A rather sombre council of war took place later that evening in the Powerscourt drawing room in Manchester Square. Johnny Fitzgerald had returned from talking to the fringes of London’s underworld about the deaths in Queen’s Inn. Lady Lucy had returned from another mission round the outer fringes of her relations for any fresh intelligence of Mr and Mrs Dauntsey. Powerscourt told them first about Mrs Dauntsey and her reaction to the fairy tale. Lady Lucy was fascinated.
‘So it must be true, that rumour,’ she said, looking intensely at her husband, ‘but don’t you see what it means, Francis? If the Queen has obeyed her husband and lain with cousins and brothers she’s still not pregnant. So what are they, what were they, going to do now? If they cannot get an heir from the Dauntsey blood lying with Dauntsey’s wife, then surely the answer is obvious.’
‘What is the answer, Lucy?’ Johnny Fitzgerald was fiddling with a corkscrew but he hadn’t yet opened a bottle.
‘Well, there are two possible answers, now I think about it, but I’m sure which one I think is right. Poor Mrs Dauntsey. Either she has to start consorting with people who aren’t her husband’s relations at all, in which case any heir wouldn’t have any Dauntsey blood in them. Or it’s time the boot went on the other foot. It’s time for Mr Dauntsey to find somebody to bear his child.’
‘And if the person was married her husband might not take too kindly to her being used as a sort of brood mare,’ said Powerscourt, thinking of Mrs Dauntsey as she poured the tea with that slight smile playing around her eyes.
‘He might even think of dropping poison into Dauntsey’s drink,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘and then have to shoot Woodford Stewart because he’d seen him do it.’
‘I think we should slow down a bit,’ said Powerscourt, ‘or we’ll all get carried away. We just need to keep a very close eye on Mr Dauntsey’s doings and any new friends he may have been making. What news do you have, Johnny?’
Johnny Fitzgerald still had an unopened bottle of Nuits St Georges in front of him. He was peering closely at the label. ‘Lucy, Francis, do you think this St George chap is the same George as the English patron saint? That he had to slay the dragon because the creature was guarding the bloody vineyards? So all he really wanted was some nice burgundy and the fire-breathing creature got in the way? Never mind. I have to tell you, Francis, that I am worried, very worried indeed, about what I have discovered down there in the East End and one or two other places as well.’
‘What’s that, Johnny?’ said Lady Lucy, concerned that the news might affect her husband.
‘My purpose in going to talk to all these people was to do with Jeremiah Puncknowle and his co-defendants, as you both know. Was it likely that any of those defendants would have tried to organize the murder of Mr Dauntsey or Mr Stewart, or indeed carried out the deed themselves? From all over London, in the back rooms of public houses, in the stinking alleyways of Shoreditch, in the corners of illegal drinking dens, the answer was always the same. The answer was No. The risk was too great. But,’ Johnny paused and looked closely at his friend, ‘somebody knew something about the murder of Dauntsey. Maybe it had to do with the poison, I couldn’t find out. But there was something else, Francis, something to do with you. Some of these criminals sounded as though they were actually concerned with your health. I don’t think there is a contract out on your life, but I think somebody has been making inquiries about who would take the job on, how much it might cost, how it could be arranged. Most of them knew something was going on. One of the villains, delightful man till you remembered he’d served fifteen years for armed robbery with violence, said you ought to leave the country. So what have you been doing with these lawyers, Francis, down there in the Strand with the wigs and the gowns and the daily refreshers, that they’re thinking of arranging your murder?’
‘Are you serious, Johnny?’ Lucy had turned pale and hurried to her husband’s side.
‘I am deadly serious, Lucy,’ said Fitzgerald, leaning forward to open his bottle at last. ‘I think Francis should take his gun with him every time he leaves the house.’
‘It’ll be like being back in South Africa, going round armed. That’s twice in one night I’ve been told to take care of my health,’ said Powerscourt bitterly, ‘and I still don’t have much of an idea who is behind these murders. It reminds me of Easter Week in that case in Compton when the whole cathedral chapter was going to desert the Anglican faith and become Catholic. I was terrified one of the clerics would change their mind and be killed like the other three before them. It may be the same with these bloody lawyers. Ask the wrong question, or more likely ask the right question, and you’ve signed your death warrant. Well, I don’t care what people say, I’m not going to give up now.’
