Death Called to the Bar

by David Dickinson

  Truly, Powerscourt thought, this room with its great brown books and their baleful contents and those dreadful guardians, this is the kingdom of the dead. We, the living who pass through here, are mere wraiths, doomed to wander in the world of shadows outside from the Strand to Aldwych to Holborn trying to forget that our own futures too will one day end up down here or in the sister chamber that holds the wills of later years. Did these rich men – for on the whole, he thought, you would have to be rich to qualify for a place in these ledgers – know that one day, hundreds of years after they were gone, complete strangers would come and inspect their wills, in an act that amounted to posthumous financial rape? Would the same fate happen to Powerscourt in his turn?

  The names of former benchers fascinated him. James Herbert Pomeroy, passed away in the 1770s, left twenty pounds to his wife and a house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields to Queen’s Inn. Edward Madingley Chawleigh, died 1780, left fifty pounds for the maintenance and education of poor students ‘that the poor might be afforded the advantages vouchsafed to us by birth’. Was Josiah Sterndale Tarleton, passed away 1785, the father of the Colonel Banastre Tarleton, painted with such verve and panache by Sir Joshua Reynolds? Tarleton had been engaged in the American War of Independence. Powerscourt could see the painting now, the young man in skin-tight white breeches and a green jacket studded with gold buttons, the smoke of a great explosion behind him and gathered around his person the varied accoutrements of war, a pair of horses, for the Colonel was of horse rather than foot, a mobile cannon and what may have been the colours of his company in deep red. Old Mr Tarleton had at least passed on before the disappointment of the loss of the American colonies his son had fought to keep. And then, Powerscourt remembered, this Colonel Banastre Tarleton had been the lover over many years of Perdita, one-time mistress of the Prince of Wales, still hanging on the walls of the Wallace Collection, painted by Gainsborough. Was Robert Fitzpaine Wilberforce, died 1792, the father or the uncle of the man who campaigned so effectively for the abolition of slavery?

  By the time he left for the day Powerscourt had entered details of over twenty wills in his thick red notebook, specially purchased for the occasion. After a while he found he was concentrating on transcribing the material as fast as possible with little attention to the content. But he had made, he thought, one significant discovery. Every single bencher so far had left some money or property or investment to Queen’s Inn. Powerscourt wondered if leaving money to the Inn in your will was a necessary part of becoming a bencher. He hoped that somewhere in William Burke’s vast range of acquaintance in the City of London there was a man who could compute how much two hundred pounds in 1800 was worth today and the likely value of property that seemed to be dotted like stardust round the lawyers’ quarters in a radius of three or four miles.

  Detective Chief Inspector Beecham was waiting for Powerscourt on his return to the Inn from Somerset House. He was exceedingly angry.

  ‘Bloody man,’ he said, slamming the fist of his right hand into the palm of his left, ‘the bloody man.’

  ‘Have you been talking to the benchers again, Chief Inspector? You know how that upsets you.’

  Beecham managed a laugh. ‘I have not been talking to any of those benchers. It’s the bloody man Newton, Porchester Newton.’

  ‘What about Newton? What’s he done to upset you?’

  ‘He’s come back, for a start,’ said Beecham. ‘And any sane person would have to put the wretch very high on his list of suspects. Huge row, as you know, with Dauntsey about that election. Dauntsey wins the election, Newton doesn’t, takes himself off in a huff after the wretched feast. He could easily have come back secretly to shoot Woodford Stewart and then disappeared again.’

  ‘Sorry, Chief Inspector,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I don’t follow you. What exactly is the latest problem with Newton?’

  ‘Sorry, my lord,’ said Beecham, running his hand through his hair, ‘he won’t speak.’

  ‘What do you mean, he won’t speak? Has he gone dumb or something?’

  ‘He won’t speak to me. He won’t answer any questions. He refuses to give an indication at all of his whereabouts on the day of the feast or any day since then. He has gone mute in this affair.’

