Death Called to the Bar

12

Spring seemed to have turned back to winter as Powerscourt’s cab took him on the short journey from railway station to house at Calne. Sheets of rain were pounding on the vehicle’s roof and the wheels were throwing up jets of spray as they raced through the wide puddles that formed on the narrow road. The sky was dark and angry. The deer in the park had become invisible, huddling beneath the trees or trying to take shelter behind one of the great stone walls that enclosed the house and inner estate.

Mrs Dauntsey’s enormous butler ushered him into the drawing room. His mistress, still looking radiant in black, was sitting peacefully by the fire reading a novel. Powerscourt felt nervous as the pleasantries were exchanged. This was the third time he had been entertained in this house and, while the nature of his mission was not as delicate this time as it had been on his previous visit, it was still fraught with great potential for embarrassment. What if his theory about the mysterious visitor was wrong? Suddenly what had seemed so certain in Manchester Square seemed vaguer, less likely in this drawing room in Calne.

‘Mrs Dauntsey,’ he began, ‘yet again you have in front of you a man with a delicate subject to discuss. I must ask your forgiveness in advance if my theories turn out to be wrong.’

‘Have you come with some more fairy stories, Lord Powerscourt? I did enjoy the last one, most of the time. I was never sure about the end. Endings can be quite difficult in fairy stories, don’t you think?’

‘They can indeed, Mrs Dauntsey,’ Powerscourt smiled at his hostess, ‘but I’m afraid there is no fairy story this time.’

‘Perhaps there will be a surprise instead, Lord Powerscourt. Please carry on.’

Powerscourt took a deep breath. ‘I do not know if you are aware of it, Mrs Dauntsey, but on the day of the feast there was a mysterious visitor to Queen’s Inn. Every single member of the institution and everybody who attended the feast was questioned about who or what they had seen by the police.’

Powerscourt suddenly remembered that he had not mentioned his theory about the mysterious visitor to Detective Chief Inspector Beecham. Maybe he was failing in his duty. But he felt that if the police knew Mrs Dauntsey had been in her husband’s room a few hours before he died, she would be arrested immediately.

‘Little is known about the visitor. The person did not speak. They were seen in the vicinity of your husband’s rooms and they were seen again leaving the Inn by one of the porters where they did not say goodnight.’

He looked at her very carefully. There were no signs of nervousness at all. Maybe she was just a very good actress.

‘It only occurred to me very recently, Mrs Dauntsey, that the reason the mysterious visitor did not speak was related to gender. To speak would be to betray the fact that the visitor was female, not male. This was Viola turned into Cesario, come not to the Middle Temple Hall on Twelfth Night, but to Queen’s Inn on the day of the feast. I put it to you, Mrs Dauntsey, as the barristers say, that you were the mysterious visitor, that you walked into Queen’s Inn dressed as a man and that you visited your husband in his rooms. Am I right?’

Mrs Dauntsey remained silent for some moments. Powerscourt though he could see tears forming in her eyes. But she brushed them aside.

‘Yes,’ she said very quietly, ‘it was me.’ There was another period of silence.

‘Mrs Dauntsey,’ Powerscourt said, trying to be as emollient as he could, ‘I think it would be best if you told me the truth, all of it. I do not believe you poisoned your husband,’ – Are you sure about that, a small inner voice asked him insistently – ‘but I think your position is difficult. Had you owned up to being the mysterious visitor, or told us that you went to see your husband on that day, your position would still be problematic, but not as awkward as it is now. You see, the police do not know that you were the mysterious visitor. They have very suspicious minds. The fact that you have concealed this information up till now will leave them thinking you have something to hide. They may assume that you were the murderer. Juries have been known to convict on flimsier evidence than that, I assure you.’

Elizabeth Dauntsey rose from her chair and went to stand by the window. Even in her hour of difficulty her back was as straight as a soldier on parade. The rain was still falling, racing down the glass and dropping with a plop on the gravel beneath. One or two deer could be seen in the distance running quite fast from one place of shelter to another.

‘I wish I could make up fairy stories like you, Lord Powerscourt. Maybe that would make life easier.’

