Death Called to the Bar (25 page)

‘Remind me, Edward,’ she said, smiling kindly at the young man, ‘when exactly is it coming to court? I know you’ve told me, but I’ve forgotten. My memory
isn’t what it was.’

Playing for the sympathy vote, Sarah said to herself.

‘It starts on Thursday, Mrs Henderson,’ said Edward.

‘And how wicked has Mr Puncknowle been? Is he as wicked as the Ripper or that terrible fraudster Jabez Balfour, Edward?’

She’s getting bloodthirsty in her old age, Sarah thought. Suddenly she wondered if she herself was going to end up like this. She rather hoped not.

‘Well, he’s pretty wicked,’ said Edward cheerfully, ‘but he didn’t actually kill anybody, as far as we know. He’s not been charged with murder or anything
like that. But he’s defrauded a great many people, Mrs Henderson, that’s pretty wicked.’

Edward was showing admirable patience, Sarah thought, seeing he had answered all these points at least once before.

‘Just tell me again how he defrauded them, Edward. I don’t think I quite got the hang of it first time round even though you explained it so beautifully.’

Poor Edward, Sarah thought, having to explain everything three times and then once more for luck.

Edward picked up a teaspoon, one of a number lying on the tea trolley. He winked at Sarah when he was out of the line of sight of her mother. That made her feel better.

‘Think of this as Company Number One, Mrs Henderson. Mr Puncknowle asks people to invest, or buy shares in a great company called the Freedom Building Society. Lots of people buy them. But
Mr Puncknowle and his friends are greedy. They take lots of the money for themselves rather than using it to help people buy houses. The promise made to the people when they bought the shares was
that they would get a dividend, a share of the profits, twice a year. But after all the money he’s stolen, Mr Puncknowle doesn’t have any money left. So he launches another company,
Company Number Two.’ Edward picked up another teaspoon. This time he blew Sarah a kiss. ‘More people subscribe or buy shares. That new money goes to pay the dividends of the old
company. And so on,’ said Edward, realizing that Companies Four, Five and Six in the Puncknowle house of cards might be too many for Mrs Henderson to grasp. And there weren’t enough
teaspoons.

‘How beautifully you explain it, Edward,’ said Mrs Henderson.

Flatterer, thought Sarah. Even Edward may be susceptible to flattery.

‘So he really is quite wicked,’ said Mrs Henderson, who seemed to get some special satisfaction out of the word wicked. ‘How long will he be sent to jail for?’

‘He has to be found guilty first,’ said Edward with a smile.

He doesn’t have to smile at her every time he speaks, Sarah thought to herself, maybe the stuttering would have been better. Then she told herself off. That, she said, was bad. Edward
talking properly is a great advance. If he goes on like this he’ll be perfectly normal in another six months.

‘And will you be in court, Edward? Will you have a ringside seat?’

‘Some of the time, I will, Mrs Henderson. I won’t have to say anything, though. I’ll only be there to give advice to our barristers.’

It was Mrs Henderson’s parting shot that was the most astonishing of all. As Sarah was helping her upstairs to bed, she turned in the doorway and said, ‘I want you to remember,
Edward, that you have two very good friends in this house. I hope you will feel free to come and see us as often as you can.’ And with that mother and daughter began the slow ascent of the
stairs. Sarah hoped it wouldn’t put Edward off, the prospect of further lengthy interrogations every time he came to Acton. Edward was wondering if he could find the courage to kiss Sarah
when she came back downstairs.

Lord Francis Powerscourt did not give the impression of having been unduly alarmed by Johnny Fitzgerald’s report that there might be a contract on his life. He had, after
all, been in danger for much of his adult life, with the Army in India, as Head of Intelligence in the Boer War, in the pursuit and apprehension of various murderers. But this time he did take it
seriously. Ever since that day he had revived a practice he had followed religiously in India. There, usually at the end of each day, he had written down his findings for the past twenty-four
hours, where he believed the enemy to be, what strength they had, what reinforcements they might expect. In this way, if he was killed, his successor would not be denied the benefit of his
knowledge. The Daily Will was how Johnny Fitzgerald used to describe it. Now, in this time of civilian danger, he had first put down a description of the murders and brief records of all his
interviews during the case. He entered too his suspicions, the lines of inquiry he wished to pursue over the next few days. He would have entered the name of the murderer if he felt sure of it.

