David Dickinson - Death in a Scarlet Coat

James Roper topped up his glass and inspected his little audience.

‘By the middle of the last century,’ he began, ‘duelling had more or less disappeared. I’ve often wondered if it didn’t have to do with the decline in traditional values associated with owning land and the military and men of honour. It’s hard to imagine a couple of cotton manufacturers in Lancashire fighting a duel if one fellow said the other’s produce was a load of rubbish. They might try to put their opponent out of business, but it’s almost impossible to think of them squaring up to each other by the waste ground at the back of the mill first thing in the morning. But here,’ Roper waved his hands in the air for a moment, ‘well, this is Lincolnshire. Old values may last longer here. Or perhaps the locals don’t know any better.’

Rufus Kershaw restrained himself with difficulty from suggesting to his superior that he hurry on with the story. The message seemed to get through anyway.

‘As far as we know, the last Lord Candlesby never served in the military. There was no tradition of it in the family. There was, however, a tradition of horse breeding and horse racing that went back a long way. I believe there are a couple of Stubbses from centuries past gathering dust on the walls of the big house in the usual way. For this incident, we must be talking thirty or forty years ago, maybe even more.’

Roper paused for a moment and stared deep into his brandy decanter as if some magical properties were contained within, or a djinn might be about to pop out of it. ‘They say he always had a good eye for a horse, the late Earl. And he liked riding them himself, even though he might have done better with a professional jockey. One day, years ago, he was riding his own horse called Romulus in a race down at Fakenham. Odds of twelve to one. Candlesby wins all right but he has to give his horse a terrible whipping to get past a horse called WG who came second. This is where the trouble started.’ Roper took a long draught of his medicine and carried on. ‘WG’s owner, not, alas, the great cricketer, but a respectable local farmer called Bell, told Candlesby in front of the crowd that he had broken all the moral rules of racing by whipping his horse like that. It was reported that blood was dripping from the animal’s flanks in the winner’s enclosure. It wasn’t worthy of a gentleman, the farmer said. Now, of course, there’s nothing more likely to arouse an Earl than to be told he’s not a gentleman. There’s not much else they can lay claim to these days after all. “Are you saying I’m not a gentleman?” asks Candlesby. “I most certainly am,” says Farmer Bell. “Pistols or swords?” says Candlesby. “Pistols,” says the farmer, who isn’t quite sure what’s going on. The next morning, very early, they meet by arrangement at a clearing by the river. The farmer fires wide on purpose. Candlesby shoots Bell through the heart and the farmer is pronounced dead within minutes.

‘He had a son, the farmer, a little boy called Oliver,’ James Roper was virtually whispering now, ‘believed to be two or three years old at the time of the duel. His mother married again and the new family went out to Australia. Oliver joined the British Army and served for over twenty years.’

‘Do we know where he is now, this Oliver?’ Powerscourt thought something terrible was coming.

‘Oliver Bell? He’s back here now,’ said Roper. ‘He’s taken a little house near Old Bolingbroke Castle not far from here.’

‘And there’s something else,’ Roper went on. ‘They say he trained as a marksman when he was with the military. They say he was one of the best shots in the British Army.’

‘I see,’ said Powerscourt, still unsure how Lord Candlesby died. Could it have been through multiple gunshot wounds? He didn’t think so but at this stage you couldn’t rule it out. You couldn’t rule anything out. ‘I mustn’t trouble you much longer, gentlemen. Do you have any more runners and riders in the Candlesby Murder Stakes?’

‘This last one is my suggestion,’ said Rufus Kershaw. ‘I came across the details of it some time ago. I’ll be brief, my lord. Many years ago the great contractors were bringing the railway through this county. If the line ran through your land you could become very rich. Not quite as rich as you would with high quality coal, but pretty good all the same. Rapallo or San Remo for your Riviera villa, maybe, rather than the more expensive Cannes or Monte Carlo. The estate next to Candlesby’s was owned by a family called Lawrence who had lived in Lawrence House for hundreds of years. They were sure they had won the contract, these Lawrences. Surveyors and people with strange instruments had been wandering all over their land for weeks. Lawyers were discussing the finer points of the financial settlement and compensation for the disruption during construction, that sort of thing. Then at the very last moment, the Lawrences lost the contract. Candlesby got it instead, whether by bribery or blackmail or intimidation nobody knows. To this day the Lawrences have complained about it. For decades they’ve been telling anybody who would listen that they were robbed by Lord Candlesby. It’s not fair, they say. He should never have been allowed to get away with it. There should be a law against this sort of thing. On and on they’ve gone for over thirty years about how they were cheated out of tens and tens of thousands of pounds.’

‘I don’t suppose you see our paper and the other local papers down there in London, my lord.’ Roper tossed back the remains of his tumbler and waved his hand airily towards a glass-fronted bookcase which contained bound copies of his newspaper. ‘If you had, you would have seen a series of advertisements over recent months. They were for the sale of the entire Lawrence estate, including the house and all its outbuildings.

‘That auction was three weeks ago. The property was sold for just over half of what was asked for it. We have known for years in these parts of the extent and scale of the decline in our agriculture: falling rents, falling income from produce, falling prices for agriculture-related property. This is the worst we have seen since things began to go wrong.’

‘They have a new tune now, of course, these Lawrences,’ Rufus Kershaw went on. ‘If they hadn’t been cheated out of the railway money, they wouldn’t have lost their estate and their house. Let’s all feel sorry for the Lawrences! Death to the new Lord Candlesby!’

Powerscourt wondered if a great loss all those years ago could lead to murder now. ‘There’s just one last thing to do with this story,’ said Rufus. ‘The old boy, the old Mr Lawrence, the one who lost the railway deal, has not been well recently. When the price was so low at the auction he took to his bed and died two days later. He was over ninety years old, mind you. You won’t be surprised to hear his descendants blame the Candlesbys for his death. If he hadn’t been cheated out of the railway money, they claim, he wouldn’t have had to sell up and deprive his descendants of what should have been their rightful inheritance.’

‘I am very grateful to you gentlemen,’ said Powerscourt, smiling at the two journalists. ‘You have been most generous with your time. And what a splendid gallery of suspects!’

Rufus Kershaw smiled rather grimly back. ‘As we said, my lord, as we said. This is Lincolnshire.’

Richard, the new Lord Candlesby, peered down the long corridor that led to the library in his great house. The corridor was empty. He closed the door. He locked it. Then he began to pace up and down. The Candlesby library had not escaped the general decay eating away at the fabric of the building. One bay where the books were stored had the wallpaper peeling off the walls. Damp had penetrated the bindings of some of the older leather-bound volumes and reached the pages where unauthorized water marks told of the steady advance of the rain that came in through the hole in the roof.