Death of a Chancellor (3 page)

‘The cover story is slightly different. You must make up the bed as if nobody had ever slept in it. And of course you must clear up the blood in the bedroom. I shall say that your master
came to see me late last night, feeling very unwell and complaining of chest pains. I kept him here overnight as I judged that the walk back to Fairfield might kill him. I watched over him all
night. Later this morning I shall return to Compton and bring Wallace back again, as if to fetch the body. We’ll say he died shortly after ten o’clock this morning. I shall send word up
to the house once Wallace has gone with the imaginary body.’

Dr Blackstaff paused. ‘Are we breaking the law?’ he whispered. ‘Are we going to end up in jail?’

‘Don’t see how we are breaking the law, sir. Poor Mr Eustace is already dead.’

‘And,’ said the doctor, stopping his carriage shortly before the entrance to the stables, ‘I shall tell anybody who asks that he most definitely did not want people peering at
him when he was dead. Indeed, I shall say that he repeated that wish to me only last night as he sat by my fire, looking very pale and ill. Got that, McKenna?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Andrew McKenna, and he loped off along the path to start his late master’s journey to the undertakers and to the grave.

Powerscourt was back at his post on deck. He watched as the black turned to dark grey, then to a paler grey as visibility grew from fifty yards to two hundred and then to half
a mile. A thin pencil of land was visible ahead of him. When he raised his binoculars he could see a tall spire somewhere near the centre of Portsmouth. He could see the naval buildings lined up
along the quayside and the multitude of dockyards, repair workshops and training stations that marked it as the centre of the Royal Navy the greatest seafaring power on earth. His heart was beating
faster. He remembered the words Lady Lucy had said to him in the drawing room of their house in Markham Square on his last evening in London and again on the station platform the following morning
as the train took him away. ‘Please come back, Francis. Please come back.’ Now the moment, of all moments the one he had most longed for, had nearly arrived.

It was Thomas who claimed he saw him first. He had appropriated the binoculars from his mother, in true male fashion, and thought he recogniszed another figure with binoculars on the deck of HMS
Fearless.

‘There he is!’ he shouted. ‘There’s Papa! Up at the front of the ship with the binoculars!’ He shouted at the very top of his voice, ‘Papa! Papa!’ and
waved furiously as fast as his hands could move. The other people waiting at the quayside for their loved ones smiled at the little boy and his enthusiasm. Now they were all waving, all three of
them, Olivia standing on tiptoe so her father would recognize her across the water.

Then Powerscourt saw them. He put his binoculars down and waved for all he was worth. Johnny Fitzgerald had stolen a naval flag from somewhere and was waving it above their heads like a banner.
Powerscourt thought he was going to cry. These three little figures, waving as though their lives depended on it, these three, not the mighty ships with their great guns, not the peaceful English
countryside that rolled back behind the city, these three were his homecoming, his landfall.

He came down the gangway as the church bells of Portsmouth rang the hour of eight. He embraced Lady Lucy. She was crying. He picked up Thomas in his arms and kissed him violently. He hid Olivia
inside his cloak and squeezed her till she thought she might break.

Lord Francis Powerscourt was home.

John Eustace came from a family of four. His elder brother Edward had died serving with his regiment in India. His twin brother James had moved to New York where he dabbled
unsuccessfully in share speculation. His elder sister Augusta Frederica Cockburn was the first to hear the news of his death, and the first to set out for Hawke’s Broughton.

Life had not been kind to Augusta Cockburn, née Eustace. She had been born with some of the features thought desirable in a young woman. She was rich, very rich. She had a great deal of
energy. She was tall, with a face adorned with a long thin nose and large protruding ears. Her fine brown eyes, one of her best features when she was young, had grown suspicious, almost bitter with
the passing years. Her marriage at the age of nineteen, an act, she told her friends at the time, largely undertaken to escape from her mother, had seemed glorious at first. George Cockburn was
handsome, charming, an adornment to any dinner table, a good fellow at any weekend house party. Everyone thought he had money when he led Augusta up the aisle at St James’s Piccadilly all
those years ago. He did have money, after a fashion. But he had it, as his brother-in-law once remarked, in negative quantities. He was always in debt. Some scheme, launched by the artful dodgers
on the fringes of the City of London, was bound to attract him. The schemes invariably failed. He began to chase after other women. He began losing heavily at cards. After ten years of marriage
Augusta had four young children, all of them looking distressingly like their father. After fifteen years of marriage they were all she had left to live for, George Cockburn being seldom seen in
the family home and then usually drunk, or come to steal some trinket he could take to the pawnshop or use as a stake at the gambling tables. The very generous settlement bestowed on her by her
father at the time of her marriage had almost all gone.