That task completed, and a letter despatched to the Financial Steward Bassett, saying he proposed to call on him the following afternoon, he went to join Lady Lucy in the drawing room in
Manchester Square. She was seated at the piano, playing, very softly, ‘Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring’. Powerscourt loved to hear her play. She began to stop but he waved her on. He
wondered if she was going to sing when Johnny Fitzgerald walked in, clutching a fistful of sheets of paper covered in drawings. Lady Lucy turned round and greeted the two of them.
‘Don’t stop, Lucy, please,’ said Johnny.

Johnny had been making melodramatic gestures as he spoke. Lady Lucy smiled at him. Powerscourt had turned pale.

‘Just confirm this for me, if you would, Johnny. Those are the opening lines of Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night
?’

‘They are indeed,’ Fitzgerald replied cheerfully. ‘Shouldn’t I know that as I played your man Orsino at school. My housemaster thought I should have been Sir Toby Belch
and the headmaster said I should I have been Sir Andrew Aguecheek, who’s even more of a drunken layabout than Sir Toby. Quite why I should have been identified with the fruits of the god
Bacchus at such an early stage I have no idea. The man who did the drama thought I should be Orsino so that’s who I played. But look here, Francis, I’ve brought an early draft of
The
Birds of London
.’

Normally this would have been the focus of intense study and excitement, but Powerscourt seemed to have no interest in birds or anything other than his own thoughts. He was pacing up and down
his drawing room like Nelson on his quarterdeck, muttering to himself from time to time, shaking his head, pausing to look out of the window into Manchester Square.

At last he stood still by the fireplace. Even then Lady Lucy could tell his mind was still far away. She waited. Johnny looked at his bird drawings. He had known his friend in this sort of mood
before, once prowling outside their tent for a full hour and a half one winter’s night in India before returning inside to prophesy, correctly as it turned out, that the attack would come
from the east, not from the south where everyone expected it.

‘Lucy, Johnny,’ he said at last, his hand stroking the top of the mantelpiece, ‘I’m sorry about that. I’ve had a most extraordinary idea I’d like to try out
on you.’

There was a pause while he collected his thoughts. Outside they could hear a couple of cabs rattling round the square and heading north into Marylebone High Street.

‘Let me give you, for your consideration,’ Powerscourt began, ‘a series of apparently unconnected facts.’

He’s going to start numbering points soon, Lady Lucy thought, the index finger of the right hand slamming into the closed fingers of the left.

‘Fact Number One,’ Powerscourt went on, quite unaware that his wife had perfectly foretold his current actions, ‘is that there was seen hanging around the Temple Church before
the service, but not attending it, a well-bred and very attractive young woman who gave her name as Eve Adams, living in Eden Street. There is no Eden Street where she said it was and the name is
obviously false.

‘Fact Number Two is that on the day of Dauntsey’s murder, a mysterious visitor was seen in Queen’s Inn, including one sighting near his chambers. It is perfectly possible that
the mysterious visitor actually went in to see the man and came out again without being seen. He was seen again, leaving the Inn by a porter. The visitor did not speak.

‘Fact Number Three, a couple of the porters saw, or thought they saw before they realized they were mistaken, the mysterious visitor again today at the memorial service. The reason they
thought they were mistaken was that they saw Mrs Dauntsey’s back and when they realized the person was female, not male as on the day of the murder, they repented of their ways.

‘Fact Number Four. Early in January this year there was staged at the Middle Temple Hall a three hundredth anniversary production of Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night
. It was first
put on in the same hall on the same date in 1602. Among the audience, on her own admission, were Mr and Mrs Dauntsey.
Twelfth Night
has, as its main character, a girl called Viola disguised
as a boy called Cesario. To add to the confusion she, or he, had a twin brother. In Shakespeare’s time when no women were allowed on the stage at all, the gender complications with boys who
were cast as girls pretending to be boys must have been even more severe.’

