A Dreadful Murder (4 page)

For the first time, Taylor understood why Luard had risen to Major-General in the Army and why he was a Justice of the Peace. It was the not knowing that had left him bereft. Faced with a possible answer, his faded eyes came back to life.

‘She’d have told him to go home and sober up,’ he barked. ‘She had no time for drunks who left their children to starve. Is that the kind of person you’re looking for?’

‘It’s a possibility,’ Taylor told him. ‘Can you give us any names? Families your wife worked with?’

Luard shook his head. ‘You’ll have to ask her friends. They’ll be able to give you a better list than I can. Caroline sits on a number of committees.’ He realised he’d used the wrong tense. ‘I can’t believe she’s dead,’ he said sadly.

* * *

Mary Stewart lived in one of the half-timbered houses overlooking the village green in Ightham. She seemed to think that having three policemen in her house was a cause for alarm, and gave way to near faints every time Taylor asked her a question. He found her empty-headed and silly, and had trouble keeping his patience with her.

Most of what she told them related to her long wait in the drawing-room at Ightham Knoll before Charles arrived. Overnight, she had ‘remembered’ feelings of doom. ‘I knew something terrible had happened,’ she gasped, tapping her chest. ‘I felt it here.’

‘Then I’m surprised you helped the Major-General look for his wife,’ Taylor said. ‘Weren’t you frightened of what you’d find?’

‘
Dreadfully
frightened. I told him I couldn’t go any further.’

‘I thought you went home to meet some guests, Mrs Stewart?’

She fanned her face with her hand. ‘I’d have gone anyway. Charles was being very strange.’

‘How?’

‘He kept slowing his pace so that I wouldn’t lag behind. I think he wanted me there when he found her.’

‘Meaning what? That he knew she was dead?’

The woman wriggled her shoulders. ‘It was just very odd, that’s all. I don’t know Charles well enough to walk
any
distance with him.’

‘Particularly if you had such strong feelings of doom,’ Taylor murmured drily.

It wasn’t just Taylor who thought her silly. Henry Warde’s scornful clearing of his throat was so pointed that it set the woman blushing to the roots of her hair. It meant she took a dislike to him, and had fewer concerns later about joining in the gossip that the Chief Constable of Kent would do anything to protect his friend.

* * *

‘Idiotic creature,’ Henry Warde, the Chief Constable, said as he led the way back to his Daimler. ‘She’ll be saying she saw a gun in Charles’s golf bag next.’

Taylor leaned on the roof of the car. ‘Did you search it last night?’

‘Matter of fact, I did. First thing I thought of after Hamble said the murder looked planned. I checked his rifles as well but none of them had been fired recently.’

‘What about handguns?’

‘Three revolvers. All clean. He said he couldn’t remember if he had any bullets for them . . . or where they might be.’ Warde glared up at the Stewarts’ house. ‘It won’t stop that silly woman inventing stories if it suits her.’

Taylor scanned the names that he’d finally prised out of Mary Stewart. They weren’t the ones he’d wanted. She’d thrown a fainting fit when he suggested that Caroline might have come across her killer through her charity work. And rather than give him a list of suspects, she’d offered some worthy ladies who were ‘bound’ to know more than she did.

‘Then let’s hope Mrs Luard’s other friends are more sensible,’ he said, tucking the page into his coat pocket. ‘We won’t get very far if they all stay silent for fear of being killed themselves.’

* * *

The
Kent Messenger
– late edition,
Tuesday, 25 August 1908:

Brutal Slaying of a Kent Lady

Warde checked his watch and offered the Scotland Yard detectives a pint of beer and a sandwich. They were standing outside Sevenoaks station and he pointed to the Farmer’s Inn, which was across the road. ‘It’s as good a place as any,’ he told them. ‘They have rooms if you don’t want to return to London tonight.’

All three men were tired. They had met the gunsmith – Edwin Churchill – off the five o’clock train and had spent the last two hours watching him study the used bullets recovered from Caroline Luard’s brain. His methods were slow because he repeated every action several times. When he wasn’t staring down the lens of his microscope, he was using pincers and tiny rulers on different parts of the crushed metal casings.

