Death Called to the Bar

by David Dickinson

  ‘If you’re right, Lord Powerscourt,’ said the Chief Inspector, ‘the poison must have been administered earlier. Either in his rooms, or at the Treasurer’s drinks party.’

  ‘I think we need to wait,’ replied Powerscourt, ‘until we get hold of the steward and all his waiters at the same time in the Hall and hear what they’ve got to say.’ Powerscourt began putting the soup plates back in their cupboard when another thought struck him. ‘Chief Inspector, sergeant, I’ve had a mad idea. You know how people never notice anything when murders are being committed because they don’t know a crime is going on?’

  The two policemen nodded. ‘Why don’t we restage the feast? The whole lot, food, drink, everything. These people can certainly afford it. We hire an actor to play Dauntsey. Immediately afterwards we interview every single person there about what they remember, in case there’s anything that’s just come back to them.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that give the murderer the idea that we think the man was poisoned at the feast?’ said the Chief Inspector.

  ‘That might be very useful to us, Chief Inspector,’ said Powerscourt with a broad smile. ‘It might draw attention away from the fact that we think he was murdered somewhere else.’

  A fine rain was falling on Calne Park a day later as Powerscourt made his way towards the great house. A couple of deer examined him carefully on his passage as if he had no right to be there. But his invitation was in his pocket, a polite letter from Dauntsey’s widow inviting him to tea this afternoon. She directed him not to the entrance through the main gate and on to the back of Reservoir Court where the mourners had foregathered for the funeral the week before, but to a small green door almost directly opposite the main entrance. Here a young footman showed him to a small drawing room where a great fire was burning vigorously.

  Powerscourt felt disappointed, even slightly cheated. For Calne was one of those English houses that people associated with grandeur, with vast drawing rooms adorned with mighty chandeliers, the walls hung with full-length Old Masters, French furniture sitting decorously on the polished oak floorboards, or great galleries hung with Flemish tapestries, their ceilings decorated with elaborate plasterwork. But the room here was small, with a cheap carpet on the floor and reproductions rather than Raphaels on the walls. Mrs Elizabeth Dauntsey was dressed in a widow’s black, a long black skirt and an elegant black blouse. She was tall with very fair skin and light brown eyes.

  ‘I expect you’re thinking you’ve come to the wrong place, Lord Powerscourt,’ she said, rising from her chair to shake his hand. ‘Most people do. I shall explain later.’ Powerscourt thought she was one of the most striking women he had ever seen. Maybe Dauntsey had been a connoisseur of feminine beauty.

  ‘I look forward to the explanation,’ Powerscourt sat in a chair opposite her on the other side of the fire, ‘and can I say how grateful I am to you for seeing me so soon after your tragic bereavement.’

  ‘Think nothing of it,’ said Elizabeth Dauntsey. ‘You said in your letter, Lord Powerscourt, that you thought I might be able to help you in some way. Please tell me what it is.’

  Powerscourt paused for a moment. ‘As I said, Mrs Dauntsey, I have been asked by the benchers of Queen’s Inn to investigate the circumstances of your husband’s death.’

  ‘Do you find the benchers easy to deal with?’ Elizabeth Dauntsey was very quick with her interruption. ‘Some people find them rather difficult,’ she went on.

  This was not, Powerscourt felt, the conversational tone one would expect from a lady whose husband had been murdered so recently. Levity rather than grief seemed to be the order of the day. Maybe Elizabeth Dauntsey was one of those unfortunate people who always speak their mind. Maybe the rules for widows had changed now they were free of the long shadow of Victoria’s forty years of mourning.

  ‘The benchers?’ Powerscourt smiled at his hostess. ‘Well, let me say that I have found easier people to deal with.’ Most murderers of his acquaintance, he might have said, were easier to deal with than Barton Somerville and his colleagues. ‘But my purpose here at Calne is not with the benchers, Mrs Dauntsey. There are two reasons behind my visit. The first is mundane – would you mind if I talked to your family solicitor? It is sometimes helpful.’

  ‘Not at all, Lord Powerscourt. The man you want is Matthew Plunkett of Plunkett Marlowe and Plunkett in Bedford Square. He’s already been to see me. I shall drop him a line telling him to expect you and to help you in your inquiries.’

