a bloody hypocrite. They say in the village that three women down there have died in childbirth in the past two years who should be alive today. All because of your incompetence! What’s a death certificate compared with that? My father was dead long before you got to him. This time you weren’t personally responsible for someone’s death, even if they were only a peasant woman down the road.’

Henry turned his pitchfork the other way up and moved one of the prongs quite close to the doctor’s face.

‘All you have to do is to fill in the death certificate or whatever it’s called.’ Richard was speaking very quietly now, a sure sign to his brothers that he was incandescent with rage. ‘That doesn’t take long. I don’t see how it should trouble your conscience that much. And we’ll make it worth your while, doctor.’

This, Richard suddenly realized, was where he should have started. Nobody knew how they knew, but all the Dymokes knew the doctor liked money, liked a great deal of it in fact. People said his late wife had very expensive tastes.

‘How much?’ asked the doctor, sounding like a drunk unable to resist another glass.

‘Let’s discuss that once you’ve signed the death certificate. It’ll be a goodly sum; you need have no fear about that.’

The doctor was not strong any more. His will had ebbed away in the Lincolnshire breeze. Eventually he did what he was told. He entered ‘heart attack’ as the cause of death of Arthur George Harold John Nathaniel Dymoke, Earl of Candlesby. There was no need for a post-mortem. The corpse was duly prepared for burial with nobody, apart from his doctor and his eldest son and his head groom, knowing the cause or the manner of his death.


 

Forty-five minutes after the accident the Powerscourts were sitting in the drawing room of the Candlesby Arms, the principal hotel of the town of the same name. The manager had secured the service of a local farmer with a powerful tractor to remove the Powerscourt car from the ditch the following morning and a skilled mechanic who worked nearby would check the engine and the bodywork. The hotel manager had inspected his visitors closely. Lord Francis Powerscourt was six feet tall with curly brown hair and pale blue eyes. Something told George Drake, the hotel manager, that he had seen service in the military in the past. He was to learn later that Powerscourt was one of the most distinguished private investigators in the country. Lady Lucy, his wife, was half a foot shorter than her husband with curly blonde hair and light brown eyes. She had, Drake thought, an air of great vivacity about her as if adventures were there for the taking and boredom might be the greatest enemy of all.


All was not well in the hotel that afternoon. There was a constant stream of visitors with long faces come to confer with the manager. As afternoon tea was being taken he came to talk to his new guests. They were, he said to himself, his last hope, and a pretty forlorn one at that.

‘You seem to have plenty of visitors this afternoon, Mr Drake,’ said Lady Lucy cheerfully. ‘Is there some big social function on this evening?’

‘You could say that, Lady Powerscourt,’ said Drake, stirring his cup of tea slowly and sadly.


‘Is there anything we could do to help, Mr Drake?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘You have been more than helpful to us here in our time of trouble.’

George Drake looked at them carefully. It’s worth a try, he said to himself. It’s a pound to a penny they won’t be able to do a thing, but you never know.


‘This is how it is,’ he said finally, ‘if you have the time to listen to my troubles. The local vicar and I run the choral society here in Candlesby. I do the organizing, book the hall, get the tickets printed and sold around the town and so forth. The Reverend Moorhouse is in charge of the singing, the works to be performed, that sort of thing. He’s got a beautiful speaking voice himself, the vicar. They say some ladies come from miles around to hear him take Matins on a Sunday morning. He was a singing scholar or whatever they call them over in Oxford when he was younger. His congregation shrinks whenever they hear his curate, Reverend Flint, is taking the services. This is the problem, my lord, my lady. There’s a performance of Handel’s Messiah scheduled for this evening. The choir have been working on it since July. It’s been advertised all round the district for weeks. Vicars far and wide have mentioned it in their parish notices. The local newspaper has run a whole series of articles about the performance as if nobody has ever sung in Candlesby before. The Bishop of Lincoln himself is planning to attend.’


