Death Called to the Bar

by David Dickinson

  ‘Has he spoken?’ said Johnny. ‘Has he told you what was going on, Chief Inspector?’

  ‘He certainly has. I regret to say I tricked him into making a confession he might not have made otherwise.’

  ‘How was that?’ asked Johnny.

  ‘I didn’t get to see him until early this morning. The man was unconscious in the Marylebone Hospital round the corner from here. The Hippocratic oath is a wonderful thing but I don’t think you receive the fastest treatment in the world if you’re brought in as an attempted murderer. Anyway, I told him he had half an hour left to live and that he should speak up at once. It wasn’t true, of course, but he wasn’t to know that. It seems he had a very religious education from his mother when he was little. He began muttering bits of prayers and hymns at me. I thought, in for a penny, in for a pound, so I told him St Peter would be pleased with him if he told the truth before his departure from this vale of tears. So he did, or I think he did.’

  The Chief Inspector pulled a notebook out of his pocket and checked a couple of entries halfway through.

  ‘It seems Somerville defended him some years ago on a charge of grievous bodily harm. Tompkins, Dennis Tompkins, that’s the fellow’s name, admitted the other man had been beaten almost to a pulp. Sentence likely to be ten years minimum, probably more. But Somerville gets him off, Tompkins is pathetically grateful, says he would do anything for Somerville as a result. Three weeks ago he gets a note from Somerville asking Tompkins to meet him in the gardens of Hampton Court. Bloody enormous grounds they are, as you know, my lady, you could plot anything in there without anybody being the wiser. Anyway, Somerville gives him an envelope with five hundred pounds in Treasury notes. Says there’s another five hundred when the job’s done. The job is to kill Lord Powerscourt, description and address to be supplied. Somerville told Tompkins Lord Powerscourt was coming to see him at the Inn three days ago. He followed him from there to the Wallace Collection. Tompkins said it was pure chance they both got locked in there together. He had no idea what the building was, he was only planning to see where Powerscourt lived and make his attempt later.’

  ‘That would explain the funny looks and the whispers I was getting about Francis when I went to check out the underworld,’ said Johnny. ‘Did he say why Somerville wanted Francis dead?’

  ‘Somerville had explained some of it, but brother Tompkins didn’t remember it very well. And, by this time, on my own timetable, I’d only six minutes left before he was due to pop off. Brother Tompkins was probably thinking his time was nearly up too. He kept looking at his watch. I’ve thought about it since and this is what I think Tompkins meant. Somerville was forced to invite Lord Powerscourt in to investigate the murders by the other benchers. But I think he was also the man who opposed appointing Lord Powerscourt at that first meeting. I imagine he felt he might be caught out. But what really rattled him was when no suspects were hauled off to jail. He thought Newton would be arrested. Then he thought somebody else must be picked up. When they weren’t he felt he must have been rumbled so the man who was about to expose him had to go.’

  ‘So what’s going to happen to this Tompkins person?’ asked Lady Lucy. ‘Will he have to stand trial? And that horrible Somerville, will he be put in the dock as well?’

  ‘When Tompkins is recovered, he will have to stand trial,’ replied the Chief Inspector. ‘Mr Somerville, well, he may be on trial somewhere else, but he won’t be attending any trials down here. This is the other piece of information I am sure your husband would wish to know. We had to let Somerville out on the most enormous bail after twenty-four hours. You will recall that Maxwell Kirk, the barrister at the head of Dauntsey’s chambers, was going to address a meeting of protest of all the barristers in Queen’s Inn. Somerville tried to prevent it but failed. The barristers were incandescent with rage at what had been happening about the money. Edward said I was to mention this point in particular, Lady Powerscourt. He said your husband would have enjoyed it hugely. They decide, these lawyers, to pass a vote of no confidence in Somerville. Just one sentence was all they needed. According to Edward, a roomful of monkeys with typewriters would have produced it quicker. It took them fifty-five minutes to agree the wording and even then there were six different caveats on the final version. So the Petition of Right, as one wag called it, is sent off to Somerville. It must have been terrible for him, total public humiliation at the hands of his peers. At any rate, when the servant goes into his rooms yesterday morning, there was Somerville slumped at his desk. The vote of censure was in front of him. The pistol was by his side. He’d blown his brains out.’