  ‘Thank you so much,’ said Powerscourt, wondering how old this Matthew Plunkett would prove to be. ‘I have found,’ he went on, looking carefully at Elizabeth Dauntsey, ‘in all my investigations that the more I know about the deceased,’ deceased was a more neutral word than victim, less upsetting than murdered man, he thought, ‘the easier it becomes to work out why he perished in the way he did. I have only one side of your late husband, the professional aspect. You don’t need me to tell you that lawyers are economical with the truth. They are very cautious with their words. Some of them measure out their version of the truth as though it were some tiny amount of a very expensive medicine being poured on to a rather small spoon. I need a broader picture of Mr Dauntsey, madam, and I am sure you can provide it.’

  Elizabeth Dauntsey looked sad for the first time in their conversation. This time her voice was very soft and had no hint of raillery.

  ‘Tell me what impression you have formed so far, Lord Powerscourt, and I will do what I can to fill in the gaps.’

  Powerscourt paused and looked at Mrs Dauntsey very closely for some time. ‘Mercurial,’ he said. ‘That, I think, is how some of his colleagues would have summed him up. A man of very great gifts, an advocate who could be brilliant, absolutely brilliant in court, a man who could dazzle juries and judges with his eloquence. But the brilliance had another side. Brilliance often does. On the bad days your husband lost all his gifts. It was as if he mislaid them or he never had them. In court on the black times he was hopeless. Of course, there were far more good days than bad ones, but it may have meant that he never rose quite as high, his fees and refreshers were never quite as great as those of some of his distinguished but less gifted contemporaries.’

  Powerscourt looked at Elizabeth Dauntsey again to see if she was bearing up. She was.

  ‘I think he was a kind man, your husband. I think he was popular with his colleagues. I think people in his Inn liked him. But I also sense, though nobody ever said this, that he was a private man, that there were areas of himself that were closed off.’

  Elizabeth Dauntsey smiled again. ‘How strange that you should have said that Alex had areas of himself that were closed off, Lord Powerscourt. Most of his house here is closed off, certainly all the grand bits, they have been for years. But that’s not relevant. I think what you say about Alex is fair, very fair. He could be mercurial at home too, you know. We had what he called his black days sometimes when he could hardly speak to me.’

  She leaned forward and put her head in her hands. Powerscourt thought she was more beautiful than ever.

  ‘And he was a private man in some ways.’ Elizabeth Dauntsey was speaking quietly, as if fearful of waking the dead. ‘Even after ten years of marriage there were times when I felt shut out, that he’d gone off somewhere else. Alex believed in God, which is becoming rare these days. He was very kind to the servants. He was a great believer in the Liberal Party even though he had always loathed Gladstone. He was a passionate devotee and player of cricket. One of his ancestors was turned back at the Dover boat, you know, at the time of the French Revolution. He was taking a team to play a match in Paris. Can you imagine, Lord Powerscourt, spin bowling in the Tuileries or the Bois de Boulogne while severed heads were dropping to the ground from the guillotine?’

  She paused for a moment, then carried on. ‘And Alex was very fond of children.’

  Suddenly Powerscourt knew from the tone of her voice that Elizabeth and Alexander Dauntsey had never had any children, that this loss mi
ght have blighted their marriage. He could not begin to imagine the depths of pain and despair it might mean for both man and woman, this desperate longing to have what your friends and neighbours were blessed with but you were not, a different but no less painful form of bereavement.

  She looked at Powerscourt with tears in her eyes. Powerscourt knew he must speak now, he must steer her away into different ground or she might collapse and his interview would be at an end. But she battled on.

  ‘We never had any children, Lord Powerscourt. That was very hard for both of us. I think Alex would rather Calne was inherited by a son of his than pass to one of his nephews, but it doesn’t matter now, it doesn’t matter at all.’

  ‘Was your husband a sportsman, Mrs Dauntsey? Fond of hunting and fishing, that sort of thing?’

  Powerscourt had no idea why he asked that question, maybe he was trying to move away from children as fast as possible.

  ‘No, he wasn’t.’ The tears had been vanquished. ‘He often quoted that line of Oscar Wilde about the English country gentleman galloping after a fox being the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable. He was very fond of Italy, Alex, not the well-known places except for Venice which he adored, but the medium-sized cities with great histories, Cremona and Urbino and Ferrara and Parma, places like that.’

