Death Called to the Bar (29 page)

‘Mrs Cavendish,’ he began, ‘how kind of you to call.’ The eyes, which he had originally thought to be cheeky, had turned cautious as Mrs Cavendish took a lightning
appraisal of the room and its furnishings.

‘Nice place you’ve got here, Lord Powerscourt,’ she replied.

‘I’m afraid I want to ask you some questions about Mr Dauntsey, Mrs Cavendish.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I didn’t think you’d asked me here to talk about the political situation in the Balkans.’

Powerscourt smiled. ‘How long ago did you meet him, Mrs Cavendish?’

‘Mr Dauntsey? I met him about nine weeks ago. It was in my husband’s waiting room. He was running very late that day, like the doctors often do, and Alex, Mr Dauntsey I mean, was the
last patient waiting to go in. I was there waiting for Dr C to come out as we were already late for a reception. We just got talking, the way you do.’

Mrs Cavendish looked rather defiant as she said this.

‘And things just went on from there, Mrs Cavendish, regular meetings, that sort of thing?’

‘I think he was the most charming man I’ve ever met, Lord Powerscourt. He used to buy me lunch, lovely lunches, they were, and always with lovely wines. He had a wonderful nose for a
wine and a great love for the names, Château La Tour Blanche, that’s a Sauterne, Lord Powerscourt, Château Fleur Cardinale, Chambolle Mussigny, Les Amoureuses, Chassagne
Montrachet.’

Powerscourt was very impressed that she did not pronounce either of the two t’s in Montrachet. Johnny Fitzgerald had been heard describing people who did as little better than Philistines.
Powerscourt found himself wondering if Johnny Fitzgerald might replace the late Alex Dauntsey in Mrs Cavendish’s affections with their shared love of fine vintages. But however hard he tried
he couldn’t see Mrs Cavendish in enormous boots, wrapped up to the chin, waiting before dawn for a flight of rare birds over the Suffolk marshes.

Lunch in expensive restaurants with expensive wine lists was one thing, Powerscourt said to himself, weekends away in riverside hotels something rather different.

‘Would I be right in saying, Mrs Cavendish, that on the weekend of the feast, you and Mr Dauntsey were planning to go away together?’

Catherine Cavendish looked down at the Powerscourt carpet. ‘I’m going to be frank with you, Lord Powerscourt, and I’ll thank you to keep what I’m going to say to
yourself.’ She paused for a moment. ‘There’s people out there,’ she made a vague nod towards the window as if referring to the population of Manchester Square and the wider
purlieus of Marylebone, ‘who will say that I married Dr C for his money. Well, that’s as maybe. He’s always been very kind to me. I have no complaints. But there’s more to
marriage than kindness, Lord Powerscourt, as I’m sure you know. Any girl who heard the sob stories of the sad husbands who used to buy time to talk with the chorus girls could tell you that.
Think of what it says in the Good Book. Man and woman created he them, Lord Powerscourt, man and woman. I’ve always said there was more going on in that Garden of Eden than eating apples, if
you follow me. Dr C, well, poor soul, he wasn’t up to any of that man and woman created he them business, not up to it at all, I can tell you. It’s because of his illness –
he’s not got very long to live, you know. Alex was, if you follow me, Lord Powerscourt. So, yes, I was going away with him. We were going to a flat that belonged to a friend of his after that
feast and going off to Moulsford the next day. That’s on the Thames up towards Oxford. I was really looking forward it. You can miss things for too long, know what I mean, Lord P?’

‘Of course,’ said Powerscourt, wondering how to reach the more delicate ground yet. ‘Did you talk about children at all, Mrs Cavendish?’

‘What about them, Lord P? I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I’m quite sure you do,’ said Powerscourt, remembering suddenly that nobody had called him Lord P since the lady who came to make his bed at Cambridge. ‘Let me be blunt,
Mrs Cavendish, did you discuss what might happen if you became pregnant?’

