Death Called to the Bar (20 page)

‘Well done, Edward, that was tremendous,’ said Sarah, clapping furiously. ‘The Philistines have been routed.’

‘I just think,’ said Edward, panting slightly from his exertions, ‘that I’ll put some distance between us in case those fellows turn around and come after us. I
don’t think they will, and we’re faster than they are in any case, but I’d feel happier all the same.’

Sarah gazed at her young man with new respect. Edward the Silent had turned into Edward the Conqueror.

‘And there’s another thing,’ said Powerscourt, who was still trying to decide if Jeremiah Puncknowle was friend or foe, ‘I have to go to these
solicitors in the next few days about this missing Maxfield person. The one Dauntsey left twenty thousand pounds to in his will.’ Powerscourt had told Lady Lucy and Johnny about the missing
Maxfield before.
‘
The police haven’t found any trace of him
,
nothing at all. Chief Inspector Beecham thinks he’s probably dead. But they’ve checked the records
at Somerset House, and there’s no record of him there either. He seems to have disappeared.’

‘Perhaps he’s gone abroad,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Do you think Alex Dauntsey gave him the money to buy him out of trouble?’

‘God knows,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Just as easy to say he was paying off a blackmailer.’

‘What happens if he’s locked up?’ said Johnny Fitzgerald cheerfully. ‘Debtors’ prison, lunatic asylum, that sort of place. Have the police checked those
out?’

‘They have, Johnny,’ said Powerscourt with a sigh, ‘but what happens if he’s joined up to a different form of institution altogether? Suppose some earlier Maxfield has
died and left our Maxfield his title. He’s not Maxfield any more, he’s Lord Kilkenny or something like that. Our Maxfield has now vanished clean away.’

‘Wouldn’t somebody remember?’ asked Lady Lucy.

‘Not necessarily,’ said Powerscourt with a grin. ‘I look forward to seeing the Chief Inspector’s face when I ask him to check this one out. He may be very intelligent,
our Jack Beecham, but like all policemen he’s taken a very heavy dose of loyalty to all the institutions of the state he’s called to protect.’

Twenty minutes later Edward and Sarah had escaped from the buildings of Oxford altogether. They had passed Magdalen with its tower and its deer park, the punt still flying
along at a rapid pace as Edward made sure that the Oxford-enders weren’t following them. Now a kind of open country with rather damp-looking fields and suspicious cows was around them. Edward
steered the punt carefully into the shade of a weeping willow on the bank and clambered forward to sit opposite Sarah in the main section of the boat.

‘Are you hungry, Edward?’ asked Sarah, checking that her picnic basket was still there, feeling quite important as the person in charge of the catering.

‘Starving,’ said Edward happily and he proceeded to devour seven sandwiches in rapid succession, favouring the ham and the tomato over the egg. Sarah, not used to living with young
males, was astonished at the amount he put away. When the demolition of the sandwiches had slowed down, she decided to ask her questions. It was so peaceful out here, nobody could mind being asked
a few questions about themselves.

‘Edward,’ she began hesitantly.

‘Sarah,’ said Edward, polishing an apple on the sleeve of his shirt.

‘Can I ask you a great favour?’ the girl went on.

‘You ask whatever you like, Sarah,’ replied Edward, inspecting his freshly polished apple as if it were a diamond of some sort.

‘It’s just I promised when I said we were coming to Oxford today.’

Edward suspected at once that this must have something to do with Sarah’s mother. He waited. Sarah was looking rather helplessly into the water. It was clear here and you could see right
to the bottom.

‘Will you come and meet my mother, Edward? She’s very keen to meet you.’

Edward began eating his apple. ‘If you want me to come and meet your mother, of course I will. What sort of person is your mother?’

Sarah wondered if she could buy time by not explaining the likely turn of events to Edward. But she thought that wouldn’t be fair.

‘She’s curious, my mother, Edward, very curious. And I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but she’s quite ill. The doctors think she may have only a couple of years to
live. And she’s in quite a lot of pain. As if,’ a bitter note crept into Sarah’s voice at this point, ‘it wasn’t bad enough my father having that stroke and dying two
years ago. Two years and four months today.’

Edward wondered if he should put an arm round her for comfort.

