Death Called to the Bar lfp-5

by David Dickinson

  ‘Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.’

  ‘What happened to him, Lord Powerscourt?’ said the doctor eagerly. ‘Did his faith come back?’

  ‘I’m afraid his faith didn’t come back, doctor. What came instead were two burly members of the Kent Constabulary who were on patrol looking out for smugglers. They heard these, to them very strange, words and couldn’t decide whether the young man was a lunatic or not. They clapped him in the cells for the night – would you believe an explanation like his must have been? – and he was bound over to keep the peace by the magistrate the next morning for a period of thirty days. They say that by the time he got to Maidstone on his return journey, his faith had completely disappeared.’

  The doctor smiled. ‘Very fine story, Lord Powerscourt. But no Dover Beach for me. I still believe. I believe I shall see God. I believe I shall be reunited with my dead parents and my dead first wife. Now, how can I help you?’

  ‘Could I ask where you were on the evening of Friday, the 28th of February?’

  ‘The evening poor Mr Dauntsey was murdered, you mean? Well, I was here in my consulting rooms until the early evening. I’m sure my secretary could give you the name of the last patient on that day. That would have been about five or half past five. Then I made some notes for an address I had to give at a conference in Oxford the following day. At seven o’clock or thereabouts I took a cab to Paddington station and the train to Oxford. I’m sure Wilfrid Baverstock, the Professor of Medicine who was organizing this conference, will vouch for the time I arrived at his college, Hertford, shortly after nine, I think.’

  Powerscourt was doing lightning calculations. If a man walked fast, or if he took a cab and was lucky with the traffic in both directions, he could just about get to Queen’s Inn and leave a little something for Alex Dauntsey and be back in time to set out for Oxford.

  ‘In the time you were here, Dr Cavendish, between the departure of the last patient and your own departure for Oxford, was there anybody else about or were you completely alone?’

  ‘Well, there will have been other doctors here in other parts of the building but I didn’t see any of them, if that’s what you mean.’

  Powerscourt took a brief look at the books in a small circular bookcase just to the left of the doctor. His heart started racing very fast.

  ‘I’m afraid I have to ask you about your wife and her relations with the dead man Dauntsey, Dr Cavendish. Could I ask you first of all how you met?’

  The little man laughed. ‘It’s an interesting question as to who picked up whom, Lord Powerscourt. I make no apologies for enjoying the music hall shows. Good enough for the King, then it’s good enough for me, that’s what I say. I’d been to see this show she was in at the Alhambra, just called The Gaiety Girls, if my memory’s right, three times. The third time I was fifty yards from the theatre on my way home and Catherine comes up and starts talking to me, bold as brass. Hadn’t she seen me in that box before, once or was it twice? Anyway, things went on from there. I may be a believer in the Almighty and all his works, Lord Powerscourt, but I thought I could still enjoy some feminine company in the last months of my life. My first wife is dead. We didn’t have any children. I didn’t want to leave my money to a collection of medical charities. So there it was. And I told Catherine right from the start that there were certain physical functions relating to marriage that I could not perform because of my illness. I didn’t mind if she found outlets for those with other people, as long as she kept coming back to me until I died.’

  Once again Powerscourt wondered if the man was telling the truth. Maybe the human capacity for jealousy disappeared when desire faded. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe you could marry somebody much younger and tolerate them sleeping with other men. But he wasn’t sure. And he had noticed a faint flush on the doctor’s face as he gave that account of himself. Maybe it had to do with the sensitive nature of the subject matter. Suddenly Powerscourt remembered Catherine Cavendish telling him that she had met Alex Dauntsey when he was the last patient of the day, in her husband’s waiting room.

  ‘I think you knew Alex Dauntsey, Dr Cavendish,’ he said. ‘I believe he was a patient of yours.’

  ‘He was indeed. He had been a patient of mine for some years.’

  Powerscourt wondered if length of service would make it more or less likely that you would murder somebody.

