A Dreadful Murder Read Online Free PDF Page B

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