Death Called to the Bar

6

Edward set off at great speed across the grass. He sprinted up the stairs and burst into Sarah Henderson’s room without even bothering to knock. She held up a hand motioning him to silence. She was working at top speed, her fingers racing over the keys of her typewriter, the left hand slamming the carriage across when she came to the end of a line. Her eyes were darting down to a shorthand notebook by her left side. Edward admired the straightness of her back on her chair, the red sheen on her hair, the white hands with their long fingers he longed to hold in his own. From the small window he could see more policemen marching in and out of the staircases, Chief Inspector Beecham and the Head Porter conferring over a large sheet of paper that might have been a map of the Inn with all the staircases marked. At last she was finished.

‘Sarah,’ said Edward, ‘are you all right?’

She smiled at him. ‘Of course I’m all right, Edward, why should I not be all right? And, yes, I have heard about Mr Stewart going missing. Have they found him yet? There seem to be more policemen every time I look. Perhaps they’re breeding in the library.’

‘They haven’t found him,’ said Edward. ‘It’s my belief that he’s not in Queen’s Inn at all.’ Since their trip to the Wallace Collection Edward seemed able to converse with Sarah in perfectly normal sentences.

‘Do they think he’s dead?’ Sarah asked the question in the same tone she might have asked a guest if he took sugar in his tea.

‘Some people do. There’s a whole lot of rumours about him already. Did you know him, Sarah?’

‘I took a very short piece of dictation for him once when his own girls were away,’ said Sarah, ‘so I couldn’t really say I knew him at all. That’s why I can’t get very excited about it. I was so upset about Mr Dauntsey. I thought I would never get over it. He had such a lovely voice, you see.’

Edward peered out of the little window on the top floor. ‘There’s even more of them now, Sarah – police, I mean. They must be very worried.’

‘They always come too late,’ said Sarah, as if she had been covering crime cases for years, ‘so they make up for it with the numbers.’

‘Are you finished now, Sarah? Finished for the day, I mean?’

‘Yes, I am. Why do you ask?’

Edward looked shy for a moment. Sarah wondered for a second if his new confidence was going to desert him. ‘I would like to escort you to the underground, Sarah. I don’t like to think of you going there alone with a murderer on the loose somewhere.’

Sarah quite liked the thought of being escorted by Edward though she would have preferred a more romantic destination than the Tube. A masked ball at some elegant house in the country? A tea dance at one of London’s great hotels? She consoled herself with the thought that the Temple at least was one of the finer names on the underground system. You wouldn’t want to be escorted to Colliers Wood or Shadwell, she thought.

‘It’s hardly any distance from here to the Tube, Edward,’ she said kindly, ‘and there seem to be enough policemen to look after the Crown Jewels. But if you would like to, I should be happy to be escorted.’

Fifteen minutes later Edward was back in Queen’s Inn. Sarah had refused all offers of his accompanying her back home to Acton. She sat down next to a barrister she knew from the Inner Temple and Edward felt fairly sure that she would not be violated before she found her way home. The police were still crawling all over the Inn. Barton Somerville himself was glowering down at them from the steps into the library as if they were particularly repulsive aliens, recently landed from a distant and disagreeable planet beyond the Milky Way. Powerscourt he could not find anywhere. None of the policemen, not even Chief Inspector Beecham, knew where he was. Edward found him at last, sitting at the desk that had been Dauntsey’s, rummaging through the papers in the drawers.

‘Edward,’ said Powerscourt, smiling at the young man, ‘have you been seeing Sarah to the Tube?’

‘I have,’ Edward replied, wondering how the devil Powerscourt had worked that out, ‘but I have something to tell you which may be important, I’m just not sure.’

‘Fire ahead, Edward,’ said Powerscourt, ‘take your time.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Edward, looking closely at a print behind Powerscourt’s head of an eighteenth-century cricket match taking place at Calne. One of the batsmen looked remarkably like the oil painting he and Powerscourt had seen only that afternoon.

‘It’s to do with the link between Mr Stewart and Mr Dauntsey, sir,’ he began. ‘They’ve always been close and in the past they’ve always conducted a lot of cases together.’

Edward paused. There, just behind the distant outfielder in the print, a couple of deer were standing to attention, watching the action carefully. ‘There’s another case they were going to do, Lord Powerscourt, sir. It was huge. A fraud case, involving the man Jeremiah Puncknowle.’

‘Were they prosecuting or defending?’

‘They were for the prosecution, sir, with splendid fees and very lavish refreshers indeed, some of the biggest I have seen. I was going to devil for them, sir, I have done a load of work already and was going to make it full time tomorrow.’