‘Take your time, Mrs Dauntsey, there’s no rush.’

She came back to her chair and looked into the fire for a while. ‘It all has to do with children,’ she said finally, ‘with Alex’s wish to have descendants for Calne and with my inability to give them to him. I’m sure he wouldn’t have married me if he’d known I was barren.’

A small trickle of tears broke through her defences and ran slowly down her cheeks. Powerscourt offered a handkerchief. ‘Why do men always have clean handkerchiefs, Lord Powerscourt? It’s always been a mystery to me that they’re never dirty.’ Elizabeth Dauntsey just managed a slight smile.

‘We’d reached the end of the road as far as my having children was concerned, Alex and I,’ she went on. ‘As you know from your last visit, we, or rather I, had tried everything possible to become pregnant. That wasn’t going to work. So Alex was going to try and find somebody else.’

This somebody, Powerscourt reflected, had managed to pass completely undetected through the filter of Lucy’s relations. This was most irregular. He waited.

‘About two months ago . . .’ Elizabeth Dauntsey paused and stared into the flames once more. ‘I’m sorry, Lord Powerscourt, I haven’t told this to anybody before, about two months ago, maybe more, Alex thought he had found somebody. She was a young woman in good health, she was married to a much older man, she had no children of her own and her brother played cricket for Middlesex. I’m sure that last fact must have been an important factor in Alex’s calculations.’

For the first time Powerscourt thought he detected a hint of sarcasm, dislike maybe, towards her late husband. He wondered about the different Elizabeth Dauntseys presented to him each time he came, as if she was like one of those Russian dolls with different characters packed inside each other.

‘We talked about it a lot,’ Elizabeth Dauntsey went on. ‘Alex kept me informed about what was going on, not in detail, just the broad picture. And then, the night before he died, Alex and I had the most enormous row.’

Powerscourt dreaded to think what the police might make of that.

‘We hardly ever rowed, Lord Powerscourt. And this one went on for a very long time. You see, Alex had arranged to go away for the weekend with this woman. As far as I know, it would have been the first time. They were going as husband and wife to some hotel on the Thames where Alex knew the owner so there wouldn’t be any questions asked. Her husband was going to be away at a medical conference.’

‘Is he a doctor?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘Yes, he is. He’s a Professor of something or other medical, I can’t remember what. That’s what the row was about, not about the husband, but about Alex going away with this woman. I knew why Alex was doing it. Part of me approved of it. But the other part of me couldn’t bear it. I shouted at him over and over again that he was betraying me, that he would destroy our marriage, that it would break my heart. The worst thing was that he never spoke. He hardly said a word, this man who earned his living by speaking and arguing in the courts of law. When we stopped rowing he went off to sleep in some other part of the house and he left very early the next morning. So if I hadn’t gone to see him that afternoon, I would never have seen him alive again. I had to tell him, you see,’ her voice began to crack slightly, ‘that I still loved him, that he had my blessing for the weekend, that he was to ignore anything I said the night before. I wanted everything right between us. I couldn’t bear it when he was angry with me.’

She stared at Powerscourt as if he could make things better.

‘But why did you go in disguise? You didn’t have to do that, surely?’ Powerscourt spoke very softly.

‘You’ll think me very silly,’ she said, ‘but I thought one or two of his work colleagues must have known about the other woman, had probably met her. Once anybody in that place knew anything the gossip went round the entire Inn faster than a Derby winner. They would all have known that the two of them were going away for the weekend. You know how men like to speculate about successes with women. I couldn’t face the embarrassment. I couldn’t have borne it. So I adapted some of Alex’s old clothes and went as a man. Even then I was terrified somebody might speak to me. I was completely exhausted when I got back here.’

Powerscourt wondered yet again if Elizabeth Dauntsey was a tragic figure or a murderer. He couldn’t tell.

‘Did you meet anybody when you were in your husband’s chambers? Anybody at all?’

‘Not a soul,’ replied Elizabeth Dauntsey.

‘Was he drinking anything while you were with him? It must have been about a quarter to six.’ Powerscourt could see, very faintly in his mind, the shadow of the gallows.

