Death Called to the Bar (16 page)

‘Shot,’ said Chief Inspector Beecham to Powerscourt later that morning. ‘Shot twice in the chest. First one enough to kill him, I would have thought. Maybe the murderer wanted
to make sure.’

‘I don’t suppose you have any idea yet as to when he was killed, Chief Inspector?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘Not yet, my lord. We should know later in the day.’

There was a knock on the door of Dauntsey’s old room where Powerscourt had established a temporary command post and a porter brought an envelope addressed to him.

‘Damn,’ said Powerscourt, reading the note very quickly. ‘I’ve got to go and see that bloody man Somerville. I notice you’re not included in the invitation, Chief
Inspector. Does that mean that he doesn’t know you’re here, or that he doesn’t want to see you?’

Beecham laughed. ‘He doesn’t want to see me ever again. He tried to get me moved off the case, you know. Letters to the Commissioner. One or two of the people here who are judges,
they all made representations.’

‘What did the Commissioner say?’ said Powerscourt, curious to see how Somerville had been beaten off.

‘He said that he had no intention of telling the judiciary which judges should preside over their various trials and he would be obliged if they would leave him the same freedom in
appointing detectives to murder cases.’

‘One thing before I go, Chief Inspector,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Was Stewart a big man, heavy, difficult to lift, would you say?’

‘No, he was slight, fairly easy to pick up and carry about the place if you’ll forgive my language. There’s just one thing that worries me about these murders, Lord
Powerscourt.’

Powerscourt stayed where he was. Somerville could wait. ‘What’s that?’

‘Well . . .’ The Chief Inspector spoke slowly, as if he wasn’t sure of his facts. ‘Murder Number One, poison in the beetroot. Murder Number Two, shot through the chest.
If it was the same man, why did he not use the same technique? Most murderers do. And there’s a theory, although I’m not sure I believe it, that poison is likely to be a woman’s
choice of murder weapon, and guns a man’s.’

‘You don’t think, Chief Inspector,’ Powerscourt was on his feet now and heading for the door, ‘that there are two separate killers at work here?’

‘I just don’t know. Do you think it’s one killer or two?’

‘One,’ said Powerscourt with more certainty than he actually possessed. ‘The chances of two killers operating in one small community like this must be very very small. I should
be most surprised if there were two murderers at work here.’

Barton Somerville was not at his enormous desk when Powerscourt arrived in his chambers on the first floor of Fountain Court. Powerscourt had been delighted to hear that his practice at the Bar
was not doing well, that his self-importance and pomposity now annoyed some of the judges so much that the instructing solicitors were deserting him, fearful that their clients would lose their
cases because of their barrister’s bombast.

‘Morning, Powerscourt.’ He dragged himself away from his tall window with the perfect sashes and withdrew to the fortified position that was his desk. ‘What do you have to
report?’

Powerscourt felt he had been summoned to his housemaster in a dispute over late arrival of homework, previous negotiations over its delivery having broken down.

‘Before I bring you up to date, may I inquire if you have heard about Mr Stewart?’

‘Woodford Stewart or Lawrence Stewart? We have two. I’m surprised you haven’t noticed that in the time you’ve been here.’

‘Mr Woodford Stewart. He’s been shot dead. His body was found by the Temple Church this morning. We won’t know any more, time of death and so on, until the doctors have had a
look at him.’

Barton Somerville stared at Powerscourt for what seemed over a minute. ‘I hold you personally responsible for this latest death, Powerscourt. If you’d been doing your job properly,
the murderer would have been unmasked by now and locked up. As it is, he’s still wandering around picking off his victims. And might I remind you, in this Inn and particularly in these rooms,
you call me Treasurer. Now, what do you have to report?’

Powerscourt stared at the ceiling. He had an intense dislike of telling his clients anything at all while an investigation was in progress. So often his final conclusions were the direct
opposite of what he had suspected at the beginning. And Somerville was certainly a suspect, though why the Treasurer of an Inn like Queen’s should want to go about killing off his own members
Powerscourt, for the moment, could not imagine. But if Dauntsey had not been poisoned at the feast, that left only two locations where the crime could have been committed, either in his own
chambers, or at the drinks party before the feast, given here in this very room by none other than Somerville himself.

‘I don’t think it would be helpful for me to say anything at this stage,’ he said finally.