  There was a brief silence. ‘There are just two other things I’m sure your husband would like to know, Lady Powerscourt. The man Porchester Newton has turned up again. He came back about three o’clock in the afternoon on the day of the shooting. Said he’d been fishing in South Wales. We asked the local police to check it out and it was all true. And John Bassett, the old Financial Steward – it’s been confirmed that he died of natural causes.’

  ‘I’m sure my husband will be most interested to hear all this news, Chief Inspector,’ said Lady Lucy, upset far more than she could have imagined by this new death. ‘And now perhaps you would like to come and see him and talk to him before you have to leave. The doctor is very keen people should talk to him.’

  On this day too, other visitors began to arrive. There were relations, always too sombre in their appearance and too gloomy in their assessments. ‘They look,’ Johnny Fitzgerald observed sourly to Lady Lucy, ‘as if they’ve decided he’s dead already and are trying to work out what to wear for the funeral.’ But some of them had been involved in earlier Powerscourt investigations. Patrick Butler, the young editor of the local newspaper in the cathedral city of Compton in the West Country, called late in the afternoon. He had been very closely involved in the Powerscourt investigation into the mysterious deaths in the cathedral the year before. He gave Lady Lucy an enormous kiss and a huge bunch of flowers. She took him straight in to see her husband and told him the details of the shooting. Compton Saviour Shot in Legal Feud was the headline that flashed through his newspaper brain. Patrick Butler thought in headlines just as farmers think of the seasons and the weather. He always had. The young Patrick sensed that beneath the surface optimism, the good cheer and the impeccable manners reserved for visitors in this politest of households, despair was probably not very far away.

  ‘I saw him, Lady Lucy,’ he began with a smile, ‘the morning after those bastards tried to kill him with all that falling masonry in the cathedral. Do you remember? Of course you do. Well, he looks to me very like he did then. He pulled round on that occasion and I’m sure he will this time.’

  He stopped talking suddenly. Lady Lucy remembered that this was a fairly rare occurrence and waited for what was coming next. They were sitting side by side by the edge of Powerscourt’s bed. Patrick Butler reached out to take her hand.

  ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do, Lady Powerscourt, with your permission.’ A whole front page of his paper, the Grafton Mercury, was flashing through his brain as fast as the paper would come off the presses. A long article on Powerscourt’s role in the salvation of Compton the previous year. A brief description of his present difficulties. A prayer for his recovery from the Dean, maybe even the Bishop. ‘We’ll give the whole front page of the next edition of the Grafton Mercury over to Lord Powerscourt! An account of his role as the Saviour of Compton. A brief summary of his current predicament. And a prayer from the Dean or the Bishop! I’m great pals now with the new Dean, Lady Powerscourt. He says I’m the only person in the city of Compton who can tell him the whole truth about what went on before. Tell you what, even better, I’ll get the Dean to organize a service of prayer for Lord Powerscourt’s recovery. The whole of Compton will turn up and pray he gets better. That’s bound to help!’

  Lady Lucy remembered Patrick’s wife’s description of him as being rather like a puppy. He hadn’t changed.

&nbs
p; ‘That would be very kind, Patrick,’ she said, smiling at her editor. ‘Francis and I were very fond of Compton. But tell me, how is Anne and what brings you to London at this time?’

  Patrick Butler blushed. ‘Anne is well, Lady Powerscourt. She is expecting our first child in August.’ He made a close inspection of the nearer twin at this point as if intent on getting some practice in child care early on. ‘And I,’ he was going rather red at this point, ‘I have been asked to London for an interview about a position on The Times. I should know in three or four days if I have been accepted.’

  ‘That’s wonderful news, Patrick,’ said Lady Lucy, feeling, as she often did with Patrick, like an elderly aunt with her favourite nephew. ‘It would be splendid to have you and Anne in London.’

