‘Care to join me?’ he boomed, shaking Powerscourt vigorously by the hand. ‘Medicinal, you know. Doctor man recommends brandy in small but regular doses. Never asked me when I start, mind you. He might think’ – Roper checked a large clock on the wall – ‘that ten to twelve is a little soon into the gallops. Never mind. Let me introduce young Rufus here, our chief reporter, Rufus Kershaw.’
Rufus was certainly young. Powerscourt didn’t think this slip of a lad could be more than twenty-five, his slim features, lack of a beard and clear brown eyes a mighty contrast to his superior.
‘Please don’t look at me like that, Lord Powerscourt,’ the young man said with a smile. ‘I am nearly twenty-six years old, you know. And I have been a reporter on this paper for the past nine years. That’s a very long time, nine years. And it’s amazing how much more people will tell me because they think they’re only talking to a boy.’
‘Now then, my lord,’ Roper was refilling his glass with great care from an enormous decanter, ‘may I ask what is the purpose of your visit here?’
‘It is very simple,’ said Powerscourt, ‘but could I ask first of all that our conversation is off the record for now? It may be that the position will change over time – we shall see. Let me explain what brings me to Lincolnshire. I have been asked to look into the death of the last Lord Candlesby. Sorry to sound obstructive but are you gentlemen happy to be off the record for the present?’
There was a short glance and a quick nod between the newspapermen.
‘We have a story about that affair ready to appear in our next edition tomorrow,’ said Roper. ‘Young Rufus here had better tell you about it; he wrote the story after all. And assume that we are all off the record.’
‘I had heard you were here, my lord,’ said Rufus. ‘I bumped into one of Inspector Blunden’s men on the way to interview one of the hunt officials. I think they told me more than they told him, mind you, seeing I’ve talked to most of them a couple of times or more in the past few years.’
Powerscourt felt his card was being marked, very delicately, but marked all the same. He smiled at the young man.
‘Did you draw any conclusions from your interviews, Mr Kershaw? Anything firm? Anything meaningful?’
‘My very first boss, my lord, was forever asking if certain stories would make “a meaningful piece”,’ the young man said. ‘It makes me smile to this day to think of the phrase.’ He paused for a moment and whipped a notebook out of his pocket. ‘I think it’s all very clear, this story, up to a certain point. There’s the hunt milling around the front of Candlesby Hall. There are the servants handing round the stirrup cup, little conversations full of hope for the new hunting season. The Master is late but the Master is often late. It is cold and the breath of horses and hunters is making vapour trails in the air.’
Powerscourt wondered if the last phrase would get past the sub-editor’s pen.
‘So far, so good. Then the picture grows dimmer. There is a horse, led by the chief groom, Jack Hayward, with a body across it. The body is covered with a couple of blankets. Quite soon, I don’t yet know how soon, everybody gathers that the corpse is that of the Master of the Hunt and Earl of Candlesby. The death party turn off into the stables. Beyond that nothing is clear. The doctor is summoned. Jack Hayward and his family disappear the next day or the day after. Various outsiders begin to appear: yourself, my lord, the Chief Constable, a shady legal gentleman from a firm of solicitors in Bedford Square. The cabbie who drove him from the station to the Hall told me that, my lord. Man gave the cabbie his card in case he ever needed the best legal advice. Silly man! Most of the local cabbies go to Campbell Moreton amp; Marsh in the High Street here. Cheaper than Bedford Square, I’m sure.’
‘Does your article come to any conclusions, Mr Kershaw?’ Powerscourt observed out of the corner of his eye that a giant’s refill was being poured very carefully into the editor’s glass.
‘Please call me Rufus,’ said the young man. ‘I feel very old if you call me Mr Kershaw. No, I most certainly did not come to any conclusions for the simple reason that I didn’t have any. I still don’t have any. Do you, my lord? Have any conclusions, I mean?’
‘No, I haven’t,’ said Powerscourt. ‘May I ask you, were you aware that Dr Miller, the doctor in attendance on the dead man, is also dead? Mind you, he was very old.’
‘Do you think there was anything suspicious about his demise?’ So far the editor’s brain seemed untouched by his brandy intake.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Powerscourt, ‘but let me try to move our conversation in a slightly different direction, if I may. I have been asked to investigate the death of the late Lord Candlesby. The person who asked me is certain it was murder. Therefore, I ask myself, is there anything in the man’s past that could have led to his death? So I come to ask you gentlemen for your advice and counsel.’
Rufus Kershaw wrote something very suddenly in his book. The editor lifted his gaze from his decanter to Powerscourt’s face.
‘Now I see, Lord Powerscourt, now I see what you have come for. Well, I’m sure we can give you a few clues. Rufus, could you begin with the most recent story that might be relevant?’
‘Yes, sir. I presume you are referring to the suicide of Lady Flavia Melville last summer. This, my lord, was a most frustrating story. You may think it is difficult to find out the truth about the body that joins the hunt. Well, it was even more difficult with this one. There is, I think, one rule that used to hold but no longer does. Its day may have passed already, I don’t know. Certainly I don’t think it’ll last another ten years. And this rule is that servants don’t talk. They may talk to the police in confidence but they won’t appear in court in case they lose their job or their house or their farm or all three together. In the Lady Melville case they must have said something but who it was or to whom it was said we still don’t know. I have to tell you, my lord, that I am trying my hand at fictional short stories. I have had two published so far in The Strand Magazine and I hope for further success in the future. But I firmly believe that my account of the Lady Melville affair still owes more to fiction than to fact.’
‘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.