‘They haven’t found him,’ said Edward. ‘It’s my belief that he’s not in Queen’s Inn at all.’ Since their trip to the Wallace Collection Edward seemed able to converse with Sarah in perfectly normal sentences.
‘Do they think he’s dead?’ Sarah asked the question in the same tone she might have asked a guest if he took sugar in his tea.
‘Some people do. There’s a whole lot of rumours about him already. Did you know him, Sarah?’
‘I took a very short piece of dictation for him once when his own girls were away,’ said Sarah, ‘so I couldn’t really say I knew him at all. That’s why I can’t get very excited about it. I was so upset about Mr Dauntsey. I thought I would never get over it. He had such a lovely voice, you see.’
Edward peered out of the little window on the top floor. ‘There’s even more of them now, Sarah – police, I mean. They must be very worried.’
‘They always come too late,’ said Sarah, as if she had been covering crime cases for years, ‘so they make up for it with the numbers.’
‘Are you finished now, Sarah? Finished for the day, I mean?’
‘Yes, I am. Why do you ask?’
Edward looked shy for a moment. Sarah wondered for a second if his new confidence was going to desert him. ‘I would like to escort you to the underground, Sarah. I don’t like to think of you going there alone with a murderer on the loose somewhere.’
Sarah quite liked the thought of being escorted by Edward though she would have preferred a more romantic destination than the Tube. A masked ball at some elegant house in the country? A tea dance at one of London’s great hotels? She consoled herself with the thought that the Temple at least was one of the finer names on the underground system. You wouldn’t want to be escorted to Colliers Wood or Shadwell, she thought.
‘It’s hardly any distance from here to the Tube, Edward,’ she said kindly, ‘and there seem to be enough policemen to look after the Crown Jewels. But if you would like to, I should be happy to be escorted.’
Fifteen minutes later Edward was back in Queen’s Inn. Sarah had refused all offers of his accompanying her back home to Acton. She sat down next to a barrister she knew from the Inner Temple and Edward felt fairly sure that she would not be violated before she found her way home. The police were still crawling all over the Inn. Barton Somerville himself was glowering down at them from the steps into the library as if they were particularly repulsive aliens, recently landed from a distant and disagreeable planet beyond the Milky Way. Powerscourt he could not find anywhere. None of the policemen, not even Chief Inspector Beecham, knew where he was. Edward found him at last, sitting at the desk that had been Dauntsey’s, rummaging through the papers in the drawers.
‘Edward,’ said Powerscourt, smiling at the young man, ‘have you been seeing Sarah to the Tube?’
‘I have,’ Edward replied, wondering how the devil Powerscourt had worked that out, ‘but I have something to tell you which may be important, I’m just not sure.’
‘Fire ahead, Edward,’ said Powerscourt, ‘take your time.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Edward, looking closely at a print behind Powerscourt’s head of an eighteenth-century cricket match taking place at Calne. One of the batsmen looked remarkably like the oil painting he and Powerscourt had seen only that afternoon.
‘It’s to do with the link between Mr Stewart and Mr Dauntsey, sir,’ he began. ‘They’ve always been close and in the past they’ve always conducted a lot of cases together.’
Edward paused. There, just behind the distant outfielder in the print, a couple of deer were standing to attention, watching the action carefully. ‘There’s another case they were going to do, Lord Powerscourt, sir. It was huge. A fraud case, involving the man Jeremiah Puncknowle.’
‘Were they prosecuting or defending?’
‘They were for the prosecution, sir, with splendid fees and very lavish refreshers indeed, some of the biggest I have seen. I was going to devil for them, sir, I have done a load of work already and was going to make it full time tomorrow.’
‘Forgive me, Edward, are you suggesting that the defendant Puncknowle may have had something to do with these deaths?’
‘I don’t know what I am suggesting, sir. I only know that this case is now scheduled for the end of next week. There’s been a delay. Before that it was to have started in two days’ time.’
‘And if both the prosecuting lawyers were removed from the scene, Edward, would the Crown apply for an adjournment while they briefed some more?’
‘They would, sir, but it would be up to the judge to decide.’
‘Have you formed any opinion about the character of this Jeremiah person? Would he have ordered up a couple of murders?’
‘I couldn’t say, sir. I could tell you a great deal about his companies but not very much about his character. You don’t get a lot of that looking at balance sheets.’
‘Edward,’ said Powerscourt, rising to his feet and looking at his watch, ‘I hope to be able to give you some sort of answer tomorrow. I am going to call on my brother-in-law.’
‘Is he an expert in character, Lord Powerscourt, sir? Is he that sort of man?’
‘He may be, Edward, come to think of it he probably is. But he is a great financier, now one of the greatest in the City of London. He will be able to tell me all the stuff about our Mr Puncknowle that never appeared in the papers.’
Powerscourt departed towards his sister’s latest house. They moved their London house so often now that he and Lucy had once actually turned up for dinner at a fashionable address that the Burkes had vacated a month before. Edward had brief conversations with the policemen before they left. There was still no sign of Mr Woodford Stewart, and his wife reported that he had not turned up at home. Tomorrow they would broaden the search into the Inner and Middle Temples. Maybe, the Chief Inspector confided to his sergeant, they would have to send divers in to search the bloody river.
‘You’re not here on a social call, Francis, I can tell.’ Powerscourt’s middle sister Mary Burke kissed him warmly on both cheeks. ‘Before I pack you off to William, how is Lucy? How are the children? And those gorgeous twins?’
‘All very well indeed,’ said Powerscourt, smiling at his sister. ‘All well here?’
‘We’re fine,’ said Mary. ‘William’s in his study, one floor up. I forget you haven’t been in this house before.’
‘I’m sure I can find the way.’ Powerscourt departed, taking the stairs two at a time. He found his brother-in-law shrouded in cigar smoke and surrounded by figures. On the desk in front of him was an enormous ledger with numbers chasing each other up and down various columns. Surrounding the mighty tome were a series of smaller volumes in a variety of colours, muted colours it would have to be said, garish colours not being available in the kind of stationer’s shop in the City patronized by the likes of William Burke.
‘Delighted to see you, Francis, delighted.’ Burke had risen from his chair and was shaking Powerscourt vigorously by the hand. He had assisted Powerscourt in a number of his inquiries and had proved a most valuable companion in arms. Powerscourt always said you could pick his brother-in-law out in a crowd of five hundred by the cut of his suit. There were many in the City who prided themselves on wearing the latest fashions. William Burke went in the opposite direction. Johnny Fitzgerald maintained that he bought two or three suits every autumn and then left them in the shop for twenty years. Powerscourt objected to this theory on the grounds that a man could not be sure he would keep exactly the same shape over a period as long as twenty years. His theory was that William Burke had a very old tailor indeed, a man who kept detailed records of all the fashions going back to Disraeli’s time or even earlier. Powerscourt imagined that Burke would be measured in the normal way. On his way out, this Nestor of the tailoring world would ask, ‘Which year, sir?’ and Burke would reply, ‘1882, please.’ In appearance, apart from his suits, Burke was perfectly normal, normal height, not fat and not slim, an ordinary sort of face with an ordinary sort of nose and rather sharp grey eyes. You could see thousands and thousands of people looking exactly like him climbing on and off the buses or the trains for the City every working day. Looking at the face, Johnny Fitzgerald once memorably remarked, you would not imagine its owner’s facility for mental arithmetic would be so great that he could multiply one hundred and forty-eight by seventeen in his head while walking down the street without having to pause and without contracting a headache. Burke had taken ten pounds off Johnny in a wager many years ago by performing this feat while walking down Threadneedle Street in the rain.