David Dickinson - Death of a Chancellor

Had somebody seen him go? And tried to ensure that he wouldn’t have been able to come back? Was somebody in the house trying to send him a message? To frighten him off? But even so they must have known he could just walk out of the church and come down the path towards the back door. Had they thought the church was locked? He wondered, as he limped back into the house, what had happened to the door. Was it still open, waiting for a possible return? Was it closed? He didn’t like to think what it might mean if it was closed.

He found McKenna checking the windows at the very front of the house.

‘Good evening, McKenna,’ said Powerscourt, sidling up behind him.

‘My goodness me, my lord, you made me jump there. I thought you had gone to bed. I’ve just been putting the lights out.’

‘You know that passageway in the library, McKenna,’ Powerscourt went on, wondering yet again if he would ever get the truth about anything out of Andrew McKenna, ‘do many people know about it? I’ve just discovered it by accident.’

‘I turned the lights off in the library a moment ago, my lord. I didn’t see anybody in there. You don’t want to be going down there in the dark, my lord. Could be quite dangerous at this time of night. Lots of people know about it round these parts, my lord. If children came to call or to stay Mr Eustace used to take them down there. Scared most of them out of their wits, I shouldn't wonder. But they quite like being frightened, I sometimes think.’

‘Very good, McKenna. I’ve left a book in the library. Goodnight to you.’

‘Goodnight to you, my lord.’

Powerscourt was trying to remember how much of the library you could see from the door by the light switches. If you could see the whole room, open door to the passageway included, then Andrew McKenna was in a for a very rough time. He opened the door and turned on the switch. If you didn’t actually walk inside the room, he realized, you couldn’t see the open door. And was the door open or closed? He took three paces into the room and looked sharply to his right. The door was still as he had left it. The route to the black hole was still open. Lots of people, he remembered, knew about it in these parts.

‘Guess who’s invited me to lunch on Thursday?’ Patrick Butler had just hung his hat and coat in their usual place in Anne Herbert’s hall.

‘The Dean? The Bishop? I’m not sure bishops ask people like you to lunch, Patrick,’ said Anne, smiling as she brought in the tea.

‘No,’ said Patrick Butler, laughing. ‘Much better than that.’

‘You can’t get much more important than the Dean and the Bishop round here,’ said Anne, offering him a piece of cake.

‘Powerscourt,’ said Patrick Butler proudly. ‘Lord Francis Powerscourt has invited me to lunch at the Queen’s Head at one o’clock.’

‘Why do you think he wants to do that, Patrick? You’re not a murder suspect or anything like that, are you?’ She looked at him carefully.

‘I would think,’ said Patrick with his man of the world air, ‘that he wants to pick my brain. Local knowledge, that sort of thing.’

‘If you were an investigator, Patrick, would you ask yourself to lunch? Yourself, the newspaper editor, I mean.’

‘I’m not sure I would,’ said Patrick Butler thoughtfully. ‘Unless I wanted something, some information maybe. Or unless I wanted to see what would happen if some story was printed in the paper. Maybe that’s what he wants.’

‘Is there any news about the death of that poor man in the kitchen of the Vicars Hall?’ Anne Herbert was wondering, as she looked at Patrick, if she should suggest buying him some new shirts. His present collection were rather frayed. Better wait, she said to herself, he won’t want to talk about shirts just now.

‘Not as far as I know,’ said Patrick Butler, unaware that he had narrowly escaped ordeal by shirt and collar. ‘I had a word with that policeman this morning, Chief Inspector Yates. Do you know what he said? I thought it was rather good, but he won’t let me use it in the Mercury. “Look at these vicars choral when they are singing,” said the Chief Inspector. “Look at how wide they open their mouths. The effort seems to exhaust them for the remaining part of every day. The rest of the time their mouths are very firmly, very tightly shut. They don’t tell you a bloody thing.”’

Lord Francis Powerscourt was walking yet again the short distance between Fairfield Park and Dr Blackstaff’s house. Only this time he was going inside, by appointment with the good doctor in his room full of medical prints.

‘Dr Blackstaff,’ Powerscourt began, ‘do you know of that passage between the library and the church up at the Park?’ He wanted to test the butler’s assertion that everybody in the locality knew about it.

‘Oh yes,’ said the doctor, ‘most people round here know about that passage. How did you find out about it?’

‘I discovered it by accident the other night,’ Powerscourt said, accepting a small glass of the doctor’s whisky. ‘I thought it interesting because it showed that some outside body could have gained entry to the house in the middle of the night. All they had to do was to walk into the church, lift up the trapdoor, make their way down the passageway and into the library. Nobody inside the house would have heard a thing. Wouldn’t you agree, Dr Blackstaff?’

‘It seems perfectly possible, I must admit. But why do you ask, Powerscourt?’

‘I am thinking of the suspicions of my employer, Mrs Augusta Cockburn. She suspects that her brother may have been murdered. Until now I have always been sceptical of that theory. I do not believe that any of the servants would have murdered him. I could not work out how any outsider might have gained entrance to the house when all the doors and windows were still bolted the following morning. Now I am not so sure. As you know, it would take less than a minute to walk out of the library, up the back stairs, and into Eustace’s bedroom.’ Powerscourt paused and looked across at Dr Blackstaff, sitting on the other side of the fire. ‘Do you follow me, doctor?’

‘I do,’ said Dr Blackstaff, ‘but I do not see the relevance of all this. John Eustace died here in this house, as you know.’

‘But he could have been killed in his own house, could he not, and then brought over here already dead by one of the servants, the butler, for example. Is that not so?’

Dr Blackstaff smiled. ‘In your profession, my friend,’ he said, ‘you are accustomed to looking for the darkest possible interpretation of events. I am sure that you could make a very credible case for saying that our late Queen was murdered in her bed by the agents of some wicked foreign powers. But John Eustace died here in this house, as you well know.’

Powerscourt changed tack. ‘Have you heard, doctor, about the death of Arthur Rudd, the vicar choral found strangled in the kitchen of the Vicars Hall?’ Dr Blackstaff nodded. ‘And have you had a chance to talk to Dr Williams, the medical man from Compton who attended on the dead person?’ Powerscourt believed that if the two doctors had met, the true facts surrounding the terrible demise of Arthur Rudd would have been exchanged. The medical profession might pride itself on its tact and discretion when dealing with their patients and people outside their own circle. But doctor will gossip unto doctor just as surely as lawyer will gossip unto lawyer. Blackstaff’s reply was a relief.

‘I have not spoken to Gregory Williams for some weeks now, not since we met at a party in the Bishop’s Palace, to be precise.’

Powerscourt found himself wondering briefly precisely what a party in the Bishop’s Palace might be like. Quizzes on the names of the Old Testament prophets? Or which came first in Egypt, the death of the first born or the plague of locusts? He pressed on. ‘Let me tell you, in confidence, if I may, the facts that have not been made public about this death.’ Powerscourt paused. ‘The body was actually found attached to the roasting spit in the kitchen of the Vicars Hall. There was a powerful fire burning. The body had been roasting in the flames for a number of hours, five or six probably, before it was discovered. Somebody killed the poor man and then roasted him as if were an ox or a stag or a deer. I do not need to tell you, doctor, the condition of the body when it was found.’