George Drake paused. Powerscourt had a faint suspicion, nothing stronger than that, about what was coming.

‘Forgive me if I’m boring you,’ said Drake, looking anxiously at his visitors. ‘I’m coming to the point, I promise you. Those people at the hotel this afternoon were all here to cry off tonight’s performance or to cry off on behalf of their friends or relatives. We’ve had a terrible dose of the influenza round here this week. Some of the choir can’t speak, let alone sing. To cap it all, the old Earl up at the big house was brought home dead on his horse this very morning and God only knows how many people might have to miss the performance because of that. Not’, Mr Drake added with feeling, ‘that there will be many local mourners for the vicious old bastard.’


‘Surely, Mr Drake,’ said Lady Lucy in her most emollient tones, ‘it doesn’t matter if you lose a bass or two. The others can just carry on. I don’t know what size your choir is but surely it won’t make much difference if you have five basses rather than six, if you see what I mean.’

‘I do see what you mean, Lady Powerscourt; I can see it very clearly. That’s not our problem, I’m afraid. It’s the soloists. Two of them and the two understudies, tenor and soprano, all laid low, every single one of them. The chief tenor has to croak to speak with his wife. The soprano woman has taken to communicating with written messages on slips of paper as if she was back at school. What are they going to sound like in the great high spaces of St Michael and All Angels in Candlesby High Street with the Bishop in the front row in his mitre and all? I don’t know what we can do. I’m told the vicar is on his knees even now praying by the High Altar. I’m not sure how that’s going to help us, I’m really not.’

‘Correct me if I’m wrong, Mr Drake,’ said Powerscourt. ‘It seems to me that the position is as follows. Your choir has been booked in for this recital for weeks if not months. You can’t cancel it now because you can’t reach all the people who might be coming. My Lord Bishop’, Powerscourt checked his watch, ‘may even have set off from his palace by now if he is a cautious traveller anxious to arrive in good time and sprinkle a few benedictions on the locals. Your choir is like a cricket team that has lost its best batsman and its best bowler and has nobody left to be twelfth man.’


While Powerscourt paused briefly, Lady Lucy took up the story.

‘Surely, Mr Drake, it’s perfectly obvious what you have to do. You just have to make do with what you’ve got. Explain to the audience at the beginning that you have lost all these people through the influenza. Apologize for the fact that the sound will not be what you hoped. That is the best thing to do, is it not?’


‘We’ve thought of that, Lady Powerscourt,’ said Drake, ‘and we don’t think it will work. You see, it’s the tenor and the soprano who have gone. Without them the whole oratorio is going to sound wrong, let alone missing the different solo parts they perform within the Messiah. It would be like Hamlet without the Prince or Macbeth without the witches or The Tempest without Caliban. It’s not as though they were singing some new work nobody had ever heard before. There’s a tradition of singing Handel’s Messiah in Candelsby church that goes back generations. Some of these people know it virtually off by heart. They come to each new performance like a bunch of wine lovers going to taste the latest Château Lafite.’


‘You did say tenor and soprano, didn’t you, Mr Drake?’ Powerscourt was looking meaningfully at Lady Lucy as he spoke.

‘Yes, I did,’ said Drake, looking perplexed.

Powerscourt managed to raise an eyebrow in inquisitive mode in Lady Lucy’s direction. There was a slight but unmistakable nod in reply.


‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, ‘if you’re willing to take a chance, Mr Drake, then we might just be able to help you.’

‘What do you mean?’ said a confused Drake.

‘This and only this. Lady Powerscourt and I have sung the tenor and soprano parts in the Messiah before. The tunes are so memorable you never really forget them but I think we would need a quick refresher course in the solo parts at least. What do you say to that, Mr Drake?’


The hotel manager was on his feet, shaking them both by the hand and performing a sort of impromptu jig on his carpet, nearly knocking over the Earl Grey and scones of a couple of elderly spinsters come to the hotel for a peaceful afternoon tea.

