Death Called to the Bar lfp-5

by David Dickinson

  ‘It was after his election as a bencher, sir. Something changed after that. Not immediately but two weeks or so later, I should say, sir. Mr Dauntsey was very cross about something. I never knew what it was. One afternoon I came into his room when he wasn’t expecting me. He was studying some figures on a pad in front of him. He looked at me, Mr Dauntsey sir, almost in despair. “It’s not right, Edward,” he said, “it’s just not right.”’

  What was it, Powerscourt said to himself, that so troubled Alex Dauntsey in the weeks after his election as a bencher? They should have been among the happiest of his professional life. Where was Porchester Newton? And why had he run away a second time? Was Mrs Cavendish lying? Was Dr Cavendish, the true believer, breaking one of the Commandments he must hold so dear? Was he in breach of the fifth one, Thou shalt not kill? His wife had been on the verge of infringing the sixth, Thou shalt not commit adultery, if she hadn’t already broken it. He remembered the portrait painter Nathaniel Stone on Dauntsey: ‘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’ – ‘there’ being Queen’s Inn.

  William Burke looked very serious when he walked into the room.

  ‘I think we should go to your study, Francis. We’re going to need that big desk of yours.’

  And so, for over two hours, William Burke took Powerscourt through the intricacies of the finances of Queen’s Inn. There was material in his report from the wills, from the accounts stolen by Edward and Sarah and from the statements provided by the man who wanted a position in Burke’s bank. His people had typed out summaries of the main findings. There were brief chapters on what appeared to have happened to particular donations. And Burke kept checking that his friend understood what he was being told. When he rose to return to his wife and the innumerate children, Powerscourt shook him by the hand. ‘I am so grateful, William. This is tremendous.’

  ‘Let me know if there is anything more I can do to help,’ said Burke. ‘I am not available for the next two days but after that I should be only too pleased.’

  As his brother-in-law departed Powerscourt remembered a previous occasion when Burke had accompanied him to a fateful meeting with the Private Secretary of the Prince of Wales and had made a dramatic contribution to the meeting.

  ‘William was a very long time, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy as he resumed his pacing in the drawing room. ‘Have you solved the mystery?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Lucy, but I tell you what I’m going to do. Current French military doctrine – God knows where I picked this up, probably down at the Cape – is all for the attack. The French soldier must never retreat. Forwards is the order of the day. Backwards is banned. L’audace, toujours l’audace, daring, always daring. Tomorrow morning I am going to spend with my Detective Chief Inspector friend with a brief interlude with Maxwell Kirk. Chief Inspector Beecham and I are going to play at being financiers for a while. And then, l’audace, toujours l’audace, I am going to make a preliminary report to our dearly beloved friend Barton Somerville, the Treasurer of Queen’s Inn.’

  The last note from the chimes of two o’clock was echoing round Fountain Court when Powerscourt and the Chief Inspector took their seats in Somerville’s vast office. Powerscourt looked quickly at the full-length portraits of previous benchers and Treasurers on the walls and realized, to his delight, that he had detailed financial information on some of them in his papers. Jack Beecham was in a dark blue suit with a white shirt and a nondescript tie, Powerscourt in what his children referred to as the funeral suit, a very dark grey pinstripe with a pale blue shirt. Somerville radiated his usual combination of arrogance and superiority.

  ‘Tea should be coming in twenty minutes or so, gentlemen,’ Somerville began. ‘You said you wanted to see me, Powerscourt.’

  Powerscourt smiled. ‘Yes, Mr Treasurer,’ he replied, reckoning that the formality, however ludicrous it might seem, would probably serve his purposes in the end. ‘I have come to make a preliminary report.’

  ‘You seem to have a great many preliminary findings,’ said Somerville, nodding in the direction of the Powerscourt papers.

  ‘We shall see,’ Powerscourt said. ‘It is my custom on these occasions to couch my findings in narrative form, commencing not in medias res, in the middle of things as the poet says, but at the very beginning.’

