David Dickinson - Death Called to the Bar

At first sight Petley Road looked exactly the same as any other Victorian terrace in the capital, most of the front doors clean, a few flowers beginning to come out in the tiny front gardens, one or two ambitious residents trying to grow trees on their section of pavement. But when you looked closely, things were different. There were little groups of women, three at least, Powerscourt thought, conversing quietly on their front porches and casting furtive glances from time to time at the late Mr Bassett’s residence at Number 15. Outside that house, looking as though he had been planted there many years before, was a six-foot, fourteen-stone policeman, his task to keep the prying eyes of all and sundry away from what lay within. And then, as Powerscourt was just a few feet away from the front door, he saw a team of four black horses pulling an undertaker’s carriage, also draped in black, turning into Petley Road from the other end. They had come, presumably, to take the body away.

Powerscourt found the police surgeon circling the body in the first-floor bedroom. Even here, Powerscourt saw, John Bassett’s love of the distant places of the earth had taken hold on the walls. Downstairs in the living room it had been views of Mount Everest and the Sahara desert, the Arctic and the vast steppes of Siberia. Up here there were pictures of a very long train climbing up what Powerscourt presumed to be the Rocky Mountains, a breathtaking illustration of Niagara Falls and a vast panorama of ruins that Powerscourt thought must be the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. He made his introductions to the police surgeon who, he gathered, was called James Wilson.

‘Your reputation precedes you, Lord Powerscourt,’ said Wilson, when he had been given the briefest of summaries of the Queen’s Inn case and Powerscourt’s close alliance with Detective Chief Inspector Beecham. ‘You and the Chief Inspector must make a formidable team. I presume,’ he went on, turning to look once more at the body of John Bassett, ‘that you want to know if there was anything untoward about this old man’s death. He used to work at Queen’s, I gather.’

‘That is correct,’ said Powerscourt. At first sight it seemed obvious that John Bassett had died in his sleep. He had gone to sleep on his back, something must have happened in the night, and he was gone. A spare pillow was lying halfway down the bed.

‘There is every reason to think that Mr Bassett died of natural causes, Lord Powerscourt. None of the examinations I have been able to perform suggest anything else. He was very old. The system decided to shut down. The heart simply stopped beating. He wasn’t hit over the head, or shot, or poisoned like your unfortunate legal gentlemen. There is only one thing you could, just possibly, think of as being suspicious if you were that way inclined.’

‘And that is?’ said Powerscourt.

‘It’s this pillow,’ said the doctor. ‘Why do you have a pillow halfway down your bed? The police were the first people into this house so we can be sure nothing has been moved. Do you know anybody, Lord Powerscourt, who sleeps with a pillow halfway down the bed?’

‘Not exactly,’ replied Powerscourt, thinking of the amazing jumble of pillows, bed clothes, blankets, soft toys, that seemed to surround his eldest children when they woke up. ‘But surely you could decide that you had too many pillows and simply move this one away? You could probably do it in your sleep.’

‘All of that is true. But,’ Dr Wilson bent down and picked up the pillow, ‘suppose you were a murderer, Lord Powerscourt. You must have imagined yourself in such a role many times, I should think. You find Mr Bassett asleep. For whatever reason, you have come to kill him. You pull, ever so gently, one of his pillows out from under his head. You press it down over his face. Gradually you hear the breathing stop. You remove the pillow and leave it lying on the bed. There are no marks anywhere. You disappear into the night. I’m not saying that did happen, Lord Powerscourt, I’m saying it could have happened.’

Lord Francis Powerscourt was pacing up and down his drawing room in Manchester Square. It was nearly half past seven in the evening and he was waiting for William Burke and his report on the tangled finances of Queen’s Inn. Strange memories of the investigation were drifting across his mind. He thought of Alex Dauntsey going to see John Bassett and being poisoned a week later. He thought of his own visit to the Finance Steward of Queen’s that was followed by Bassett’s own death, whether accidental or not. He thought of the vanished Porchester Newton and those huge hands that could have strangled a man in seconds. He heard, suddenly, the voice of Elizabeth Dauntsey, dressed in black and sitting by her fire in Calne telling him, ‘There was something worrying him. It must have been in the weeks after he was elected a bencher, you see. Alex said it more than once, I’m certain of that, Lord Powerscourt. He said he was very worried about the accounts.’ He thought about Rivers Cavendish, a man with the mighty motive of the cuckold’s horns for murdering Dauntsey, and his two books on poisons. That afternoon Powerscourt had established to his own satisfaction that a man who took a cab to and from Paddington station en route to Oxford, like Dr Rivers Cavendish, could have reached Queen’s Inn in time to poison Dauntsey. He thought of Mrs Cavendish, enjoying her lunches and fine wines with Dauntsey, deprived of her nights away. And then he heard the voice of Edward from the very first time they met:

‘It was after his election as a bencher, sir. Something changed after that. Not immediately but two weeks or so later, I should say, sir. Mr Dauntsey was very cross about something. I never knew what it was. One afternoon I came into his room when he wasn’t expecting me. He was studying some figures on a pad in front of him. He looked at me, Mr Dauntsey sir, almost in despair. “It’s not right, Edward,” he said, “it’s just not right.”’

What was it, Powerscourt said to himself, that so troubled Alex Dauntsey in the weeks after his election as a bencher? They should have been among the happiest of his professional life. Where was Porchester Newton? And why had he run away a second time? Was Mrs Cavendish lying? Was Dr Cavendish, the true believer, breaking one of the Commandments he must hold so dear? Was he in breach of the fifth one, Thou shalt not kill? His wife had been on the verge of infringing the sixth, Thou shalt not commit adultery, if she hadn’t already broken it. He remembered the portrait painter Nathaniel Stone on Dauntsey: ‘Hold on, he did say one thing, but I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time. It was something about very strange things going on there’ – ‘there’ being Queen’s Inn.

William Burke looked very serious when he walked into the room.

‘I think we should go to your study, Francis. We’re going to need that big desk of yours.’

And so, for over two hours, William Burke took Powerscourt through the intricacies of the finances of Queen’s Inn. There was material in his report from the wills, from the accounts stolen by Edward and Sarah and from the statements provided by the man who wanted a position in Burke’s bank. His people had typed out summaries of the main findings. There were brief chapters on what appeared to have happened to particular donations. And Burke kept checking that his friend understood what he was being told. When he rose to return to his wife and the innumerate children, Powerscourt shook him by the hand. ‘I am so grateful, William. This is tremendous.’

‘Let me know if there is anything more I can do to help,’ said Burke. ‘I am not available for the next two days but after that I should be only too pleased.’