That night Lady Lucy added another prayer to her collection. She prayed that God would save and preserve her Francis, that He would keep him safe from the devices of his enemies, that he might live long as father to his children and husband of his wife.
The main court of Queen’s Inn looked like a convocation of ravens to Powerscourt as he crossed it at about nine thirty on Monday morning. Down every stairway they came, sometimes singly, sometimes in pairs, sometimes in threes and fours, ravens in pack formation. Papers were checked, ties adjusted, fragments of dust flicked off gowns that had spent the last few days on a hook at the back of a door, wigs settled firmly in place. Then the convoy set off, arms flapping in their gowns, to the welcoming embrace of the Royal Courts of Justice or the Old Bailey. The whole procession must have taken ten or fifteen minutes, one or two latecomers actually running at full speed across the grass so as to reach their courtroom on time.
Edward was not among them. Edward was a solitary bird this morning, still devilling into the fraud case of Jeremiah Puncknowle, now expected to start later that week.
‘Can you spare me half an hour, Edward?’ asked Powerscourt respectfully as his young friend sat down with his papers.
‘Of course, sir,’ said Edward, who would have laid down his life for Powerscourt or his family.
Powerscourt led the way out of the Inn down the Strand and into a quiet corner of the Regent’s Hotel, looking over the river. He ordered coffee.
‘I apologize for all the secrecy, Edward. I very much need to ask you for some information. But I think it could be very dangerous for both of us if we were overheard in Queen’s.’
Edward looked sceptical for a moment.
‘Think of it like this, my friend,’ said Powerscourt, taking a large gulp of his coffee. ‘Suppose it was something to do with money that led to the two deaths. I know for a fact that Dauntsey was very worried about the accounts in the period before he died.’ Powerscourt took care not to let slip where his information had come from or that it might have related to accounts other than those of Queen’s Inn. ‘If the murders are to do with the money, then anybody else found inquiring too closely into the finances may well end up murdered too.’
Edward nodded. ‘You’re not going to get murdered, are you, Lord Powerscourt? I couldn’t bear that, not after the way you and your family have been so kind to me.’
Powerscourt grinned. ‘I have absolutely no intention of departing this life and leaving Lucy a widow and the children a life without a father. Why, there’s hardly been time so far to get to know the twins properly. Anyway, Edward, I am presuming that the accounts are not available for general inspection by members of the Inn. I believe that there must be some official who supervises the payments of rent for chambers and bills for food and so on, though that person would not necessarily know the true state of the accounts.’
‘There’s a new Financial Steward who came last year,’ said Edward. ‘The chap who did the job before, man by the name of Bassett, kept going till he was seventy-five before he stopped. For some reason they all stay for a very long time. There’s only been six of them in the Inn’s history.’
Six in around a hundred and forty years, Powerscourt said to himself. One every twenty-five years or so.
‘But I presume, Edward, that these stewards do not necessarily know the true picture of the accounts. They know all about the bread and butter stuff but not any investments that may have been made, or monies or property that may have been inherited.’
‘That’s true,’ said Edward. ‘There have been all kinds of rumours about the wealth of Queen’s. At one end of the scale it’s the poorest Inn of Court in London, at the other it owns most of Mayfair and half of Oxford Street. But what do you want me to do?’
‘Can you get me the names of all the people who have been benchers here and the dates of their death?’
Edward dropped his coffee cup on to the hard floor. The cup shattered into a thousand fragments. The coffee concentrated in one narrow stream and made for the nearby carpet. The whole room looked round and stared at Edward as if he had ruined their morning. ‘I’m t-t-t-terribly s-s-sorry,’ he stammered to the elderly maid who arrived at remarkable speed to clear up the mess.
Powerscourt, disturbed by Edward’s full-blown stuttering, decided to keep talking for a while until calm returned to his mind.
