Death Called to the Bar lfp-5

by David Dickinson

  ‘When was he last seen?’ asked Powerscourt, as two of Beecham’s policemen slipped into the staircase behind him and marched up the stairs.

  ‘Midday, sir. Said he was going to a meeting. Didn’t say who with. That’s five hours he’s been gone. There’s plenty round here say he’s the next in line.’

  ‘Next in line for what?’ asked Powerscourt, wondering if this was some strange legal term he did not know.

  ‘Next in line after Mr Dauntsey, sir. Next in line for murder.’

  6

  Edward set off at great speed across the grass. He sprinted up the stairs and burst into Sarah Henderson’s room without even bothering to knock. She held up a hand motioning him to silence. She was working at top speed, her fingers racing over the keys of her typewriter, the left hand slamming the carriage across when she came to the end of a line. Her eyes were darting down to a shorthand notebook by her left side. Edward admired the straightness of her back on her chair, the red sheen on her hair, the white hands with their long fingers he longed to hold in his own. From the small window he could see more policemen marching in and out of the staircases, Chief Inspector Beecham and the Head Porter conferring over a large sheet of paper that might have been a map of the Inn with all the staircases marked. At last she was finished.

  ‘Sarah,’ said Edward, ‘are you all right?’

  She smiled at him. ‘Of course I’m all right, Edward, why should I not be all right? And, yes, I have heard about Mr Stewart going missing. Have they found him yet? There seem to be more policemen every time I look. Perhaps they’re breeding in the library.’

  ‘They haven’t found him,’ said Edward. ‘It’s my belief that he’s not in Queen’s Inn at all.’ Since their trip to the Wallace Collection Edward seemed able to converse with Sarah in perfectly normal sentences.

  ‘Do they think he’s dead?’ Sarah asked the question in the same tone she might have asked a guest if he took sugar in his tea.

  ‘Some people do. There’s a whole lot of rumours about him already. Did you know him, Sarah?’

  ‘I took a very short piece of dictation for him once when his own girls were away,’ said Sarah, ‘so I couldn’t really say I knew him at all. That’s why I can’t get very excited about it. I was so upset about Mr Dauntsey. I thought I would never get over it. He had such a lovely voice, you see.’

  Edward peered out of the little window on the top floor. ‘There’s even more of them now, Sarah – police, I mean. They must be very worried.’

  ‘They always come too late,’ said Sarah, as if she had been covering crime cases for years, ‘so they make up for it with the numbers.’

  ‘Are you finished now, Sarah? Finished for the day, I mean?’

  ‘Yes, I am. Why do you ask?’

  Edward looked shy for a moment. Sarah wondered for a second if his new confidence was going to desert him. ‘I would like to escort you to the underground, Sarah. I don’t like to think of you going there alone with a murderer on the loose somewhere.’

  Sarah quite liked the thought of being escorted by Edward though she would have preferred a more romantic destination than the Tube. A masked ball at some elegant house in the country? A tea dance at one of London’s great hotels? She consoled herself with the thought that the Temple at least was one of the finer names on the underground system. You wouldn’t want to be escorted to Colliers Wood or Shadwell, she thought.

  ‘It’s hardly any distance from here to the Tube, Edward,’ she said kindly, ‘and there seem to be enough policemen to look after the Crown Jewels. But if you would like to, I should be happy to be escorted.’

  Fifteen minutes later Edward was back in Queen’s Inn. Sarah had refused all offers of his accompanying her back home to Acton. She sat down next to a barrister she knew from the Inner Temple and Edward felt fairly sure that she would not be violated before she found her way home. The police were still crawling all over the Inn. Barton Somerville himself was glowering down at them from the steps into the library as if they were particularly repulsive aliens, recently landed from a distant and disagreeable planet beyond the Milky Way. Powerscourt he could not find anywhere. None of the policemen, not even Chief Inspector Beecham, knew where he was. Edward found him at last, sitting at the desk that had been Dauntsey’s, rummaging through the papers in the drawers.

  ‘Edward,’ said Powerscourt, smiling at the young man, ‘have you been seeing Sarah to the Tube?’