‘My poor Sarah,’ he said, laying off his demolition of the apple for the moment, ‘I thought from what you said that your mother wasn’t very well, but I didn’t know
about your father. I’m so sorry. Were you close to him?’

Sarah managed a little smile. ‘I was the last child, Edward, I was a girl, I was quick when I was little, very quick. I adored him. And I knew he adored me. I suspect, although he would
never have said so, that I was his favourite.’

‘What did he die of? He can’t have been very old.’

‘He had a stroke and never recovered. The doctors couldn’t do anything about it. He’d been a teacher in the primary school up the road for years and years. It was so sweet, the
teachers were so fond of him that they brought the older children to his funeral. All these lovely little children singing those sad hymns, it was so moving.’

Sarah suddenly realized that far from teasing out of Edward the facts of his parentage, she had merely given him her own. But she felt she hadn’t given him proper warning of his likely
reception.

‘My mother, Edward,’ Sarah hesitated. Two enormous cows had plodded over to the side of the river and were inspecting them both.

‘Are these cows bothering you?’ said Edward suddenly, ‘We could move on if you like.’

Sarah shook her head. ‘Cows don’t bother me,’ she said. ‘Anyway my mother will want to ask you a whole lot of questions about yourself and your parents and where you went
to school and what you want to become later on.’

‘Will she indeed?’ said Edward. Sarah noticed he was growing rather tense. ‘Will you be there all the time, Sarah? You won’t go off to bake some scones or make the tea or
something and leave me at your mother’s mercy?’

‘Not if you don’t want me to, Edward. Do you think you will be able to cope?’

‘Do you mean will I be able to speak, Sarah? God knows. I got so worried about ordering those tickets at Paddington this morning, I’d been practising for days. I’ll get worried
about meeting your mother too.’

‘What will you say about your parents, Edward?’ Sarah had been dying to ask this question herself for a long time now. She hoped Edward wouldn’t mind, not here on the River
Cherwell with a couple of cows for company and the spires of Oxford dreaming behind them.

There was a pause. Sarah didn’t know if Edward had been struck dumb at the prospect of her mother or if he didn’t know what to say. He flung the core of his apple angrily into the
field and picked out another one.

‘Sorry about that,’ he said, moodily. Sarah kept silent. She felt sure that whatever Edward’s answer was going to be, assuming one ever came, it would tell her a lot about the
nature of his character and, perhaps, about his problems with speaking.

Edward drew his knees up to his chin and wrapped his arms around his legs. Sarah wondered if he was going to meditate.

‘My p-p-parents are dead,’ he said finally. ‘They were killed in an accident along with my elder sister and my little b-b-brother.’ There was no attempt to keep the anger
out of his voice.

‘How did it happen, Edward?’ said Sarah. ‘I’m so sorry, it’s so terrible losing parents.’ So very terrible, she realized, that even the thought of it had
brought on the stammer which Edward struggled so hard to keep to at bay.

‘Train crash,’ he said. ‘We were all going to Bristol on a train. There was something wrong with the points. The carriages came off the line at about fifty miles an hour and
rolled down a slope. I was buried beneath my parents and the remains of the carriage for hours. When the police pulled everyone out of the rubble I was unconscious beneath them. They say I
didn’t speak for a week after that.’

‘My God,’ said Sarah, almost wishing she hadn’t been told this ghastly news. Perhaps she should ask her mother not to speak to Edward about his parents at all. ‘How
frightful, Edward, how absolutely frightful. Your poor family, just wiped out in front of you.’

Edward began munching on his apple. The cows wandered off to another part of their field. A couple of rowing boats, going quite fast, sped past them on their return journey to Oxford.

‘So where do you live now, Edward?’ Sarah had a vision of Edward living on his own in some squalid boarding house where the food was terrible and he never tidied his room.

‘I live with my grandparents,’ he said with a smile. ‘They’re very good to me. Maybe you should come and meet them, Sarah. I’m sure they’d love to see
you.’ Even in his sixties Edward knew his grandfather had an eye for a pretty girl. Sarah would enchant him. The thought seemed to cheer him up.

‘Right,’ he said, ‘we’d better think about getting back or we won’t have any time to look at Oxford at all.’