When the maid was out of earshot Powerscourt continued. ‘If we have those dates, we can look at the wills in Somerset House or wherever they keep them. The wills won’t tell us a great deal, but they will give us an indication of how much may have been left to the Inn, or perhaps to the benchers. Now, they may have invested five per cent of their income from the rents for years and years and made a tidy sum, we just don’t know and the wills won’t help, but they’ll be a start. Do you see my point, Edward?’
Edward nodded. Then it was his turn to grin. He took a deep breath and swallowed hard. ‘I was thinking how difficult it was going to be, Lord Powerscourt,’ he said. It was all right. He was in control of the words again. Sometimes they were just so elusive, so slippery. ‘Then I remembered. There’s a little guidebook they give to all prospective members, everybody who’s interested in coming here. I think they give it to visitors too, sometimes. It lists all the benchers in the back, and the dates they served. Some places retire people in their late sixties or early seventies. Not here. Once a bencher, you’re a bencher for life. It’s like the Supreme Court in America.’
‘So,’ said Powerscourt, suspecting that his job had suddenly become a lot easier, ‘can you remember, and please remember too that one particular answer to this question will make me very happy, are the dates given in years only, or do they include the month of the year as well?’
Edward thought for a moment. ‘You’re in luck, Lord Powerscourt. They must have been very concerned with accuracy. Very proper, I suppose, for the legal profession. You do get the month. And in most cases you get the day of the month as well.’
One hour later Powerscourt was staring at his list of names. There were, he had counted, just over a hundred benchers who had served Queen’s Inn since its foundation. Now he was in a basement room in Somerset House where details of all the wills up to 1858 were recorded in enormous dark brown ledgers. Clerks of the Court of Canterbury had entered the main points of each will as they reached them. Historians, necrophiliacs, any of the deranged who wanted this material had to copy the wills they wanted out of the big books. The room was in the shape of a rectangle with a long oak table in the centre. There were enough chairs for about twenty ghouls, Powerscourt saw, though only five were occupied this morning. A little light filtered through from glass skylights set into the ceiling that was the floor of the courtyard outside. The electric lights on the walls gave off a slightly yellowish tinge as if they weren’t connected properly to the supply. There was a strange smell, a compound of sweat and dirt and the musty odour that came from so many opened ledgers. Ferocious notices were pinned up everywhere, warning of the dangers of misbehaviour. Writing in the ledgers guaranteed life expulsion from the premises. Spilt ink was almost as serious with a ban of five years. Marking the covers of the ledgers with a penknife or sharp nib would bring a fine of twenty pounds. And, sitting at a high desk at the far end of the room, underneath a fading picture of Queen Victoria on her Jubilee, were the guardians of this Valley of Lost Things, two enormous curators with identical handlebar moustaches, wearing a Prussian-looking uniform of dark blue. They stared relentlessly at their customers with an expression of the deepest suspicion. Powerscourt thought they must be former sergeant majors, ferocious drill at the double in the Somerset House courtyard an extra punishment, perhaps, for the miscreants and defaulters among the ledgers.
Truly, Powerscourt thought, this room with its great brown books and their baleful contents and those dreadful guardians, this is the kingdom of the dead. We, the living who pass through here, are mere wraiths, doomed to wander in the world of shadows outside from the Strand to Aldwych to Holborn trying to forget that our own futures too will one day end up down here or in the sister chamber that holds the wills of later years. Did these rich men – for on the whole, he thought, you would have to be rich to qualify for a place in these ledgers – know that one day, hundreds of years after they were gone, complete strangers would come and inspect their wills, in an act that amounted to posthumous financial rape? Would the same fate happen to Powerscourt in his turn?
