Death Called to the Bar

9

Twenty minutes later Edward and Sarah had escaped from the buildings of Oxford altogether. They had passed Magdalen with its tower and its deer park, the punt still flying along at a rapid pace as Edward made sure that the Oxford-enders weren’t following them. Now a kind of open country with rather damp-looking fields and suspicious cows was around them. Edward steered the punt carefully into the shade of a weeping willow on the bank and clambered forward to sit opposite Sarah in the main section of the boat.

‘Are you hungry, Edward?’ asked Sarah, checking that her picnic basket was still there, feeling quite important as the person in charge of the catering.

‘Starving,’ said Edward happily and he proceeded to devour seven sandwiches in rapid succession, favouring the ham and the tomato over the egg. Sarah, not used to living with young males, was astonished at the amount he put away. When the demolition of the sandwiches had slowed down, she decided to ask her questions. It was so peaceful out here, nobody could mind being asked a few questions about themselves.

‘Edward,’ she began hesitantly.

‘Sarah,’ said Edward, polishing an apple on the sleeve of his shirt.

‘Can I ask you a great favour?’ the girl went on.

‘You ask whatever you like, Sarah,’ replied Edward, inspecting his freshly polished apple as if it were a diamond of some sort.

‘It’s just I promised when I said we were coming to Oxford today.’

Edward suspected at once that this must have something to do with Sarah’s mother. He waited. Sarah was looking rather helplessly into the water. It was clear here and you could see right to the bottom.

‘Will you come and meet my mother, Edward? She’s very keen to meet you.’

Edward began eating his apple. ‘If you want me to come and meet your mother, of course I will. What sort of person is your mother?’

Sarah wondered if she could buy time by not explaining the likely turn of events to Edward. But she thought that wouldn’t be fair.

‘She’s curious, my mother, Edward, very curious. And I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but she’s quite ill. The doctors think she may have only a couple of years to live. And she’s in quite a lot of pain. As if,’ a bitter note crept into Sarah’s voice at this point, ‘it wasn’t bad enough my father having that stroke and dying two years ago. Two years and four months today.’

Edward wondered if he should put an arm round her for comfort.

‘My poor Sarah,’ he said, laying off his demolition of the apple for the moment, ‘I thought from what you said that your mother wasn’t very well, but I didn’t know about your father. I’m so sorry. Were you close to him?’

Sarah managed a little smile. ‘I was the last child, Edward, I was a girl, I was quick when I was little, very quick. I adored him. And I knew he adored me. I suspect, although he would never have said so, that I was his favourite.’

‘What did he die of? He can’t have been very old.’

‘He had a stroke and never recovered. The doctors couldn’t do anything about it. He’d been a teacher in the primary school up the road for years and years. It was so sweet, the teachers were so fond of him that they brought the older children to his funeral. All these lovely little children singing those sad hymns, it was so moving.’

Sarah suddenly realized that far from teasing out of Edward the facts of his parentage, she had merely given him her own. But she felt she hadn’t given him proper warning of his likely reception.

‘My mother, Edward,’ Sarah hesitated. Two enormous cows had plodded over to the side of the river and were inspecting them both.

‘Are these cows bothering you?’ said Edward suddenly, ‘We could move on if you like.’

Sarah shook her head. ‘Cows don’t bother me,’ she said. ‘Anyway my mother will want to ask you a whole lot of questions about yourself and your parents and where you went to school and what you want to become later on.’

‘Will she indeed?’ said Edward. Sarah noticed he was growing rather tense. ‘Will you be there all the time, Sarah? You won’t go off to bake some scones or make the tea or something and leave me at your mother’s mercy?’

‘Not if you don’t want me to, Edward. Do you think you will be able to cope?’

‘Do you mean will I be able to speak, Sarah? God knows. I got so worried about ordering those tickets at Paddington this morning, I’d been practising for days. I’ll get worried about meeting your mother too.’

‘What will you say about your parents, Edward?’ Sarah had been dying to ask this question herself for a long time now. She hoped Edward wouldn’t mind, not here on the River Cherwell with a couple of cows for company and the spires of Oxford dreaming behind them.