‘Forgive me, Edward, are you suggesting that the defendant Puncknowle may have had something to do with these deaths?’

‘I don’t know what I am suggesting, sir. I only know that this case is now scheduled for the end of next week. There’s been a delay. Before that it was to have started in two days’ time.’

‘And if both the prosecuting lawyers were removed from the scene, Edward, would the Crown apply for an adjournment while they briefed some more?’

‘They would, sir, but it would be up to the judge to decide.’

‘Have you formed any opinion about the character of this Jeremiah person? Would he have ordered up a couple of murders?’

‘I couldn’t say, sir. I could tell you a great deal about his companies but not very much about his character. You don’t get a lot of that looking at balance sheets.’

‘Edward,’ said Powerscourt, rising to his feet and looking at his watch, ‘I hope to be able to give you some sort of answer tomorrow. I am going to call on my brother-in-law.’

‘Is he an expert in character, Lord Powerscourt, sir? Is he that sort of man?’

‘He may be, Edward, come to think of it he probably is. But he is a great financier, now one of the greatest in the City of London. He will be able to tell me all the stuff about our Mr Puncknowle that never appeared in the papers.’

Powerscourt departed towards his sister’s latest house. They moved their London house so often now that he and Lucy had once actually turned up for dinner at a fashionable address that the Burkes had vacated a month before. Edward had brief conversations with the policemen before they left. There was still no sign of Mr Woodford Stewart, and his wife reported that he had not turned up at home. Tomorrow they would broaden the search into the Inner and Middle Temples. Maybe, the Chief Inspector confided to his sergeant, they would have to send divers in to search the bloody river.

‘You’re not here on a social call, Francis, I can tell.’ Powerscourt’s middle sister Mary Burke kissed him warmly on both cheeks. ‘Before I pack you off to William, how is Lucy? How are the children? And those gorgeous twins?’

‘All very well indeed,’ said Powerscourt, smiling at his sister. ‘All well here?’

‘We’re fine,’ said Mary. ‘William’s in his study, one floor up. I forget you haven’t been in this house before.’

‘I’m sure I can find the way.’ Powerscourt departed, taking the stairs two at a time. He found his brother-in-law shrouded in cigar smoke and surrounded by figures. On the desk in front of him was an enormous ledger with numbers chasing each other up and down various columns. Surrounding the mighty tome were a series of smaller volumes in a variety of colours, muted colours it would have to be said, garish colours not being available in the kind of stationer’s shop in the City patronized by the likes of William Burke.

‘Delighted to see you, Francis, delighted.’ Burke had risen from his chair and was shaking Powerscourt vigorously by the hand. He had assisted Powerscourt in a number of his inquiries and had proved a most valuable companion in arms. Powerscourt always said you could pick his brother-in-law out in a crowd of five hundred by the cut of his suit. There were many in the City who prided themselves on wearing the latest fashions. William Burke went in the opposite direction. Johnny Fitzgerald maintained that he bought two or three suits every autumn and then left them in the shop for twenty years. Powerscourt objected to this theory on the grounds that a man could not be sure he would keep exactly the same shape over a period as long as twenty years. His theory was that William Burke had a very old tailor indeed, a man who kept detailed records of all the fashions going back to Disraeli’s time or even earlier. Powerscourt imagined that Burke would be measured in the normal way. On his way out, this Nestor of the tailoring world would ask, ‘Which year, sir?’ and Burke would reply, ‘1882, please.’ In appearance, apart from his suits, Burke was perfectly normal, normal height, not fat and not slim, an ordinary sort of face with an ordinary sort of nose and rather sharp grey eyes. You could see thousands and thousands of people looking exactly like him climbing on and off the buses or the trains for the City every working day. Looking at the face, Johnny Fitzgerald once memorably remarked, you would not imagine its owner’s facility for mental arithmetic would be so great that he could multiply one hundred and forty-eight by seventeen in his head while walking down the street without having to pause and without contracting a headache. Burke had taken ten pounds off Johnny in a wager many years ago by performing this feat while walking down Threadneedle Street in the rain.

Certainly this evening’s suit, though of excellent cloth, was not one likely to be worn by the Beau Brummells of the capital’s dress elite like Charles Augustus Pugh.

Powerscourt waved a hand at the multicoloured concentration of ledgers and financial fire power in front of his brother-in-law.

‘Selling up, William?’ he asked cheerfully. ‘Preparing to flee before the bailiffs come round?’

William Burke laughed. ‘Annual audit, Francis. Once a year I make myself go through all the family accounts, see how we’re doing. Are we better off than last year, that sort of thing. Can Mary buy a new pair of shoes, you know? We make all our big companies do it, don’t see why we shouldn’t do it at home.’