The names of former benchers fascinated him. James Herbert Pomeroy, passed away in the 1770s, left twenty pounds to his wife and a house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields to Queen’s Inn. Edward Madingley Chawleigh, died 1780, left fifty pounds for the maintenance and education of poor students ‘that the poor might be afforded the advantages vouchsafed to us by birth’. Was Josiah Sterndale Tarleton, passed away 1785, the father of the Colonel Banastre Tarleton, painted with such verve and panache by Sir Joshua Reynolds? Tarleton had been engaged in the American War of Independence. Powerscourt could see the painting now, the young man in skin-tight white breeches and a green jacket studded with gold buttons, the smoke of a great explosion behind him and gathered around his person the varied accoutrements of war, a pair of horses, for the Colonel was of horse rather than foot, a mobile cannon and what may have been the colours of his company in deep red. Old Mr Tarleton had at least passed on before the disappointment of the loss of the American colonies his son had fought to keep. And then, Powerscourt remembered, this Colonel Banastre Tarleton had been the lover over many years of Perdita, one-time mistress of the Prince of Wales, still hanging on the walls of the Wallace Collection, painted by Gainsborough. Was Robert Fitzpaine Wilberforce, died 1792, the father or the uncle of the man who campaigned so effectively for the abolition of slavery?
By the time he left for the day Powerscourt had entered details of over twenty wills in his thick red notebook, specially purchased for the occasion. After a while he found he was concentrating on transcribing the material as fast as possible with little attention to the content. But he had made, he thought, one significant discovery. Every single bencher so far had left some money or property or investment to Queen’s Inn. Powerscourt wondered if leaving money to the Inn in your will was a necessary part of becoming a bencher. He hoped that somewhere in William Burke’s vast range of acquaintance in the City of London there was a man who could compute how much two hundred pounds in 1800 was worth today and the likely value of property that seemed to be dotted like stardust round the lawyers’ quarters in a radius of three or four miles.
Detective Chief Inspector Beecham was waiting for Powerscourt on his return to the Inn from Somerset House. He was exceedingly angry.
‘Bloody man,’ he said, slamming the fist of his right hand into the palm of his left, ‘the bloody man.’
‘Have you been talking to the benchers again, Chief Inspector? You know how that upsets you.’
Beecham managed a laugh. ‘I have not been talking to any of those benchers. It’s the bloody man Newton, Porchester Newton.’
‘What about Newton? What’s he done to upset you?’
‘He’s come back, for a start,’ said Beecham. ‘And any sane person would have to put the wretch very high on his list of suspects. Huge row, as you know, with Dauntsey about that election. Dauntsey wins the election, Newton doesn’t, takes himself off in a huff after the wretched feast. He could easily have come back secretly to shoot Woodford Stewart and then disappeared again.’
‘Sorry, Chief Inspector,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I don’t follow you. What exactly is the latest problem with Newton?’
‘Sorry, my lord,’ said Beecham, running his hand through his hair, ‘he won’t speak.’
‘What do you mean, he won’t speak? Has he gone dumb or something?’
‘He won’t speak to me. He won’t answer any questions. He refuses to give an indication at all of his whereabouts on the day of the feast or any day since then. He has gone mute in this affair.’
Powerscourt remembered an old judge telling him years before that if you were guilty on a major charge your best course was to say nothing at all. Any information you gave to the police led them somewhere else, then to more questions which brought more discoveries until you were thoroughly trapped.
‘That’s not very wise of him, surely?’ Powerscourt said.
‘It’s not,’ said the Chief Inspector. ‘And much bloody good it is going to do him. I’m going to put a team of my men on to his whereabouts since the Dauntsey murder full time. And if they find anything, however small, we’ll have him in and lock him up on a charge of obstruction. Maybe a night or two in the cells would restore his powers of speech.’
Powerscourt wondered if he should volunteer to try his own, different, powers of persuasion to induce some speech out of Porchester Newton. But he didn’t want to offend the Chief Inspector. Before he had decided, Beecham was already there.
‘Why don’t you try, my lord? You get on better with those bloody benchers than I do. He might talk to you more easily than to me. After all, I don’t care how we get the information.’
Three minutes later Powerscourt was knocking on the door of Newton’s rooms on the ground floor of the little Stone Court hidden away at the back of the Inn. Newton was an enormous man, well over six feet tall, going to fat about the face and stomach, florid of complexion and with rather brutal hands that looked to Powerscourt as though they should have belonged to a butcher rather than a barrister.