‘He was drinking Chateauneuf-du-Pape,’ Elizabeth Dauntsey had gone pale, ‘the stuff they were going to have later at the feast.’ Only Alex Dauntsey never got that far, Powerscourt said to himself, the strychnine got to him first. The poison concealed, perhaps, behind the strong taste of the red wine.

‘And did you put a drop of poison in his drink when you were there, Mrs Dauntsey?’

There was a slight pause, whether through guilt or insult Powerscourt could not decide.

‘I did not.’ He couldn’t decide if she was telling the truth. He thought she probably was.

Now it was Powerscourt’s turn to walk to the window. A jury, he thought, could well convict on what he had heard this afternoon. The rain had stopped. Spring sunshine was beginning to dry the park out. The deer had abandoned their hiding places and were gambolling about on the grass.

‘I have to ask you this question, Mrs Dauntsey. I seem to need a sentence of permanent apology virtually every time I speak in this house. What were you all going to do if the woman became pregnant?’ Don’t even think of asking the really nasty question today, he said to himself – what happens if it’s a girl. ‘To put it at its crudest, did you think he was going to divorce you?’

‘No,’ said Elizabeth Dauntsey firmly, ‘I don’t believe he was. Alex said the woman’s husband wasn’t going to live very long.’

‘Was the man ill? Did he have some terminal illness?’

‘I don’t know, Lord Powerscourt, Alex didn’t say.’

Christ in heaven, Powerscourt said to himself. Maybe other murders were contemplated, Alexander Dauntsey and his mistress plotting to push an old man down the stairs or shove him under the wheels of a train.

‘Did Alex have a time scale, Mrs Dauntsey? Did he think the doctor would have departed in six months, nine months maybe?’

‘He didn’t say.’

‘Let’s play make believe, Mrs Dauntsey. Not quite a fairy story, more of a let’s suppose. Would you be agreeable to that?’

‘Of course, Lord Powerscourt. I’m only trying to help you.’

‘I know you are. Now then, let’s suppose that in a couple of months’ time the young woman becomes pregnant. The husband dies, conveniently, well before the child is due. Then she gives birth, let us say to a son. How, if Alex is still married to you, would he get his hands on the child? The two of them can hardly come and live here. Perhaps the young woman would be happy to give up the child for Alex to bring up here with you. It’s all frightfully complicated.’

Elizabeth Dauntsey looked at the ring on her wedding finger. ‘Alex said he would work something out, that we had to take one step at a time. He was always an impulsive sort of thinker.’

Powerscourt wondered if it was time for him to go. Mrs Dauntsey was looking tired and drawn all of a sudden, as if these confessions had taken their toll.

She looked at him suddenly, ‘It doesn’t matter now, Lord Powerscourt, it doesn’t matter at all. Alex is dead. Nothing is going to bring him back.’

Powerscourt took her hand. It felt cold, even though she had been close to the fire. ‘I will do whatever I can to help you, Mrs Dauntsey. I may have to come back to see you again in a few days. But before I go – forgive me for causing yet more embarrassment but it is important. The name of the young woman with whom your husband was going to spend some time would be most useful to me, if you would be so kind. And the professional address of her husband.’

For the first time since Powerscourt had known her, Elizabeth Dauntsey blushed. ‘It might be easier all round,’ said Powerscourt, sensing her discomfiture, ‘if you wrote them down, the names and addresses, I mean.’

Elizabeth Dauntsey crossed to a small writing table by the window. Powerscourt did not read her piece of paper at once but waited until he was in the train back to London. Rivers Cavendish, he read, 24 Harley Street, W1. A fashionable address. Mrs Catherine Cavendish, 36 Tite Street, Chelsea, SW3. He didn’t think it likely, however you looked at it, that Catherine Cavendish was the killer. Excitement and romance were meant to be on the menu as far as she was concerned. But Dr Rivers Cavendish, a man being cuckolded in the last months of his life? At the speed the criminal justice system worked, he would probably have been able to kill Dauntsey and pass away several months later without even being brought to trial. And there was something else. Doctors, Powerscourt said to himself, know all about poison.