‘And are all the coloured books for different kinds of investment? And the huge tome the master document, the Book of Numbers as it were, for the whole lot?’

‘They said you’d been consorting with lawyers, Francis. They seem to have sharpened your wits. Red for property – I’ve got a couple of other houses in London as well as the place in the country.’ Powerscourt recalled that the place in the country stood on the banks of the Thames not far from Goring and had twenty-seven bedrooms and fourteen bathrooms. Not to mention the huge palace on the sea front at Antibes. ‘Blue for stocks, green for bonds, maroon for savings accounts, it’s all fairly simple. But you haven’t come here to talk about annual balance sheets, Francis, you’ve come to talk about something else.’

Powerscourt smiled. ‘I want to know about a man called Jeremiah Puncknowle,’ he said.

William Burke moved to the sofa in front of his fireplace. He looked closely at his brother-in-law. ‘Could you be a bit more specific, Francis?’ he said. ‘Puncknowle as businessman, Puncknowle as family man, Puncknowle as friend of the deserving poor? It’s pronounced Punnel by the way, like punnet only with an l at the end.’

Powerscourt had always put his cards on the table with William Burke. ‘Right, William. This is how it goes, or might go. Friend Puncknowle is about to go on trial, sometime in the next ten days at the latest. The two main prosecuting counsel both come from Queen’s Inn. One of them, man by the name of Dauntsey, was murdered almost two weeks ago. He was poisoned and fell face forwards into a bowl of soup at a feast. The benchers, governing body of the Inn, have asked me to investigate his death. Now the other lawyer, fellow by the name of Woodford Stewart, has disappeared. The Crown will either have to proceed with the case and give new counsel virtually no time to prepare what is a very complicated case, or they will have to ask for an adjournment which they may or may not get, depending on the judge. So, you might think, what a coincidence. Just as this massive fraudster is about to go on trial, the lawyers going to attack him are dead or disappear. And, if you were of a suspicious mind, William, you would want to warn the new lawyers to mind their step as they cross Chancery Lane or set out for the Old Bailey. I want to know if this Puncknowle is capable of ordering up a murderer or two. But before that I want to know what sort of fraudster he was. And before that, though why you should have this information I do not know, I want to know if he is in jail or out on bail.’

William Burke closed his eyes briefly. He put the fingers of his two hands together and opened them out into a kind of fan or steeple. ‘He’s not in jail,’ he began, ‘though there are many in the City who were astounded when he was given bail. The policeman in charge of the investigation insisted on the Bank of England itself confirming for him that the relevant sum had been posted. And it was an enormous figure, some men claimed to know it was half a million pounds.’

‘How did this crook persuade a judge to give him bail in the first place? Surely they would have wanted him kept under lock and key until he appeared in court?’

William Burke laughed. ‘It was a fearsome combination, Francis. Clever lawyers and clever doctors. God knows how much they were paid. They told the judge that Puncknowle was perfectly willing to appear in court, but that he had a heart condition. This condition made it highly likely that he would not survive a period as a guest of His Majesty. Many of the other inmates after all would have been defrauded by our friend Jeremiah and might not take too kindly to finding him in their midst. They might wish to take physical revenge for their financial suffering.’

‘Why couldn’t they put him in solitary? Leave him alone for the duration?’

‘Simple minds, Francis, simple minds might think along those lines. There was a further ramification to the heart condition, you see. Claustrophobia, from which our Jeremiah suffered acutely, would be brought on by solitary confinement. There could well be a fatal attack in a couple of days at most. And then what would the great British public and the great British newspapers say of the authorities who had, in their intransigence, kept Puncknowle out of the dock and denied the British investor the chance to see some reparations made for his suffering and his losses?’

‘Surely to God there must have been some place the prison authorities could have put him?’

‘I’m sure there was,’ said Burke cheerfully. His fingers were still arching up towards his fireplace. ‘But they had hit on a masterstroke, Puncknowle’s people. They had discovered, or one of the doctors giving evidence on his behalf had discovered – large sums changing hands, no doubt – that the judge suffered from precisely the same heart condition that Puncknowle was supposed to have. So the judge could imagine only too well what his reaction would have been to a bout of solitary. It would have killed him for sure. So he gave the fellow bail.’

Powerscourt laughed. William Burke looked quite pleased with himself. He sent an enormous puff from his cigar directly into his chimney.

‘And the frauds, William? How did they work?’

Once again Burke paused. This time he looked carefully at his ledgers as if checking they had not been infected by the Puncknowle virus of financial irregularity. He knew his brother-in-law was perfectly capable of grasping financial facts, unlike, to his enormous and eternal regret, his wife and his three sons.