‘Good afternoon,’ Powerscourt began. Nobody could complain if you said good afternoon to them. ‘My name is Powerscourt. I have been asked by the benchers to investigate these murders. I wonder if you could spare me the time to answer some questions.’ Powerscourt was speaking in what he hoped was his most emollient voice. The reply was loud, virtually shouted.
‘No! Get out!’
‘Mr Newton, I am, I would humbly remind you, a man of some experience in murder investigations. It is my belief that refusal to answer questions makes people suspicious. It makes people, particularly policemen, think that the refusal is meant to conceal something. From there it is but a short step to the assumption that the person is refusing information about the murder. And from there it is only another short step to the assumption that the person refusing to speak may actually be the murderer. We are fortunate here that we have very intelligent policemen engaged on the case. I have known less intelligent policemen send those refusing to speak to court on the charge of murder because they thought silence denoted guilt. On one occasion it only transpired after the man had been sentenced, Mr Newton, that his silence had been to protect a woman. If she had not come forward, with all the shame and obloquy it brought her, the man would have been hanged. I ask you again. Could you spare me some time to answer a few questions?’
The voice was even louder. ‘No! Get out!’
Anybody listening might think, Powerscourt reflected, that the fellow doesn’t want to talk to me.
‘Let me make one last appeal, Mr Newton,’ Powerscourt suspected it was hopeless but was resolved on one last attempt. ‘Let me remind you of the difficulties your colleagues are facing each and every day these mysteries remain unsolved. There are policemen crawling all over the Inn. I haunt the place, asking uncomfortable questions from time to time. Nobody can be certain there will not be another murder, that they are not going to be the next victim. I am sure that some of the stenographers are contemplating leaving their employment here because of the uncertainty, not knowing if they will be poisoned as they eat their lunch or shot on their way to the underground railway station. I am sure you could help, Mr Newton. If your knowledge would advance the quest for the murderer, then surely it is your duty to talk to us.’
Porchester Newton stood up. Powerscourt saw with some alarm that those butcher’s hands were rising to his waist as if preparing to wring something that might have been a pillow case or a human form.
‘No! Get out! One more word and I’ll throw you out!’
Nobody could say, Powerscourt thought to himself as he made his way to confess his defeat to the Chief Inspector, that Porchester Newton had failed to make himself clear.
‘Is my hat straight?’ Sarah Henderson asked Edward the day after Powerscourt’s unsuccessful jousting with Porchester Newton.
‘Your hat is fine, Sarah,’ said Edward, thinking that she looked even more attractive in black. They were making the final adjustments to Sarah’s clothes in her attic office before proceeding to the memorial service for Alexander Dauntsey in the Temple Church. It was the custom in Queen’s Inn for all benchers not buried at the Temple Church to be given a sort of memorial service with addresses by their colleagues there within two months of their death. In less than a week, Sarah had reminded Edward gloomily that morning, they would be doing exactly the same thing for the unfortunate Woodford Stewart.
The church was full, not only with Dauntsey’s colleagues from Queen’s, but with lawyers from the other Inns of Court, instructing solicitors, two men from the East End he had saved from the gallows who had come to pay their last respects, a couple of men from the City he had played cricket with, and members of various financial institutions he had represented with distinction. There was a sprinkling of women, some wives who had known him closely, some stenographers he had employed like Sarah. The benchers sat in splendid isolation in their allotted rows at the front. Mrs Dauntsey sat alone in the left-hand pew at the front. Porchester Newton was staring bitterly at the benchers from halfway down the nave. Edward and Sarah were squeezed in right at the back with a couple of criminals and a Chancery judge in full regalia who looked as though he might have adjourned his court to attend.