There was a pause. Sarah didn’t know if Edward had been struck dumb at the prospect of her mother or if he didn’t know what to say. He flung the core of his apple angrily into the field and picked out another one.

‘Sorry about that,’ he said, moodily. Sarah kept silent. She felt sure that whatever Edward’s answer was going to be, assuming one ever came, it would tell her a lot about the nature of his character and, perhaps, about his problems with speaking.

Edward drew his knees up to his chin and wrapped his arms around his legs. Sarah wondered if he was going to meditate.

‘My p-p-parents are dead,’ he said finally. ‘They were killed in an accident along with my elder sister and my little b-b-brother.’ There was no attempt to keep the anger out of his voice.

‘How did it happen, Edward?’ said Sarah. ‘I’m so sorry, it’s so terrible losing parents.’ So very terrible, she realized, that even the thought of it had brought on the stammer which Edward struggled so hard to keep to at bay.

‘Train crash,’ he said. ‘We were all going to Bristol on a train. There was something wrong with the points. The carriages came off the line at about fifty miles an hour and rolled down a slope. I was buried beneath my parents and the remains of the carriage for hours. When the police pulled everyone out of the rubble I was unconscious beneath them. They say I didn’t speak for a week after that.’

‘My God,’ said Sarah, almost wishing she hadn’t been told this ghastly news. Perhaps she should ask her mother not to speak to Edward about his parents at all. ‘How frightful, Edward, how absolutely frightful. Your poor family, just wiped out in front of you.’

Edward began munching on his apple. The cows wandered off to another part of their field. A couple of rowing boats, going quite fast, sped past them on their return journey to Oxford.

‘So where do you live now, Edward?’ Sarah had a vision of Edward living on his own in some squalid boarding house where the food was terrible and he never tidied his room.

‘I live with my grandparents,’ he said with a smile. ‘They’re very good to me. Maybe you should come and meet them, Sarah. I’m sure they’d love to see you.’ Even in his sixties Edward knew his grandfather had an eye for a pretty girl. Sarah would enchant him. The thought seemed to cheer him up.

‘Right,’ he said, ‘we’d better think about getting back or we won’t have any time to look at Oxford at all.’

Lord Francis Powerscourt was trying to review his knowledge of the Queen’s Inn investigation as his train carried him down to Calne and the beautiful Mrs Dauntsey. Murder Number One, her husband, poisoned at a feast, the poison probably administered at a drinks party in the rooms of the Treasurer of the Inn, the unpleasant Barton Somerville. Murder Number Two, Woodford Stewart, shot twice in the chest. Connections between the two? Both were retained for the prosecution in what would be one of the great fraud trials of the decade, that of Jeremiah Puncknowle and his associates. And both were benchers of their Inn of Court, though why that should make them liable to sudden and violent death Powerscourt didn’t know. He did know that Woodford Stewart had been elected two months before Dauntsey so they must have been the most junior members of the Inn’s governing body. And what of the missing Maxfield? Had he resurfaced to murder Dauntsey for his twenty thousand pounds? Then there was Porchester Newton, Dauntsey’s great rival in the election to the bench. He had disappeared shortly after Dauntsey’s death but was due to return the following week.

Had he, perhaps, returned in time to shoot Woodford Stewart and dump his body by the Temple Church? Powerscourt could think of lots of reasons why somebody might want to kill Dauntsey and Stewart individually. It was the connection that worried him, assuming the two deaths were linked. Surely it had to be professional, he said to himself, as the train rattled through a tunnel. He still didn’t know what to say to Mrs Dauntsey, how to bring up the very delicate subject he was travelling to Calne to raise.

As his cab rattled past the grey stone walls of the great house, Powerscourt remembered the covered furniture, the sofas under wraps, the floors covered with rough matting, the vast expanse of the great house that most people never saw, a forbidden kingdom for the dust and the shadows and the ghosts of Dauntseys past.

She was waiting for him, Elizabeth Dauntsey, still dressed in black that showed off her creamy skin. She smiled as she offered her hand to him.

‘Lord Powerscourt, how very pleasant to see you again. I trust you had a pleasant journey? Would you care for some tea, perhaps?’