  Powerscourt remembered an old judge telling him years before that if you were guilty on a major charge your best course was to say nothing at all. Any information you gave to the police led them somewhere else, then to more questions which brought more discoveries until you were thoroughly trapped.

  ‘That’s not very wise of him, surely?’ Powerscourt said.

  ‘It’s not,’ said the Chief Inspector. ‘And much bloody good it is going to do him. I’m going to put a team of my men on to his whereabouts since the Dauntsey murder full time. And if they find anything, however small, we’ll have him in and lock him up on a charge of obstruction. Maybe a night or two in the cells would restore his powers of speech.’

  Powerscourt wondered if he should volunteer to try his own, different, powers of persuasion to induce some speech out of Porchester Newton. But he didn’t want to offend the Chief Inspector. Before he had decided, Beecham was already there.

  ‘Why don’t you try, my lord? You get on better with those bloody benchers than I do. He might talk to you more easily than to me. After all, I don’t care how we get the information.’

  Three minutes later Powerscourt was knocking on the door of Newton’s rooms on the ground floor of the little Stone Court hidden away at the back of the Inn. Newton was an enormous man, well over six feet tall, going to fat about the face and stomach, florid of complexion and with rather brutal hands that looked to Powerscourt as though they should have belonged to a butcher rather than a barrister.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ Powerscourt began. Nobody could complain if you said good afternoon to them. ‘My name is Powerscourt. I have been asked by the benchers to investigate these murders. I wonder if you could spare me the time to answer some questions.’ Powerscourt was speaking in what he hoped was his most emollient voice. The reply was loud, virtually shouted.

  ‘No! Get out!’

  ‘Mr Newton, I am, I would humbly remind you, a man of some experience in murder investigations. It is my belief that refusal to answer questions makes people suspicious. It makes people, particularly policemen, think that the refusal is meant to conceal something. From there it is but a short step to the assumption that the person is refusing information about the murder. And from there it is only another short step to the assumption that the person refusing to speak may actually be the murderer. We are fortunate here that we have very intelligent policemen engaged on the case. I have known less intelligent policemen send those refusing to speak to court on the charge of murder because they thought silence denoted guilt. On one occasion it only transpired after the man had been sentenced, Mr Newton, that his silence had been to protect a woman. If she had not come forward, with all the shame and obloquy it brought her, the man would have been hanged. I ask you again. Could you spare me some time to answer a few questions?’

  The voice was even louder. ‘No! Get out!’

  Anybody listening might think, Powerscourt reflected, that the fellow doesn’t want to talk to me.

  ‘Let me make one last appeal, Mr Newton,’ Powerscourt suspected it was hopeless but was resolved on one last attempt. ‘Let me remind you of the difficulties your colleagues are facing each and every day these mysteries remain unsolved. There are policemen crawling all over the Inn. I haunt the place, asking uncomfortable questions from time to time. Nobody can be certain there will not be another murder, that they are not going to be the next victim. I am sure that some of the stenographers are contemplating leaving their employment here because of the uncertainty, not knowing if they will be poisoned as they eat their lunch or shot on their way to the underground railway station. I am sure you could help, Mr Newton. If your knowledge would advance the quest for the murderer, then surely it is your duty to talk to us.’

  Porches
ter Newton stood up. Powerscourt saw with some alarm that those butcher’s hands were rising to his waist as if preparing to wring something that might have been a pillow case or a human form.

  ‘No! Get out! One more word and I’ll throw you out!’

  Nobody could say, Powerscourt thought to himself as he made his way to confess his defeat to the Chief Inspector, that Porchester Newton had failed to make himself clear.

  ‘Is my hat straight?’ Sarah Henderson asked Edward the day after Powerscourt’s unsuccessful jousting with Porchester Newton.

