Death of a Chancellor (17 page)

Powerscourt pressed on. He passed the place where the drip came down from the ceiling. It fell on his head instead. It felt very cold. He wondered if he should turn round. He heard a scurrying
of very light feet in the distance, rats, he thought, fleeing from the human invader. The wall was growing damper. He realized that his boots were beginning to splash their way along the floor. He
heard another drip, more than a drip, a small cascade up ahead. He pressed on, trying to move faster. He forced himself to take a series of deep breaths. Panic, he knew, would be a disaster. He
wished Johnny Fitzgerald was with him. Now he could see nothing at all. He thought he heard a different noise, far in the distance, a low moaning sound. Maybe the ghosts of Fairfield spent most of
their half lives down here, flitting restlessly up and down this dank corridor, only emerging to haunt the living when one of the doors was opened. Up until this point Powerscourt's right hand had
told him that the side of the passage was simply rock. Now it became smoother suddenly. He thought it might be bricks. That gave him hope.

The stairs were almost his undoing. However carefully he was moving his feet, he missed the first step. He fell forward, holding out his hands to break his fall. Something very unfortunate had
happened to his ankle. He was now half lying, half sitting on the floor at the bottom of the stairs, in total darkness. Slowly, very slowly, he pulled himself upright. He found it was easier to
crawl up the steps than to walk. They were lined with a damp and slippery mould. Twice he nearly slipped backwards. Then he banged his head very loudly on something above. Powerscourt was stunned.
He felt as though something was echoing inside his skull. He waited a few minutes to compose himself, his ankle aching, his head throbbing. That must be a trap door, or something similar, above my
head, he said to himself. He put both his hands up and pushed as hard as he could. The door fell backwards. Powerscourt crawled slowly out of the terrible tunnel and found himself surrounded by
what seemed to be a low wooden wall. Only when he stood up did he realize that he was in the enclosed pew of the inhabitants of Fairfield Park in the little church behind the house. John Eustace,
he remembered, was buried in the churchyard outside. There was a faint light coming in through the windows. Various marble tombs were semi-visible on the walls. The pulpit was only fifteen feet
away. Powerscourt closed the trap door and made his way out of the church. Thank God the door wasn’t locked. He didn’t fancy spending the night in there, surrounded by the bats and the
dead, even if was preferable to spending it in the passageway he had just left.

He took several deep breaths and hobbled towards the house. His brain was reeling. Maybe Augusta Cockburn had been right all along. For until now the reason he had dismissed her murder theory
was that he could not see how the intruders might have got in and out of the house. All the doors and windows, he remembered the butler telling him, had been securely fastened from the inside the
morning after John Eustace’s death. Now he knew how a murderer could have got in and out without being detected and without leaving any telltale trace behind. Into the church, down the
passageway, into the library, up the back stairs, into John Eustace’s bedroom. But why, in that case, had the body ended up in Dr Blackstaff’s house? Unless the murderer had carried him
there? Was the murderer an ally of the doctor’s? Was he acting in concert with the butler? But in that case, why did they need the murderer at all? Either or both of them could perfectly
easily have walked into the bedroom without anybody else being any the wiser.

It was only just outside the house that Powerscourt noticed something was wrong. The lights in the library had gone out. When he left, not more than twenty minutes before at the most, they had
been switched on. It was their light that had shone down the steps and illuminated the first stage of his journey. He checked again. He remembered standing in the garden in the daylight only the
day before, making a mental note of where all the ground-floor rooms were. The library was the last room on the left from the garden. There were no lights on. Even if he was wrong, and he
didn’t think he was, all the lights in this part of the house had been turned off.

Had somebody seen him go? And tried to ensure that he wouldn’t have been able to come back? Was somebody in the house trying to send him a message? To frighten him off? But even so they
must have known he could just walk out of the church and come down the path towards the back door. Had they thought the church was locked? He wondered, as he limped back into the house, what had
happened to the door. Was it still open, waiting for a possible return? Was it closed? He didn’t like to think what it might mean if it was closed.

He found McKenna checking the windows at the very front of the house.

‘Good evening, McKenna,’ said Powerscourt, sidling up behind him.

‘My goodness me, my lord, you made me jump there. I thought you had gone to bed. I’ve just been putting the lights out.’