‘A little later for the tea would be most agreeable, Mrs Dauntsey. My journey was fine. Your park is looking very well with all these early flowers.’

‘I think it likes the spring, our park. It always looks good about now. But come, Lord Powerscourt, before you disclose your business, I have something to tell you. I don’t know if it is important or not but you did ask in your letter if I could think of anything unusual Alex might have said in the month or so before he died.’

Powerscourt nodded gravely. ‘Have you thought of something, Mrs Dauntsey?’

She looked down at her hands briefly. ‘There was something, I hope it’s not too trivial. It must have been in the weeks after he was elected a bencher, you see, and there was quite a lot that was new to him about all that.’

She paused and looked closely at Powerscourt as if he could help her. He gave her what he hoped was an encouraging smile.

‘He said it more than once, I’m certain of that, Lord Powerscourt. He said he was very worried about the accounts.’

‘Whose accounts, Mrs Dauntsey? Your own personal accounts? The estate accounts perhaps? Some extra expenditure needed for improvement, maybe? His legal accounts? Or the Inn accounts, which I suppose he now had access to after his election?’

‘What a lot of accounts you can rattle off at a moment’s notice Lord Powerscourt! Do you think it’s because you’re a man?’

Powerscourt smiled. ‘I think it’s because of my brother-in-law. He’s a mighty financier in the City of London. When I called on him the other day he was surrounded by records of income and expenditure and ledgers and an enormous volume called the Book of Numbers which contained the secrets of all the other accounts.’

Now it was Mrs Dauntsey’s turn to smile. ‘It must be very useful having a brother-in-law who’s good with money, Lord Powerscourt. Nearly as good as, maybe better than having one who’s a doctor. You don’t have one who’s a medical man, do you?’

Powerscourt did a lightning audit of Lucy’s vast tribe of relations. Not one of them, he realized, had entered the medical profession.

‘No doctors,’ he said, ‘one or two naval men, plenty of soldiers, probably enough to form a small regiment. But to return to your husband, Mrs Dauntsey, do you have an idea in your mind of which kind of account he was talking about?’

‘I’ve thought about that a lot,’ she said, ‘particularly as you were coming to see me today. I don’t think it was our personal accounts and I don’t think it was to do with the accounts of his chambers. That clerk they had ran those as if it was the Bank of England. That leaves us with the estate and Queen’s Inn. I’m honestly not sure which one it would have been, I’m afraid. Alex kept the estate accounts very close to his chest.’

‘Can you remember exactly what he said, the words he used, Mrs Dauntsey?’

She frowned. Powerscourt thought she looked even more attractive when she frowned. ‘I can’t,’ she said finally. ‘I can’t decide if he said unusual, or strange, or worrying. It was something along those lines.’

Powerscourt groaned mentally as he thought of the problem of asking Barton Somerville if he could cast an eye over the Inn accounts. ‘I don’t suppose,’ he said hopefully, ‘that he brought any of the Inn accounts down here, to look at them over the weekend, perhaps?’

‘I don’t think so. I’ll have a look in his study and let you know, if that would be helpful. Perhaps we should move on to what you wanted to talk to me about, Lord Powerscourt. Then we could have some tea.’

Powerscourt felt rather nervous all of a sudden. ‘The matter is exceedingly delicate, Mrs Dauntsey. It touches on the most delicate and intimate of subjects, one we discussed last time, if you recall, about children and heirs and all sort of thing. If you have any objection, please tell me now.’

Elizabeth Dauntsey did not blush, or look down, or ask to be excused. ‘I am sure, Lord Powerscourt, that you would not be raising such a matter if you did not think it might be important.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Dauntsey, thank you. Sometimes, I must confess, I think this area may be of the utmost importance, at others I feel I may be wasting my time.’

Outside the sun had gone in and a fierce wind was whipping through the trees. Rain was now lashing against the windows of the Dauntsey drawing room.

‘Perhaps I could put my concern to you in the form of a fairy story, Mrs Dauntsey. I hope you like fairy stories?’

