Powerscourt now pulled out a will from inside the sheaf of documents in front of him. ‘He also left ten thousand pounds to the Queen’s Inn for the relief of poverty among the barristers and servants of this Inn and their families. A generous bequest, you might think, and one which is worth, according to the Bank of England, about three hundred thousand pounds in today’s money.’
There was a sharp look from Somerville, upset perhaps to learn that the Bank of England were ranged against him. ‘We may presume,’ Powerscourt continued, ‘that the executors made sure the formalities were followed. Thirty years ago, before your time, Mr Treasurer, there were indeed in the accounts of Queen’s Inn various payments made according to the Wallace bequest. They are described as such in the documents. But they are not there now. The Wallace legacy has been absorbed into the general accounts of Queen’s Inn. When I say the general accounts, I don’t quite mean that. The general accounts relate to the running costs, maintenance of property, provision of meals and so on and are all covered, amply covered, by the monthly payments made by the residents of chambers. But there is another account, called the Treasurer’s Account, controlled by this office. The Wallace hundreds of thousands have been diverted into there and there they remain to this day.
‘Consider this other gentleman behind me, Benjamin Rockland, a barrister rather than a judge, a bencher of this Inn rather than a Treasurer, a man famous for his abilities for the defence in capital cases and much sought after by instructing solicitors. He was famous in his day, according to the official Inn history, for his generosity towards the young. He left four thousand pounds in his will in 1785 for the maintenance and upkeep and clothing of poor students attending the Inn. He hoped to ensure that the poorer citizens were not denied the advantages he had enjoyed. Turning once more to the Bank of England reckoning, that figure would amount to two hundred thousand pounds in today’s money. You could support a number of poor students on the interest from that sum. How many Rockland students are there in the Inn at present? Not one. Thirty years ago there were a number of these young men gracing the walks and courts of this institution. Once again the monies have been diverted, not into the general accounts where they might benefit everybody, but into the Treasurer’s Account, controlled from this office.
‘And then consider this. Downstairs in your Hall you have one of the most famous and beautiful paintings in London. People come from far and wide to see The Judgement of Paris by Rubens, a glorious and sensuous account of the decision that led to the Trojan War. There is no record, unfortunately, as there might be if it happened today, of either of the two losing ladies going to the Court of Appeal. I am not concerned today with the technique or the overall impression given by the work apart from noting that the three goddesses, as everyone knows who has seen it, are wearing rather less than Catherine Cavendish was in her days as a chorus girl. Rather I am concerned with the way it was purchased twelve years ago. A plaque, as you well know, Mr Treasurer, says that it was paid for by the generosity of past and current benchers and benefactors. I do not believe that to be strictly true. The painting cost twelve thousand five hundred pounds, say fourteen thousand with commissions and taxes and so on. That was the precise total, less one hundred and forty-seven pounds, of a bequest made to the Inn a year before in the will of bencher Josiah Swanton for the relief of barristers rendered unfit for work by injury or illness. There are no records, Mr Treasurer, of any payments going to such people though the chaplain has informed me that there must be four candidates at least who are eligible for such payments today and whose lives would be transformed by them. The sick and the maimed paid for the Rubens. At least its beauty can be enjoyed by all, it has not, like the appropriation of so much other money intended for good causes, ended up in the Treasurer’s Account.
‘I could go on, Mr Treasurer, with more examples. I have dozens of them here in my papers. All tell the same story. The rich are robbing the poor. Money intended to relieve suffering, to enable poor young men to acquire an education here, has been taken from them and given to old men already wealthy beyond the dreams of most Londoners. They have no voice, the sick barristers fallen on hard times, the young men from the East End who have been denied their proper place by old men’s greed. Your greed, Mr Treasurer. Your actions, in fraudulently changing the bequests of generous people who died long ago, are a disgrace to your Inn and to your profession. No wonder the cartoonists so often portray the lawyers of London as greedy fellows only interested in enormous meals and enormous retainers and even more enormous refreshers. I can only make a rough estimate about the amount of money diverted. You, of course, as Treasurer are liable to re-election by your fellow benchers every five years. Maybe you embarked on your criminal career over twenty years ago when you first came up for re-election. A little bribe to the electors never went amiss. The only problem is that they expect a slightly larger bribe next time. Well, you were certainly able to provide it. My calculation, based on the Bank of England figures and some of your own accounts, is that each bencher, who received virtually nothing for being a bencher twenty-five years ago, now enjoys an annual income of between ten and fifteen thousand pounds. Each. For doing precisely nothing. The position is exactly like some of those late eighteenth-century sinecures that paid out thousands and thousands of pounds for doing nothing that so enraged William Pitt the Younger. The value of the principal required to produce such figures is around twenty million pounds, a sum well within the range of the stolen bequests we know of when adjusted to today’s values.’
Powerscourt paused again. The Chief Inspector was still scribbling. Somerville looked as though he would like to vault over the desk and hit him.
‘Is that all you’ve got?’ the Treasurer sneered. ‘A third rate Irish peer and a jumped-up constable from Clerkenwell?’ He banged his fist on the desk. Powerscourt looked at him, unmoved by the insult, and untouched by the threat of violence.
‘No, Mr Treasurer,’ he went on, ‘that is certainly not all we’ve got. We’ve got, you’ll be delighted to hear, a whole lot more. That last part of my report dealt with finance. It’s now time to go back to murder, to the murders of Alexander Dauntsey and Woodford Stewart. Stewart had been elected a bencher some two months before Dauntsey. The two men were very close. They had prosecuted in some of the great financial cases of their times. Dauntsey was one of the few barristers of any Inn who was rated by the sharper minds in the City of London. With his demise they lengthened the odds against a conviction in the Puncknowle fraud trial. So Dauntsey knew about money. It is my belief that he discovered what had been going on in the accounts of Queen’s Inn. There are reports of his saying to his wife that he was worried about the accounts, and looking at some figures with a junior member here and saying things weren’t right. Shortly before his death Dauntsey had a meeting with the previous Financial Steward in Fulham and asked about bursaries for poor students. He was obviously on the right track. He asked for a meeting with you just days before he died. He brought Woodford Stewart with him. I believe that on that occasion he threatened to go public with the frauds that had been going on. Whatever his weaknesses, lack of courage wasn’t one of them. Your blustering and banging of your fists wouldn’t have had any impact on Alex Dauntsey. So you killed him. Woodford Stewart was not at the feast. You killed him several days later, probably hiding the body in your private rooms above this one and taking him to Temple Church in the middle of the night. We have heard, Mr Treasurer, about the First, Second, Third and Fourth Suspects. You are the Fifth Suspect. And, I put it to you in conclusion, Mr Treasurer, the other four are innocent. You are guilty.’