David Dickinson - Death in a Scarlet Coat

‘Bestir yourself with the bloody story, Rufus,’ growled his editor. ‘Some of us have to go to press later on.’

‘Sorry, sir,’ said the young man. He paused for a moment or two before he resumed. ‘Not far from here, between Candlesby Hall and the coast at Skegness, lies the estate of Sir Arthur Melville, Baronet, with a fine Elizabethan manor house and many thousands of acres. Last summer he would have been fifty-seven years old. They say, how shall I put it, my lord, that he was never at the top of the class, Sir Arthur. He spent many years in the military before rising to the rank of captain, but beyond that, he never progressed. Anyway, back to this fairy story mansion of his. Last Easter he brought a bride home at last, a widow in her early thirties called Mrs Flavia von Humboldt, previously married to a German philosophy professor in Tubingen who dropped down dead in the university library next to the complete works of Aristotle. History does not recall what kind of existence she led in the confines of her German university – Kant and Nietzsche for lunch perhaps and Hobbes and Locke for supper – but it cannot have been proper preparation for life in Lincolnshire. She grew bored. Her eyes began to stray. Perhaps the fifty-seven-year-old was equally ill equipped for married life on England’s east coast. After all, the hill station and the club and the punkah wallah do not translate happily to Lincolnshire. Anyway Flavia began a passionate affair with Lord Candlesby. They did not seem to care who knew. Discretion went out of the window along with common sense. The husband did not know. He thought they were riding together or inspecting horses when they were, in fact, engaged on other, rather more private recreations. All through the summer it went on, and into the autumn.

‘They forgot one thing, the lovers, or they ignored it, and it probably did for them in the end. Because of her married name, von Humboldt, the locals thought she was German. Well might she tell all and sundry that she was christened Flavia Witherspoon in Margate, they didn’t believe her. People on this side of the country, my lord, are even more hostile to the Germans than they would be in Cornwall or the south-west.’

‘Why is that?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘Closer, that’s why. I mean the Germans are closer. They could reach Skegness a damn sight quicker than they could invade Weston Super Mare. Anyway, the precise timetable gets a bit vague at this point but the sequence of events seems to go as follows. One day somebody sends Flavia copies of half the love letters she’s ever written to John, Lord Candlesby. The next day they send him copies of half the letters he’s sent to her. People say she was distraught and that Lord Candlesby told her to keep calm. Nothing happened in the letter-sending department on the third day. But on the fourth day the somebody, presumably the same somebody, probably a servant, sends all the love letters, all hers to him, all his to her, to Sir Arthur. They were timed to coincide with breakfast. It was said Sir Arthur swept a whole sideboard of dishes on to the floor in one single movement – kidneys, eggs, bacon, mushrooms, tomatoes, black pudding, fried bread, kedgeree, kippers, all felled by a baronet’s fury. When she tried to apologize he told her that he was going to ruin her reputation by dragging her through the divorce courts. Even an Indian untouchable, he shouted at her, wouldn’t go near her when he’d finished with her. Then he shouted some more insults after her – no better than a Whitechapel whore, Jack the Ripper too good for her, that sort of stuff. Sometime that afternoon she took an overdose of her husband’s sleeping pills. She knew where they were. Then she walked into the sea. Her body was washed up weeks later near Hunstanton. Poor Sir Arthur! Married, cuckolded and widowed inside a year. People say that he blames Lord Candlesby for everything, leading his wife astray, disgracing her till she had to commit suicide. Sometimes, it is reported, but I have no means of knowing if it’s true, he can be heard late at night in his cups, shouting from his balustrade that he’ll kill that Candlesby one of these days, you see if he doesn’t.’

‘What a terrible story,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Is he still drinking a lot, poor man?’

‘He is, I believe,’ said James Roper, senior representative present of the drinking fraternity, ‘but you can certainly see why Sir Arthur might want to kill the Earl. Now then, young Rufus, do you want to tell the duel story, or shall I?’

‘Duels?’ said Powerscourt. ‘I thought they’d gone out years ago with Canning and Castlereagh in the 1820s.’

‘Nothing ever goes out, as you put it, up here in Lincolnshire. This is the land time forgot. You know about la France Profonde, Lord Powerscourt? This is l’Angleterre Profonde, up here with the winds and the sand and the cold fury of the North Sea. Let me tell the duel story; it’ll be a lot shorter than the first one.’

Lady Lucy Powerscourt was being driven north to the flatlands of Lincolnshire. Rhys, the Powerscourt butler and chauffeur, was driving as well as he always did, with no fuss but reaching quite remarkable speeds. Lady Lucy remembered him telling her recently that this car was just the latest form of transport he had driven. He had experienced every form of horse-drawn vehicle, from flies to broughams, known to man, camels in the deserts of Arabia, miserable animals in Rhys’s view, an elephant in northern India, a paddle steamer on the Mississippi. None of them, he maintained, could hold a candle to the Silver Ghost, a car of such restrained power it was as if you had your very own four-in-hand waiting under the bonnet to sweep you on to ever greater speeds.

Lady Lucy had fulfilled the instructions in Powerscourt’s telegram. With great difficulty, and the promise of two expensive lunches on her return to town, she had located an aunt, an aunt at a number of removes it had to be said, but an aunt nonetheless. This aunt, of unknown age, though Lady Lucy thought she must be well over seventy, lived at a place called Ashby Hall, in Ashby Puerorum not far from Candlesby in the Silver Ghost. Lady Lucy had already despatched a letter saying that she proposed to call, and to bring her consort with her. At least the aunt could look forward to inspecting Lady Lucy’s husband, whom she had never met. Indeed, Lady Lucy had some difficulty working out if the elderly aunt had ever met her either.

When she thought of her husband now, she felt rather concerned about his future. For as long as she had known him, her Francis had been involved in solving murders and mysteries of every sort: frauds in the art market, blackmail in the royal family, murder in an Inn of Court. There had been danger, one occasion indeed when he had been knocking quite loudly at death’s door and promised to stop investigating afterwards until Lucy agreed to absolve him from his promise. Then he had gone to St Petersburg, where she felt certain he had never told her how dangerous his adventures had been. Always, in all these cases, she knew but had never mentioned it, there was, for Francis, an element of a game, maybe a variant of the Great Game he had played out in India with the Russians. Solving the murder was like solving a puzzle or cracking a code. But it was no preparation for the secret work he had been asked to do in the past year or so by the government. This, Lady Lucy realized very quickly from watching her husband, was completely different. Murders, even when they crossed the path of the Tsar of Russia, usually involved one family or one extended family. Working for the authorities, as Francis always referred to his government employers, meant working for the whole country, millions and millions of people. Make a mistake in a murder inquiry and the wrong person might be convicted for the crime; make a mistake on government business and you could jeopardize the future security of your fellow countrymen. Francis said very little about his opponents, presumably investigators and policemen turned into spies by the other great powers, but Lady Lucy thought that on a number of occasions he had been as close to being frightened as she had ever seen him. These people take no prisoners, he had said to her once; they’d throw you over the side of the ship and leave you for the fishes without a second’s thought. And somehow, though Lady Lucy didn’t know how she knew it, they were going to come for him again, the authorities, and pressgang him into service once more for the good of his country. With all her heart she prayed the tocsin would not sound too soon.