Powerscourt was taking a special interest in the service. He had handed over the sum of five pounds to the Head Porter to be distributed among himself and his colleagues who were shepherding the guests into position in return for information relating to two particular questions. The first he regarded, at best, as a shot in the dark. Suppose Alexander Dauntsey had found a woman, a woman who might bear him a child to inherit the glory and the desolation that was Calne, would she appear at this memorial service? Surely she wouldn’t have gone to the funeral in the alien county of Kent. But might she just pop in here, maybe sometime before the service started, for a last encounter with the ghost of Dauntsey? Powerscourt had left instructions with his team that anybody unknown to them was to be asked to give their name and address. If questioned, they were to say it was for insertion in the record of the service that would appear in the respectable newspapers and for Queen’s own records. Nobody could refuse such a request, Powerscourt thought, though they might give a false name. Any Mrs Smiths, those regular visitors to the divorce courts, he would regard with extreme suspicion. And his second line of inquiry related to the mysterious visitor to Dauntsey’s chambers on the day of the feast. The porter who had seen this person had been told to brief all his colleagues on the appearance of the stranger. Powerscourt had offered a further reward of five pounds if anybody recognized this person again. Powerscourt had protected himself from false sightings by saying that this further instalment of cash would be handed over only when the visitor admitted his earlier trip to Queen’s on the day of Dauntsey’s death.
The living of the Temple Church was in the gift of the Inner and Middle Temples. The elders of those Inns of Court, concerned that eloquence should be confined to the legal profession and not be displayed by what they regarded as the inferior body of the Church, usually picked somebody with a good speaking voice, audible at the back of the church, who gave very short and very undistinguished sermons. Even on Sundays, after all, lawyers were busy people. The present incumbent, one Wallace Thornaby, was a tall, balding man in his fifties who had learned long ago, at the start of his ministry in the Temples, that it was never a good idea to argue with the lawyers.
As the Reverend Thornaby made his way up the nave behind his choir, Powerscourt saw that it was going to be standing room only in the Round Church at the end. People were going to be packed in there as though they were at a football match. Maybe there would be an overflow congregation outside, close, he suddenly remembered with a shudder, to the spot where the body of the other dead lawyer Woodford Stewart had been found.
The priest began by leading his congregation through the Lord’s Prayer and the Collect of the Day. He recited the bare facts of Dauntsey’s career and introduced the first speaker, a lawyer from Gray’s Inn who had worked on numerous cases with the dead man. Much of this was technical stuff about Chancery and the Queen’s Bench Division and the Court of Appeal, and Powerscourt’s brain drifted off. Who had killed Alexander Dauntsey? Porchester Newton, in a fit of pique after he lost the election to bencher? Some old criminal whose conviction and imprisonment he had secured? Had he made some startling discoveries about the monies of Queen’s Inn? From the little he knew so far Powerscourt doubted that. And what of the mysterious Maxfield, still undiscovered, still with twenty thousand pounds waiting for him in the vaults of Plunkett Marlowe and Plunkett? Did Mrs Dauntsey know more than she was saying? Behind that beautiful and haughty reserve was she hiding some information vital to his inquiry?
With a start he realized that the man from Gray’s Inn had departed and the congregation had risen for a hymn. With a guilty grin he saw that even here the legal profession had made their mark.
Day of dark and doom impending
David’s word with Sibyl’s blending
Heaven and earth in ashes ending!
O, what fear man’s bosom rendeth,
When from Heaven the Judge descendeth
On whose sentence all dependeth!
There was more, to Powerscourt’s delight, a verse later.
Lo the book exactly worded
Wherein all hath been recorded
Thence shall judgement be awarded.
When the Judge his seat attaineth,
And each hidden deed arraigneth
Nothing unavenged remaineth.
From the Middle Temple and from Queen’s, from Gray’s Inn even unto Lincoln’s Inn Fields, yea, even from the Inner Temple, Powerscourt said to himself as another lawyer climbed into the pulpit to give his contribution, the judges shall come to pronounce not on the living in the dock before them, but on the dead in some celestial court, not on the crimes they may have committed on earth, but on their prospects for a place in Paradise. Maybe they would have new livery, fresh colours and fresh gowns, white possibly, to pass this eternal judgement. Powerscourt only sat up from his reverie when he realized that the man was talking not about the law but about cricket.
