Death Called to the Bar

5

I wonder if she’ll come, Edward said to himself. He checked his watch again. She was ten minutes late already. Edward had placed himself at the top of the drive that led into the Wallace Collection, a famous collection of paintings, armour and furniture in Manchester Square. He had sent Sarah Henderson a note the day before asking her to join him here at three o’clock on the Saturday afternoon. She had dropped in to see him on her way home and said she would be delighted. Powerscourt, who had appointed himself to a position of unofficial godfather to the attachment and the meeting, had insisted that the pair should come to tea at his house in Number 8 Manchester Square. He had, he told Edward, recently purchased a typewriting machine and would be grateful for an expert opinion on the instrument.

Sarah had not intended to be late. Perhaps her mother had planned it. For just as Sarah was about to set off for the distant quarters of Marylebone and the Wallace Collection, her mother suddenly announced that she had run out of one set of pills. It would be all right, she said, if Sarah got them on Monday, but then she might be in agony for the rest of the weekend. Maybe, maybe, Sarah could find the time to pop down to the chemist’s and collect the medicine this afternoon. Surely her other engagement couldn’t take precedence over her mother’s health. Fuming quietly under her breath, cursing her brother and sister for having escaped the drudgery and the intensity of their Acton home, Sarah walked as fast as she could to the chemist, but it was fifteen minutes there and fifteen minutes home again. When she got back her mother calmly informed her that she was now so late it was hardly worth while going. Nobody would wait that long. Sarah might as well stop at home and read to her mother from one of the weekly magazines. Sarah smiled sweetly, said she would see her mother later and fled to the smoky embrace of the District Line.

Some people might have wondered how Sarah reconciled her earlier resolve to have nothing to do with her colleagues at work with an afternoon tryst with a young man, even if he seldom spoke. That had not proved too difficult. For a start, she told herself, most of the men she had been warned against on her secretarial course were older. They were married. They had families. Edward fitted into none of those categories. Anyway, she thought, Edward was perfectly harmless. Everybody knew that.

It was only after about fifteen minutes delay that Edward began to grow seriously worried. I’ll go at twenty past, he said to himself. Twenty past came and went and Edward was still there. There were vague rumours, nothing substantiated, nothing Edward would ever have allowed any of the men he devilled for to take into court, but rumours nonetheless that Sarah’s mother was ill and liable to be difficult. Half past came and half past went. Edward was reluctant to abandon the afternoon because he had arrived two hours early. He had spent them learning about the story of the collection and about the most famous of the pictures. He had astonished himself by asking one of the curators two questions about one of the Fragonards. And on his afternoon vigil, he could console himself with surreptitious glances at the Powerscourt house and wonder about what was going on inside. He hoped he might meet the other twin this time, but then he wondered if he, an outsider, would be able to tell the two of them apart.

‘Edward, I’m so sorry.’ Sarah was out of breath and put a hand briefly on Edward’s arm as if to slow herself down. ‘I’m so glad you waited.’ All the way there on the trains Sarah had been wondering if Edward would write her little notes, as he had with the invitation, or would he actually speak? He spoke.

‘Take a seat,’ he said, escorting her to a wooden bench just outside the house. ‘We’ll go in when you’re ready.’

Sarah wanted to say Well Done. Nine consecutive words from Edward in Queen’s Inn would be a day’s portion, if not a week’s. Now it was tumbling out.

‘Have you been here before, Edward? Can you tell me about the place?’

Sarah watched as Edward collected his thoughts. She wondered if he had realized how much conversation might be involved on this sort of afternoon. Or had he thought they would peer at the pictures in silence?

‘Named after Sir Richard Wallace. Illegitimate son of fourth Duke of Hertford.’ Edward had reverted to staccato prose once again. ‘All Hertfords collected pictures and things. Wallace died. Left everything to wife. Wife lived here for last seven years of life. Famous for smoking black cheroots. On her death left all to the nation. Pictures and stuff, not cheroots. Now here for ever.’

Sarah wondered about the black cheroots. Where had Edward found that out, she wondered? Once a deviller, she recalled, always a deviller. You could root out facts about art galleries as easily as you could those about court cases.

‘Shall we go in? You’d better lead the way, Edward.’

Edward wondered if Sarah had been to this sort of establishment before. He was constantly amazed by the number of people who didn’t even know where the National Gallery was. He had planned a route round some of the more dramatic pictures, the ones that should interest a newcomer. The armour he had resolved to ignore, and the furniture he would leave to the end. Edward was bored to tears by armoires and escritoires and secretaires and writing tables and garderobes and commodes and wardrobes. He led them rapidly across the hall and into the Housekeeper’s Room.