  ‘Your hat is fine, Sarah,’ said Edward, thinking that she looked even more attractive in black. They were making the final adjustments to Sarah’s clothes in her attic office before proceeding to the memorial service for Alexander Dauntsey in the Temple Church. It was the custom in Queen’s Inn for all benchers not buried at the Temple Church to be given a sort of memorial service with addresses by their colleagues there within two months of their death. In less than a week, Sarah had reminded Edward gloomily that morning, they would be doing exactly the same thing for the unfortunate Woodford Stewart.

  The church was full, not only with Dauntsey’s colleagues from Queen’s, but with lawyers from the other Inns of Court, instructing solicitors, two men from the East End he had saved from the gallows who had come to pay their last respects, a couple of men from the City he had played cricket with, and members of various financial institutions he had represented with distinction. There was a sprinkling of women, some wives who had known him closely, some stenographers he had employed like Sarah. The benchers sat in splendid isolation in their allotted rows at the front. Mrs Dauntsey sat alone in the left-hand pew at the front. Porchester Newton was staring bitterly at the benchers from halfway down the nave. Edward and Sarah were squeezed in right at the back with a couple of criminals and a Chancery judge in full regalia who looked as though he might have adjourned his court to attend.

  Powerscourt was taking a special interest in the service. He had handed over the sum of five pounds to the Head Porter to be distributed among himself and his colleagues who were shepherding the guests into position in return for information relating to two particular questions. The first he regarded, at best, as a shot in the dark. Suppose Alexander Dauntsey had found a woman, a woman who might bear him a child to inherit the glory and the desolation that was Calne, would she appear at this memorial service? Surely she wouldn’t have gone to the funeral in the alien county of Kent. But might she just pop in here, maybe sometime before the service started, for a last encounter with the ghost of Dauntsey? Powerscourt had left instructions with his team that anybody unknown to them was to be asked to give their name and address. If questioned, they were to say it was for insertion in the record of the service that would appear in the respectable newspapers and for Queen’s own records. Nobody could refuse such a request, Powerscourt thought, though they might give a false name. Any Mrs Smiths, those regular visitors to the divorce courts, he would regard with extreme suspicion. And his second line of inquiry related to the mysterious visitor to Dauntsey’s chambers on the day of the feast. The porter who had seen this person had been told to brief all his colleagues on the appearance of the stranger. Powerscourt had offered a further reward of five pounds if anybody recognized this person again. Powerscourt had protected himself from false sightings by saying that this further instalment of cash would be handed over only when the visitor admitted his earlier trip to Queen’s on the day of Dauntsey’s death.

  The living of the Temple Church was in the gift of the Inner and Middle Temples. The elders of those Inns of Court, concerned that eloquence should be confined to the legal profession and not be displayed by what they regarded as the inferior body of the Church, usually picked somebody with a good speaking voice, audible at the back of the church, who gave very short and very undistinguished sermons. Even on Sundays, after all, lawyers were busy people. The present incumbent, one Wallace Thornaby, was a tall, balding man in his fifties who had learned long ago, at the start of his ministry in the Temples, that it was never a good idea to argue with the lawyers.

  As the Reverend Thornaby made his way up the nave behind his choir, Powerscourt saw that it was going to be standing room only in the Round Church at the end. People were going to be packed in there as though they were at a football match. Maybe there would be an overflow congregation outside, close, he suddenly remembered with a shudder, to the spot where the body of the other dead lawyer Woodford Stewart had been found.

  The priest began by leading his congregation through the Lord’s Prayer and the Collect of the Day. He recited the bare facts of Dauntsey’s career and introduced the first speaker, a lawyer from Gray’s Inn who had worked on numerous cases with the dead man. Much of this was technical stuff about Chancery and the Queen’s Bench Division and the Court of Appeal, and Powerscourt’s brain drifted off. Who had killed Alexander Dauntsey? Porchester Newton, in a fit of pique after he lost the election to bencher? Some old criminal whose conviction and imprisonment he had secured? Had he made some startling discoveries about the monies of Queen’s Inn? From the little he knew so far Powerscourt doubted that. And what of the mysterious Maxfield, still undiscovered, still with twenty thousand pounds waiting for him in the vaults of Plunkett Marlowe and Plunkett? Did Mrs Dauntsey know more than she was saying? Behind that beautiful and haughty reserve was she hiding some information vital to his inquiry?

