Death Called to the Bar lfp-5

by David Dickinson

  There was a low muttering from the public gallery. Powerscourt heard Sarah muttering ‘Disgraceful’ to herself several times. Her hand was still locked in his own. But Edward didn’t seem very concerned.

  ‘We shall have to take your word for it, sir, that these monies went to the intermediaries, not to line the pockets of yourself and your colleagues. I come now to an entry on the next page. Halfway down under the heading Property there is an entry of two hundred and fifty thousand pounds credit.’ He turned again. ‘I would remind you, gentlemen of the jury, that it is this holding which puts the company into profit and enables it to pay its enormous dividend. Perhaps you could tell the court, sir, what and where these various properties were?’

  Jeremiah looked flustered. ‘I cannot remember, sonny,’ he said finally, ‘any more than you can remember what toys you had at the same time when you were seven years old.’

  ‘I would suggest you try again, Mr P-Puncknowle,’ said Edward in a calm yet firm voice. ‘After all, you have had six or seven years yourself to prepare your defence against these charges.’

  There was laughter from the public gallery and a low cheer from Edward’s supporters’ club, the clerk looking as though the horse lately at the back of the field, once in danger of falling down completely, was now moving cleanly through the other runners and might even be first to the winning post. There was a lowish rumble that might or might not be a throat being cleared from the judge.

  This time there was no answer from Puncknowle. Not bad, Powerscourt thought to himself, reducing a figure of this stature to silence at Edward’s age. Perhaps they were witnessing a historic moment that would be talked about in hushed tones for years to come, like Shakespeare’s first play or Gladstone’s maiden speech.

  ‘I put it to you, Mr P-Puncknowle, that it is much better for you to have forgotten the details of those properties. And since you have no recollection of them, I will tell the members of the jury what was going on.’ Edward looked down at his notes once more and faced the jury. ‘What we have here,’ he went on, ‘is essentially a conjuring trick. The p-p-property concerned was a group of hotels in London which were initially p-purchased by another of Mr P-Puncknowle’s companies, the Barnsley Development Corporation, for forty thousand pounds. Then they were sold on to another company owned by Mr Puncknowle for one hundred and twenty thousand pounds. I should add that no substantial improvements were made to the hotels between the two purchases. Nor were there any improvements made before the final sale to the Puncknowle Property Company for two hundred and fifty thousand pounds. We have been unable to find any traces of payment. The whole exercise was designed to increase the apparent assets of the Puncknowle company to the point where it could appear solvent. Without this sum, which existed only on paper, the company would have been bankrupt.’

  Mr Puncknowle was on the verge of losing his temper. ‘Stuff and nonsense, sonny! Stuff and nonsense! Fairy stories, that’s what he’s telling you, members of the jury, he’s still of an age when fairy stories are all he can understand.’

  Edward had had enough. ‘I would remind you, Mr Puncknowle,’ – the age difference between the two must have been nearly forty years – ‘of the conventions concerning the behaviour of defendants and witnesses towards the barristers appearing before them in court. Any more insults from you and I shall have to ask the judge to arraign you for contempt.’

  There was a smattering of applause from the public gallery. Mr Justice Webster glowered fiercely at the spectators and the noise fell away. Jeremiah Puncknowle looked down at his boots. A smile flickered across the normally sphinx-like features of Sir Isaac Redhead. Charles Augustus Pugh slapped his thigh. Sarah squeezed Powerscourt’s hand even tighter. Edward looked at his watch. He was extraordinarily tired.

  ‘If I could make a suggestion, my lord,’ Edward was addressing Mr Justice Webster directly now, ‘the next area of cross-examination has to do with the dividend payments, my lord, a complicated matter, needing considerable exposition. It could take well over an hour. I have no doubt that the jury are perfectly capable of holding half of the matter in their heads overnight, but I would feel I had performed my service to the Crown with more clarity if we could handle the question all together.’

  He’s saying the jury are too stupid to take it in two halves, Powerscourt said to himself. He felt the pressure of Sarah’s hand beginning to abate.

  ‘Sir Isaac, do you have a problem with this suggestion?’ said the judge.

