Lady Lucy thought that she might try a question.
‘Which men, Bertha?’ She spoke very softly and stroked the old lady’s forehead once more. It was burning hot. ‘Which men?’ she tried again. The old lady began to speak. ‘Men,’ she said, ‘men.’ Lady Lucy kept quiet now. It didn’t seem as if the questions were going to work. She would try again later. Bertha was now deeply asleep, snoring vigorously. Lady looked at the sheets that had seen better days, at the dirt ingrained on the floorboards and the accumulated grime on the walls and on the small window that looked out over the main street. Cleanliness is next to godliness, she remembered some grown-up telling her when she was small. Well, God should come down here and clean the whole village. He could probably do it in a minute or less if he set his mind to it, Lady Lucy thought. As the night fell the old lady began muttering again. ‘Shoes,’ she said, and ‘Wind.’ Only by leaning very close could Lady Lucy hear the other words, ‘Pay the doctor, pay the doctor,’ over and over again.
This time she met no Charles Candlesby on her way home. Powerscourt wrote all the words down in his own notebook.
George Drake, manager of the Candlesby Arms, was a very worried man. He had checked the barometer in his reception area five times that morning. The message was bad. There was going to be another storm. One of his porters, a man who had lived with Candlesby weather for over sixty years, man and boy, prophesied that it would be worse than the last one. So George Drake toured the breakfast tables in the dining room, warning his guests what was to come and asking them to make sure that all their windows were securely fastened. At one of his tables, the one by the window, he had different news to impart first.
‘Lord Powerscourt, Lady Powerscourt, Johnny Fitzgerald, you will remember the strange message with the even stranger spelling delivered to you here some days ago? And the GNR jackets dumped in the corridor outside your room? That is all sorted out now. The practical joker has been told that if he ever tries anything like that in my hotel again he will be fired. Immediately. You can regard the matter as closed.’
‘Very good, Mr Drake. Thank you for clearing that up. Now what of this weather? Is it going to be bad?’
George Drake nodded. ‘Oh, yes, very bad.’
The news was greeted with great interest.
‘Another storm then? A bad one?’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, pausing briefly in the demolition of a kipper.
‘Probably worse than the last one,’ said George Drake, moving off to spread more bad news.
‘How interesting, how very interesting,’ said Powerscourt, in the middle of a poached egg.
‘Do you think we should, Francis?’ said Johnny.
‘I’m sure of it, certain.’
‘Should we go now, or wait till it’s really got going?’
‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I think we should finish our breakfast first. We can take the Ghost the first part of the way.’
‘I’ll bring my stuff,’ said Johnny, referring to the strange collection of implements that enabled him to gain entrance to most of the locked doors in the kingdom. ‘Just in case.’
Lady Lucy had often seen her husband and Johnny Fitzgerald finish each other’s sentences but this display of telepathy was new. They seemed to be reading each other’s minds. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ she said, ‘but do you mind telling me what you are thinking of doing? I’m rather in the dark here.’
Powerscourt smiled. ‘Sorry, Lucy. I should have thought it was obvious. The first murder was committed in the middle of a great storm. We are going to retrace the last journey of the victim in the middle of this one. We should certainly be able to see more than he could.’
‘Well,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘just make sure you don’t get yourselves killed.’
21
Powerscourt and Johnny Fitzgerald set off shortly after nine o’clock. They were both wrapped up against the rain like Egyptian mummies with hats from Jermyn Street. Johnny Fitzgerald had a great stick to beat off any wild animals they might encounter. The left the Silver Ghost by the gate lodges and joined the road that Jack Hayward had taken early in the morning with Lord Candlesby dead on the back of his horse. They turned left, away from the stables and the house.
The wind was growing louder and angrier by the minute, howling and shrieking as it rushed around the landscape. Powerscourt had already lost his hat once; Johnny had a hand firmly wedged on top of his. The rain was lashing down, dripping from their faces on to the tops of their collars. The land was pasture here as far as the eye could see, grazing for Candlesby cows and Candlesby sheep. The sea was a mile or two to the right. Powerscourt remembered Charles telling him that from the bottom of the drive the land was theirs, as far as the eye could see in all directions. And still the family was burdened with a mountain of debt.
‘My God, Francis, this is pretty hard pounding,’ shouted Johnny Fitzgerald.
‘Four hundred yards,’ Powerscourt yelled at his friend, ‘four hundred yards from the end of the drive to the place where Jack Hayward found the body.’ He paused to negotiate a particularly vicious gust of wind.
‘I’ll count the yards, Johnny. You’ve always had trouble getting beyond sixty-five.’
‘That’s not fair, Francis and you know it,’ said Johnny, shaking a fist at his friend. Powerscourt was counting his paces on his fingers now, trying not to lose the number. A couple of trees loomed up in front of them, like stragglers left behind by a retreating army. One hundred and sixty-seven. Pausing behind one of them Johnny announced that they were no bloody use as a shelter against the storm. They were making very slow progress, bent over against the force of the wind. Two hundred and fifteen.
‘Francis?’ shouted Johnny.
‘Yes?’ Powerscourt yelled back.
‘Can you speak?’
‘Three hundred and five. Hold on a minute,’ roared Powerscourt, concentrating on his fingers and the steps of his boots. They were climbing very slowly up a little hill which seemed to go on for a long time. Lincolnshire is meant to be flat, Powerscourt said to himself, but it’s only flat in parts. Four hundred. They weren’t even at the top of the hill yet. They couldn’t see very far in front of them, the rain was so thick. ‘Somewhere round here it must have been’, Powerscourt announced at the top of his voice, ‘that the body was dumped.’
‘They didn’t exactly put up a memorial to the fellow,’ bellowed Johnny, surveying the empty landscape. ‘Not a sign to be seen.’