David Dickinson - Death Called to the Bar

By half past nine William Burke had still not arrived in Manchester Square. Powerscourt imagined there must have been some frightful financial crisis at his bank in the City. Burke had told him of some of these perils once when they were all on holiday together in Antibes, terrifying stories of books that refused to balance even though the entries had been put in twice, of monies that seemed to be there in the morning, at least on paper, only for them to have disappeared by the evening into some strange hole hidden inside the ledgers. Once, Burke had told him with pride, they seemed to have lost the entire accounts for a whole northern city in the space of one afternoon. They were always found, these missing funds, Burke said, it was always that somebody had made one tiny mistake and never realized it.

Lady Lucy was leafing through the manuscript of Johnny Fitzgerald’s book on The Birds of London . Powerscourt was running through his strange collection of wills one last time.

‘I think this book is going to do jolly well, Francis. There are birds in here that I never knew existed, let alone were flying around London.’

‘I shall order fifty copies of the first edition from Hatchard’s when it comes out, Lucy. We can give them to people as birthday and Christmas presents.’

Just then they heard low conversation on the stairs. Rhys, the Powerscourt butler, was ushering Burke up to the drawing room and promising to return with a large bottle of beer.

‘Good evening, Lucy, good evening, Francis.’ The great financier kissed his sister-in-law on both cheeks. ‘Sorry I’m late. Bloody money wouldn’t add up. I got very thirsty so Rhys is going to bring me a beer. Hope you don’t mind.’

He sat down at the end of the sofa and began to revive after his first long gulp of beer.

‘Francis, Lucy, can’t stay long. Promised to help young Peter with his maths.’ Powerscourt remembered that the one thing that pained William Burke above everything else was that his three children could not cope with mathematics. The first two could scarcely add up, let alone remember their tables.

‘How would you rate this case, Francis? In comparison with some of the others, I mean.’

‘It’s proving rather elusive, William. Every time you think you have put a hand on something definite, it disappears. I’ve got these papers for you, the ones we talked about.’

‘You mean those wills? How many were there in the end?’

‘Just over a hundred. Look, I’ve arranged them all in date order. And I’ve also marked them up in the various categories of expenditure where the dead benchers wanted them to go. And we’re hoping to steal a set of accounts tomorrow or the next day.’

‘Are you indeed? And how are you proposing to do that?’

‘I think you’d be better off not knowing, William. Honestly. We don’t want your directors inquiring how you have been concealing criminal intentions and not reporting them to the proper authorities.’

‘Very well,’ said William Burke. ‘Now then, Francis, I have two pieces of information to report, one of them perfectly legal, the other . . . well, not illegal but the bench of bishops might not approve. The first relates to the relative value of money. You remember we talked the last time we met about whether it is possible to translate the money of, let us say, 1761 when Queen’s Inn was founded into the equivalent value of today. In the vaults of the Bank of England, Francis – well, not quite that far down, certainly a good way down in the basements – there lurks a very tall man, stooped now with knowledge, called Flanagan. This Flanagan is truly a wizard. You tell him that a bequest was made to the Inn in 1785 of three hundred pounds, he will consult some files and tell you, almost immediately, that it is worth twelve thousand pounds in today’s money, or some such figure.’

‘How on earth does he do it?’ asked Lady Lucy.

‘Records, Lucy, he has collected thousands and thousands of records. The man’s a human squirrel on a titanic scale. He looks up government records, records of house sales, wills, household accounts, government contracts, military records. They say the happiest moment in his life was when he discovered that some great house, Chatsworth or Longleat, somewhere like that, had continuous records stretching over a period of a hundred and fifty years during which time they noted in great ledgers the cost of everyday purchases like tea, coffee, wine and so on. And they still had the records of the wages paid to every single workman involved in the making of the artificial lake and the creation of the landscape gardens, including the very considerable sums made over to Capability Brown. Flanagan was, apparently, so excited by this discovery that he had to ask the Governor of the Bank of England for a week off for his brain to calm down. Anyway, Francis, the good Flanagan, Thomas Flanagan I believe he’s called, will be very happy to make those calculations for you tomorrow on receipt of the wills. He would like to make a copy of them for his own records and I said that would be fine.’

‘Does that mean, William, that after this Mr Flanagan has done his sums, as it were, we will have just one figure for the value of all these bequests? One hundred thousand pounds, let us say, in today’s money?’

‘Exactly, Lucy. Only I suspect it may be a lot more than one hundred thousand pounds.’

‘And your other piece of information, William?’

Powerscourt was to tell Johnny Fitzgerald afterwards that William Burke went very conspiratorial at this point. He looked around in a rather shifty fashion. He leant forward in his chair. He lowered his voice till it was almost a whisper.

‘Keep it very quiet,’ he muttered. ‘Bank accounts. Bank statements. I happen to know the fellow who looks after the accounts of Queen’s Inn.’ Burke looked around him again as if spies might be lurking underneath the sofa or behind the curtains. ‘Fact is, the fellow wants to transfer to our bank. Transfer himself, I mean, not some money. I let it be known, in a delicate fashion, that his application might be put to advantage if I could, accidentally as it were, have a look at those statements. That should happen tomorrow morning.’

Burke sat back in his chair and breathed deeply as if he’d run a race or just come out from confession.

‘You old devil, William. I am most grateful.’

‘It’s not as bad as it seems,’ Burke said finally. ‘The chap was going to get the job anyway.’

There was a mild knock on the door and coughing noises on the far side of it. That could only mean one thing. Powerscourt and Lady Lucy looked at each other and smiled. Rhys had come with a message. He had. Rhys always coughed. He did. ‘I’m very sorry to interrupt, my lord, my lady, Mr Burke, there’s a message from one of Chief Inspector Beecham’s young constables.’

The ones Lady Lucy referred to as the creche, Powerscourt recalled.

‘The Chief Inspector thought you would want to know, my lord. He’ll be calling in the morning. It’s Mr Newton, my lord, Mr Porchester Newton. He’s disappeared.’

Edward was relieved to find that his stutter had not returned the following morning. He had an anxious moment about the p of Temple station when he bought his ticket but all seemed to be well. He did, however, feel extremely nervous about the whole operation. What would happen if something went wrong? What if they were caught? Then he remembered something Powerscourt had told him on the way down the stairs the previous evening. ‘The thing to remember about any hazardous operation, Edward,’ he had said, ‘is that everybody feels nervous and a bit wobbly beforehand. No matter how many times a soldier has been in battle, they still feel anxious before it starts.’ Well, this was Edward’s first engagement and he didn’t want to let his general down.