Powerscourt was feeling desperately sorry for the man. He popped out to alert the butler that he was going now and to invite Sir Arthur to lunch at the Candlesby Arms the following day if he was well enough. As he passed the library with the ornamental fountain outside, he heard a plaintive cry like Polyphemus in his cave after he lost his eye.
‘Where are you, Powers, Powerscribe, Powerscart? Dammit, man, I seem to have forgotten your name.’
Everything seemed normal as Powerscourt made his way up to his rooms in the hotel. Their suite was three-quarters of the way up a long corridor on the first floor. As he turned into it, he noticed that there was a package of sorts lying on the ground as if it had just been dropped on to the carpet. As he drew closer and took his key out his pocket, he saw that there were two pairs of dark trousers and a couple of jackets. They both carried the legend ‘Great Northern Railway’.
Powerscourt picked them up and carried them in. Lady Lucy was sitting by the window.
‘Francis!’ She rose and gave him a kiss. ‘How very nice to see you. What are these clothes doing here, my love? Do they need washing?’
‘Well may you ask, Lucy. They were dumped right outside our door when I came up just now.’
Lady Lucy held one of the jackets up at arm’s length as if it might be an unexploded bomb. ‘These aren’t the ones those men were wearing on the special train, are they?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine, my love. We’d better have a look in the pockets.’
The only item of interest they found was a ticket from Spalding to London King’s Cross whose date seemed to have been blacked out.
‘That might have been for the day of the murder, Lucy. I don’t know if you need tickets for special trains or not. I’m sure the Inspector will know.’
‘Do you think the murderers wore these clothes, Francis?’
‘No, I don’t,’ said Powerscourt firmly. ‘I think somebody is playing games with us, that’s all. There was another pair of identical jackets dumped outside Sir Arthur Melville’s fountain last night. Sir Arthur was so drunk he would not have recognized the intruder even if he had been the Prime Minister himself. Come to think of it, Lucy, I’m not sure I like the fact that the jacket people know which one is our room. Maybe I should talk to Mr Drake about it all. Nobody will have seen anything, nobody will have heard anything. All will be perfectly normal.’
‘Francis, I want to ask you a favour.’
‘Please do, my love.’
‘I’m sure you’ll have heard about this terrible influenza down in the village. Some of the servants have stopped coming to work in case they infect everybody up here as well. The poor mothers are terribly over-stretched. They’ve got husbands to look after and their other children as well as the ones who are sick. Sometimes the husbands are taken ill too and there’s scarcely any money coming in. I was going to go down, if you approve, and see what I could do to help. Buy them food or medicines in the Ghost, help with the nursing, do whatever I can.’
She paused and took her husband’s hand. ‘I wouldn’t want to do anything that might undermine your investigation, of course.’
‘I hardly think it’s likely that some poor children from Candlesby village have been going round the county killing people, Lucy, especially if they’re confined to bed with this dreadful influenza. You must do what think is best. Do you have enough money for now?’
‘I’ll be fine,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘I’m just going to talk to Mr Drake about sheets and things. I’m sure those poor children will recover better in clean linen.’
‘I’ll come with you to speak to George Drake, my love. I want to ask him about these jackets and the strange letter. I have a feeling he may know something about it all.’
Powerscourt was walking over to Candlesby Hall. He wanted to have a talk with Charles and he wanted to ask him a favour. The question had been troubling him for days now. He didn’t know if it had anything to do with his investigation. If he was honest with himself he suspected it might not, it had all happened so long ago. He wondered, yet again, about his summons to see the authorities and what it might bring. Maybe, he said crossly to himself, I won’t even have the time to take Lucy away for a holiday when the case was over. He tried to think of somewhere warm on this November afternoon. He wondered what the weather would be like in Sicily. He had always wanted to see Palermo, much more beautiful than Naples, his next-door neighbour in Markham Square had told him, rotting Baroque churches falling down all over the city. Sanctified and consecrated Candlesby Halls, he said to himself, staring across at the crumbling facade and the one-armed statuary on the roof. The great house managed to look even more bedraggled in the damp and the wet than it had in the late autumn sunshine.
He heard voices over in the stable block, or rather, he thought, a single voice.
‘Lord P-p-powerscourt,’ said the unmistakable voice, ‘how very good to see you. I’ve got important news for you.’
‘Please tell me, Charles. Good to see you too.’
The young man drew him deeper into the stables where not even the horses could have heard them.
‘On the night of the first murder, one of the servants says he saw lights on over in the village.’
‘How many lights, Charles? When was this? Twelve? Two, three o’clock in the morning? And who was the person who told you?’
‘More than one, light I mean, not p-p-person. And somewhere between twelve and one, my informant thought. B-b-but I p-p-romised not to tell who told me.’
‘Very well,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Do you believe them?’
‘I do, my lord. I’m quite sure of it.’
‘Why would the villagers be putting lights on in the middle of the night? What on earth was going on? Could your informant hear any voices?’
‘I wasn’t here that night. I was still in London, my lord. B-b-but everybody says there was a terrible storm. Maybe their roofs were leaking.’
‘Well, that’s interesting, most interesting,’ said Powerscourt. Another fifty or sixty suspects had just arrived. ‘Now then, Charles, I want to ask you a favour.’
‘I’m sure we can help,’ said Charles. ‘What is it?’
Powerscourt felt ever so slightly embarrassed as he told him. ‘I want to see the room with the Caravaggios.’
Charles Candlesby whistled to himself. ‘I don’t think anybody’s b-b-been in there since Earl Edward died. They say he used to haunt the upper floors at night in the winter, wearing his nightclothes and carrying Goliath’s head in his hand like in one of the p-p-paintings he b-b-brought b-back to the Caravaggio room.’
‘Good God!’ said Powerscourt. He knew he would never say so in polite society but part of him did actually believe in ghosts, even ones carrying giants’ heads under their arms. ‘Is he still at large, this chap? Perhaps he is David, not a Dymoke at all, though how King David of the Israelites could end up in England, I don’t quite know.’
‘Nobody has seen him since Mary the p-parlourmaid,’ said Charles, ‘and that was round about the time of the Chartist riots, my lord, a long time ago. There are terrible stories about those times, Lord P-p-powerscourt. P-p-people coming home from here covered in blood. Marks on their necks sometimes. Or left hanging upside down.’