Truly, Powerscourt thought, this room with its great brown books and their baleful contents and those dreadful guardians, this is the kingdom of the dead. We, the living who pass through here, are mere wraiths, doomed to wander in the world of shadows outside from the Strand to Aldwych to Holborn trying to forget that our own futures too will one day end up down here or in the sister chamber that holds the wills of later years. Did these rich men – for on the whole, he thought, you would have to be rich to qualify for a place in these ledgers – know that one day, hundreds of years after they were gone, complete strangers would come and inspect their wills, in an act that amounted to posthumous financial rape? Would the same fate happen to Powerscourt in his turn?
The names of former benchers fascinated him. James Herbert Pomeroy, passed away in the 1770s, left twenty pounds to his wife and a house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields to Queen’s Inn. Edward Madingley Chawleigh, died 1780, left fifty pounds for the maintenance and education of poor students ‘that the poor might be afforded the advantages vouchsafed to us by birth’. Was Josiah Sterndale Tarleton, passed away 1785, the father of the Colonel Banastre Tarleton, painted with such verve and panache by Sir Joshua Reynolds? Tarleton had been engaged in the American War of Independence. Powerscourt could see the painting now, the young man in skin-tight white breeches and a green jacket studded with gold buttons, the smoke of a great explosion behind him and gathered around his person the varied accoutrements of war, a pair of horses, for the Colonel was of horse rather than foot, a mobile cannon and what may have been the colours of his company in deep red. Old Mr Tarleton had at least passed on before the disappointment of the loss of the American colonies his son had fought to keep. And then, Powerscourt remembered, this Colonel Banastre Tarleton had been the lover over many years of Perdita, one-time mistress of the Prince of Wales, still hanging on the walls of the Wallace Collection, painted by Gainsborough. Was Robert Fitzpaine Wilberforce, died 1792, the father or the uncle of the man who campaigned so effectively for the abolition of slavery?
By the time he left for the day Powerscourt had entered details of over twenty wills in his thick red notebook, specially purchased for the occasion. After a while he found he was concentrating on transcribing the material as fast as possible with little attention to the content. But he had made, he thought, one significant discovery. Every single bencher so far had left some money or property or investment to Queen’s Inn. Powerscourt wondered if leaving money to the Inn in your will was a necessary part of becoming a bencher. He hoped that somewhere in William Burke’s vast range of acquaintance in the City of London there was a man who could compute how much two hundred pounds in 1800 was worth today and the likely value of property that seemed to be dotted like stardust round the lawyers’ quarters in a radius of three or four miles.
Detective Chief Inspector Beecham was waiting for Powerscourt on his return to the Inn from Somerset House. He was exceedingly angry.
‘Bloody man,’ he said, slamming the fist of his right hand into the palm of his left, ‘the bloody man.’
‘Have you been talking to the benchers again, Chief Inspector? You know how that upsets you.’
Beecham managed a laugh. ‘I have not been talking to any of those benchers. It’s the bloody man Newton, Porchester Newton.’
‘What about Newton? What’s he done to upset you?’
‘He’s come back, for a start,’ said Beecham. ‘And any sane person would have to put the wretch very high on his list of suspects. Huge row, as you know, with Dauntsey about that election. Dauntsey wins the election, Newton doesn’t, takes himself off in a huff after the wretched feast. He could easily have come back secretly to shoot Woodford Stewart and then disappeared again.’
‘Sorry, Chief Inspector,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I don’t follow you. What exactly is the latest problem with Newton?’
‘Sorry, my lord,’ said Beecham, running his hand through his hair, ‘he won’t speak.’
‘What do you mean, he won’t speak? Has he gone dumb or something?’
‘He won’t speak to me. He won’t answer any questions. He refuses to give an indication at all of his whereabouts on the day of the feast or any day since then. He has gone mute in this affair.’
Powerscourt remembered an old judge telling him years before that if you were guilty on a major charge your best course was to say nothing at all. Any information you gave to the police led them somewhere else, then to more questions which brought more discoveries until you were thoroughly trapped.
‘That’s not very wise of him, surely?’ Powerscourt said.
‘It’s not,’ said the Chief Inspector. ‘And much bloody good it is going to do him. I’m going to put a team of my men on to his whereabouts since the Dauntsey murder full time. And if they find anything, however small, we’ll have him in and lock him up on a charge of obstruction. Maybe a night or two in the cells would restore his powers of speech.’
Powerscourt wondered if he should volunteer to try his own, different, powers of persuasion to induce some speech out of Porchester Newton. But he didn’t want to offend the Chief Inspector. Before he had decided, Beecham was already there.
‘Why don’t you try, my lord? You get on better with those bloody benchers than I do. He might talk to you more easily than to me. After all, I don’t care how we get the information.’
Three minutes later Powerscourt was knocking on the door of Newton’s rooms on the ground floor of the little Stone Court hidden away at the back of the Inn. Newton was an enormous man, well over six feet tall, going to fat about the face and stomach, florid of complexion and with rather brutal hands that looked to Powerscourt as though they should have belonged to a butcher rather than a barrister.
‘Good afternoon,’ Powerscourt began. Nobody could complain if you said good afternoon to them. ‘My name is Powerscourt. I have been asked by the benchers to investigate these murders. I wonder if you could spare me the time to answer some questions.’ Powerscourt was speaking in what he hoped was his most emollient voice. The reply was loud, virtually shouted.
‘No! Get out!’
‘Mr Newton, I am, I would humbly remind you, a man of some experience in murder investigations. It is my belief that refusal to answer questions makes people suspicious. It makes people, particularly policemen, think that the refusal is meant to conceal something. From there it is but a short step to the assumption that the person is refusing information about the murder. And from there it is only another short step to the assumption that the person refusing to speak may actually be the murderer. We are fortunate here that we have very intelligent policemen engaged on the case. I have known less intelligent policemen send those refusing to speak to court on the charge of murder because they thought silence denoted guilt. On one occasion it only transpired after the man had been sentenced, Mr Newton, that his silence had been to protect a woman. If she had not come forward, with all the shame and obloquy it brought her, the man would have been hanged. I ask you again. Could you spare me some time to answer a few questions?’
The voice was even louder. ‘No! Get out!’
Anybody listening might think, Powerscourt reflected, that the fellow doesn’t want to talk to me.
‘Let me make one last appeal, Mr Newton,’ Powerscourt suspected it was hopeless but was resolved on one last attempt. ‘Let me remind you of the difficulties your colleagues are facing each and every day these mysteries remain unsolved. There are policemen crawling all over the Inn. I haunt the place, asking uncomfortable questions from time to time. Nobody can be certain there will not be another murder, that they are not going to be the next victim. I am sure that some of the stenographers are contemplating leaving their employment here because of the uncertainty, not knowing if they will be poisoned as they eat their lunch or shot on their way to the underground railway station. I am sure you could help, Mr Newton. If your knowledge would advance the quest for the murderer, then surely it is your duty to talk to us.’