Sarah Henderson was thinking about Edward. It was just after nine o’clock in the morning in Queen’s Inn but she had been thinking about him for some time already. Sarah spent quite a lot of her waking day thinking about Edward. She had discovered that her fingers could shoot out and turn her shorthand into sheets of typewritten paper on her keyboard while her mind was elsewhere. She wondered when, or maybe if, Edward was going to ask her to marry him. Only the previous evening, encased in the fog, they had spent a passionate forty-five minutes wrapped round a lamp-post together on the Embankment. She had felt then that he might pop the question. After all, ‘Will you marry me?’ didn’t have any of those awkward b’s or p’s or s’s that sometimes gave Edward so much trouble. She wondered if she should suggest that they needed to have a talk about things. But Sarah wasn’t sure about this plan of action. Men, according to an old school friend who had been observing two elder brothers at home for years and who had nearly been engaged to half a dozen young men, were always happy to go for walks, to take you to the theatre, to make love to you, but if you suggested serious talks or discussing things like relationships, their eyes would glaze over and suddenly they would have urgent engagements elsewhere. It wasn’t their fault really, her friend had explained, it was just the way they were made, rather like they enjoyed watching cricket or playing football. But then there was so much to discuss. If, just supposing, if they were married, where would they live? Ever since she was a small child Sarah had believed that one of the main, if not the principal, reasons for getting married was that she could move furniture about all over her own house whenever the fancy took her. But now, in the real world, there were difficulties. She couldn’t leave her mother, but it wouldn’t be fair to Edward to ask him to start married life with a sick mother-in-law who took you to her own updated version of the Inquisition about the law courts every time you crossed her threshold. And then there was Edward’s future to consider. After his triumph in the Puncknowle case was he going to take up the speaking side of the law, or was he content to go on devilling for ever? Sarah had not detected any eagerness on Edward’s part for a change of direction in his career. And then she heard his footstep on the stairs. Edward appeared to have a telepathic knowledge of when her room mate had gone out to deliver some work or to take dictation elsewhere.

‘Morning, Sarah,’ said Edward, ‘you’re looking very smart today.’ Sarah was wearing a dark skirt, a cream blouse and a dark blue jacket that had a slightly masculine look about it.

‘Thank you, Edward,’ Sarah replied, thinking suddenly of the two of them wrapped round the lamp-post the evening before.

‘I’ve got some splendid news, Sarah,’ said Edward, admiring the way the red hair curled down those pale cheeks. ‘Lord Powerscourt has asked us round to Manchester Square any time next weekend. He was going to invite us to their place in the country but Lady Lucy thought that might not suit the twins.’

‘And where is the Powerscourt place in the country?’

‘It is, in the good lord’s words, in the splendidly unfashionable county of Northamptonshire. It’s near Oundle. They’ve got a cricket pitch and a tennis court, though it’s a bit early for that. It’s frightfully old, Sarah. Powerscourt thinks men went out from it to fight at Crecy and Agincourt.’

‘My goodness,’ said Sarah, not quite sure how far back in the past those two battles were. It was the kind of thing Edward always knew.

‘And there’s a ghost, Sarah. Mr Ghost, not Mrs Ghost or Miss Ghost. A real clanking-about-in-the-middle-of-the-night-ghost. But look, I’ve got to go and look up those wills for Lord Powerscourt. I’m not due in court at all today.’

‘Wills, what wills, Edward? What does Lord Powerscourt want with wills?’

Edward lowered his voice. ‘It’s the benchers’ wills, Sarah. He thinks there’s a very faint chance they might be connected with the murders. I’ll see you later.’

With that Edward clattered off down the stairs. Less than five minutes later Sarah heard an unfamiliar pair of boots tramping up towards her attic fastness. Big man, she thought, quite heavy. That stair near the top only squeaks if you’re over fifteen stone. There was a grunt as if the climb up the stairs had taken its toll. Then the door was opened and her visitor was beside her, towering above Sarah at her station by the typewriter.

‘Miss Henderson,’ said Barton Somerville, ‘forgive me for calling on you like this. I was looking for the young man they call Edward. They said I might find him up here.’