  ‘I have,’ Edward replied, wondering how the devil Powerscourt had worked that out, ‘but I have something to tell you which may be important, I’m just not sure.’

  ‘Fire ahead, Edward,’ said Powerscourt, ‘take your time.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Edward, looking closely at a print behind Powerscourt’s head of an eighteenth-century cricket match taking place at Calne. One of the batsmen looked remarkably like the oil painting he and Powerscourt had seen only that afternoon.

  ‘It’s to do with the link between Mr Stewart and Mr Dauntsey, sir,’ he began. ‘They’ve always been close and in the past they’ve always conducted a lot of cases together.’

  Edward paused. There, just behind the distant outfielder in the print, a couple of deer were standing to attention, watching the action carefully. ‘There’s another case they were going to do, Lord Powerscourt, sir. It was huge. A fraud case, involving the man Jeremiah Puncknowle.’

  ‘Were they prosecuting or defending?’

  ‘They were for the prosecution, sir, with splendid fees and very lavish refreshers indeed, some of the biggest I have seen. I was going to devil for them, sir, I have done a load of work already and was going to make it full time tomorrow.’

  ‘Forgive me, Edward, are you suggesting that the defendant Puncknowle may have had something to do with these deaths?’

  ‘I don’t know what I am suggesting, sir. I only know that this case is now scheduled for the end of next week. There’s been a delay. Before that it was to have started in two days’ time.’

  ‘And if both the prosecuting lawyers were removed from the scene, Edward, would the Crown apply for an adjournment while they briefed some more?’

  ‘They would, sir, but it would be up to the judge to decide.’

  ‘Have you formed any opinion about the character of this Jeremiah person? Would he have ordered up a couple of murders?’

  ‘I couldn’t say, sir. I could tell you a great deal about his companies but not very much about his character. You don’t get a lot of that looking at balance sheets.’

  ‘Edward,’ said Powerscourt, rising to his feet and looking at his watch, ‘I hope to be able to give you some sort of answer tomorrow. I am going to call on my brother-in-law.’

  ‘Is he an expert in character, Lord Powerscourt, sir? Is he that sort of man?’

  ‘He may be, Edward, come to think of it he probably is. But he is a great financier, now one of the greatest in the City of London. He will be able to tell me all the stuff about our Mr Puncknowle that never appeared in the papers.’

  Powerscourt departed towards his sister’s latest house. They moved their London house so often now that he and Lucy had once actually turned up for dinner at a fashionable address that the Burkes had vacated a month before. Edward had brief conversations with the policemen before they left. There was still no sign of Mr Woodford Stewart, and his wife reported that he had not turned up at home. Tomorrow they would broaden the search into the Inner and Middle Temples. Maybe, the Chief Inspector confided to his sergeant, they would have to send divers in to search the bloody river.

  ‘You’re not here on a social call, Francis, I can tell.’ Powerscourt’s middle sister Mary Burke kissed him warmly on both cheeks. ‘Before I pack you off to William, how is Lucy? How are the children? And those gorgeous twins?’

  ‘All very well indeed,’ said Powerscourt, smiling at his sister. ‘All well here?’

  ‘We’re fine,’ said Mary. ‘William’s in his study, one floor up. I forget you haven’t been in this house b
efore.’

  ‘I’m sure I can find the way.’ Powerscourt departed, taking the stairs two at a time. He found his brother-in-law shrouded in cigar smoke and surrounded by figures. On the desk in front of him was an enormous ledger with numbers chasing each other up and down various columns. Surrounding the mighty tome were a series of smaller volumes in a variety of colours, muted colours it would have to be said, garish colours not being available in the kind of stationer’s shop in the City patronized by the likes of William Burke.

