David Dickinson - Death of a Chancellor

The figures he was looking at related to the recent sales of his paper. Since his arrival he reckoned that he had increased the circulation by about twenty per cent. But that was not enough for Patrick Butler. There were thousands and thousands of citizens in the county who were not buying his paper. When he saw the good people of Grafton en masse, on market days or attending a local football match, he wanted to harangue them on the error of their ways. Did they know what they were missing by not buying the Grafton Mercury ? Did they not realize how their lives would be enriched by reading the pages of his paper? But one recent edition had sold spectacularly well. It was the commemorative special on the death of Queen Victoria which was still on sale all over the county. It was going to make an enormous profit. What else, Patrick wondered, could merit the same treatment and deliver an equivalent volume of sales?

He rose cautiously to his feet and crouched under the grimy skylight. If he craned his neck, he could just see the spire of the minster off to his right. Something was stirring in his restless brain. The cathedral, something to do with the cathedral. Then he had it. The anniversary, the one thousandth anniversary of the cathedral was to come at Easter. There had been announcements in the paper already, details of the plans for the celebrations, of course. But what a perfect opportunity for another anniversary edition. The articles and headlines began to roll through the printing presses in his mind. A Day in the Life of a Medieval Monk. The Role and Responsibilities of an Abbot. Patrick thought the Dean might enjoy writing that one. The Hands of Time, he could find somebody to tell the story of the medieval clock, said to be the oldest in England. The Bells of God, one of the fraternity of bell ringers who still met after practice in the Bell tavern could provide that one. He wondered briefly about the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the Reformation. Had there been any executions at that time? Terror Stalks Compton as Friars Burn, he particularly liked that headline. Then there had been the corrupt and venial Dean early in the last century who had packed the offices of the cathedral with no fewer than fourteen of his own relatives. Corruption in the Chapter. Perhaps that was a bit strong, but the article would please the dissenters and the Nonconformists. Something for everybody in the broad church of the Grafton Mercury. As he pulled his head back inside his attic Patrick forgot to duck. He cracked his head loudly and painfully on one of the rafters. ‘Damn,’ he said very loudly. ‘Damn.’ He checked his watch. It was nearly half-past four. Maybe he should call on the Dean to ask him to deliver his thoughts on the managerial and administrative role of an abbot in the reign of Edward the Confessor. His route, he realized, would take him right past the front door of Anne Herbert’s little house on the edge of the Cathedral Close. And it was tea time.

Mr Archibald Matlock was the proud owner of an office considerably larger and more opulent than that of the Editor of the Grafton Mercury. His was on the second floor of a handsome old building on Chancery Lane. Prints of lawyers, old and modern, lined the walls. There were lawyers with enormous pens, lawyers with enormous faces, lawyers with enormous noses, lawyers with enormous bellies. There was even one, Powerscourt noticed, almost hidden on the top rank of this rogues’ gallery, hanging from an enormous gibbet for his crimes against humanity. Powerscourt rather liked that one.

‘I have come about a will,’ said Powerscourt, ‘the will of a clergyman called Charles John Whitney Eustace.’ Archibald Matlock did not look like a man who might feature in the prints on his walls. He was of regulation height, with a regulation dark grey suit, and a regulation dark blue tie. The most noticeable thing about the man was his hair, or the lack of it. Archibald Matlock was completely bald. Every now and then he would rub the top of his head as if checking to see if his earlier complement of hair had returned.

‘Lord Powerscourt, it is not our custom to discuss the wills of our clients with anybody else, however distinguished they may be.’ With that he smiled a deprecating smile.

‘Forgive me,’ said Powerscourt, smiling back, ‘I should have said. I have a letter here from Mr Oliver Drake, solicitor of Compton. He is the executor of Mr Eustace’s will.’

Matlock took out a small pair of glasses and scanned the document. ‘I see. So you are an investigator, Lord Powerscourt. Is there, may I ask, trouble about the will?’

Powerscourt felt sorely tempted to reply that he was not in the habit of discussing his client’s affairs with outsiders, however bald they might be, but he refrained.

‘There is indeed trouble about the will,’ he said. ‘The trouble is that there are three of them.’

‘Three wills?’ said Matlock incredulously. ‘I have heard of cases with two wills, but never three. Is it true that the late Mr Eustace was one of the richest men in England? I seem to remember reading about it in the newspapers but you can never really believe what they tell you.’

‘I believe it is true,’ said Powerscourt, his eye suddenly caught by one of Matlock’s lawyers on the wall, who appeared to be reading out to a greedy-looking company from an enormously long piece of paper with the legend Will inscribed at the top.

‘It would help me,’ he went on, ‘if you could tell me everything you can remember about the composition of this will. I believe it was written about six or seven months ago, all of it, except the signatures, typewritten.’

Archibald Matlock paused. He went to a large cupboard at the back of his office. ‘We keep copies of all the wills that pass through our hands,’ he said. ‘These ones here should really be locked up in the basement safe. I shall make a note to have them removed.’ Powerscourt noticed that above his head was a splendid print of two eighteenth-century lawyers, wigs slightly adrift, consuming an enormous meal. Discarded bones are lying on the floor. Two empty bottles are lying on the table, a phalanx of further bottles waiting to one side. An elderly, very fat lawyer is just about to carve an enormous side of roast beef.

‘I remember this will very clearly,’ said Matlock, returning to his desk with a piece of paper. ‘The whole process began when Mrs Augusta Cockburn – do you know Mrs Cockburn, Lord Powerscourt?’ A faint tremor of distaste, it might even have been fear, passed over the Matlock countenance. Powerscourt nodded. It looked as if the woman was as ferocious in Chancery Lane as she was in Compton. ‘Anyway the whole process began, as I was saying, when Mrs Cockburn turned forty. In my experience, turning forty can be a pretty traumatic event, particularly for women.’ Powerscourt wondered briefly how many forty-year-old females Archibald Matlock had helped cross this particular threshold. ‘Mrs Cockburn decided it was time to make her will. She grew very excited about the making of wills. She decided it was time for her husband to make his will, though there was nothing there to leave to anybody at all. And she decided that it was time for her brother to make his will. He was staying with her at the time of this particular onslaught.’ Powerscourt suspected the moon must have been full at the time, Augusta Cockburn rampant across heaven and earth.

‘Both Mr and Mrs Cockburn’s wills were made here in this office. They wrote out what they wanted, one of our young women typed it up on the machines downstairs, they were signed here in this office.’ Archibald Matlock paused. ‘Did you know Mr Eustace, Lord Powerscourt? Did you meet him in the flesh?’

‘I have only met his twin brother,’ Powerscourt said, ‘and he is rather dissolute, to put it mildly. I never met Mr John Eustace in person. But why do you ask, Mr Matlock?’