‘You know that passageway in the library, McKenna,’ Powerscourt went on, wondering yet again if he would ever get the truth about anything out of Andrew McKenna, ‘do many
people know about it? I’ve just discovered it by accident.’

‘I turned the lights off in the library a moment ago, my lord. I didn’t see anybody in there. You don’t want to be going down there in the dark, my lord. Could be quite
dangerous at this time of night. Lots of people know about it round these parts, my lord. If children came to call or to stay Mr Eustace used to take them down there. Scared most of them out of
their wits, I shouldn't wonder. But they quite like being frightened, I sometimes think.’

‘Very good, McKenna. I’ve left a book in the library. Goodnight to you.’

‘Goodnight to you, my lord.’

Powerscourt was trying to remember how much of the library you could see from the door by the light switches. If you could see the whole room, open door to the passageway included, then Andrew
McKenna was in a for a very rough time. He opened the door and turned on the switch. If you didn’t actually walk inside the room, he realized, you couldn’t see the open door. And was
the door open or closed? He took three paces into the room and looked sharply to his right. The door was still as he had left it. The route to the black hole was still open. Lots of people, he
remembered, knew about it in these parts.

‘Guess who’s invited me to lunch on Thursday?’ Patrick Butler had just hung his hat and coat in their usual place in Anne Herbert’s hall.

‘The Dean? The Bishop? I’m not sure bishops ask people like you to lunch, Patrick,’ said Anne, smiling as she brought in the tea.

‘No,’ said Patrick Butler, laughing. ‘Much better than that.’

‘You can’t get much more important than the Dean and the Bishop round here,’ said Anne, offering him a piece of cake.

‘Powerscourt,’ said Patrick Butler proudly. ‘Lord Francis Powerscourt has invited me to lunch at the Queen’s Head at one o’clock.’

‘Why do you think he wants to do that, Patrick? You’re not a murder suspect or anything like that, are you?’ She looked at him carefully.

‘I would think,’ said Patrick with his man of the world air, ‘that he wants to pick my brain. Local knowledge, that sort of thing.’

‘If you were an investigator, Patrick, would you ask yourself to lunch? Yourself, the newspaper editor, I mean.’

‘I’m not sure I would,’ said Patrick Butler thoughtfully. ‘Unless I wanted something, some information maybe. Or unless I wanted to see what would happen if some story
was printed in the paper. Maybe that’s what he wants.’

‘Is there any news about the death of that poor man in the kitchen of the Vicars Hall?’ Anne Herbert was wondering, as she looked at Patrick, if she should suggest buying him some
new shirts. His present collection were rather frayed. Better wait, she said to herself, he won’t want to talk about shirts just now.

‘Not as far as I know,’ said Patrick Butler, unaware that he had narrowly escaped ordeal by shirt and collar. ‘I had a word with that policeman this morning, Chief Inspector
Yates. Do you know what he said? I thought it was rather good, but he won’t let me use it in the
Mercury.
“Look at these vicars choral when they are singing,” said the
Chief Inspector. “Look at how wide they open their mouths. The effort seems to exhaust them for the remaining part of every day. The rest of the time their mouths are very firmly, very
tightly shut. They don’t tell you a bloody thing.”’

Lord Francis Powerscourt was walking yet again the short distance between Fairfield Park and Dr Blackstaff’s house. Only this time he was going inside, by appointment
with the good doctor in his room full of medical prints.

‘Dr Blackstaff,’ Powerscourt began, ‘do you know of that passage between the library and the church up at the Park?’ He wanted to test the butler’s assertion that
everybody in the locality knew about it.

‘Oh yes,’ said the doctor, ‘most people round here know about that passage. How did you find out about it?’

‘I discovered it by accident the other night,’ Powerscourt said, accepting a small glass of the doctor’s whisky. ‘I thought it interesting because it showed that some
outside body could have gained entry to the house in the middle of the night. All they had to do was to walk into the church, lift up the trapdoor, make their way down the passageway and into the
library. Nobody inside the house would have heard a thing. Wouldn’t you agree, Dr Blackstaff?’

‘It seems perfectly possible, I must admit. But why do you ask, Powerscourt?’

