Death Called to the Bar (3 page)

‘Listen very carefully,’ he said. ‘We’re going to move Mr Dauntsey. He’s the gentleman who has fallen into his soup at the top table. I want to stick to the usual
channels we’ve been using this evening. So I want you two,’ he pointed to two of his regulars, ‘to go up behind the top table, as if you were going to serve the benchers, and I
want you two,’ he nodded to a couple of his young recruits for the evening here, ‘to go round the back of the right-hand bench, as you have been doing all evening, and reach Mr Dauntsey
that way. Don’t rush but don’t stop until you have got him into the library. I shall hold the door at the back of the benchers’ table open for you. Good luck.’

Joseph led his pincer movement up the Hall. He suspected that his waiters were more or less invisible to the barristers by now. Benchers, for some strange reason, sit on chairs at the Whitelock
Feast. It was stipulated in the original bequest. Joseph’s plan was that they should simply lift the chair and Dauntsey all in one movement and take him out. It went without a hitch. Nobody
asked what they were doing. Nobody challenged them at all. The Treasurer, in charge at his top table, did not even look sideways as his colleague was swiftly and silently removed. It was as if the
waters had closed over a sinking ship. The surface of the ocean returned to normal.

It was only when they had dumped their passenger on a sofa in the library that one of the young men bent down to listen to the KC’s breathing. He looked very pale as he stood up.

‘Mr Joseph, sir,’ he stammered, ‘I think the gentleman’s dead.’

‘Nonsense,’ said one of the regular waiters, ‘he can’t be dead.’

‘He bloody well is,’ said the young man, ‘you see if you can hear him breathing. Look at the colour of him, for God’s sake. It’s a bloody corpse that we’ve
just carried in, God help us all.’

Joseph bent down and listened for a breath. There was nothing. Joseph had coped with many crises in his time, drunken students, penniless barristers, people who refused to pay their bills,
organizing lunch for a temperamental Balkan prince who was rumoured to shoot the staff if the food didn’t agree with him, but not death. Not death on the 28th of February on a day still
afflicted with fog, not death at a feast, not death served with borscht and sour cream and the unpronounceable Russian vodka. He knew he should return to his post.

‘Johnston,’ he chose one of his regulars who knew his way about, ‘would you please go to the Head Porter and tell him what has happened. He’s served in the military so he
may know more than we do as to whether Mr Dauntsey is alive or not. Tell him we think we need a doctor, and if he agrees, then could he please send you to fetch one. Tell him that I don’t
propose to tell the Treasurer anything yet but that I would welcome his advice.’

Johnston ran off towards the porter’s lodge. Tragedy seemed to have brought about a temporary truce in relations between the steward’s office and the porter’s lodge. Back to
the Hall went Joseph and his colleagues. It was time to serve the cheese.

Dr James Chamberlain was in the endgame of a chess match with his brother when the summons came. The timing, perhaps, was good for him. His King was trapped in a corner, he had
only a castle and a solitary pawn left under his command. The enemy forces bearing down on him consisted of a Queen, a castle and a knight with an ample draft of pawns if they were required. The
doctor reckoned he had only a few moves left before defeat, a loss that would put his brother in the lead by sixty-eight to fifty-nine in this marathon match that had now lasted over two years.

‘Sorry to deny you your victory.’ He smiled at his brother John and departed into the night for Queen’s Inn and the recumbent person of Alexander Dauntsey.

Roland Haydon, the Head Porter, solemnly escorted the doctor to the library. It took him less than a minute to give his diagnosis.

‘Mr Dauntsey is dead, I’m afraid. The Treasurer will have to be informed at once. And the next of kin, of course. Do you know who his regular doctor was, Haydon?’

‘I’m afraid I do not, sir. Mr Dauntsey had chambers here, of course, but his home was in Kent. Maybe his regular doctor was down there, sir.’

The doctor bent down again and looked very closely at Dauntsey’s face. He was still looking at it when Barton Somerville, the Treasurer, was shown in, protesting loudly that Dauntsey
couldn’t possibly be dead, why, he had seen him only a couple of hours before.

‘Are you sure, Dr Chamberlain? I think he just had a bit too much to drink, that’s all. He’ll be much better in the morning, what?’

