David Dickinson - Death Called to the Bar

‘Forgive me for sounding curious, Mrs Cavendish, did Mr Dauntsey ever ask you what you would do if you became pregnant?’

Catherine Cavendish looked at him as if he came from another planet. ‘You do ask the strangest things, Lord P. Anyone might think you’re one of those perverted blokes who spy on other people from behind a curtain. He did ask me once, as a matter of fact. I said I’d give it up for adoption, that’s what I’d do. I’ve known girls in chorus lines get in the family way, happens all the time. Lots of them open the oven door before the bun is ready and throw it out, if you follow me. Well, I’ve known girls, perfectly healthy before, ending up with insides like rows of washing lines after that. Not me, Lord P.’

‘I’ve nearly finished, Mrs Cavendish,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Did Mr Dauntsey ever mention his wife?’

The word wife seemed to trigger some semi-automatic reaction in Catherine Cavendish. Her earlier openness disappeared. She composed her face until it was almost a mask. She blinked rapidly.

‘No, he didn’t, apart from failing to have the children as I said before.’

Powerscourt was certain she was lying. For a fraction of a second he considered challenging her. Then he thought better of it.

‘In the weeks before he died, Mrs Cavendish, did Mr Dauntsey say anything to you about being worried, about any problems he might have had?’

‘Not to me, he didn’t, Lord P, he was always cheerful with me. And I know he was looking forward to our little weekend away.’

‘On the day of the feast, Mrs Cavendish, did you see Mr Dauntsey at all?’

‘No, I was going to meet him later,’ said Mrs Cavendish.

‘You didn’t go round to his chambers in the late afternoon by any chance?’

‘I’ve told you,’ Catherine Cavendish had turned rather red, ‘I was going to see him later.’ Powerscourt thought she was lying, but that if she was, she would stick to her story through thick and thin.

Most, if not all, men, Powerscourt felt sure, would have looked forward to a weekend away with Catherine Cavendish. He wondered if they might find it rather exhausting. But most of all, as she departed back to Chelsea, he wondered why she had lied to him. And what had Alex Dauntsey said, or not said, to Catherine Cavendish about his wife? Most men in the circumstances, Powerscourt felt, would have mentioned the existence of a spouse. They might have blackened her name with tales of not being understood, of wives permanently suffering from headaches, wives misbehaving in any number of ways. Such confessions, after all, were how the men justified their infidelity to themselves. But for the man to say nothing at all, which was what Catherine Cavendish implied, must be unusual. And surely, in those circumstances, Powerscourt thought, the mistress figure would herself inquire about the existence and disposition of a wife.

Then a fresh thought struck him with such force that he was out of his chair and pacing up and down the room. Suppose Alex Dauntsey had told Catherine Cavendish that he was going to leave his wife. Suppose they planned to time his departure to take place after the rather different and more permanent departure of Dr Cavendish. Catherine, as it were, would be lining up the next husband even before the first one was in his grave. Well, it had happened before and would, no doubt, happen again. So far, so good, Powerscourt said to himself. But suppose Catherine discovered that Dauntsey was not going to leave his wife. Naughty weekends in riverside hotels, whole evenings of man and woman created he them, supposedly undertaken with one purpose in view, that Dauntsey should take her if not to the altar, at least to the registry office, would be in vain. She would be giving away her assets for nothing at all, as it were. And suppose she decides to take the ultimate revenge. She takes some poison from her husband’s medicine chest. The one flaw in his theory was how she delivered the fatal dose. The answer would, no doubt, present itself. But for the moment Powerscourt was certain that Catherine Cavendish might have as valid a motive for murdering Alexander Dauntsey as anybody else, if not more. During most investigations, Powerscourt said ruefully to himself, the number of suspects decreases as inquiries go on. But in this case, the number of suspects was growing, and he had the feeling that it hadn’t stopped growing yet.

Mrs Henderson had finally managed to get Edward entirely on his own. This feat, which Edward had asked Sarah to prevent before his first visit to the Henderson household, had been accomplished by the simple ploy of throwing away the milk and the tea. Sarah, when asked to pop down to the shops for replacements, thought her mother must have been consuming tea at an incredibly rapid rate, but had no idea of the deception, or of what was planned in her absence. Edward, his earlier anxieties allayed by the satisfactory nature of his previous visit, had no idea what was coming either. But for Mrs Henderson, this was a duty she owed both to herself and, as she reminded herself sternly, to Sarah’s father. Her visit to old Dr Carr that morning had been far worse than she had feared. She, Mrs Henderson, had thought her illness was not getting any worse. True, she found it more difficult to climb the stairs and she now had to lean more heavily on Sarah than she had before. True, even without ascending to the upper floor, she often felt very short of breath. Sometimes even sitting by the fire and reading one of the magazines Sarah bought for her, the quick wheezy breaths told her something was wrong. The doctor had examined her carefully, not speaking as he did so. When he had finished, he put down his instruments and sat down opposite Mrs Henderson. Dr Carr took one of her hands in his and inspected it carefully, as if the lines on the back might help him to foretell her future. Looking at his sad face, she knew things were bad. That was the same expression the doctor had when he told them her husband had not long to live. Now he told her, in the gentlest voice he could, that the illness was progressing faster than he had thought it would. Things seemed to be deteriorating more quickly than he would like. Of course, the process might go into reverse, everything might be arrested and her position stabilized. Part of Mrs Henderson did not want to ask the obvious question at this point. Had she been single, or a widow, she told herself later, she would have walked out without the inquiry.

‘How long do you think I have, doctor?’ she asked in a very subdued voice.

‘I could not say, Mrs Henderson,’ said Dr Carr, still holding her hand. ‘I can only guess. When you saw me before, I said two or three years, probably. If things continue as they are, I should have to change the figure. Nine months? Twelve months? I could be wrong.’

Mrs Henderson felt, perfectly rationally, that nobody had ever taken away a whole year of her life before, and that it should take more than only fifteen minutes in a doctor’s surgery to do it. As she hobbled slowly and painfully out of the surgery, less than a hundred yards from her house, Dr Carr’s next patient had to wait some time before being admitted. The doctor was staring out of his window, looking at the distant railway tracks that led to Ealing station and out towards the west of England. When he was younger these encounters upset him, but not for long. Now, after his decades of doctoring, they were heavier and heavier to bear. He felt desperately sad every time he sentenced one of his patients like Mrs Henderson to death and sent them out alone into an unfriendly world. Now he felt there was a part of him under sentence too, that whatever portion of life he had left to him had been diminished. That evening, he said to himself, he would speak to his wife. The practice would be sold. The retirement cottage in Dorset, close to the coast near Lyme Regis, had been bought some time ago. He would spend his last years in contemplation of another of life’s great mysteries, not the painful deaths of his patients in this new century, but the ever-changing movements of the sea and the unpredictable movements of the birds above it.