‘Do you think there is a connection with the murders, Lord Powerscourt?’
‘Not directly, no. But there is certainly something odd going on and I am most curious to find out what it is. Suppose Dauntsey discovers something strange is going on to do with the money. He tells his friend Stewart. Then he tries a bit of blackmail on Barton Somerville. Or maybe it’s the other way round. I just don’t know.’
‘So how do we find out what’s been happening?’
‘I have a proposition to put to you, Edward. I can’t say it is particularly glamorous or romantic but it could help a great deal.’
‘Anything at all, Lord Powerscourt.’
‘Before I outline the task ahead, Edward, let me explain what is going to happen to these wills.’ He popped a hand under his chair and brought out a bundle of papers, secured, Edward noticed, with legal string.
‘These wills are arranged, first of all, in time order. Then I have tabulated them into categories of payment, help for poor students, help for retired barristers, general discretion of the Inn, that sort of thing. I have put the date of each bequest in brackets before the money. Thank God there weren’t any more of these dead benchers, Edward, we’d have suffocated in paper. My brother-in-law, financial equivalent of W.G. Grace as I said before, is coming to collect them this evening and peruse them in his counting house tomorrow. But I know what he will want before he can come to any conclusion.’
Edward lifted a quizzical eyebrow.
‘Annual accounts or the equivalent, from last year or some other recent year. Now, listen carefully, Edward, and tell me where I go wrong in this description.’ Powerscourt paused. A prolonged wail of great unhappiness shot down the stairs, followed by a second, rather shorter protest.
‘I think she’s washing their hair,’ Powerscourt said, sounding as if he disapproved of the practice. ‘Anyway, there is a bencher in the Inn one of whose tasks is to look after the money but only, you might say, in a tactical sense. The strategic direction rests, as you might expect given his title, with the Treasurer. In symbolic recognition of which fact, the box files relating to the annual accounts are held in his outer office, guarded by that gorgonic female with the mousy grey hair and the long fingernails. I forget the bloody woman’s name.’
‘McKenna,’ said Edward, ‘Bridget McKenna.’
‘She would be called Bridget,’ said Powerscourt bitterly, who had a violent dislike of the name since hostile encounters with a very stupid parlourmaid called Bridget in his youth. ‘But she has the files all right. They stretch round behind her desk on shelves, two or three levels high, in black boxes with the dates of the accounts written on them. I know that, because I inspected them the first time I went to see Somerville and his gang. How am I doing, Edward?’
‘You’re doing fine,’ Edward smiled, suspecting he knew what was coming. ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘I want you to steal some of them,’ said Powerscourt. ‘As many as you can. Preferably tomorrow.’
‘I see,’ said Edward, and scratched his head.
‘Let me give you a suggestion as to the general method I would employ if it was me. I would do it, or Johnny Fitzgerald and I would do it, but I think you would have a better chance if you were caught. You could say you were doing it for a dare or a bet or some other foolish extravagance of youth. I have asked to see them, of course, I asked long ago and was told it was none of my business. I think we may need to involve Sarah, though I leave that to your discretion. There are two ways of approaching the files, what you might call theft or substitution. Theft is self-explanatory, you simply take them off the shelf and walk away. Substitution means that you bring with you a couple of identical files with the same dates as the ones you wish to purloin. You take one out and you pop the other one in. So, at a glance, nobody would know anything had gone. But it all depends on how and when they lock the door.’
There was a faraway look in Edward’s eyes as if he had left Manchester Square and had returned on a piratical mission to the courts and walks of Queen’s Inn.
‘I think it works like this, Lord Powerscourt,’ he said, speaking quite slowly as if his plan hadn’t finally been settled in his mind. ‘If they’re both out to lunch, they make sure the door is locked. Any major departures, they close up behind them. But on minor matters there must be times when it’s empty, even if only for a few minutes.’
‘Does the gorgonic female lock up when she goes to the bathroom, do you suppose?’
