‘You seem to have made a better fist of it than me, my lord,’ he said ruefully, continuing his massage programme.
‘I only remembered just before I jumped’, said Powerscourt, ‘that it’s better for some reason to jump upwards rather than straight out, if you see what I mean.’
‘Well, I don’t suppose I’ll be doing it again for a while,’ said Blunden, tottering slowly to his feet. ‘We do know one thing now we didn’t before. The two men, if there were two men who boarded the train at Boston, could have garrotted the Earl once they were out of the station and then jumped off the train just here. I don’t suppose they’d have torn off their uniforms here and dumped them in the long grass. I’d better send a search party out once we get back to the station.’
‘There is one thing we may have forgotten, though, Inspector.’ Powerscourt was climbing to the top of the cutting, looking for their return train back to the station.
‘What’s that, my lord?’
‘It’s this,’ said Powerscourt, waving happily at the sight of Jones leaning out of his driver’s car. ‘If the killers did murder the Earl and jump out here, either they were regular users of the line, or else they were employees of the railway who could easily have obtained access to the special train to garrotte Lord Candlesby. And they would certainly have known where to jump.’
Five days later another melancholy party made their way from the Hall up to the Candlesby mausoleum on its hill. Richard was laid to rest in the next niche to his father. There were now sixty-seven empty niches left. Powerscourt calculated that if the death rate were maintained at the current level there would be standing room only in the death chamber in a couple of years’ time. There were fewer mourners than there had been for the first funeral. Maybe Richard hadn’t had as much time to collect enemies as his father. Certainly there were none of those mourners who had come to make sure the hated Earl was actually dead and buried.
Powerscourt was wondering if the two men had been killed because they were Candlesbys or because of some other more personal reason. He wondered if this was some long-forgotten curse or family skeleton risen from the rich land of Lincolnshire to harass the family. Two of the other brothers were there, Edward and Charles. The unfortunate James, last seen being rescued from the waters of the lake by his brother, had remained in his rooms ever since. The servants said that he sat or rather crouched by the fire wrapped in an enormous dressing gown and talked to himself.
‘Isn’t it odd, my lord,’ Charles Candlesby was walking back down the hill with Powerscourt, ‘how you can find you don’t really like your relations? I never felt sad for my father though I thought I should. And I feel nothing at all for my brother. Am I a really b-bad p-p-person?’
Powerscourt smiled. ‘I don’t think so. You’d be surprised how many people feel the same way as you do about their relations. It’s just that people don’t really like to talk about it.’
‘Is that so? The only one of my b-b-brothers I really love is James and he’s still not very well.’
‘Did Richard have any enemies, Charles? Anybody who might have disliked him enough to kill him?’
‘Well,’ said Charles, ‘most of the servants disliked him. He was so rude to them. His p-p-problem was that he never went to school. He was b-b-brought up here. The tutors could never control him. So he got more and more arrogant. Candlesbys rule the world.’
Powerscourt doubted if a home education necessarily qualified you for death in a special train. He was haunted every day in this case by the memories of the two human heads, the first with one side of his face battered to pulp by some unknown instrument, the other with that dark purple weal round the neck and eyes that stared out of the head.
‘Then there are the villagers,’ Charles went on. ‘They weren’t fond of my b-brother at all. When he was b-b-bored Richard used to go down there and swagger round a bit. You remember, Lord P-p-powerscourt, I said I would ask around down there about the night my father was killed? Well, nobody would speak to me at all. They all clammed up. Do you think that’s strange?’
‘I do, as a matter of fact,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Look here, young Charles, I have a question for you. The room with the Caravaggios that your ancestor brought back from the Grand Tour, is it still there?’
‘It is. I’ve always been too frightened to go in to see it, gory b-b-bodies and sweaty Neapolitan locals hanging Christ on the cross. Legend says the p-p-place is haunted. Ghosts are said to come out of the walls, day and night.’
‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, ‘it’s strange, possibly the strangest thing in this very strange house. Wasn’t the man who collected the paintings and then locked them away known as the Wicked Earl?’
‘He was,’ said Charles. ‘Somebody told me when I was small that he was the wickedest Earl of the lot. Just think how wicked he must have b-b-been!’
Selina Hamilton and Sandy Temple were taking a morning walk in the grounds of Woodlands, the house in Norfolk where they were spending the weekend. Sandy had discovered that love could be as exciting as politics and Selina was now a devotee of the country house practice of leaving lists of the sleeping arrangements pinned up on a noticeboard outside the dining room.
The company was diverse. There was an American financier called Wright whose main claim to fame was that he had just equipped a house in Surrey with thirty-two bedrooms, eleven bathrooms, a private theatre, three lakes and, most wondrous of all, an underwater billiard room enclosed in glass so you could actually watch the fish swimming in the lake as you prepared to make your stroke. The American financier never tired of telling whoever would listen about his house and his underwater room, the only aquatic site, he would say, pulling on an enormous cigar, apart from a transatlantic liner, where you could watch the waters as you potted your red.
There was a man who owned a chain of grocery shops who had been elevated to the House of Lords by the previous King. Sandy Temple felt sure money must have changed hands to lubricate this transaction, the King having too little of it and the shopkeeper too much.
There was a strange tall thin man called Burroughs who hardly ever spoke but who was believed to be the finest shot in England. There was Sir Arthur Cholmondley Smith, whose young and pretty wife was rumoured to have been first spotted by her current husband upon the music hall stage. There was Lord Winterton of Winterton Staithe, widely believed to be Norfolk’s richest man, a proposition he did not argue with.
And there was a rich widow, Mrs Kennedy Miller, whose husband had made a large fortune manufacturing women’s underclothing, a task he took so seriously that it killed him. His former wife was known to be in pursuit of a new husband with a more agreeable occupation and a milder temperament. Selina thought she was too obvious in expressing interest in the local unattached males her hostess might care to invite to dinner.
‘Honestly, Sandy,’ she had said, ‘she may as well hang up a sign on her front saying “Available” like those boys with the sandwich boards you see in Oxford Street. I think it’s just vulgar!’
Over in the woods to their left there was a sudden rattle of gunfire, as a shooting party from the house tried their luck with the local birds.
‘You don’t mind missing the shooting, Sandy, do you?’
‘I loathe shooting, Selina, as you well know.’
‘Have you had any luck yet with asking these lords how they are going to vote on the Budget?’
Sandy laughed. ‘One down, one to go. I engaged our grocer lord in conversation yesterday evening.’
‘Lord Hudder of Huddersfield?’ asked Selina. ‘That was quick work.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t say the conversation went all that well. Not to begin with, at any rate. Even now, after all his success, there’s something about Lord Hudder that makes you think you’re in a grocer’s shop. It’s as if he’s wearing his apron all the time. He’s imprinted the manner of the man behind the counter on his personality. You think he’s going to ask if you want the bacon thickly sliced or the ham cut thin. Anyway, I asked Lord Hudder straight out how he was going to vote. He looked at me as if he thought I was insane. “What a ridiculous question,” he said. “I always vote the same way. Approve the annual accounts and the other recommendations of the board. No need to say any more. Can’t have the ordinary bloody shareholders saying anything, can we? Always complaining about the price of bananas in the shops or some ridiculous thing.”’