She smiled. ‘I have always been most devoted to fairy stories and plays about magic islands like Prospero’s in The Tempest or Illyria in Twelfth Night. Alex and I saw Twelfth Night a couple of months ago in Middle Temple Hall. It was the three hundredth anniversary of its first performance in 1602 in the very same building. It was extraordinary. Sorry, Lord Powerscourt, I’m holding you up.’

‘I went to that performance too. Perhaps we passed one another, like ships in the night.’ Both The Tempest and Twelfth Night, he remembered, featured shipwrecks. The current fate of Mrs Dauntsey? Certainly she didn’t look very like one shipwrecked now, he thought, her beauty shining through the pain of bereavement.

‘A long long time ago,’ he began, ‘when the world was young, there was a small kingdom perched high up in the mountains. These mountains were much higher than any we have in this country. Snow sat on the highest of them for most of the year and only the bravest of the young men climbed to the very top. Their customs were very different from ours. This, after all, was long before the invention of the telegraph or the spinning jenny, the telephone or the motor car, of paved roads and of great steamships. The people of the Mountain Kingdom, for that was how its name translated into English, had never seen the sea. But their land was rich. There were fertile valleys as well as the great summits. Their horses were beautiful and very fast and could race most of the day without being tired. The seasons were beautiful, Mrs Dauntsey. In spring the slopes of the mountains would be covered with flowers. In summer the sun shone but the streams that came down from the hills were always cool. In autumn the trees lost their leaves in a blaze of colour, yellows and gold and black and hectic reds. And in the winter the snow sat on the turrets and the battlements of the Royal Palace until it looked like fairyland.

‘The people were ruled over by a King, who was getting old at the beginning of our story, but he had a son, a handsome Prince who would succeed him. As the Prince grew to manhood he looked about him for a beautiful girl he could marry. None of the daughters of the nobles pleased him very much. He began to despair until a wise old man told him about the child of a king two little countries away, who was said to be very beautiful indeed. So our Prince rode off to the Kingdom of the Plain and fell in love with the Princess. Eight months later they were married. Two weeks after that the old King died in his sleep and the Prince and Princess became the King and Queen.’

You’d better get to the point, pretty soon, Powerscourt said to himself or you’ll be here all day.

‘For the first few years,’ Powerscourt went on, ‘everything seemed perfect in this highland Garden of Eden. The harvests were good, the people were contented, peace reigned inside and outside the little kingdom. There was only one shadow across perfection. The new King and Queen had no children. Now it was the custom in this land that each new King had to be the son of the previous one. Nephews, younger brothers, distant cousins just wouldn’t do. The custom dated back many centuries to a time when civil war had torn the country apart. On that occasion when the old King died, the courtiers tried to put his younger brother on the throne in his place. The nobles would have none of it, declaring him not to be the rightful sovereign and plunging the country into a civil war that lasted fifteen years.

‘Time went by, some more years passed and still the King had no heirs. The nobles became restless and began to plot among themselves as nobles always do. The citizens were fearful of the bloodshed that might follow his end. The King went on a journey, accompanied only a by a few faithful followers, to a temple in the mountains where the holy men lived. They listened to his story and told him to travel further on still, up into the high mountains. When he had lived among the snows for ten days, he was to return to the holy place for his answer.

‘On his return, the holy men gave the King their message. Now in this kingdom there were no laws about relations between the sexes, only customs. So it was the custom for husband and wife to be faithful, one to the other, but it was not a legal obligation. The Queen, they told the King, must lie with your brother, or any of your cousins, until she be with child. And you also must lie with her so nobody will know that you may not be the father. The peace of the kingdom demands this, they said to the King. For if you have no son and heir of your own blood, what will happen to the kingdom?’

Powerscourt stopped. Elizabeth Dauntsey looked at him carefully.

‘Don’t tell me the story stops there, Lord Powerscourt,’ she said, ‘with the King still up there in the mountains.’

‘I’m afraid that’s where the manuscript runs out, Mrs Dauntsey, I’m truly sorry.’

She rang the bell and ordered tea. ‘Well, let me see if I could help you out, Lord Powerscourt, with the story, I mean. I’m not a storyteller like yourself and I could only speak for the Queen, I think, not for any of the other characters.’

