Death Called to the Bar

14

Edward found Lord Francis Powerscourt pacing up and down his drawing room with the twins nestling against his chest. Edward could have sworn he was talking to them about Pericles’ funeral speech in Book Two of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War.

‘You’ve got to talk to them about something,’ said Powerscourt cheerfully. ‘Johnny Fitzgerald has told them already about all the birds of London and their breeding habits. Would you like one?’

Edward told Sarah later that evening that his host offered him a twin as he might have offered a cucumber sandwich or a slice of cake at afternoon tea. Very gingerly he took a small, well-wrapped bundle in his arms, holding it very delicately.

‘They look about quite a bit now,’ said Powerscourt happily. ‘Sometimes they grab hold of your finger as if they’re a monkey. The nurse will be coming to take them away for their bath in a minute, Edward. You won’t have to last out for very long.’

‘Which one have I got?’ asked Edward.

‘You’ve got the boy, Christopher. The other children are calling him Chris already. I’d much rather he had the full name. If we’d wanted to call him Chris, I keep telling Thomas and Olivia, we’d have christened him that. But they don’t pay any attention. Do you have a view on this?’

Edward had no wish to tread into some diplomatic imbroglio between parent and children. ‘Well,’ he said tactfully, ‘you don’t have to decide yet, do you? Christopher himself might have a view on this?’

At that point a middle-aged nurse, spotless in white, appeared in the doorway. She had two large white towels over one arm.

‘Nurse Mary Muriel,’ said Powerscourt, ‘you have come for the twins, I see. Allow me to introduce Edward, a great friend of the family.’

‘How do you do,’ Mary Muriel said to Edward, and advanced to claim her charges. ‘It’s bath time,’ she said, as if it were some ritual fixed by Royal Decree or Act of Parliament, and swept out of the room towards the upper floors, her tiny charges firmly under her control.

‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, parking himself in his favourite armchair to the left of the sofa in front of the fire, ‘I sometime want to suggest to Mary Muriel that she postpone bath time for ten minutes so I could have more time with the twins. I am their father, after all. And I pay her wages, come to that. But she is terribly good at her job. She looked after Thomas and Olivia when they were little. But her world runs like clockwork. If you check your watch, Edward, I think you’ll find that it is about one minute after six. If bath time does not commence at exactly six o’clock, London will sink below the Thames, there will be a plague of locusts and the waters shall cover the face of the earth.’

Edward smiled. ‘I’m glad I’ve met this titan of the nursery,’ he said, ‘and it is just coming up to two minutes after six.’

‘Now then, young Edward,’ said Powerscourt, ‘time to be serious for a moment. I’ve been reading those wills and I’m very confused. There are a number of people supposed to be receiving money from the Inn who aren’t. Have you ever come across any poor pupils or students being maintained by the munificence of Queen’s and the generosity of its past benchers?’

‘I have not,’ Edward replied, ‘none at all. And I don’t think I’ve ever heard of any money going to retired barristers in straitened circumstances either.’

‘I wonder if they could have changed the statutes,’ said Powerscourt, cocking an ear to sounds of unhappiness floating down from the higher levels, presumably to do with the total immersion in water, ‘but it’s very difficult to change people’s wills after they’ve been proved. It’s almost unheard of.’

‘Do you think there is a connection with the murders, Lord Powerscourt?’

‘Not directly, no. But there is certainly something odd going on and I am most curious to find out what it is. Suppose Dauntsey discovers something strange is going on to do with the money. He tells his friend Stewart. Then he tries a bit of blackmail on Barton Somerville. Or maybe it’s the other way round. I just don’t know.’

‘So how do we find out what’s been happening?’

‘I have a proposition to put to you, Edward. I can’t say it is particularly glamorous or romantic but it could help a great deal.’

‘Anything at all, Lord Powerscourt.’

‘Before I outline the task ahead, Edward, let me explain what is going to happen to these wills.’ He popped a hand under his chair and brought out a bundle of papers, secured, Edward noticed, with legal string.

‘These wills are arranged, first of all, in time order. Then I have tabulated them into categories of payment, help for poor students, help for retired barristers, general discretion of the Inn, that sort of thing. I have put the date of each bequest in brackets before the money. Thank God there weren’t any more of these dead benchers, Edward, we’d have suffocated in paper. My brother-in-law, financial equivalent of W.G. Grace as I said before, is coming to collect them this evening and peruse them in his counting house tomorrow. But I know what he will want before he can come to any conclusion.’