‘I beg your pardon?’ boomed Somerville, his face growing red with fury. ‘Do you dare refuse to tell me what you have found out so far, I who brought you into this matter in the
first place! It is monstrous!’

‘I don’t think it is monstrous, actually,’ said Powerscourt as reasonably as he could, and more determined than ever not to give anything away. ‘You see, in my
experience, whatever people like myself think at this stage of the investigation is usually wrong. As things develop, our opinion changes.’

‘I presume,’ Somerville interrupted him quickly, possibly thinking he was back in court, ‘that by things developing, you mean more members of my Inn being killed off by your
incompetence.’

Powerscourt shrugged his shoulders, well aware that a policy of total calm would infuriate the Treasurer even more. ‘I’m sorry I can’t help you at this stage. When I have
something definite to report I shall let you know.’ Powerscourt suddenly felt rather sorry for the pompous and unpleasant Somerville. If his practice was drying up, so must be his income. And
if his income was drying up, the expenses of his position, which Powerscourt suspected must be considerable, must be growing harder to bear. And now these two murders, which would almost certainly
be the permanent mark of his period in office. Somerville’s Treasurership, people would say in years to come, wasn’t that when those dreadful murders happened?

‘Powerscourt, Powerscourt,’ the voice was calmer now, ‘you had gone on a journey in your mind just now and seemed almost incapable of speech. I just hope you understand my
position here.’ Somerville had removed his thick spectacles and was polishing them on a bright blue handkerchief. Maybe tentative peace overtures were being launched. ‘Every day I am
asked for the latest news of Dauntsey’s murder. After this morning I shall be asked for news of two murders. It is difficult for me to say I know nothing at all. After all, the barristers say
to me, we are employing this man Powerscourt to find out the truth. Why, they imply, have you nothing to tell us? Can you understand?’

Powerscourt nodded. An uneasy truce seemed to have broken out over the battlefield, though Powerscourt suspected it would soon be broken by skirmishes elsewhere. ‘Of course I understand. I
will do what I can.’

Five minutes later he was at the side of the Temple Church where the body of Woodford Stewart had been found. One of Beecham’s sergeants, a man who looked old enough to be the Chief
Inspector’s father, if not his grandfather, greeted him solemnly.

‘He wasn’t killed here, the poor man,’ he said slowly. ‘There’s marks where his body was dragged along the ground. We couldn’t work out what they were at
first, these marks, until one of the constables remembered pulling a colleague out of a fight in Stoke Newington. Looks like he may have come from a room somewhere in the Inner Temple, or even from
Queen’s itself, my lord. Frightful business.’

Powerscourt was surprised that the sergeant was still capable of such sympathy for the dead. Most of the Metropolitan policemen he had known had formed a thick carapace against terrible sights
by the time they were thirty, if not before. It was as if that was the only way they could cope with the bloody remains of London’s citizens, wounded in gang fights in the East End,
London’s suicides pulled out of the River Thames or lying in bloody fragments behind the wheels of the Tube trains, London’s murdered dead who might turn up anywhere from Whitechapel to
the Temple Church in the Strand.

Edward had begun to feel that the power of words had been replaced in his brain by the power of numbers. He had been working late for the past two days on the accounts of Jeremiah
Puncknowle’s companies. All he could see in his mind this morning were these numbers forming and re-forming in front of him in strings and sequences and series, looping round each other,
breeding somewhere in the basement of his brain and resurfacing again, numbers infinite, numbers serial, numbers prime, numbers eternal, numbers to do with money raised from flotation, numbers to
do with money handed out in commission, numbers to do with money paid out in dividends, numbers to do with the difference between the first number and the second and third combined, numbers to do
with the size and extent of the vanishing numbers, the ones that disappeared from the published accounts and must have ended up in the clutches of Jeremiah Puncknowle. But now he had had enough. He
might, he felt, turn into an equation if he carried on or be carried out gibbering madly about prospectuses and interim reports. Only one thing had kept him sane in the midst of his mathematical
Stations of the Cross. He was going to ask Sarah for another assignation. The destination had only occurred to him when he saw a poster that morning on the walls of Temple underground station.

