David Dickinson - Death in a Scarlet Coat

He fished about in his bedclothes and put on a pair of very thick spectacles. His face had turned paler yet.

‘This seems satisfactory,’ he said at last and signed it. ‘You must do what you have to do with this document.’ He stopped suddenly as if a great thought had come to him close to the end.

‘Lord Powerscourt,’ he said, ‘will you look into this matter for me? Will you investigate the Candlesby death on my behalf? Think of this as a last commission from a dying man. I shall remember your efforts in my will. It would please me greatly if I could think that my sins are being sorted out. I would not die with such a heavy burden on my shoulders.’

Powerscourt smiled. ‘I should be delighted to accept your commission, doctor. Now, I feel it is time to rest. I fear Mrs Baines will be upon us again at any moment.’

The doctor sank back on his pillows once more. Inside a couple of minutes he was asleep. The sweat was still there on his forehead, his colour was still deathly pale, but a slight smile played about his face as if he were happier now. Powerscourt tiptoed slowly from the room, wondering if the doctor was back in his pram once more, or playing in his parents’ garden in the sunshine.

Powerscourt took himself for a long walk on his journey from the doctor’s house to Mr Drake’s hotel where he was to spend the night. This must be one of the most unusual cases he had ever undertaken, commissioned to solve a murder by a doctor who had lied on the death certificate. He was passing the back entrance to Candlesby Hall now, a pair of gate lodges with smoke rising from the chimneys, a prospect of farmland, and a herd of deer in the distance but no sight of the house itself. He was trying to work out what to do. As far as he could tell there were only two people, apart from the murderer, who had seen the dead Earl and must have some idea of what had killed him. But when he considered his own position he was not sure how to proceed. Officially, the death certificate said death by natural causes. If the two people who knew the truth refused to speak, sworn, presumably, to silence in the manner of the doctor, then all he had was a page in a notebook, handwritten, not even typed, which he suspected would have little purchase in the English legal system. If there was no agreement that there had been a murder at all, how could he investigate it? Anybody ill disposed to his efforts, the new Lord Candlesby for instance, could make life very difficult.

There was only one way forward. He would have to throw himself on the mercy of the Lincolnshire Constabulary. In his experience, if you told the police what you were doing at the beginning of an inquiry, they would as a rule bend over backwards to be helpful. Bring them in late and they would be surly and suspicious and occasionally obstructive. He asked George Drake the hotel manager that evening for the name of a sympathetic senior detective who operated in those parts. Detective Inspector William Blunden, he was told, based at Spalding, was his man. A message was sent saying that Powerscourt proposed to call on him at eleven o’clock the following morning. If George Drake had any curiosity about Powerscourt asking for guidance about senior detectives he didn’t show it. He didn’t mention it to anybody, not even to his wife. If Powerscourt was in trouble and had to confess his sins to a senior policeman, then he, George Drake, was not going to start any rumours.

Detective Inspector Blunden was a big man. A small child might have described him as a giant. He was over six feet three inches tall with powerful shoulders and massive hands. He looked, the Detective Inspector, as if he might have played rugby seriously, probably as a second row forward, and a couple of cups and a photograph on the side of his desk confirmed his sporting past. His eyes were not those of a leader of the pack, however; they were light brown and rather gentle. It was these soft eyes indeed that constituted his chief appeal for the girl who later became his wife.

‘Good morning, Lord Powerscourt,’ said the Detective Inspector, rising from his desk to shake Powerscourt by the hand. ‘What a privilege to meet you!’

‘Thank you so much for your time, Inspector. I’m sure you must be very busy.’

‘Something tells me, my lord, that I may be even busier when I have heard what you have got to say.’

Blunden had been wondering before this meeting what a leading investigator from London could want from a provincial policeman in one of England’s more obscure counties. The wall of silence constructed around the death of the Earl of Candlesby was so effective that it never crossed his mind that Candlesby Hall and its last master might be at the centre of Powerscourt’s story.

Powerscourt told him everything: the breakdown of his car, his and Lady Lucy’s emergency singing role at the Messiah, the meeting with Dr Miller, the summons to see him on his sickbed, the details of the day of the death. Or murder, he said, realizing he was now authorized to say that by the doctor’s note.

‘I’ll give you the sequence of events on that morning in time order, if I may, Inspector. I got them in bits from the doctor yesterday and I don’t have very much detail. The hunt was meeting in front of the house. They were getting ready to move off. Then they saw a horse with something that later transpired to be a corpse across it coming up that long drive that leads to the Hall. There must have been somebody leading the horse unless the animal knew its way home but I’m damned if I know who it was. The horse and the corpse are diverted into the stables away from prying eyes. The doctor is summoned; he doesn’t live far away. He is bullied into agreeing to sign a death certificate saying the late Earl died from natural cases. Only he didn’t. He was murdered, but that death certificate meant there was no question of a post-mortem or anything like that.’ He handed over his notebook opened at the page with the doctor’s statement.

‘Well,’ said Detective Inspector Blunden, ‘this is a pretty kettle of fish and no mistake. One murdered Earl, but we don’t know where he had gone to be murdered, if you see what I mean. Presumably one of the sons could have gone out and killed him and got back to the Hall before daybreak. And, if there was someone with the body, which seems most likely, how did they know where to find him? And the most difficult questions are something else again. The false death certificate. The lack of a post-mortem. How might we get round them?’

‘I’m not sure’, said Powerscourt, ‘where the law would stand on this. There is one official death certificate, saying death by natural causes, signed by the good Dr Miller. There is a different account of events, also signed by the good Dr Miller, to say the first one was wrong and the poor man was murdered by person or persons unknown.’

‘There is one thing that has just occurred to me, my lord,’ said Inspector Blunden, twiddling a pencil in his enormous hands. ‘Those injuries, to the dead man, I mean, they must have been pretty horrendous, don’t you think? That might have accounted for the diversion into the stables.’

‘It’s possible,’ Powerscourt replied, ‘but it might just be the natural reluctance of the family to have all the members of the hunt come to peer at the corpse.’

‘Unless we get a post-mortem we’re not going to know how the Earl was killed. Unless we know how he was killed, my lord, we’ve precious little to go on to investigate a charge of murder. I’ve never had to ask for an exhumation before, but if the family want to keep the murder a secret I’m sure they could make life very difficult for us.’

‘You can hear the lawyers now, Inspector,’ said Powerscourt, a vision of his barrister friend Charles Augustus Pugh floating into his mind. ‘“Which should we believe, my lord, the official death certificate, properly signed by the doctor when he was still in good health, or this scribbled entry in a cheap notebook, the bulk of the testimony not even in the doctor’s hand? The formal record of a man passing away, carried out according to custom and tradition, or the ramblings of a sick man close to his deathbed dictated to an investigator who hasn’t investigated a case for nearly two years and was obviously desperate for a commission. I submit, my lord, that this appeal for an exhumation is vexatious and should be dismissed.”’