‘But why did you go in disguise? You didn’t have to do that, surely?’ Powerscourt spoke very softly.
‘You’ll think me very silly,’ she said, ‘but I thought one or two of his work colleagues must have known about the other woman, had probably met her. Once anybody in that place knew anything the gossip went round the entire Inn faster than a Derby winner. They would all have known that the two of them were going away for the weekend. You know how men like to speculate about successes with women. I couldn’t face the embarrassment. I couldn’t have borne it. So I adapted some of Alex’s old clothes and went as a man. Even then I was terrified somebody might speak to me. I was completely exhausted when I got back here.’
Powerscourt wondered yet again if Elizabeth Dauntsey was a tragic figure or a murderer. He couldn’t tell.
‘Did you meet anybody when you were in your husband’s chambers? Anybody at all?’
‘Not a soul,’ replied Elizabeth Dauntsey.
‘Was he drinking anything while you were with him? It must have been about a quarter to six.’ Powerscourt could see, very faintly in his mind, the shadow of the gallows.
‘He was drinking Chateauneuf-du-Pape,’ Elizabeth Dauntsey had gone pale, ‘the stuff they were going to have later at the feast.’ Only Alex Dauntsey never got that far, Powerscourt said to himself, the strychnine got to him first. The poison concealed, perhaps, behind the strong taste of the red wine.
‘And did you put a drop of poison in his drink when you were there, Mrs Dauntsey?’
There was a slight pause, whether through guilt or insult Powerscourt could not decide.
‘I did not.’ He couldn’t decide if she was telling the truth. He thought she probably was.
Now it was Powerscourt’s turn to walk to the window. A jury, he thought, could well convict on what he had heard this afternoon. The rain had stopped. Spring sunshine was beginning to dry the park out. The deer had abandoned their hiding places and were gambolling about on the grass.
‘I have to ask you this question, Mrs Dauntsey. I seem to need a sentence of permanent apology virtually every time I speak in this house. What were you all going to do if the woman became pregnant?’ Don’t even think of asking the really nasty question today, he said to himself – what happens if it’s a girl. ‘To put it at its crudest, did you think he was going to divorce you?’
‘No,’ said Elizabeth Dauntsey firmly, ‘I don’t believe he was. Alex said the woman’s husband wasn’t going to live very long.’
‘Was the man ill? Did he have some terminal illness?’
‘I don’t know, Lord Powerscourt, Alex didn’t say.’
Christ in heaven, Powerscourt said to himself. Maybe other murders were contemplated, Alexander Dauntsey and his mistress plotting to push an old man down the stairs or shove him under the wheels of a train.
‘Did Alex have a time scale, Mrs Dauntsey? Did he think the doctor would have departed in six months, nine months maybe?’
‘He didn’t say.’
‘Let’s play make believe, Mrs Dauntsey. Not quite a fairy story, more of a let’s suppose. Would you be agreeable to that?’
‘Of course, Lord Powerscourt. I’m only trying to help you.’
‘I know you are. Now then, let’s suppose that in a couple of months’ time the young woman becomes pregnant. The husband dies, conveniently, well before the child is due. Then she gives birth, let us say to a son. How, if Alex is still married to you, would he get his hands on the child? The two of them can hardly come and live here. Perhaps the young woman would be happy to give up the child for Alex to bring up here with you. It’s all frightfully complicated.’
Elizabeth Dauntsey looked at the ring on her wedding finger. ‘Alex said he would work something out, that we had to take one step at a time. He was always an impulsive sort of thinker.’
Powerscourt wondered if it was time for him to go. Mrs Dauntsey was looking tired and drawn all of a sudden, as if these confessions had taken their toll.
She looked at him suddenly, ‘It doesn’t matter now, Lord Powerscourt, it doesn’t matter at all. Alex is dead. Nothing is going to bring him back.’
Powerscourt took her hand. It felt cold, even though she had been close to the fire. ‘I will do whatever I can to help you, Mrs Dauntsey. I may have to come back to see you again in a few days. But before I go – forgive me for causing yet more embarrassment but it is important. The name of the young woman with whom your husband was going to spend some time would be most useful to me, if you would be so kind. And the professional address of her husband.’
For the first time since Powerscourt had known her, Elizabeth Dauntsey blushed. ‘It might be easier all round,’ said Powerscourt, sensing her discomfiture, ‘if you wrote them down, the names and addresses, I mean.’
Elizabeth Dauntsey crossed to a small writing table by the window. Powerscourt did not read her piece of paper at once but waited until he was in the train back to London. Rivers Cavendish, he read, 24 Harley Street, W1. A fashionable address. Mrs Catherine Cavendish, 36 Tite Street, Chelsea, SW3. He didn’t think it likely, however you looked at it, that Catherine Cavendish was the killer. Excitement and romance were meant to be on the menu as far as she was concerned. But Dr Rivers Cavendish, a man being cuckolded in the last months of his life? At the speed the criminal justice system worked, he would probably have been able to kill Dauntsey and pass away several months later without even being brought to trial. And there was something else. Doctors, Powerscourt said to himself, know all about poison.
Sarah Henderson was thinking about Edward. It was just after nine o’clock in the morning in Queen’s Inn but she had been thinking about him for some time already. Sarah spent quite a lot of her waking day thinking about Edward. She had discovered that her fingers could shoot out and turn her shorthand into sheets of typewritten paper on her keyboard while her mind was elsewhere. She wondered when, or maybe if, Edward was going to ask her to marry him. Only the previous evening, encased in the fog, they had spent a passionate forty-five minutes wrapped round a lamp-post together on the Embankment. She had felt then that he might pop the question. After all, ‘Will you marry me?’ didn’t have any of those awkward b’s or p’s or s’s that sometimes gave Edward so much trouble. She wondered if she should suggest that they needed to have a talk about things. But Sarah wasn’t sure about this plan of action. Men, according to an old school friend who had been observing two elder brothers at home for years and who had nearly been engaged to half a dozen young men, were always happy to go for walks, to take you to the theatre, to make love to you, but if you suggested serious talks or discussing things like relationships, their eyes would glaze over and suddenly they would have urgent engagements elsewhere. It wasn’t their fault really, her friend had explained, it was just the way they were made, rather like they enjoyed watching cricket or playing football. But then there was so much to discuss. If, just supposing, if they were married, where would they live? Ever since she was a small child Sarah had believed that one of the main, if not the principal, reasons for getting married was that she could move furniture about all over her own house whenever the fancy took her. But now, in the real world, there were difficulties. She couldn’t leave her mother, but it wouldn’t be fair to Edward to ask him to start married life with a sick mother-in-law who took you to her own updated version of the Inquisition about the law courts every time you crossed her threshold. And then there was Edward’s future to consider. After his triumph in the Puncknowle case was he going to take up the speaking side of the law, or was he content to go on devilling for ever? Sarah had not detected any eagerness on Edward’s part for a change of direction in his career. And then she heard his footstep on the stairs. Edward appeared to have a telepathic knowledge of when her room mate had gone out to deliver some work or to take dictation elsewhere.