Death Called to the Bar (34 page)

Edward was less than a hundred yards away from the Treasurer’s staircase.

Sarah realized to her horror that the gorgon’s solution would see her out of the door in a minute or so. Edward might not have enough time. He might be caught by the gorgon in person and
confined in some monstrous prison.

‘Surely it won’t work if we cut it,’ she said. ‘That bit of ribbon that’s stuck around those two keys means that we won’t have the letters p and l at
all.’

‘I think you’ll find,’ the gorgon said rather sharply, seizing the scissors firmly as if she was going to slit someone’s throat, ‘that if we cut the ribbon as close
as we can to the keys, they will be released as the ribbon falls down into the machine.’ She began clipping the ribbon firmly. Edward was now at the entrance to the staircase containing
Barton Somerville’s quarters. Twenty-five minutes had elapsed. The Treasurer might even now be on his way back to his quarters but Edward did not dare look round.

With a particularly vicious snip the gorgon freed the reluctant keys of p and l. ‘There,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t as bad as all that. Do you have a new ribbon,
Sarah?’

Edward took the stairs up to the first floor two at a time. The door was closed. Oh, no, he said to himself, peering back down the stairs. Very gingerly, as if the door might explode in his
face, Edward turned the handle and pushed. He was in.

‘I think I’ll be getting back now,’ said the gorgon, watching Sarah unwrap another roll of typewriter ribbon. ‘We can’t leave the Treasurer’s office unmanned
for too long, can we.’

Sarah was not sure if Edward had had enough time. She wondered desperately if there was some other ruse that might keep the gorgon in her attic a little longer.

Edward had brought down the three files relating to 1899 and the first six months of 1900. He slipped the three dummy files he had brought into the place where the originals had been, checking
they were correctly aligned with their fellows.

Miss McKenna waited no longer. With a businesslike ‘Goodbye’ she was down the stairs, heading rapidly back towards her lair.

‘We’ve checked all those places, of course,’ said Beecham. ‘Newton’s parents in Wolverhampton and the grandmother. No sign of him. My colleague
who went to talk to the parents said how proud they were of their son, gone from a Midlands back street to Queen’s Inn and maybe even a bencher’s chair.’

‘Did they have any idea where he was?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘No, but this is the interesting thing, Lord Powerscourt. My colleague who questioned them said he was sure the parents thought their son was the killer. They looked very rattled when told
about the two deaths. And when he asked them if Newton had a temper they both said he did. The father began rubbing his hand round some mark on his forehead as if Porchester had clocked him one in
his youth.’

‘God bless my soul,’ said Powerscourt. ‘How very interesting that the parents should think he was the murderer. Not that they’d ever say anything in court.’

There was a knock at the door and another of the Chief Inspector’s young policemen came in with a note for Beecham. He read it very fast and looked up at Powerscourt. ‘Death calls
again, I fear. Not in Queen’s Inn but for that former employee you went to see, a Mr Bassett, Mr John Bassett, of Petley Road, Fulham. They only found him today. The sergeant isn’t sure
if the death is due to natural causes or not. The police surgeon is on his way. I have to stay here for now, Lord Powerscourt, with the various strands of inquiry into Newton still coming in . . .
’

‘Of course,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I shall go at once to pay my last respects to Mr Bassett. I rather liked the little man.’

Edward saw the large diary lying open on her desk. Quickly he swung the pages back to the week before the murder of Alex Dauntsey. There it was, six days before the feast, a
meeting with Dauntsey and Stewart, at Dauntsey’s request, underlined in the gorgon’s hand. Edward wondered what other clues might be hiding here. Then he turned and walked as fast as he
could down the stairs, his three files under his arm, until he realized he had forgotten to close the door. As he headed back up the stairs, his heart pounding once more, the gorgon was emerging
from the main entrance to Edward’s chambers in New Court. He came down the steps two at a time, turned right and was out of the back door of the Inn a full thirty seconds before the gorgon
came into view. Within a minute Edward and his files were in a cab, heading for Manchester Square. He hoped Lord Powerscourt would be pleased with him.