Dr Chamberlain looked at his watch. He didn’t care for a late evening spent disputing a death with a collection of drunken lawyers.

‘I’m afraid there can be absolutely no doubt about it, Mr Somerville.’ The doctor was not to know it, but Barton Somerville had a special weakness for being addressed as
Treasurer, rather than by his name. He had even circulated a note on the subject to his colleagues on taking up his office. ‘Mr Dauntsey here has been dead for a couple of hours, I should
say.’

Dimly Somerville recalled his own words when the dead man had collapsed. ‘He’s drunk. Bloody fool! Leave him there. He’ll come round in a moment. Carry on.’ He thought it
unnecessary to mention this to the doctor. He wondered if medical attention then might have saved his life. He wondered briefly if he was liable to a charge of some kind, manslaughter maybe?
Criminal negligence? But he thought not.

‘There is not much more we can do this evening, Mr Somerville. I suggest you take the poor gentleman to his own rooms and put him on the bed for now. I think you should tell the next of
kin. Was there a wife and children down there in Kent?’

The Treasurer nodded sadly. ‘Wife, no children.’

‘Well, a wire, or a phone call if they are connected. I shall come back in the morning. I shall inform the coroner. And I shall have to bring the police as well.’

‘The police? Why do we need the police, for heaven’s sake? We’re lawyers here, not criminals.’

‘It is routine procedure, Mr Somerville, that’s all. We have to decide if the death was due to natural causes or not. There may have to be a post-mortem before the
inquest.’

‘You don’t think there was anything unnatural about Dauntsey’s death, do you?’ said the Treasurer, consumed with anxiety about his own behaviour.

The doctor had decided that he did not care for Mr Barton Somerville. And he thought the man was hiding something, probably about the circumstances of the death.

‘It’s far too early to say whether your colleague died from natural causes or not,’ he said. ‘From my brief inspection of the man I shouldn’t be at all surprised if
there was something unnatural about it, but I could not be sure.’

‘Poison,’ said the pathologist, peering sadly at the human organs that had once been Alexander Dauntsey on the slab in front of him.

‘Are you sure?’ said the policeman, waiting respectfully some distance away, twirling his hat in his hands.

‘Yes, I am,’ replied the pathologist, ‘but quite what sort of poison it was or how fast it acts upon the human body, I do not yet know. I shall have to send this lot away for
further analysis.’

The two men, their faces pale in the antiseptic colours of the mortuary, were very different. James Willoughby, the pathologist, was old and bald and bent. He had only two more years to go
before he retired to the little cottage he had already bought in Norfolk. Chief Inspector Jack Beecham had many many years to go before his retirement. He was tall and slim with light curly hair
and he looked even younger than his thirty-two years. His superiors in the Metropolitan Police suspected from the start that Dauntsey had been murdered – the doctor had alerted them –
and had assigned one of their most intelligent detectives to the case.

Forty minutes later Beecham was shown into the Treasurer’s quarters in Queen’s Inn. They were on the first floor in Fortune Court, in a glorious room nearly forty feet long, looking
out over the Thames with high ceilings and old prints of London adorning the walls. Here you could have seen one of the earliest extant prints of the Temple Church and fine watercolours of the
Queen’s Inn and its gardens. Barton Somerville was seated at an enormous desk, with a couple of briefs lying at the corner.

‘Good morning, constable,’ he said, looking with some disdain at the policeman. ‘What can I do for you?’

Jack Beecham was well used to people making the wrong assumptions about him. ‘I stopped being a constable some years ago, sir,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’m Detective Chief
Inspector Beecham now. I’m in charge of the case of the late Mr Dauntsey, sir.’

‘In charge, are you?’ said Somerville incredulously. ‘Are you the most senior person they’ve got?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Beecham, trying to remain polite, ‘I am. And I’m here to tell you that we believe, or rather the pathologist believes, that we are dealing with a case of
murder here.’

With difficulty Somerville resisted the temptation to ask how old the pathologist was. Fifteen? Twenty-one? ‘Are you sure it was murder? Are you saying he was poisoned? Do you yet know
what sort of poison it was?’

