Death Called to the Bar
Read Death Called to the Bar Online
Authors: David Dickinson
D
AVID
D
ICKINSON
was born in Dublin. He graduated from Cambridge with a first-class honours degree
in classics and joined the BBC. After a spell in radio he transferred to television and went on to become editor of
Newsnight
and
Panorama
. In 1995 he was series editor of
Monarchy
, a three-part examination of its current state and future prospects. David lives in London.
Praise for the Lord Francis Powerscourt series
‘A kind of locked room bedroom mystery . . . Dickinson’s view of the royals is edgy and shaped by our times.’
The Poisoned Pen
‘Fine prose, high society and complex plot recommend this series.’
Library Journal
Titles in this series
(listed in order)
Goodnight Sweet Prince
Death & the Jubilee
Death of an Old Master
Death of a Chancellor
Death Called to the Bar
Death on the Nevskii Prospekt
Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the UK by Constable, an imprint
of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2006, this paperback
edition published by Robinson, an imprint of
Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2007
First US edition published by Carroll & Graf Publishers 2006,
this paperback edition, 2007
Carroll & Graf Publishers
An imprint of Avalon Publishing Group, Inc.
245 W. 17th Street, 11th Floor
New York, NY 10011-5300
www.carrollandgraf.com
Copyright © David Dickinson 2006, 2007
The right of David Dickinson to be identified as the author of this work has been identified by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any
form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library.
UK ISBN-13: 978-1-84529-129-7 (hbk)
UK ISBN-13: 978-1-84529-382-6
UK ISBN-10: 1-84529-382-7
eISBN: 978-1-78033-411-0
US ISBN-13: 978-0-78671-999-0
US ISBN-10: 0-7867-1999-0
Printed and bound in the EU
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
For Gay and Charlie
There was a tremendous crash right up against the wall. One carriage, maybe two, had turned on its side and fallen to the ground. Horses were screaming in pain as they too were
pulled down by the harness to street level. Then came the swearing. Lord Francis Powerscourt did not think it would be possible for one man’s voice to penetrate through the thick walls of
Chelsea Old Church, but it was. The words the coachman was speaking were not suitable for any morning of the week, let alone a morning of such importance in the Powerscourt family calendar. And
there was worse. A different voice, presumably that of the other coachman, rang out in the midday air in language that was if anything even riper than the cursing of the first fellow. Powerscourt
realized that he would not be able to give precise meanings to many of these words. They were new to him. He looked down at his two children, hoping they would not ask him what the words meant
afterwards. He looked round at the congregation and saw one or two of the men smiling quietly to themselves and one or two of the maiden aunts covering their ears with their hands, scandalized
expressions on their faces. The fog had claimed another victim, one more road accident to add to all the others earlier that day. All morning it had swirled round London, filling in the gaps
between the people and the buildings, enveloping them in its clammy embrace. There had been accidents like the one outside the church all over the capital. In the West End the omnibuses had given
up the unequal struggle and waited in their depots for the air to clear. On the Thames and in the docks the captains steered their boats very slowly, making frequent use of their hooters and sirens
to warn oncoming traffic of their passage. The noises echoed round the city like trumpet notes, reports and instructions to soldiers in battles fought far away.
Still the shouting went on. The canon of the church, who had at first been overwhelmed by the racket outside his walls, suddenly inserted another hymn into the service.
‘Hymn three hundred and sixty-five,’ he said in his loudest voice, sending a meaningful glance to his organist to take note of the change in plan. ‘The Old Hundredth. All
people that on earth do dwell.’ There were five verses of that, the canon thought to himself; with any luck the noise outside would have finished by the end.
‘The Lord ye know is God indeed,
Without our aid he did us make. . .’
Lord Francis Powerscourt was an investigator. He had made his reputation in Army Intelligence in India and consolidated it by solving a number of murders in England. He was a little short of six
feet tall with unruly black curls and bright blue eyes that inspected the world with detachment and irony.