  ‘Delighted to see you, Francis, delighted.’ Burke had risen from his chair and was shaking Powerscourt vigorously by the hand. He had assisted Powerscourt in a number of his inquiries and had proved a most valuable companion in arms. Powerscourt always said you could pick his brother-in-law out in a crowd of five hundred by the cut of his suit. There were many in the City who prided themselves on wearing the latest fashions. William Burke went in the opposite direction. Johnny Fitzgerald maintained that he bought two or three suits every autumn and then left them in the shop for twenty years. Powerscourt objected to this theory on the grounds that a man could not be sure he would keep exactly the same shape over a period as long as twenty years. His theory was that William Burke had a very old tailor indeed, a man who kept detailed records of all the fashions going back to Disraeli’s time or even earlier. Powerscourt imagined that Burke would be measured in the normal way. On his way out, this Nestor of the tailoring world would ask, ‘Which year, sir?’ and Burke would reply, ‘1882, please.’ In appearance, apart from his suits, Burke was perfectly normal, normal height, not fat and not slim, an ordinary sort of face with an ordinary sort of nose and rather sharp grey eyes. You could see thousands and thousands of people looking exactly like him climbing on and off the buses or the trains for the City every working day. Looking at the face, Johnny Fitzgerald once memorably remarked, you would not imagine its owner’s facility for mental arithmetic would be so great that he could multiply one hundred and forty-eight by seventeen in his head while walking down the street without having to pause and without contracting a headache. Burke had taken ten pounds off Johnny in a wager many years ago by performing this feat while walking down Threadneedle Street in the rain.

  Certainly this evening’s suit, though of excellent cloth, was not one likely to be worn by the Beau Brummells of the capital’s dress elite like Charles Augustus Pugh.

  Powerscourt waved a hand at the multicoloured concentration of ledgers and financial fire power in front of his brother-in-law.

  ‘Selling up, William?’ he asked cheerfully. ‘Preparing to flee before the bailiffs come round?’

  William Burke laughed. ‘Annual audit, Francis. Once a year I make myself go through all the family accounts, see how we’re doing. Are we better off than last year, that sort of thing. Can Mary buy a new pair of shoes, you know? We make all our big companies do it, don’t see why we shouldn’t do it at home.’

  ‘And are all the coloured books for different kinds of investment? And the huge tome the master document, the Book of Numbers as it were, for the whole lot?’

  ‘They said you’d been consorting with lawyers, Francis. They seem to have sharpened your wits. Red for property – I’ve got a couple of other houses in London as well as the place in the country.’ Powerscourt recalled that the place in the country stood on the banks of the Thames not far from Goring and had twenty-seven bedrooms and fourteen bathrooms. Not to mention the huge palace on the sea front at Antibes. ‘Blue for stocks, green for bonds, maroon for savings accounts, it’s all fairly simple. But you haven’t come here to talk about annual balance sheets, Francis, you’ve come to talk about something else.’

  Powerscourt smiled. ‘I want to know about a man called Jeremiah Puncknowle,’ he said.

  William Burke moved to the sofa in front of his fireplace. He looked closely at his brother-in-law. ‘Could you be a bit more specific, Francis?’ he said. ‘Puncknowle as businessman, Puncknowle as family man, Puncknowle as friend of the deserving poor? It’s pronounced Punnel by the way, like punnet only with an l at the end.’

  Powerscourt had always put his cards on the table with William Burke. ‘Right, William. This is how it goes, or might go. Friend Puncknowle is about to go on trial, sometime in the next ten days at the latest. The two main prosecuting counsel both come from Queen’s Inn. One of them, man by the name of Dauntsey, was murdered almost two weeks ago. He was poisoned and fell face forwards into a bowl of soup at a feast. The benchers, governing body of the Inn, have asked me to investigate his death. Now the other lawyer, fellow by the name of Woodford Stewart, has disappeared. The Crown will either have to proceed with the case and give new counsel virtually no time to prepare what is a very complicated case, or they will have to ask for an adjournment which they may or may not get, depending on the judge. So, you might think, what a coincidence. Just as this massive fraudster is about to go on trial, the lawyers going to attack him are dead or disappear. And, if you were of a suspicious mind, William, you would want to warn the new lawyers to mind their step as they cross Chancery Lane or set out for the Old Bailey. I want to know if this Puncknowle is capable of ordering up a murderer or two. But before that I want to know what sort of fraudster he was. And before that, though why you should have this information I do not know, I want to know if he is in jail or out on bail.’