‘Very simple really, to begin with, I suppose. Most fraudsters should stick to their original trick. It’s when they become too elaborate that the house falls down.’

‘So where,’ asked Powerscourt, ‘did he start, this Jeremiah Puncknowle?’

‘He started in the West Country, Francis. I don’t know if you were aware of it but there’s a whole host of tiny dissenting religious communities down there, Muggletonians, Shelmerstonians, Babbacombians, Yalbertonians, hundreds and hundreds of them, all only too happy to knock you down if you disagree with their version of the Book of Revelations or the precise order of the reawakening of the saints on Judgement Day.’

‘Did they think that God had some sort of enormous batting order for Peter and Paul and Sebastian and all the rest of the saints when they’d be called to the wicket for the first innings of the new world?’ As a small boy Powerscourt had always been worried about how Sebastian would be able to rise from the dead when his turn came with all those arrows in him. Surely, he had thought, Sebastian might get up, but he would just as surely fall down again.

‘I’m not acquainted with the finer points of Muggletonian theology, Francis, but the point, for our purposes, was this. The man Puncknowle set up a building society aimed at these religious brethren. It was very successful. The idea of helping their fellow men even if you disagreed violently with their religion appealed to these West Country characters. The society was a success. It was straight. It is still going to this day, the only honest business ever founded by Jeremiah Puncknowle. It did give him one important idea. Some of the pastors helped set up the building society, they sat on its board, they advertised its products.’

‘So did he move in for wholesale corruption of the clergy?’ Powerscourt asked with a grin.

‘Not quite,’ said William Burke, ‘but they say that he was surprised by two things in his West Country venture. One was how useful the clergy could be if they were on your side. And the other is as old as the hills in terms of money but people are always forgetting it. If you’re floating public companies you can aim for a lot of money from fairly few people or institutions or a small amount of money from a great many people. Puncknowle chose the latter. He toured the country promoting his schemes. They say he followed the routes of Wesley himself, the founder of Methodism. He employed dissenting ministers as a clerical collar sales force and paid them generous commissions. And he raised money in millions for his building societies. Their prospectuses were a wonderful combination of piety and greed. There was the noble purpose of helping those of lowly means to save safely, so that eventually they could purchase their own dwellings, humble maybe, but no less glorious in the sight of the Lord. There were the donations to charity and good works – precise figures never specified – but that section was usually penned by some leading dissenter. Once they even got an evangelical Church of England dean to write it but they say he got into trouble with his bishop. And then there were the earthly rewards, never oversold, normally placed quite discreetly in the prospectuses, but eight per cent is eight per cent if you’re a railwayman or a Rothschild. I don’t think you or I would have wanted to invest, Francis. My own broker swore he’d have been able to sell a bucketload of the shares to the late Queen, Victoria well amused by the piety and the good works and the eight per cent to pay for her grandchildren’s extravagance.’

‘So what went wrong, Edward? Our Jeremiah must have had millions rolling in.’

‘It’s the normal story,’ said William Burke. ‘Caveat emptor, as the poet said. Let the buyer beware. Only trouble was most of these investors didn’t know much about caveating and even less about the traps awaiting the emptors. If you can get two and a half per cent interest on government stock anybody who comes along offering you eight per cent is virtually certain to be a crook. But these poor little dissenters didn’t know anything about that. Their pastors could go on about the difference between the gospels of Matthew and Luke for hours at a time but they had no knowledge at all of interest rate differentials. And while the Bible is full of crooks and shysters all over the shop, the pastors wouldn’t recognize one if he walked up to them and shook them by the hand. Which, of course, is precisely what Jeremiah Puncknowle did. One of his critics in later years claimed that Puncknowle had shaken hands with over three thousand men of the cloth. The building societies did their stuff, houses got built, all that sort of thing, but they were never going to produce eight per cent return. So there was another company floated, the subscribers to the second unwittingly paying out the dividends of the first. And a third, whose investors paid out the dividends of the second. It became like one of those card tricks where the conman has the cards spinning faster and faster. Soon there was nearly a football team of these companies. Then they moved into banking and property and building, the whole golden wheel spinning faster and faster. Then the people at the top got too greedy. They began selling properties between one company and another and then selling them on to a third so they could make off with the notional profits that appeared in the accounts. That’s what brought them down – property companies with too many debts and virtually no assets. Whole house of cards had taken about twelve years to set up. It fell down in three days flat.’

