‘And what did this London reporter say?’ Anne Herbert had read one of these accounts in a great national daily and been appalled. She hoped that her Patrick was not going to be contaminated by these strangers who could arrive in a town and tell packs of lies about the inhabitants, secure in the knowledge that they would shortly be on the next train back to London.
‘He said, Anne,’ Patrick looked into those green eyes again with great delight, ‘that this Lord Powerscourt is an investigator. He is famous for solving murders and mysteries of every description! How about that!?’
‘Well, he may well be an investigator, Patrick. He may equally well be a friend of the family as everybody says. You mustn’t jump to conclusions.’
‘Maybe not,’ said the editor of the Grafton Mercury. ‘But what if he was? What has he come to investigate? Death Comes to the Cathedral? The Curse of Compton Minster?’
Anne Herbert had decided long ago that journalists like her friend fell in love with their headlines rather more than they did with the truth.
‘That’s all very interesting, Patrick,’ she said, looking at him in rather the same way she looked at her eldest when he came up with some outlandish piece of nonsense. ‘I think you’d better have another biscuit.’
The subject of Patrick Butler’s speculation let himself quietly out of the side door of Fairfield Park. It was raining heavily again, large puddles threatening to meet and cover the little road with water. In the distance a lone horseman leant forward in his saddle, trotting peacefully towards his destination. Lord Francis Powerscourt was going to pay his respects and ask his questions of Dr William Blackstaff, friend of John Eustace, and the last man to see him alive.
He wondered about the lies and the liars he had known as he splashed his way towards the doctor’s house. Some people were just very bad at lying. He suspected that the butler Andrew McKenna was one of those. A furtive air came over him any time his late master’s death was mentioned. Others simply convinced themselves that the lie was true, that the falsehoods they were telling had actually happened. And Powerscourt was certain as he entered the drive of Dr Blackstaff’s house that it was seldom the words that gave the liars away. Rather it was the gestures, the lack of eye contact, the slight shifting in the chair, the sudden combing of the hair. He remembered one spectacularly successful liar and fraudster in India whose only fault was that the fingers of his left hand would strum very slowly on his knee when he began to dissemble. The greater the lie, the faster the strumming became.
A servant showed him into the doctor’s drawing room at the back of the house. Curtained windows led out to where the Blackstaff garden must have been. There were three sofas and a couple of old armchairs on either side of a great fire.
‘Lord Powerscourt, good to see you again.’ The two men had met briefly at the reception after Eustace’s burial. ‘How can I help?’ The doctor was charm personified, clad for the day in a suit of dark green tweed.
He thinks I’ve come about my health, Powerscourt suddenly realized, a hacking cough perhaps, influenza brought on by the winter rains of Compton.
‘Dr Blackstaff, I owe you an apology. I am afraid I am operating under false pretences.’ Powerscourt sank into a chair opposite the doctor by the fire. ‘I have been described as a family friend, and it was under those auspices that we met the other day.’
Dr Blackstaff wondered what was coming. Was Powerscourt another long-lost relation come to claim his inheritance? Was he a lawyer come to arbitrate about some problem concerning the will?
‘I am a private investigator, Dr Blackstaff. I have been hired by Mrs Augusta Cockburn to investigate the circumstances surrounding her brother’s death.’
Dr Blackstaff looked at Powerscourt for about fifteen seconds. Then he burst out laughing. ‘That bloody woman,’ he said, ‘she’ll be the death of us all. I shouldn’t be at all surprised if she was having us all watched twenty-four hours a day.’ He stopped suddenly and looked closely at Powerscourt. ‘You’re not having me watched twenty-four hours a day, are you, Lord Powerscourt?’
Powerscourt laughed. ‘Certainly not,’ he said. But he knew, after that meeting in Drake’s the solicitors, he knew even better than the doctor that there were no depths to which Augusta Cockburn would not stoop to conquer her adversaries and retire from the field with one million pounds sterling.
‘Perhaps the best thing, Dr Blackstaff, if you could bear it, would be if you could tell me the whole story once again. I apologize for asking you. I know how close you were to John Eustace and that further narration of his last hours will not be easy.’
So the doctor told his story once more; the late-night visit of his friend; John Eustace’s complaints of feeling unwell; his examination of his patient and his decision to keep him overnight in his own house; his suspicions, already formed, that Eustace was suffering from a heart condition; his death, so sudden and so tragic the following morning. Sometimes Dr Blackstaff looked at Powerscourt. Sometimes he looked into the fire.
Powerscourt found his eyes wandering to the remarkable collection of medical prints and portraits from the past. To the left of the fireplace four men were holding down a fifth. In the centre of the print a man in a long coat was advancing towards the captive with a vicious pair of forceps in his hand. A fifth man was holding the victim’s mouth open. Just a routine operation in the life of an eighteenth-century dentist, though Powerscourt suspected the bills must have been very high after all the assistants had been paid off.
‘Thank you, doctor,’ said Powerscourt when the narrative was complete. ‘I’m sure it must be painful, even for a medical man like yourself, to have to recall all the details once more.’ Mind you, he said to himself, he’s had plenty of practice already. Mrs Cockburn, the coroner – and the Dean, Powerscourt remembered, had told him he’d had a long conversation with Blackstaff about John Eustace’s last hours. ‘I hope you won’t mind,’ he said, ‘if I ask you a few questions?’
‘Not at all,’ said Dr Blackstaff.
Powerscourt felt that he needed some unorthodox bowling at this point. Any obvious question about the central points would be easily parried. He needed a googly the ball that spins in the opposite direction to the one expected. Or an inswinging yorker, the ball of very full length that shoots under the bat and spreadeagles the batsman’s wicket.
‘Would you say that you were in any financial difficulties at present, Dr Blackstaff?’ said Powerscourt, his eyes wandering towards an oil painting above the fireplace.
‘Financial difficulties?’ said Dr Blackstaff, turning slightly red. ‘No. I have no worries about money. Why do you ask?’
‘Forgive me, doctor. Let me tell you in confidence that there is a possible bequest to you in John Eustace’s will of fifty thousand pounds. In my profession, we are accustomed to looking for the dark side of the moon, as it were. If you were my current employer, you would look for the dark side of Satan himself. Money is often a motive for murder.’