‘This one,’ he whispered, ‘very bloody, but very dramatic. Painter French Romantic, name of Delacroix. Called The Execution of Doge Marin Falier.’

The painting showed the interior courtyard or loggia of a great Venetian palace. White marble stairs led up to a higher level. Lining the stairs and crowded round a figure at the top were noblemen, some dressed in rich costumes. A beautifully dressed Moor with an orange headband stared into the courtyard below, as if he were expecting trouble. At the top a Venetian senator held aloft a bloody sword. At the bottom of the steps, a few feet from the supercilious Moor, the headless body of the former Doge Marin Falier lay flat on the ground.

‘What’s going on, Edward? Why did this poor man have his head chopped off?’

‘Falier Doge of Venice. Meant to be constitutional ruler like our King Edward. Power very limited. Falier wanted to smash the constitution and make himself tyrant. Nobles found out. Nobles cut his head off. Byron wrote poem about it. Byron fond of blood and gore. Painter probably knew poem. Painter also fond of blood and gore, probably fonder even than Byron.’

Sarah looked closely at Edward who was perspiring lightly from all this conversation. She hoped it wasn’t going to make him ill.

‘Going somewhere bit more peaceful now. Still Venice.’ Edward led the way into the small drawing room where a pair of unusually large Canalettos looked across the Basin of St Mark from opposite directions. One showed the view from the mouth of the Giudecca Canal with the Customs House on the left out to Palladio’s Church of San Giorgio Maggiore. The companion piece looked out from the steps of San Giorgio back to the mouth of the Giudecca Canal. The water was pale green, the sky a light blue with fluffy clouds. Small groups of Venetians discussed their business on the quays. Gondolas carried cloaked men and bales of cargo across the bay. A couple of sailing boats lurked at the edges of the picture. The great Venetian symbols, the Doge’s Palace and the huge baroque dome of Santa Maria della Salute, reminded the viewer of the topography of the city. In both paintings there was an air of great calm as if Venice were at peace with itself and the world, as if these scenes had existed for hundreds of years past and would go on for hundreds of years into the future.

Again that hand briefly on Edward’s arm. ‘It’s so beautiful,’ said Sarah. ‘I would so much like to go to Venice, wouldn’t you, Edward?’

Edward nodded. ‘English on Grand Tour bought Canalettos,’ he said, ‘like photographs on your holiday. Only in colour. Time for some froth and fluff now.’

So far, Edward hoped, Sarah had not realized how deliberate their itinerary was. Edward was taking them to the places where he had done his homework. If Sarah had wanted to stop in front of the Greuzes or the Watteaus, Edward would have been lost for words. As it was he was heading straight for Fragonard.

‘The Swing,’ he said quietly. ‘Frenchman. Eighteenth-century. Name of Fragonard.’

In a dreamy forest of varying shades of green an attractive girl rode on a swing, dressed in layers of pink silk. Behind her, in the shade, an elderly gentleman in a dark green suit controlled the strings of the swing. Convention dictated that he was her husband. And on the far side of the girl, who was hiding him from sight of her husband, stood a handsome young lover in a pale green suit with a flower in his buttonhole, his hand stretched out towards the girl. One of her feet was much higher than the other on the swing, giving a view of her legs, and her slipper had fallen off her foot and was flying upwards through the air.

‘Edward!’ said Sarah, giggling to herself. ‘Just look where that young man’s looking! You’re very naughty showing me this one, nearly as naughty as that girl in the picture. Haven’t you anything more decent to show me?’

Edward smiled at her. ‘All right, Sarah. Not naughty, these ones. But fantastic all the same.’

Edward took her to the first-floor landing where the world of Francois Boucher awaited them. This was a world where the laws of gravity and reality, of time and space, had been suspended, a world where naked gods rode chariots across the sky and semi-naked goddesses scattered pink roses among the clouds. Clothes were the exception in these fabulous landscapes although some scanty shifts were included from time to time so the artist could show off his brushwork. There were putti everywhere, plump little cherubs rolling back clouds or performing arabesques in the sky or gambolling playfully on the surface of the sea. Almost everything was subordinate to the naked female figure. A judgement of Paris was constructed in such a way as to give three different perspectives on the female form, groups of nude women frolicked on the waves, a glorious naked Venus caressed her husband Vulcan, god of fire and armourer of the gods. These were the wilder mythological poems of the wilder mythological poets translated on to canvas in shades of pale blue and pink and diaphanous green, a world of rococo and make believe and fantasy.

‘My goodness me,’ said Sarah, ‘how absolutely wonderful. I wouldn’t tell my mother this, Edward, but I like them, I really do. I think they’re marvellous. Are there any more?’