Edward lifted a quizzical eyebrow.

‘Annual accounts or the equivalent, from last year or some other recent year. Now, listen carefully, Edward, and tell me where I go wrong in this description.’ Powerscourt paused. A prolonged wail of great unhappiness shot down the stairs, followed by a second, rather shorter protest.

‘I think she’s washing their hair,’ Powerscourt said, sounding as if he disapproved of the practice. ‘Anyway, there is a bencher in the Inn one of whose tasks is to look after the money but only, you might say, in a tactical sense. The strategic direction rests, as you might expect given his title, with the Treasurer. In symbolic recognition of which fact, the box files relating to the annual accounts are held in his outer office, guarded by that gorgonic female with the mousy grey hair and the long fingernails. I forget the bloody woman’s name.’

‘McKenna,’ said Edward, ‘Bridget McKenna.’

‘She would be called Bridget,’ said Powerscourt bitterly, who had a violent dislike of the name since hostile encounters with a very stupid parlourmaid called Bridget in his youth. ‘But she has the files all right. They stretch round behind her desk on shelves, two or three levels high, in black boxes with the dates of the accounts written on them. I know that, because I inspected them the first time I went to see Somerville and his gang. How am I doing, Edward?’

‘You’re doing fine,’ Edward smiled, suspecting he knew what was coming. ‘What do you want me to do?’

‘I want you to steal some of them,’ said Powerscourt. ‘As many as you can. Preferably tomorrow.’

‘I see,’ said Edward, and scratched his head.

‘Let me give you a suggestion as to the general method I would employ if it was me. I would do it, or Johnny Fitzgerald and I would do it, but I think you would have a better chance if you were caught. You could say you were doing it for a dare or a bet or some other foolish extravagance of youth. I have asked to see them, of course, I asked long ago and was told it was none of my business. I think we may need to involve Sarah, though I leave that to your discretion. There are two ways of approaching the files, what you might call theft or substitution. Theft is self-explanatory, you simply take them off the shelf and walk away. Substitution means that you bring with you a couple of identical files with the same dates as the ones you wish to purloin. You take one out and you pop the other one in. So, at a glance, nobody would know anything had gone. But it all depends on how and when they lock the door.’

There was a faraway look in Edward’s eyes as if he had left Manchester Square and had returned on a piratical mission to the courts and walks of Queen’s Inn.

‘I think it works like this, Lord Powerscourt,’ he said, speaking quite slowly as if his plan hadn’t finally been settled in his mind. ‘If they’re both out to lunch, they make sure the door is locked. Any major departures, they close up behind them. But on minor matters there must be times when it’s empty, even if only for a few minutes.’

‘Does the gorgonic female lock up when she goes to the bathroom, do you suppose?’

‘I don’t think she would, but that might only leave a very little time. How about this, Lord Powerscourt? Mr Kirk, the head of my chambers, has hurt his leg very badly. It’s true. He brought two sticks in with him today. So let’s say he appeals to Somerville to come and see him on some important matter, rather than him going through hell to reach the Treasurer’s quarters. Once he’s arrived, Sarah sets off for the gorgon’s lair, with a terribly sad story. Her typewriter has gone funny. The ribbon is wrapped round the cantilever or whatever the thing is called and can’t be cleared, so it’s now rather like a tangled fishing line. Sarah will know how to do that. The gorgon always prides herself on being Queen Bee or Head Girl to all these stenographers. So if Sarah makes it dramatic enough, wailing away about work that has to be finished by two o’clock that afternoon or whatever it might be, the gorgon will hurry out to help, and she hasn’t time to lock the door. Enter the Artful Dodger, me. I depart half a minute later. I like substitution better than theft, Lord Powerscourt. I think they shift about, those files, and throw up a lot of dust if they’re all moved three boxes to the left. It wouldn’t look right either. I think three is the most you could carry around Queen’s Inn. You see people walking about with one or two or three under their arm, very seldom any more.’

Powerscourt supposed Edward must have been exposed for some years now to the inner workings of the criminal mind. ‘Do you think Sarah will be able to carry it off, Edward?’

‘I’m sure she will, she’s female,’ said Edward delphically.

‘What’s that got to do with it?’ said Powerscourt.

‘I only meant, my lord, that women can always come over melodramatic when it suits them. Even Sarah,’ he added darkly.

