‘No, Papa! No!’
‘Very good then,’ said their father, rising to his feet. He thought the children could have carried on shouting all night. ‘Off you go now. I’ll come and see you later.’
‘I hope that may reassure them a bit,’ he said, readjusting his waistcoat and smiling at Lady Lucy. Johnny Fitzgerald was looking closely at a wine label on the sofa. Powerscourt had told them both about the strange goings-on in Compton just after he arrived back in London. Now he wanted to take their advice.
‘Lucy Johnny,’ he began, ‘what do you think I should do about Augusta Cockburn? Should I tell her that I think her suspicions were justified, that there was something strange about her brother’s death?’
‘It’s a contradiction in terms,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, still inspecting the writing on his bottle. ‘Couvent des Jacobins, it says here. I know my French isn’t world class but couvent says convent, nunnery to me, lots of ladies in black habits and wimples praying all day and all night, that sort of thing. Jacobins says French revolutionaries to me, violent and unstable fellows, their brains addled with cheap red wine and garlic, endlessly denouncing their colleagues and sending them off to the bloody guillotine. What are they doing on the same bottle, Francis? If the nuns had their way they wouldn’t have let any Jacobins inside the nunnery, if the Jacobins had got in there wouldn’t have been any nuns left alive. I don’t understand.’
Lady Lucy smiled as she handed him the corkscrew. ‘Maybe you can tell from the taste, Johnny. As to Mrs Cockburn, Francis, I think you are morally obliged to pass on your suspicions. I’m not sure but I think that must be the right thing to do.’
‘You haven’t met the woman, Lucy. Please God you can get through the next few months without that privilege. Augusta Cockburn is a monster.’
Johnny Fitzgerald now had a dreamy look on his face. ‘I think the Jacobins must have won out against the nuns,’ he said. ‘It’s sort of spicy, raring to go. Just the thing to sample before you charged a few barricades. I don’t think you have to do anything at all about the Cockburn connection, Francis. Let it wait. Any number of things could happen in the next couple of weeks. You haven’t been engaged on the case for very long. And,’ he went on cheerfully ‘you haven’t had me around to help you. Things are about to look up.’ And with that he took another large mouthful of his Jacobin Couvent.
‘Think of it this way,’ said Powerscourt, still wrestling with his conscience. ‘What if the brother did commit suicide? I still think that’s the most likely explanation. Or, much more unlikely, what if he was murdered, though I can’t for the life of me work out how that might have been done. If it was murder, there may be more murders. And if it was suicide and it was your brother wouldn’t you want to know?’
‘Francis,’ said Lucy, trying to ease her husband’s way, ‘you don’t actually know any more than this Mrs Cockburn woman. She had her suspicions. You have yours. But there’s nothing more than that, is there? You haven’t got any evidence at all. So why not tell her that you are continuing with your investigations and leave it at that?’
Powerscourt didn’t look happy with that. Johnny Fitzgerald was looking at the fire through the red in his glass. ‘I’m ready for anything, Francis,’ he said. ‘One or two more glasses of this stuff and I’ll be fit to storm the Bastille single-handed. I do wonder, mind you, if it mightn’t be necessary to sample another bottle of this revolutionary brew. It mightn’t taste quite as uplifting as this one. You do have some more of this stuff, don’t you, Francis?’
‘Lots more,’ said Powerscourt, grinning at his friend. ‘But look here, Johnny. There’s the business with the wills. Oliver Drake implied quite strongly at the last meeting that there was something fishy about the Cockburn will that left her all the money. It was as if he didn’t quite believe in it.’
‘When was it dated?’ asked Johnny Fitzgerald. ‘How long before he died?’
‘It must have been about six or seven months before his death, when he was staying with Mrs Cockburn the sister up in London,’ said Powerscourt. ‘But suppose he wasn’t actually staying with Mrs Cockburn at all. Suppose it happened like this. Here’s Mrs Cockburn, always hard up, always moving house all the time to cheaper property, as one of the servants in Fairfield Park told me so happily. She decides to forge a will for her brother, which leaves most of the money to herself. Even if there is another will she can still use the fake one to contest it. End of money problems for Mrs Cockburn.’
‘You’re not suggesting, are you, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy, looking slightly shocked, ‘that Mrs Cockburn was the murderer, or that she organized some hired killers to murder her brother?’
‘I don’t think I’d rule it out,’ said Powerscourt after a pause for thought.
‘But,’ Lady Lucy went on, ‘there’s a flaw in your argument. If she was the murderer, why did she ask you to investigate the business?’
‘Cover, Lucy, it could just be cover. What better proof of your innocence could you offer than hiring an investigator to look into a murder you have committed yourself? It’s the most disarming thing you could do, virtually guaranteed to make everybody believe automatically in your own innocence.’
‘Just because you don’t like the woman,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘doesn’t mean that you have to wish she’s going to end up on the gallows.’
‘Let me just say one last word on the subject,’ said Powerscourt with a smile. ‘You two have not actually met this virago in the flesh. You have not faced her insults and her rudeness. If you ask me, hanging is far too good for her.’
6
Blissfully unaware that he had recently been described as a most unsuitable young man, Patrick Butler sat looking at a set of figures in his office in Compton. To call it an office was to pay it a great compliment, for it was really much more like an attic than a place of business. The command post of the Grafton Mercury was on the top floor of an old building in a side street some distance from the Cathedral Close. To gain admittance visitors had to climb a rickety set of stairs that creaked out the details of every new arrival. Inside there was just enough room for the three people who worked there, and then only one could stand fully upright. There was a large map of the county on one wall and back copies of the newspaper piled up against the others. A small and rather dirty skylight admitted an inadequate amount of natural light. Patrick felt sure that the newspaper editors in the great cities of Britain must have enormous offices with well-tended fires and handsome paintings lining their walls. But he knew that he would never be as proud of any future office he might inhabit as he was of this tiny garret. This was his first command.
The production of newspapers is a complicated business requiring considerable powers of organization and discipline. Every week Patrick and his colleagues displayed those virtues to the full. In their everyday lives, however, they did not reveal any sign of such powers. Their little office was a shambles. There were scraps of paper, empty bottles, cigarette butts, opened books overdue at the local library, old bills lying all over the floor. The desks, as they referred to the rough trestle tables where they wrote their stories, were virtually invisible. Piles of paper, half-finished articles, draft copies of advertisements, old editions of the national newspapers were scattered about in cheerful abandon. Every now and then Patrick and his colleagues would rouse themselves to action. The floors would be swept, the tables cleared of their accumulated detritus. For days afterwards one or other of them would complain that a piece of paper full of vital information had been lost, or that the full list of all those persons attending the Rotary Club luncheon could not be found. Patrick was a great believer in printing lists of persons attending functions, however humble. He believed that human vanity is always flattered when a person sees his or her name in print. Word of this stupendous fact travels fast round the little community. The person or persons are duty bound to purchase a copy of the Grafton Mercury to see their name in print. Maybe even two copies, as this is such an important edition.