Edward smiled. ‘Not here. Probably in National Gallery. Nothing else as exotic as Boucher here.’

Sarah lingered in front of the rising and the setting of the sun.

‘Boucher had important patron, Madame de Pompadour, official mistress of Louis the something or other,’ Edward whispered. ‘Kept wolf from door later on by designing tapestries for royal tapestry factory.’

‘Where now, Edward?’

He led them halfway down the Great Gallery on the first floor, past a couple of sombre Van Dycks, a gorgeous full-length Gainsborough, and a sumptuous Rubens landscape. He stopped in front of a young man with a turned-up moustache, an elegant black hat and very fashionable clothes. Even back in the seventeenth century painters were keen to show how versatile their brushwork could be. This young man had a beautifully depicted ruff with a dark grey kerchief hanging from it, and a very intricate white cuff on a richly embroidered jacket. A faint smile played across his lips as if he were thinking of a secret or a joke that only he and the painter knew. It all looked totally spontaneous as if the young man had walked in and parked himself on Franz Hals’s canvas the afternoon before.

‘That’s the Laughing Cavalier,’ said Sarah knowledgeably. ‘Everybody knows him from the advertisements. Isn’t he by Franz somebody or other?’

‘Good,’ said Edward solemnly. ‘But work originally called Portrait of a Young Man. Franz Hals. Dutchman. Early sixteen hundreds.’

‘But why,’ asked Sarah, ‘do we call The chap The Laughing Cavalier?’

‘Painting up for sale,’ said Edward, now firmly back in cryptic mode, ‘forty or fifty years ago. Nobody paid much attention. Nobody heard much of Hals chap. Fourth Marquess of Hertford takes a fancy to it. So does a Rothschild. Big battle in the auction rooms. Sells for six times its asking price. Newspapers drawn to battle between a Marquess and a Rothschild, supposed to be as rich as Croesus. Laughing Cavalier makes better copy than Portrait of a Young Man. Not good title. Look carefully.’

Sarah inspected the gentleman on the wall carefully. ‘I’m afraid I can’t see what you mean,’ she said, frowning slightly at Edward.

‘Look again,’ he replied. ‘He’s not laughing, he’s smiling. And look at his clothes. No indication he’s a cavalier at all. Just the name stuck.’

Sarah looked round the gallery. The place was going to close in ten minutes’ time and they were the last people there apart from a solitary curator lost in his own thoughts in the far corner.

‘Last picture, Sarah. Another portrait. Different story.’ Edward led her ten yards away from the Laughing Cavalier and stopped in front of another young man. He had a head ringed with dark brown curls and a dull red beret on top. His face was pale and handsome. He was looking slightly to the left of the painter. The young man wore a dark brown robe with a gold chain. Some people thought they detected a hint of a smile on his red lips. Others felt he had more serious matters on his mind.

‘Titus,’ said Edward gravely, moving back a few yards to get a different view. ‘Titus Rembrandt. Terribly sad story. Titus’s mother dead. Rembrandt married again. Rembrandt declared bankrupt the year before. Rembrandt not able to sell any pictures. The Dutch people in Amsterdam didn’t care for them, didn’t commission any. God in heaven. It’s as if the English abandoned Shakespeare. Under the rules of the guild, Titus and the second Mrs Rembrandt had to administer the production of his etchings and the sale of his paintings. It’s terrible.’

Sarah noticed that Edward was speaking in perfect sentences now and that he was more animated than she had ever seen him.

‘There’s worse,’ he said. ‘Much worse. The second Mrs Rembrandt died. Then Titus died. This Titus here, the boy in the painting, died before his father. Rembrandt had to bury his own son.’ Sarah thought there might be a tear in the corner of his eye now as he recounted the various disasters that befell the great painter.

‘When Rembrandt died, one of the finest painters who ever lived, all he left were some old clothes and his painting equipment. How very sad! So if anybody ever says to you, Sarah, that the Dutch produced some great painters, that is perfectly true. They also turned their back on the greatest.’

Ten minutes later Edward and Sarah were eating their first muffins in the Powerscourt drawing room. Olivia was there, and Thomas, and both twins, fast asleep. Listening to all these young voices, Olivia asking Sarah what it was like working in an Inn, Thomas discussing football teams with Edward, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of all of them, Powerscourt found it hard to believe that he earned his living investigating violent death and that his latest victim had been poisoned as he tucked into his beetroot soup. After tea they all trooped off to inspect the new typewriter. Sarah pronounced it an excellent model and astonished the children by typing perfectly coherent sentences as she looked over her shoulder. Olivia made her do it again with her eyes closed. Touch typing, Sarah explained, meant that you knew where all the keys were automatically so you didn’t have to look down to find the letter you wanted. Both Thomas and Olivia thought it was a form of witchcraft or magic. Powerscourt wondered how long it would take to learn. He suspected that the young policeman had already mastered it.

