Death in a Scarlet Coat (25 page)

Inspector Blunden was back behind his desk. Powerscourt and Constable Merrick were seated on either side of the round table in the centre of the room.

‘I’ve put out a general alert for Bell,’ said the policeman, ‘ports, railway stations, and such hotels as we can reach. I often wonder how anybody was apprehended before the invention of the telegraph.’

Constable Andrew Merrick, emboldened perhaps by his previous success with Oliver Bell and his non-existent alibi, was holding his hand up as if he was back at school.

‘Well, Constable Merrick, what do you have to say for yourself now?’ Blunden felt he couldn’t be too harsh with the lad after his good work.

‘Sir, my lord, you asked me to think about how we might find out more about the movements of the middle Mr Lawrence, sir, Carlton Lawrence, the one reportedly seen at the railway station, sir.’

‘What of it?’ said Blunden. ‘I’m not sure how much
credence
we can attach to that evidence now. Maybe Bell was trying to throw mud in our eyes.’

‘Well, sir, my lord, we could ask at the station. Ask if anybody else saw Mr Lawrence, I mean.’

‘Very good, young man. We’ll make a detective of you yet. But that wasn’t what you were going to say before, was it?’

‘No, sir, my lord. That was about Mr Lawrence. I was going to suggest the photographer’s shop, sir, my lord.’

‘The photographer’s shop?’

‘Yes, sir, my lord. You see, there was a big wedding last year.’

‘Wedding? Photographer’s shop? What is going on here?’

Constable Merrick had turned a deep shade of red. Even the two deep breaths taken very slowly failed him on this occasion.

Powerscourt coughed what he hoped was a diplomatic cough. He had no idea how much his comment was about to infuriate the Inspector.

‘If I could make a suggestion, Inspector. What I think our friend is trying to say is this. There was a big wedding in the Lawrence family last year. Maybe it was a member of our Mr Lawrence’s family, his son or daughter perhaps, more likely a grandchild. There will probably be photographs of the occasion taken by the local man. With luck we will be able to find a photo of Mr Lawrence from the photographers or the newspapers to aid in his identification in London and elsewhere. Would that be right, Constable?’

‘Yes, sir, my lord.’ Merrick was nodding like a puppet. ‘It was a daughter, sir. Mr Lawrence’s granddaughter.’

How typical of Powerscourt, the Inspector said to himself. Put two and two together and make five. How very
irritating
. He consoled himself with the thought that Powerscourt wouldn’t be any use in the second row of a rugby scrum.

‘Well then,’ the Inspector said, ‘you’d better get off to the photographer’s and the railway station. Let’s hope you have good luck.’

‘Sir, my lord.’ Constable Merrick had his hand up again. Powerscourt felt, looking at him with affection, that the young man had spent far more time at school than he had in the police service. Putting his hand up must still seem the natural thing to do.

‘It’s about going to London, sir. I’ve never been to London, sir.’

‘If you think, Constable Merrick, that I am sending you to London you are out of your mind.’ Blunden’s brain filled with possible disasters: Constable Merrick lost in the capital, unable to find his way home, Constable Merrick taken and sold into slavery, Constable Merrick seized and put to work in some terrible factory, Constable Merrick incarcerated for ever in the Marshalsea.

‘I wasn’t thinking of that, sir, my lord, I was only
wondering
if I could go with whoever does make the journey, my lord, sir. To be of assistance, sir.’

‘You get off to the photographer’s and the railway station now, there’s a good boy.’

Merrick trotted off. Powerscourt, unaware how annoyed his last intervention had made the Inspector, tried again.

‘I have a suggestion to make about London, Inspector. My companion in arms Johnny Fitzgerald is here now. He went to Ireland to bring Jack Hayward back, you will recall. He’s not doing anything in particular at the moment. He would be the perfect person to go to London and make inquiries. Maybe he could take Constable Merrick with him. I’m sure they’d make a formidable pair.’

The Inspector laughed. ‘Excellent plan, Lord Powerscourt. Let’s do it.’ He couldn’t get the rugby question out of his mind. ‘Tell me, Lord Powerscourt, did you ever play rugby in your younger days?’