She stopped and a faint twinkle came into her eyes. ‘How can I put this? I think my contribution to the story, speaking for the Queen of course, is that it is always very important for a wife, especially if she is a Queen and married to a King, to obey her husband at all times.’

Powerscourt laughed. ‘How very well you put it, Mrs Dauntsey, and what an important moral to take from the story.’ By God, it’s true, he said to himself, those faint reports from Lucy’s relations must be true. Where does that leave my investigation, he asked himself. His brain was reeling.

‘Tea, Lord Powerscourt?’ she said as the butler departed once again to the wider realms of Calne. ‘You must be thirsty after telling all those stories.’ Powerscourt saw that the subject had been closed by the arrival of the Darjeeling. He felt oddly relieved. He wondered briefly which of the characters in Twelfth Night Elizabeth Dauntsey might have been. Cesario? Who certainly had been shipwrecked. Probably even in Powerscourt’s biased eye, she was too old for that. Olivia perhaps, with her great household and unruly relations? Certainly, he thought, you could hide Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek well out of sight in the dusty recesses of Calne. She brought him back from his daydream.

‘Tell me, Lord Powerscourt, somebody informed me the other day that you have had additions to your own family. Is it true that you now have twins?’

Edward had punted back to Folly Bridge very slowly. There was no sign of their previous adversaries and no more rude comments about Edward standing at the wrong end. Sarah leant back on the cushions, her hand trailing in the water, and peered at Edward through semi-closed eyes. Eventually the motion of the boat sent her off to sleep. Edward smiled down at his passenger, so innocent as she lay there, her head slightly to one side, her red hair bright on the cushion. Then they had walked through Christ Church, marvelling at the size of Tom Quad. London’s Inns of Court could hold their heads up against most Oxford colleges but this quadrangle had no equal near the Strand. Lots of politicians, Edward informed Sarah, had been at Christ Church, Canning and Peel and Gladstone and Lord Salisbury.

‘Would you like to have been to Oxford, Edward?’ asked Sarah, staring at a group of undergraduates about to go into Hall. She thought Edward would look nice in one of those gowns.

‘I don’t think so, Sarah. I’m not sure I would fit in. Most of these people are very rich.’

It was only in the train back to Paddington that Sarah raised her fears about Queen’s Inn. They were alone in their compartment and Edward was polishing off the remains of the sandwiches and the apples from the picnic.

‘How long do you think it will be, Edward,’ she said rather sadly, ‘before they catch this murderer?’

‘Oh dear,’ said Edward, ‘I hoped a day in Oxford would take your mind off it all. I know it’s easy for me to say it, but you mustn’t worry. Nobody’s going to want to harm you. Lord Powerscourt is one of the best investigators in the country and that policeman is very sharp. I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.’

‘It’s not me I’m that worried about so much, Edward,’ said Sarah, her eyes large and bright as she looked across at him. ‘Who worked very closely with Mr Dauntsey? Who worked closely with Mr Stewart? Who must know a lot of the secrets they knew? Who is the best-informed person in the Inn about that huge fraud case? In every case, Edward, the answer is you. I’m so worried you’re next on their list.’

‘That’s ridiculous, Sarah,’ said Edward, secretly touched by the amount of her concern – surely she must care for him, maybe he should hold her hand. ‘I’m not going to be on anybody’s list. It’s absurd. I’m in more danger crossing the road.’

But all of Edward’s protests came to nothing. Sarah remained convinced he was in great danger. An offer by Edward to come and meet her mother the following week did something to calm her. He may not like being interrogated by my mother, she thought, but at least he won’t get killed.

It was no longer enjoying the pride of place it had occupied at the time of Powerscourt’s last visit to his brother-in-law William Burke, but it still took a fairly prominent position. It sat in the centre of the lowest row of bookshelves to the left of Burke’s fireplace. It was taller than the others and its black cover gave the Book of Numbers an air of great authority. Powerscourt wondered if the benchers of Queen’s Inn had a similar volume, a financial Holy of Holies, the Ark of the Covenant of the Inn’s accounts.

‘Alexander Dauntsey, William,’ Powerscourt began, ‘the chap who got poisoned, was apparently very worried about the accounts before he died.’