  ‘No, my lord, we are in agreement with it.’

  And so Mr Justice Webster ended Edward’s first day in court as a speaking barrister. Both Sir Isaac and Charles Augustus Pugh congratulated him on his debut. Edward watched in a daze as the spectators and the barristers and the instructing solicitors left the court. Powerscourt hastened off to Queen’s Inn to a meeting with Detective Chief Inspector Beecham. Eventually only Edward and Sarah were left.

  ‘Edward,’ said Sarah, ‘I am so proud of you. You were wonderful.’

  Edward’s reply was to hold her very tight and kiss her passionately on the lips. He had had enough of words for one afternoon.

  In the middle of the embrace Edward heard a door opening. The judge had forgotten some of his papers. Edward and Sarah disengaged themselves as fast as they could. Edward looked anxiously at Mr Justice Webster. He seemed to be staring at Sarah with some interest. Was there some terrible penalty, Edward wondered, for being caught kissing your beloved right under the judge’s chair in a Court of the Queen’s Bench?

  ‘Objection, my lord?’ Edward asked in a quizzical voice.

  The judge smiled at the two of them. It was, though they did not know it, the smile of a grandfather looking at his favourite granddaughter, rather than the smile of a High Court judge.

  ‘Objection overruled, Edward. Carry on.’

  The judge shuffled off back to his quarters. As the door closed behind him they heard the faint echo of a judicial chuckle echoing down the corridors of the Royal Courts of Justice.

  12

  Spring seemed to have turned back to winter as Powerscourt’s cab took him on the short journey from railway station to house at Calne. Sheets of rain were pounding on the vehicle’s roof and the wheels were throwing up jets of spray as they raced through the wide puddles that formed on the narrow road. The sky was dark and angry. The deer in the park had become invisible, huddling beneath the trees or trying to take shelter behind one of the great stone walls that enclosed the house and inner estate.

  Mrs Dauntsey’s enormous butler ushered him into the drawing room. His mistress, still looking radiant in black, was sitting peacefully by the fire reading a novel. Powerscourt felt nervous as the pleasantries were exchanged. This was the third time he had been entertained in this house and, while the nature of his mission was not as delicate this time as it had been on his previous visit, it was still fraught with great potential for embarrassment. What if his theory about the mysterious visitor was wrong? Suddenly what had seemed so certain in Manchester Square seemed vaguer, less likely in this drawing room in Calne.

  ‘Mrs Dauntsey,’ he began, ‘yet again you have in front of you a man with a delicate subject to discuss. I must ask your forgiveness in advance if my theories turn out to be wrong.’

  ‘Have you come with some more fairy stories, Lord Powerscourt? I did enjoy the last one, most of the time. I was never sure about the end. Endings can be quite difficult in fairy stories, don’t you think?’

  ‘They can indeed, Mrs Dauntsey,’ Powerscourt smiled at his hostess, ‘but I’m afraid there is no fairy story this time.’

  ‘Perhaps there will be a surprise instead, Lord Powerscourt. Please carry on.’

  Powerscourt took a deep breath. ‘I do not know if you are aware of it, Mrs Dauntsey, but on the day of the feast there was a mysterious visitor to Queen’s Inn. Every single member of the institution and everybody who attended the feast was questioned about who or what they had seen by the police.’

  Powe
rscourt suddenly remembered that he had not mentioned his theory about the mysterious visitor to Detective Chief Inspector Beecham. Maybe he was failing in his duty. But he felt that if the police knew Mrs Dauntsey had been in her husband’s room a few hours before he died, she would be arrested immediately.

  ‘Little is known about the visitor. The person did not speak. They were seen in the vicinity of your husband’s rooms and they were seen again leaving the Inn by one of the porters where they did not say goodnight.’

  He looked at her very carefully. There were no signs of nervousness at all. Maybe she was just a very good actress.

  ‘It only occurred to me very recently, Mrs Dauntsey, that the reason the mysterious visitor did not speak was related to gender. To speak would be to betray the fact that the visitor was female, not male. This was Viola turned into Cesario, come not to the Middle Temple Hall on Twelfth Night, but to Queen’s Inn on the day of the feast. I put it to you, Mrs Dauntsey, as the barristers say, that you were the mysterious visitor, that you walked into Queen’s Inn dressed as a man and that you visited your husband in his rooms. Am I right?’