  ‘What did you think of him?’

  ‘Dauntsey?’ said the doctor reflectively, looking at the Annunciation on his wall as if there might be a message in there for him as well. ‘I liked him very much. He had a certain grace about him, a certain style that you don’t often see in today’s barristers. They’re all too concerned with making money.’

  Of all the people whose deaths he had investigated, Powerscourt thought, Dauntsey was the one he would have most liked to meet. He thought of the portrait, now presumably lurking in some basement in Queen’s Inn, and wondered fancifully if he could buy it off them. He was sure Lady Lucy would have liked Dauntsey too, with those good looks and the charm that had bewitched Catherine Cavendish. He would even have been forgiven the love affair with cricket.

  ‘It’s such a pity he’s gone,’ said Powerscourt. ‘One last question, and forgive me if it is personal once again. Did you and Mrs Cavendish ever talk about what would happen after you had died?’

  The doctor thought Powerscourt apologized too much. Bloody man’s nearly strangling himself with good manners, he said to himself. But then he reflected that while he dealt with the reality of death every day, Powerscourt did not.

  ‘I don’t think we have discussed it, actually,’ said Dr Cavendish. ‘Do you think we should?’

  Powerscourt smiled. ‘I think that’s entirely a matter for yourselves,’ he said and rose to take his leave. As he stepped out into the cold air of Harley Street he saw again in his mind’s eye those two volumes on Dr Cavendish’s revolving bookcases. Poisons and Their Treatment was the first one in a brown binding. The Impact of Poison was the other, bound, appropriately enough, Powerscourt felt, in black. There was only room for the surname on the spine, not the full details of the writer and his qualifications which would appear inside. On both books the author was the same. His name was Cavendish.

  All of the Maxfield replies were now with Powerscourt in Manchester Square with the Army and Calne bringing up the rear. No from Cambridge, he read, no from the Army, no from his old school. Only one reply offered any sort of hope and even that looked pretty slim. It came from the head groundsman at Calne. He himself, he wrote, was unable to be of assistance as he had only been in the post for five years and had no knowledge of Mr Dauntsey growing up. He had, however, discussed it with his predecessor, who believed he might be able to help. If Lord Powerscourt could confirm by return of post, Matthew Jenkins, who had been head groundsman for almost fifty years, would meet him at the Calne cricket pavilion at three o’clock in the afternoon in two days’ time.

  Johnny Fitzgerald had almost persuaded Powerscourt that Maxfield was a blackmailer, spacing out his demands over the decades to avoid detection. Chief Inspector Beecham’s theory was that Maxfield had lent Dauntsey a great sum of money to pay off youthful indiscretions and the cash was now being returned with interest. Lady Lucy believed the bequest was a reward. Maybe Maxfield had saved Dauntsey’s life in the past and this was a thank you from beyond the grave. Powerscourt just hoped that this was his last trip to Calne. I should have bought a season ticket when this investigation started, he said to himself, peering anxiously round the estate for armed assassins come to finish him off.

  Matthew Jenkins had brought two chairs and a small table on to the verandah of the cricket pavilion. There were a number of notebooks lying roughly beside one of the chairs. Jenkins was a small
wrinkled old gentleman with a full head of white hair. His hands and his arms were very brown from years in the open air. His face was clean-shaven and looked to Powerscourt like a nut with human features attached. He spoke slowly and seemed to think quite hard before he opened his mouth.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mr Jenkins,’ said Powerscourt, opening the batting. ‘Thank you very much for seeing me.’

  ‘If there’s anything I could do for Mr Dauntsey, sir, I’d walk through hellfire to do it for him, I would.’ And with that, Matthew Jenkins nodded his white hair for what seemed to Powerscourt to be almost a minute.

  ‘You told John James, your successor, that you might be able to help me with this missing Maxfield, Mr Jenkins.’