Powerscourt had often urged his brother-in-law to take up his pen and write short and amusing sketches of financial behaviour for the magazines. He was sure they would be very successful and make his brother-in-law even richer than he already was. But William Burke always declined.

‘Tell me, William, was there ever any hint of violence about our friend Puncknowle? Any whispers about people being beaten up or disappearing?’

‘You’re wondering about those two lawyers, of course. I don’t think there was. I’ve never heard of any such thing but I can’t be sure. Tell you what, I’ll speak to a couple of fellows tomorrow and let you know. On the face of it, it’s highly improbable, nothing more likely to put those kind of investors off than the chairman’s thugs beating people up. It would be very different if we were talking about South African diamond shares ten or fifteen years ago, but we’re not.’

‘I’m much obliged to you for the information,’ said Powerscourt as he prepared to take his leave.

‘I’ve only one other titbit for you about that trial, Francis,’ said William Burke, inspecting the last few inches of his cigar rather sadly. ‘ I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but the people in the City don’t have a very high opinion of the people from the Temples and the Inns when it comes to big fraud cases. The money men think the lawyers can’t read balance sheets, finance may be something other people may want to dirty their hands with but it’s way beneath counsel with their wigs and their gowns and their seventeenth-century libraries. But that chap Dauntsey rated very highly with the men of Mammon. The odds against a conviction went up dramatically when he toppled forward into his borscht. I don’t know how this other fellow is rated but I suspect the odds will get longer still. Would you like me to take a flutter on your behalf, Francis? Just a little flutter, five or ten pounds?’

Powerscourt laughed. ‘I don’t think I could do that, William. I don’t think it would be ethical to bet against my current employers, however unpleasant they may be.’

Try as she might, Sarah Henderson could not see how she could disguise from her mother her unease at what was happening in Queen’s Inn. For she was more concerned, much more concerned than she had told Edward, about the events of the afternoon. She felt sure Mr Stewart was dead. You just had to look at the policemen, or at Lord Powerscourt, to realize that. And now, here she was, clearing away the tea things, her mother about to start the evening interrogation across the fire. Sarah wondered about a headache and going to bed early, but that would only postpone matters. She wished she could have stayed with Edward all evening and not had to come home to her sick mother.

‘I think I’d like a cup of hot chocolate, Sarah dear, when you’re through in there.’

‘Any cake, mama?’ said Sarah, playing for time. There were still a couple of slices left of the Victoria sponge baked in honour of Mr Dauntsey’s funeral.

‘No thank you, dear, the chocolate will do me fine. I only bought it today in the grocer’s. Mrs Wiggins was in there, telling me for the third time how well that son of hers was doing in the Metropolitan Railway. I was able to tell her you’d been to Mr Dauntsey’s funeral in a first class carriage and had conversed on the way with the Head of Chambers. She left quite soon after that, Mrs Wiggins.’

Even in the confined quarters of the little kitchen Sarah could appreciate the glory in her mother’s victory, the forces of darkness or the Metropolitan Railway in the person of Mrs Wiggins routed and forced to flee from the field.

Sarah knew she was looking anxious as she went to sit on the opposite side of the fire. She wondered if she could tell her mother about Edward as a means of avoiding telling her about Mr Stewart, though quite what she would actually say about Edward she had no idea. Her mother had, she felt, been fairly unmoved about the death of Alexander Dauntsey, even though she, Sarah, had been so very upset.

‘Something went wrong at chambers today, dear, didn’t it?’ Mrs Henderson took a preliminary sip of her chocolate. ‘I can tell.’ Privately Mrs Henderson suspected that Sarah was not very accomplished as a shorthand typist. As a child she had been clumsy, awkward with her hands, often dropping things. Her mother could not imagine how she would be able to keep up to the exacting standards of an Inn of Court. In fact, she could not have been more wrong: the twenty-year-old Sarah was a very different character from the child Sarah and knew very well how highly her work was valued.

‘It’s Mr Stewart, Mr Woodford Stewart, mama. He’s disappeared.’

In spite of all the months of conversations about the Inn the name of Stewart had not yet been entered into Mrs Henderson’s filing system.

‘Mr Stewart? Is he one of the porters?’

‘No, mama, he’s a KC in a different chambers from mine. He is or was a great friend of Mr Dauntsey. They were going to work together on that big fraud case I’ve been telling you about.’

‘Mr Bunkerpole? I read about him today in the paper.’

‘Puncknowle, mama, pronounced Punnel, like funnel on a ship.’

