‘You give me your word’, said Bamford, ‘that you’re not going to have him arrested the moment you find him?’
‘I do.’
‘Well then, I have no more idea than you do of where he is but I think my wife might be able to give you a steer. She was very close to Jack’s wife when Jack worked for Laughton’s, the big trainer down the road, very successful fellow. Bertha!’
He gave an enormous yell which duly produced Bertha from the kitchen, wearing a dark blue apron and with flour in her hair.
‘You didn’t have to shout so loud, Dick. The cat has gone into hiding again. Sorry, I didn’t know we had company. Good afternoon.’
‘Johnny Fitzgerald,’ said Johnny, shaking a floury hand.
‘Mr Fitzgerald is looking for Jack Hayward, dear. He was caught up in a mysterious death which may well turn out to be murder. He’s left Candlesby Hall for the time being. And he departed in a hurry by all accounts, taking the wife and children with him. Mr Fitzgerald and his friends are keen to talk to him as he is one of the very few people to have seen the dead man.’
‘That wouldn’t be the old Earl of Candlesby, would it, the dead man, I mean, Mr Fitzgerald?’
‘It would, I’m afraid,’ said Johnny.
‘Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid at all. Rejoice, rejoice. He was one of the worst men in England. Jack Hayward’s wife has written to me many times with details of his crimes. She’ll be so pleased.’
‘I was hoping, Mrs Bamford,’ said Johnny, keen to draw the conversation back to where he wanted it to go, ‘that you might be able to help us in terms of where Jack Hayward would have taken his wife and family. I think it would have to be somewhere he could find work, and somewhere he could feel safe if anybody came looking for him. Do you have any ideas?’
Mrs Bamford looked doubtful. ‘I don’t remember having any conversations with Kathleen, that’s the wife, about where they might go in an emergency.’
‘What about her family? Where did she come from?’
‘She was Irish, I’m sure of that. Now you’re going to ask me which part, aren’t you? Hold on a moment, let me think.’
Mrs Bamford went over to the window and stared at a corner of the stables. She went and looked at a small painting on the wall which showed a string of horses out for their morning gallop.
‘Kathleen gave me this picture,’ she said. ‘Her people have something to do with horses, breeding them, training them, riding them, I can’t remember. But there’s a name on the picture somewhere. Here it is: O’Grady Stables, Cashel. Cashel’s got a rock in it, I remember them telling us about it at school, though whether it’s a sweet like Brighton rock or a great stone thing sticking up into the sky I don’t know. Cashel, that’s where she came from, Kathleen O’Grady as she was before she married Jack. Maybe that’s where you should head for, Mr Fitzgerald.’
Johnny thought there was something biblical about the name. Rock of Cashel. Rock of Ages. Maybe the Haywards were hiding themselves in it.
Three days after the inquest with its verdict of unlawful killing, Powerscourt and Detective Inspector Blunden were on their way back to the Hall. The inquest had been regularly interrupted by Mark Sowerby, the late Earl of Candlesby’s man of business from Hopkins Pettigrew amp; Green of Bedford Square. Sowerby had tried to establish that the exhumation from the Candlesby mausoleum had been unlawful because the family had not been consulted. The coroner informed him politely that he, as coroner, had full authority to order exhumations in cases of this kind. Sowerby’s next assault had been to claim that as the exhumation had clearly been unlawful the inquest had no right to issue a verdict other than that of death by natural causes as signed off by Dr Miller at the time of death. Dr Carey, making notes in a large red notebook, was biding his time. When summoned to give his evidence he took care to give the most graphic description he could of the injuries delivered to the dead man’s body. His description of the dried blood and crushed bone left one or two of the ladies in the court looking rather pale. Mark Sowerby made one last stand on behalf of his clients, still protesting that the inquest was unlawful and that therefore its verdict could not stand. By this stage the coroner’s patience was exhausted.
‘Mr Sowerby, you have tried my good temper long enough. Your ignorance of the law relating to inquests and exhumations is equalled only by your inability or your unwillingness to listen to the evidence. I do not see why this court should be troubled by your vexatious interruptions and your false disquisitions on the law. Gentlemen,’ the coroner nodded to two policemen at the side of the court, ‘take him away.’
Powerscourt and the Inspector had decided to divide their forces. The two principal powers among the Candlesby staff, they had decided, were likely to be the butler and the housekeeper. Powerscourt would take the butler and Blunden, who prided himself on his abilities with female witnesses, would interview the housekeeper. Blunden had also secured the consolation prize of the cook.
Nobody on the staff is young here, Powerscourt said to himself, as he was shown into the butler’s room on the ground floor, next to where the silver was kept and across the way from the cellars. A couple of grandmothers, their arms piled high with clean sheets, passed him in the corridor like members of the chorus in some Greek tragedy. He remembered the steward and his melancholy account of his time here. Barnabas Thorpe the butler was well over seventy years old. He still had a fine head of hair, even if it had turned white, but his cheeks looked as though they had fallen in and his brown eyes looked sad all the time, as if they had seen enough.
‘Very good of you to talk to me, Mr Thorpe,’ Powerscourt began cheerfully. ‘Tell me, how long have you been here now?’
The old man was counting on his fingers, working out the years of his servitude. ‘Sixty-two years I’ve been here now, my lord. I came in 1847 when I was fourteen years old as a trainee footman.’
‘So you’re seventy-six now. That’s about time to be thinking of retiring, surely.’
‘I don’t hold with this here retiring business, my lord. My father went on working till he was eighty-five, when he dropped down in his dairy, and my uncle went on till he was ninety-one. There’s something about the Candlesby air, I reckon. It’s the absence of all them modern things like motor cars and central heating and that electricity wiring, that’s what keeps us going if you ask me.’
‘Quite,’ said Powerscourt, wondering how to proceed with this veteran of domestic service, a Methuselah in a frock coat. ‘Perhaps you could tell us a little about the first two Lord Candlesbys you served before we move on to the one who’s just died.’
‘It’s odd, my lord. People tell you when you’re younger that you can remember things that happened a long time ago much better as you grow older, and you don’t quite believe them. But it’s true, the further back I go the clearer things seem in my mind. The old Earl, the one I served when I first came here, he was a good man. He was happily married, he cared about the estate, the whole agricultural business hadn’t started to go wrong. Maybe it’s because I was so young – I wasn’t yet twenty when he died – but the sun seemed to be always shining. His youngest daughter got married in that time and the celebrations went on for days – dinners for all the tenants, dancing, presents for the girls. It was magic. He dropped down dead one afternoon, that Earl, and the place was never the same again.’
‘Would you have said that he was eccentric, that he had some strange characteristics at all?’