‘I want to ask your advice, Lucy,’ he said when Edward and Sarah had gone and their own children had departed to the upper floors.

‘Of course, Francis. Whatever you want.’

‘I’ve been thinking about the Dauntseys and their lack of children. I have no idea if it has anything to do with this investigation. Can you tell me what it would mean to Elizabeth Dauntsey, knowing you couldn’t have children?’

Lady Lucy looked at a child’s picture book left lying on the sofa.

‘I’m sure you know as well as I do, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘I think it must have been absolutely frightful. I presume she didn’t go into any details of what the doctors told them. I presume they have no idea who is at fault, although fault is the wrong word completely and I take it back.’ She bent down to pick up a diminutive teddy bear, bought for one of the twins, sitting upright against a side table.

‘Guilt,’ she went on. ‘I think you’d blame yourself for not being able to have children. I think you’d feel incomplete without them, that you hadn’t fulfilled your duty by being a mother. Every time you went out into the streets and saw all kinds of people, people with less money than you, people with less taste than you, people uglier than you, people stupider than you, carrying their children about or holding their hands as they learn to walk or watching them run about in the park, why, it would nearly break your heart. When you went to stay with people you would have to watch others getting their children up in the morning or reading them bedtime stories at night, it would be awful, just awful. You don’t think we’ve got too many, Francis, do you?’

‘Too many what, Lucy?’ said Powerscourt who had been thinking of Elizabeth Dauntsey going through Lucy’s litany of misery.

‘Too many children.’

‘No,’ said Powerscourt firmly. ‘Four isn’t very many between us. Two each. Lots of people have more than that, ten twelve, fifteen, imagine fifteen of them, Lucy, you could scarcely remember all their names. But tell me, is there anything a woman in such a predicament might try?’

‘I don’t understand, Francis,’ said Lucy, looking confused.

‘Might she try to get pregnant by a different man?’

‘And pass the child off as her husband’s?’ Lady Lucy looked as though she found the conversation distasteful. ‘Well, she might, I’m sure that’s been done often enough in the past. Risky though, if the husband finds out. Or I’ve heard of people who go abroad for nine months or a year and come back with a child they say is theirs. It may be adopted, or the husband may have paid some other woman to have his child and then they pass it off as theirs. At least half the genes will be right that way.’

Powerscourt remembered what Elizabeth Dauntsey had said about her husband’s love of Calne, his feeling for its past and its future. A man with that sense of historical continuity would find the lack of heirs more distressing than most.

‘It must have been pretty frightful for Dauntsey too,’ Powerscourt said. ‘That place meant so much to him, that sense of it belonging to Dauntseys past, Dauntseys present and Dauntseys future. Only there might not be any future, or a different future peopled by relations, your own flesh and blood of course, but not your own issue.’

Lady Lucy smiled at him. ‘I always think issue is such a dreadful word, Francis. It’s a lawyer’s word, beginning halfway down the first page of some dreary document about inheritance or something.’

‘Sorry,’ said Powerscourt. He was struck once more by the image of Elizabeth Dauntsey in her slim elegance gliding through the deserted drawing rooms and empty galleries of Calne, hoping maybe to find inspiration in the portraits of the ancestors who lined the walls. ‘Dauntsey could have had an illegitimate child with some other woman,’ he continued, ‘somebody he could maybe adopt or make his heir later on. That chap whose widow left the Wallace Collection to the nation, he was illegitimate, but he was still able to inherit the lot. I don’t think, forgive me, that he’d want to breed from any old stock. I can’t see Alexander Dauntsey hoping to produce his heir with some common female who was prepared to bear his child for money.’ Powerscourt paused and looked closely at the teddy bear. Already it was beginning to show signs of wear and tear, from the twins or Olivia. The fur on one arm had almost disappeared as if some strange disease had struck. One eye was slightly out of position, giving the bear a rather sinister aspect as if it was looking in two directions at once.

‘I can’t very well advertise in the newspapers, Lucy, can I? Would anybody involved with the late Alexander Dauntsey, especially in a child-bearing capacity, please get in touch with Francis Powerscourt, of Manchester Square?’

