Death Called to the Bar

by David Dickinson

  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.

  7

  Robert Woodford Stewart went missing on Wednesday afternoon. They didn’t find his body until the Monday morning. It was discovered under a pile of masonry rubble, covered with a black tarpaulin, at the side of the Temple Church, the chapel and spiritual home of the Inner and Middle Temples, next to Queen’s Inn. Restoration work was being carried out in the nave, and when another wheelbarrow of rubble was carried out to the pile outside the church, Stewart’s body was found at th
e top of it.

  ‘Shot,’ said Chief Inspector Beecham to Powerscourt later that morning. ‘Shot twice in the chest. First one enough to kill him, I would have thought. Maybe the murderer wanted to make sure.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you have any idea yet as to when he was killed, Chief Inspector?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘Not yet, my lord. We should know later in the day.’

  There was a knock on the door of Dauntsey’s old room where Powerscourt had established a temporary command post and a porter brought an envelope addressed to him.

  ‘Damn,’ said Powerscourt, reading the note very quickly. ‘I’ve got to go and see that bloody man Somerville. I notice you’re not included in the invitation, Chief Inspector. Does that mean that he doesn’t know you’re here, or that he doesn’t want to see you?’

  Beecham laughed. ‘He doesn’t want to see me ever again. He tried to get me moved off the case, you know. Letters to the Commissioner. One or two of the people here who are judges, they all made representations.’

  ‘What did the Commissioner say?’ said Powerscourt, curious to see how Somerville had been beaten off.

  ‘He said that he had no intention of telling the judiciary which judges should preside over their various trials and he would be obliged if they would leave him the same freedom in appointing detectives to murder cases.’

  ‘One thing before I go, Chief Inspector,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Was Stewart a big man, heavy, difficult to lift, would you say?’

  ‘No, he was slight, fairly easy to pick up and carry about the place if you’ll forgive my language. There’s just one thing that worries me about these murders, Lord Powerscourt.’

  Powerscourt stayed where he was. Somerville could wait. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Well . . .’ The Chief Inspector spoke slowly, as if he wasn’t sure of his facts. ‘Murder Number One, poison in the beetroot. Murder Number Two, shot through the chest. If it was the same man, why did he not use the same technique? Most murderers do. And there’s a theory, although I’m not sure I believe it, that poison is likely to be a woman’s choice of murder weapon, and guns a man’s.’

  ‘You don’t think, Chief Inspector,’ Powerscourt was on his feet now and heading for the door, ‘that there are two separate killers at work here?’

  ‘I just don’t know. Do you think it’s one killer or two?’

  ‘One,’ said Powerscourt with more certainty than he actually possessed. ‘The chances of two killers operating in one small community like this must be very very small. I should be most surprised if there were two murderers at work here.’

  Barton Somerville was not at his enormous desk when Powerscourt arrived in his chambers on the first floor of Fountain Court. Powerscourt had been delighted to hear that his practice at the Bar was not doing well, that his self-importance and pomposity now annoyed some of the judges so much that the instructing solicitors were deserting him, fearful that their clients would lose their cases because of their barrister’s bombast.

  ‘Morning, Powerscourt.’ He dragged himself away from his tall window with the perfect sashes and withdrew to the fortified position that was his desk. ‘What do you have to report?’

  Powerscourt felt he had been summoned to his housemaster in a dispute over late arrival of homework, previous negotiations over its delivery having broken down.

  ‘Before I bring you up to date, may I inquire if you have heard about Mr Stewart?’

  ‘Woodford Stewart or Lawrence Stewart? We have two. I’m surprised you haven’t noticed that in the time you’ve been here.’

  ‘Mr Woodford Stewart. He’s been shot dead. His body was found by the Temple Church this morning. We won’t know any more, time of death and so on, until the doctors have had a look at him.’

  Barton Somerville stared at Powerscourt for what seemed over a minute. ‘I hold you personally responsible for this latest death, Powerscourt. If you’d been doing your job properly, the murderer would have been unmasked by now and locked up. As it is, he’s still wandering around picking off his victims. And might I remind you, in this Inn and particularly in these rooms, you call me Treasurer. Now, what do you have to report?’

  Powerscourt stared at the ceiling. He had an intense dislike of telling his clients anything at all while an investigation was in progress. So often his final conclusions were the direct opposite of what he had suspected at the beginning. And Somerville was certainly a suspect, though why the Treasurer of an Inn like Queen’s should want to go about killing off his own members Powerscourt, for the moment, could not imagine. But if Dauntsey had not been poisoned at the feast, that left only two locations where the crime could have been committed, either in his own chambers, or at the drinks party before the feast, given here in this very room by none other than Somerville himself.