Powerscourt remembered that the Inspector had been a mighty power in the world of the scrum and the line-out and the rolling maul.

‘I did, as a matter of fact.’

‘And where did you play?’

‘Why,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I played in the centre.’

Bloody typical, the Inspector said to himself. I should have guessed. Centre, a bloody centre, one of those irritating people who could see a gap in the opponents’ defence and be through it before anyone knew they had gone. Centres could pass through the eye of the proverbial needle. Clever
players, centres. Tries under the posts. Glory boys. The darlings of the women.

Lady Lucy was walking back to the hotel that evening after another day of nursing. Will, the little boy she had
entertained
with the cat story, was on the mend. He would try to sit up in bed now and give her a hug when she came in to see him. One of the rambling old ladies had gone to meet her maker. The other two remained, still talking nonsense in their delirium, but letting slip every now and then just one word which Lady Lucy thought might be significant for her husband’s inquiry. She had added another that very evening, another small brick, perhaps, for her husband to build a wall of evidence that might solve the mystery. ‘Sail’. What ‘sail’ meant Lady Lucy had no idea but she added it to her list. She would have to tell Francis about it soon.

‘Good evening to you, Lady P-p-powerscourt. I trust I see you well?’

Charles Dymoke was wearing a long cloak that reached down to his feet and a dark grey Russian hat. He looked like a Cossack on patrol out in the steppes.

‘Charles!’ said Lady Lucy. ‘How very nice to see you. What takes you to the village late at night?’

‘I have heard about your nursing activities, Lady
P-p-powerscourt.
They are going to make you a saint soon. I was delivering a b-b-basket of vegetables, and arranging for some wood to be brought over tomorrow.’

‘Noblesse still obliges then, Charles? That’s very good of you.’

‘The vicar, who does not go to Candlesby village in case he gets ill and leaves the village without a p-p-priest, says I am the first one of my family in five hundred years to care for the p-p-poor. He tells me my p-p-predecessor was called Charles the Fair. He was hanged at B-b-boston Assizes
eventually, though not for helping the p-p-poor. But tell me, how is it with your husband?’

Charles did not like to mention Lady Lucy’s husband’s sojourn in the Caravaggio room. He suspected she had not been told about it.

‘Francis?’ said Lady Lucy with a smile. ‘He is well. He is anxious to find the answers in the case, of course.’

‘Can you tell him I have some news for him? I went to see Walter Savage the steward when he came out of prison today. Something very odd about that arrest. I must
p-p-pass
on what he said to Lord P-p-powerscourt.’

‘Why don’t you come for breakfast tomorrow and tell him then?’

‘Do they have p-p-porridge? My old nanny always
s-s-said
I had to have p-p-porridge.’

‘They do, Charles. And ham and eggs and kidneys and tomatoes and things.’

‘I hate kidneys,’ said the young man from Candlesby Hall, ‘but I’ll come for the p-p-porridge.’

Andrew Merrick received confirmation from three different sources that Carlton Lawrence had indeed been seen at the railway station at the time specified by Oliver Bell. Now he was off on his travels.

Johnny Fitzgerald tried to tell the young man all he knew about London on the train down to the capital. He told him that the great majority of the people who lived in the city were very poor, that the better off and the rich were
scattered
across the city in clusters, in Mayfair and Belgravia and Chelsea in the West End, in Hampstead and Highgate in the north, in Blackheath and Dulwich in the south-east, in Richmond and Wimbledon in the south-west. The prospect of visiting the Tower of London or Buckingham Palace or the Houses of Parliament left Constable Merrick cold. There was only one place he felt he had to see this time, he
told Johnny. And where was that? Scotland Yard, Andrew replied, if there was time. If the police force was to be his profession then he had to see the headquarters. Surely, he pointed out, a devout Catholic would go to St Peter’s if he was in Rome.