  Beecham, Powerscourt could see out of the corner of his eye, was taking notes already. The engagement had scarcely begun. ‘Let me begin with the murders, Mr Treasurer. On the day of his death, the day of the Whitelock Feast, February 28th this year, Alexander Dauntsey was in his chambers here until shortly after six o’clock. He had been working on forthcoming cases. There were no reports of any visitors to his rooms though there could have been some who were not observed. Shortly after six, as I said, he came to a drinks party here in your chambers, as you know, Mr Treasurer. At the soup course of the feast he collapsed and died almost instantaneously. He had been poisoned. And the medical men believe that the poison was most likely administered here, slipped into the champagne or the sherry he was enjoying with his peers, or taken shortly before he left his own chambers to come here. Twelve days later, a Wednesday, Mr Woodford Stewart disappeared. He was not seen in his rooms after lunch. His body was found on the Monday morning, dumped with some builder’s rubble at the side of Temple Church. He had been shot twice in the chest.

  ‘I think I should go back now a couple of months to the time when there was a vacancy for the position of bencher in this Inn. I do not need to tell you, Mr Treasurer, that this is a democratic election with all the barristers who are members of the Inn able to vote. The election is for life, though it was not always so in the past as I understand it. There were two candidates for the position. One was Porchester Newton and the other was Alexander Dauntsey, both distinguished advocates in their own fields. Right at the end the contest degenerated somewhat. Newton’s supporters began to put it abroad that Dauntsey would be a three-day-a-week candidate, a reference to Dauntsey’s unfortunate affliction which caused him to be superb in court one day and then, for no apparent reason, hopeless the next. I think I would have been pretty cross about that if I had been Dauntsey. But his supporters’ club hit back, alleging that Newton was not a gentleman. They produced a rather vicious cartoon which showed Burton performing various menial tasks relating to his upbringing as the son of a grocer and the grandson of a junior parlourmaid. The ballot is secret but I believe Dauntsey won the contest by twenty-two votes, a fair margin.’

  ‘Where did you get that information from, Powerscourt?’ said Somerville crossly.

  ‘I’m afraid I cannot tell you my sources at present, Mr Treasurer, I feel it would be inappropriate.’

  There was a loud grunt from Somerville. Powerscourt did not wish to reveal that it was the Head Porter who had told him.

  ‘So Porchester Newton had reason to hate Dauntsey. He vanished for a while after the election. He was here at the time of the feast, then he vanished and came back and he has now disappeared again.’

  Powerscourt paused while the tea was brought in, the gorgon herself carrying the tray and placing it carefully on the left of Somerville’s desk. Powerscourt wondered if she had checked her records recently. He had been horrified to learn from Edward, when he was asked what he put in the three dummy files, that they had all been filled with back copies of the racing newspapers.

  ‘You will recall, Mr Treasurer,’ Powerscourt went on, taking a preliminary sip of his tea, ‘Shakespeare’s Macbeth where there are dramatic instructions about the arrival of the First Murderer, Second Murderer and so on. I propose to adapt the device to my own humbler narrative and label Porchester Newton the First Suspect. He certainly had the motive and I do not believe we can rule him out at this stage.

  ‘I turn now to our Second Suspect. This, I fear, takes us into the complicated waters of the Dauntsey marriage. I do not wish to break any confidences but I feel free to say that
the difficulties were caused entirely by the inability of the poor couple to have any children of their own. This was a severe trial to them both. Alex Dauntsey felt it particularly keenly for he was the inheritor of one of the great houses of England. Calne may be covered in dust sheets today, its fabulous galleries preserved from decay but not open to visitors, but it has a great history stretching back to Elizabeth and beyond. For Calne not to have his heir was terrible for Dauntsey. And since he was sure his wife Elizabeth could not conceive, he resolved to try for an heir with another woman. He was indeed, intending to spend the night after the feast and the following weekend with the other woman. Mrs Dauntsey appeared to agree with this decision but it became the subject of a ferocious row between the two of them the day before his death. The Chief Inspector’s men, Mr Treasurer, carried out detailed interviews with every member of this Inn who was here for the feast in order to establish, where possible, the times of the movements of the participants. There were a number of reports of a mysterious visitor who came between five and six and was seen leaving shortly after six. Nobody recognized the figure, though one of the porters said later that he originally thought it was Mrs Dauntsey until he realized that was impossible, as the visitor was universally agreed to be male. I am sure, Mr Treasurer, that you attended the three hundredth anniversary performance of Twelfth Night in Middle Temple Hall earlier this year. So did Elizabeth Dauntsey, who will have remembered that one of the principal characters, Viola or Cesario, was a girl pretending to be a boy who would have been played in Shakespeare’s time by a boy pretending to be a girl, pretending to be a boy. We now know that Mrs Dauntsey was the mysterious visitor, disguised as a man. We know she went to her husband’s rooms, according to her account, to apologize for the row and to wish him well for the weekend. She went in disguise, she says, because she feared other members of the Inn would know about the weekend away and would be laughing at her. That is her story. But it is perfectly possible that she was still incensed with her husband and that she came in disguise to the Inn intent, not on reconciliation, but on murder. Her husband, after all, was drinking red wine when she called. It would have been perfectly possible to slip in some poison while her husband went to the bathroom. So she is the Second Suspect.’