  ‘I can, sir.’ The old man stopped there and stared out at the pitch as if remembering matches from long ago. A couple of deer were inspecting them from the far boundary. ‘You mentioned nicknames in your letter, sir. Well, that was what set me thinking. You see, we did have a boy and man, contemporary of Mr Dauntsey, with a nickname. Squirrel, he was called. I can’t remember, if I ever knew, why he was called Squirrel. Maybe he hoarded things and buried them in secret places. He was born here, his father worked on the estate. He must have been about the same age as Mr Dauntsey. They grew up together, played together, chased the deer together.’ This brought another of those long-drawn-out noddings of the Jenkins head. Powerscourt watched it move slowly up and down, the eyes still staring out at the wicket.

  ‘Did everybody call him Squirrel, Mr Jenkins?’

  ‘Somebody told me the other day, sir, that they thought even his own family must have called him Squirrel. But I’m losing my way, Lord Powerscourt. The reason I asked to meet you here was that Mr Dauntsey and Squirrel played cricket together. They opened the batting for the junior team, then the senior team, they even had a trial together for the County. And the scorer for the Calne cricket team was the estate steward, a miserable man who’d been in the Army called Buchanan-Smith. A real stickler for formality, he was, sir. There was no way he would have put just Squirrel in his score book.’

  Matthew Jenkins bent down and picked up a faded green volume. ‘Here we are, sir, A.M. Dauntsey, caught Pollard, bowled Keyes, thirty-four, Squirrel Maxfield, bowled Hawkins, forty-two.’

  Powerscourt picked up another book for another year and found more records of successful partnerships between the two men.

  Powerscourt was as interested as the next man in cricket records but he felt he should press on.

  ‘Is he still here, Squirrel Maxfield? Is he still opening the batting for Calne?’

  Matthew Jenkins looked so sad, Powerscourt thought he might burst into tears. ‘No, my lord, he’s not here. He left soon after the catastrophe. You know how they say some people are marked out for disaster, for the vengeance of the gods – well, I think he was one of them.’

  The white head was off again. Powerscourt waited. ‘He married late, this Squirrel,’ Jenkins went on, leafing absent-mindedly through another of the score books, ‘must have been about five or six years ago. They had a son, lovely little boy he was, with blond hair and big green eyes. Until he was one and a half, nearly two, everything was fine. Then things began to go wrong with the boy. They took him to a lot of doctors but there was no cure. Epilepsy and mental deficiency, that’s what they said it was. Just when they were taking all that in, the wife was pregnant again. Same thing. Another little boy, same problem, same illness. The doctors shook their heads. They needed extra help to look after the little ones. Worst thing was, these children would never get better, they’d need looking after all their lives. People said there were special hospitals and places you could send them. Squirrel Maxfield said nobody ever came out alive from those places. He said if they could just keep them alive long enough somebody would come up with a cure. Squirrel said he didn’t believe God could send people out into this world who weren’t well without intending to cure them.’

  ‘Did they receive help from anywhere, Mr Jenkins? Financial help?’

  ‘Well, my lord, you know how it is in small communities like ours. Gossip going everywhere, like a weed. People said Mr Dauntsey gave them money, a lot of money, but nobody knew. They all went off to the South of France. Maybe the climate would be better, I don’t know. People say it’s cheaper to live there, I wouldn’t know, I sometimes think I haven’t much time left here myself.’

  ‘Nonsense, Mr Jenkins,’ said Powerscourt, ‘you’ll be here for years yet. But tell me, what did you make of the two of them, Dauntsey and Maxfield?’

  The old man looked at him carefully and began extracting pipe, tobacco pouch and matches from various pockets.

  ‘Squirrel Maxfield, I didn’t know him well. He worked in the town as a carpenter so we did see him here from time to time. Very pleasant gentleman, always polite to me. Mr Dauntsey, mind you, I watched him grow up. I never knew a more considerate man, always happy to help the people on the estate in bad times. He was a real loss, sir.’