  With a start he realized that the man from Gray’s Inn had departed and the congregation had risen for a hymn. With a guilty grin he saw that even here the legal profession had made their mark.

  Day of dark and doom impending

  David’s word with Sibyl’s blending

  Heaven and earth in ashes ending!

  O, what fear man’s bosom rendeth,

  When from Heaven the Judge descendeth

  On whose sentence all dependeth!

  There was more, to Powerscourt’s delight, a verse later.

  Lo the book exactly worded

  Wherein all hath been recorded

  Thence shall judgement be awarded.

  When the Judge his seat attaineth,

  And each hidden deed arraigneth

  Nothing unavenged remaineth.

  From the Middle Temple and from Queen’s, from Gray’s Inn even unto Lincoln’s Inn Fields, yea, even from the Inner Temple, Powerscourt said to himself as another lawyer climbed into the pulpit to give his contribution, the judges shall come to pronounce not on the living in the dock before them, but on the dead in some celestial court, not on the crimes they may have committed on earth, but on their prospects for a place in Paradise. Maybe they would have new livery, fresh colours and fresh gowns, white possibly, to pass this eternal judgement. Powerscourt only sat up from his reverie when he realized that the man was talking not about the law but about cricket.

  ‘Many of you’ – the man was called Fraser and came from the Middle Temple, Edward told Powerscourt afterwards – ‘would have said that Dauntsey’s heart, the most important thing in his life, was his work here, in Queen’s Inn. I do not believe that to be the case. I would suggest the cricket pitch at Calne, or that extraordinary house that is Calne, or something indefinable that you might call the spirit of Calne had better claims on his heart. I am not sure how many of you have seen the vast interior of that house, room after room, hall after hall, gallery after gallery, boarded up, covered in dust sheets, protected from dry rot but very little else, an exquisite interior, probably one of the finest in England, merely holding time at bay and not showing off her glories to the world. Alex Dauntsey dreamed of restoring that house, of bringing it back to what his ancestors had made. His periods of depression were, he told me once, the greatest cross he had to bear for they ensured he would never be consistent and respected enough at the Bar to earn sufficient money for his task.’

  Mr Fraser paused and looked carefully at his audience. They were spellbound, even the eldest bencher of Queen’s, who was reputed to be ninet
y-six years old, hanging on his words.

  ‘And if the house was his dream unfulfilled, then the cricket pitch was where some of his dreams came true. Alex never played very well on away matches, he was, as he said to me in the slips once, only happy at home with his own deer watching over him. Even those of you who do not know much about cricket and cricketers will know that the tribe is divided, on the whole, into bowlers and batsmen. Bowlers are more prosaic, they are instruments of speed and cunning and attrition and, occasionally, guile. You do not imagine that bowlers would be poets or composers. Batsmen, on the other hand, can display grace and style and class that can take your breath away. Giorgione would have been a batsman if cricket had ever arrived in Cinquecento Venice. Keats, I am sure, would have been a batsman. He would have played some beautiful strokes and got out for a disappointing but exquisite thirty. Alex was a batsman. I once saw him score a hundred and fifty and then get himself out. He refused to let the scorer enter his total in his book, insisting his runs be attributed to someone else. ‘They were hopeless,’ he said to me, ‘unworthy opponents.’ On another occasion I saw him score twenty-five not out at Calne with the light fading and two of the fastest bowlers I have ever seen racing in to bowl at him like the Charge of the Light Brigade. ‘Best innings of my life,’ he said to me after that.