‘I don’t need lessons in pronunciation from my own daughter, thank you very much, Sarah.’ Mrs Henderson paused to take a large mouthful of her chocolate. ‘So what do they think has happened to this Mr Stewart? Has he run off with somebody?’ Mrs Henderson’s paper and her magazines contained regular features about wicked men running off with people who were not their wives and causing great unhappiness. Less than a year ago she had given Sarah a long lecture on the Dangers of Being Run Away With by Wicked Men which Sarah had completely ignored.

‘There’s no sign of any running away, mother. That’s all nonsense. People think he may have been murdered, like Mr Dauntsey.’

The minute she said it, Sarah regretted it. She was only trying to take out a pathetic revenge for the pronunciation remark, this over her mother who was ill and in pain all the time and might not be around much longer. Surely now her mother would be worried.

‘He might well have run away with somebody, Sarah. People like that always take very good care to keep it secret. That’s probably why nobody knows where he is. He’ll turn up sooner or later, maybe travelling in the South of France under a false name, mark my words.’

For some reason that Sarah had never understood, the wicked runners away always seemed to end up in her mother’s version in the South of France. The place seemed to carry spectacular undertones of villainy, a Mediterranean equivalent of Sodom and Gomorrah, in her mind. But she doubted it would have much appeal for Mr Woodford Stewart, whose holidays, she had overheard somebody telling one of the policemen that very afternoon, were usually spent in the Highlands where he could pursue his twin delights of walking the hills and playing golf. But she knew how difficult it would be to shake her mother’s belief in the running away theory. She tried.

‘I don’t think any of the policemen or Lord Powerscourt think he’s run away, mother. They think he’s disappeared or he’s dead.’

‘This Lord Burrscourt, Sarah. Is he a friend of the Punchbowl man?’

Sarah was gripped by a moment of panic and a moment of total recall. She was back in the doctor’s surgery with Dr Carr, old and white-haired now, the man who had looked after her father so well in his last, fatal illness. Dr Carr was talking to Sarah and her mother, his voice weary now after forty years of dealing with the sickness of London’s poor, a dead look in his eyes. He had almost finished describing the likely course of her mother’s illness, when he told them that in a few cases, not many at all in his experience, the mind began to deteriorate, not into senile decay as the doctors called it, but the memory began to fail, particularly about what had happened very recently. Sarah looked closely at her mother before she spoke. The last drop of chocolate was being drained with great enjoyment. She prayed that her mother was tired today, maybe the pain had dulled her wits.

‘Lord Powerscourt, mama, is the man the benchers brought in to investigate Mr Dauntsey’s death. I shouldn’t think he knows Mr Puncknowle at all. Edward says that Lord Powerscourt once solved a murder mystery for the Royal Family.’

‘What sort of age is this Lord Powerscourt?’

Sarah smiled at the transparency of her mother’s behaviour. ‘He’s in his early forties, I think. His wife’s just had twins. Edward and I saw them last Saturday. They’re very sweet – the twins, I mean.’

‘Your father’s sister had twins long ago. Bad lot, both of them. Your father used to say how unfair it was. One bad one might just be bad luck, but two bad, it was terrible. Nearly killed the parents.’

Sarah wanted to ask what form this wickedness had taken. Had they, perhaps, ended up in the been-run-away with category? But there was a tightened look about her mother’s lips which hinted that the topic was now closed. Suddenly Sarah decided to float her idea of a treat to her mother. She felt so sorry for her, so frail, growing less and less able to cope all the time.

‘I’ve been thinking, mama, about a treat for you when the weather gets better.’

‘A treat, my dear? I don’t think people get treats at my time of life and in my condition.’

‘Listen carefully, mama. It would involve putting you in a wheelchair some of the time, but we could say you’d twisted your ankle. People wouldn’t have to think you weren’t very mobile. Anyway we’d get you down to Queen’s Inn and we could wheel you round the courts and you could meet lots of these barristers we’ve talked about so often. With any luck we could get you invited to lunch in the Hall, as a guest of one of the barristers. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?’

Mrs Henderson looked rather frightened all of a sudden. Sarah suddenly remembered that they had hardly had time to talk about the disappearance of Mr Stewart so at least her mother wouldn’t worry about that.

‘I’ll have to think about that, Sarah. It’s very kind of you to suggest it, very kind indeed. I’m not sure I feel strong enough for it now, let alone in a couple of months’ time. And I’ve got nothing to wear.’

‘Just think about it, mama, you don’t have to decide now.’

Later that night, after Sarah had helped her mother up the stairs and into bed, she decided that she needed some assistance in the planning of this escapade. Tomorrow, she decided, she would talk to Edward.