  Powerscourt paused and looked down at his papers. The Chief Inspector’s pen stopped for a moment. Barton Somerville was fiddling with a biscuit. A pair of seagulls settled briefly on the window sill and moved on.

  ‘Suspect Number Three,’ he went on, ‘is the young woman Alex Dauntsey was going to spend time with in pursuit of a son and heir. Catherine Cavendish is a lively and attractive woman in her early thirties, a former chorus girl who is married to a doctor much older than herself. The doctor is dying of some unknown illness and is unable to perform some of the more intimate functions of the married state. He has, he says, no objections to his wife partaking of these pleasures, forbidden fruit we might almost say, in some mythical Eden, with another man. That man was Dauntsey.’

  Powerscourt paused and took another sip of his tea. Barton Somerville was taking notes too. Powerscourt suspected that he might be subjected to a fearful cross-examination at the end.

  ‘I have talked at length with the two ladies involved in this delicate transaction and it seems to me that there was a misunderstanding about Dauntsey’s intentions after the first husband had passed on. Mrs Dauntsey was convinced that he would never leave her. Mrs Cavendish, for her part, believed Dauntsey would leave his wife and marry her. If Catherine Cavendish discovered that Dauntsey was taking his pleasure with her, but not, as it were, prepared to pay his bills, then I believe she would have been capable of murdering him. And in a perverse way I think we have to count her husband as Suspect Number Four. For it is one thing to announce that you have no objections to your wife carrying on with another man, quite another when it is about to happen under your very nose and you realize that your objections may be more visceral and more irrational than you had thought. Far from not minding, you suddenly find that you mind very much. And there are two further reasons for placing Dr Cavendish in the suspects’ pound. Here was a man with but a few months left to live. The chances are that he would be dead by normal means before his case could come to court. So he wouldn’t care about the hangman’s noose as others might. And he was an expert on poisons, he had written at least two books on them.’

  ‘Forgive me for interrupting, Powerscourt.’ Somerville was peering at him over the top of his spectacles, half a biscuit dangling from his left hand. ‘What about Woodford Stewart? You talk as if there was only one murder. There have been two.’

  ‘I am coming to that, Mr Treasurer,’ Powerscourt continued. ‘There is absolutely nothing in Mr Stewart’s private life that either the Chief Inspector or I could discover which might have led to somebody wanting to kill him. His domestic life was beyond reproach. There is, of course, as there is with Alex Dauntsey, the outside chance of some prisoner whose conviction they secured years ago now achieving release and coming to exact revenge. But I do not think that likely. What killed Woodford Stewart had to do with this Inn and it had to do with his friendship with Dauntsey. It may be that he knew who the poisoner was and had to be silenced. It may be that the reasons that led to Dauntsey’s murder also led to Stewart’s.’

  Powerscourt paused again. He could hear footsteps coming up the stairs, rather a lot of footsteps. The Chief Inspector looked across at him. Barton Somerville did not react. Maybe his hearing was not what it was.

  ‘You will know far better than I, Mr Treasurer,’ Powerscourt went on, smiling slightly at Somerville ‘how sometimes in important cases the defending barrister sets out on what seems to be a completely pointless line of argument, apparently having little to do with the case under trial. The prosecuting counsel objects. The judge quizzes the defence. Eventually, though not always, the judge permits the line of questioning because he believes the defence’s assurances that the information is relevant. So it is with me here. Every word I say from now on has, in my judgement and that of my colleague on my left, the greatest relevance to this case, whatever you may think at the time. And, in deference to the surroundings, Mr Treasurer, I am going to call some witnesses. I am sure you will be interested to learn that they are all dead, and, more surprising perhaps, that some of them are here in this very room.’