He also spent a long time looking at the wounds in Caroline Luard’s skull. He pointed out flecks of soot on her skin, which had been caused by flames in the barrel of the gun when the bullets had been fired.

His conclusion – stated with absolute confidence – was that she had been shot by a .32 revolver at a distance of a few inches.

‘The man clearly knows what he’s talking about,’ said Warde as he led Taylor and Philpott into the saloon bar.

Taylor pulled out a chair at an empty table and sat down. ‘He claims it’s only a matter of time before he’ll be able to prove which guns fire which bullets. It seems barrels are like fingerprints. No two are the same.’

Warde lowered himself wearily onto another chair. ‘It’s a pity he can’t do it now. It would help at the inquest if he could say that none of Charles’s weapons were used.’

‘It depends what calibre of bullets they fire. If the barrel widths are less than .32, they can certainly be ruled out.’ Taylor broke off while a waitress took their order. ‘Which doesn’t mean there wasn’t a fourth revolver that Luard hasn’t told you about.’

The Chief Constable sighed. ‘Do you still see him as a suspect?’

‘Not at the moment.’ Taylor took out a tobacco pouch and started to roll a cigarette. ‘But my mind will change very quickly if we find any evidence that his marriage wasn’t as perfect as he wants us to think.’

* * *

Seven miles away at the George & Dragon in Ightham, late editions of the local newspaper were being passed from hand to hand. No one was surprised that Kent police were keeping an open mind about Mrs Luard’s murder.

Few of the regulars at the George & Dragon had any liking for Major-General Luard. One or two had been on the receiving end of his over-lengthy sentences and the rest resented his high-handed manner. They saw him as a cold and distant man who thought the working classes beneath him.

In any case, it was well known that Mrs Luard was a deeply unhappy woman. For no reason at all, she would burst into tears in front of friends and strangers. It was well known, too, that the Major-General used golf as an excuse to leave home every Tuesday and Thursday in order to visit the house of a certain lady in the village.

The dissenting voices of the gardeners, James Wickham and Walter Harding, were drowned out. No one believed that a controlled and rigid man like the Major-General would weep openly over his dead wife and call her ‘his darling’.

The truth was more simple. The pub customers thought Mrs Luard had found out about her husband’s affair, and the Major-General – bored with her complaints, or scared by her threats of divorce for adultery – had shot her.

* * *

The inquest was held the next morning in the drawing-room at Ightham Knoll. Such was the interest of the locals that there was standing room only by the time Taylor, Philpott and the gunsmith, Edwin Churchill, entered the room.

They had arrived an hour before so that Churchill, who’d caught an early train, could examine the Major-General’s weapons and ammunition. But they hadn’t reckoned on so many people wanting to hear the gory details of Mrs Luard’s death.

Taylor wondered if Henry Warde had been wise to choose this room for the event. As Dr Mansfield gave his post-mortem report, all eyes were on the portrait of Caroline as a beautiful and vibrant young woman. It was hard to remember that she was fifty-eight at the time of her death and had been married for thirty-three years to the elderly man who made his statement after the doctor.

A whispered comment floated back to Taylor. ‘What’s the betting it was
her
who was having the affair?’

The Major-General did himself no favours by the clipped way he gave his evidence. To Taylor it was clear that he was trying to keep his emotions in check, but it made him seem uncaring about the fate of his wife. There was very little sympathy for him in the room.

Indeed, one or two spectators protested loudly that the inquest was being bent in his favour. Why had the Coroner allowed it to be held in the Major-General’s own home? And why was his close friend, the Chief Constable of Kent, in charge of the inquiry?

From the remarks being made, there seemed to be a genuine belief in the room that Charles Luard was guilty. Yet Taylor didn’t understand why, since most of the evidence pointed to someone else being the murderer.

Henry Warde’s men had found two members of staff at Frankfield House – Daniel Kettle and Anna Wickham – who said they’d heard gunshots at 3.15 on the afternoon of Monday, 24 August. Since Thomas Durrand saw Charles Luard pass Hall Farm at 3.20 – a fifty-minute walk away – the Coroner made the point that it couldn’t have been the Major-General who fired the shots.