‘Many of you’ – the man was called Fraser and came from the Middle Temple, Edward told Powerscourt afterwards – ‘would have said that Dauntsey’s heart, the most important thing in his life, was his work here, in Queen’s Inn. I do not believe that to be the case. I would suggest the cricket pitch at Calne, or that extraordinary house that is Calne, or something indefinable that you might call the spirit of Calne had better claims on his heart. I am not sure how many of you have seen the vast interior of that house, room after room, hall after hall, gallery after gallery, boarded up, covered in dust sheets, protected from dry rot but very little else, an exquisite interior, probably one of the finest in England, merely holding time at bay and not showing off her glories to the world. Alex Dauntsey dreamed of restoring that house, of bringing it back to what his ancestors had made. His periods of depression were, he told me once, the greatest cross he had to bear for they ensured he would never be consistent and respected enough at the Bar to earn sufficient money for his task.’
Mr Fraser paused and looked carefully at his audience. They were spellbound, even the eldest bencher of Queen’s, who was reputed to be ninety-six years old, hanging on his words.
‘And if the house was his dream unfulfilled, then the cricket pitch was where some of his dreams came true. Alex never played very well on away matches, he was, as he said to me in the slips once, only happy at home with his own deer watching over him. Even those of you who do not know much about cricket and cricketers will know that the tribe is divided, on the whole, into bowlers and batsmen. Bowlers are more prosaic, they are instruments of speed and cunning and attrition and, occasionally, guile. You do not imagine that bowlers would be poets or composers. Batsmen, on the other hand, can display grace and style and class that can take your breath away. Giorgione would have been a batsman if cricket had ever arrived in Cinquecento Venice. Keats, I am sure, would have been a batsman. He would have played some beautiful strokes and got out for a disappointing but exquisite thirty. Alex was a batsman. I once saw him score a hundred and fifty and then get himself out. He refused to let the scorer enter his total in his book, insisting his runs be attributed to someone else. ‘They were hopeless,’ he said to me, ‘unworthy opponents.’ On another occasion I saw him score twenty-five not out at Calne with the light fading and two of the fastest bowlers I have ever seen racing in to bowl at him like the Charge of the Light Brigade. ‘Best innings of my life,’ he said to me after that.
‘One of my children once asked me, in that disconcerting way that children have, if I thought Gladstone was a great man. I was on my way to court at the time so I just told him Yes. He never asked me about it again. Was Alex a great man? I think that’s the wrong question in his case. Greatness was not what he was about. But he was a man of enormous personal charm, a man with a mind that worked like a rapier, the finest companion I ever knew and the best friend I ever had.’
There was complete silence in the church as Mr Fraser returned to his pew. If you listened very carefully, you could hear some of the women crying. Powerscourt wondered if Sarah, so devoted to Dauntsey, was among them. After that there was an anthem from the choir, ‘I Know that My Redeemer Liveth’ from Handel’s Messiah. Try as he might, Powerscourt was unable to find any references to judge or jury, earthly or celestial in it. A bencher from Queen’s Inn spoke about Dauntsey’s contribution there. Powerscourt thought the man must have given the same speech before. Then a final prayer from the vicar and the congregation, with that look of relief people often have when leaving church services, streamed out into the windy sunshine. Powerscourt saw that the porters were being particularly assiduous in their duties. He observed, but did not disturb them, that Sarah was leaning heavily on Edward’s arm as if the service was still upsetting her.
Exactly one hour after the last person had departed, Powerscourt presented himself, as stealthily as he could, in the back parlour of the porter’s lodge. A fire burned brightly in the tiny grate and a junior porter was despatched to hold the fort while Roland Haydon, the Head Porter, conferred with Powerscourt.
‘Please take a seat, sir, and I’ll tell you what we found out.’ Haydon was a surprisingly youthful Head Porter, just into his thirties, easily the youngest man in that position in any Inn of Court. He had begun his career in the hotel trade and then become a junior porter in Queen’s five years before. His quickness and discretion made him a natural choice when his predecessor finally retired at the age of seventy-one, not, he said, because he was getting old, but because he’d always believed in giving youth a chance.
‘That’s very kind of you,’ said Powerscourt, taking his place by the left side of the fire.