‘I am thinking of the suspicions of my employer, Mrs Augusta Cockburn. She suspects that her brother may have been murdered. Until now I have always been sceptical of that theory. I do not
believe that any of the servants would have murdered him. I could not work out how any outsider might have gained entrance to the house when all the doors and windows were still bolted the
following morning. Now I am not so sure. As you know, it would take less than a minute to walk out of the library, up the back stairs, and into Eustace’s bedroom.’ Powerscourt paused
and looked across at Dr Blackstaff, sitting on the other side of the fire. ‘Do you follow me, doctor?’

‘I do,’ said Dr Blackstaff, ‘but I do not see the relevance of all this. John Eustace died here in this house, as you know.’

‘But he could have been killed in his own house, could he not, and then brought over here already dead by one of the servants, the butler, for example. Is that not so?’

Dr Blackstaff smiled. ‘In your profession, my friend,’ he said, ‘you are accustomed to looking for the darkest possible interpretation of events. I am sure that you could make
a very credible case for saying that our late Queen was murdered in her bed by the agents of some wicked foreign powers. But John Eustace died here in this house, as you well know.’

Powerscourt changed tack. ‘Have you heard, doctor, about the death of Arthur Rudd, the vicar choral found strangled in the kitchen of the Vicars Hall?’ Dr Blackstaff nodded.
‘And have you had a chance to talk to Dr Williams, the medical man from Compton who attended on the dead person?’ Powerscourt believed that if the two doctors had met, the true facts
surrounding the terrible demise of Arthur Rudd would have been exchanged. The medical profession might pride itself on its tact and discretion when dealing with their patients and people outside
their own circle. But doctor will gossip unto doctor just as surely as lawyer will gossip unto lawyer. Blackstaff’s reply was a relief.

‘I have not spoken to Gregory Williams for some weeks now, not since we met at a party in the Bishop’s Palace, to be precise.’

Powerscourt found himself wondering briefly precisely what a party in the Bishop’s Palace might be like. Quizzes on the names of the Old Testament prophets? Or which came first in Egypt,
the death of the first born or the plague of locusts? He pressed on. ‘Let me tell you, in confidence, if I may, the facts that have not been made public about this death.’ Powerscourt
paused. ‘The body was actually found attached to the roasting spit in the kitchen of the Vicars Hall. There was a powerful fire burning. The body had been roasting in the flames for a number
of hours, five or six probably, before it was discovered. Somebody killed the poor man and then roasted him as if were an ox or a stag or a deer. I do not need to tell you, doctor, the condition of
the body when it was found.’

‘How terrible, how absolutely frightful,’ said the doctor. Even he, Powerscourt noticed, turned rather pale. ‘But why are you telling me all this?’

Powerscourt was looking very sombre. ‘Let me be perfectly frank with you, Dr Blackstaff. I have to admit that there were certain inconsistencies, certain discrepancies, between your
account of what happened on the night of John Eustace’s death and the account of the butler Andrew McKenna.’ Powerscourt had no intention of spelling out what the inconsistencies were.
If he did, he suspected that the leaky vessel that was their story might be hastily repaired. Dr Blackstaff looked as if was about to speak, but Powerscourt held up his hand to stop him.

‘Please hear me out, doctor. And please make your own allowances for the tendency of my profession to be forever looking at the darkest sides of human nature. But suppose for a moment, if
you will, that my employer’s suspicions are correct, that her brother was murdered. Now we have not one death but two. And in the case of the second one we know that there is a murderer on
the loose with a macabre, not to say demented, method of killing his victims. Suppose the two deaths were linked in some way. Suppose that it was the same motive that led to the deaths of John
Eustace and Arthur Rudd. And suppose that the murderer has not yet got what he wanted. Suppose there are going to be more victims in the days and weeks ahead, bodies discovered nailed to a cross on
the Cathedral Green, maybe, or hanging in chains from the roof of the chapter house. I put it to you, Dr Blackstaff, that anybody in possession of any information that might be relevant to these
inquiries should unburden themselves of it immediately. I put it to you that anybody in possession of such information who chooses to remain silent, may be contributing to another terrible death,
or even deaths, in Compton and its surroundings. And I would remind you that any such information passed on to me would be treated in the strictest confidence.’ Powerscourt stopped for his
words to sink in. Then he asked very quietly, ‘Is there anything you would like to tell me, Dr Blackstaff?’