  ‘I don’t suppose,’ said Powerscourt, anxious to remove all possible ambiguity, ‘that Mr Maxfield has been back here in the last couple of months or so?’ Not on a feast day in Queen’s Inn at the end of February, he said to himself.

  ‘No, sir, he’s not been back. I’m sure he would have come back for the funeral if he’d heard about it in time. Don’t suppose the posts and things work very well over there. And if he’d been back he’d have come down to see his old mother who’s still alive in the town and we’d have heard all about it.’

  On his train back to London Powerscourt felt relieved that F.L. Maxfield could at last be removed from their inquiries. And he wondered again about the nature of his first murder victim, Alexander Dauntsey, a man whose generosity to his friends extended beyond the grave.

  14

  Edward found Lord Francis Powerscourt pacing up and down his drawing room with the twins nestling against his chest. Edward could have sworn he was talking to them about Pericles’ funeral speech in Book Two of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War.

  ‘You’ve got to talk to them about something,’ said Powerscourt cheerfully. ‘Johnny Fitzgerald has told them already about all the birds of London and their breeding habits. Would you like one?’

  Edward told Sarah later that evening that his host offered him a twin as he might have offered a cucumber sandwich or a slice of cake at afternoon tea. Very gingerly he took a small, well-wrapped bundle in his arms, holding it very delicately.

  ‘They look about quite a bit now,’ said Powerscourt happily. ‘Sometimes they grab hold of your finger as if they’re a monkey. The nurse will be coming to take them away for their bath in a minute, Edward. You won’t have to last out for very long.’

  ‘Which one have I got?’ asked Edward.

  ‘You’ve got the boy, Christopher. The other children are calling him Chris already. I’d much rather he had the full name. If we’d wanted to call him Chris, I keep telling Thomas and Olivia, we’d have christened him that. But they don’t pay any attention. Do you have a view on this?’

  Edward had no wish to tread into some diplomatic imbroglio between parent and children. ‘Well,’ he said tactfully, ‘you don’t have to decide yet, do you? Christopher himself might have a view on this?’

  At that point a middle-aged nurse, spotless in white, appeared in the doorway. She had two large white towels over one arm.

  ‘Nurse Mary Muriel,’ said Powerscourt, ‘you have come for the twins, I see. Allow me to introduce Edward, a great friend of the family.’

  ‘How do you do,’ Mary Muriel said to Edward, and advanced to claim her charges. ‘It’s bath time,’ she said, as if it were some ritual fixed by Royal Decree or Act of Parliament, and swept out of the room towards the upper floors, her tiny charges firmly under her control.

  ‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, parking himself in his favourite armchair to the left of the sofa in front of the fire, ‘I sometime want to suggest to Mary Muriel that she postpone bath time for ten min
utes so I could have more time with the twins. I am their father, after all. And I pay her wages, come to that. But she is terribly good at her job. She looked after Thomas and Olivia when they were little. But her world runs like clockwork. If you check your watch, Edward, I think you’ll find that it is about one minute after six. If bath time does not commence at exactly six o’clock, London will sink below the Thames, there will be a plague of locusts and the waters shall cover the face of the earth.’

  Edward smiled. ‘I’m glad I’ve met this titan of the nursery,’ he said, ‘and it is just coming up to two minutes after six.’

  ‘Now then, young Edward,’ said Powerscourt, ‘time to be serious for a moment. I’ve been reading those wills and I’m very confused. There are a number of people supposed to be receiving money from the Inn who aren’t. Have you ever come across any poor pupils or students being maintained by the munificence of Queen’s and the generosity of its past benchers?’

  ‘I have not,’ Edward replied, ‘none at all. And I don’t think I’ve ever heard of any money going to retired barristers in straitened circumstances either.’

  ‘I wonder if they could have changed the statutes,’ said Powerscourt, cocking an ear to sounds of unhappiness floating down from the higher levels, presumably to do with the total immersion in water, ‘but it’s very difficult to change people’s wills after they’ve been proved. It’s almost unheard of.’