He climbed up past the first and second floors, where the voice of a senior could be heard tearing strips off some young deviller who had failed to carry out his work properly, and up to the
attic floor that was Sarah’s kingdom. He heard the sound of the keys, two typewriters, he thought, so Sarah’s friend must be there too today. The sound was music to Edward’s ears,
like a gang of woodpeckers attacking a whole row of trees at the same time.

Sarah’s companion, a small mousy girl called Winifred, fled once Edward put in his appearance to renew their stocks of typing paper in the stationery shop across the road.

Edward stood looking at Sarah, who was wearing a cream blouse today with a blue scarf and those long red tresses trailing down her back.

‘Edward,’ Sarah said with her finest smile, ‘how very nice to see you. You don’t look very well this morning.’

Edward opened his mouth to speak but no sound came forth. Damn, he said to himself, damn, damn damn. Just when I thought I was over all that business with Sarah. He wished Lord Powerscourt was
there, or even better, that he and Sarah were taking tea in Manchester Square once more.

Sarah was thinking very fast. If she took Edward by the hand, she was sure he would speak normally. But then Winifred might come back and find them in a compromising position. Winifred was so
light on her feet she was the only person in chambers you couldn’t hear coming up the stairs.

‘How is Lord Powerscourt?’ she said instead, trying to bring him back to happier times. ‘Do you think we will be invited to tea there again? Any news of the twins?’

One of those cues must have worked. Sarah watched the lines of strain on Edward’s face relax. She wondered, not for the first time, what had caused his speech problem. Sometimes her mother
read her extracts from the newspapers about people being struck dumb by some personal or professional catastrophe. Edward seemed far too young to have gone through anything like that.

‘Twins well,’ said Edward, his face going red with the effort. ‘Lord Powerscourt is well too.’ He beamed at Sarah as if he had just climbed a mountain. Perhaps he had.
‘Accounts. Puncknowle accounts. Head of Chambers said to keep going even though Mr Stewart dead. My head is spinning.’

Sarah had noticed before that once one verb appeared, others were sure to follow. Maybe Edward’s problem had to do with verbs rather than words in general.

‘Want to make a suggestion, Sarah,’ Edward carried on bravely. This after all was the reason for his mission.

‘And what might that be?’ asked Sarah, looking at Edward in her most flirtatious manner. His eyes, she thought suddenly, his eyes were a wonderful sort of soft brown colour and
looked as if they might melt if their owner was maltreated.

‘Oxford,’ said Edward in his most authoritative tone. ‘Let’s go to Oxford for the day on Saturday.’ Then he nearly spoilt it all by adding, ‘There’s a
special offer on the train. From Paddington.’

Sarah had never been to Oxford. She didn’t think Edward had either. She had a sketchy picture in her mind of ancient colleges, of a river running through the city, of great libraries, of
hundreds and hundreds of young men lying about on the lawns, or draping themselves across punts and rowing boats with straw hats on.

‘Why, Edward,’ she said, ‘that would be lovely. Would you like me to bring lunch? Isn’t there a river up there where we could have a picnic?’

‘I believe there is,’ said Edward hesitantly. ‘I’ve not been there before, Sarah. One of the young silks is going to brief me, a man I did a lot of work for last month.
He went to Magdalen College. He says that’s the best. It’s by the river. And it’s got a deer park.’

‘Just like Calne,’ said Sarah sadly, thinking of Dauntsey’s funeral.

‘Will your mother be all right?’ asked Edward anxiously.

Sarah had long suspected that Edward must have or have had a close relation who was not well. Otherwise he wouldn’t understand how important these questions were.

‘As long as it’s not a surprise,’ said Sarah. ‘I’ll tell her this evening.’ Just then they caught the faint mouse-like tread of Winifred’s return.
Edward made his way back downstairs. Sarah continued with her typing. It was nobody else’s business after all if they were going to Oxford for the day on Saturday with a special offer on the
train.

Johnny Fitzgerald’s stockinged feet were draped elegantly on the Powerscourt dining table. His right hand was holding a glass of crystal clear Sancerre, his left a bundle
of papers filled with drawings that might have been birds. To his left, Lady Lucy was drinking tea, as was Powerscourt on the opposite side of the table. At the far end, sleeping peacefully in
their Moses baskets, were the twins. Lady Lucy believed they should see a bit of family life from time to time and she knew how much her husband loved looking at them or talking way above their
heads with poetry or whatever was passing through his mind.