Many families progress upwards as they move through life. They move into larger houses to accommodate their growing numbers. Augusta found herself carrying out the same manoeuvre, only in
reverse. The family moved from Mayfair to Chelsea, from Chelsea to Notting Hill, from Notting Hill to an address that Augusta referred to as West Kensington but that everybody else, particularly
the postmen, knew as Hammersmith.

Augusta did not take these changes well. She grew sour and embittered. Only the appeal to his nephews and nieces persuaded her brother John to keep her financially afloat. So when she heard of
his death she resolved to set out at once, without the children, on a visit of mourning and condolence to Fairfield Park. Her real purpose was to discover what had happened to her brother’s
money, and, if possible, to appropriate as much of it as possible for herself and her family. Thus could she restore the fortunes her wastrel husband had thrown away.

It also has to be said that Augusta had not been a welcome visitor in her brother’s house. John Eustace found her constant complaints, the endless whingeing about poverty and the cost of
school fees rather wearing, particularly as it began over the breakfast table when a man wants to read his newspaper. And she was bad with the servants, peremptory, short-tempered, always secretly
resentful that there were far more of them than she could afford back in West Kensington or Hammersmith. They, in turn, had devised subtle forms of revenge. Her morning tea was never cold, but
never hot either. Tepid perhaps, lukewarm. The junior footman, who was almost a genius at pipes and plumbing, would contrive an ingenious and elaborate system for the course of her stay whereby the
water in the bathroom, like the tea, was never hot but never cold. In the autumn and winter her room would be so thoroughly aired that the temperature would sink almost to freezing point. Then the
fire would be made so hot it was virtually unbearable. They had, to be fair to them, the servants, decided that in view of the tragic circumstances they would behave properly in the course of her
visit to the bereaved household. But only, said the junior footman who doubled as a plumbing expert, only if she behaved herself.

It was now three days since the passing of John Eustace. Andrew McKenna, waiting nervously in the Great Hall to greet Augusta Cockburn, had found them very difficult. He had never liked lying.
He didn’t think he was particularly good at it. As he told the servants the sad news of their master’s death, he tried to sound as authoritative as he could. Grief overwhelmed them so
fast they had no time to notice the anxiety in his voice, the slightly shaky legs. That too, he told himself, could have been put down to shock. But now, he knew with deep foreboding in his heart,
he would face a much sterner test, Mrs Augusta Cockburn with the light of battle in her eyes. The trouble was, he said to himself as he waited for the sound of the carriage coming down the hill,
that he still wasn’t certain he and Dr Blackstaff had done the right thing.

Then the nightmare started. Leaving the servants to carry in her small mountain of luggage, she swept him off to the great drawing room at the back of the house, looking out over the gardens and
the ornamental pond.

‘McDougal, isn’t it?’ she said imperiously, settling herself into what had been her brother’s favourite chair.

‘McKenna, madam, McKenna,’ said the unfortunate butler, wondering if he was about to develop a stammer.

‘No need to say it twice,’ snapped Augusta Cockburn, ‘I’m not stupid. I knew it was Scottish anyway.’

She was twisting slightly in her chair to get a better view. McKenna was hovering at what he hoped was a safe distance.

‘Come here, McKenna! Come closer where I can see you properly! No need to skulk over there like a criminal.’

Criminal was the very worst word she could have used. For Andrew McKenna had often suspected in the previous seventy-two hours that he was indeed a criminal. Some phrase about obstructing the
course of justice kept wandering in and out of his mind. He blushed as he advanced to a new and more dangerous position right in front of Mrs Augusta Cockburn.

