The sergeant grinned. ‘Don’t think I’d like to be next to Mr Dauntsey when he goes off, sir. Might be a suspect. Think I’ll have to be a waiter.’
Powerscourt managed to lay a primitive place setting for the Chief Inspector, mat, two sets of knife and fork, a couple of spoons, a cheese knife. He thrust two soup bowls into the sergeant’s hands.
‘The important thing,’ said Powerscourt, ‘about the service at the feast, gentlemen, according to my man, is that it is served from two ends.’ He took the sergeant down to the bottom of the room, at the opposite end to the dining table. ‘The food comes from down here. The kitchens are on the far side of that wall with a passage between them and the Hall. Don’t come to serve the soup until I say so, sergeant.’ Powerscourt strode back to the other end of the room and grinned at Jack Beecham. ‘But the drink,’ Powerscourt had found a couple of empty bottles at the back of his cupboard and carried them, one in each hand, to the door into the dining room, ‘the drink comes from the opposite end, what they called the buttery in my college in Cambridge. The white wine will have been kept cool and opened as late as possible. It will, my man informs me, have been served in its original bottles. The red would have been decanted and placed in those elegant French containers the benchers are so proud of. But, alas, we are not concerned with the red here, for Dauntsey was dead before it came on the scene. The bottles will have been lined up on a great bench on the far side of the two Gainsboroughs here on the Inn walls, gentlemen. The only people allowed in there would have been the waiters. Anybody else would have been suspected of wanting to steal some of the Inn’s finest wine and kicked out. If you were a murderous waiter, you could pop your poison into a bottle at a special place, but you could not be sure that somebody else would not pick it up first and kill the wrong person. I am just going to pop out and return as a wine waiter complete with bottle.’
The Chief Inspector smiled. The sergeant waited patiently, his two soup plates filled with imaginary soup. Powerscourt looked quickly up his hall. It was empty. He returned with the bottle in his right hand.
‘Right, gentlemen, let us suppose I am the murderous waiter. I have managed to pop the poison into this bottle in the few seconds it takes to pass from the buttery into the top of the Hall here. But the gentlemen are drinking at different speeds. Maybe Mr Dauntsey’s glass is still full, refilled by one of my colleagues. Let us further suppose that I have come back with just one glassful in my bottle. Mr Dauntsey doesn’t want any of it. But two places away the Treasurer himself beckons you over. He likes this Meursault very much. He would like some more. He would like some more this minute. Do you kill the wrong man?’
The Chief Inspector looked in horror at Powerscourt. ‘My God, Powerscourt, you don’t suppose that it happened as you describe? Only Dauntsey was the wrong man. Some other bencher was meant to be murdered.’
Powerscourt paused. ‘I think not. I don’t know why. If I could complete the demonstration, I think the same problem applies to the soup. The soup is served at the top end of the kitchen. There is a parade of four to six waiters bringing it up in relays.’ Powerscourt waved at his very own waiter to come forward. ‘Suppose you have somehow managed to drop the poison into one of your soup plates, gentlemen. Hidden up your sleeve perhaps and released by some secret and ingenious mechanism. You have no idea if Mr Dauntsey has been served his borscht or not. If he has, what do you do? You can’t very well turn round and take your deadly cargo back to the kitchens. Everyone will think you are a bit mad and somebody may send the soup out again to kill some other innocent barrister. It’s all very risky, poisoning at the feast.’
‘If you’re right, Lord Powerscourt,’ said the Chief Inspector, ‘the poison must have been administered earlier. Either in his rooms, or at the Treasurer’s drinks party.’
‘I think we need to wait,’ replied Powerscourt, ‘until we get hold of the steward and all his waiters at the same time in the Hall and hear what they’ve got to say.’ Powerscourt began putting the soup plates back in their cupboard when another thought struck him. ‘Chief Inspector, sergeant, I’ve had a mad idea. You know how people never notice anything when murders are being committed because they don’t know a crime is going on?’
The two policemen nodded. ‘Why don’t we restage the feast? The whole lot, food, drink, everything. These people can certainly afford it. We hire an actor to play Dauntsey. Immediately afterwards we interview every single person there about what they remember, in case there’s anything that’s just come back to them.’
‘Wouldn’t that give the murderer the idea that we think the man was poisoned at the feast?’ said the Chief Inspector.
‘That might be very useful to us, Chief Inspector,’ said Powerscourt with a broad smile. ‘It might draw attention away from the fact that we think he was murdered somewhere else.’
A fine rain was falling on Calne Park a day later as Powerscourt made his way towards the great house. A couple of deer examined him carefully on his passage as if he had no right to be there. But his invitation was in his pocket, a polite letter from Dauntsey’s widow inviting him to tea this afternoon. She directed him not to the entrance through the main gate and on to the back of Reservoir Court where the mourners had foregathered for the funeral the week before, but to a small green door almost directly opposite the main entrance. Here a young footman showed him to a small drawing room where a great fire was burning vigorously.
Powerscourt felt disappointed, even slightly cheated. For Calne was one of those English houses that people associated with grandeur, with vast drawing rooms adorned with mighty chandeliers, the walls hung with full-length Old Masters, French furniture sitting decorously on the polished oak floorboards, or great galleries hung with Flemish tapestries, their ceilings decorated with elaborate plasterwork. But the room here was small, with a cheap carpet on the floor and reproductions rather than Raphaels on the walls. Mrs Elizabeth Dauntsey was dressed in a widow’s black, a long black skirt and an elegant black blouse. She was tall with very fair skin and light brown eyes.
‘I expect you’re thinking you’ve come to the wrong place, Lord Powerscourt,’ she said, rising from her chair to shake his hand. ‘Most people do. I shall explain later.’ Powerscourt thought she was one of the most striking women he had ever seen. Maybe Dauntsey had been a connoisseur of feminine beauty.
‘I look forward to the explanation,’ Powerscourt sat in a chair opposite her on the other side of the fire, ‘and can I say how grateful I am to you for seeing me so soon after your tragic bereavement.’
‘Think nothing of it,’ said Elizabeth Dauntsey. ‘You said in your letter, Lord Powerscourt, that you thought I might be able to help you in some way. Please tell me what it is.’
Powerscourt paused for a moment. ‘As I said, Mrs Dauntsey, I have been asked by the benchers of Queen’s Inn to investigate the circumstances of your husband’s death.’
‘Do you find the benchers easy to deal with?’ Elizabeth Dauntsey was very quick with her interruption. ‘Some people find them rather difficult,’ she went on.
This was not, Powerscourt felt, the conversational tone one would expect from a lady whose husband had been murdered so recently. Levity rather than grief seemed to be the order of the day. Maybe Elizabeth Dauntsey was one of those unfortunate people who always speak their mind. Maybe the rules for widows had changed now they were free of the long shadow of Victoria’s forty years of mourning.
‘The benchers?’ Powerscourt smiled at his hostess. ‘Well, let me say that I have found easier people to deal with.’ Most murderers of his acquaintance, he might have said, were easier to deal with than Barton Somerville and his colleagues. ‘But my purpose here at Calne is not with the benchers, Mrs Dauntsey. There are two reasons behind my visit. The first is mundane – would you mind if I talked to your family solicitor? It is sometimes helpful.’