What was it, Powerscourt said to himself, that so troubled Alex Dauntsey in the weeks after his election as a bencher? They should have been among the happiest of his professional life. Where was Porchester Newton? And why had he run away a second time? Was Mrs Cavendish lying? Was Dr Cavendish, the true believer, breaking one of the Commandments he must hold so dear? Was he in breach of the fifth one, Thou shalt not kill? His wife had been on the verge of infringing the sixth, Thou shalt not commit adultery, if she hadn’t already broken it. He remembered the portrait painter Nathaniel Stone on Dauntsey: ‘Hold on, he did say one thing, but I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time. It was something about very strange things going on there’ – ‘there’ being Queen’s Inn.
William Burke looked very serious when he walked into the room.
‘I think we should go to your study, Francis. We’re going to need that big desk of yours.’
And so, for over two hours, William Burke took Powerscourt through the intricacies of the finances of Queen’s Inn. There was material in his report from the wills, from the accounts stolen by Edward and Sarah and from the statements provided by the man who wanted a position in Burke’s bank. His people had typed out summaries of the main findings. There were brief chapters on what appeared to have happened to particular donations. And Burke kept checking that his friend understood what he was being told. When he rose to return to his wife and the innumerate children, Powerscourt shook him by the hand. ‘I am so grateful, William. This is tremendous.’
‘Let me know if there is anything more I can do to help,’ said Burke. ‘I am not available for the next two days but after that I should be only too pleased.’
As his brother-in-law departed Powerscourt remembered a previous occasion when Burke had accompanied him to a fateful meeting with the Private Secretary of the Prince of Wales and had made a dramatic contribution to the meeting.
‘William was a very long time, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy as he resumed his pacing in the drawing room. ‘Have you solved the mystery?’
‘I don’t think so, Lucy, but I tell you what I’m going to do. Current French military doctrine – God knows where I picked this up, probably down at the Cape – is all for the attack. The French soldier must never retreat. Forwards is the order of the day. Backwards is banned. L’audace, toujours l’audace, daring, always daring. Tomorrow morning I am going to spend with my Detective Chief Inspector friend with a brief interlude with Maxwell Kirk. Chief Inspector Beecham and I are going to play at being financiers for a while. And then, l’audace, toujours l’audace, I am going to make a preliminary report to our dearly beloved friend Barton Somerville, the Treasurer of Queen’s Inn.’
The last note from the chimes of two o’clock was echoing round Fountain Court when Powerscourt and the Chief Inspector took their seats in Somerville’s vast office. Powerscourt looked quickly at the full-length portraits of previous benchers and Treasurers on the walls and realized, to his delight, that he had detailed financial information on some of them in his papers. Jack Beecham was in a dark blue suit with a white shirt and a nondescript tie, Powerscourt in what his children referred to as the funeral suit, a very dark grey pinstripe with a pale blue shirt. Somerville radiated his usual combination of arrogance and superiority.
‘Tea should be coming in twenty minutes or so, gentlemen,’ Somerville began. ‘You said you wanted to see me, Powerscourt.’
Powerscourt smiled. ‘Yes, Mr Treasurer,’ he replied, reckoning that the formality, however ludicrous it might seem, would probably serve his purposes in the end. ‘I have come to make a preliminary report.’
‘You seem to have a great many preliminary findings,’ said Somerville, nodding in the direction of the Powerscourt papers.
‘We shall see,’ Powerscourt said. ‘It is my custom on these occasions to couch my findings in narrative form, commencing not in medias res, in the middle of things as the poet says, but at the very beginning.’
Beecham, Powerscourt could see out of the corner of his eye, was taking notes already. The engagement had scarcely begun. ‘Let me begin with the murders, Mr Treasurer. On the day of his death, the day of the Whitelock Feast, February 28th this year, Alexander Dauntsey was in his chambers here until shortly after six o’clock. He had been working on forthcoming cases. There were no reports of any visitors to his rooms though there could have been some who were not observed. Shortly after six, as I said, he came to a drinks party here in your chambers, as you know, Mr Treasurer. At the soup course of the feast he collapsed and died almost instantaneously. He had been poisoned. And the medical men believe that the poison was most likely administered here, slipped into the champagne or the sherry he was enjoying with his peers, or taken shortly before he left his own chambers to come here. Twelve days later, a Wednesday, Mr Woodford Stewart disappeared. He was not seen in his rooms after lunch. His body was found on the Monday morning, dumped with some builder’s rubble at the side of Temple Church. He had been shot twice in the chest.
‘I think I should go back now a couple of months to the time when there was a vacancy for the position of bencher in this Inn. I do not need to tell you, Mr Treasurer, that this is a democratic election with all the barristers who are members of the Inn able to vote. The election is for life, though it was not always so in the past as I understand it. There were two candidates for the position. One was Porchester Newton and the other was Alexander Dauntsey, both distinguished advocates in their own fields. Right at the end the contest degenerated somewhat. Newton’s supporters began to put it abroad that Dauntsey would be a three-day-a-week candidate, a reference to Dauntsey’s unfortunate affliction which caused him to be superb in court one day and then, for no apparent reason, hopeless the next. I think I would have been pretty cross about that if I had been Dauntsey. But his supporters’ club hit back, alleging that Newton was not a gentleman. They produced a rather vicious cartoon which showed Burton performing various menial tasks relating to his upbringing as the son of a grocer and the grandson of a junior parlourmaid. The ballot is secret but I believe Dauntsey won the contest by twenty-two votes, a fair margin.’
‘Where did you get that information from, Powerscourt?’ said Somerville crossly.
‘I’m afraid I cannot tell you my sources at present, Mr Treasurer, I feel it would be inappropriate.’
There was a loud grunt from Somerville. Powerscourt did not wish to reveal that it was the Head Porter who had told him.
‘So Porchester Newton had reason to hate Dauntsey. He vanished for a while after the election. He was here at the time of the feast, then he vanished and came back and he has now disappeared again.’
Powerscourt paused while the tea was brought in, the gorgon herself carrying the tray and placing it carefully on the left of Somerville’s desk. Powerscourt wondered if she had checked her records recently. He had been horrified to learn from Edward, when he was asked what he put in the three dummy files, that they had all been filled with back copies of the racing newspapers.
‘You will recall, Mr Treasurer,’ Powerscourt went on, taking a preliminary sip of his tea, ‘Shakespeare’s Macbeth where there are dramatic instructions about the arrival of the First Murderer, Second Murderer and so on. I propose to adapt the device to my own humbler narrative and label Porchester Newton the First Suspect. He certainly had the motive and I do not believe we can rule him out at this stage.