  ‘I must flee, Lady Powerscourt,’ said Patrick, pulling a reporter’s notebook from his pocket, ‘or I shall miss my train. Please give my very best love and wishes to your husband. I shall write part of the front page on the train!’ He took a last sad look at Powerscourt as he left the room. Patrick Butler had tried his best to be cheerful, to keep up the spirits of the little band on the second floor of 8 Manchester Square. But anybody watching him set off up Marylebone High Street towards Baker Street station would have seen that his eyes were filled with tears.

  On the next day Dr Tony came early in the morning. He went through the usual routines with his patient and had a long conference with the nurse on duty. Then he went downstairs to talk to Lady Lucy.

  ‘What news, Dr Tony?’ she asked him with a smile.

  ‘Some of the time, Lady Powerscourt, we doctors swing between very different emotions. At eleven we may have to tell some unfortunate person that there is no hope, their time is almost gone. At twelve we may be in the fortunate position of having to tell some other luckier soul that the treatment has worked, that they are cured and may well live for another thirty years.’ He watched Lady Lucy’s face swing between hope and despair as he spoke. The lights were going on and off in her eyes. Perhaps that was a mistake, he said to himself, and hurried on.

  ‘Lord Powerscourt is much the same as he has been since he was shot, more or less. I can detect little change in him today from yesterday, Lady Powerscourt. I shall return after lunch to see him again.’

  ‘Hope?’ said Lady Lucy, very quietly.

  ‘As I said before,’ briefly he took her hand, ‘there is always hope. You must not give up. You must not let your household give up. I can only guess how difficult it must be for you all. But, please, please, hope, hope for your husband, hope for your children, hope for yourself.’

  Thomas and Olivia had decided on a different tactic for their papa on this day. They were going to read to him together, they told Lady Lucy over breakfast, well, not exactly together because Olivia wasn’t a great reader yet while Thomas was quite proficient by now. But they were going to read Treasure Island, a work their father had often read to them. Thomas was to do most of the reading. Olivia had a number of tasks to perform. She had some paper and a pair of scissors and pens of different colours as she had to make a black spot for Blind Pew to press into the palms of his victims as he did in the story. She had to join in the reading every time the book said ‘Fifteen Men on a Dead Man’s Chest, Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum’ or the longer version with the two extra lines ‘Drink and the Devil Had Done for the Rest, Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.’ The children had agreed upstairs that they should be able to make enough noise with this chorus to wake their father, if not the persons at rest in the nearest graveyard.

  In the end the nurse put them off. Nurse Winifred was one of the kindest people alive and loved children of every age. But her appearance, what Olivia privately thought of as that sea of starched white at the front of her, put you off if you were only six years old.

  There was one very important visitor late that afternoon. Shortly after five o’clock a beautifully dressed man of about forty years presented himself at the door. He had an enormous bunch of flowers. ‘They’re from Lord Salisbury’s Hatfield greenhouses, Lady Powerscourt. The Prime Minister was most insistent I should deliver them in person.’

  The impeccable suit bowed. Inside it was Schomberg McDonnell, Private Secretary to Prime Minister Salisbury, now, so the gossip said, nearing the end of his tenure at Number 10 Downing Street. Powerscourt had taken his orders twice before, once in saving the City of London from a terrible plot, and on the second occasion taking up, at Salisbury’s request, the position of Head of Army Intelligence in the war in South Africa. Truly, the great world had come to pay its respects to Francis Powerscourt in his hour of need in Manchester Square.

  McDonnell listened gravely to Lady Lucy’s account of her husband’s situation. ‘I would stay longer if I could but I have to return to the Prime Minister, Lady Powerscourt. I have often brought your husband messages from Lord Salisbury in the past. I have another one for him today. Lord Salisbury says that he is weary of office, and, between ourselves, expects to leave it soon. He does not expect to live very long in retirement. But his message to Lord Powerscourt is very clear. He is damned if he is going to have to attend Powerscourt’s funeral. He expects, nay, he orders that Powerscourt should attend his, whenever that may be. Your husband, Lady Powerscourt, in the Prime Minister’s words, is under government orders to recover.’