‘I don’t think she would, but that might only leave a very little time. How about this, Lord Powerscourt? Mr Kirk, the head of my chambers, has hurt his leg very badly. It’s true. He brought two sticks in with him today. So let’s say he appeals to Somerville to come and see him on some important matter, rather than him going through hell to reach the Treasurer’s quarters. Once he’s arrived, Sarah sets off for the gorgon’s lair, with a terribly sad story. Her typewriter has gone funny. The ribbon is wrapped round the cantilever or whatever the thing is called and can’t be cleared, so it’s now rather like a tangled fishing line. Sarah will know how to do that. The gorgon always prides herself on being Queen Bee or Head Girl to all these stenographers. So if Sarah makes it dramatic enough, wailing away about work that has to be finished by two o’clock that afternoon or whatever it might be, the gorgon will hurry out to help, and she hasn’t time to lock the door. Enter the Artful Dodger, me. I depart half a minute later. I like substitution better than theft, Lord Powerscourt. I think they shift about, those files, and throw up a lot of dust if they’re all moved three boxes to the left. It wouldn’t look right either. I think three is the most you could carry around Queen’s Inn. You see people walking about with one or two or three under their arm, very seldom any more.’
Powerscourt supposed Edward must have been exposed for some years now to the inner workings of the criminal mind. ‘Do you think Sarah will be able to carry it off, Edward?’
‘I’m sure she will, she’s female,’ said Edward delphically.
‘What’s that got to do with it?’ said Powerscourt.
‘I only meant, my lord, that women can always come over melodramatic when it suits them. Even Sarah,’ he added darkly.
‘When do you think you might be able to effect this piece of criminality, Edward?’
‘I shall have to talk to Sarah. I’m on my way to see her now, in fact. I shall let you know. It may be that the opportunity will simply present itself out of the blue. We shall trust in God and keep our powder dry.’
Powerscourt was escorting Edward towards the front door. At the top of the stairs they heard a firm cough behind them. It was Nurse Mary Muriel.
‘I know this is very unconventional, Lord Powerscourt, but I wondered if you would like to kiss the twins goodnight, you and your young friend.’ She smiled at Edward. ‘It’s not every day you’re here at this time, my lord.’
So Powerscourt and Edward had a double armful each, an armful of perfectly clean, sweet-smelling, sleepy-looking twin.
By half past nine William Burke had still not arrived in Manchester Square. Powerscourt imagined there must have been some frightful financial crisis at his bank in the City. Burke had told him of some of these perils once when they were all on holiday together in Antibes, terrifying stories of books that refused to balance even though the entries had been put in twice, of monies that seemed to be there in the morning, at least on paper, only for them to have disappeared by the evening into some strange hole hidden inside the ledgers. Once, Burke had told him with pride, they seemed to have lost the entire accounts for a whole northern city in the space of one afternoon. They were always found, these missing funds, Burke said, it was always that somebody had made one tiny mistake and never realized it.
Lady Lucy was leafing through the manuscript of Johnny Fitzgerald’s book on The Birds of London. Powerscourt was running through his strange collection of wills one last time.
‘I think this book is going to do jolly well, Francis. There are
birds in here that I never knew existed, let alone were flying around London.’
‘I shall order fifty copies of the first edition from Hatchard’s when it comes out, Lucy. We can give them to people as birthday and Christmas presents.’
Just then they heard low conversation on the stairs. Rhys, the Powerscourt butler, was ushering Burke up to the drawing room and promising to return with a large bottle of beer.
‘Good evening, Lucy, good evening, Francis.’ The great financier kissed his sister-in-law on both cheeks. ‘Sorry I’m late. Bloody money wouldn’t add up. I got very thirsty so Rhys is going to bring me a beer. Hope you don’t mind.’
He sat down at the end of the sofa and began to revive after his first long gulp of beer.