‘Tell me how my brother died, McKenna. I want all the details. I shall not rest until I am satisfied that I know absolutely everything about it.’ She made it sound like an
accusation.

‘Well, madam,’ said McKenna, wondering already if his legs were holding firm, ‘he went over to see the doctor three nights ago. That would have been on Monday night. I believe
Mr Eustace was feeling unwell, madam. The doctor thought he was not well enough to come home so he kept him at his house overnight. That way he could keep an eye on Mr Eustace, madam, and give him
any attention he needed. Unfortunately the doctor could not save him. He died at about ten o’clock the following morning, madam. His heart had given out. Dr Blackstaff came to tell us just
after eleven.’

Augusta Cockburn thought there was something wrong about this account. The man spoke as if he had learned it off by heart, or had just translated it from a foreign language. Precisely what was
wrong she did not yet know. But she was going to find out.

‘Hold on, McKenna or McDougal or whatever your name is –’

‘McKenna, madam.’

‘Don’t interrupt me when I am speaking to you. You have begun at the end. I want you to begin at the beginning. What happened on the Monday? Was my brother feeling unwell? Did he
complain about pains in his chest or anything like that? People don’t usually drop down dead with no warning at all.’

‘Sorry madam. Your brother went off to the cathedral in the normal way on Monday morning. He came back about five, I believe, madam, and had some tea in his study. James the footman
brought it in to him. We served his dinner in the dining room at eight o’clock, madam. He would have been finished about a quarter to nine. Then Mr Eustace went back to his study,
madam.’

He paused. Now came the difficult bit. For if everything he had said so far was totally or partially true, the words he was about to utter were complete fabrication. And there was no mercy from
his interrogator.

‘Get on with it, McKenna. All of this only happened three days ago. It’s not as if you’re telling me the line of battle at Trafalgar.’

‘I went to see Mr Eustace at about nine thirty in his study to ask if there was anything he wanted. He said I was not to wait up as he might be working till quite late. That was the last
time I or anybody else in this house saw him, madam.’ Until I found him dead in bed in the middle of the night, he thought, blood all over the sheets.

Augusta Cockburn sniffed the air slightly, like a bloodhound. If she had suspected something was amiss before, she was almost certain now. How unfortunate it was that a man so bad at lying
should have encountered a bloodhound like Augusta Cockburn at such a time. For if he was bad at lying, she was an expert in its detection. She felt she could hold down a chair, the Regius
Professorship in Lie Detection, at one of the ancient universities. After all her long years of marriage she had listened to so many lies from her own husband. Lies innumerable as the grains of
sand on the seashore or the stardust on the Milky Way. Kept very late at dinner, couldn’t get away. Need some money to buy some railroad shares. Damaged my ankle so badly at the club I
couldn’t even walk down the stairs. Some damned woman spilt her perfume right down my shirt. Fellow insisted I go home with him for a nightcap. Bloody trains cancelled yet again,
couldn’t make it home. Those were just the preface. Now she stared at McKenna as though he were a common criminal.

‘And where is the body?’

‘The body, madam?’

‘My brother’s body, McDougal. Where is it and when can we pay our last respects and say our goodbyes?’

‘I believe the body is at the undertaker’s in Compton, madam.’

‘And when is it being brought back here for the family’s last respects?’

‘I’m afraid I could not say, madam. The doctor has been looking after the arrangements.’

‘Are you not meant to be the butler here? Are you not meant to be looking after the arrangements, as you put it? Is that not what you are paid to do?’

Andrew McKenna turned bright red at the insult to his professional abilities. ‘I have been butler here for the last fifteen years, madam. I have never had any complaints about the
performance of my duties.’

Augusta Cockburn snorted. The whole house obviously needed taking in hand from top to bottom.

‘I have not found this interview at all satisfactory,’ she said, drawing herself erect in the chair, her eyes flashing. ‘You may go now. I shall be writing to this doctor,
Blacksmith or Blackstaff or whatever he is called. Perhaps you could arrange for its immediate delivery.’