‘When do you think you might be able to effect this piece of criminality, Edward?’

‘I shall have to talk to Sarah. I’m on my way to see her now, in fact. I shall let you know. It may be that the opportunity will simply present itself out of the blue. We shall trust in God and keep our powder dry.’

Powerscourt was escorting Edward towards the front door. At the top of the stairs they heard a firm cough behind them. It was Nurse Mary Muriel.

‘I know this is very unconventional, Lord Powerscourt, but I wondered if you would like to kiss the twins goodnight, you and your young friend.’ She smiled at Edward. ‘It’s not every day you’re here at this time, my lord.’

So Powerscourt and Edward had a double armful each, an armful of perfectly clean, sweet-smelling, sleepy-looking twin.

By half past nine William Burke had still not arrived in Manchester Square. Powerscourt imagined there must have been some frightful financial crisis at his bank in the City. Burke had told him of some of these perils once when they were all on holiday together in Antibes, terrifying stories of books that refused to balance even though the entries had been put in twice, of monies that seemed to be there in the morning, at least on paper, only for them to have disappeared by the evening into some strange hole hidden inside the ledgers. Once, Burke had told him with pride, they seemed to have lost the entire accounts for a whole northern city in the space of one afternoon. They were always found, these missing funds, Burke said, it was always that somebody had made one tiny mistake and never realized it.

Lady Lucy was leafing through the manuscript of Johnny Fitzgerald’s book on The Birds of London. Powerscourt was running through his strange collection of wills one last time.

‘I think this book is going to do jolly well, Francis. There are birds in here that I never knew existed, let alone were flying around London.’

‘I shall order fifty copies of the first edition from Hatchard’s when it comes out, Lucy. We can give them to people as birthday and Christmas presents.’

Just then they heard low conversation on the stairs. Rhys, the Powerscourt butler, was ushering Burke up to the drawing room and promising to return with a large bottle of beer.

‘Good evening, Lucy, good evening, Francis.’ The great financier kissed his sister-in-law on both cheeks. ‘Sorry I’m late. Bloody money wouldn’t add up. I got very thirsty so Rhys is going to bring me a beer. Hope you don’t mind.’

He sat down at the end of the sofa and began to revive after his first long gulp of beer.

‘Francis, Lucy, can’t stay long. Promised to help young Peter with his maths.’ Powerscourt remembered that the one thing that pained William Burke above everything else was that his three children could not cope with mathematics. The first two could scarcely add up, let alone remember their tables.

‘How would you rate this case, Francis? In comparison with some of the others, I mean.’

‘It’s proving rather elusive, William. Every time you think you have put a hand on something definite, it disappears. I’ve got these papers for you, the ones we talked about.’

‘You mean those wills? How many were there in the end?’

‘Just over a hundred. Look, I’ve arranged them all in date order. And I’ve also marked them up in the various categories of expenditure where the dead benchers wanted them to go. And we’re hoping to steal a set of accounts tomorrow or the next day.’

‘Are you indeed? And how are you proposing to do that?’

‘I think you’d be better off not knowing, William. Honestly. We don’t want your directors inquiring how you have been concealing criminal intentions and not reporting them to the proper authorities.’

‘Very well,’ said William Burke. ‘Now then, Francis, I have two pieces of information to report, one of them perfectly legal, the other . . . well, not illegal but the bench of bishops might not approve. The first relates to the relative value of money. You remember we talked the last time we met about whether it is possible to translate the money of, let us say, 1761 when Queen’s Inn was founded into the equivalent value of today. In the vaults of the Bank of England, Francis – well, not quite that far down, certainly a good way down in the basements – there lurks a very tall man, stooped now with knowledge, called Flanagan. This Flanagan is truly a wizard. You tell him that a bequest was made to the Inn in 1785 of three hundred pounds, he will consult some files and tell you, almost immediately, that it is worth twelve thousand pounds in today’s money, or some such figure.’

‘How on earth does he do it?’ asked Lady Lucy.