‘Francis, Lucy, can’t stay long. Promised to help young Peter with his maths.’ Powerscourt remembered that the one thing that pained William Burke above everything else was that his three children could not cope with mathematics. The first two could scarcely add up, let alone remember their tables.
‘How would you rate this case, Francis? In comparison with some of the others, I mean.’
‘It’s proving rather elusive, William. Every time you think you have put a hand on something definite, it disappears. I’ve got these papers for you, the ones we talked about.’
‘You mean those wills? How many were there in the end?’
‘Just over a hundred. Look, I’ve arranged them all in date order. And I’ve also marked them up in the various categories of expenditure where the dead benchers wanted them to go. And we’re hoping to steal a set of accounts tomorrow or the next day.’
‘Are you indeed? And how are you proposing to do that?’
‘I think you’d be better off not knowing, William. Honestly. We don’t want your directors inquiring how you have been concealing criminal intentions and not reporting them to the proper authorities.’
‘Very well,’ said William Burke. ‘Now then, Francis, I have two pieces of information to report, one of them perfectly legal, the other . . . well, not illegal but the bench of bishops might not approve. The first relates to the relative value of money. You remember we talked the last time we met about whether it is possible to translate the money of, let us say, 1761 when Queen’s Inn was founded into the equivalent value of today. In the vaults of the Bank of England, Francis – well, not quite that far down, certainly a good way down in the basements – there lurks a very tall man, stooped now with knowledge, called Flanagan. This Flanagan is truly a wizard. You tell him that a bequest was made to the Inn in 1785 of three hundred pounds, he will consult some files and tell you, almost immediately, that it is worth twelve thousand pounds in today’s money, or some such figure.’
‘How on earth does he do it?’ asked Lady Lucy.
‘Records, Lucy, he has collected thousands and thousands of records. The man’s a human squirrel on a titanic scale. He looks up government records, records of house sales, wills, household accounts, government contracts, military records. They say the happiest moment in his life was when he discovered that some great house, Chatsworth or Longleat, somewhere like that, had continuous records stretching over a period of a hundred and fifty years during which time they noted in great ledgers the cost of everyday purchases like tea, coffee, wine and so on. And they still had the records of the wages paid to every single workman involved in the making of the artificial lake and the creation of the landscape gardens, including the very considerable sums made over to Capability Brown. Flanagan was, apparently, so excited by this discovery that he had to ask the Governor of the Bank of England for a week off for his brain to calm down. Anyway, Francis, the good Flanagan, Thomas Flanagan I believe he’s called, will be very happy to make those calculations for you tomorrow on receipt of the wills. He would like to make a copy of them for his own records and I said that would be fine.’
‘Does that mean, William, that after this Mr Flanagan has done his sums, as it were, we will have just one figure for the value of all these bequests? One hundred thousand pounds, let us say, in today’s money?’
‘Exactly, Lucy. Only I suspect it may be a lot more than one hundred thousand pounds.’
‘And your other piece of information, William?’
Powerscourt was to tell Johnny Fitzgerald afterwards that William Burke went very conspiratorial at this point. He looked around in a rather shifty fashion. He leant forward in his chair. He lowered his voice till it was almost a whisper.
‘Keep it very quiet,’ he muttered. ‘Bank accounts. Bank statements. I happen to know the fellow who looks after the accounts of Queen’s Inn.’ Burke looked around him again as if spies might be lurking underneath the sofa or behind the curtains. ‘Fact is, the fellow wants to transfer to our bank. Transfer himself, I mean, not some money. I let it be known, in a delicate fashion, that his application might be put to advantage if I could, accidentally as it were, have a look at those statements. That should happen tomorrow morning.’
Burke sat back in his chair and breathed deeply as if he’d run a race or just come out from confession.
‘You old devil, William. I am most grateful.’
‘It’s not as bad as it seems,’ Burke said finally. ‘The chap was going to get the job anyway.’