  ‘I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear, Mrs Dauntsey, that there are fantastic rumours about your husband’s interest in art circulating round the courts of Queen’s Inn. The stories grow more fantastical in the telling.’

  ‘Tell me the most outrageous,’ she said, smiling at the investigator. Powerscourt felt rather weak.

  He smiled back. ‘The most outrageous, which I must have heard about five or six times, was that, in a fit of modernity, Mr Dauntsey had thrown all the Old Masters into the cellars and replaced them with modern works by the French artists known as Impressionists. It was furthermore alleged – I’m beginning to sound like a lawyer myself, Mrs Dauntsey, – that he was intending to strip out the ancient oak panelling and replace it with contemporary wallpaper by Edward Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement.’

  Elizabeth Dauntsey smiled a beautiful smile. She rubbed her hands together in delight.

  ‘Excellent, Lord Powerscourt, I do like that. The truth, however, is more prosaic. Some of the Old Masters were indeed taken down, but that was on advice from a very earnest young man from the National Gallery who said the air was too damp for them and they should be stored elsewhere. I believe we still pay a large amount of annual rent for their storage at a London gallery. The panelling was taken down because it had some rare form of woodworm and had to be repaired. How prosaic the truth is.’

  Tea appeared, on a very expensive-looking silver tray.

  ‘Cake, Lord Powerscourt?’ asked Elizabeth Dauntsey, elegant hands offering him plate and chocolate cake at the same time. ‘There’s something else I think you ought to be aware of, and I don’t quite know how it would fit in, or what use it would be. But you wouldn’t understand Alex without it. It has to do with being brought up in this house, living in it all your life, being baptized and buried in it. It must be like growing up in Chatsworth or Blenheim. You’re surrounded by so much history and so much beauty and so many precious things that you simply don’t notice them after a while. They become part of you. Perhaps you become part of them too. Perhaps somewhere in the air there’s the spirit of Dauntseys past and Dauntseys present waiting to welcome Dauntseys future. Alex loved this house with a very deep love. Even when we were on holiday somewhere he liked a lot, the Italian lakes maybe, or a Venetian palazzo, he’d be thinking of Calne. Maybe he compared all those fine houses and their treasures with what he had at home. I don’t have any doubt which he preferred. There was always a smile on Alex’s face when he came back up that drive past the deer even if he’d only left the place in the morning. Can you understand that, Lord Powerscourt? Were you brought up somewhere special?’

  Powerscourt nodded. ‘I certainly can understand it.’ He thought of his parents’ house, the dances until dawn in the great drawing room in the summer, the ornate steps down to the great fountain, the ever-changing reflections in the lake with the water lilies, the blue-green of the Wicklow Mountains in the background, the riders in their scarlet coats leaving for the hunt from the Powerscourt front door on crisp winter mornings. He thought of the funerals and the burials of his parents and how the entire family had to flee their grief and escape to the colder world of London after their parents died. ‘I was brought up in the country in Ireland,’ he went on, ‘not anything as grand as Calne, but Irish country houses have charms of their own, as you know.’

  ‘Forgive me, Lord Powerscourt,’ said Elizabeth Dauntsey, ‘look at the time. It’s beginning to get dark. I’m sure you would like to see the house, everybody always does. The really grand bits aren’t in use at all, the family haven’t lived in them except for special occasions for decades. But I’m sure Marshall, our butler, could show you round. He doesn’t say much but he does know the way. Some people went off to tour the place on their own last year and got terribly lost. It was hours before they were found. Please come back and say goodbye when you’ve finished.’