‘Thank God!’ he cried. ‘Thank God for the crooked bridge that brought your car low! Thank God you are here in our hour of need! I will bring you straight away to St Michael’s and the vicar can run you through your paces. I must just tell Mabel to mind the hotel while I’ve gone. She’s much better at it than I am anyway.’


Two minutes later the three of them were walking briskly up the street towards St Michael and All Angels. Attentive passers-by would have heard a female voice singing, ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the Earth.’ Lady Lucy’s voice soared upwards into the evening sky and was lost before it reached the stars. 




‘At least we’ll be able to get our hands on some money now the old bastard’s dead.’ Edward Dymoke, tubby third son of the late Lord Candlesby, was addressing his elder brother Henry in the saloon of Candlesby Hall, a mangy dog with three legs lounging at his feet. Richard the redhead, the eldest son, the new Earl, was reading a newspaper at the far side of the room, as if he wished to put as much space as possible between himself and his brothers. Most of the space between them was occupied by a disused billiard table with two pockets hanging out and a rug concealing whatever damage the young of Candlesby had managed to inflict on the playing surface over the years.

‘Absolutely,’ said Henry. ‘I’m up for a spot of money too. I’ll be able to place some decent bets at the races at last. Do you know, I think I might take a holiday in Monte Carlo and have a flutter at the tables. What are you going to do with yours?’

‘I thought I would escape from all this dreary countryside for a start,’ said Edward, kicking a decrepit stuffed fox by the side of the hearth. ‘I’ve had enough of fields and grass and wheat and harvests and rain and trees and wet leaves and beefy women who look as if they’ve done nothing but bake and wash clothes all their lives. It’s the city life for me. London? New York? Paris? I’ve been told there are plenty of gorgeous whores on the Champs-Elysées and the Boulevard Saint-Michel.’


‘I wonder how much there is,’ said Henry reflectively. ‘Money, I mean.’

‘God knows,’ said Edward, reluctant to return to Candlesby Hall from his trysts with the good-time girls of Paris, ‘but if you stand at the highest point near here up by that dreary mausoleum on the hill – it’s not what you’d call high but it’s the highest thing for miles around – all the land you can see belongs to us. Maybe we should sell some of it.’

There was a cackle that might have been a snarl from the far side of the room. Richard put down his newspaper, revealing a large damp patch on the wall behind him, and advanced towards his brothers.

‘You stupid pair!’ he began. ‘Who in heaven’s name do you think you are, to start talking about money and how you’re going to spend it? What makes you think you are going to inherit any money?’

Richard had reached the other side of the room and was now in spitting distance of his brothers. He glanced at them both in turn in a gesture of supreme contempt.

‘How do you know there is any money, for God’s sake? Or are you just assuming there must be some because you’d like to get your hands on as much of it as you can? Well, let me tell you one or two things that might not have occurred to you.’

Richard sat down and continued to address his brothers as if they had just failed the entrance test for England’s stupidest regiment.

‘Let me remind you for a start of the batting order round here. I am the eldest son. I inherit the title. You don’t. I inherit the estate. You don’t. I inherit this house. You don’t. You don’t inherit a thing. Quite soon I shall be called to London to be installed as a member of the House of Lords, where I shall make my views known to my fellow countrymen. I shall do everything in my power to make life difficult for that vulgar little commoner Lloyd George. You two’ – he stared balefully at his brothers – ‘are younger sons. Younger sons, unless they are very lucky, do not inherit. They do not inherit anything at all. That is why so many occupations like vicars and wine merchants and those people who play with money in the City of London were invented; it’s all to give younger sons something to do, something that can stop them being a drain on their families. Monte Carlo? The prostitutes of Paris? I think not, brothers!’


As he made his way to the door Richard turned for a parting shot. ‘There’s one other thing you should be aware of,’ he said. ‘You talk as if there was money, as if the estate and everything is solvent. Well, I had a talk with our steward this afternoon. There isn’t any money. There are only debts, m