Lord Francis Powerscourt had evolved a new routine all of his own in his new house in Manchester Square. After breakfast he would go and see the twins, sometimes talking to them or reciting poetry if they seemed to be awake, and then he would cross to the Wallace Collection for a ten-minute visit. Usually he would go and look at some of the paintings in the Great Gallery on the first floor where the Gainsboroughs and the Van Dycks held sway, but today he was looking at the hardware of death on the ground floor. Just round the corner, on this very floor, he thought, there were some exquisite pieces of craftsmanship, a French musical clock that could play thirteen different tunes including a Gallic equivalent of ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’, an astronomical clock, again from France, where you could find the time in hours, minutes and seconds, solar time as on a sundial in hours and minutes, the sign of the zodiac, the day, the date of the week, the time at any place in the northern hemisphere, the age of the moon and its current phase, and the position of the sun in the sky or the moon if it was night. But here, right in front of Powerscourt, resting innocently inside their glass cases, lay a couple of daggers from India and a tulwar, previously owned by the Tipu Sultan, which could have ripped a man’s innards out or cut his throat so that he would die inside a minute, pausing only to reflect, as the light faded fast from his eyes, on the exquisite carvings on the sword blade and the diamonds and gold inset into the pommel. Upstairs Watteau’s musicians danced out their private version of a pastoral heaven. Downstairs lurked long swords from Germany with very sharp edges, thin rapiers from Italy intended to cut and thrust their way into their victims, a curved Sikh sword that could cut a person in two, an Arabian shamshir with a walrus ivory grip which would leave terrible wounds. Above, Gainsborough’s Perdita, one-time mistress of the Prince Regent, gazed enigmatically down the Long Gallery. Down below stood suits of armour, rich men’s attempts to counter the stabs and the slashes and the thrusts, armour for men, armour even for horses, armour that grew so heavy that most warriors discarded it, armour designed to replicate the fashions of the day so that the Elizabethan Lord Buckhurst, in his armour with its peascod doublet with a point at the waist and an extravagantly puffed trunk hose reaching from waist to middle thigh, could probably have clanked into court at Greenwich or Westminster without anybody paying much attention. Upstairs gods danced across the sky and various versions of heaven, mythical and Christian and metaphorical, were on display. Down here – Powerscourt looked suspiciously at a deadly Italian falchion, a broad sword tapered to a vicious point at the end – was a stockpile of weapons that could send a man to heaven or hell in less than ten seconds.

He wondered, as he made his way out towards Bedford Square and Queen’s Inn, what had happened to Woodford Stewart. Had he too been poisoned? Or had the murderer turned to an easier and older means of death, a mighty blow from a steel sword, a thrust through the throat with a scimitar, a fatal stab with a dagger or kris?

The reception area for Plunkett Marlowe and Plunkett was pretty standard stuff, Powerscourt thought, as he surveyed the comfortable but fading chairs, the anonymous carpet, the prints of hunting and other rural pursuits on the walls. It was as though heaven for the solicitor breed was to be found somewhere in the hunting territory of Hampshire or Gloucestershire. The barristers, he thought, would prefer something more confrontational, perhaps some secret county with cock fighting and bear baiting. But Mr Plunkett, the younger Mr Plunkett as he had been referred to by the receptionist, was certainly a surprise. He was young for a start, very young. Powerscourt thought he could not have been out of university very long. He wondered, indeed, if the young man had started shaving yet as his cheeks were as smooth as silk. He positively bounded across the room to greet Powerscourt warmly.

‘Lord Powerscourt, welcome. Matthew Plunkett. What an honour to meet you in person! Come with me!’

With that the young man led his visitor at breakneck speed up two flights of stairs, along a corridor, past a small library and into Mr Plunkett the younger’s spacious office, decorated with prints of London. At least this one wants to stay where he is, Powerscourt said to himself, rather than escape to the Elysian Fields of horn and fox.

‘Now then, please take a seat across my desk, Lord Powerscourt, and we can get down to business.’

Powerscourt thought this was the youngest solicitor he had ever seen . Normally they were middle-aged or elderly citizens. Perhaps the younger ones were sent away to practise elsewhere until they came of age, hidden away in the attics until sometime beyond their fortieth birthdays.

‘Mrs Dauntsey has given me full discretion in what I tell you about the will,’ he said cheerfully, smiling at Powerscourt. ‘In some ways it’s a simple document, but it does have one fascinating oddity.’ He collected a group of papers together on his desk but Powerscourt noticed that he did not refer to them once as he gave his description of Dauntsey’s last will and testament.

‘The estate itself, the house, the land, the paintings and so on are all covered by the family trust. I believe that this document was started at about the same time Moses was found among the bulrushes in Egypt. It covers every possible eventuality and it stipulates, quite simply, that in this case of an owner dying with no children, the estate should pass to the eldest brother, if there is one, in this case Nicholas Dauntsey, currently thought to be resident in Manitoba and expected back to claim his little kingdom in the next month or so.’