  William Burke closed his eyes briefly. He put the fingers of his two hands together and opened them out into a kind of fan or steeple. ‘He’s not in jail,’ he began, ‘though there are many in the City who were astounded when he was given bail. The policeman in charge of the investigation insisted on the Bank of England itself confirming for him that the relevant sum had been posted. And it was an enormous figure, some men claimed to know it was half a million pounds.’

  ‘How did this crook persuade a judge to give him bail in the first place? Surely they would have wanted him kept under lock and key until he appeared in court?’

  William Burke laughed. ‘It was a fearsome combination, Francis. Clever lawyers and clever doctors. God knows how much they were paid. They told the judge that Puncknowle was perfectly willing to appear in court, but that he had a heart condition. This condition made it highly likely that he would not survive a period as a guest of His Majesty. Many of the other inmates after all would have been defrauded by our friend Jeremiah and might not take too kindly to finding him in their midst. They might wish to take physical revenge for their financial suffering.’

  ‘Why couldn’t they put him in solitary? Leave him alone for the duration?’

  ‘Simple minds, Francis, simple minds might think along those lines. There was a further ramification to the heart condition, you see. Claustrophobia, from which our Jeremiah suffered acutely, would be brought on by solitary confinement. There could well be a fatal attack in a couple of days at most. And then what would the great British public and the great British newspapers say of the authorities who had, in their intransigence, kept Puncknowle out of the dock and denied the British investor the chance to see some reparations made for his suffering and his losses?’

  ‘Surely to God there must have been some place the prison authorities could have put him?’

  ‘I’m sure there was,’ said Burke cheerfully. His fingers were still arching up towards his fireplace. ‘But they had hit on a masterstroke, Puncknowle’s people. They had discovered, or one of the doctors giving evidence on his behalf had discovered – large sums changing hands, no doubt – that the judge suffered from precisely the same heart condition that Puncknowle was supposed to have. So the judge could imagine only too well what his reaction would have been to a bout of solitary. It would have killed him for sure. So he gave the fellow bail.’

  Powerscourt laughed. William Burke looked quite pleased with himself. He sent an enormous puff from his cigar directly into his chimney.

  ‘And the frauds, William? How did they work?’

  Once again Burke paused. This time he looked carefully at his ledgers as if
checking they had not been infected by the Puncknowle virus of financial irregularity. He knew his brother-in-law was perfectly capable of grasping financial facts, unlike, to his enormous and eternal regret, his wife and his three sons.

  ‘Very simple really, to begin with, I suppose. Most fraudsters should stick to their original trick. It’s when they become too elaborate that the house falls down.’

  ‘So where,’ asked Powerscourt, ‘did he start, this Jeremiah Puncknowle?’

  ‘He started in the West Country, Francis. I don’t know if you were aware of it but there’s a whole host of tiny dissenting religious communities down there, Muggletonians, Shelmerstonians, Babbacombians, Yalbertonians, hundreds and hundreds of them, all only too happy to knock you down if you disagree with their version of the Book of Revelations or the precise order of the reawakening of the saints on Judgement Day.’

  ‘Did they think that God had some sort of enormous batting order for Peter and Paul and Sebastian and all the rest of the saints when they’d be called to the wicket for the first innings of the new world?’ As a small boy Powerscourt had always been worried about how Sebastian would be able to rise from the dead when his turn came with all those arrows in him. Surely, he had thought, Sebastian might get up, but he would just as surely fall down again.

  ‘I’m not acquainted with the finer points of Muggletonian theology, Francis, but the point, for our purposes, was this. The man Puncknowle set up a building society aimed at these religious brethren. It was very successful. The idea of helping their fellow men even if you disagreed violently with their religion appealed to these West Country characters. The society was a success. It was straight. It is still going to this day, the only honest business ever founded by Jeremiah Puncknowle. It did give him one important idea. Some of the pastors helped set up the building society, they sat on its board, they advertised its products.’