Death of a Chancellor

by David Dickinson

  ‘My suggestion is this, gentlemen. It is based on the enormous sums of money available. I propose that we come to an informal agreement among ourselves. Let Will A go forward as I believe it should. But let there be no objections from the other parties. When the business is completed, let the money be divided three ways. One third for the cathedral. One third for the Salvation Army. One third for Mrs Cockburn. If my calculations are correct, each party should receive a sum slightly in excess of four hundred thousand pounds.’

  Drake sat down. Neat, thought Powerscourt, very neat, the judgement if not of Solomon, then of Oliver Drake, solicitor of Compton. Everybody wins, nobody wins. Nobody loses, everybody loses. Then, as he heard the muttered conversations between client and lawyer start up around the table, he saw the flaw. Everybody wins, except the lawyers. No contested will, no expensive visits to the Probate Divorce and Admiralty Division of the High Court, no need for any further representation or indeed any fees at all if the Drake plan went ahead.

  There was a slight cough from Alaric Wall for the Salvation Army. ‘Ingenious, very ingenious,’ he said, ‘but I could not in all conscience suggest to my clients that they willingly forgo the sum of eight hundred thousand pounds, a sum which would make such an enormous difference to the poor and needy in our great cities.’

  Powerscourt didn’t think it likely that Alaric Wall would shortly be joining the ranks of the poor and needy in our great cities in person.

  ‘I fear that my clients,’ it was Stamford Joyce’s turn now, speaking for the Dean, ‘would also find that such a scheme, however superficially attractive, was not in the best interests of the Church or the cathedral or the architectural heritage of Great Britain.’

  Powerscourt wondered if Drake had ever thought that his plan might work. Maybe he had a warped sense of humour.

  ‘And for my part,’ said Sebastian Childs for Mrs Cockburn, ‘I could not recommend to my client that she accepts such an arrangement which could deprive her and her family of their rightful inheritance.’

  At least Oliver Drake now had the chance to close the meeting. He told everybody that he was going to seek proof of Will A and the others were free to lodge their caveats if they wished. The three briefcases and their owners and clients shuffled slowly out of the boardroom.

  ‘That business with Fairfield Park, Powerscourt,’ said Drake as he collected his papers, ‘it’s all absolutely fine. Thank you for the very generous down payment of the rent.’ He looked out into the street. Two of the lawyers were having a stand-up row on the pavement outside his office. It looked as if they might come to blows.

  ‘What a bad-tempered meeting,’ said Drake. ‘There was only one redeeming feature, Powerscourt. Did you spot it?’

  Powerscourt shook his head.

  ‘That bloody woman,’ said Drake. ‘That bloody woman Augusta Cockburn. She didn’t say a single word. Can you believe it?’

  9

  The Rule of St Augustine. The Rule of St Benedict. The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution. Lord Francis Powerscourt was browsing through the small library in Fairfield Park. Mrs Cockburn and her lawyer had both departed to London to plot further assaults on the will of the late John Eustace. Mrs Cockburn informed Powerscourt that she was going to take her family abroad for a while until the legal business was settled. Her parting shot showed that she had lost little of her venom.

  ‘I shall be most surprised, Powerscourt, if you have solved the mystery of what happened to my brother before I return. But I shall send you an address in case you turn lucky.’

  Powerscourt, now temporary master of the house, had invited Lady Lucy and the children to come and stay. He had also asked Johnny Fitzgerald.

  Powerscourt was now browsing through a large box with the words ‘History of Fairfield’ on the cover. He learnt that there had been a house here in Tudor times, that most of the present building had been constructed at the end of the seventeenth century by a man called Crosthwaite, Secretary of State for War and paymaster of the armies of William the Third. There were several references to the French style of architecture fashionable at the time, the enclosed courtyard in the front, the low wings containing nurseries, and the covered passage. Covered passage? What covered passage? Powerscourt said to himself, suddenly wide awake despite the late hour. Where did it go to? Where did it start?

  Further researches revealed that the passage was concealed behind a door beside the fireplace in the drawing room. But the drawing room in the sketches of the time did not correspond with where the drawing room was now. Some later Crosthwaite must have moved it. Powerscourt found an earlier map of the house, which contained no reference to this mysterious passage, but did show the previous layout of the ground floor. What had been the drawing room, he decided, must have been turned into the library, where he was now. And, sure enough, there was a door to the left of the fireplace, less than fifteen feet from where he was standing.

