‘I think you are a very brave man,’ said the Inspector. ‘My final question is this. Did you see or hear of anything round about the time of these murders that might help us find the killer?’
Oliver Bell thought for a moment. ‘Just one thing, Inspector, and it could be nothing. Early in the afternoon on the day of the great storm I’d come back from Lincoln on the train. I’d been to the cathedral to hear a talk about the cloisters. It always refreshes me, Lincoln Cathedral. Every time I go there I think we don’t deserve to be exposed to such beauty. Carlton Lawrence, the middle one of that family who had to sell up recently, he was coming out of the railway station. He looked rather nervous, as if he had just done something wrong or was about to do something he shouldn’t. He kept looking around him as if he didn’t want to be recognized. As I say, it could be nothing, Inspector.’
Oliver Bell watched the policeman go. I didn’t think that would be so easy, he said to himself. Much easier than I thought. He went inside and began to pack his bags.
Edward Nathaniel, Earl of Candlesby, referred to by his detractors as the Wicked Earl, had been restored to the room he created at the end of the eighteenth century. Powerscourt and the butler had brought him up two flights of stairs from his place on the dining-room wall next to the second Earl. Only Powerscourt had actually carried the portrait into the room. He was now ensconced on one of the two easels by the window. Powerscourt checked the various copies he had discovered and found that there were two pictures where Candlesby had painted himself as a copy of the Caravaggio original. One was of a saint often depicted in religious paintings. St Jerome is old and losing his hair. He is engaged in copying out the Vulgate, wearing a deep red robe as far as his waist. A skull and a candlestick and a mirror remind us that death is never far away, the very items that Powerscourt had discovered in the cupboard. Powerscourt suspected that Candlesby put the original painting on one easel and his own canvas on the other. When he had copied all the background, he had removed the original and aligned the large mirror on the easel in such a way that he could paint his own reflection on to the canvas. He was wearing the red robe Powerscourt had found in the cupboard, and the skull was nearby as it had been in the Caravaggio version. Unlike the real Caravaggio, there was little life and no energy in it. It was, Powerscourt thought, a poor thing.
But the others, what of the others? Did Candlesby know that Caravaggio used contemporary models from the street or the tavern or the house next door? Would they have told him that in those art galleries in Rome?
He rearranged the Caravaggio canvases once more and discovered that there was a clear sequence of paintings about Christ’s last days, the flagellation of Christ, Ecce Homo or Here is the Man, the crowning with thorns, all concerned with Jesus being scourged and shown to the multitude by Pontius Pilate.
Powerscourt found three copies by the former owner of the house. He stared at them for a long time. None of these men was Candlesby himself. The models being flogged or crowned with thorns were all different people. Were they locals? Had Candlesby simply selected them from his labourers or his servants to act as models for his grisly hobby? Had he ordered them up here, beaten them or flogged them to the required degree and made them sit or stand or be twisted round a pillar, their wounds still bleeding so the paint would look fresh on the canvas? Christ in heaven.
Powerscourt staggered back from the Candlesby paintings and found himself in a dark corner with an enormous cupboard he had not seen before. He pulled very carefully at the door. It seemed to have been locked. Powerscourt vented his rage on the lower panels and kicked the door down. There were two smaller groups of paintings on opposite sides of the door panel. Leaning across the back of the cupboard was a tall piece of wood, eight or nine feet tall. He pulled it into the light. There was another shorter piece of wood joined to it about two-thirds of the way up. This shape had been used in the ancient states of Persia and Greece and Macedonia. It was employed widely in ancient Rome. Six thousand of Spartacus’s slaves were hung on them along the Appian Way after the end of the revolt. Jesus Christ ended his life on one of them. The object in the cupboard on the top floor of Candlesby Hall was a cross, the holiest, the best known, the most powerful symbol of the Christian faith on earth.
Two old people and one four-year-old child had already died from the influenza in the village of Candlesby when Lady Lucy Powerscourt went to help. She was careful at the beginning not to make any suggestions and not to put herself forward. She told the women of the village that she was happy to be useful in any way she could, whatever would be most helpful to them. The women with the sick families were short of time. When their parents and their children were sick at the same time they were stretched to breaking point. So Lady Lucy found herself dividing her time between the very young and the very old. She read to the children, old stories from her childhood, stories she had told to her own children when they were the same age as the Candlesby ones. More stories were ordered, to be sent express from Hatchard’s in London. When the children were too hot, or delirious, she would stroke their faces and hold their hands and whisper softly to them. Sometimes when she thought they were on the verge of death she found it very hard not to break down.
The Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost was seen a lot in the village, carrying supplies, fetching medicines, ferrying the doctor to and fro. Lady Lucy had ordered provisions to be despatched from Mr Drake’s hotel, soup and fresh bread and roast chickens and fruit. Children who were only mildly afflicted by the influenza would be carried out to the great car with its gleaming silver bonnet, heavily wrapped up, and allowed to sit beside Rhys and inspect the controls for a couple of minutes. None of them had ever seen a motor car before. Every child in the village was promised a proper ride in the Ghost when they were better.
The social life had broken down most severely for the old, most of them female. In normal times their daughters would come to call, or their grandchildren, or their nephews or nieces. They would eat with the rest of the family in the house of one of their children. Now the mothers who cooked had their hands full with sick children, the grandchildren were laid low by the influenza and the neighbours were either confined to bed themselves or on nursing duty elsewhere. Lady Lucy would call on as many as she could find time for, making endless cups of tea, bringing bowls of soup or fresh chicken sandwiches. They were shy of her at first, the old ladies of Candlesby, but they soon realized that, though the externals of their lives were so very different, the central core was the same: children, husbands, family, home. After a couple of days Lady Lucy would ask them about the men they had loved, the men they had married, the men they wished they had married, the men they wished they had never seen. The stronger of them would smile and ask her the same questions back. Some of the old ladies were rambling at the height of the influenza, their minds wandering, their speech virtually unintelligible. Lady Lucy stroked their hands just the same and made more tea. It was only later that she realized some of the things she was hearing might not just be the ramblings of the very sick. Was the key to the mystery of Candlesby Hall being revealed to her in small and unconnected batches as the diseased and the dying referred unwittingly in their ravings to things they would never have mentioned when they were well?
Powerscourt was now very angry indeed. He had pulled out the cross and found various marks in various places he did not like at all. In both lots of paintings, Caravaggios and Candlesbys, there was one disciple crucified upright and one crucified upside down. There was Christ being laid in the tomb, a dead Saviour who looked very dead indeed. Had Candlesby waited for a corpse to paint that particular scene? Surely he couldn’t have killed the man just to have a model for the painting. Had he stolen the corpse from the undertakers? There were various severed heads he didn’t care for either, quite apart from Judith with the head of Holofernes. There was Salome with the head of John the Baptist, David with the head of Goliath, both particularly bloody and realistic, blood dripping artistically from the severed necks, eyes staring in astonishment that death dared take them out of the frames of their lives.