‘Records, Lucy, he has collected thousands and thousands of records. The man’s a human squirrel on a titanic scale. He looks up government records, records of house sales, wills, household accounts, government contracts, military records. They say the happiest moment in his life was when he discovered that some great house, Chatsworth or Longleat, somewhere like that, had continuous records stretching over a period of a hundred and fifty years during which time they noted in great ledgers the cost of everyday purchases like tea, coffee, wine and so on. And they still had the records of the wages paid to every single workman involved in the making of the artificial lake and the creation of the landscape gardens, including the very considerable sums made over to Capability Brown. Flanagan was, apparently, so excited by this discovery that he had to ask the Governor of the Bank of England for a week off for his brain to calm down. Anyway, Francis, the good Flanagan, Thomas Flanagan I believe he’s called, will be very happy to make those calculations for you tomorrow on receipt of the wills. He would like to make a copy of them for his own records and I said that would be fine.’

‘Does that mean, William, that after this Mr Flanagan has done his sums, as it were, we will have just one figure for the value of all these bequests? One hundred thousand pounds, let us say, in today’s money?’

‘Exactly, Lucy. Only I suspect it may be a lot more than one hundred thousand pounds.’

‘And your other piece of information, William?’

Powerscourt was to tell Johnny Fitzgerald afterwards that William Burke went very conspiratorial at this point. He looked around in a rather shifty fashion. He leant forward in his chair. He lowered his voice till it was almost a whisper.

‘Keep it very quiet,’ he muttered. ‘Bank accounts. Bank statements. I happen to know the fellow who looks after the accounts of Queen’s Inn.’ Burke looked around him again as if spies might be lurking underneath the sofa or behind the curtains. ‘Fact is, the fellow wants to transfer to our bank. Transfer himself, I mean, not some money. I let it be known, in a delicate fashion, that his application might be put to advantage if I could, accidentally as it were, have a look at those statements. That should happen tomorrow morning.’

Burke sat back in his chair and breathed deeply as if he’d run a race or just come out from confession.

‘You old devil, William. I am most grateful.’

‘It’s not as bad as it seems,’ Burke said finally. ‘The chap was going to get the job anyway.’

There was a mild knock on the door and coughing noises on the far side of it. That could only mean one thing. Powerscourt and Lady Lucy looked at each other and smiled. Rhys had come with a message. He had. Rhys always coughed. He did. ‘I’m very sorry to interrupt, my lord, my lady, Mr Burke, there’s a message from one of Chief Inspector Beecham’s young constables.’

The ones Lady Lucy referred to as the creche, Powerscourt recalled.

‘The Chief Inspector thought you would want to know, my lord. He’ll be calling in the morning. It’s Mr Newton, my lord, Mr Porchester Newton. He’s disappeared.’

Edward was relieved to find that his stutter had not returned the following morning. He had an anxious moment about the p of Temple station when he bought his ticket but all seemed to be well. He did, however, feel extremely nervous about the whole operation. What would happen if something went wrong? What if they were caught? Then he remembered something Powerscourt had told him on the way down the stairs the previous evening. ‘The thing to remember about any hazardous operation, Edward,’ he had said, ‘is that everybody feels nervous and a bit wobbly beforehand. No matter how many times a soldier has been in battle, they still feel anxious before it starts.’ Well, this was Edward’s first engagement and he didn’t want to let his general down.

The authorities of Queen’s Inn seemed to have moved Chief Inspector Beecham and his men around the place as if he was a piece of old furniture waiting for the rag and bone men. First they had operated from an office very close to the rooms of the late Alexander Dauntsey. The surrounding barristers had complained about the volume of their conversations and the noise of their boots on the stairs. They were then transferred to some empty offices at the top of one of the buildings in Fountain Court. Again, the people who lived underneath complained about the noise. Now the detectives were occupying a former classroom that had seen better days, but was hidden away behind the room with the boilers for the heating so that the policemen themselves were complaining about the racket and had to shout to each other when standing virtually on top of one another.

‘Good morning, my lord,’ said the Chief Inspector. ‘I’m sorry the news about Newton reached you so late last night but I thought you would like to know.’

‘I am most grateful to you, Chief Inspector. Do you have any more information about his disappearance? Any leads?’

‘We know now that the last time he disappeared he went to stay with a younger sister in Kent. There he went for walks, played with the children, acted out the role of favourite uncle to perfection. But he hasn’t gone there this time, not so far.’

Powerscourt remembered his last interview with Porchester Newton, the point blank refusal to answer questions, the veins throbbing in his forehead, those huge hands moving forward into what might have been an attack and strangle position.

‘Do you suppose that he had come to learn about your inquiries, that one of them might have really alarmed him? Sorry, Chief Inspector, I’m not expressing myself very well.’ Powerscourt found it hard to think and talk in this noisy inferno. ‘Is it possible that you were pursuing a line of inquiry which would have revealed to Newton that you now knew him to be the murderer? And that, therefore, he had to disappear?’

