Of the three, it was Lady Lucy who made the greatest contribution to the cause in those fallow days before the meeting. She had continued her nursing duties. Two nights before the Candlesby assembly she was asked to sit with a younger woman she had not met before. Her new patient was asleep when Lady Lucy walked into the bedroom. She had nursed two of her children back to health and then seen her sister die from the influenza three nights before. When she woke up, Sarah Carter, who must have been very blonde and very beautiful in her youth, told Lady Lucy, in between bouts of delirium, that she was sure she was going to die. The disease had come for her, she said, God was calling her home to join her sister, though she doubted if the trumpets would sound for her on the other side. Nothing Lady Lucy said could persuade Sarah Carter otherwise. Shortly after nine o’clock she fell into a troubled sleep. Lady Lucy thought about the poor woman and all the other poor women in the village, their lives blighted by poverty and disease, their futures little more than a continuation of the present, their only hope that in the new world opening up outside their village their children who survived the squalor might be able to build a better life. Not that Candlesby village would equip them for very much, she reflected sadly. Shortly after half past ten Sarah Carter woke up, looking troubled. Lady Lucy wiped her face and held her hand.
‘Can I tell you something?’ Sarah Carter said suddenly. ‘I’d like somebody sensible to know it before I go. She never did anything wrong, whatever people might think. I’d like you to hear about it.’
‘If you think it would make you feel better, I’d be honoured to hear it.’
Sarah Carter paused for a moment and looked closely at Lady Lucy. She seemed reassured by what she saw and by Lady Lucy’s steady gaze.
‘It’s about my daughter,’ she said with a slight smile. ‘She’s called Lucy too, Lucy Carter.’
The Silver Ghost took them the short distance from the hotel to the house. The normal calling cards were in evidence as Powerscourt, escorted by Lady Lucy and Johnny Fitzgerald, made his way into the saloon at Candlesby Hall, the multicoloured pillars with the stains, the missing antlers, the great dark marks on the walls like the work of some malignant tumour, the stuffed animals in their glass cases. Somebody had put a table with two chairs at one end of the room with a couple of rows of other chairs arranged in random rather than uniform fashion in front of them. It was going to be like a lecture at university, Powerscourt decided, where the outgoing undergraduates hadn’t bothered to put the seating back where they found it. Inspector Blunden was seated on the left-hand side of the table, a police notepad in front of him filling up with ornate copperplate squiggles. Powerscourt was pleased to see that he too had been honoured with a police notebook of the same type and a police pen. Maybe he could bring a couple home for the twins.
The rows in front of them were filling up. In the front, fiddling with his monocle, was the Chief Constable, flanked by a rather sinister-looking Chief Inspector who Blunden whispered was called Skeggs. Powerscourt wasn’t sure how those two had got there. Beside them sat Henry, now Lord Candlesby, and his brother Edward. This was their house after all. Behind them sat Lady Lucy and Johnny Fitzgerald, with Constable Andrew Merrick beside them. Charles Dymoke, wearing an elegant grey suit, was lounging against the fireplace, looking like some aristocratic ancestor posing for his portrait.
The Inspector handed Powerscourt a letter.
‘Arrived this morning, my lord,’ he whispered. ‘I think it might interest you.’
‘Dear Inspector Blunden,’ Powerscourt read. ‘I gather you have been looking for me. On the evening of the murder I was with a lady in Lincoln who is not my wife. Her father had just died and left her a lot of money. I only went back to the cottage to collect my stuff. I was in such a state when you called I said the first thing that came into my head. I did not kill Lord Candlesby. I was miles away. Yours faithfully, Oliver Bell.’
‘Gives a whole new meaning to feeling uplifted by the cathedral in Lincoln, Inspector,’ said Powerscourt. ‘The Salvation Army and the later works of Tolstoy seem to have lost out to the more profitable activities of Mammon.’
The Inspector smiled and took a wary look at the audience. Then he rose to his feet and stared hard at Constable Merrick, who was chattering away with Johnny Fitzgerald about football teams. ‘My lords, Chief Constable, ladies and gentlemen,’ he began as silence fell over the room, ‘thank you for attending this rather unorthodox gathering. Thank you to the family also for allowing us to make use of this room.’ Powerscourt’s eye was drawn to a strip of wallpaper that had become detached from its place on the top of the wall and was now snaking about fifteen feet down in a dramatic bid to reach the ground. ‘I think it would be fair to say,’ Blunden went on, glancing at his companion on his left, ‘that the bulk of the work in this case has been done by members of the Lincolnshire constabulary.’ There was a vigorous nod from the Chief Constable and his villainous-looking Chief Inspector in the front row. ‘The intellectual firepower in the case has come from our own force, of course, but especially from Lord Powerscourt and his companions.’ Inspector Blunden had never entirely recovered from the news that Powerscourt had played rugby as a centre. ‘So I think it is fitting’, the Inspector concluded, ‘that he should summarize the position as we see it today.’
Powerscourt rose slowly to his feet. He had some notes in his pocket but he decided to leave them where they were. He had been thinking about what he was going to say in the train up and down from London.
‘Thank you, Inspector. And could I take this opportunity of thanking you and all your colleagues for being such valiant companions in arms in this difficult case.’
There was a loud ‘Hear, hear’ from the Chief Constable and a handclap or two from his sinister companion. ‘I was originally asked to look into this case’, Powerscourt went on, ‘by the late Dr Miller on his deathbed, and by a member of the family here in this house. Our purpose today is in the nature of a report to the members of the Candlesby family so they can learn what happened to their father and their brother. Nothing can take away their grief, but something, some news, might stop the endless uncertainty and worry.’
There was a muffled grunt from Johnny Fitzgerald who thought his friend was laying it on a bit thick. Lady Lucy kicked him sharply on the ankle.
‘I do not bring any certainty about what I am about to tell you today. I do not believe for a moment that my theories, shared and shaped as they are by the good Inspector on my right, would stand up to the more forensic examination of a courtroom. Let me begin with the day of the meeting of the hunt and the discovery of the body of the previous Earl. And let me apologize to those in the family if I appear to be speaking harshly of other family members. The truth may sometimes be unpalatable to our nearest and dearest.’
Powerscourt suddenly noticed Johnny Fitzgerald making a sign at him that dated back to their army days and meant ‘Get on with it, troops becoming restless.’
‘I don’t think anybody will deny that the Candlesbys are a strange family. They are the ones who only communicated with their sons and daughters by letter, even though they lived in the same house. They are the ones who cut off their children and banished them for not standing up or for smoking when the father entered the room, never mind the one who collected Caravaggios on the Grand Tour and tried to reproduce them in an upstairs room in this house, using local people as models for some of the bloodiest scenes in the New Testament. I have been in that room. I do not think I would ever go in it again. It showed a total contempt by the then Lord Candlesby for his fellow men, whom he obviously treated as mere possessions to be used at will. I would draw your attention to the fact that there are virtually no women servants in this house and that those who are here, with no disrespect to them, are well over fifty years old.’