David Dickinson - Death Called to the Bar

‘I’m sure there was,’ said Burke cheerfully. His fingers were still arching up towards his fireplace. ‘But they had hit on a masterstroke, Puncknowle’s people. They had discovered, or one of the doctors giving evidence on his behalf had discovered – large sums changing hands, no doubt – that the judge suffered from precisely the same heart condition that Puncknowle was supposed to have. So the judge could imagine only too well what his reaction would have been to a bout of solitary. It would have killed him for sure. So he gave the fellow bail.’

Powerscourt laughed. William Burke looked quite pleased with himself. He sent an enormous puff from his cigar directly into his chimney.

‘And the frauds, William? How did they work?’

Once again Burke paused. This time he looked carefully at his ledgers as if checking they had not been infected by the Puncknowle virus of financial irregularity. He knew his brother-in-law was perfectly capable of grasping financial facts, unlike, to his enormous and eternal regret, his wife and his three sons.

‘Very simple really, to begin with, I suppose. Most fraudsters should stick to their original trick. It’s when they become too elaborate that the house falls down.’

‘So where,’ asked Powerscourt, ‘did he start, this Jeremiah Puncknowle?’

‘He started in the West Country, Francis. I don’t know if you were aware of it but there’s a whole host of tiny dissenting religious communities down there, Muggletonians, Shelmerstonians, Babbacombians, Yalbertonians, hundreds and hundreds of them, all only too happy to knock you down if you disagree with their version of the Book of Revelations or the precise order of the reawakening of the saints on Judgement Day.’

‘Did they think that God had some sort of enormous batting order for Peter and Paul and Sebastian and all the rest of the saints when they’d be called to the wicket for the first innings of the new world?’ As a small boy Powerscourt had always been worried about how Sebastian would be able to rise from the dead when his turn came with all those arrows in him. Surely, he had thought, Sebastian might get up, but he would just as surely fall down again.

‘I’m not acquainted with the finer points of Muggletonian theology, Francis, but the point, for our purposes, was this. The man Puncknowle set up a building society aimed at these religious brethren. It was very successful. The idea of helping their fellow men even if you disagreed violently with their religion appealed to these West Country characters. The society was a success. It was straight. It is still going to this day, the only honest business ever founded by Jeremiah Puncknowle. It did give him one important idea. Some of the pastors helped set up the building society, they sat on its board, they advertised its products.’

‘So did he move in for wholesale corruption of the clergy?’ Powerscourt asked with a grin.

‘Not quite,’ said William Burke, ‘but they say that he was surprised by two things in his West Country venture. One was how useful the clergy could be if they were on your side. And the other is as old as the hills in terms of money but people are always forgetting it. If you’re floating public companies you can aim for a lot of money from fairly few people or institutions or a small amount of money from a great many people. Puncknowle chose the latter. He toured the country promoting his schemes. They say he followed the routes of Wesley himself, the founder of Methodism. He employed dissenting ministers as a clerical collar sales force and paid them generous commissions. And he raised money in millions for his building societies. Their prospectuses were a wonderful combination of piety and greed. There was the noble purpose of helping those of lowly means to save safely, so that eventually they could purchase their own dwellings, humble maybe, but no less glorious in the sight of the Lord. There were the donations to charity and good works – precise figures never specified – but that section was usually penned by some leading dissenter. Once they even got an evangelical Church of England dean to write it but they say he got into trouble with his bishop. And then there were the earthly rewards, never oversold, normally placed quite discreetly in the prospectuses, but eight per cent is eight per cent if you’re a railwayman or a Rothschild. I don’t think you or I would have wanted to invest, Francis. My own broker swore he’d have been able to sell a bucketload of the shares to the late Queen, Victoria well amused by the piety and the good works and the eight per cent to pay for her grandchildren’s extravagance.’

‘So what went wrong, Edward? Our Jeremiah must have had millions rolling in.’

‘It’s the normal story,’ said William Burke. ‘Caveat emptor, as the poet said. Let the buyer beware. Only trouble was most of these investors didn’t know much about caveating and even less about the traps awaiting the emptors. If you can get two and a half per cent interest on government stock anybody who comes along offering you eight per cent is virtually certain to be a crook. But these poor little dissenters didn’t know anything about that. Their pastors could go on about the difference between the gospels of Matthew and Luke for hours at a time but they had no knowledge at all of interest rate differentials. And while the Bible is full of crooks and shysters all over the shop, the pastors wouldn’t recognize one if he walked up to them and shook them by the hand. Which, of course, is precisely what Jeremiah Puncknowle did. One of his critics in later years claimed that Puncknowle had shaken hands with over three thousand men of the cloth. The building societies did their stuff, houses got built, all that sort of thing, but they were never going to produce eight per cent return. So there was another company floated, the subscribers to the second unwittingly paying out the dividends of the first. And a third, whose investors paid out the dividends of the second. It became like one of those card tricks where the conman has the cards spinning faster and faster. Soon there was nearly a football team of these companies. Then they moved into banking and property and building, the whole golden wheel spinning faster and faster. Then the people at the top got too greedy. They began selling properties between one company and another and then selling them on to a third so they could make off with the notional profits that appeared in the accounts. That’s what brought them down – property companies with too many debts and virtually no assets. Whole house of cards had taken about twelve years to set up. It fell down in three days flat.’

Powerscourt had often urged his brother-in-law to take up his pen and write short and amusing sketches of financial behaviour for the magazines. He was sure they would be very successful and make his brother-in-law even richer than he already was. But William Burke always declined.

‘Tell me, William, was there ever any hint of violence about our friend Puncknowle? Any whispers about people being beaten up or disappearing?’

‘You’re wondering about those two lawyers, of course. I don’t think there was. I’ve never heard of any such thing but I can’t be sure. Tell you what, I’ll speak to a couple of fellows tomorrow and let you know. On the face of it, it’s highly improbable, nothing more likely to put those kind of investors off than the chairman’s thugs beating people up. It would be very different if we were talking about South African diamond shares ten or fifteen years ago, but we’re not.’

‘I’m much obliged to you for the information,’ said Powerscourt as he prepared to take his leave.

‘I’ve only one other titbit for you about that trial, Francis,’ said William Burke, inspecting the last few inches of his cigar rather sadly. ‘ I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but the people in the City don’t have a very high opinion of the people from the Temples and the Inns when it comes to big fraud cases. The money men think the lawyers can’t read balance sheets, finance may be something other people may want to dirty their hands with but it’s way beneath counsel with their wigs and their gowns and their seventeenth-century libraries. But that chap Dauntsey rated very highly with the men of Mammon. The odds against a conviction went up dramatically when he toppled forward into his borscht. I don’t know how this other fellow is rated but I suspect the odds will get longer still. Would you like me to take a flutter on your behalf, Francis? Just a little flutter, five or ten pounds?’