Death Called to the Bar (24 page)

There was more, to Powerscourt’s delight, a verse later.

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.’

And still, Powerscourt thought, irritated now by his inability to solve the mystery, there was Maxfield. Or rather, there wasn’t Maxfield. Surely a man couldn’t
just vanish off the face of the earth and defy the efforts of the police, solicitors, private inquiry agents to find him. One of his junior officers, Jack Beecham had told Powerscourt with a grin,
had thought of the House of Lords solution very early on. It had been checked. Maxfield wasn’t there. The police had now extended their search to all the mental hospitals and asylums in the
North of England, to all persons recruited in the last three years into the armed forces, the Merchant Navy and the coastguard. Johnny Fitzgerald had put forward the theory that Maxfield had joined
the French Foreign Legion and would never be seen again.

Powerscourt was walking up and down his drawing room now, wrestling with the problem. Something from his very first meeting with Matthew Plunkett was floating elusively at the edge of his brain.
It was something to do with a name. No, it wasn’t a name, it was a nickname. Plunkett’s uncle answered to the name of Killer Plunkett, that was it. No doubt, in the same way that his
own close friends referred to him as Francis, this Plunkett was hailed and greeted as Killer. Did Maxfield have such a name? A name, or rather a nickname, he must have had for so many years that
most of his close friends would not have known or had forgotten he was called Maxfield at all? How did that help to find him?

Powerscourt sat down at the little desk by the window where he sometimes wrote his letters. There were two things he felt sure of about Maxfield, even though his mind told him they were
completely irrational. One was that he had to do with cricket. The second was that he had been in serious financial trouble, that Dauntsey’s money was to bale a friend out of debt, gambling
debts perhaps. Even on the Stock Market, he did not think Maxfield could have lost that much money. Perhaps he would check with William Burke. He began writing a series of letters to different
parts of the organizations already visited by Plunkett Marlowe and Plunkett. They had written to the bursar of Dauntsey’s old school, to the admissions tutor of his Cambridge college, to the
adjutant of his regiment in the Army and so on. They had merely inquired about a past member called F.L. Maxfield. Powerscourt wrote to the senior groundsman at the same places, asking after a boy
or a young man who had been known throughout his time with them by his nickname. Powerscourt had to admit that he had no idea what the nickname might be, but that the person’s real name was
F.L. Maxfield. He added that this person was a keen cricketer and had possibly played in the same team as one Alexander Dauntsey. Only at the end of the letter did he mention that Dauntsey had been
murdered. He stopped when he had reached five and was about to address his envelopes when he thought of one last shot. He wrote a final letter and popped it in its envelope. It was addressed to the
Head Groundsman, Calne, Maidstone, Kent.

It was odd, Sarah Henderson reflected to herself, how the presence of a man changed the atmosphere so considerably. She supposed you would have to count her Edward, as she now
mentally referred to him, Edward himself not yet informed of the change of ownership, as a man, though she usually thought of him with his gangling frame and innocent face as a boy. But here he
was, sitting in front of the fire in her home at Acton, with her mother on one side and herself on the other. Everything about this evening had been totally unexpected. Sarah had told her mother
days before all she had learnt from Edward, about his train crash, about his speech difficulties, about living with his grandparents. She was resigned to a long inquisition. None came. She thought
her mother would be her normal crabby self, ever ready with a sharp interjection or a put-down. None came. It was as if Edward brought a change of personality to her mother. And that, in turn, made
Sarah feel irritated. Why she should feel irritated because her mother was going out of her way to be pleasant to her young man she did not know. Deep down, she suspected, she might feel –
not jealous, that would be too strong, peeved perhaps that somebody else was trying to captivate her Edward. Her mother had developed a deep interest in the forthcoming Puncknowle trial.