Powerscourt paused. ‘Do you see it? Surely you must see it,’ he said. Lady Lucy and Johnny Fitzgerald both shook their heads.

‘It’s only a supposition. It could be completely wrong. But suppose we have read the Dauntsey marriage completely wrong. We know – well, we don’t know, we suspect that
she cannot have his children or children bearing the Dauntsey blood in some admixture or other. Dauntsey decides to leave her. And the person of his choice is none other than the Eve Adams who
cannot resist sniffing round the church where her late lover is to have his memorial service. But Mrs Dauntsey knew what was happening and determined to stop it. She decides to take revenge.
Remembering the Viola/Cesario person from
Twelfth Night
she dresses in man’s clothes, goes to Queen’s Inn, pops into her husband’s room and poisons him.’

‘Good God,’ said Lady Lucy.

‘What about Woodford Stewart?’ asked Johnny.

‘Easy. He saw her leaving the Inn so he cannot be left alive. A couple of weeks later she comes back, probably with that giant butler of hers, and shoots Stewart. You can’t tell me
that somebody who lives in that world of Calne doesn’t know how to shoot. She leaves the giant butler to dispose of the body. By that time she’s back safely in her own drawing
room.’

‘Do you believe it, Francis?’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Do you think it’s true? If it is, you’ve solved the murder.’

‘Different question, Francis,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald. ‘How are you going to find out if it’s true or not?’

‘That’s easy, Johnny,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Tomorrow morning I’m going to send her a telegram. In three days’ time I shall arrive at Calne for tea. Then I shall
discover the answer.’

‘I shouldn’t eat anything while you’re there, Francis,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘not even the best chocolate cake. And I should watch your back all the way there
and the way home.’

Petley Road was a terrace of respectable Victorian houses in Fulham not far from the river and its great warehouses. Schoolteachers, rising bank clerks, those sort of
respectable citizens, Powerscourt reckoned, would be the inhabitants here. Mr John Bassett’s house was Number 15 and Mr Bassett himself opened the door. He was a small man, with ears that
seemed to be pointed, and he sported a well-trimmed goatee beard that gave him the appearance of a troll or other resident of some forbidding German forest. His living room, Powerscourt saw, as he
was ushered to the most comfortable chair, was full of painted panoramas of some of the world’s remotest places, the Sahara desert, the Arctic or the Antarctic, Powerscourt wasn’t sure
which, a view of the back of Mount Everest, the vast steppes of Siberia.

‘Are you a traveller, Mr Bassett?’ Powerscourt asked. He wondered if the whole house was full of these kind of pictures, if you might have to cross the Gobi desert in the bathroom or
traverse the sands of Arabia before you could go to sleep.

‘I wish I had been,’ said the little man. ‘I have a constitution fitted to the counting house, not to great liners and the rough conveyance of the wagon train or even to
arduous treks on foot. But I like to contemplate these great spaces, as you see. Now, how can I be of assistance to you, Lord Powerscourt?’

‘I presume, Mr Bassett, that you have heard about the terrible murders in Queen’s Inn?’

John Bassett nodded sadly.

‘I have been asked to investigate these murders and I understand that Mr Dauntsey came to see you shortly before he died. Is that so?’

The little man remained silent. Powerscourt wondered briefly if he had been sworn to complete secrecy by his employers. That hardly seemed necessary – why would they want to silence a man
who knew all the details of the Inn’s plate and how many spoons went missing in an average year?

‘I must make a confession, Lord Powerscourt. And please forgive me. It is my age. I shall be seventy-seven next birthday if the Lord spares me that long. Sometimes, I must tell you, I
rather wish he would call me home before that. But my memory comes and goes. I do not remember Mr Dauntsey’s visit. All I can remember is that he asked a question I could not answer and I had
to check with the bencher who looks after the money at the Inn.’

‘Can you remember the question, Mr Bassett?’ Powerscourt asked gently, wondering if this visit had been a complete waste of time. ‘Anything at all?’

The little man’s face brightened. ‘I’ve got it, I think. It wasn’t anything important, just something about bursaries for poor students.’