Death in a Scarlet Coat (14 page)

There was a brief silence. The topic of murdering vicars seemed to have run its course. Lady Lucy made a mental note of the sections of the conversation she would report to her Francis. The ladies moved on to an abstract discussion of whether murder was more prevalent in the aristocracy than in the working classes. There was a surprising consensus that it was more common among the aristocracy.

James Candlesby, the youngest son who lived alone with his nurse at the top of the Hall, had not been well for some days. At first this took the form of wandering round the house on his own in the middle of the night, disturbing the mice and the rats and upsetting the bats in the basement. His nurse had sent word to the asylum outside Lincoln where the doctor who had been looking after him for some years was based. Dr Wilson, in spite of the entreaties of James’s eldest brothers, had refused to admit him as a patient in the asylum. He would only grow worse there, he said. He believed, Dr Wilson, that James’s eccentricities could be accommodated perfectly easily in the enormous house, especially if he was accompanied by a trained nurse.

This afternoon James’s eyes were unusually bright and he was unable to settle anywhere, moving from chair to sofa to standing by the window for a few seconds and looking at the view. Something, in the nurse’s view, was about to
happen
, and it did, in a way the nurse had never seen before. Lying on the floor and refusing to get up had once been the favourite. Then there had been days when James curled himself up into a ball and stayed under a table in the corner of the room. Sometimes there had been shouting – not any particular word, just a general shout that came across in the same inchoate fashion as the roar of a great crowd at a football match.

James went to a cupboard in the corridor outside his sitting room and pulled out a very large brush. He held it
out in front of him as though it were a cross and he was the person carrying it in some religious procession.

‘Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war,’ he sang, making his way slowly down the corridor,

He seemed to have forgotten the chorus. He was walking very deliberately, as if he was in a procession. He passed a glass case full of stuffed birds and started down the stairs.

He was on the second-floor landing now, where most of the bedrooms were situated. The nurse hurried down the stairs after him. James continued down towards the ground floor and the basement, passing a racehorse whose front features were still visible but whose hindquarters and rump had been overcome by the advance of the Candlesby grime.

As he reached the first floor, his elder brother Edward stuck his head out of the drawing room. ‘For God’s sake, you stupid lunatic,’ he said, ‘what on earth do you think you are doing? You’re madder than usual today, even for you.’

James made no reply. His eyes appeared to be fixed on some distant goal. Perhaps he thought he was a crusader
from centuries past come to fight with the armies of Saladin in front of the walls of Jerusalem. Perhaps he was a recruit to Cromwell’s New Model Army in the Civil War, dragged from field and barn to learn the arts of war before the battlefield at Naseby.

The mention of Christ’s promise seemed to give James extra strength. He held the broomstick ever firmer as if he were escorting an archbishop to his stall in Canterbury Cathedral. He was down the stairs into the lower floor and out of the door into the outside world. There was no hesitation. He turned sharply to the left and began marching purposefully towards the lake. Henry and Edward both stuck their heads out of the saloon windows one floor up.

‘Why don’t you go and drown yourself, you mad person?’

‘Put us all out of our misery, you stupid lunatic. Go straight into the water! Don’t turn round! Don’t bother coming back!’

With that the two brothers collapsed in hysterical
laughter
. James did not stop. He was quite close to the water’s edge now. Charles had heard a noise where he was in the stables and began running as fast as he could towards the lake. James was on the edge of the water, marching straight on. The brothers were yelling out the chorus as an act of encouragement.

They sang it over and over, falling into helpless laughter
from time to time as they watched their brother advancing further into the water.

‘Why can’t you go in after him?’ yelled Charles to the nurse.

‘I can’t swim,’ replied the man.

Almost up to his neck now, James was still singing. Charles pulled off his jacket and charged into the lake. There seemed to be a struggle. Indeed it looked as if Charles might have knocked his brother out to make it easier to drag him away from the water. With the nurse arriving to help in
shallower
waters they managed to pull him ashore. The brush was still held firmly in his hands. They began to drag him across the grass towards the house in case he made another dash into the lake. When James came round a few minutes later he looked at them both very carefully. Then he burst into tears. From the first-floor window still came the chorus:

‘God help sailors on a night like this.’ Detective Inspector Blunden was speaking to Powerscourt as the two men stood on the steps of the Candlesby mausoleum at ten to three in the morning. It had been raining hard since early evening and a wind had now got up, blowing in from the sea. Three of the Inspector’s junior police constables were shielding their lamps against the storm. The clouds cleared over the moon every now and then to reveal the lake and the solid bulk of the house behind it like a great liner untroubled by the weather.

‘Ten minutes to go,’ said Powerscourt. The exhumation of the Earl of Candlesby was due to begin in precisely ten minutes. A small procession could be seen making its way up the hill towards the mausoleum.

‘What about the key?’ said Powerscourt suddenly, all too aware that if the new Earl had his way they would never get into the mausoleum at all.

‘The coroner has that in hand,’ said Blunden, pulling his cloak tighter around his shoulders. ‘I think he gave out some pretty fierce warnings about disobeying an instrument of the law. The butler is to bring it at the appointed time.’

A tall man, wrapped in an enormous cloak, materialized out of the darkness.

‘Carey,’ he said, ‘Nathaniel Carey, pathologist, at your service.’

As Powerscourt made the introductions another
bedraggled
figure joined them. The vicar who conducted the
service
of interment had come back to see the body removed. Later on he would have to inter the body once again. He nodded gravely to the other members of the melancholy party.