At first sight Petley Road looked exactly the same as any other Victorian terrace in the capital, most of the front doors clean, a few flowers beginning to come out in the tiny
front gardens, one or two ambitious residents trying to grow trees on their section of pavement. But when you looked closely, things were different. There were little groups of women, three at
least, Powerscourt thought, conversing quietly on their front porches and casting furtive glances from time to time at the late Mr Bassett’s residence at Number 15. Outside that house,
looking as though he had been planted there many years before, was a six-foot, fourteen-stone policeman, his task to keep the prying eyes of all and sundry away from what lay within. And then, as
Powerscourt was just a few feet away from the front door, he saw a team of four black horses pulling an undertaker’s carriage, also draped in black, turning into Petley Road from the other
end. They had come, presumably, to take the body away.

Powerscourt found the police surgeon circling the body in the first-floor bedroom. Even here, Powerscourt saw, John Bassett’s love of the distant places of the earth had taken hold on the
walls. Downstairs in the living room it had been views of Mount Everest and the Sahara desert, the Arctic and the vast steppes of Siberia. Up here there were pictures of a very long train climbing
up what Powerscourt presumed to be the Rocky Mountains, a breathtaking illustration of Niagara Falls and a vast panorama of ruins that Powerscourt thought must be the Valley of the Kings in Egypt.
He made his introductions to the police surgeon who, he gathered, was called James Wilson.

‘Your reputation precedes you, Lord Powerscourt,’ said Wilson, when he had been given the briefest of summaries of the Queen’s Inn case and Powerscourt’s close alliance
with Detective Chief Inspector Beecham. ‘You and the Chief Inspector must make a formidable team. I presume,’ he went on, turning to look once more at the body of John Bassett,
‘that you want to know if there was anything untoward about this old man’s death. He used to work at Queen’s, I gather.’

‘That is correct,’ said Powerscourt. At first sight it seemed obvious that John Bassett had died in his sleep. He had gone to sleep on his back, something must have happened in the
night, and he was gone. A spare pillow was lying halfway down the bed.

‘There is every reason to think that Mr Bassett died of natural causes, Lord Powerscourt. None of the examinations I have been able to perform suggest anything else. He was very old. The
system decided to shut down. The heart simply stopped beating. He wasn’t hit over the head, or shot, or poisoned like your unfortunate legal gentlemen. There is only one thing you could, just
possibly, think of as being suspicious if you were that way inclined.’

‘And that is?’ said Powerscourt.

‘It’s this pillow,’ said the doctor. ‘Why do you have a pillow halfway down your bed? The police were the first people into this house so we can be sure nothing has been
moved. Do you know anybody, Lord Powerscourt, who sleeps with a pillow halfway down the bed?’

‘Not exactly,’ replied Powerscourt, thinking of the amazing jumble of pillows, bed clothes, blankets, soft toys, that seemed to surround his eldest children when they woke up.
‘But surely you could decide that you had too many pillows and simply move this one away? You could probably do it in your sleep.’

‘All of that is true. But,’ Dr Wilson bent down and picked up the pillow, ‘suppose you were a murderer, Lord Powerscourt. You must have imagined yourself in such a role many
times, I should think. You find Mr Bassett asleep. For whatever reason, you have come to kill him. You pull, ever so gently, one of his pillows out from under his head. You press it down over his
face. Gradually you hear the breathing stop. You remove the pillow and leave it lying on the bed. There are no marks anywhere. You disappear into the night. I’m not saying that did happen,
Lord Powerscourt, I’m saying it could have happened.’

Lord Francis Powerscourt was pacing up and down his drawing room in Manchester Square. It was nearly half past seven in the evening and he was waiting for William Burke and his
report on the tangled finances of Queen’s Inn. Strange memories of the investigation were drifting across his mind. He thought of Alex Dauntsey going to see John Bassett and being poisoned a
week later. He thought of his own visit to the Finance Steward of Queen’s that was followed by Bassett’s own death, whether accidental or not. He thought of the vanished Porchester
Newton and those huge hands that could have strangled a man in seconds. He heard, suddenly, the voice of Elizabeth Dauntsey, dressed in black and sitting by her fire in Calne telling him,
‘There was something worrying him. It must have been in the weeks after he was elected a bencher, you see. Alex said it more than once, I’m certain of that, Lord Powerscourt. He said he
was very worried about the accounts.’ He thought about Rivers Cavendish, a man with the mighty motive of the cuckold’s horns for murdering Dauntsey, and his two books on poisons. That
afternoon Powerscourt had established to his own satisfaction that a man who took a cab to and from Paddington station en route to Oxford, like Dr Rivers Cavendish, could have reached Queen’s
Inn in time to poison Dauntsey. He thought of Mrs Cavendish, enjoying her lunches and fine wines with Dauntsey, deprived of her nights away. And then he heard the voice of Edward from the very
first time they met:

‘It was after his election as a bencher, sir. Something changed after that. Not immediately but two weeks or so later, I should say, sir. Mr Dauntsey was very cross about something. I
never knew what it was. One afternoon I came into his room when he wasn’t expecting me. He was studying some figures on a pad in front of him. He looked at me, Mr Dauntsey sir, almost in
despair. “It’s not right, Edward,” he said, “it’s just not right.”’

What was it, Powerscourt said to himself, that so troubled Alex Dauntsey in the weeks after his election as a bencher? They should have been among the happiest of his professional life. Where
was Porchester Newton? And why had he run away a second time? Was Mrs Cavendish lying? Was Dr Cavendish, the true believer, breaking one of the Commandments he must hold so dear? Was he in breach
of the fifth one, Thou shalt not kill? His wife had been on the verge of infringing the sixth, Thou shalt not commit adultery, if she hadn’t already broken it. He remembered the portrait
painter Nathaniel Stone on Dauntsey: ‘Hold on, he did say one thing, but I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time. It was something about very strange things going on there’
– ‘there’ being Queen’s Inn.

William Burke looked very serious when he walked into the room.

‘I think we should go to your study, Francis. We’re going to need that big desk of yours.’

And so, for over two hours, William Burke took Powerscourt through the intricacies of the finances of Queen’s Inn. There was material in his report from the wills, from the accounts stolen
by Edward and Sarah and from the statements provided by the man who wanted a position in Burke’s bank. His people had typed out summaries of the main findings. There were brief chapters on
what appeared to have happened to particular donations. And Burke kept checking that his friend understood what he was being told. When he rose to return to his wife and the innumerate children,
Powerscourt shook him by the hand. ‘I am so grateful, William. This is tremendous.’

‘Let me know if there is anything more I can do to help,’ said Burke. ‘I am not available for the next two days but after that I should be only too pleased.’

As his brother-in-law departed Powerscourt remembered a previous occasion when Burke had accompanied him to a fateful meeting with the Private Secretary of the Prince of Wales and had made a
dramatic contribution to the meeting.

‘William was a very long time, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy as he resumed his pacing in the drawing room. ‘Have you solved the mystery?’

‘I don’t think so, Lucy, but I tell you what I’m going to do. Current French military doctrine – God knows where I picked this up, probably down at the Cape – is
all for the attack. The French soldier must never retreat. Forwards is the order of the day. Backwards is banned.
L’audace, toujours l’audace
, daring, always daring. Tomorrow
morning I am going to spend with my Detective Chief Inspector friend with a brief interlude with Maxwell Kirk. Chief Inspector Beecham and I are going to play at being financiers for a while. And
then,
l’audace, toujours l’audace
, I am going to make a preliminary report to our dearly beloved friend Barton Somerville, the Treasurer of Queen’s Inn.’

The last note from the chimes of two o’clock was echoing round Fountain Court when Powerscourt and the Chief Inspector took their seats in Somerville’s vast office.
Powerscourt looked quickly at the full-length portraits of previous benchers and Treasurers on the walls and realized, to his delight, that he had detailed financial information on some of them in
his papers. Jack Beecham was in a dark blue suit with a white shirt and a nondescript tie, Powerscourt in what his children referred to as the funeral suit, a very dark grey pinstripe with a pale
blue shirt. Somerville radiated his usual combination of arrogance and superiority.

‘Tea should be coming in twenty minutes or so, gentlemen,’ Somerville began. ‘You said you wanted to see me, Powerscourt.’

Powerscourt smiled. ‘Yes, Mr Treasurer,’ he replied, reckoning that the formality, however ludicrous it might seem, would probably serve his purposes in the end. ‘I have come
to make a preliminary report.’