Burke’s reply was the same as Powerscourt’s had been down in Calne. ‘Which ones, Francis? Estate? Personal? Chambers? Queen’s Inn?’

‘Exactly the same question that I asked. Two were more or less eliminated, his chambers’ because their clerk is so efficient, and the personal ones because they were usually in good health. So that leaves us with the estate and the Inn. Mrs Dauntsey couldn’t remember which one it was.’

‘Strange how even very intelligent women often get a mental blank about money, Francis. Take your sister, my beloved wife, highly intelligent woman, not the slightest idea about money.’

‘Some of them must be good at it, William. Women, I mean. Exceptions that prove the rule. Anyway, the reason I am here is to ask you which of those two you think more likely and what kind of irregularities we might be talking about that would worry a cool and experienced barrister like Dauntsey. The estate accounts or the accounts of the Inn?’

William Burke took a careful sip of his white port. ‘This really is guessing in the dark, Francis. But I think it is less likely to do with the estate accounts. They will follow the same sort of pattern year after year. There may be some exceptional event like a bad harvest. But even then they work like a see-saw.’

‘See-saw, William?’ Powerscourt had a mental image of his daughter going up and down on one. The twins, when their time came, could have an end each.

‘Sorry, see-saw in the sense that a bad harvest is bad for the people whose crops fail, but very good for those whose don’t because the prices go through the roof. I don’t think there have been any natural disasters that could have affected things . You didn’t see any sign of natural catastrophe down there in Kent, Francis? Vesuvius-type eruptions? Fire and brimstone consuming the cities of the plain? Death of the firstborn?’

‘It all looked fairly peaceful to me, William. Deer running about, spring flowers everywhere, the vast hinterland of that house smothered in dust jackets and sheeting. So, it must be the Inn, or perhaps I should say it is more likely to be the Inn. What could be going on there?’

Burke rose from his chair and wandered over to the window. He looked out into the square below, a couple of pedestrians going home, a lone policeman plodding along the opposite side. He came back and sat on his sofa.

‘I can’t say I know very much about how an Inn of Court organizes its finances, Francis. They must have somebody, I presume, to arrange the collection of all those rents for the various chambers. I doubt if anything fishy could be going on there. If they pitched the rents too high, presumably the barristers might decamp to Gray’s Inn or the Middle Temple.’

Burke paused. ‘Let me ask you a question, Francis. Presumably you think this worry about money might have been important. Do you think it might have led to the two deaths? Because if you do think that, then it must have been some enormous financial crime for somebody to have murdered these two fellows.’

Now it was Powerscourt’s turn to pause. ‘I simply don’t know. It might be nothing at all. But just give me a list, if you would, of the kinds of money crimes that could lead to murder.’

‘The actual crime might not that be all that huge, Francis. But suppose there was blackmail. Suppose Dauntsey and Stewart were operating some kind of blackmailing ring down there in Queen’s. A worm turns. Poisons one and shoots the other. In terms of the big financial crimes, they’re almost all related to theft in one form or another, theft from fellow shareholders like Mr Puncknowle, theft from banks, theft from the public by fraud and deception. What makes life so difficult with the Inn, Francis, is that they will all keep silent on you. They may all have been paying Danegeld to some blackmailer or other for years and years but they’re not going to tell you about it. Any attempt to get a look at the accounts of individual chambers isn’t going to be greeted with birthday cake and balloons, and any attempt to look at the accounts of the Inn itself will be running into a blank wall. “Terribly sorry, Powerscourt,” they will say, “Inn is a closed body, under no obligation to show our accounts to anybody, even if we wanted to, which we don’t.”’

‘I’m very grateful, William. You’ve raised a whole host of possibilities.’

‘I’m sure,’ said Burke, ‘that I haven’t got the right one. Let me give you a word of advice. I do not know how many other possible theories you have for the motive for these murders, quite a few, I suspect. But let’s suppose it does have to do with the money. Let’s suppose that supposition holds good. If you get anywhere near the truth, Francis, you won’t live to tell the tale. These people have killed twice already. No reason to doubt they will do it again. I don’t mind going to the funerals of very aged and decrepit customers of my bank, but I’m damned if I’m going to go to yours.’