Lady Lucy shook her head. She knew what was coming. In a number of his previous investigations Lady Lucy had activated for her husband the vast tribe of her relations to report on particular individuals, whether they had fallen out with their wives or husbands, whether they were having affairs, who had been jilted in love. Powerscourt attributed the success of the venture to one important difference between the sexes. Women, he believed, were more curious than men. Women liked gossip more than men. What else were institutions like hairdressers’ and ladies’ luncheon clubs for, in heaven’s name. Women were more interested in human relationships, their rise, their decline and fall, their occasional recoveries. Women, in his view – and he did not condemn them for these characteristics – were able to talk, gossip, if you will, about a particular topic or person or relationship for hours longer than their male counterparts. The final proof of his theory, in Powerscourt’s view, had been given to him by one of London’s leading booksellers, who informed him that women outnumbered men by a factor of four to one in the purchase of the novels of Miss Jane Austen.

‘Do you think, Lucy, that you could rouse the team? Bring them out of retirement or wherever they’ve been to report on Elizabeth and Alexander Dauntsey? Not a clarion call, not a drumbeat, just a whisper, it all needs to be very quiet. I don’t suppose any of your relations live anywhere near Calne, Lucy?’

Lady Lucy blushed slightly. ‘I’m afraid, Francis, that I have a second cousin twice removed who lives on the other side of Maidstone. Her husband is very rich, something in the City, I think. I’m sure they move in the same circles as the Dauntseys.’

‘Put the word out, please,’ said Powerscourt, rising to his feet and holding his wife by the hands. ‘What do you say to dinner out, Lucy? It’s all those young people we had here earlier on this afternoon. I’m feeling quite reinvigorated.’

Powerscourt and Chief Inspector Beecham were greeted by a bizarre sight when they went to meet Joseph the steward in the Hall on the Tuesday morning after Edward and Sarah’s tea in Manchester Square. The top half of the tables were roughly laid out with knife, fork and spoon. Each place had its own wine glass. And circulating round this phantom feast were the waiters who had served at the real one. It was, Powerscourt thought, like looking at the three ages of man. The old boys were back, swaying slightly as they carried round their dishes of imaginary vegetables, the veteran nearest Powerscourt with a face that looked like a parchment map. The regular staff of the Inn, middle-aged mostly, looked as if they served imaginary guests every day of their lives. The young men, two of whom did not look to be properly awake yet, were carrying bowls full of imaginary soup, or filling glasses with water Joseph had put in empty wine bottles. Powerscourt thought the prospect of it being turned into wine were slim.

‘I thought this would get them into the swing of things,’ said Joseph cheerfully, emptying a couple of wine glasses into a bucket. ‘I’ve told them all to be ready to answer questions in a few minutes.’

Chief Inspector Beecham had gone to Dauntsey’s place and sat down in it, looking carefully at the passing waiters.

‘Gather round!’ said Joseph and a macabre circle assembled round the place of the poisoned bencher. ‘Lord Powerscourt!’ He introduced him like a major-domo.

‘Thank you all very much for coming in today,’ he began. ‘I know it can’t have been easy for you. Now, do any of you remember anything about the feast? About Mr Dauntsey’s death?’

There was a certain amount of shuffling and then one of the regular waiters spoke up. ‘We’ve talked about this a lot, my lord, on the night itself and earlier this morning. We don’t see how the poor gentleman could have been poisoned at the feast. They started with that terrine. We took the plates up to the High Table and nobody could have known which one was going to Mr Dauntsey, no one at all. Then there was the soup, my lord. How are you meant to put a drop of poison into a bowl of soup when you’re carrying two at a time? It’s not possible. Same with the wine, you don’t know whose glass you’re going to refill when you collect a fresh bottle from the wine room. If you wanted to kill the whole lot of them’ – Powerscourt suspected this might be the preferred option for this particular waiter from the vehemence with which he said it – ‘that would be easier. The cook slips the poison into the soup and off you go. Or you add something special to half a dozen bottles of wine and finish them off like that. But one person, no, not possible.’

The waiter stared at them rather defiantly, as if he thought they would contest his findings. They did not.

‘First class,’ said Chief Inspector Beecham. ‘We agree with every word of that.’

It is a rare, almost impossible event for an investigator like Lord Francis Powerscourt to come face to face with the man whose death he is investigating, for the living, as it were, to meet the dead. But it was happening now, the day after the phantom feast in the Hall. Edward had been the midwife to the meeting.

‘New benchers,’ he said cryptically to Powerscourt, ‘always have portrait done. Hangs in Hall or library.’ Now Edward mentioned it, Powerscourt remembered seeing some of these portraits displayed in prominent positions. He recalled, in particular, the two full-length Gainsboroughs of previous benchers behind Alexander Dauntsey in the Hall on the night of the feast. ‘Painter man wants to see somebody from Inn. Check he’s got the details right.’

