David Dickinson - Death Called to the Bar

Barton Somerville stared at Powerscourt for what seemed over a minute. ‘I hold you personally responsible for this latest death, Powerscourt. If you’d been doing your job properly, the murderer would have been unmasked by now and locked up. As it is, he’s still wandering around picking off his victims. And might I remind you, in this Inn and particularly in these rooms, you call me Treasurer. Now, what do you have to report?’

Powerscourt stared at the ceiling. He had an intense dislike of telling his clients anything at all while an investigation was in progress. So often his final conclusions were the direct opposite of what he had suspected at the beginning. And Somerville was certainly a suspect, though why the Treasurer of an Inn like Queen’s should want to go about killing off his own members Powerscourt, for the moment, could not imagine. But if Dauntsey had not been poisoned at the feast, that left only two locations where the crime could have been committed, either in his own chambers, or at the drinks party before the feast, given here in this very room by none other than Somerville himself.

‘I don’t think it would be helpful for me to say anything at this stage,’ he said finally.

‘I beg your pardon?’ boomed Somerville, his face growing red with fury. ‘Do you dare refuse to tell me what you have found out so far, I who brought you into this matter in the first place! It is monstrous!’

‘I don’t think it is monstrous, actually,’ said Powerscourt as reasonably as he could, and more determined than ever not to give anything away. ‘You see, in my experience, whatever people like myself think at this stage of the investigation is usually wrong. As things develop, our opinion changes.’

‘I presume,’ Somerville interrupted him quickly, possibly thinking he was back in court, ‘that by things developing, you mean more members of my Inn being killed off by your incompetence.’

Powerscourt shrugged his shoulders, well aware that a policy of total calm would infuriate the Treasurer even more. ‘I’m sorry I can’t help you at this stage. When I have something definite to report I shall let you know.’ Powerscourt suddenly felt rather sorry for the pompous and unpleasant Somerville. If his practice was drying up, so must be his income. And if his income was drying up, the expenses of his position, which Powerscourt suspected must be considerable, must be growing harder to bear. And now these two murders, which would almost certainly be the permanent mark of his period in office. Somerville’s Treasurership, people would say in years to come, wasn’t that when those dreadful murders happened?

‘Powerscourt, Powerscourt,’ the voice was calmer now, ‘you had gone on a journey in your mind just now and seemed almost incapable of speech. I just hope you understand my position here.’ Somerville had removed his thick spectacles and was polishing them on a bright blue handkerchief. Maybe tentative peace overtures were being launched. ‘Every day I am asked for the latest news of Dauntsey’s murder. After this morning I shall be asked for news of two murders. It is difficult for me to say I know nothing at all. After all, the barristers say to me, we are employing this man Powerscourt to find out the truth. Why, they imply, have you nothing to tell us? Can you understand?’

Powerscourt nodded. An uneasy truce seemed to have broken out over the battlefield, though Powerscourt suspected it would soon be broken by skirmishes elsewhere. ‘Of course I understand. I will do what I can.’

Five minutes later he was at the side of the Temple Church where the body of Woodford Stewart had been found. One of Beecham’s sergeants, a man who looked old enough to be the Chief Inspector’s father, if not his grandfather, greeted him solemnly.

‘He wasn’t killed here, the poor man,’ he said slowly. ‘There’s marks where his body was dragged along the ground. We couldn’t work out what they were at first, these marks, until one of the constables remembered pulling a colleague out of a fight in Stoke Newington. Looks like he may have come from a room somewhere in the Inner Temple, or even from Queen’s itself, my lord. Frightful business.’

Powerscourt was surprised that the sergeant was still capable of such sympathy for the dead. Most of the Metropolitan policemen he had known had formed a thick carapace against terrible sights by the time they were thirty, if not before. It was as if that was the only way they could cope with the bloody remains of London’s citizens, wounded in gang fights in the East End, London’s suicides pulled out of the River Thames or lying in bloody fragments behind the wheels of the Tube trains, London’s murdered dead who might turn up anywhere from Whitechapel to the Temple Church in the Strand.

Edward had begun to feel that the power of words had been replaced in his brain by the power of numbers. He had been working late for the past two days on the accounts of Jeremiah Puncknowle’s companies. All he could see in his mind this morning were these numbers forming and re-forming in front of him in strings and sequences and series, looping round each other, breeding somewhere in the basement of his brain and resurfacing again, numbers infinite, numbers serial, numbers prime, numbers eternal, numbers to do with money raised from flotation, numbers to do with money handed out in commission, numbers to do with money paid out in dividends, numbers to do with the difference between the first number and the second and third combined, numbers to do with the size and extent of the vanishing numbers, the ones that disappeared from the published accounts and must have ended up in the clutches of Jeremiah Puncknowle. But now he had had enough. He might, he felt, turn into an equation if he carried on or be carried out gibbering madly about prospectuses and interim reports. Only one thing had kept him sane in the midst of his mathematical Stations of the Cross. He was going to ask Sarah for another assignation. The destination had only occurred to him when he saw a poster that morning on the walls of Temple underground station.

He climbed up past the first and second floors, where the voice of a senior could be heard tearing strips off some young deviller who had failed to carry out his work properly, and up to the attic floor that was Sarah’s kingdom. He heard the sound of the keys, two typewriters, he thought, so Sarah’s friend must be there too today. The sound was music to Edward’s ears, like a gang of woodpeckers attacking a whole row of trees at the same time.

Sarah’s companion, a small mousy girl called Winifred, fled once Edward put in his appearance to renew their stocks of typing paper in the stationery shop across the road.

Edward stood looking at Sarah, who was wearing a cream blouse today with a blue scarf and those long red tresses trailing down her back.

‘Edward,’ Sarah said with her finest smile, ‘how very nice to see you. You don’t look very well this morning.’

Edward opened his mouth to speak but no sound came forth. Damn, he said to himself, damn, damn damn. Just when I thought I was over all that business with Sarah. He wished Lord Powerscourt was there, or even better, that he and Sarah were taking tea in Manchester Square once more.

Sarah was thinking very fast. If she took Edward by the hand, she was sure he would speak normally. But then Winifred might come back and find them in a compromising position. Winifred was so light on her feet she was the only person in chambers you couldn’t hear coming up the stairs.

‘How is Lord Powerscourt?’ she said instead, trying to bring him back to happier times. ‘Do you think we will be invited to tea there again? Any news of the twins?’

One of those cues must have worked. Sarah watched the lines of strain on Edward’s face relax. She wondered, not for the first time, what had caused his speech problem. Sometimes her mother read her extracts from the newspapers about people being struck dumb by some personal or professional catastrophe. Edward seemed far too young to have gone through anything like that.