‘Well, we might have been,’ said Beecham morosely, ‘but if we were, it was an accident.’

Edward and Sarah had finalized the details of the theft the night before. Sarah had agreed that the typewriter should be successful in drawing the gorgon from her lair, as Edward put it. As it happened, Sarah had in her attic a number of box files that had come from the gorgon’s cave, and had labels attached to them in the handwriting of the gorgon herself. Sarah was confident that with a bit of practice she could do a passable imitation of the handwriting to be found on the boxes with the account files.

The first stage of Operation Theft, as Edward liked to call it, was due to take place shortly before nine thirty. Maxwell Kirk, head of the chambers where Edward and Sarah worked, had agreed surprisingly easily to ask for a visit from Barton Somerville on being told that the scheme was really Powerscourt’s and might have a minor role to play in the murder investigation. A porter was sent with the request from New Court across to Fountain Court where the Treasurer’s rooms were. Edward watched him go, a middle-aged porter with the steady walk of one who had travelled this route many times before. Sarah’s room mate was away for the morning so Sarah was contemplating the ruin of her typewriter with some satisfaction. The ribbon had got stuck somewhere in the bowels of the machine, bits of it were wrapped firmly round various keys and would, Sarah thought, take some time to sort out.

Nine forty came and the beginning of the exodus of barristers towards their day in court. There were always a few who departed earlier than they needed to, anxious perhaps to arrange their papers properly before judge and jury. The great mass would go about nine forty-five and it was this throng that Edward hoped Somerville would join. As he watched anxiously at his window, Edward saw the clock move on with agonizing slowness. Ten to ten, five to ten. Maybe Somerville wasn’t coming. Maybe he had simply refused as the request threatened his dignity. He was, after all, a man who asked his colleagues to address him as Treasurer. Five past ten. Edward began to feel like a soldier all geared up for battle, bayonet at the ready, who is told by his commanding officer that the battle has been postponed until another day. He wondered if he should go upstairs and tell Sarah. Then he might miss the arrival of Somerville. Sarah, in the attic floor, leaning out of the window, probably had the best view of the lot.

‘It’s always seemed to me to be perfectly possible that Porchester Newton was the murderer,’ said Powerscourt, ‘though I am somewhat confused about the motive. Was it a continuation of the feud that carried on right up to the benchers’ election? Was it fury that he would not now enjoy the fruits of being a bencher? Did he know more than we do about how rewarding those fruits might be?’

‘It’s a great pity we never found out what the row was about,’ said Beecham. ‘Not one of them would speak to us about it and not one of them would speak to you, Lord Powerscourt.’

‘I think I have the better of you there,’ said Powerscourt, suddenly animated, ‘and I apologize most sincerely for not telling you beforehand. It slipped my mind. I got the information by handing over a considerable sum to the Head Porter. It’s amazing how notes can make people talk. Now then, the main bone of contention in the feud was as follows.’

It was ten past ten before the tall, silver-haired figure of Barton Somerville could be seen, marching slowly across his court towards Maxwell Kirk’s chambers. Edward watched him come in, just beneath his window. Half an hour was the figure he had given Kirk for the length of time required for the meeting. Sarah was to wait one minute before setting out for the gorgon’s lair. Even watching from behind, Edward could tell she was upset. She seemed to have wrenched her hair into a condition of confusion rather than the well-planned order it normally displayed. She was running, if not at full speed, then at a steady pace.

‘Miss McKenna,’ Sarah panted, ‘I’m so pleased you’re here. It’s my typewriter, it’s broken, the ribbon, I can’t fix it and I’ve got this work for Mr Kirk that has to be handed in and I don’t know what to do. Will you please come and help me?’

The gorgon inspected Sarah carefully. Her hair was indeed a mousy colour and she was wearing a suit that Sarah did not believe could ever have been fashionable, in a colour once memorably described by Edward as Repugnant Brown.

‘Take it more slowly, Sarah. Your typewriter is not functioning?’

Sarah nodded.

‘The ribbon is malfunctioning?’

‘It’s come off,’ Sarah said, ‘it’s wrapped round some other part and I can’t undo it. I’m sure you could sort it out for me, Miss McKenna, it would only take you a minute or two.’