Powerscourt and Edward were walking along the Mall that runs from Hammersmith Bridge along the river in the direction of Chiswick. Some of the houses were recent but there were also some fine eighteenth-century specimens looking out over the Thames. Number 35, The Terrace, Powerscourt learned, was where their painter lived, a man by the name of Stone, Nathaniel Stone.

‘Who the hell are you? What the devil do you want? Why can’t you leave me alone?’ This violent reaction to Edward ringing the bell came from a small red-bearded man with angry eyes, wearing a painter’s apron now stained with all the colours of the rainbow and a few more besides.

‘My name is Powerscourt,’ said Powerscourt in his most authoritative voice, ‘and this is my friend Edward. We have come from Queen’s Inn about the portrait of Mr Dauntsey. As you probably know, Mr Dauntsey is dead but the Inn still wants his portrait.’

‘Why couldn’t you say so?’ The red-bearded man sounded as though he was going to continue in the same vein. ‘You’d better come in. Thought you’d come about a bill. You look like you might have come about a bill. Had a lot of trouble lately with that bloody bill.’

He led them upstairs to a great drawing room that looked out over the river, back to Hammersmith Bridge on the left, and across the water to the fields of Barnes on the other side. A large easel, Powerscourt noticed, contained a full-length portrait of a society beauty, almost finished, he suspected, except for some elaborate lacework on the cuffs.

The little man glowered at the portrait. ‘She’s been driving me mad all day, that woman.’ He walked right up to the canvas and stared moodily at where the lace should have been. ‘Progress, that’s what they keep telling us, progress. Bloody electricity coming in to light everything up. Bloody motor cars coming along to run us all over.’ Nathaniel Stone picked up a brush and began prodding uncertainly at his canvas. ‘Bloody telephones coming in so your creditors can harass you in your own home without ever leaving their bloody offices. Bloody cameras – all right, I know they’ve been around for a long time – but they’re getting better and better all the time. Won’t be any bloody portraits left for us painters at all, some bloody monkey with an expensive camera will take our trade away.’

The little man paused and peered at those elusive cuffs once more. Powerscourt was about to speak but he wasn’t quick enough.

‘Progress? What progress?’ Nathaniel Stone spat bitterly into his fire. A sudden hiss flared up, matching the temper of the owner. He pointed back to his easel. ‘Four hundred years ago, three hundred years ago, any fool with a brush could have painted that cuff. Last year I could have done it. The year before I could have done it. When I was twenty-one years old I could have done it with my eyes closed. Now I can’t do it at all. I’m not progressing. I’m not progressing at all. I’m going bloody backwards.’

Powerscourt wasn’t sure how much this bravura display was genuine and how much was for effect. ‘Mr Stone,’ he said firmly, ‘you underestimate yourself, you really do. The reputation of Mr Nathaniel Stone in London’s artistic circles would not be what it is today if you were a man going backwards.’ Powerscourt would have had to admit that his knowledge of the Stone reputation was small, if not non-existent, but wounded artistic egos must be salved somehow. ‘I am sure it is the bill that is responsible,’ he went on. ‘Bills have a habit of being extremely disagreeable. They put a man off his stroke or his brush. They occupy the brain so it cannot issue proper instructions.’

Out of the corner of his eye Powerscourt saw Edward making discreet signs at him. Edward’s right thumb was moving rhythmically down into the palm of his left hand. The gesture was repeated over and over again. What on earth was Edward trying to tell him? Powerscourt saw that Nathaniel Stone was limbering up for another broadside of oaths. Suddenly he got the message. Edward was counting banknotes.

‘However, Mr Stone,’ he continued, ‘if it would help with the disagreeable bill, we could make a preliminary payment on Mr Dauntsey’s portrait.’ Powerscourt began rummaging about in his wallet. ‘Should we say thirty pounds, Mr Stone? Perhaps that would help?’

Stone looked at the notes greedily, like a man who finds the oasis after long days wandering in the desert. Powerscourt wondered what happened to the money. The man must be well paid and his portraits were excellent. Perhaps there was a Mrs Stone and a battalion of little Stones to feed. Maybe there was more than one Mrs Stone.

The painter stuffed the notes into his back pocket. They didn’t seem to have improved his temper very much. He swore violently as he lifted the society lady off her easel. ‘Bloody cuffs,’ he said bitterly, ‘bloody lace, why didn’t I make the bloody woman wear those very long gloves? Even I can manage gloves these days.’ He began heaving the painting towards the door. ‘Be back in a minute. Bringing your Mr Dauntsey for you to have a look at.’