Catherine Cavendish tossed her head back and roared with laughter. ‘Is there anything you don’t want to know, Lord P? You’re the curiousest man I’ve ever met. Quite what
any of this has to do with Alex ended up crocked in a bowl of beetroot I don’t know. Yes, we did talk about children once. I said I couldn’t stand the little buggers, pardon my French,
Lord P, but they’ve always seemed to me to be an unimaginable amount of work for very little return. It’s as if the whole chorus line dances its heart out for one man in the audience
and he doesn’t even bother to clap. Alex told me he’d been trying to have children with his wife for years and failed so he thought he couldn’t have any anyway. Not that that
would have got in the way of the man and woman created he them business, I can tell you that for nothing, Lord P.’

‘Forgive me for sounding curious, Mrs Cavendish, did Mr Dauntsey ever ask you what you would do if you became pregnant?’

Catherine Cavendish looked at him as if he came from another planet. ‘You do ask the strangest things, Lord P. Anyone might think you’re one of those perverted blokes who spy on
other people from behind a curtain. He did ask me once, as a matter of fact. I said I’d give it up for adoption, that’s what I’d do. I’ve known girls in chorus lines get in
the family way, happens all the time. Lots of them open the oven door before the bun is ready and throw it out, if you follow me. Well, I’ve known girls, perfectly healthy before, ending up
with insides like rows of washing lines after that. Not me, Lord P.’

‘I’ve nearly finished, Mrs Cavendish,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Did Mr Dauntsey ever mention his wife?’

The word wife seemed to trigger some semi-automatic reaction in Catherine Cavendish. Her earlier openness disappeared. She composed her face until it was almost a mask. She blinked rapidly.

‘No, he didn’t, apart from failing to have the children as I said before.’

Powerscourt was certain she was lying. For a fraction of a second he considered challenging her. Then he thought better of it.

‘In the weeks before he died, Mrs Cavendish, did Mr Dauntsey say anything to you about being worried, about any problems he might have had?’

‘Not to me, he didn’t, Lord P, he was always cheerful with me. And I know he was looking forward to our little weekend away.’

‘On the day of the feast, Mrs Cavendish, did you see Mr Dauntsey at all?’

‘No, I was going to meet him later,’ said Mrs Cavendish.

‘You didn’t go round to his chambers in the late afternoon by any chance?’

‘I’ve told you,’ Catherine Cavendish had turned rather red, ‘I was going to see him later.’ Powerscourt thought she was lying, but that if she was, she would stick
to her story through thick and thin.

Most, if not all, men, Powerscourt felt sure, would have looked forward to a weekend away with Catherine Cavendish. He wondered if they might find it rather exhausting. But most of all, as she
departed back to Chelsea, he wondered why she had lied to him. And what had Alex Dauntsey said, or not said, to Catherine Cavendish about his wife? Most men in the circumstances, Powerscourt felt,
would have mentioned the existence of a spouse. They might have blackened her name with tales of not being understood, of wives permanently suffering from headaches, wives misbehaving in any number
of ways. Such confessions, after all, were how the men justified their infidelity to themselves. But for the man to say nothing at all, which was what Catherine Cavendish implied, must be unusual.
And surely, in those circumstances, Powerscourt thought, the mistress figure would herself inquire about the existence and disposition of a wife.

Then a fresh thought struck him with such force that he was out of his chair and pacing up and down the room. Suppose Alex Dauntsey had told Catherine Cavendish that he was going to leave his
wife. Suppose they planned to time his departure to take place after the rather different and more permanent departure of Dr Cavendish. Catherine, as it were, would be lining up the next husband
even before the first one was in his grave. Well, it had happened before and would, no doubt, happen again. So far, so good, Powerscourt said to himself. But suppose Catherine discovered that
Dauntsey was not going to leave his wife. Naughty weekends in riverside hotels, whole evenings of man and woman created he them, supposedly undertaken with one purpose in view, that Dauntsey should
take her if not to the altar, at least to the registry office, would be in vain. She would be giving away her assets for nothing at all, as it were. And suppose she decides to take the ultimate
revenge. She takes some poison from her husband’s medicine chest. The one flaw in his theory was how she delivered the fatal dose. The answer would, no doubt, present itself. But for the
moment Powerscourt was certain that Catherine Cavendish might have as valid a motive for murdering Alexander Dauntsey as anybody else, if not more. During most investigations, Powerscourt said
ruefully to himself, the number of suspects decreases as inquiries go on. But in this case, the number of suspects was growing, and he had the feeling that it hadn’t stopped growing yet.