  Johnny Fitzgerald took the last watch that day. The children were asleep. He hoped Lady Lucy was too. He walked up and down the room for a long time, lost in the memories of his and Powerscourt’s lives together. They had been to so many places after leaving Ireland and had shared so many adventures. He thought of Lady Lucy and the enormous strain she must be under. Johnny had seen how, more than ever now, all the threads of this house and of Francis’s life ran through her hands. Lady Lucy had to determine the altered routines of the house with the cook and the domestic staff. She had to liaise with the nurses and with the frequent presence of Dr Tony, who demanded total attention when he came. She had to look after the two oldest children who stitched on, at her instructions, he suspected, a mask of cheer and optimism about their father’s chances of recovery during the day. At night, he knew, the hope deserted them and Thomas and Olivia fled to weep in their mother’s bed. Johnny had heard them crying from two floors further up the night before. And all the time, reassuring her children, organizing her household, welcoming the visitors and ordering yet more tea, Lady Lucy must, Johnny felt sure, have her own private nightmares. Would Francis pull through? Could she imagine life without him? How would the children cope? And this worry above all, he was sure, how would the twins, so tiny and so young, cope with life without their father?

  At about half past eleven Johnny sat down by the side of the bed. He began telling his friend stories about the officers and men they had known in India, the eccentric, the mad, the brave, the cowards, the ones who liked the Indians, the ones who despised Indians, the very occasional ones who went completely native. Most of these stories contained jokes, some of them very good jokes. But the laughter Johnny hoped for did not come. As the church clock rang the midnight hour Lord Francis Powerscourt was still in a coma, drifting uncertainly between life and death.

  17

  Edward and Sarah came round to Manchester Square in the middle of the fifth afternoon. They brought fresh news of the Inn. There had been little sadness over the suicide of Barton Somerville, Edward reported. The remaining benchers, on the instigation of Maxwell Kirk, had all resigned to mark their failure to rein in the previous Treasurer. There had, Edward and Sarah quickly realized, been considerable progress in the story of Treasure Island in the sick room. Olivia had quickly mastered the production of Black Spots, supposed to bring bad luck to those holding them, and had pressed one into the palm of virtually every member of the household. Edward himself had collected two already and the unfortunate butler was marked with four of the things. Edward was able to bring another dimension to the story. While Sarah took over the job of reading Treasure Island, Edward, with the aid of some elast
ic, some very long socks and some string, taught the children how to tie one leg up so the foot was attached to the thigh. Two retired broom handles were discovered in the pantry and cut to the appropriate sizes for Thomas and Olivia. With the leg tied up and the broom acting as a crutch they could each pretend to be Long John Silver thumping his way across the boards of their parents’ bedroom that was really the upper deck of the Hispaniola sailing across the oceans to the fabulous island of treasure. Edward regretted that there were no parrots available but he suggested they ask Johnny Fitzgerald to say ‘Pieces of eight’ in his best parrot voice when he next appeared. The only problem in acting out the role of a handicapped pirate in quest of treasure was that it was much more difficult to walk with the broomstick than you might have imagined, even if you were small and supple. The two children kept falling over and giggled helplessly on the floor until some kind person helped them up. If there hadn’t been anybody else around to assist them, Thomas told the assembled company, he and Olivia would be left there until the end of time. Edward assured the children that there was a section of the book, he couldn’t remember exactly which chapter, where the author says it took Long John Silver himself over a year to learn how to walk properly with his crutch. For a brief quarter of an hour the children forgot about their sick father. Then the doctor came in for his afternoon visit, accompanied by Lady Lucy. The children disappeared upstairs. Edward took Sarah by the hand and led her out into Manchester Square.

  ‘Where are we going, Edward? Are we going to the Wallace Collection to see where Lord Powerscourt was shot?’

  ‘We are going to the Wallace Collection, Sarah,’ said Edward, as he led her up the drive, ‘but we are not going to the scene of the shooting. I want to take you to look at a painting on the second floor, if I may.’