Powerscourt and Edward smiled to each other. Then there was a great bang from next door. ‘My God,’ they heard Stone say, ‘the Hungarian Ambassador! In his Robes of State! With that damned Transylvanian fur! He was meant to be finished three months ago!’ Then a thin scraping sound as if something was being pulled across the floor. ‘Christ!’ There was real pain in the voice now. ‘The bloody Bishop of Rochester! Four months late and I never got that bishop’s crook right!’

The back room seemed to be a treasure house of unfinished masterpieces. Maybe he was like Leonardo, Powerscourt reflected. The man seemed to be constitutionally incapable of finishing a picture.

‘No, please God, no.’ Stone’s voice had turned into a high-pitched wail now. ‘The Cabinet Minister’s wife! That’s so far back I can’t remember the woman’s name!’

A loud crash followed as if a group of paintings had all fallen forward on to the floor. ‘Where’s that bloody lawyer gone? Who’s this? Oh, my God, it’s the Great Conductor! I should never have tried him with that baton, it was never going to work. And who are you, for heaven’s sake?’ Again they heard the scraping sound as if a canvas was being pulled along the floor. ‘You’re not, my God, you’re not. You can’t be. You can. You are. You damned well are. In Christ’s name, you are the bloody Governor of the Bank of England, due for delivery, it says here on the back, eight months ago.’

There was another loud bang. Powerscourt was to say afterwards that it was yet another canvas falling over. Edward maintained that Nathaniel Stone had kicked the wall very hard. The complaints went on.

‘You’re not a damned lawyer, you’re the Editor of The Times, for God’s sake. When were you due to be delivered? Six weeks ago. They might forgive me that. And you? Are you Dauntsey? No, you are not. You are some miserable banking person, meant to be handed over last October. Oh my God!’

Powerscourt suddenly remembered that his sister had commissioned a portrait of her husband, the distinguished banker William Burke, but he had no recollection of seeing it on the Burke walls. Perhaps it was still here. Perhaps he could ask the little man about it. Another wail came from next door.

‘How could I! One of the very few people I’ve painted I really liked! You wouldn’t expect me to like the bloody King’s Private Secretary, but I did. And he’s still here! Five months late! All because of that monocle! I should never have tried it! And here’s some bloody General with huge moustaches. Who the hell are you? I don’t bloody know. Here’s Dauntsey. Thank God for that.’

Muttering under his breath, Stone returned and placed Dauntsey on the easel. Edward was astonished. ‘Brilliant, Mr Stone,’ he said, ‘absolutely brilliant. It’s a perfect likeness. I can’t tell you how lifelike it is.’

Nathaniel Stone had painted Dauntsey in some great room with a grey wall, a pillar behind him and wooden boards at his feet. He was wearing a light grey suit with a cream shirt. The red bencher’s robes sat comfortably on his shoulders. Powerscourt saw that he had light brown hair, thinning slightly at the temples, a high forehead, a Roman nose and eyes of light blue. In his left hand he was holding a number of briefs, the fingers long and slender. His expression was serious but there was a very faint hint of a smile. Surely this was a man, Powerscourt thought, you could imagine walking the great park with its deer at Calne or playing cricket on his very own pitch in the hot and dreamy days of summer. Above all, he reflected, Stone had made him impressive, a man to be reckoned with. Powerscourt thought he would have liked him if he had met him alive.

‘Tell me, Mr Stone,’ said Powerscourt, ‘what did you make of Mr Dauntsey? Did you like him? You must have spent a fair amount of time with him at the sittings.’

‘It’s a very strange thing,’ said Stone, shaking his head, ‘how people behave when they’re sitting for a portrait. It can take up to ten hours, five two-hour sessions, if things aren’t going well. Some of them tell you their life story, they really do. I had a man last year, peer of the realm, no less, and he spent the entire ten hours complaining about his wife. You’d think he might take a break now and then, but no, on and on he went. Last month I had a woman who complained about her daughter all the time. Envy possibly. But Mr Dauntsey was different. He didn’t treat me as his father confessor. He was very polite, very considerate, asking if he was sitting the right way. Quite unusual, that, he treated me as an equal, not some hired hand.’

‘Did he mention Queen’s Inn at all?’ asked Powerscourt.

Stone looked at the Dauntsey in oil in front of him. ‘I don’t think he did,’ he said, scratching his head. ‘Hold on, he did say one thing, but I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time. It was something about very strange things going on there. He didn’t say any more than that.’

‘He didn’t give any detail about the strange goings on?’

The painter thought for a moment. ‘No, he didn’t,’ he said finally, ‘he said it quite quietly, almost as if he was talking to himself.’

