David Dickinson - Death Called to the Bar

‘Train crash,’ he said. ‘We were all going to Bristol on a train. There was something wrong with the points. The carriages came off the line at about fifty miles an hour and rolled down a slope. I was buried beneath my parents and the remains of the carriage for hours. When the police pulled everyone out of the rubble I was unconscious beneath them. They say I didn’t speak for a week after that.’

‘My God,’ said Sarah, almost wishing she hadn’t been told this ghastly news. Perhaps she should ask her mother not to speak to Edward about his parents at all. ‘How frightful, Edward, how absolutely frightful. Your poor family, just wiped out in front of you.’

Edward began munching on his apple. The cows wandered off to another part of their field. A couple of rowing boats, going quite fast, sped past them on their return journey to Oxford.

‘So where do you live now, Edward?’ Sarah had a vision of Edward living on his own in some squalid boarding house where the food was terrible and he never tidied his room.

‘I live with my grandparents,’ he said with a smile. ‘They’re very good to me. Maybe you should come and meet them, Sarah. I’m sure they’d love to see you.’ Even in his sixties Edward knew his grandfather had an eye for a pretty girl. Sarah would enchant him. The thought seemed to cheer him up.

‘Right,’ he said, ‘we’d better think about getting back or we won’t have any time to look at Oxford at all.’

Lord Francis Powerscourt was trying to review his knowledge of the Queen’s Inn investigation as his train carried him down to Calne and the beautiful Mrs Dauntsey. Murder Number One, her husband, poisoned at a feast, the poison probably administered at a drinks party in the rooms of the Treasurer of the Inn, the unpleasant Barton Somerville. Murder Number Two, Woodford Stewart, shot twice in the chest. Connections between the two? Both were retained for the prosecution in what would be one of the great fraud trials of the decade, that of Jeremiah Puncknowle and his associates. And both were benchers of their Inn of Court, though why that should make them liable to sudden and violent death Powerscourt didn’t know. He did know that Woodford Stewart had been elected two months before Dauntsey so they must have been the most junior members of the Inn’s governing body. And what of the missing Maxfield? Had he resurfaced to murder Dauntsey for his twenty thousand pounds? Then there was Porchester Newton, Dauntsey’s great rival in the election to the bench. He had disappeared shortly after Dauntsey’s death but was due to return the following week.

Had he, perhaps, returned in time to shoot Woodford Stewart and dump his body by the Temple Church? Powerscourt could think of lots of reasons why somebody might want to kill Dauntsey and Stewart individually. It was the connection that worried him, assuming the two deaths were linked. Surely it had to be professional, he said to himself, as the train rattled through a tunnel. He still didn’t know what to say to Mrs Dauntsey, how to bring up the very delicate subject he was travelling to Calne to raise.

As his cab rattled past the grey stone walls of the great house, Powerscourt remembered the covered furniture, the sofas under wraps, the floors covered with rough matting, the vast expanse of the great house that most people never saw, a forbidden kingdom for the dust and the shadows and the ghosts of Dauntseys past.

She was waiting for him, Elizabeth Dauntsey, still dressed in black that showed off her creamy skin. She smiled as she offered her hand to him.

‘Lord Powerscourt, how very pleasant to see you again. I trust you had a pleasant journey? Would you care for some tea, perhaps?’

‘A little later for the tea would be most agreeable, Mrs Dauntsey. My journey was fine. Your park is looking very well with all these early flowers.’

‘I think it likes the spring, our park. It always looks good about now. But come, Lord Powerscourt, before you disclose your business, I have something to tell you. I don’t know if it is important or not but you did ask in your letter if I could think of anything unusual Alex might have said in the month or so before he died.’

Powerscourt nodded gravely. ‘Have you thought of something, Mrs Dauntsey?’

She looked down at her hands briefly. ‘There was something, I hope it’s not too trivial. It must have been in the weeks after he was elected a bencher, you see, and there was quite a lot that was new to him about all that.’

She paused and looked closely at Powerscourt as if he could help her. He gave her what he hoped was an encouraging smile.

‘He said it more than once, I’m certain of that, Lord Powerscourt. He said he was very worried about the accounts.’

‘Whose accounts, Mrs Dauntsey? Your own personal accounts? The estate accounts perhaps? Some extra expenditure needed for improvement, maybe? His legal accounts? Or the Inn accounts, which I suppose he now had access to after his election?’

‘What a lot of accounts you can rattle off at a moment’s notice Lord Powerscourt! Do you think it’s because you’re a man?’

Powerscourt smiled. ‘I think it’s because of my brother-in-law. He’s a mighty financier in the City of London. When I called on him the other day he was surrounded by records of income and expenditure and ledgers and an enormous volume called the Book of Numbers which contained the secrets of all the other accounts.’

Now it was Mrs Dauntsey’s turn to smile. ‘It must be very useful having a brother-in-law who’s good with money, Lord Powerscourt. Nearly as good as, maybe better than having one who’s a doctor. You don’t have one who’s a medical man, do you?’

Powerscourt did a lightning audit of Lucy’s vast tribe of relations. Not one of them, he realized, had entered the medical profession.

‘No doctors,’ he said, ‘one or two naval men, plenty of soldiers, probably enough to form a small regiment. But to return to your husband, Mrs Dauntsey, do you have an idea in your mind of which kind of account he was talking about?’

‘I’ve thought about that a lot,’ she said, ‘particularly as you were coming to see me today. I don’t think it was our personal accounts and I don’t think it was to do with the accounts of his chambers. That clerk they had ran those as if it was the Bank of England. That leaves us with the estate and Queen’s Inn. I’m honestly not sure which one it would have been, I’m afraid. Alex kept the estate accounts very close to his chest.’

‘Can you remember exactly what he said, the words he used, Mrs Dauntsey?’

She frowned. Powerscourt thought she looked even more attractive when she frowned. ‘I can’t,’ she said finally. ‘I can’t decide if he said unusual, or strange, or worrying. It was something along those lines.’

Powerscourt groaned mentally as he thought of the problem of asking Barton Somerville if he could cast an eye over the Inn accounts. ‘I don’t suppose,’ he said hopefully, ‘that he brought any of the Inn accounts down here, to look at them over the weekend, perhaps?’

‘I don’t think so. I’ll have a look in his study and let you know, if that would be helpful. Perhaps we should move on to what you wanted to talk to me about, Lord Powerscourt. Then we could have some tea.’

Powerscourt felt rather nervous all of a sudden. ‘The matter is exceedingly delicate, Mrs Dauntsey. It touches on the most delicate and intimate of subjects, one we discussed last time, if you recall, about children and heirs and all sort of thing. If you have any objection, please tell me now.’

Elizabeth Dauntsey did not blush, or look down, or ask to be excused. ‘I am sure, Lord Powerscourt, that you would not be raising such a matter if you did not think it might be important.’