David Dickinson - Death Called to the Bar

‘He can’t do this! You can’t do this! I shall forbid the meeting! He can’t call it without my approval! You’ll pay for this, Powerscourt, mark my words, you’ll pay for it. Kirk is a traitor! He can’t have this meeting!’

‘I’m afraid he can and he will, Mr Treasurer.’ It was only the second time Detective Chief Inspector Beecham had spoken in the entire meeting. He had risen to his feet. ‘You see, Mr Treasurer, tomorrow afternoon you won’t be here.’ He went to the door and beckoned in a sergeant and a constable who had been waiting in the outer office. ‘Barton Obadiah Somerville, I am arresting you in connection with the murders of Alexander Dauntsey and Woodford Stewart. I must warn you that anything you say may be taken down and used in evidence. Take him away.’

Powerscourt saw that all the files in the gorgon’s office had been removed. That must have been the noises they heard in the early stages of the interview. Somerville was still screaming, ‘You’ll pay for this, Powerscourt!’ as they led him down the stairs and out the back door. The gorgon herself seemed to have disappeared too, Powerscourt saw, fled to a different lair.

‘You take care, my lord,’ said Beecham to Powerscourt as they parted on the bottom of the staircase. ‘I don’t think it’s over yet. And well done, my lord, you were tremendous in there.’

‘I just hope I made him cross,’ said Powerscourt with a grin. ‘The prospect of being voted out in disgrace is going to prey on his mind.’

As the cab bearing Somerville to the cells drew away, Powerscourt heard a final scream. All he could catch was ‘. . . pay for this’.

There were still a number of Chief Inspector Beecham’s men working in and around Queen’s Inn, but none of them noticed that Lord Francis Powerscourt was not alone on the journey back to his home. A stocky man with a dark beard slipped out of an alleyway just the far side of the porter’s lodge and followed him all the way. The man kept to a distance of about a hundred yards and every now and then he patted his pocket as if to reassure himself he had not left some important object at home.

Powerscourt walked slowly back to Manchester Square. He was still marvelling at the vicious hatred Somerville had directed his way. All of the vitriol seemed to be targeted at him. Chief Inspector Beecham, object of so much venom at the beginning of the investigation, had escaped scot free.

Perhaps a painting or two will calm my brain, he said to himself as he passed the Wallace Collection, more or less opposite his own house in Manchester Square. It was a quarter to five and there was still an hour and a quarter before the Head Porter closed up for the night, his great bunch of keys jangling on his belt as he patrolled right round the building checking that everything was in order. Powerscourt slipped into the Housekeeper’s Room and stared idly at an extraordinary painting by Paul Delaroche showing the State Barge of Cardinal Richelieu on the Rhone. A couple of aristocrats who had conspired to overthrow the mighty Cardinal were being towed in a boat behind, guarded by soldiers with halberds. Richelieu himself was dying at this point but he was still towing his enemies to Lyon for their execution. His barge was luxuriously furnished with red silk drapes and a rich oriental carpet trailed in the water by its side. Delaroche was interested in the reflections in the water, the almost Eastern luxury of his Cardinal. Powerscourt still had lawyers running through his mind, the living and the dead ones he had dealt with earlier that afternoon. He wondered briefly if Richelieu would have been a successful lawyer, Master of the Rolls perhaps, or a hanging judge. He stared briefly at the sister painting on the left which showed Richelieu’s successor Cardinal Mazarin literally on his deathbed, playing cards with his friends and surrounded by intriguing courtiers.

For Powerscourt there was something too rich, too decadent about these men of God flaunting their earthly power. It was time to move on. These two Delaroches were in the Housekeeper’s Room to the left of the main entrance. And on this particular day Powerscourt had his timings wrong. The Collection was going to close at five, not six. The Head Porter had already completed his circuit of the first floor, ushering the last visitors out of the building. And because Powerscourt was on one side of the building, he was not seen by the Head Porter as he began his Royal Progress on the other side, moving the pilgrims on, seeing to the doors and windows. By the time he did reach the Housekeeper’s Room Powerscourt had moved off up the stairs towards his favourite landscape in the Great Gallery, vacated by the Head Porter some ten minutes before. Just as he arrived in front of Rubens’ The Rainbow Landscape he heard a dull thud coming from downstairs. He checked his watch. It was exactly five o’clock. The Collection must have closed an hour earlier than usual today. He set forth for the front door, fingering the gun in his pocket. Ever since he heard the warnings from the underworld as relayed to Johnny Fitzgerald about threats to his life, he had carried it in his pocket every day. Lady Lucy checked with him every time he left the house. By the time he reached the ground floor he thought that he must be the only person left in the building, certainly the only one inside by mistake. At the front door he realized that no amount of manpower was going to let him out. The locks were huge, dark and forbidding in the shadows by the door. Powerscourt remembered that the nightwatchman came early in the evening, seven or eight o’clock. He would have a couple of hours to enjoy the paintings entirely on his own.

He stopped halfway up the stairs. He thought he heard a noise. Somebody with heavy boots was walking along the Great Gallery. And from the pattern of the steps he thought they were coming in his direction. Powerscourt didn’t wait for formal introductions. Something told him that this might be enemy action. His right hand felt once more for the gun in his pocket. Suddenly he remembered being locked in the cathedral with the dead of centuries in his last case in the West Country, when a huge pile of lethal masonry had been poured down, missing him by inches. He tiptoed down the stairs as fast as he could and made his way into the armoury section on the ground floor. Early evening light was falling on the great wood and glass cases that lined the walls, illuminating enormous spears, or ancient sets of body armour. There was a huge collection of weapons of death in here, long lances for horsemen to carry and run through their enemies, heavy pikes for foot soldiers to decapitate their foes, long swords and short swords, swords with pommels and swords without, swords for stabbing people, swords for cutting them in two, straight swords, curved swords, daggers, cuirasses, kris, armour from many centuries. In one of the rooms there was, he remembered, a horse clad in armour, ridden by a man in armour, a general perhaps, his visor slightly open so he could catch a proper sight of the opposition.

Powerscourt listened carefully. He could hear nothing. He suddenly realized that on either the ground or the first floors you could go right round the building in a clockwise or anti-clockwise direction. There was no wall or staircase that would force a man to retrace his steps and go back the way he had come. Here, in this beautiful set of rooms, he was going to play hide and seek round the galleries. The prize might be life or death. Powerscourt thought there was a staircase in the room next to the last of the armoury collections which had once been the Victorian smoking room. He thought he could hear those footsteps again, coming from the upper floors. The noise would continue for about half a minute or so and then stop. Was the man on the floor above waiting for him to appear? Was he looking for a hiding place, inside some great curtain perhaps, where only the barrel of his gun would need to come out of hiding and shoot his enemy in the heart? Very gingerly Powerscourt tiptoed up the stairs into a room full of Dutch landscapes. There was one painting of a ferry boat very early in the morning where the light glittered beautifully on the water and the daily commerce of the Dutch ebbed and flowed across the river. There was that sound again. His opponent certainly wasn’t concerned about making a noise. Powerscourt wondered suddenly about Somerville’s terrible threats and hoped he had not escaped from the police station to come here and take his revenge in the middle of the masterpieces of Europe and the armour of the East.