David Dickinson - Death of a Chancellor

‘And was he wearing boots or shoes, can you recall?’

Again Andrew McKenna paused. Powerscourt could hear John Eustace’s eighteenth-century clock ticking on the mantelpiece. McKenna, he noticed, had turned rather red during the interrogation.

‘As far as I remember, it was boots,’ he said finally. Powerscourt suddenly remembered the dental print on Dr Blackstaff’s wall. McKenna was the victim, held down by four men, a fifth forcing open his jaws, while he, Powerscourt, was advancing towards him, fearful pliers in hand.

‘What colour of boots, McKenna?’

‘Brown, my lord. Mr Eustace didn’t like black boots for some reason. Black shoes were acceptable, but not boots.’

‘I see,’ said Powerscourt as gently as he could. ‘Perhaps you could you just describe the last evening he spent here in this house. Before he went to the doctor’s.’

Andrew McKenna began the same narrative he had given to Mrs Cockburn some time before. He was word perfect on this part of the story. He repeated it to himself many times every night in case he had to tell it again. He had even written it all out on three sheets of paper and hidden them under his floorboards.

Powerscourt wasn’t really listening. He knew. Well, he didn’t actually know in any sense that would stand up in a court of law. It wasn’t just the discrepancy between the colour of the boots and the shirts in the two accounts. It was the demeanour of the two men.

‘Shortly after he finished his dinner, my lord, Mr Eustace went to his study,’ McKenna was still going, telling his story like children at school reciting a poem they had been made to learn for their homework the night before, struggling occasionally to remember the next line. Powerscourt wasn’t sure what to do. ‘I went to see him some time after that and he told me not to wait up for him . . .’

Just what had happened to John Eustace? Had one of these two men killed him? Killed him for the doctor’s cut of the will? Fifty thousand pounds would go a long way, even after you had paid off your accomplice. Andrew McKenna might be a very poor liar but he didn’t look like a murderer. But then, as Powerscourt remembered from some of his previous cases, murderers seldom do look like murderers.

‘The next time we heard of Mr Eustace, my lord, was when the doctor came round the following morning and told me he was dead.’ McKenna’s recital was almost over.

Had Eustace killed himself? Powerscourt wondered. Blown the top of his head off with a pistol, rendering himself so disfigured that nobody could have endured the sight of him lying in his coffin, half of his face blown away in the blast? That would explain why the coffin lid was sealed so early. Maybe the shame of a suicide had to be covered up. Powerscourt wondered briefly if he should put this very question right now to Andrew McKenna. ‘Did Mr Eustace commit suicide, McKenna? Did you find him with the top of his head blown off and then go to the doctor who concocted this cover story?’ He decided against it.

‘I got all the servants together – we had to wait a while, my lord, for the gardeners to come in from outside – and I told them the terrible news.’

McKenna stopped. Powerscourt found himself looking closely at McKenna’s hands. They were clasped together very tightly, as if to stop them from shaking.

‘Very good, McKenna,’ said Powerscourt in his most emollient manner. ‘Could I just ask you one more thing? Would you have said that Mr Eustace was upset or depressed about anything in the days and weeks before his death?’

McKenna thought for a moment or two. ‘I wouldn’t have said he was depressed, my lord. He was always a very cheerful gentleman, at least to us servants. Maybe preoccupied would be the word, my lord. But then he was often preoccupied if he had to preach an important sermon or something like that.’

‘Thank you so much, McKenna. I am much obliged to you for that account. And now, perhaps, you could be so kind as to bring me a whisky. I shall be in Mr Eustace’s study.’

Without realizing at first what he was doing Powerscourt began pacing restlessly up and down the drawing room. Lady Lucy would have smiled had she seen the habits of Markham Square reproduced so perfectly in a country house nearly two hundred miles away, the same abstracted air, the same sense of having completely departed from the immediate surroundings. Suppose it wasn’t suicide, he said to himself. Suppose John Eustace was murdered. But by whom? By the butler? By the doctor? By another of the servants with a grudge against his master? By an outside hand, by a person or persons unknown? But how did they get in? How did they get out? McKenna had told him very clearly on his first afternoon in the house that none of the doors or windows had been disturbed during the night of John Eustace’s death. The whole household would have had to be involved in such a conspiracy. And what should he tell the ferocious Augusta Cockburn? She was, after all, his employer. Was he bound to pass on his suspicions to her? Powerscourt dreaded to think of the mayhem her tongue and her malevolence could cause if she thought her brother had committed suicide or been murdered.

Andrew McKenna was waiting in the study with the whisky. Powerscourt told the butler he could go, and not to wait for him. He checked his watch. He had just given McKenna the same instructions at virtually the same time as his previous master had done some days before. And in virtually the same place. Maybe, thought Powerscourt fancifully, this is my last evening on earth. Maybe I shall meet a mysterious death in this very house tonight. Maybe my body too will be sealed in its coffin before its time, leaving Johnny Fitzgerald to conduct an investigation into the circumstances of my demise.

‘Shut up,’ he said quietly to himself and took a drink from his whisky. He sat down at the Eustace desk. Hanging on the wall directly in front of him was a reproduction of a Raphael. Powerscourt remembered reading about this painting. It showed Pope Leo the Tenth flanked by two other cardinals who just happened to be his nephews. The Pope, a powerful figure of a man, is wearing a red cape over an ornate white cassock. The fleshy jowls on his face reveal that whoever may have been his favourite saint it was not one of the ascetic ones like St Francis of Assisi. Leo is seated at a desk, covered with a rich red cloth, examining an illustrated book with a magnifying glass. One of his nephews is to his right-hand side, staring into space, possibly praying. The other, a rather shifty-looking prelate in Powerscourt’s view, is looking directly at the painter. Powerscourt shuddered as he remembered that Raphael painted it shortly after a murder plot against Leo had been unearthed in the College of Cardinals. This was Leo’s way of telling the world, and the College of Cardinals in particular, that he was still at large. The whole canvas, dominated by reds and scarlets against an almost black background, reeked with pomp and power and privilege.

A sudden thought struck Powerscourt. He got up from the desk and went to the door to look at the painting from a greater distance. His original assumption was that it must be a reproduction. Perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps it was the real thing, an original Raphael hanging here in the quiet hamlet of Hawke’s Broughton. He peered at it again. He looked round the other walls to see if Leonardos and Michelangelos might be hanging here as well. He didn’t think so. He remembered what he had learnt in a previous investigation involving works of art and forgeries and murdered art critics. Raphaels for some reason fetched incredibly high prices. John Eustace could certainly have afforded a whole gallery of Raphaels. Perhaps the value of his estate would have to be increased by another hundred thousand pounds or so if Pope Leo and his nephews were consigned to the art dealers and the auctioneers of New Bond Street.