  ‘I don’t think it would be helpful for me to say anything at this stage,’ he said finally.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ boomed Somerville, his face growing red with fury. ‘Do you dare refuse to tell me what you have found out so far, I who brought you into this matter in the first place! It is monstrous!’

  ‘I don’t think it is monstrous, actually,’ said Powerscourt as reasonably as he could, and more determined than ever not to give anything away. ‘You see, in my experience, whatever people like myself think at this stage of the investigation is usually wrong. As things develop, our opinion changes.’

  ‘I presume,’ Somerville interrupted him quickly, possibly thinking he was back in court, ‘that by things developing, you mean more members of my Inn being killed off by your incompetence.’

  Powerscourt shrugged his shoulders, well aware that a policy of total calm would infuriate the Treasurer even more. ‘I’m sorry I can’t help you at this stage. When I have something definite to report I shall let you know.’ Powerscourt suddenly felt rather sorry for the pompous and unpleasant Somerville. If his practice was drying up, so must be his income. And if his income was drying up, the expenses of his position, which Powerscourt suspected must be considerable, must be growing harder to bear. And now these two murders, which would almost certainly be the permanent mark of his period in office. Somerville’s Treasurership, people would say in years to come, wasn’t that when those dreadful murders happened?

  ‘Powerscourt, Powerscourt,’ the voice was calmer now, ‘you had gone on a journey in your mind just now and seemed almost incapable of speech. I just hope you understand my position here.’ Somerville had removed his thick spectacles and was polishing them on a bright blue handkerchief. Maybe tentative peace overtures were being launched. ‘Every day I am asked for the latest news of Dauntsey’s murder. After this morning I shall be asked for news of two murders. It is difficult for me to say I know nothing at all. After all, the barristers say to me, we are employing this man Powerscourt to find out the truth. Why, they imply, have you nothing to tell us? Can you understand?’

  Powerscourt nodded. An uneasy truce seemed to have broken out over the battlefield, though Powerscourt suspected it would soon be broken by skirmishes elsewhere. ‘Of course I understand. I will do what I can.’

  Five minutes later he was at the side of the Temple Church where the body of Woodford Stewart had been found. One of Beecham’s sergeants, a man who looked old enough to be the Chief Inspector’s father, if not his grandfather, greeted him solemnly.

  ‘He wasn’t killed here, the poor man,’ he said slowly. ‘There’s marks where his body was dragged along the ground. We couldn’t work out what they were at first, these marks, until one of the constables remembered pulling a colleague out of a fight in Stoke Newington. Looks like he may have come from a room somewhere in the Inner Temple, or even from Queen’s itself, my lord. Frightful business.’

  Powerscourt was surprised that the sergeant was still capable of such sympathy for the dead. Most of the Metropolitan policemen he had known had formed a thick carapace against terrible sights by the time they were thirty, if not before. It was as if that was the only way
they could cope with the bloody remains of London’s citizens, wounded in gang fights in the East End, London’s suicides pulled out of the River Thames or lying in bloody fragments behind the wheels of the Tube trains, London’s murdered dead who might turn up anywhere from Whitechapel to the Temple Church in the Strand.

  Edward had begun to feel that the power of words had been replaced in his brain by the power of numbers. He had been working late for the past two days on the accounts of Jeremiah Puncknowle’s companies. All he could see in his mind this morning were these numbers forming and re-forming in front of him in strings and sequences and series, looping round each other, breeding somewhere in the basement of his brain and resurfacing again, numbers infinite, numbers serial, numbers prime, numbers eternal, numbers to do with money raised from flotation, numbers to do with money handed out in commission, numbers to do with money paid out in dividends, numbers to do with the difference between the first number and the second and third combined, numbers to do with the size and extent of the vanishing numbers, the ones that disappeared from the published accounts and must have ended up in the clutches of Jeremiah Puncknowle. But now he had had enough. He might, he felt, turn into an equation if he carried on or be carried out gibbering madly about prospectuses and interim reports. Only one thing had kept him sane in the midst of his mathematical Stations of the Cross. He was going to ask Sarah for another assignation. The destination had only occurred to him when he saw a poster that morning on the walls of Temple underground station.