Porchester Newton stood up. Powerscourt saw with some alarm that those butcher’s hands were rising to his waist as if preparing to wring something that might have been a pillow case or a human form.
‘No! Get out! One more word and I’ll throw you out!’
Nobody could say, Powerscourt thought to himself as he made his way to confess his defeat to the Chief Inspector, that Porchester Newton had failed to make himself clear.
‘Is my hat straight?’ Sarah Henderson asked Edward the day after Powerscourt’s unsuccessful jousting with Porchester Newton.
‘Your hat is fine, Sarah,’ said Edward, thinking that she looked even more attractive in black. They were making the final adjustments to Sarah’s clothes in her attic office before proceeding to the memorial service for Alexander Dauntsey in the Temple Church. It was the custom in Queen’s Inn for all benchers not buried at the Temple Church to be given a sort of memorial service with addresses by their colleagues there within two months of their death. In less than a week, Sarah had reminded Edward gloomily that morning, they would be doing exactly the same thing for the unfortunate Woodford Stewart.
The church was full, not only with Dauntsey’s colleagues from Queen’s, but with lawyers from the other Inns of Court, instructing solicitors, two men from the East End he had saved from the gallows who had come to pay their last respects, a couple of men from the City he had played cricket with, and members of various financial institutions he had represented with distinction. There was a sprinkling of women, some wives who had known him closely, some stenographers he had employed like Sarah. The benchers sat in splendid isolation in their allotted rows at the front. Mrs Dauntsey sat alone in the left-hand pew at the front. Porchester Newton was staring bitterly at the benchers from halfway down the nave. Edward and Sarah were squeezed in right at the back with a couple of criminals and a Chancery judge in full regalia who looked as though he might have adjourned his court to attend.
Powerscourt was taking a special interest in the service. He had handed over the sum of five pounds to the Head Porter to be distributed among himself and his colleagues who were shepherding the guests into position in return for information relating to two particular questions. The first he regarded, at best, as a shot in the dark. Suppose Alexander Dauntsey had found a woman, a woman who might bear him a child to inherit the glory and the desolation that was Calne, would she appear at this memorial service? Surely she wouldn’t have gone to the funeral in the alien county of Kent. But might she just pop in here, maybe sometime before the service started, for a last encounter with the ghost of Dauntsey? Powerscourt had left instructions with his team that anybody unknown to them was to be asked to give their name and address. If questioned, they were to say it was for insertion in the record of the service that would appear in the respectable newspapers and for Queen’s own records. Nobody could refuse such a request, Powerscourt thought, though they might give a false name. Any Mrs Smiths, those regular visitors to the divorce courts, he would regard with extreme suspicion. And his second line of inquiry related to the mysterious visitor to Dauntsey’s chambers on the day of the feast. The porter who had seen this person had been told to brief all his colleagues on the appearance of the stranger. Powerscourt had offered a further reward of five pounds if anybody recognized this person again. Powerscourt had protected himself from false sightings by saying that this further instalment of cash would be handed over only when the visitor admitted his earlier trip to Queen’s on the day of Dauntsey’s death.
The living of the Temple Church was in the gift of the Inner and Middle Temples. The elders of those Inns of Court, concerned that eloquence should be confined to the legal profession and not be displayed by what they regarded as the inferior body of the Church, usually picked somebody with a good speaking voice, audible at the back of the church, who gave very short and very undistinguished sermons. Even on Sundays, after all, lawyers were busy people. The present incumbent, one Wallace Thornaby, was a tall, balding man in his fifties who had learned long ago, at the start of his ministry in the Temples, that it was never a good idea to argue with the lawyers.
As the Reverend Thornaby made his way up the nave behind his choir, Powerscourt saw that it was going to be standing room only in the Round Church at the end. People were going to be packed in there as though they were at a football match. Maybe there would be an overflow congregation outside, close, he suddenly remembered with a shudder, to the spot where the body of the other dead lawyer Woodford Stewart had been found.
The priest began by leading his congregation through the Lord’s Prayer and the Collect of the Day. He recited the bare facts of Dauntsey’s career and introduced the first speaker, a lawyer from Gray’s Inn who had worked on numerous cases with the dead man. Much of this was technical stuff about Chancery and the Queen’s Bench Division and the Court of Appeal, and Powerscourt’s brain drifted off. Who had killed Alexander Dauntsey? Porchester Newton, in a fit of pique after he lost the election to bencher? Some old criminal whose conviction and imprisonment he had secured? Had he made some startling discoveries about the monies of Queen’s Inn? From the little he knew so far Powerscourt doubted that. And what of the mysterious Maxfield, still undiscovered, still with twenty thousand pounds waiting for him in the vaults of Plunkett Marlowe and Plunkett? Did Mrs Dauntsey know more than she was saying? Behind that beautiful and haughty reserve was she hiding some information vital to his inquiry?
With a start he realized that the man from Gray’s Inn had departed and the congregation had risen for a hymn. With a guilty grin he saw that even here the legal profession had made their mark.
Day of dark and doom impending
David’s word with Sibyl’s blending
Heaven and earth in ashes ending!
O, what fear man’s bosom rendeth,
When from Heaven the Judge descendeth
On whose sentence all dependeth!
There was more, to Powerscourt’s delight, a verse later.
Lo the book exactly worded
Wherein all hath been recorded
Thence shall judgement be awarded.
When the Judge his seat attaineth,
And each hidden deed arraigneth
Nothing unavenged remaineth.
From the Middle Temple and from Queen’s, from Gray’s Inn even unto Lincoln’s Inn Fields, yea, even from the Inner Temple, Powerscourt said to himself as another lawyer climbed into the pulpit to give his contribution, the judges shall come to pronounce not on the living in the dock before them, but on the dead in some celestial court, not on the crimes they may have committed on earth, but on their prospects for a place in Paradise. Maybe they would have new livery, fresh colours and fresh gowns, white possibly, to pass this eternal judgement. Powerscourt only sat up from his reverie when he realized that the man was talking not about the law but about cricket.
‘Many of you’ – the man was called Fraser and came from the Middle Temple, Edward told Powerscourt afterwards – ‘would have said that Dauntsey’s heart, the most important thing in his life, was his work here, in Queen’s Inn. I do not believe that to be the case. I would suggest the cricket pitch at Calne, or that extraordinary house that is Calne, or something indefinable that you might call the spirit of Calne had better claims on his heart. I am not sure how many of you have seen the vast interior of that house, room after room, hall after hall, gallery after gallery, boarded up, covered in dust sheets, protected from dry rot but very little else, an exquisite interior, probably one of the finest in England, merely holding time at bay and not showing off her glories to the world. Alex Dauntsey dreamed of restoring that house, of bringing it back to what his ancestors had made. His periods of depression were, he told me once, the greatest cross he had to bear for they ensured he would never be consistent and respected enough at the Bar to earn sufficient money for his task.’