‘Do you believe it, Francis?’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Do you think it’s true? If it is, you’ve solved the murder.’
‘Different question, Francis,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald. ‘How are you going to find out if it’s true or not?’
‘That’s easy, Johnny,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Tomorrow morning I’m going to send her a telegram. In three days’ time I shall arrive at Calne for tea. Then I shall discover the answer.’
‘I shouldn’t eat anything while you’re there, Francis,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘not even the best chocolate cake. And I should watch your back all the way there and the way home.’
Petley Road was a terrace of respectable Victorian houses in Fulham not far from the river and its great warehouses. Schoolteachers, rising bank clerks, those sort of respectable citizens, Powerscourt reckoned, would be the inhabitants here. Mr John Bassett’s house was Number 15 and Mr Bassett himself opened the door. He was a small man, with ears that seemed to be pointed, and he sported a well-trimmed goatee beard that gave him the appearance of a troll or other resident of some forbidding German forest. His living room, Powerscourt saw, as he was ushered to the most comfortable chair, was full of painted panoramas of some of the world’s remotest places, the Sahara desert, the Arctic or the Antarctic, Powerscourt wasn’t sure which, a view of the back of Mount Everest, the vast steppes of Siberia.
‘Are you a traveller, Mr Bassett?’ Powerscourt asked. He wondered if the whole house was full of these kind of pictures, if you might have to cross the Gobi desert in the bathroom or traverse the sands of Arabia before you could go to sleep.
‘I wish I had been,’ said the little man. ‘I have a constitution fitted to the counting house, not to great liners and the rough conveyance of the wagon train or even to arduous treks on foot. But I like to contemplate these great spaces, as you see. Now, how can I be of assistance to you, Lord Powerscourt?’
‘I presume, Mr Bassett, that you have heard about the terrible murders in Queen’s Inn?’
John Bassett nodded sadly.
‘I have been asked to investigate these murders and I understand that Mr Dauntsey came to see you shortly before he died. Is that so?’
The little man remained silent. Powerscourt wondered briefly if he had been sworn to complete secrecy by his employers. That hardly seemed necessary – why would they want to silence a man who knew all the details of the Inn’s plate and how many spoons went missing in an average year?
‘I must make a confession, Lord Powerscourt. And please forgive me. It is my age. I shall be seventy-seven next birthday if the Lord spares me that long. Sometimes, I must tell you, I rather wish he would call me home before that. But my memory comes and goes. I do not remember Mr Dauntsey’s visit. All I can remember is that he asked a question I could not answer and I had to check with the bencher who looks after the money at the Inn.’
‘Can you remember the question, Mr Bassett?’ Powerscourt asked gently, wondering if this visit had been a complete waste of time. ‘Anything at all?’
The little man’s face brightened. ‘I’ve got it, I think. It wasn’t anything important, just something about bursaries for poor students.’
Powerscourt felt rather disappointed. He wished suddenly that he had finished off the business of reading the rest of the wills. Edward had volunteered to do it for him, saying that it would be good experience for his legal work. He felt he could not in all decency just stand up and leave now, it would look so rude to leave the man to his remote corners of the globe in less than five minutes.
‘Can you tell me, Mr Bassett, exactly what the nature of your work at the Inn entailed?’
John Bassett smiled. ‘Seeing as I started there nearly fifty years ago, my lord, and the work didn’t change very much, I can do that right proper. Memory’s all right going back to the Crimean War. Once up to them Boers it gets a bit hazy.’
He fidgeted about in his chair as if settling himself for some great speech.
‘Money goes in, money goes out,’ he said as if he had just discovered an eleventh commandment, ‘that’s the secret. Money comes in, that’s money for chambers, cheaper if the gentlemen pay a year at a time, money for food, money for wine. Money goes out, wages for the servants, payments for the food and wine, payments for benchers, payments for the gardeners, payments for painters and decorators. If the in and the out are more less the same, you’re fine. If the in is more than the out, even better. Only if the out is a lot more than the in are you in trouble. And I can truthfully say that the out was more than the in only once in my time, my lord, and that was when we had to repaint everything unexpectedly for a visit from Queen Victoria.’
‘That’s very clear, Mr Bassett,’ said Powerscourt, ‘and could you tell me what your relationship was with the bencher who looked after the overall financial picture? I believe he’s called the Surveyor.’
‘That he is, sir. Just two of them I knew in my time. Mr James Knighton, he was the first, sir, and now Mr Obadiah Colebrook, why, he’s even older than me, sir, he’s eighty if he’s a day. Funny how they don’t retire at Queen’s like they do in them other Inns, but ours not to reason why. I got on fine with both of them, sir, better with Mr Colebrook, I think, definitely better.’
Mr Bassett leaned forward and began speaking in a confidential voice, as if he was betraying the state secrets of Queen’s Inn. ‘Fact is, my lord, that Mr Knighton, he was a Quaker or one of those strange sects that don’t believe in washing or whatever it is, and he didn’t touch a drop. Completely teetotal. Mr Colebrook, sir, he was the wine steward as well for part of the time, and he used to invite me to sample the latest stuff the Inn was thinking of buying. “If you like it, Bassett,” he used to say, “then the ordinary barristers will like it too.” I was never sure whether that was a compliment or not, sir.’
‘I’m sure it was a great compliment to your palate, Mr Bassett. One of the best assets a man can have, a fine palate. Now tell me, did Mr Colebrook control a lot of money you never saw? Money from investments, that sort of thing?’
‘There was two kinds of accounts, my lord. Both operated on the same principle, money comes in, money goes out. I was Ordinary Accounts, if you follow me, my lord. Mr Colebrook was Special Accounts. I didn’t have anything to do with them, sir, nothing at all.’
‘You never even managed a peep at them, Mr Bassett? People can get curious sometimes.’
‘That was not my place, nor my position,’ said the little man indignantly, as if his integrity was being impugned, which perhaps it was. ‘I would never have done such a thing.’
‘My apologies, Mr Bassett, I never meant to suggest that you might be party to some underhand action,’ said Powerscourt. Suddenly he remembered some of the bequests he had noted in his basement. ‘Did you have anything to do with bequests for poor scholars like the ones Mr Dauntsey mentioned?’
‘That would be Mr Colebrook’s line of business, sir.’
‘I see,’ said Powerscourt. ‘And finally, Mr Bassett, was there anything you can remember about the finances of Queen’s Inn that might lead to murder, anything at all?’
John Bassett was very quick to answer. ‘Nothing, sir, on my honour, nothing at all.’
The following afternoon Edward had promised Powerscourt a treat. For it would be the second day of the Puncknowle trial before Mr Justice Webster in a Court of the Queen’s Bench. Maxwell Kirk, head of the Dauntsey chambers, leading for the prosecution, with Edward acting as his junior for this day, was expected to begin his cross-examination of Jeremiah Puncknowle, the first day and a half having being taken up with the opening statements. Early in the morning the queues stretched out from the Royal Courts of Justice way down the Strand, almost as far as Waterloo Bridge, as the British public waited for the chance to see Puncknowle in the dock. He had, after all, cheated so many of them out of their savings. So deep had he penetrated into the lives of the working classes of Britain that four members of the jury empanelled to try him obtained exemption from service on the grounds that they had financial interests in one or other of his companies.