‘How many pall bearers, Sarah?’ asked Mrs Henderson, leaning forward now in her chair, her eyes bright with curiosity.
‘Six, mama. Two gentlemen from chambers, two from the estate and two members of the family. So all parts of Mr Dauntsey’s life were there. They walked very slowly, mama. I remember thinking the coffin must have been heavy because Mr Dauntsey himself can’t have weighed very much. They went out across the two courts and turned right at the main entrance to reach the family chapel. Then there was the most extraordinary thing, I’ve never seen anything like it.’
Sarah paused. Mrs Henderson looked expectant. Sarah looked slightly embarrassed as she went on. ‘It was the deer, mama. It was as if they knew what was going on. A whole lot of them, I don’t know, thirty or forty maybe, came and stood very still about twenty yards from the funeral cortege. As if they were paying their last respects. One of the young barristers said afterwards that he’d never seen a man go to his funeral service with an honour guard of his own four-legged friends.’
‘Did they stay like that for the service?’ asked Mrs Henderson. ‘Were they still there when you all came out again?’
Sarah laughed. ‘No, they weren’t that patient. I looked round just before we went into the service and they were all trotting off. Maybe they thought they had done their duty.’
‘And the service, Sarah? What was that like?’
Sarah was beginning to realize how the victims of the Inquisition must have felt as their interrogators kept on and on with their questions. She helped herself to a large slice of Protestant cake.
‘All the usual stuff about I am the Resurrection and the Life,’ said Sarah with the world-weary resignation of a twenty-year-old attending her second funeral. ‘Mr Kirk read one lesson. Mr Dauntsey’s brother did another. The vicar preached a sermon about how impossible it was to understand God’s purpose. One of the young barristers in the pew behind me was whispering to his friend that it was equally impossible to understand the purpose of the vicar.’
Mrs Henderson shook her head at the flippancy of the young.
‘They buried him next to his father,’ Sarah carried on. ‘Nearly at the top of the hill. You could see most of the estate and the house and the deer and the cricket pitch, a lovely place to end up in, I thought.’
‘Was the church full, Sarah? Fifty mourners? A hundred, would you have said?’
‘More than that, mama, some people had to wait outside the church, it was so packed. Hundred and fifty, maybe more. That young policeman came, which I thought was nice of him. And that man Lord Powerscourt the benchers brought in to investigate Mr Dauntsey’s death. He was there.’
‘And the widow, Sarah? Was she very upset?
‘She looked very beautiful, mama, Mrs Dauntsey. Black suited her. And she had a black veil made of very fine lace, maybe it was a mantilla, which made her look rather mysterious.’
‘I’m not sure people should look mysterious at funerals. I was taught they should look sad.’
‘I was never very close to her, mama. There was one odd thing just when they were lowering the body into the grave. You know how they have four ropes or runners round the thing before they lower it into the ground? Well, Mr Dauntsey’s coffin sort of slipped. It looked for a second as if it might flip right over and fall in upside down. The bearers had a terrible time, almost wrestling with it. There was a sort of collective gasp from the congregation, everybody holding their breath for a moment. Then it was under control again. Just think, mama, how awful it would have been if Mr Dauntsey’s coffin had fallen in the wrong way round or the wrong way up.’
Mrs Henderson looked into the fire. ‘You could say, could you not, that the whole thing was a parable, a metaphor for Mr Dauntsey’s life. He ended up the wrong way round, the wrong way up, slumped into his soup bowl at that feast. You’re not meant to end up murdered, not in this bright new century of ours.’
4
There was another note from Johnny Fitzgerald waiting for Powerscourt when he returned from the Dauntsey funeral in Kent. Peace, Powerscourt learned, had returned to the troubled East London borough of Whitechapel where Johnny had been sent to check out Winston Howard, the man unsuccessfully defended by Dauntsey at his trial for armed robbery some years before and recently released from prison. Reports from the East End had indicated that the ex-convict might bear a grudge against his legal team for his lengthy incarceration within the unfriendly walls of Pentonville.
Johnny Fitzgerald claimed to have won prizes for his handwriting at school. Powerscourt had no reason to doubt it. But he wondered if decades of consumption of Pomerol and Meursault, of Chablis and Chardonnay, of Bordeaux and Beaujolais and Muscadet and Armagnac and the other treasures of Johnny’s wine merchants might not have had an impact, the hand grown shakier with the passing years, some letters and words virtually indistinguishable. Then there were all those hours peering at birds through those heavy German binoculars Johnny was so proud of. That must damage your wrists. The Fitzgerald script was becoming more and more indistinct as it staggered its way down the page and over to the other side. There had, Johnny reported, been an obstacle, was it, in Whitechapel. No, it couldn’t be obstacle, it was miracle. Surely not. Miracle in Whitechapel? Powerscourt read on. There was, at the present time, a major crusade being conducted in the crime-ridden borough by the Salvation Army, ever vigilant for the propagation of the gospel and the salvation of souls. At one of these torch-lit rallies, Powerscourt read, the star turn of the preaching department of the Salvation Army, God’s equivalent to W.G. Grace in Johnny’s phrase, had reaped a mighty harvest of souls. The sinners of Whitechapel had formed long queues to confess their sins and be borne into the bosom of the Lord. And among those carried into this spacious resting place, Powerscourt learnt to his astonishment, was none other than Winston Howard, former burglar, armed robber and vicious inhabitant of His Majesty’s prisons. So great was the conversion that Howard had taken to proselytizing in the unlikely quarter of Whitechapel High Street. Johnny himself, the note went on, had been accosted by the prodigal only the day before and could only effect escape from the speeches of conversion by the purchase of four copies of the Salvation Army newsletter. It was therefore unlikely, in Johnny’s view, that Howard would be contemplating violence against any of God’s creatures, or not for a while at any rate, as long as the Salvation Army had him in their clutches.
The last paragraph was the most difficult to read. Even Lady Lucy, a veteran and expert in decoding Johnny’s messages, was stumped. He was going to watch some birds for a day. Wigeon? Pigeon? Redwing? It was hard to tell. These creatures were expected to come, or was it go, at this time of year over the mudflats of . . . Essex? Sussex? Wessex? Powerscourt doubted if Johnny would be going there. The problems with the decoding became less serious once the last sentence had been deciphered. Johnny would not want Francis to think he was being abandoned. He would be back in London the day after tomorrow. But of one thing he could be sure. Whoever had killed Dauntsey, it was not Winston Howard.
The following morning a bizarre meeting was taking place in the Powerscourt dining room in Manchester Square. All the chairs, except three at the top end, had been taken away from the table and placed against the wall. Stretching round the table were a series of cardboard labels, roughly inscribed with a thick black pen, with the legends nine to ten, ten to eleven, eleven to twelve and so on all the way round the clock to seven to eight. And standing behind the three chairs were Powerscourt, Detective Chief Inspector Jack Beecham and his detective sergeant, an absurdly young-looking man called Richard Gibson whose uniform was slightly too big for him. Looking at Sergeant Gibson, Powerscourt wondered if his mother thought he hadn’t finished growing yet. And piled up on the table in front of the trio was an enormous heap of paper, the typed records of the detectives’ interviews with the inhabitants of Queen’s Inn, and the two black notebooks where Powerscourt kept his own records of his interviews. And, to complete the display, several pairs of scissors.