  Powerscourt was to tell Lady Lucy later that evening that it had been one of the stranger experiences of his life. Some of the state rooms of Calne had the shutters drawn or the curtains pulled so there was little light there in the first place. In others the grime of ages had accumulated on the windows, forming a thick film, now laced with enormous cobwebs and malevolent spiders. Marshall had a lantern which threw extraordinary shadows on the walls, baroque reflections from enormous marble mantelpieces that seemed to touch the ceiling, fleeting shafts of light on nymph and shepherd on the tapestries that lined the walls. The sound of their boots on the oak floors was muffled by a protective layer of threadbare and faded carpet. Marshall himself was a giant of a man casting giant shadows on floors and ceiling as they went. They passed long galleries, two lined with pictures and one with elaborate tapestries. A dining room that seemed to have walls of pale blue had an enormous ghostly dining table, far longer than a cricket pitch. They passed through shadowy bedrooms with vast beds, four-posters that looked as if they could accommodate entire families at a time. Marshall hurried them through dressing rooms and retiring rooms and sitting rooms and studies. The lantern swung across an entire wall of books in the vast library, surprising a full-length Restoration Dauntsey at the far end and a pair of rats in the skirting board. Vast pieces of furniture, draped in dust sheets, loomed in front of them, like ocean liners in a fog. Everywhere they could sense other Dauntseys watching their progress, full-length Dauntseys in robes of state, miniature Dauntseys in Jacobean lockets, Dauntsey wives in green and blue and scarlet peering out of the frames at a future they never saw. Sometimes they would hear the scuttling of tiny feet as the mice or the rats retreated from the invaders to regroup on a higher floor. When the lantern swung upwards the ornate plaster patterns on the ceilings assumed grotesque shapes, racing down the room to vanish in the darkness. They passed statues nude and statues clothed, ancient statues, Roman statues, some that might have been sold as Greek but were made in Florence or Bologna. The heads of innumerable deer and stags stared down at them from on high as they passed. They sped through an enormous kitchen where the brass saucepans on the wall gleamed and glittered for a brief second of glory as the lantern went by. In some places the air was musty, as if the tapestries and the pictures on the walls had only each other for company. Some of the clocks still worked, sounding out the quarter hours as the lantern sped on and the chimes echoed round the great empty rooms of Calne.

  ‘I take it, sir, that you don’t wish to see the cellars on this occasion?’ Marshall spoke for the first time as they descended yet another oak staircase, dust sheets on the ornate banisters, rough matting on the floor. Powerscourt had a sudden nightmare vision of Goliath-sized shadows flitting across abandoned wine racks, of discarded pieces of furniture, sharp at the ed
ges, lying in wait for the unwary, of cobwebs and spiders brushing across his face, of dirt and grime and smell and squalor.

  ‘You are quite right, Marshall,’ said Powerscourt, now deposited outside Elizabeth Dauntsey’s doorway once again. ‘Thank you very much.’

  Powerscourt thanked Mrs Dauntsey profusely for her time and her insights into her husband. She thanked him for his visit and said she hoped he would feel free to come again if he thought she could help. But it was the handshake Powerscourt remembered most vividly as he set off back towards the station. It had been cold, her hand, and the grip firm, but it seemed to him, or was it just his imagination, that the grip meant more than it seemed to say. Quite what that might be, he did not know. But he did feel that at some point in the future it might be necessary, if not vital, to return to Calne and shake Mrs Dauntsey by the hand once again. Most of all, he fretted about the children that were not there.

  5

  I wonder if she’ll come, Edward said to himself. He checked his watch again. She was ten minutes late already. Edward had placed himself at the top of the drive that led into the Wallace Collection, a famous collection of paintings, armour and furniture in Manchester Square. He had sent Sarah Henderson a note the day before asking her to join him here at three o’clock on the Saturday afternoon. She had dropped in to see him on her way home and said she would be delighted. Powerscourt, who had appointed himself to a position of unofficial godfather to the attachment and the meeting, had insisted that the pair should come to tea at his house in Number 8 Manchester Square. He had, he told Edward, recently purchased a typewriting machine and would be grateful for an expert opinion on the instrument.

  Sarah had not intended to be late. Perhaps her mother had planned it. For just as Sarah was about to set off for the distant quarters of Marylebone and the Wallace Collection, her mother suddenly announced that she had run out of one set of pills. It would be all right, she said, if Sarah got them on Monday, but then she might be in agony for the rest of the weekend. Maybe, maybe, Sarah could find the time to pop down to the chemist’s and collect the medicine this afternoon. Surely her other engagement couldn’t take precedence over her mother’s health. Fuming quietly under her breath, cursing her brother and sister for having escaped the drudgery and the intensity of their Acton home, Sarah walked as fast as she could to the chemist, but it was fifteen minutes there and fifteen minutes home again. When she got back her mother calmly informed her that she was now so late it was hardly worth while going. Nobody would wait that long. Sarah might as well stop at home and read to her mother from one of the weekly magazines. Sarah smiled sweetly, said she would see her mother later and fled to the smoky embrace of the District Line.