Lord Francis Powerscourt was trying to review his knowledge of the Queen’s Inn investigation as his train carried him down to Calne and the beautiful Mrs Dauntsey. Murder
Number One, her husband, poisoned at a feast, the poison probably administered at a drinks party in the rooms of the Treasurer of the Inn, the unpleasant Barton Somerville. Murder Number Two,
Woodford Stewart, shot twice in the chest. Connections between the two? Both were retained for the prosecution in what would be one of the great fraud trials of the decade, that of Jeremiah
Puncknowle and his associates. And both were benchers of their Inn of Court, though why that should make them liable to sudden and violent death Powerscourt didn’t know. He did know that
Woodford Stewart had been elected two months before Dauntsey so they must have been the most junior members of the Inn’s governing body. And what of the missing Maxfield? Had he resurfaced to
murder Dauntsey for his twenty thousand pounds? Then there was Porchester Newton, Dauntsey’s great rival in the election to the bench. He had disappeared shortly after Dauntsey’s death
but was due to return the following week.

Had he, perhaps, returned in time to shoot Woodford Stewart and dump his body by the Temple Church? Powerscourt could think of lots of reasons why somebody might want to kill Dauntsey and
Stewart individually. It was the connection that worried him, assuming the two deaths were linked. Surely it had to be professional, he said to himself, as the train rattled through a tunnel. He
still didn’t know what to say to Mrs Dauntsey, how to bring up the very delicate subject he was travelling to Calne to raise.

As his cab rattled past the grey stone walls of the great house, Powerscourt remembered the covered furniture, the sofas under wraps, the floors covered with rough matting, the vast expanse of
the great house that most people never saw, a forbidden kingdom for the dust and the shadows and the ghosts of Dauntseys past.

She was waiting for him, Elizabeth Dauntsey, still dressed in black that showed off her creamy skin. She smiled as she offered her hand to him.

‘Lord Powerscourt, how very pleasant to see you again. I trust you had a pleasant journey? Would you care for some tea, perhaps?’

‘A little later for the tea would be most agreeable, Mrs Dauntsey. My journey was fine. Your park is looking very well with all these early flowers.’

‘I think it likes the spring, our park. It always looks good about now. But come, Lord Powerscourt, before you disclose your business, I have something to tell you. I don’t know if
it is important or not but you did ask in your letter if I could think of anything unusual Alex might have said in the month or so before he died.’

Powerscourt nodded gravely. ‘Have you thought of something, Mrs Dauntsey?’

She looked down at her hands briefly. ‘There was something, I hope it’s not too trivial. It must have been in the weeks after he was elected a bencher, you see, and there was quite a
lot that was new to him about all that.’

She paused and looked closely at Powerscourt as if he could help her. He gave her what he hoped was an encouraging smile.

‘He said it more than once, I’m certain of that, Lord Powerscourt. He said he was very worried about the accounts.’

‘Whose accounts, Mrs Dauntsey? Your own personal accounts? The estate accounts perhaps? Some extra expenditure needed for improvement, maybe? His legal accounts? Or the Inn accounts, which
I suppose he now had access to after his election?’

‘What a lot of accounts you can rattle off at a moment’s notice Lord Powerscourt! Do you think it’s because you’re a man?’

Powerscourt smiled. ‘I think it’s because of my brother-in-law. He’s a mighty financier in the City of London. When I called on him the other day he was surrounded by records
of income and expenditure and ledgers and an enormous volume called the Book of Numbers which contained the secrets of all the other accounts.’

Now it was Mrs Dauntsey’s turn to smile. ‘It must be very useful having a brother-in-law who’s good with money, Lord Powerscourt. Nearly as good as, maybe better than having
one who’s a doctor. You don’t have one who’s a medical man, do you?’

Powerscourt did a lightning audit of Lucy’s vast tribe of relations. Not one of them, he realized, had entered the medical profession.

‘No doctors,’ he said, ‘one or two naval men, plenty of soldiers, probably enough to form a small regiment. But to return to your husband, Mrs Dauntsey, do you have an idea in
your mind of which kind of account he was talking about?’

‘I’ve thought about that a lot,’ she said, ‘particularly as you were coming to see me today. I don’t think it was our personal accounts and I don’t think it
was to do with the accounts of his chambers. That clerk they had ran those as if it was the Bank of England. That leaves us with the estate and Queen’s Inn. I’m honestly not sure which
one it would have been, I’m afraid. Alex kept the estate accounts very close to his chest.’