Powerscourt turned round for another surreptitious inspection of the congregation. He had already conducted his own audit of those present. Anything less than fifty of his wife Lady Lucy’s
relations on parade and her family would regard the event as a catastrophic failure. Seventy-five might be regarded as a break-even point, a pretty poor show really, but not a total disgrace to the
family name. Score a century and the event could be described in future histories of Lady Lucy’s tribe as a modest success. A hundred and thirty-one, which was Powerscourt’s estimate of
the turn-out today, would be a matter for mild congratulation. A hundred and fifty, mind you, would have been better. The hymn was drawing to a close.
‘From men and from the angel host
Be praise and glory evermore.’
It was with something of a shock that Powerscourt realized as the canon was leading them back past the congregation towards the font near the entrance to the church that his numbers were wrong.
Not a hundred and thirty-one at all, but a hundred and thirty-three. He had momentarily forgotten why they had all braved the fog this February morning. For they were all there for the christening
of the two newest additions to the tribe, the twins, his twins, the latest and youngest members of the Powerscourt family. Lady Lucy had given birth before Christmas, and, as Powerscourt said to
himself, if her own children, however tiny, weren’t to be counted as members of the tribe, then who the hell was?
Just over a mile away, the fog, distributing its favours equally across various sectors of the city, had nearly made Queen’s Inn disappear. It was right on the River
Thames between Westminster and the City of London – both as rich in legal pickings over the centuries as they were now – and the water seemed to give the swirling white-grey mist an
extra depth. A determined student of architecture might have been able to discern a handsome set of eighteenth-century buildings with tall sash windows, and, presumably, grass growing in the
courtyards, though any such growth would have been hard to spot unless you were virtually on top of it.
Queen’s Inn was the smallest and youngest of London’s Inns of Court, training ground and stomping ground for the city’s barristers and High Court judges and Masters of the
Rolls. It did not have the fabulous history of the Inner and Middle Temple with Knights Templar adorning their pedigree way back in the mists of legal history. Nor did it have the splendour of the
Temple Gardens, frequently celebrated in verse, truly one of the most delightful places in London on a summer’s day with the grass and the flowers running down to the Thames. Queen’s
could almost match the austere elegance of Lincoln’s Inn’s New Square or the gardens of Gray’s Inn. It did not claim superiority over the other four Inns. It just claimed to be
slightly different. Slightly more worldly, with close links to some of the richer and grander colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. Slightly richer than the others through a complicated system of
internal finance. Slightly more likely to tolerate eccentrics, Queen’s people would say, proud of the strange dress and sometimes stranger methods of transport adopted by some of its more
flamboyant barristers.
And on this day Queen’s Inn was preparing for a feast. A feast in memory of one of its more distinguished sons, one Theophilus Grattan Whitelock, one-time bencher, or senior member, of
Queen’s, a man twice passed over for the post of Lord Chancellor, a distinguished judge who sentenced so many people to be transported to the colonies that the cynics said he should have a
ship on the route named after him. HMS
Whitelock
, direct to Botany Bay. He had been born, the man Whitelock, on this day, 28th February, so he missed a leap year birthday by a single day.
The feast he endowed in his memory took place on this day, irrespective of which day of the week the 28th happened to fall on. Whitelock had consulted three expert legal draftsmen before finalizing
the clause which stipulated that if, at any point in the future, carping clergymen or interfering bishops should prevent his feast taking place on the Sabbath, then the bequest would be cancelled
in perpetuity. So generous was the bequest and so splendid the food and wine the Inn was able to provide that the members of Queen’s Inn would have defied the Archbishop of Canterbury or the
Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, or both, if they dared to protest.
Even as early as midday the preparations were well under way. Queen’s had been blessed for many years with a Senior Steward known to all and sundry as Joseph. Few, if any, knew his
surname. Some of the younger students claimed Joseph himself had forgotten it. But he had a genius for efficient organization and over the years had developed a remarkable system of alliances and
understandings with some of London’s finest grocers and butchers and wine merchants so that he could always command the best at very modest prices. Cynics, and what community of lawyers does
not have a good supply of those, claimed that the whole edifice was based on back-handers and would, one day, collapse to general disgrace and a long prison sentence for Joseph. Or, the most
cynical would add at this point, transportation for him in memory of Theophilus Grattan Whitelock. One more for Botany Bay. Direct.
