‘All you have to do is to fill in the death certificate or whatever it’s called.’ Richard was speaking very quietly now, a sure sign to his brothers that he was incandescent with rage. ‘That doesn’t take long. I don’t see how it should trouble your conscience that much. And we’ll make it worth your while, doctor.’
This, Richard suddenly realized, was where he should have started. Nobody knew how they knew, but all the Dymokes knew the doctor liked money, liked a great deal of it in fact. People said his late wife had very expensive tastes.
‘How much?’ asked the doctor, sounding like a drunk unable to resist another glass.
‘Let’s discuss that once you’ve signed the death certificate. It’ll be a goodly sum; you need have no fear about that.’
The doctor was not strong any more. His will had ebbed away in the Lincolnshire breeze. Eventually he did what he was told. He entered ‘heart attack’ as the cause of death of Arthur George Harold John Nathaniel Dymoke, Earl of Candlesby. There was no need for a post-mortem. The corpse was duly prepared for burial with nobody, apart from his doctor and his eldest son and his head groom, knowing the cause or the manner of his death.
Forty-five minutes after the accident the Powerscourts were sitting in the drawing room of the Candlesby Arms, the principal hotel of the town of the same name. The manager had secured the service of a local farmer with a powerful tractor to remove the Powerscourt car from the ditch the following morning and a skilled mechanic who worked nearby would check the engine and the bodywork. The hotel manager had inspected his visitors closely. Lord Francis Powerscourt was six feet tall with curly brown hair and pale blue eyes. Something told George Drake, the hotel manager, that he had seen service in the military in the past. He was to learn later that Powerscourt was one of the most distinguished private investigators in the country. Lady Lucy, his wife, was half a foot shorter than her husband with curly blonde hair and light brown eyes. She had, Drake thought, an air of great vivacity about her as if adventures were there for the taking and boredom might be the greatest enemy of all.
All was not well in the hotel that afternoon. There was a constant stream of visitors with long faces come to confer with the manager. As afternoon tea was being taken he came to talk to his new guests. They were, he said to himself, his last hope, and a pretty forlorn one at that.
‘You seem to have plenty of visitors this afternoon, Mr Drake,’ said Lady Lucy cheerfully. ‘Is there some big social function on this evening?’
‘You could say that, Lady Powerscourt,’ said Drake, stirring his cup of tea slowly and sadly.
‘Is there anything we could do to help, Mr Drake?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘You have been more than helpful to us here in our time of trouble.’
George Drake looked at them carefully. It’s worth a try, he said to himself. It’s a pound to a penny they won’t be able to do a thing, but you never know.
‘This is how it is,’ he said finally, ‘if you have the time to listen to my troubles. The local vicar and I run the choral society here in Candlesby. I do the organizing, book the hall, get the tickets printed and sold around the town and so forth. The Reverend Moorhouse is in charge of the singing, the works to be performed, that sort of thing. He’s got a beautiful speaking voice himself, the vicar. They say some ladies come from miles around to hear him take Matins on a Sunday morning. He was a singing scholar or whatever they call them over in Oxford when he was younger. His congregation shrinks whenever they hear his curate, Reverend Flint, is taking the services. This is the problem, my lord, my lady. There’s a performance of Handel’s Messiah scheduled for this evening. The choir have been working on it since July. It’s been advertised all round the district for weeks. Vicars far and wide have mentioned it in their parish notices. The local newspaper has run a whole series of articles about the performance as if nobody has ever sung in Candlesby before. The Bishop of Lincoln himself is planning to attend.’
George Drake paused. Powerscourt had a faint suspicion, nothing stronger than that, about what was coming.
‘Forgive me if I’m boring you,’ said Drake, looking anxiously at his visitors. ‘I’m coming to the point, I promise you. Those people at the hotel this afternoon were all here to cry off tonight’s performance or to cry off on behalf of their friends or relatives. We’ve had a terrible dose of the influenza round here this week. Some of the choir can’t speak, let alone sing. To cap it all, the old Earl up at the big house was brought home dead on his horse this very morning and God only knows how many people might have to miss the performance because of that. Not’, Mr Drake added with feeling, ‘that there will be many local mourners for the vicious old bastard.’
‘Surely, Mr Drake,’ said Lady Lucy in her most emollient tones, ‘it doesn’t matter if you lose a bass or two. The others can just carry on. I don’t know what size your choir is but surely it won’t make much difference if you have five basses rather than six, if you see what I mean.’
‘I do see what you mean, Lady Powerscourt; I can see it very clearly. That’s not our problem, I’m afraid. It’s the soloists. Two of them and the two understudies, tenor and soprano, all laid low, every single one of them. The chief tenor has to croak to speak with his wife. The soprano woman has taken to communicating with written messages on slips of paper as if she was back at school. What are they going to sound like in the great high spaces of St Michael and All Angels in Candlesby High Street with the Bishop in the front row in his mitre and all? I don’t know what we can do. I’m told the vicar is on his knees even now praying by the High Altar. I’m not sure how that’s going to help us, I’m really not.’
‘Correct me if I’m wrong, Mr Drake,’ said Powerscourt. ‘It seems to me that the position is as follows. Your choir has been booked in for this recital for weeks if not months. You can’t cancel it now because you can’t reach all the people who might be coming. My Lord Bishop’, Powerscourt checked his watch, ‘may even have set off from his palace by now if he is a cautious traveller anxious to arrive in good time and sprinkle a few benedictions on the locals. Your choir is like a cricket team that has lost its best batsman and its best bowler and has nobody left to be twelfth man.’
While Powerscourt paused briefly, Lady Lucy took up the story.
‘Surely, Mr Drake, it’s perfectly obvious what you have to do. You just have to make do with what you’ve got. Explain to the audience at the beginning that you have lost all these people through the influenza. Apologize for the fact that the sound will not be what you hoped. That is the best thing to do, is it not?’
‘We’ve thought of that, Lady Powerscourt,’ said Drake, ‘and we don’t think it will work. You see, it’s the tenor and the soprano who have gone. Without them the whole oratorio is going to sound wrong, let alone missing the different solo parts they perform within the Messiah. It would be like Hamlet without the Prince or Macbeth without the witches or The Tempest without Caliban. It’s not as though they were singing some new work nobody had ever heard before. There’s a tradition of singing Handel’s Messiah in Candelsby church that goes back generations. Some of these people know it virtually off by heart. They come to each new performance like a bunch of wine lovers going to taste the latest Chateau Lafite.’
‘You did say tenor and soprano, didn’t you, Mr Drake?’ Powerscourt was looking meaningfully at Lady Lucy as he spoke.
‘Yes, I did,’ said Drake, looking perplexed.
Powerscourt managed to raise an eyebrow in inquisitive mode in Lady Lucy’s direction. There was a slight but unmistakable nod in reply.
‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, ‘if you’re willing to take a chance, Mr Drake, then we might just be able to help you.’
‘What do you mean?’ said a confused Drake.