There was a mild knock on the door and coughing noises on the far side of it. That could only mean one thing. Powerscourt and Lady Lucy looked at each other and smiled. Rhys had come with a message. He had. Rhys always coughed. He did. ‘I’m very sorry to interrupt, my lord, my lady, Mr Burke, there’s a message from one of Chief Inspector Beecham’s young constables.’
The ones Lady Lucy referred to as the creche, Powerscourt recalled.
‘The Chief Inspector thought you would want to know, my lord. He’ll be calling in the morning. It’s Mr Newton, my lord, Mr Porchester Newton. He’s disappeared.’
Edward was relieved to find that his stutter had not returned the following morning. He had an anxious moment about the p of Temple station when he bought his ticket but all seemed to be well. He did, however, feel extremely nervous about the whole operation. What would happen if something went wrong? What if they were caught? Then he remembered something Powerscourt had told him on the way down the stairs the previous evening. ‘The thing to remember about any hazardous operation, Edward,’ he had said, ‘is that everybody feels nervous and a bit wobbly beforehand. No matter how many times a soldier has been in battle, they still feel anxious before it starts.’ Well, this was Edward’s first engagement and he didn’t want to let his general down.
The authorities of Queen’s Inn seemed to have moved Chief Inspector Beecham and his men around the place as if he was a piece of old furniture waiting for the rag and bone men. First they had operated from an office very close to the rooms of the late Alexander Dauntsey. The surrounding barristers had complained about the volume of their conversations and the noise of their boots on the stairs. They were then transferred to some empty offices at the top of one of the buildings in Fountain Court. Again, the people who lived underneath complained about the noise. Now the detectives were occupying a former classroom that had seen better days, but was hidden away behind the room with the boilers for the heating so that the policemen themselves were complaining about the racket and had to shout to each other when standing virtually on top of one another.
‘Good morning, my lord,’ said the Chief Inspector. ‘I’m sorry the news about Newton reached you so late last night but I thought you would like to know.’
‘I am most grateful to you, Chief Inspector. Do you have any more information about his disappearance? Any leads?’
‘We know now that the last time he disappeared he went to stay with a younger sister in Kent. There he went for walks, played with the children, acted out the role of favourite uncle to perfection. But he hasn’t gone there this time, not so far.’
Powerscourt remembered his last interview with Porchester Newton, the point blank refusal to answer questions, the veins throbbing in hi
s forehead, those huge hands moving forward into what might have been an attack and strangle position.
‘Do you suppose that he had come to learn about your inquiries, that one of them might have really alarmed him? Sorry, Chief Inspector, I’m not expressing myself very well.’ Powerscourt found it hard to think and talk in this noisy inferno. ‘Is it possible that you were pursuing a line of inquiry which would have revealed to Newton that you now knew him to be the murderer? And that, therefore, he had to disappear?’
‘Well, we might have been,’ said Beecham morosely, ‘but if we were, it was an accident.’
Edward and Sarah had finalized the details of the theft the night before. Sarah had agreed that the typewriter should be successful in drawing the gorgon from her lair, as Edward put it. As it happened, Sarah had in her attic a number of box files that had come from the gorgon’s cave, and had labels attached to them in the handwriting of the gorgon herself. Sarah was confident that with a bit of practice she could do a passable imitation of the handwriting to be found on the boxes with the account files.
The first stage of Operation Theft, as Edward liked to call it, was due to take place shortly before nine thirty. Maxwell Kirk, head of the chambers where Edward and Sarah worked, had agreed surprisingly easily to ask for a visit from Barton Somerville on being told that the scheme was really Powerscourt’s and might have a minor role to play in the murder investigation. A porter was sent with the request from New Court across to Fountain Court where the Treasurer’s rooms were. Edward watched him go, a middle-aged porter with the steady walk of one who had travelled this route many times before. Sarah’s room mate was away for the morning so Sarah was contemplating the ruin of her typewriter with some satisfaction. The ribbon had got stuck somewhere in the bowels of the machine, bits of it were wrapped firmly round various keys and would, Sarah thought, take some time to sort out.
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