Sarah wondered what was going on. Never before had the Treasurer of the Inn been to see her. Nor could she see what he might want with such a humble person as Edward. He might be all the world to her, she knew, but he was a very junior member of these chambers let alone the Inn.

‘Edward’s not here, sir,’ she said.

‘I can see that,’ said Barton Somerville testily. ‘Do you know where he is, by any chance?’

‘I think he’s gone to look up some benchers’ wills for Lord Powerscourt, sir.’

‘Benchers’ wills?’ Somerville suddenly sounded quite extraordinarily angry. ‘Working for Powerscourt now, is he? Not for the chambers that pay his wages. We’ll see about that, young lady.’

‘I’m sure he would have cleared it with Mr Kirk, sir. Edward’s always very scrupulous about things like that.’

Barton Somerville snorted. He slammed the door and departed noisily down the stairs. Edward had not told Sarah not to mention where he was going or anything like that. She hoped she hadn’t got Edward into trouble. And, once more, as she looked out at the innocent lawns of New Court, a frock-coated porter pushing a mighty pile of documents down the path that led to the law courts, Sarah felt very frightened. And it would be hours before Edward came back.

Two days later Powerscourt was waiting for a visitor in the first-floor drawing room in Manchester Square. Catherine Cavendish was due in ten minutes’ time. And he had written to ask for an appointment with Dr Cavendish at his Harley Street consulting rooms for the following day.

Lady Lucy found him pacing up and down the room. She was smiling broadly.

‘Francis, my love, you’ll like this!’ she said happily.

‘What news, Lucy?’ said Powerscourt.

‘It’s Catherine Cavendish, Francis. She was born Catherine Chadwick. She was a chorus girl. At the Alhambra and the Duke of York’s and the Gentleman’s Relish. They say she was the senior dancer at the Alhambra, a sort of Head Prefect.’

Powerscourt tried to get his brain around what would be entailed in being the Head Girl of a chorus line and failed. ‘God bless my soul, Lucy, I didn’t know you had any relations in what one might call the saucier part of the West End.’

Lady Lucy laughed. ‘I don’t, Francis. I mean I don’t have any relations in that world. Mrs Trumper Smith told me.’

Powerscourt’s face registered complete ignorance, if not astonishment, at the mention of Mrs Trumper Smith.

‘You know Mrs T, Francis. That’s what everyone calls her, behind her back at any rate. She lives three doors down from here. Her son is in the same class at school as Thomas. The husband’s a doctor, quite a fashionable one, I think, with a practice in Harley Street or Wimpole Street. He knows the Cavendishes, says the chorus girl is quite delightful.’

‘Did the woman say what was wrong with Dr Cavendish, the one who’s meant to be leaving this world quite shortly?’

‘She did not, Francis.’

There was a ring at the front door bell. A tall, dark-haired woman in a long grey dress was shown in and took her seat in front of the fire. Powerscourt noted that she was very slim, with a tiny waist and a very beautiful face. The eyes, even in the sad circumstances in which Mrs Cavendish presumably found herself, were grey and slightly cheeky and her lips looked as if they wanted nothing better than to be kissed. Powerscourt suddenly remembered the rather vulgar assessment of female beauty carried out by some of his more disreputable fellow officers stationed at Simla, summer residence of the British Raj in India. It was known as the ships test and was based on Marlowe’s famous line about Helen of Troy: ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships/ And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?’ The great beauties of Simla were awarded ships by the hundred according to the male estimates of their beauty. Powerscourt thought he remembered one gorgeous creature reaching the dizzy heights of seventy hundred and fifty. That record stood all through that summer, up to and including the Viceroy’s Ball. Mrs Cavendish, Powerscourt felt, would have been most eager to play the game. Her score would certainly have approached the record, perhaps even bettered it. An entire chorus line, led by Catherine Cavendish in person, he reckoned, would muster a combined score of many thousands.

‘Mrs Cavendish,’ he began, ‘how kind of you to call.’ The eyes, which he had originally thought to be cheeky, had turned cautious as Mrs Cavendish took a lightning appraisal of the room and its furnishings.