‘Just put on your best policeman’s brain, Andrew, and tell me what you think of this. Ever since Francis’ – Andrew Merrick had worked out long ago that Francis was Powerscourt, though he was amazed the man had a Christian name at all, since he, Andrew had always thought of him as Lord Powerscourt as if Lord was his first name – ‘told me what the old man Harold Lawrence said about the trip to London, I’ve always thought there was something odd about it. So does Francis. Most of the family, certainly all the ones from Lincolnshire, were on this expedition. Old boy Lawrence told Francis about it very deliberately, as if it was something he’d been told to say. And then he mentioned both the hotel, White’s, where they stayed, and the theatre, the Savoy, where they saw the play. Harold did not mention that his son Carlton peeled off somewhere in the middle and went back to Candlesby. But why? And why did the old boy not mention it to Francis?’

‘Maybe the old boy forgot about Carlton, sir. Maybe he didn’t even know he’d gone.’

‘It’s possible. But think about it. If he had mentioned a hotel but with no name and a theatre with no name we could never have checked anything at all. London has too many hotels and too many theatres.’

‘Maybe they had worked out that we would come and ask for the names of the hotel and the theatre. Maybe that was the whole point of the trip to London, to give themselves an alibi.’

‘I don’t like it,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald darkly. ‘I don’t like it one little bit.’

Twenty minutes later they were inside White’s Hotel,
one of the newest and grandest in the capital. A short walk across an enormous entrance hall and halfway down a long corridor lined with hunting prints led them to a door labelled General Manager, James Thomas. The bearer of the title was remarkably young, scarcely over thirty, Johnny thought. He heard their request for information very
seriously
and without interruption, making a few notes with a gold pen in a small black notebook.

‘A murder case,’ he said quietly, ‘and the key events all some time ago. I do hope none of our guests were involved. Now then, I am going to send for the people most likely to have had dealings with these Lawrences.’ He rang a small bell and a very young man with ginger hair appeared, dressed in the regulation white shirt and dark red uniform. Johnny thought he might be even younger than Constable Merrick, if such a thing were possible.

‘Tom,’ said the hotel manager, ‘can you bring the
following
people here to my office: the reservations manager with his ledgers for the last couple of months, the head waiter who was on duty on the evening of Wednesday the sixth and Thursday the seventh of October together with the waiter who served the Lawrences those two evenings, the same for the waiter at breakfast the following morning, the chambermaid who made up their rooms and the head porter who was on duty the evenings they were here. He may remember ordering a cab.’

Tom duly departed. ‘Can he remember all that, your young man Tom?’ asked Johnny incredulously. ‘Without taking a note?’

‘He can remember a lot more than that,’ the hotel manager smiled. ‘He has what they call a photographic memory and great ability in mathematics. He’s more than helpful with the accounts. Tom came to us from Hoxton, where his father is a successful bookmaker. Maybe that has something to do with it. I have just engaged a tutor to see how great his potential is. If he is as promising as we think, I hope to
persuade the directors to pay for him to be educated up to the point where he can go to university.’

Constable Merrick was having one of the best days of his life. He was to give his parents a limited account of the hotel personnel: the bent old man with a tiny white beard and a twinkle in his eye who divulged the facts about the Lawrence reservations; the waiters, one French with a
moustache
, one Italian with a beard, at dinner and at breakfast who reported them as a perfectly normal family; the
chambermaid
who had made up their beds and reported that all the beds the Lawrences were meant to be in had been slept in on both nights; the head porter who had indeed booked them a cab. All had recognized the Lawrences from the
wedding
photograph. All, except the head porter, recognized the middle Mr Lawrence as being present on all occasions, though the head porter who had ordered the cab couldn’t be sure as it was dark. The one curious thing was the booking. That had originally been made for the Wednesday night only. The rooms were booked some six days before. Then the second night was added the day the party arrived. Constable Merrick wrote it all down, wishing he had young Tom’s powers of recall.

James Thomas brought them to a quiet corner of the
reception
area when the evidence had been presented and ordered them some coffee. ‘You may wish to think about what the staff just told you. With most people this kind of detail can take a while to sink in. And you may well think of one or two other people you wish to talk to or a question you wish to ask. Just come back and knock on my door if you do.’

The porters performed their arabesques across the
carpet
, with trays and cake holders and glasses. The clientele wandered in and looked as if they owned the place. Dotted about the huge room, usually in corners, were enormous potted plants with flowers of green and red.