  Mrs Dauntsey remained silent for some moments. Powerscourt though he could see tears forming in her eyes. But she brushed them aside.

  ‘Yes,’ she said very quietly, ‘it was me.’ There was another period of silence.

  ‘Mrs Dauntsey,’ Powerscourt said, trying to be as emollient as he could, ‘I think it would be best if you told me the truth, all of it. I do not believe you poisoned your husband,’ – Are you sure about that, a small inner voice asked him insistently – ‘but I think your position is difficult. Had you owned up to being the mysterious visitor, or told us that you went to see your husband on that day, your position would still be problematic, but not as awkward as it is now. You see, the police do not know that you were the mysterious visitor. They have very suspicious minds. The fact that you have concealed this information up till now will leave them thinking you have something to hide. They may assume that you were the murderer. Juries have been known to convict on flimsier evidence than that, I assure you.’

  Elizabeth Dauntsey rose from her chair and went to stand by the window. Even in her hour of difficulty her back was as straight as a soldier on parade. The rain was still falling, racing down the glass and dropping with a plop on the gravel beneath. One or two deer could be seen in the distance running quite fast from one place of shelter to another.

  ‘I wish I could make up fairy stories like you, Lord Powerscourt. Maybe that would make life easier.’

  ‘Take your time, Mrs Dauntsey, there’s no rush.’

  She came back to her chair and looked into the fire for a while. ‘It all has to do with children,’ she said finally, ‘with Alex’s wish to have descendants for Calne and with my inability to give them to him. I’m sure he wouldn’t have married me if he’d known I was barren.’

  A small trickle of tears broke through her defences and ran slowly down her cheeks. Powerscourt offered a handkerchief. ‘Why do men always have clean handkerchiefs, Lord Powerscourt? It’s always been a mystery to me that they’re never dirty.’ Elizabeth Dauntsey just managed a slight smile.

  ‘We’d reached the end of the road as far as my having children was concerned, Alex and I,’ she went on. ‘As you know from your last visit, we, or rather I, had tried everything possible to become pregnant. That wasn’t going to work. So Alex was going to try and find somebody else.’

  This somebody, Powerscourt reflected, had managed to pass completely undetected through the filter of Lucy’s relations. This was most irregular. He waited.

  ‘About two months ago . . .’ Elizabeth Dauntsey paused and stared into the flames once more. ‘I’m sorry, Lord Powerscourt, I haven’t told this to anybody before, about two months ago, maybe more, Alex thought he had found somebody. She was a young woman in good health, she was married to a much older man, she had no children of her own and her brother played cricket for Middlesex. I’m sure that last fact must have been an important factor in Alex’s calculations.’

  For the first time Powerscourt thought he detected a hint of sarcasm, dislike maybe, towards her late husband. He wondered about the different Elizabeth Dauntseys presented to him each time he came, as if she was like one of those Russian dolls with different characters packed inside each other.

  ‘We talked about it a lot,’ Elizabeth Dauntsey went on. ‘Alex kept me informed about what was going on, not in detail, just the broad picture. And then, the night before he died, Alex and I had the most enormous row.’

  Powerscourt dreaded to think what the police might make of that.

  ‘We hardly ever rowed, Lord Powerscourt. And this one went on for a very long time. You see, Alex had arranged to go away for the weekend with this woman. As far as I know, it would have been the first time. They were going as husband and wife to some hotel on the Thames where Alex knew the owner so there wouldn’t be any questions asked. Her husband was going to be away at a medical conference.’