‘Where are you going to conduct your examination, Dr Carey?’ Powerscourt was whispering out of respect for the dead.

‘They’ve made a room at the morgue in the hospital available for me. I hope to start first thing in the morning. Shouldn’t take long. I mean, was the bloody man murdered or not? That shouldn’t be too difficult to establish. Feel free to drop in around eleven. I should have something for you by then.’

Another group was advancing towards the mausoleum, led by the Candlesby butler carrying a powerful light. Behind him came the coroner, shrouded in a vast cloak, and the man from the undertakers who had supervised the burial, leading a cart drawn by two horses.

‘Well,’ said the coroner, ‘all present and correct. I’m sure Thorpe can open up for us.’

Thorpe, the Candlesby butler, had on his belt one of the biggest bunches of keys Powerscourt had ever seen. Surely there were more keys on it than there were rooms in Candlesby Hall. The butler didn’t hesitate for a moment. One quick glance down and a very large key, totally black, was inserted into the main door of the mausoleum. Within
a minute the party were inside, the three policemen forming up around them with the lamps. The light shot across the great columns that reached up to the dome, flickering and fading as it went, dancing briefly across human faces. Their boots echoed off the marble floor. High up at the top of the building the bats were squeaking an ineffectual protest at this invasion under cover of darkness.

The coroner led the way downstairs to the vault. Some of the flagstones here were wet with damp. Powerscourt
suddenly
realized that in one sense they were fortunate. Sliding the coffin out of its niche down here would be much easier than digging it up from an ordinary grave in a cemetery on a night like this: the need to construct some sort of awning so nobody could see what was happening, the spades clogged with wet earth, the strain of pulling the coffin out of the ground, the constant rain and the howling of the wind.

Barnabas Thorpe whipped another ancient key from his ring and unlocked the iron grille that had enclosed Candlesby’s coffin. The policemen pulled it out while Thorpe locked the gate once more. Then the undertaker supervised the transport out to the cart, the policemen and the undertaker himself acting as pallbearers.

Dr Carey looked at his prey with an appreciative eye, anxious to get on with his work. As the cart moved off the coroner came to say goodbye to Powerscourt and the Inspector. He shook them both by the hand.

‘There, gentlemen, we have managed to secure what you wanted. I hope Carey’s results will be to your liking. I am going to announce the day for the inquest when he has finished his investigations tomorrow. I don’t like to call it beforehand in case any body parts have to be sent away for tests. A very good morning to you.’

Inspector Blunden led the way to the hospital morgue the following morning. He had, as he pointed out ruefully to
Powerscourt, been there far too many times before. There was the normal smell of hospital disinfectant. A couple of orderlies were cleaning the floor. They were taken to a small room to one side. A body was lying on a slab with a white sheet over its face but there was nobody else in the room. Dr Carey appeared after a moment or two, a large notebook in his left hand and an expensive-looking fountain pen in the other.

‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ he said cheerfully, placing notebook and pen on a small table in the corner. ‘This one didn’t take very long, hardly any time at all. Come, let me show you. You’re not squeamish about dead bodies, are you? I have to warn you that this one is absolutely disgusting.’

Both men said they thought they would be able to cope. ‘Here goes,’ said Dr Carey, and pulled the sheet slowly back to about the level of the shoulder. It was one of the most revolting corpses Powerscourt had ever seen, and the battlefields of India and South Africa had been strewn with bodies hideously mutilated by the weapons of modern warfare. One side of Candlesby’s face had not been touched at all. The other had been battered, hit, smashed, thumped, over and over and over and over again. The skin had been reduced to pulp. The bones had been beaten into strange and grotesque shapes. The nose had virtually disappeared. There was dried blood everywhere, caked in lumps on his shoulder, lining his body as far as they could see. There was a sickly smell of dried blood and death and the faint overlay of the hospital anaesthetic.

‘You won’t be surprised to hear that this poor man did not die of natural causes. I have to say I am at a loss to say exactly how he did die. I mean, after a fairly limited spell of this battering his heart gave up so the actual cause of death was heart failure. As for the time of death, it is difficult if not impossible to estimate so long after the event, but I would hazard sometime between ten in the evening and four
o’clock the following morning. So I can certainly answer the coroner’s question, Was this death by natural causes? No, it was not. You gentlemen have lots of experience looking at dead bodies. Have you ever seen anything like this before? This brutal battering on one side of the face only?’

Neither man had seen anything like it. ‘Would he have been upright perhaps?’ Powerscout suggested. ‘Lashed to a pillar so his assailant or assailants could attack him with a spade or something like that?’

‘That’s good, Powerscourt. He was tied up to something. His hands and ankles have marks on them as though he had indeed been secured on to pillar or post or some such.’

‘You don’t suppose our murderer has a rather bizarre way of killing people?’ Inspector Blunden was rather hesitant. ‘I mean, suppose he gets his man tied up so he can’t move. Then he picks up his spade or his shovel or whatever it is. He gives one good whack to the man’s face. If he’s
right-handed
maybe it’s easier to batter him on one side only rather than go round to the other side where the blows may not be so effective.’

‘That’s clever, Inspector. It may even be right.’ Nathaniel Carey was nodding at Blunden. ‘But there is something else I have to tell you. Whatever killed him might not have been a spade or a shovel or anything like that though I could be wrong. I have no idea what killed him.’

‘Do you think you will be able to work it out – what killed him, I mean?’