David Dickinson - Death Called to the Bar

‘Are you sure it’s a man? Might this be a Miss Maxfield or a Mrs Maxfield, an old flame from days gone by?’

‘We’ve talked about that a lot, Lord Powerscourt. My view is this. Mr Dauntsey was a lawyer, trained to be precise in his use of language. If the Maxfield was a woman, he would have put Miss or Mrs in the document, I’m sure of it.’

Busloads of Maxfields, Maxfields old, Maxfields young, Maxfields rich, Maxfields poor, floated past Powerscourt’s brain and disappeared.

‘When did he make this will, Mr Plunkett? Was it the first one or an updated version of a will that had existed before? And did he make it here, with one of you gentlemen present?’

‘My goodness me, Lord Powerscourt, you do ask a lot of questions. To take them in order, he made the will three years ago and we think he wrote it in his chambers. It was the latest in a series of wills the trustees encouraged him to make ever since his twenty-first birthday. That, I fear, is rather the kind of thing the trustees go in for.’

Powerscourt smiled. The young man was not completely indoctrinated with the solicitor’s mindset, or not yet at any rate.

‘He’d been in to talk to my uncle, the one they call Killer Plunkett, the day before he wrote this will. This latest one, dated 1899, was the first appearance of the wretched Maxfield.’

Powerscourt wondered what this perfectly law-abiding Plunkett had done to earn the nickname Killer. ‘So whoever Maxfield is or was,’ he said, ‘his association with Dauntsey must have been complete, so to speak, three years ago. I mean, whatever the reason for giving him the money, it was all there then. Do you know, Mr Plunkett, if Dauntsey told his beneficiary about his plans? Did Maxfield, not to put too fine a point on it, know that he would get twenty thousand pounds if Dauntsey fell into his borscht?’

‘I’m afraid he did,’ Matthew Plunkett grimaced slightly, ‘or rather he said he was going to. He told Killer he was going to write to Maxfield and give him the good news.’

‘Did he indeed?’ said Powerscourt, realizing that another name had to be added to his list of suspects. ‘But, of course, he didn’t leave a copy of the letter which would have had an address on it, did he?’

‘No, he didn’t,’ Matthew Plunkett replied. ‘That would have made life far too easy for everybody. Mind you, to be fair to Mr Dauntsey, I don’t think he was the kind of man who would have wanted to cause trouble after he had gone. Not like some I could mention.’

Matthew Plunkett sounded as if he had many lifetimes’ experience of obstreperous corpses and troublemaking cadavers.

‘Never mind,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I think I can be of some assistance in your quest, Mr Plunkett. Dauntsey’s death is the subject of a police investigation. This Maxfield person is obviously suspect. Therefore, we can ask the police to look for him too. They have enormous resources at their disposal. If anybody in Britain can find him, they can.’

Matthew Plunkett smiled. ‘I cannot tell you, Lord Powerscourt, how pleased I am to hear that. Will you please come and report any progress to us here? And I’m so glad we are no longer alone in our search. Surely we should know who and where he is within a week or two.’

Making his way down the stairs, past a couple of stags that looked as though they might be enjoying their last day on earth, Powerscourt wasn’t so sure.

Robert Woodford Stewart went missing on Wednesday afternoon. They didn’t find his body until the Monday morning. It was discovered under a pile of masonry rubble, covered with a black tarpaulin, at the side of the Temple Church, the chapel and spiritual home of the Inner and Middle Temples, next to Queen’s Inn. Restoration work was being carried out in the nave, and when another wheelbarrow of rubble was carried out to the pile outside the church, Stewart’s body was found at the top of it.

‘Shot,’ said Chief Inspector Beecham to Powerscourt later that morning. ‘Shot twice in the chest. First one enough to kill him, I would have thought. Maybe the murderer wanted to make sure.’

‘I don’t suppose you have any idea yet as to when he was killed, Chief Inspector?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘Not yet, my lord. We should know later in the day.’

There was a knock on the door of Dauntsey’s old room where Powerscourt had established a temporary command post and a porter brought an envelope addressed to him.

‘Damn,’ said Powerscourt, reading the note very quickly. ‘I’ve got to go and see that bloody man Somerville. I notice you’re not included in the invitation, Chief Inspector. Does that mean that he doesn’t know you’re here, or that he doesn’t want to see you?’

Beecham laughed. ‘He doesn’t want to see me ever again. He tried to get me moved off the case, you know. Letters to the Commissioner. One or two of the people here who are judges, they all made representations.’

‘What did the Commissioner say?’ said Powerscourt, curious to see how Somerville had been beaten off.

‘He said that he had no intention of telling the judiciary which judges should preside over their various trials and he would be obliged if they would leave him the same freedom in appointing detectives to murder cases.’

‘One thing before I go, Chief Inspector,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Was Stewart a big man, heavy, difficult to lift, would you say?’

‘No, he was slight, fairly easy to pick up and carry about the place if you’ll forgive my language. There’s just one thing that worries me about these murders, Lord Powerscourt.’

Powerscourt stayed where he was. Somerville could wait. ‘What’s that?’

‘Well . . .’ The Chief Inspector spoke slowly, as if he wasn’t sure of his facts. ‘Murder Number One, poison in the beetroot. Murder Number Two, shot through the chest. If it was the same man, why did he not use the same technique? Most murderers do. And there’s a theory, although I’m not sure I believe it, that poison is likely to be a woman’s choice of murder weapon, and guns a man’s.’

‘You don’t think, Chief Inspector,’ Powerscourt was on his feet now and heading for the door, ‘that there are two separate killers at work here?’

‘I just don’t know. Do you think it’s one killer or two?’

‘One,’ said Powerscourt with more certainty than he actually possessed. ‘The chances of two killers operating in one small community like this must be very very small. I should be most surprised if there were two murderers at work here.’

Barton Somerville was not at his enormous desk when Powerscourt arrived in his chambers on the first floor of Fountain Court. Powerscourt had been delighted to hear that his practice at the Bar was not doing well, that his self-importance and pomposity now annoyed some of the judges so much that the instructing solicitors were deserting him, fearful that their clients would lose their cases because of their barrister’s bombast.

‘Morning, Powerscourt.’ He dragged himself away from his tall window with the perfect sashes and withdrew to the fortified position that was his desk. ‘What do you have to report?’

Powerscourt felt he had been summoned to his housemaster in a dispute over late arrival of homework, previous negotiations over its delivery having broken down.

‘Before I bring you up to date, may I inquire if you have heard about Mr Stewart?’

‘Woodford Stewart or Lawrence Stewart? We have two. I’m surprised you haven’t noticed that in the time you’ve been here.’

‘Mr Woodford Stewart. He’s been shot dead. His body was found by the Temple Church this morning. We won’t know any more, time of death and so on, until the doctors have had a look at him.’