Mrs Henderson had finally managed to get Edward entirely on his own. This feat, which Edward had asked Sarah to prevent before his first visit to the Henderson household, had
been accomplished by the simple ploy of throwing away the milk and the tea. Sarah, when asked to pop down to the shops for replacements, thought her mother must have been consuming tea at an
incredibly rapid rate, but had no idea of the deception, or of what was planned in her absence. Edward, his earlier anxieties allayed by the satisfactory nature of his previous visit, had no idea
what was coming either. But for Mrs Henderson, this was a duty she owed both to herself and, as she reminded herself sternly, to Sarah’s father. Her visit to old Dr Carr that morning had been
far worse than she had feared. She, Mrs Henderson, had thought her illness was not getting any worse. True, she found it more difficult to climb the stairs and she now had to lean more heavily on
Sarah than she had before. True, even without ascending to the upper floor, she often felt very short of breath. Sometimes even sitting by the fire and reading one of the magazines Sarah bought for
her, the quick wheezy breaths told her something was wrong. The doctor had examined her carefully, not speaking as he did so. When he had finished, he put down his instruments and sat down opposite
Mrs Henderson. Dr Carr took one of her hands in his and inspected it carefully, as if the lines on the back might help him to foretell her future. Looking at his sad face, she knew things were bad.
That was the same expression the doctor had when he told them her husband had not long to live. Now he told her, in the gentlest voice he could, that the illness was progressing faster than he had
thought it would. Things seemed to be deteriorating more quickly than he would like. Of course, the process might go into reverse, everything might be arrested and her position stabilized. Part of
Mrs Henderson did not want to ask the obvious question at this point. Had she been single, or a widow, she told herself later, she would have walked out without the inquiry.

‘How long do you think I have, doctor?’ she asked in a very subdued voice.

‘I could not say, Mrs Henderson,’ said Dr Carr, still holding her hand. ‘I can only guess. When you saw me before, I said two or three years, probably. If things continue as
they are, I should have to change the figure. Nine months? Twelve months? I could be wrong.’

Mrs Henderson felt, perfectly rationally, that nobody had ever taken away a whole year of her life before, and that it should take more than only fifteen minutes in a doctor’s surgery to
do it. As she hobbled slowly and painfully out of the surgery, less than a hundred yards from her house, Dr Carr’s next patient had to wait some time before being admitted. The doctor was
staring out of his window, looking at the distant railway tracks that led to Ealing station and out towards the west of England. When he was younger these encounters upset him, but not for long.
Now, after his decades of doctoring, they were heavier and heavier to bear. He felt desperately sad every time he sentenced one of his patients like Mrs Henderson to death and sent them out alone
into an unfriendly world. Now he felt there was a part of him under sentence too, that whatever portion of life he had left to him had been diminished. That evening, he said to himself, he would
speak to his wife. The practice would be sold. The retirement cottage in Dorset, close to the coast near Lyme Regis, had been bought some time ago. He would spend his last years in contemplation of
another of life’s great mysteries, not the painful deaths of his patients in this new century, but the ever-changing movements of the sea and the unpredictable movements of the birds above
it.

So Mrs Henderson had only one thought left in her mind. Sarah must be settled. Sarah’s future must be secure. And soon. Whatever was going to happen to her, Mrs Henderson had to know that
her daughter’s future was assured. She felt that she would have to approach the matter in a roundabout fashion or Edward might simply bolt, or say he was going to help Sarah carry the
shopping. Mrs Henderson had no belief in the ability of young men to last out this particular course. But she knew that she had only a limited time. The shops were not far away, and Sarah moved
fast. She and Edward were sitting by the fire in the little sitting room in the house in Acton.

‘So, Edward,’ she began, with what she hoped was a friendly smile, ‘Sarah tells me you had a great triumph in court very recently, when you spoke in the great fraud
case.’

Edward found the smile slightly disturbing. Something about it reminded him of the wolf in the nursery story who consumed the grandmother and sat up in her bed waiting for the arrival of Little
Red Riding Hood, intending to eat her as well. And he, Edward, was Little Red Riding Hood. ‘It was nothing, Mrs Henderson,’ he said, ‘anybody who had been researching that case
could have done it. And I was so glad Sarah was there.’