When Edwin Churchill gave his evidence, he produced a careful summary of the type of weapon and size of bullets that had been used to kill Mrs Luard. He also displayed the Major-General’s three revolvers and used a .32 bullet to show the barrels were too narrow to take it.

Taylor’s own evidence was brief. He had taken charge of Mrs Luard’s clothes following the post-mortem, and he described how the pocket in her dress had been ripped. The Coroner asked him if he had any idea why that should be so.

‘I’m told she carried her purse in it. I assume the killer tore the pocket in his haste to get at the money.’

‘Do you have any doubt that theft was the motive?’

But Taylor wasn’t prepared to put his cards on the table at that time. ‘We are looking at everything,’ he said.

* * *

‘You should have come down on the side of armed robbery,’ Henry Warde grumbled after the inquest was halted. ‘Now we have to go through the whole thing again because that silly fool of a Coroner was too afraid to rule she was murdered by someone unknown.’

They were standing by the Daimler, waiting for Constable Philpott to bring Churchill outside. ‘Do you blame the Coroner?’ Taylor asked. ‘If he’d given in to the hostility in that room, he’d have named the Major-General as Mrs Luard’s killer.’
³

‘He’d have listened to a Scotland Yard detective,’ Warde said irritably.

Taylor gave an amused laugh. ‘You think so? I got the feeling no one was being heard. Besides, I didn’t want to reveal too much to the newspapers. I saw a couple of reporters from the London rags in there.’

‘They’ll write what they like anyway.’

‘Indeed, but we’ve a better chance of finding Mrs Luard’s rings if the culprit thinks we suspect the Major-General.’

‘You’re hoping he’ll pawn them?’

‘If he’s stupid, he will. If he’s not. . . he’ll have tossed them into the nearest river.’

* * *

Unsigned letter addressed to Major-General
Luard, Ightham, Kent – received by the evening
post on Wednesday, 26 August 1908:

WE ALL KNOW YOU SHOT YOUR WIFE.

YOUR FRIEND THE CHIEF CONSTABLE
CAN’T PROTECT YOU FOREVER.

YOU DON’T DESERVE TO LIVE.

DO EVERYONE A FAVOUR.

KILL YOURSELF.

Despite all their efforts in the days following Caroline Luard’s murder, the police made little progress in finding her killer.

Henry Warde, the Chief Constable of Kent, took the lead in searching the county for armed vagrants and men sentenced by Major-General Luard in his role as Justice of the Peace. The Chief Constable also dispatched teams to check the pawn shops and go house-to-house seeking anyone who had seen strangers in and around Frankfield Park on the day of the crime.

Inspector George Hamble was tasked with taking a close look at the Major-General’s story. It seemed even more solid after a couple of woodcutters came forward to say that they too had heard gunshots in Frankfield Park at 3.15. But Henry Warde wanted every aspect of his friend’s alibi checked in order to clear him.

What was the shortest time that Charles and Caroline could have walked to the summer house from their home, Ightham Knoll? Was there a shortcut that Charles could have taken from the summer house to Hall Farm? Was there any evidence he’d recently bought or borrowed a revolver? Or had contact with a hired assassin?

After days of work, all Hamble was able to say was that no one, however fit, could have reached Hall Farm by 3.20 if the shooting happened at 3.15. He had looked at the possibility that the witnesses had heard different gunfire – someone out game hunting perhaps – but the timings didn’t work for that either.

‘At a very fast walk, the Luards could have reached the summer house by 2.30,’ he told the Chief Constable. ‘And if Mrs Luard had died then, the Major-General could have run to Hall Farm by 3.20, but—’ he broke off.

‘But what?’

‘I can’t see why his wife would agree to it. She knew the Major-General’s plan was to go to Godden Green for his golf clubs because the housemaid heard them discussing it over lunch. What reason could he have come up with for taking her at a fast trot to the summer house first?’