‘Nice place you’ve got here, Lord Powerscourt,’ she replied.

‘I’m afraid I want to ask you some questions about Mr Dauntsey, Mrs Cavendish.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I didn’t think you’d asked me here to talk about the political situation in the Balkans.’

Powerscourt smiled. ‘How long ago did you meet him, Mrs Cavendish?’

‘Mr Dauntsey? I met him about nine weeks ago. It was in my husband’s waiting room. He was running very late that day, like the doctors often do, and Alex, Mr Dauntsey I mean, was the last patient waiting to go in. I was there waiting for Dr C to come out as we were already late for a reception. We just got talking, the way you do.’

Mrs Cavendish looked rather defiant as she said this.

‘And things just went on from there, Mrs Cavendish, regular meetings, that sort of thing?’

‘I think he was the most charming man I’ve ever met, Lord Powerscourt. He used to buy me lunch, lovely lunches, they were, and always with lovely wines. He had a wonderful nose for a wine and a great love for the names, Chateau La Tour Blanche, that’s a Sauterne, Lord Powerscourt, Chateau Fleur Cardinale, Chambolle Mussigny, Les Amoureuses, Chassagne Montrachet.’

Powerscourt was very impressed that she did not pronounce either of the two t’s in Montrachet. Johnny Fitzgerald had been heard describing people who did as little better than Philistines. Powerscourt found himself wondering if Johnny Fitzgerald might replace the late Alex Dauntsey in Mrs Cavendish’s affections with their shared love of fine vintages. But however hard he tried he couldn’t see Mrs Cavendish in enormous boots, wrapped up to the chin, waiting before dawn for a flight of rare birds over the Suffolk marshes.

Lunch in expensive restaurants with expensive wine lists was one thing, Powerscourt said to himself, weekends away in riverside hotels something rather different.

‘Would I be right in saying, Mrs Cavendish, that on the weekend of the feast, you and Mr Dauntsey were planning to go away together?’

Catherine Cavendish looked down at the Powerscourt carpet. ‘I’m going to be frank with you, Lord Powerscourt, and I’ll thank you to keep what I’m going to say to yourself.’ She paused for a moment. ‘There’s people out there,’ she made a vague nod towards the window as if referring to the population of Manchester Square and the wider purlieus of Marylebone, ‘who will say that I married Dr C for his money. Well, that’s as maybe. He’s always been very kind to me. I have no complaints. But there’s more to marriage than kindness, Lord Powerscourt, as I’m sure you know. Any girl who heard the sob stories of the sad husbands who used to buy time to talk with the chorus girls could tell you that. Think of what it says in the Good Book. Man and woman created he them, Lord Powerscourt, man and woman. I’ve always said there was more going on in that Garden of Eden than eating apples, if you follow me. Dr C, well, poor soul, he wasn’t up to any of that man and woman created he them business, not up to it at all, I can tell you. It’s because of his illness – he’s not got very long to live, you know. Alex was, if you follow me, Lord Powerscourt. So, yes, I was going away with him. We were going to a flat that belonged to a friend of his after that feast and going off to Moulsford the next day. That’s on the Thames up towards Oxford. I was really looking forward it. You can miss things for too long, know what I mean, Lord P?’

‘Of course,’ said Powerscourt, wondering how to reach the more delicate ground yet. ‘Did you talk about children at all, Mrs Cavendish?’

‘What about them, Lord P? I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I’m quite sure you do,’ said Powerscourt, remembering suddenly that nobody had called him Lord P since the lady who came to make his bed at Cambridge. ‘Let me be blunt, Mrs Cavendish, did you discuss what might happen if you became pregnant?’

Catherine Cavendish tossed her head back and roared with laughter. ‘Is there anything you don’t want to know, Lord P? You’re the curiousest man I’ve ever met. Quite what any of this has to do with Alex ended up crocked in a bowl of beetroot I don’t know. Yes, we did talk about children once. I said I couldn’t stand the little buggers, pardon my French, Lord P, but they’ve always seemed to me to be an unimaginable amount of work for very little return. It’s as if the whole chorus line dances its heart out for one man in the audience and he doesn’t even bother to clap. Alex told me he’d been trying to have children with his wife for years and failed so he thought he couldn’t have any anyway. Not that that would have got in the way of the man and woman created he them business, I can tell you that for nothing, Lord P.’

