David Dickinson - Death Called to the Bar

‘Midday, sir. Said he was going to a meeting. Didn’t say who with. That’s five hours he’s been gone. There’s plenty round here say he’s the next in line.’

‘Next in line for what?’ asked Powerscourt, wondering if this was some strange legal term he did not know.

‘Next in line after Mr Dauntsey, sir. Next in line for murder.’

Edward set off at great speed across the grass. He sprinted up the stairs and burst into Sarah Henderson’s room without even bothering to knock. She held up a hand motioning him to silence. She was working at top speed, her fingers racing over the keys of her typewriter, the left hand slamming the carriage across when she came to the end of a line. Her eyes were darting down to a shorthand notebook by her left side. Edward admired the straightness of her back on her chair, the red sheen on her hair, the white hands with their long fingers he longed to hold in his own. From the small window he could see more policemen marching in and out of the staircases, Chief Inspector Beecham and the Head Porter conferring over a large sheet of paper that might have been a map of the Inn with all the staircases marked. At last she was finished.

‘Sarah,’ said Edward, ‘are you all right?’

She smiled at him. ‘Of course I’m all right, Edward, why should I not be all right? And, yes, I have heard about Mr Stewart going missing. Have they found him yet? There seem to be more policemen every time I look. Perhaps they’re breeding in the library.’

‘They haven’t found him,’ said Edward. ‘It’s my belief that he’s not in Queen’s Inn at all.’ Since their trip to the Wallace Collection Edward seemed able to converse with Sarah in perfectly normal sentences.

‘Do they think he’s dead?’ Sarah asked the question in the same tone she might have asked a guest if he took sugar in his tea.

‘Some people do. There’s a whole lot of rumours about him already. Did you know him, Sarah?’

‘I took a very short piece of dictation for him once when his own girls were away,’ said Sarah, ‘so I couldn’t really say I knew him at all. That’s why I can’t get very excited about it. I was so upset about Mr Dauntsey. I thought I would never get over it. He had such a lovely voice, you see.’

Edward peered out of the little window on the top floor. ‘There’s even more of them now, Sarah – police, I mean. They must be very worried.’

‘They always come too late,’ said Sarah, as if she had been covering crime cases for years, ‘so they make up for it with the numbers.’

‘Are you finished now, Sarah? Finished for the day, I mean?’

‘Yes, I am. Why do you ask?’

Edward looked shy for a moment. Sarah wondered for a second if his new confidence was going to desert him. ‘I would like to escort you to the underground, Sarah. I don’t like to think of you going there alone with a murderer on the loose somewhere.’

Sarah quite liked the thought of being escorted by Edward though she would have preferred a more romantic destination than the Tube. A masked ball at some elegant house in the country? A tea dance at one of London’s great hotels? She consoled herself with the thought that the Temple at least was one of the finer names on the underground system. You wouldn’t want to be escorted to Colliers Wood or Shadwell, she thought.

‘It’s hardly any distance from here to the Tube, Edward,’ she said kindly, ‘and there seem to be enough policemen to look after the Crown Jewels. But if you would like to, I should be happy to be escorted.’

Fifteen minutes later Edward was back in Queen’s Inn. Sarah had refused all offers of his accompanying her back home to Acton. She sat down next to a barrister she knew from the Inner Temple and Edward felt fairly sure that she would not be violated before she found her way home. The police were still crawling all over the Inn. Barton Somerville himself was glowering down at them from the steps into the library as if they were particularly repulsive aliens, recently landed from a distant and disagreeable planet beyond the Milky Way. Powerscourt he could not find anywhere. None of the policemen, not even Chief Inspector Beecham, knew where he was. Edward found him at last, sitting at the desk that had been Dauntsey’s, rummaging through the papers in the drawers.

‘Edward,’ said Powerscourt, smiling at the young man, ‘have you been seeing Sarah to the Tube?’

‘I have,’ Edward replied, wondering how the devil Powerscourt had worked that out, ‘but I have something to tell you which may be important, I’m just not sure.’

‘Fire ahead, Edward,’ said Powerscourt, ‘take your time.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Edward, looking closely at a print behind Powerscourt’s head of an eighteenth-century cricket match taking place at Calne. One of the batsmen looked remarkably like the oil painting he and Powerscourt had seen only that afternoon.

‘It’s to do with the link between Mr Stewart and Mr Dauntsey, sir,’ he began. ‘They’ve always been close and in the past they’ve always conducted a lot of cases together.’

Edward paused. There, just behind the distant outfielder in the print, a couple of deer were standing to attention, watching the action carefully. ‘There’s another case they were going to do, Lord Powerscourt, sir. It was huge. A fraud case, involving the man Jeremiah Puncknowle.’

‘Were they prosecuting or defending?’

‘They were for the prosecution, sir, with splendid fees and very lavish refreshers indeed, some of the biggest I have seen. I was going to devil for them, sir, I have done a load of work already and was going to make it full time tomorrow.’

‘Forgive me, Edward, are you suggesting that the defendant Puncknowle may have had something to do with these deaths?’

‘I don’t know what I am suggesting, sir. I only know that this case is now scheduled for the end of next week. There’s been a delay. Before that it was to have started in two days’ time.’

‘And if both the prosecuting lawyers were removed from the scene, Edward, would the Crown apply for an adjournment while they briefed some more?’

‘They would, sir, but it would be up to the judge to decide.’

‘Have you formed any opinion about the character of this Jeremiah person? Would he have ordered up a couple of murders?’

‘I couldn’t say, sir. I could tell you a great deal about his companies but not very much about his character. You don’t get a lot of that looking at balance sheets.’

‘Edward,’ said Powerscourt, rising to his feet and looking at his watch, ‘I hope to be able to give you some sort of answer tomorrow. I am going to call on my brother-in-law.’

‘Is he an expert in character, Lord Powerscourt, sir? Is he that sort of man?’

‘He may be, Edward, come to think of it he probably is. But he is a great financier, now one of the greatest in the City of London. He will be able to tell me all the stuff about our Mr Puncknowle that never appeared in the papers.’

Powerscourt departed towards his sister’s latest house. They moved their London house so often now that he and Lucy had once actually turned up for dinner at a fashionable address that the Burkes had vacated a month before. Edward had brief conversations with the policemen before they left. There was still no sign of Mr Woodford Stewart, and his wife reported that he had not turned up at home. Tomorrow they would broaden the search into the Inner and Middle Temples. Maybe, the Chief Inspector confided to his sergeant, they would have to send divers in to search the bloody river.

‘You’re not here on a social call, Francis, I can tell.’ Powerscourt’s middle sister Mary Burke kissed him warmly on both cheeks. ‘Before I pack you off to William, how is Lucy? How are the children? And those gorgeous twins?’