David Dickinson - Death Called to the Bar

‘All very well indeed,’ said Powerscourt, smiling at his sister. ‘All well here?’

‘We’re fine,’ said Mary. ‘William’s in his study, one floor up. I forget you haven’t been in this house before.’

‘I’m sure I can find the way.’ Powerscourt departed, taking the stairs two at a time. He found his brother-in-law shrouded in cigar smoke and surrounded by figures. On the desk in front of him was an enormous ledger with numbers chasing each other up and down various columns. Surrounding the mighty tome were a series of smaller volumes in a variety of colours, muted colours it would have to be said, garish colours not being available in the kind of stationer’s shop in the City patronized by the likes of William Burke.

‘Delighted to see you, Francis, delighted.’ Burke had risen from his chair and was shaking Powerscourt vigorously by the hand. He had assisted Powerscourt in a number of his inquiries and had proved a most valuable companion in arms. Powerscourt always said you could pick his brother-in-law out in a crowd of five hundred by the cut of his suit. There were many in the City who prided themselves on wearing the latest fashions. William Burke went in the opposite direction. Johnny Fitzgerald maintained that he bought two or three suits every autumn and then left them in the shop for twenty years. Powerscourt objected to this theory on the grounds that a man could not be sure he would keep exactly the same shape over a period as long as twenty years. His theory was that William Burke had a very old tailor indeed, a man who kept detailed records of all the fashions going back to Disraeli’s time or even earlier. Powerscourt imagined that Burke would be measured in the normal way. On his way out, this Nestor of the tailoring world would ask, ‘Which year, sir?’ and Burke would reply, ‘1882, please.’ In appearance, apart from his suits, Burke was perfectly normal, normal height, not fat and not slim, an ordinary sort of face with an ordinary sort of nose and rather sharp grey eyes. You could see thousands and thousands of people looking exactly like him climbing on and off the buses or the trains for the City every working day. Looking at the face, Johnny Fitzgerald once memorably remarked, you would not imagine its owner’s facility for mental arithmetic would be so great that he could multiply one hundred and forty-eight by seventeen in his head while walking down the street without having to pause and without contracting a headache. Burke had taken ten pounds off Johnny in a wager many years ago by performing this feat while walking down Threadneedle Street in the rain.

Certainly this evening’s suit, though of excellent cloth, was not one likely to be worn by the Beau Brummells of the capital’s dress elite like Charles Augustus Pugh.

Powerscourt waved a hand at the multicoloured concentration of ledgers and financial fire power in front of his brother-in-law.

‘Selling up, William?’ he asked cheerfully. ‘Preparing to flee before the bailiffs come round?’

William Burke laughed. ‘Annual audit, Francis. Once a year I make myself go through all the family accounts, see how we’re doing. Are we better off than last year, that sort of thing. Can Mary buy a new pair of shoes, you know? We make all our big companies do it, don’t see why we shouldn’t do it at home.’

‘And are all the coloured books for different kinds of investment? And the huge tome the master document, the Book of Numbers as it were, for the whole lot?’

‘They said you’d been consorting with lawyers, Francis. They seem to have sharpened your wits. Red for property – I’ve got a couple of other houses in London as well as the place in the country.’ Powerscourt recalled that the place in the country stood on the banks of the Thames not far from Goring and had twenty-seven bedrooms and fourteen bathrooms. Not to mention the huge palace on the sea front at Antibes. ‘Blue for stocks, green for bonds, maroon for savings accounts, it’s all fairly simple. But you haven’t come here to talk about annual balance sheets, Francis, you’ve come to talk about something else.’

Powerscourt smiled. ‘I want to know about a man called Jeremiah Puncknowle,’ he said.

William Burke moved to the sofa in front of his fireplace. He looked closely at his brother-in-law. ‘Could you be a bit more specific, Francis?’ he said. ‘Puncknowle as businessman, Puncknowle as family man, Puncknowle as friend of the deserving poor? It’s pronounced Punnel by the way, like punnet only with an l at the end.’

Powerscourt had always put his cards on the table with William Burke. ‘Right, William. This is how it goes, or might go. Friend Puncknowle is about to go on trial, sometime in the next ten days at the latest. The two main prosecuting counsel both come from Queen’s Inn. One of them, man by the name of Dauntsey, was murdered almost two weeks ago. He was poisoned and fell face forwards into a bowl of soup at a feast. The benchers, governing body of the Inn, have asked me to investigate his death. Now the other lawyer, fellow by the name of Woodford Stewart, has disappeared. The Crown will either have to proceed with the case and give new counsel virtually no time to prepare what is a very complicated case, or they will have to ask for an adjournment which they may or may not get, depending on the judge. So, you might think, what a coincidence. Just as this massive fraudster is about to go on trial, the lawyers going to attack him are dead or disappear. And, if you were of a suspicious mind, William, you would want to warn the new lawyers to mind their step as they cross Chancery Lane or set out for the Old Bailey. I want to know if this Puncknowle is capable of ordering up a murderer or two. But before that I want to know what sort of fraudster he was. And before that, though why you should have this information I do not know, I want to know if he is in jail or out on bail.’

William Burke closed his eyes briefly. He put the fingers of his two hands together and opened them out into a kind of fan or steeple. ‘He’s not in jail,’ he began, ‘though there are many in the City who were astounded when he was given bail. The policeman in charge of the investigation insisted on the Bank of England itself confirming for him that the relevant sum had been posted. And it was an enormous figure, some men claimed to know it was half a million pounds.’

‘How did this crook persuade a judge to give him bail in the first place? Surely they would have wanted him kept under lock and key until he appeared in court?’

William Burke laughed. ‘It was a fearsome combination, Francis. Clever lawyers and clever doctors. God knows how much they were paid. They told the judge that Puncknowle was perfectly willing to appear in court, but that he had a heart condition. This condition made it highly likely that he would not survive a period as a guest of His Majesty. Many of the other inmates after all would have been defrauded by our friend Jeremiah and might not take too kindly to finding him in their midst. They might wish to take physical revenge for their financial suffering.’

‘Why couldn’t they put him in solitary? Leave him alone for the duration?’

‘Simple minds, Francis, simple minds might think along those lines. There was a further ramification to the heart condition, you see. Claustrophobia, from which our Jeremiah suffered acutely, would be brought on by solitary confinement. There could well be a fatal attack in a couple of days at most. And then what would the great British public and the great British newspapers say of the authorities who had, in their intransigence, kept Puncknowle out of the dock and denied the British investor the chance to see some reparations made for his suffering and his losses?’

‘Surely to God there must have been some place the prison authorities could have put him?’