‘Forgive me for sounding curious, Mrs Cavendish, did Mr Dauntsey ever ask you what you would do if you became pregnant?’

Catherine Cavendish looked at him as if he came from another planet. ‘You do ask the strangest things, Lord P. Anyone might think you’re one of those perverted blokes who spy on other people from behind a curtain. He did ask me once, as a matter of fact. I said I’d give it up for adoption, that’s what I’d do. I’ve known girls in chorus lines get in the family way, happens all the time. Lots of them open the oven door before the bun is ready and throw it out, if you follow me. Well, I’ve known girls, perfectly healthy before, ending up with insides like rows of washing lines after that. Not me, Lord P.’

‘I’ve nearly finished, Mrs Cavendish,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Did Mr Dauntsey ever mention his wife?’

The word wife seemed to trigger some semi-automatic reaction in Catherine Cavendish. Her earlier openness disappeared. She composed her face until it was almost a mask. She blinked rapidly.

‘No, he didn’t, apart from failing to have the children as I said before.’

Powerscourt was certain she was lying. For a fraction of a second he considered challenging her. Then he thought better of it.

‘In the weeks before he died, Mrs Cavendish, did Mr Dauntsey say anything to you about being worried, about any problems he might have had?’

‘Not to me, he didn’t, Lord P, he was always cheerful with me. And I know he was looking forward to our little weekend away.’

‘On the day of the feast, Mrs Cavendish, did you see Mr Dauntsey at all?’

‘No, I was going to meet him later,’ said Mrs Cavendish.

‘You didn’t go round to his chambers in the late afternoon by any chance?’

‘I’ve told you,’ Catherine Cavendish had turned rather red, ‘I was going to see him later.’ Powerscourt thought she was lying, but that if she was, she would stick to her story through thick and thin.

Most, if not all, men, Powerscourt felt sure, would have looked forward to a weekend away with Catherine Cavendish. He wondered if they might find it rather exhausting. But most of all, as she departed back to Chelsea, he wondered why she had lied to him. And what had Alex Dauntsey said, or not said, to Catherine Cavendish about his wife? Most men in the circumstances, Powerscourt felt, would have mentioned the existence of a spouse. They might have blackened her name with tales of not being understood, of wives permanently suffering from headaches, wives misbehaving in any number of ways. Such confessions, after all, were how the men justified their infidelity to themselves. But for the man to say nothing at all, which was what Catherine Cavendish implied, must be unusual. And surely, in those circumstances, Powerscourt thought, the mistress figure would herself inquire about the existence and disposition of a wife.

Then a fresh thought struck him with such force that he was out of his chair and pacing up and down the room. Suppose Alex Dauntsey had told Catherine Cavendish that he was going to leave his wife. Suppose they planned to time his departure to take place after the rather different and more permanent departure of Dr Cavendish. Catherine, as it were, would be lining up the next husband even before the first one was in his grave. Well, it had happened before and would, no doubt, happen again. So far, so good, Powerscourt said to himself. But suppose Catherine discovered that Dauntsey was not going to leave his wife. Naughty weekends in riverside hotels, whole evenings of man and woman created he them, supposedly undertaken with one purpose in view, that Dauntsey should take her if not to the altar, at least to the registry office, would be in vain. She would be giving away her assets for nothing at all, as it were. And suppose she decides to take the ultimate revenge. She takes some poison from her husband’s medicine chest. The one flaw in his theory was how she delivered the fatal dose. The answer would, no doubt, present itself. But for the moment Powerscourt was certain that Catherine Cavendish might have as valid a motive for murdering Alexander Dauntsey as anybody else, if not more. During most investigations, Powerscourt said ruefully to himself, the number of suspects decreases as inquiries go on. But in this case, the number of suspects was growing, and he had the feeling that it hadn’t stopped growing yet.