David Dickinson - Death in a Scarlet Coat

‘Let us begin,’ he said. Johnny always started like that:

‘The Badger drew himself up, took a firm grip of his stick with both paws, glanced round at his comrades, and cried -

“The hour is come! Follow me!”

And flung the door open wide.

My!

What a squealing and a squeaking and a screeching filled the air!’

‘Aaah! Help! Yaroo! Look out! Whoops!’

In full voice, Johnny reckoned, Christopher and Juliet would have a good chance of bringing down the walls of Jericho.

After three more pages, with the twins now in uproar, he tiptoed out of the door and shot down the stairs.

‘Constable Merrick,’ he said, panting slightly, ‘duty calls. There is a danger of a serious breach of public order one floor up. You are to proceed upstairs at once and sort it out. I recommend most strongly that you wear your helmet!’

‘Sir!’ Constable Merrick had performed this sort of duty at home before now. He had younger brothers and sisters himself. By now the impactof his uniform had dissolved completely. He was not the master but a figure of fun in his own house.

Here in Markham Square, however, he felt, things might be different. He climbed the stairs as noisily as he could, fixing his helmet to his head as he went. Outside the twins’ door he paused and coughed. As he went in he took out a pencil and a notebook and inspected the twins with great severity.

‘Now then,’ he began.

He did not have to say more. Unknown to him, and unknown to Johnny, an enormous policeman with a huge helmet had told the twins off one day in the park recently for digging up the flowers. His helmet had made an indelible impression. Now the twins were underneath the bedclothes, pulling blankets and sheets over themselves as fast as possible before he could make a single note. He stood by the door for a moment, humming to himself. The peace of sleep seemed to be stealing over Christopher and Juliet.

For weeks afterwards Constable Merrick’s ghost haunted the house. Nurse Mary Muriel would warn her charges that she thought she heard the policeman’s footsteps on the stairs. They would fall into bed immediately. Powerscourt was to say afterwards that Constable Merrick had been able to do what few could perform in their lifetime. He could keep the twins quiet. He had achieved a sort of eternal life up there with the schoolroom and the boxes of dressing-up clothes and the broken toys on the nursery floor of Markham Square.

Barnabas Thorpe, butler of Candlesby Hall, was a worried man. The general uncertainty about the future, with two members of the family involved in unsolved murders, concerned him. The behaviour of the two eldest surviving brothers, Henry and Edward, concerned him even more. They had discovered another wine merchant who would extend them a line of credit. That very morning carters had been unloading case after case of claret and burgundy, port and Madeira into the cellars. Only Barnabas Thorpe had read the fine print of the agreement, left lying around on a broken table in the saloon. It stipulated an enormous rate of interest if the bill was not paid in full within thirty days. After that wealth beckoned for the wine merchants. Thorpe thought it unlikely that the bill would be paid on time.

Then there was the poor strange boy, as Thorpe had always referred to James, on the top floor. The boy’s illness was not Thorpe’s province, but reports of his deterioration filtered down through the floors of Candlesby Hall. A medical doctor, expert in the strange ways of the semi-insane, was in attendance now, as well as the nurse. The boy was delirious part of the time, rather like the old ladies of Candlesby, talking of King Arthur and the Lady of Shalott and apparently able to quote lines from Tennyson’s poem at will. Barnabas Thorpe had always regarded any interest in poetry as conclusive proof of the softening of the brain, if not actual insanity itself. Only Charles Candlesby knew the true position about his brother’s health. It was he who had sanctioned the extra expense of hiring the doctor. Only he knew how long the engagement might last.

Charles Candlesby, indeed, was the only positive person in Barnabas Thorpe’s book at this time. Helping the poor, looking after his brother, he was at once the most unlikely Candlesby, but at the same time the most likeable member of the family. This morning he was polishing off an enormous bowl of porridge at the Powerscourt breakfast table in Mr Drake’s hotel. He was becoming a regular visitor.

‘Would you like some more porridge, Charles?’ said Lady Lucy, who always treated him as a favourite son.

‘No, no thanks,’ said Charles, ‘I’ll just tuck into a couple of eggs and a few rashers and maybe a tomato. Nothing much.’

‘Charles,’ said Powerscourt, finishing off some toast, ‘do you mind if we talk business for a moment?’

His mouth full of bacon and tomato, Charles managed a vigorous nod of the head by way of reply.

‘It’s this,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. You know the habits of your family up at the Hall. Why was your father wearing his scarlet coat on the night he died? We have no idea why he put it on. The pathologist thought he died sometime between the hours of ten in the evening and four the following morning. Now, suppose you go out, intending to meet somebody at the earlier time of ten – he must have been going to meet somebody surely, unless he wanted to wander round in the storm which seems unlikely – wouldn’t you expect to come home again after you met them? And you’d have plenty of time to put on your scarlet coat the next morning in time for the hunt. You didn’t have to put it on for the early rendezvous the evening before. Your father was hardly going to meet a fox at that time of day, was he?’

‘I’m not sure’, said Charles sadly, pulling a piece of bacon out from between his teeth, ‘that I like where this is going to go. B-but p-p-please continue.’

‘Let us look at it from the later date given by the pathologist, four o’clock in the morning. Suppose he left home at three for his rendezvous. Again he is wearing the scarlet coat. Why? He must think he is not coming home before the hunt – that he needs to go out dressed in his hunting gear because he has to be wearing it in the morning. So what was he intending to do all that time? Between, say, ten or eleven the night before and eight o’clock in the morning when he would have to set out back to the Hall?’

Powerscourt left his question hanging in the air.

‘Boat?’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Would he have gone somewhere in a boat?’

‘Not in that weather,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Every boat in the county will have been tied up at her mooring that night.’

Charles looked at them sadly. ‘Surely,’ he said, ‘there’s only one conclusion. My father was going to meet somebody. He intended to spend the night with them and go b-b-back for the hunt in the morning. That’s why he was wearing the coat. And’, he looked embarrassed now, ‘the somebody was p-p-probably a woman.’

‘We don’t need to dwell on this,’ said Powerscourt, ‘but where on earth, in all that empty space, would you meet a woman? Where would you find one? There isn’t a house for miles.’

‘Maybe’, said Lady Lucy, ‘he did ride for miles, but inland, to the next village. There’s nothing to say he went straight to where he was collected by Jack Hayward. He needn’t have gone near the sea at all. He could have gone in the opposite direction. His murderers could have brought him back and dumped him where he was found.’

Powerscourt put his head in his hands and groaned slightly. ‘Here’s another thing. The horse. Jack Hayward went to collect him with a horse, Marlborough, your father’s horse. But your father must have set off on a different horse. What happened to that one? The one Lord Candlesby left his house on?’