‘Anyway, it’s a very fine painting. You must be very pleased with it, Mr Stone,’ said Powerscourt tactfully.

There was a sort of low muttering from the man in the apron. ‘Fools they send me! Fools! Blind people despatched to look at pictures, my pictures! God help us all!’

Stone subsided into a battered chair to the left of his easel and glowered at them. Powerscourt suddenly realized what the trouble might be. The man might be a perfectionist. Plenty of people of his acquaintance wanted things, their clothes, their lawns, their horses, their women, to be as near perfect as possible, but knew that they were never going to reach one hundred per cent success. But a few, an unlucky few, were destined to be dissatisfied with anything less than perfection. One of Lady Lucy’s elderly relations was so obsessed with the perfection of tidiness in her home, as Lady Lucy called it, that she practically had a fit if you moved an ashtray two inches to the left. And for a painter it might be much worse. A section of Transylvanian fur, a conductor’s baton, a courtier’s monocle might reduce a man to despair. Powerscourt felt rather sorry for Nathaniel Stone.

‘It’s the bloody shoes, for God’s sake.’ Stone was speaking quietly now as if the long encounter with the unfinished works had exhausted him. Powerscourt and Edward peered closely at the shoes. Black. Leather. Highly polished. Expensive. New. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with them at all.

‘Can’t you see, Pursecourt or whatever your name is, that the shoes are all wrong?’

Powerscourt couldn’t see it at all. Stone leapt out of his chair. Some of the earlier vigour and all of the earlier bad temper seemed to be returning.

‘A child of three, for God’s sake, could tell you that the light in the painting is coming from the right of the sitter. There’s even a bloody great shadow behind him so the morons of Queen’s Inn could tell where it was coming from if they put their minds to it.’ Now he pointed dramatically at the two shoes. ‘The direction of the light means that the left-hand shoe should be in the light and the right-hand one in shadow. And what have I done, fool that I am? They’re the other way round, for Christ’s sake. I’ve tried three times to fix it and everything just gets worse.’

‘Mr Stone,’ said Powerscourt firmly, ‘I have absolutely no doubt that the benchers and the barristers of Queen’s Inn will be happy with your splendid painting just as it is.’ Little bit of pomposity might not go amiss, Powerscourt said to himself. ‘I go further. Speaking on their behalf, and as your patron as it were on this occasion, I forbid you to attempt to change the shoes. I shall arrange the transport of the painting from here to the Inn tomorrow and the completion of the payment of your fee. And soon there will be another commission. As I said when we arrived, Alexander Dauntsey is dead. A new bencher will be chosen to replace him after a decent interval. A new portrait will be required. I cannot speak for my colleagues but I am sure it is more than likely you will be asked to carry out the work.’

The mention of death seemed to subdue Nathaniel Stone. ‘How did he die?’ he asked very quietly. ‘He was here in this room only two weeks ago.’

‘He was murdered,’ said Powerscourt, rising to take his leave.

The red-headed man saw them out, down his creaking stairs. Even as the door closed behind them they could hear him muttering, ‘Murdered, murdered, murdered,’ over and over again.

‘Wish we could have seen them,’ said Edward, walking briskly beside the Thames on their way back to the underground railway.

‘Seen what?’ said Powerscourt, trying to populate Calne with various versions of Dauntsey, Dauntsey taking his dinner in the great dining room, Dauntsey walking through his estate, Dauntsey relaxing at his billiard table or looking at his paintings after supper.

‘Those other paintings,’ said Edward. ‘The Hungarian Ambassador. The Private Secretary. The Governor of the Bank of England. I bet they were all very good. Like our Mr Dauntsey.’

But as they reached Queen’s Inn, they could tell that something was wrong. Groups of porters were inspecting every staircase. Powerscourt thought he could see Chief Inspector Beecham and a couple of his men on the roof. The Head Porter told them what had happened in the middle of the great court.

‘It’s Mr Woodford Stewart, sir. He’s disappeared. We know he meant to leave early today, sir. He mentioned it to two people in his chambers and to his clerk. He meant to leave by two at the latest. It’s now five o’clock. He’s not at home, sir. We spoke to his wife by the telephone. His coat and his papers that he would take away with him are still here, sir.’

‘When was he last seen?’ asked Powerscourt, as two of Beecham’s policemen slipped into the staircase behind him and marched up the stairs.

‘Midday, sir. Said he was going to a meeting. Didn’t say who with. That’s five hours he’s been gone. There’s plenty round here say he’s the next in line.’

‘Next in line for what?’ asked Powerscourt, wondering if this was some strange legal term he did not know.

‘Next in line after Mr Dauntsey, sir. Next in line for murder.’