‘Well, sir, there’s two pieces of intelligence, I suppose you could call them. And I’m not sure what to make of either of them. You remember you asked us to look out for any young women who might be scouting round before the service but not actually attending it? Well, we found one of those, about an hour before kick-off, sir, if you’ll pardon the expression. Young Matthews spoke to her, he’s very good at being polite when he wants to be, is young Matthews. She told him her name was Eve Adams, sir, and she gave her address as Number 7, Eden Street in Finsbury.’
Powerscourt laughed. ‘I’m glad to see you agree with me, sir,’ said Haydon. ‘I told Matthews he’d been sold a pup, a biblical pup from the Book of Genesis, mind you, but still a pup. I had to make him look it up on the street map to show him there was no Eden Street in Finsbury.’
‘Well, she showed some spirit, this female, Mr Haydon. What was she like?’
Haydon smiled. ‘He’s got an eye for the ladies, young Matthews has. I will not repeat the precise words of his description or what he said he would like to do to the young lady, sir. When you decode his statement, she was about thirty years old, well spoken, blonde hair, brown eyes and a shapely figure, sir, that might be the best way to translate the Matthews version.’
‘Had he ever seen her before?’ asked Powerscourt.
‘No, he hadn’t, but he very much hopes he’ll see her again. Matthews says what she needs is a younger man, sir. He’s only nineteen.’
‘I’m sure,’ Powerscourt said with a smile, ‘that he’ll keep a good lookout for her. And how about the other piece of news?’
Roland Haydon scratched his head at this point. ‘That’s more curious still. You’ll recall that two of the people who saw the mysterious visitor saw his back only. They didn’t get a front view at all. They both of them thought they saw the visitor today around the time of the service, but realized later that they must have been mistaken.’
‘Why was that?’ asked Powerscourt, sensing that anything that puzzled such a capable man as Haydon must be hard to grasp.
‘It’s this, sir,’ he said. ‘They thought Mrs Dauntsey was the visitor, seen from the back. Once they realized who it was, they knew they must be mistaken, but it’s strange all the same.’
Powerscourt looked curious. ‘How odd that they should have made the same error,’ he said, reaching for his wallet. ‘Your men have done splendidly, Mr Haydon, and so have you as officer commanding. May I present you with another five pounds for distribution as you think fit? No, I insist. Just one last thing, Mr Haydon. Could you let me have the address for the previous Financial Steward, Mr Bassett?’
Haydon disappeared into his seat of custom and came back with an ancient ledger. ‘Here we are, Number 15, Petley Road, Fulham. Funny thing, Lord Powerscourt, Mr Dauntsey asked me for the address, must have been a week or so before he died. It went right out of my mind.’
Powerscourt was on his way to talk to Edward in New Court when he almost bumped into Chief Inspector Beecham.
‘Come, my lord, I have news, but I would rather not impart it here.’ He led the way out of the porter’s lodge and on to the Embankment. Jack Beecham remained silent until they were well away from Queen’s Inn.
‘We’ve got the report from the government analyst, Dr Stevenson, about what was used to poison Mr Dauntsey, my lord. The reason it took so long was that he had been on holiday in France, Dr Stevenson.’
‘Well?’ said Powserscourt.
‘Strychnine, sir, that’s what it was. He found 6.39 grains of it in the stomach and its contents. He wasn’t taking any chances, our murderer, my lord. It only takes half a grain to kill you.’
‘What about the time it was administered? What did Dr Stevenson say about that?’
‘You know as well as I do, my lord, what these medical gentlemen are like. He said it could have been as little as fifteen minutes before death, but he doubts that. If pressed he would say about one hour to one hour and a half before the fatal accident.’
‘So,’ said Powerscourt, ‘Dauntsey probably took the fatal dose at that drinks party in the Treasurer’s rooms before the feast. He could have taken it in his own rooms just before six o’clock but we do not know if he had any visitors. Do we know, Chief Inspector, if Treasurer Somerville had one of the Inn servants in attendance on his guests, or did he do it all himself?’
‘I checked that in our transcripts but half an hour ago, my lord,’ said Beecham. ‘It seems the servants were all tied up with the preparations of the feast. Either the gentlemen helped themselves or Mr Treasurer Somerville poured the drinks.’