By now, in the master plan, the gorgon should have been out of her lair and halfway down the stairs. Edward was rooted to his window. Barton Somerville had been in with Kirk for over ten minutes. It was four minutes since Sarah had set off for the gorgon’s cave. The operation was not going according to plan.

‘Did you say you had some work that has to be completed for Mr Kirk?’

Sarah nodded. ‘Why don’t you borrow another machine?’ Miss McKenna suggested brightly. ‘We could get one of the porters to bring it up for you.’

This possibility hadn’t featured in Sarah’s conversations with Edward at all, but she rose to the occasion magnificently.

‘I thought of that but it wouldn’t do, Miss McKenna. Mr Kirk has a special machine which produces slightly bigger type on the page. I think his eyes must be going. It’s the only one of its kind in Queen’s. And,’ here Sarah looked at her watch and groaned, ‘it’s meant to be handed over by lunchtime and I’ve got pages and pages to do. I’ll get sacked if I don’t finish it. It’s for that big fraud trial, you see. Please, Miss McKenna, won’t you come and help me. You’re the only person in the Inn who can save me now! Please! We must be quick!’

‘Well,’ said the gorgon, ‘it’s most unusual for myself and the Treasurer to be out of the office at the same time but it can’t be helped.’

Sarah half dragged her out of the office and down the stairs, the gorgon pausing only to close the door. Nineteen minutes had elapsed since Barton Somerville entered the Kirk chambers. Twenty had passed before Sarah and Miss McKenna were sighted approaching Sarah’s rooms. Twenty-two had elapsed before they had clattered up the stairs and Edward reckoned they were fully engaged with the errant typewriter ribbon. After twenty-three minutes Edward, with three black box files under his arm, set out across the path leading to Fountain Court. He wanted to run but he knew he couldn’t. Walking across the court like this was perfectly normal. Running, unless a man was extremely late for court, was most unusual.

‘I think the reason the barristers refused to speak to us, Chief Inspector,’ said Powerscourt, ‘is that they were ashamed of themselves. Even the Head Porter, not a man famous for criticizing his lords and masters, said that their language was often worse than that of Billingsgate Fish Market and the behaviour bad enough to have some of them up in front of the justices for breaches of the peace.’

‘I suppose,’ said Beecham, ‘that if you make a living by being prepared to insult people in a courtroom occasionally, you won’t find it too hard when it comes to events back in your own chambers.’

‘Exactly so,’ said Powerscourt. ‘The contest appeared to be going along with little advantage to one side or the other until about ten days before polling day. You must remember, Chief Inspector, that the porters were most intimately involved in the event. They were following the gentlemen’s bets on the outcome very closely and they themselves had a variety of wagers at different odds with the unofficial bookmaker, covering bets, bets on the size of the majority, bets on the total number of votes that would be cast, that sort of thing. Anyway, as I say, with ten days to go Newton and his people decide it’s time to take the gloves off. They start putting it about that the barristers should not be electing a bencher who would only be able to serve from Monday to Wednesday. This was a clear reference to Dauntsey’s nervous depressions, his days off, as it were, the inexplicable occasions when his great talent seemed to desert him.’

‘That was a pretty filthy tactic,’ said Chief Inspector Beecham. ‘Did it work? Surely the barristers knew all that already?’

‘It seemed to work for about a week,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Whether it took Dauntsey’s people that long to do their research, or whether they thought Newton’s tactics might backfire, I don’t know. But they certainly fought back in kind. Newton wasn’t a gentleman, they said. His father kept two grocery shops in Wolverhampton. His grandmother had been a junior parlourmaid. They produced a rather vicious but very effective cartoon, apparently. Across the top was the legend “Our New Bencher” with many exclamation marks beside it. Underneath were two drawings, one showing a younger but very recognizable Newton counting out the change in the grocery shop, and the other showing him helping an elderly lady, presumably his grandmother, to fold the ironing in some great airing room. A hundred years ago or less, people fought duels for stuff like this.’

‘Have you thought, Lord Powerscourt, that it may be that the people here still haven’t stopped fighting duels for this kind of smear?’

‘I see what you mean, Sarah,’ said the gorgon, inspecting the loops of typewriter ribbon festooned across the top of the machine. She tugged, lightly at first, then harder and harder until the veins on her neck began to stand out. ‘Do you have any scissors? And a spare ribbon, I’m sure you must have one or two of those.’

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.’