  Powerscourt pulled hard at the door. It refused to move. He wondered if it was locked. He tried one more time. This time it creaked open very slowly, as if it had not been in use recently. Behind it Powerscourt saw another black metal door with a small knob halfway down. Powerscourt turned it and peered inside. He could see nothing apart from a set of steps leading downwards. The sensible thing to do would be to wait for the morning and descend the steps, lantern in hand. But Powerscourt wasn’t feeling particularly sensible. He fetched two enormous volumes, bound in red leather, The History of Dorset they claimed to be, and wedged them as firmly as he could in the jamb of the door. He checked carefully to make sure they could not move. Then he set off.

  It was easy at the beginning. There was enough light filtering through to make the descent of the first dozen steps fairly straightforward. Then the passageway turned sharply to the left. The steps gave way to a narrow path, leading, Powerscourt thought, away from the house. The walls, he noticed, were a dark and slimy green and rather damp. He could hear water further up, dripping onto the rocky passageway below. He wondered if there were mice or rats or bats down here. Powerscourt didn’t mind mice or rats very much but he had an abiding terror of bats from his days in India. The light behind him had almost gone. He was groping his way forward now, his right hand feeling the surface of the wall, one boot brought forward so the heel rested on the toe of the one in front. His earlier calm had been replaced by a growing unease. What if the passage was three or four hundred yards long? What if the gate or the trap door at the far end was locked? If he looked back he could just see a sliver of light falling on the passageway. Soon that too would disappear.

  Powerscourt pressed on. He passed the place where the drip came down from the ceiling. It fell on his head instead. It felt very cold. He wondered if he should turn round. He heard a scurrying of very light feet in the distance, rats, he thought, fleeing from the human invader. The wall was growing damper. He realized that his boots were beginning to splash their way along the floor. He heard another drip, more than a drip, a small cascade up ahead. He pressed on, trying to move faster. He forced himself to take a series of deep breaths. Panic, he knew, would be a disaster. He wished Johnny Fitzgerald was with him. Now he could see nothing at all. He thought he heard a different noise, far in the distance, a low moaning sound. Maybe the ghosts of Fairfield spent most of their half lives down here, flitting restlessly up and down this dank corridor, only emerging to haunt the living when one of the doors was opened. Up until this point Powerscourt's right hand had told him that the side of the passage was simply rock. Now it became smoother suddenly. He thought it might be bricks. That gave him hope.

  The stairs were almost his undoing. However carefully he was moving his feet, he missed the first step. He fell forward, holding out his hands to break his fall. Something very unfortunate had happened to his ankle. He was now half lying, half sitting on the floor at the bottom of the stairs, in total darkness. Slowly, very slowly, he pulled himself upright. He found it was
easier to crawl up the steps than to walk. They were lined with a damp and slippery mould. Twice he nearly slipped backwards. Then he banged his head very loudly on something above. Powerscourt was stunned. He felt as though something was echoing inside his skull. He waited a few minutes to compose himself, his ankle aching, his head throbbing. That must be a trap door, or something similar, above my head, he said to himself. He put both his hands up and pushed as hard as he could. The door fell backwards. Powerscourt crawled slowly out of the terrible tunnel and found himself surrounded by what seemed to be a low wooden wall. Only when he stood up did he realize that he was in the enclosed pew of the inhabitants of Fairfield Park in the little church behind the house. John Eustace, he remembered, was buried in the churchyard outside. There was a faint light coming in through the windows. Various marble tombs were semi-visible on the walls. The pulpit was only fifteen feet away. Powerscourt closed the trap door and made his way out of the church. Thank God the door wasn’t locked. He didn’t fancy spending the night in there, surrounded by the bats and the dead, even if was preferable to spending it in the passageway he had just left.

  He took several deep breaths and hobbled towards the house. His brain was reeling. Maybe Augusta Cockburn had been right all along. For until now the reason he had dismissed her murder theory was that he could not see how the intruders might have got in and out of the house. All the doors and windows, he remembered the butler telling him, had been securely fastened from the inside the morning after John Eustace’s death. Now he knew how a murderer could have got in and out without being detected and without leaving any telltale trace behind. Into the church, down the passageway, into the library, up the back stairs, into John Eustace’s bedroom. But why, in that case, had the body ended up in Dr Blackstaff’s house? Unless the murderer had carried him there? Was the murderer an ally of the doctor’s? Was he acting in concert with the butler? But in that case, why did they need the murderer at all? Either or both of them could perfectly easily have walked into the bedroom without anybody else being any the wiser.

  It was only just outside the house that Powerscourt noticed something was wrong. The lights in the library had gone out. When he left, not more than twenty minutes before at the most, they had been switched on. It was their light that had shone down the steps and illuminated the first stage of his journey. He checked again. He remembered standing in the garden in the daylight only the day before, making a mental note of where all the ground-floor rooms were. The library was the last room on the left from the garden. There were no lights on. Even if he was wrong, and he didn’t think he was, all the lights in this part of the house had been turned off.

  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.