  ‘Is he a doctor?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘Yes, he is. He’s a Professor of something or other medical, I can’t remember what. That’s what the row was about, not about the husband, but about Alex going away with this woman. I knew why Alex was doing it. Part of me approved of it. But the other part of me couldn’t bear it. I shouted at him over and over again that he was betraying me, that he would destroy our marriage, that it would break my heart. The worst thing was that he never spoke. He hardly said a word, this man who earned his living by speaking and arguing in the courts of law. When we stopped rowing he went off to sleep in some other part of the house and he left very early the next morning. So if I hadn’t gone to see him that afternoon, I would never have seen him alive again. I had to tell him, you see,’ her voice began to crack slightly, ‘that I still loved him, that he had my blessing for the weekend, that he was to ignore anything I said the night before. I wanted everything right between us. I couldn’t bear it when he was angry with me.’

  She stared at Powerscourt as if he could make things better.

  ‘But why did you go in disguise? You didn’t have to do that, surely?’ Powerscourt spoke very softly.

  ‘You’ll think me very silly,’ she said, ‘but I thought one or two of his work colleagues must have known about the other woman, had probably met her. Once anybody in that place knew anything the gossip went round the entire Inn faster than a Derby winner. They would all have known that the two of them were going away for the weekend. You know how men like to speculate about successes with women. I couldn’t face the embarrassment. I couldn’t have borne it. So I adapted some of Alex’s old clothes and went as a man. Even then I was terrified somebody might speak to me. I was completely exhausted when I got back here.’

  Powerscourt wondered yet again if Elizabeth Dauntsey was a tragic figure or a murderer. He couldn’t tell.

  ‘Did you meet anybody when you were in your husband’s chambers? Anybody at all?’

  ‘Not a soul,’ replied Elizabeth Dauntsey.

  ‘Was he drinking anything while you were with him? It must have been about a quarter to six.’ Powerscourt could see, very faintly in his mind, the shadow of the gallows.

  ‘He was drinking Chateauneuf-du-Pape,’ Elizabeth Dauntsey had gone pale, ‘the stuff they were going to have later at the feast.’ Only Alex Dauntsey never got that far, Powerscourt said to himself, the strychnine got to him first. The poison concealed, perhaps, behind the strong taste of the red wine.

  ‘And did you put a drop of poison in his drink when you were there, Mrs Dauntsey?’

  There was a slight pause, whether through guilt or insult Powerscourt could not decide.

  ‘I did not.’ He couldn’t decide if she was telling the truth. He thought she probably was.

  Now it was Powerscourt’s turn to walk to the window. A jury, he thought, could well convict on what he had heard this afternoon. The rain had stopped. Spring sunshine was beginning to dry the park out. The deer
had abandoned their hiding places and were gambolling about on the grass.

  ‘I have to ask you this question, Mrs Dauntsey. I seem to need a sentence of permanent apology virtually every time I speak in this house. What were you all going to do if the woman became pregnant?’ Don’t even think of asking the really nasty question today, he said to himself – what happens if it’s a girl. ‘To put it at its crudest, did you think he was going to divorce you?’

  ‘No,’ said Elizabeth Dauntsey firmly, ‘I don’t believe he was. Alex said the woman’s husband wasn’t going to live very long.’

  ‘Was the man ill? Did he have some terminal illness?’

  ‘I don’t know, Lord Powerscourt, Alex didn’t say.’

  Christ in heaven, Powerscourt said to himself. Maybe other murders were contemplated, Alexander Dauntsey and his mistress plotting to push an old man down the stairs or shove him under the wheels of a train.

  ‘Did Alex have a time scale, Mrs Dauntsey? Did he think the doctor would have departed in six months, nine months maybe?’

  ‘He didn’t say.’

  ‘Let’s play make believe, Mrs Dauntsey. Not quite a fairy story, more of a let’s suppose. Would you be agreeable to that?’

  ‘Of course, Lord Powerscourt. I’m only trying to help you.’

  ‘I know you are. Now then, let’s suppose that in a couple of months’ time the young woman becomes pregnant. The husband dies, conveniently, well before the child is due. Then she gives birth, let us say to a son. How, if Alex is still married to you, would he get his hands on the child? The two of them can hardly come and live here. Perhaps the young woman would be happy to give up the child for Alex to bring up here with you. It’s all frightfully complicated.’

  Elizabeth Dauntsey looked at the ring on her wedding finger. ‘Alex said he would work something out, that we had to take one step at a time. He was always an impulsive sort of thinker.’