Matthew Plunkett paused to inspect a tattered seagull that had taken up temporary residence on his window sill.

‘Mrs Dauntsey, of course, is well provided for, with accommodation inside the house if that should suit, or in one of the decent houses on the fringes of the estate. There is ample financial provision, as we lawyers like to say. There are a number of small bequests to staff or local institutions like the cricket club. And then we come to the mystery bequest.’

Matthew Plunkett was enjoying this. He leaned forward and addressed Powerscourt directly.

‘After the ten pounds here, and the five pounds there, Lord Powerscourt, we have the spectacular sum of twenty thousand pounds left to one F.L. Maxfield. Maxfield the mystery man we call him here now, my lord.’

‘You can’t find him?’ said Powerscourt.

‘Correct. Now you know as well as I do that solicitors have to spend a lot of time tracing people in cases like this. Plunkett Marlowe and Plunkett is also a founder member of a specialist firm devoted to finding persons like this Maxfield. We can’t find him. They can’t find him. We’ve tried Mr Dauntsey’s old school, his Cambridge college, his regiment in the Army, every single chambers he’s ever served in. We can’t find a birth certificate but they do get mislaid sometimes, or he might have been born abroad. We can’t, you won’t be surprised to hear, find any evidence of marriage or even death which would make our lives easier.’

‘Are you sure it’s a man? Might this be a Miss Maxfield or a Mrs Maxfield, an old flame from days gone by?’

‘We’ve talked about that a lot, Lord Powerscourt. My view is this. Mr Dauntsey was a lawyer, trained to be precise in his use of language. If the Maxfield was a woman, he would have put Miss or Mrs in the document, I’m sure of it.’

Busloads of Maxfields, Maxfields old, Maxfields young, Maxfields rich, Maxfields poor, floated past Powerscourt’s brain and disappeared.

‘When did he make this will, Mr Plunkett? Was it the first one or an updated version of a will that had existed before? And did he make it here, with one of you gentlemen present?’

‘My goodness me, Lord Powerscourt, you do ask a lot of questions. To take them in order, he made the will three years ago and we think he wrote it in his chambers. It was the latest in a series of wills the trustees encouraged him to make ever since his twenty-first birthday. That, I fear, is rather the kind of thing the trustees go in for.’

Powerscourt smiled. The young man was not completely indoctrinated with the solicitor’s mindset, or not yet at any rate.

‘He’d been in to talk to my uncle, the one they call Killer Plunkett, the day before he wrote this will. This latest one, dated 1899, was the first appearance of the wretched Maxfield.’

Powerscourt wondered what this perfectly law-abiding Plunkett had done to earn the nickname Killer. ‘So whoever Maxfield is or was,’ he said, ‘his association with Dauntsey must have been complete, so to speak, three years ago. I mean, whatever the reason for giving him the money, it was all there then. Do you know, Mr Plunkett, if Dauntsey told his beneficiary about his plans? Did Maxfield, not to put too fine a point on it, know that he would get twenty thousand pounds if Dauntsey fell into his borscht?’

‘I’m afraid he did,’ Matthew Plunkett grimaced slightly, ‘or rather he said he was going to. He told Killer he was going to write to Maxfield and give him the good news.’

‘Did he indeed?’ said Powerscourt, realizing that another name had to be added to his list of suspects. ‘But, of course, he didn’t leave a copy of the letter which would have had an address on it, did he?’

‘No, he didn’t,’ Matthew Plunkett replied. ‘That would have made life far too easy for everybody. Mind you, to be fair to Mr Dauntsey, I don’t think he was the kind of man who would have wanted to cause trouble after he had gone. Not like some I could mention.’

Matthew Plunkett sounded as if he had many lifetimes’ experience of obstreperous corpses and troublemaking cadavers.

‘Never mind,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I think I can be of some assistance in your quest, Mr Plunkett. Dauntsey’s death is the subject of a police investigation. This Maxfield person is obviously suspect. Therefore, we can ask the police to look for him too. They have enormous resources at their disposal. If anybody in Britain can find him, they can.’

Matthew Plunkett smiled. ‘I cannot tell you, Lord Powerscourt, how pleased I am to hear that. Will you please come and report any progress to us here? And I’m so glad we are no longer alone in our search. Surely we should know who and where he is within a week or two.’

Making his way down the stairs, past a couple of stags that looked as though they might be enjoying their last day on earth, Powerscourt wasn’t so sure.