The policeman was beginning to grasp just how difficult this investigation could turn out to be. These lawyers were used to cross-examining policemen in the witness box, trying to undermine
their evidence and their credibility. They would not appreciate it when the boot was on the other foot.

‘I am not at liberty, sir, to say how the murder was carried out at this stage.’

‘Heavens above, young man,’ Barton Somerville banged his fist on the table and raised his voice to nearly a shout, ‘I am the Treasurer of this Inn. Surely I have the right to
know how one of my own benchers died? Surely I have the right to ask for that?’

The policeman had had enough for now. It was time, Jack Beecham thought, for a little salvo back just to let this pompous and self-important man know that he could look after himself.

‘The position remains as I outlined it earlier, sir,’ he said. Then he paused and looked Somerville straight between the eyes. ‘I will tell you more when I can, sir. But for
now, I’m afraid, you are a suspect in this case, just like all the other members of your Inn. At the moment I don’t see how anybody can expect preferential treatment. And now, with your
permission, sir, I and my team would like to begin questioning the people in Mr Dauntsey’s chambers and on his staircase.’

With that the policeman picked up his hat and strode from the room. Barton Somerville stared after him in fury. He composed a sulphurous letter of complaint to the Commissioner of Metropolitan
Police and had it sent round by one of the porters. He demanded the removal of Detective Chief Inspector Beecham at once. If his request was not granted, he went on, he would be forced to request
his barristers to offer the police the minimum co-operation necessary to comply with the law. And, he concluded, he was going to take steps to ensure that the Inn was in a position to conduct its
own investigation which would, he felt sure, be more likely to succeed than any inquiry conducted by the infant or cadet branch of the Metropolitan Police. After that he walked north to
Gray’s Inn to confer with a man he knew who had some expertise about London’s private investigators.

Shortly after six thirty that evening a tall man in a very beautiful suit knocked on the front door of the Powerscourt house in Markham Square in Chelsea. Inside he found
chaos. There were packing cases everywhere, all along the hallway, in the dining room, stacked high at the bottom of the stairs. Upstairs further noises of departure could be heard, trunks or
suitcases being dragged along the floor, small children shouting, a bath being run. The reason for all this confusion and excitement had to do with the two people who knew least about it –
the twins. Powerscourt and Lady Lucy had decided that they needed more room with the extra nurses and probably the need for extra bathrooms and bedrooms. It might have looked as if they were moving
house but the move was only temporary. Powerscourt had solved the problem of space by buying the house next door, which had come on the market after the sudden and unexpected death of its owner.
The family was going to Manchester Square in Marylebone while various alterations were made, alterations which were likely to make more dust than would be good for the twins.

‘Powerscourt!’ said the man in the beautiful suit, as he saw a rather harassed owner descending the stairs with a small green valise in his hand.

‘Pugh, by God! Charles Augustus Pugh!’ said Powerscourt, sprinting down the stairs to shake his friend by the hand. In an earlier case involving art fraud an innocent man had been
put on trial for his life. Powerscourt and Pugh, with the assistance of some splendid forgeries displayed in court, and the forger himself, had secured his acquittal. Ever since, they had kept in
touch with lunches and the occasional dinner at the Pughs’ beautiful house by the river.

‘I see your crimes have finally caught up with you, Powerscourt,’ said Pugh, waving a hand at the packing cases and surrounding confusion. ‘Leaving the country before the law
comes knocking at the door? I could offer my services free, you know, if they try to deport you.’

‘If moving to Marylebone constitutes leaving the country, my friend, then we are indeed in flight. But come upstairs, the drawing room is still free of all this paraphernalia.’

‘I’m sure you must be very busy, I could come back another day, or in the morning if that would be convenient. I don’t want to get in the way.’

‘You’re never in the way, Charles, certainly not in a suit as elegant as that.’

As Pugh seated himself on the sofa, Powerscourt organized the drinks and wondered, not for the first time, what the judges and juries made of the Pugh clothes. Would the juries be jealous of a
man who could afford such expensive clothes? Would the judges wish that they had such a fine figure to show off the tailors’ best? One thing was certain. Both judges and juries would remember
Charles Augustus Pugh. Maybe that was the point of it all.