  Powerscourt rose from his chair and walked to the wall farthest away from Somerville’s desk.

  ‘This is my first witness,’ he said proudly, ‘and what a handsome fellow Sir Thomas Lawrence has made him.’ Powerscourt waved airily at the full-length portrait which showed the sitter in red judicial robes, looking as much a cardinal as a judge, staring crossly at a long piece of paper which could have been a will or some other legal document. Behind him and slightly to the left was a beautiful room with long Georgian windows and a view over the Thames. ‘As you can see, Mr Justice Wallace is a former Treasurer of this Inn, who has presided over this kingdom as Mr Treasurer Somerville does now. He is examining his paper in the very room in which we are now meeting.’

  Powerscourt resumed his seat and began to turn over one or two of his papers. ‘The good judge,’ he went on, ‘who came from a respectable family in Dorset, one brother becoming a Cabinet Minister, another an Admiral of the Blue, lived to the ripe old age of eighty-seven. In his will of 1824 he left a lot of money and property to his numerous family.’

  Powerscourt now pulled out a will from inside the sheaf of documents in front of him. ‘He also left ten thousand pounds to the Queen’s Inn for the relief of poverty among the barristers and servants of this Inn and their families. A generous bequest, you might think, and one which is worth, according to the Bank of England, about three hundred thousand pounds in today’s money.’

  There was a sharp look from Somerville, upset perhaps to learn that the Bank of England were ranged against him. ‘We may presume,’ Powerscourt continued, ‘that the executors made sure the formalities were followed. Thirty years ago, before y
our time, Mr Treasurer, there were indeed in the accounts of Queen’s Inn various payments made according to the Wallace bequest. They are described as such in the documents. But they are not there now. The Wallace legacy has been absorbed into the general accounts of Queen’s Inn. When I say the general accounts, I don’t quite mean that. The general accounts relate to the running costs, maintenance of property, provision of meals and so on and are all covered, amply covered, by the monthly payments made by the residents of chambers. But there is another account, called the Treasurer’s Account, controlled by this office. The Wallace hundreds of thousands have been diverted into there and there they remain to this day.

  ‘Consider this other gentleman behind me, Benjamin Rockland, a barrister rather than a judge, a bencher of this Inn rather than a Treasurer, a man famous for his abilities for the defence in capital cases and much sought after by instructing solicitors. He was famous in his day, according to the official Inn history, for his generosity towards the young. He left four thousand pounds in his will in 1785 for the maintenance and upkeep and clothing of poor students attending the Inn. He hoped to ensure that the poorer citizens were not denied the advantages he had enjoyed. Turning once more to the Bank of England reckoning, that figure would amount to two hundred thousand pounds in today’s money. You could support a number of poor students on the interest from that sum. How many Rockland students are there in the Inn at present? Not one. Thirty years ago there were a number of these young men gracing the walks and courts of this institution. Once again the monies have been diverted, not into the general accounts where they might benefit everybody, but into the Treasurer’s Account, controlled from this office.

  ‘And then consider this. Downstairs in your Hall you have one of the most famous and beautiful paintings in London. People come from far and wide to see The Judgement of Paris by Rubens, a glorious and sensuous account of the decision that led to the Trojan War. There is no record, unfortunately, as there might be if it happened today, of either of the two losing ladies going to the Court of Appeal. I am not concerned today with the technique or the overall impression given by the work apart from noting that the three goddesses, as everyone knows who has seen it, are wearing rather less than Catherine Cavendish was in her days as a chorus girl. Rather I am concerned with the way it was purchased twelve years ago. A plaque, as you well know, Mr Treasurer, says that it was paid for by the generosity of past and current benchers and benefactors. I do not believe that to be strictly true. The painting cost twelve thousand five hundred pounds, say fourteen thousand with commissions and taxes and so on. That was the precise total, less one hundred and forty-seven pounds, of a bequest made to the Inn a year before in the will of bencher Josiah Swanton for the relief of barristers rendered unfit for work by injury or illness. There are no records, Mr Treasurer, of any payments going to such people though the chaplain has informed me that there must be four candidates at least who are eligible for such payments today and whose lives would be transformed by them. The sick and the maimed paid for the Rubens. At least its beauty can be enjoyed by all, it has not, like the appropriation of so much other money intended for good causes, ended up in the Treasurer’s Account.