Certainly this evening’s suit, though of excellent cloth, was not one likely to be worn by the Beau Brummells of the capital’s dress elite like Charles Augustus Pugh.
Powerscourt waved a hand at the multicoloured concentration of ledgers and financial fire power in front of his brother-in-law.
‘Selling up, William?’ he asked cheerfully. ‘Preparing to flee before the bailiffs come round?’
William Burke laughed. ‘Annual audit, Francis. Once a year I make myself go through all the family accounts, see how we’re doing. Are we better off than last year, that sort of thing. Can Mary buy a new pair of shoes, you know? We make all our big companies do it, don’t see why we shouldn’t do it at home.’
‘And are all the coloured books for different kinds of investment? And the huge tome the master document, the Book of Numbers as it were, for the whole lot?’
‘They said you’d been consorting with lawyers, Francis. They seem to have sharpened your wits. Red for property – I’ve got a couple of other houses in London as well as the place in the country.’ Powerscourt recalled that the place in the country stood on the banks of the Thames not far from Goring and had twenty-seven bedrooms and fourteen bathrooms. Not to mention the huge palace on the sea front at Antibes. ‘Blue for stocks, green for bonds, maroon for savings accounts, it’s all fairly simple. But you haven’t come here to talk about annual balance sheets, Francis, you’ve come to talk about something else.’
Powerscourt smiled. ‘I want to know about a man called Jeremiah Puncknowle,’ he said.
William Burke moved to the sofa in front of his fireplace. He looked closely at his brother-in-law. ‘Could you be a bit more specific, Francis?’ he said. ‘Puncknowle as businessman, Puncknowle as family man, Puncknowle as friend of the deserving poor? It’s pronounced Punnel by the way, like punnet only with an l at the end.’
Powerscourt had always put his cards on the table with William Burke. ‘Right, William. This is how it goes, or might go. Friend Puncknowle is about to go on trial, sometime in the next ten days at the latest. The two main prosecuting counsel both come from Queen’s Inn. One of them, man by the name of Dauntsey, was murdered almost two weeks ago. He was poisoned and fell face forwards into a bowl of soup at a feast. The benchers, governing body of the Inn, have asked me to investigate his death. Now the other lawyer, fellow by the name of Woodford Stewart, has disappeared. The Crown will either have to proceed with the case and give new counsel virtually no time to prepare what is a very complicated case, or they will have to ask for an adjournment which they may or may not get, depending on the judge. So, you might think, what a coincidence. Just as this massive fraudster is about to go on trial, the lawyers going to attack him are dead or disappear. And, if you were of a suspicious mind, William, you would want to warn the new lawyers to mind their step as they cross Chancery Lane or set out for the Old Bailey. I want to know if this Puncknowle is capable of ordering up a murderer or two. But before that I want to know what sort of fraudster he was. And before that, though why you should have this information I do not know, I want to know if he is in jail or out on bail.’
William Burke closed his eyes briefly. He put the fingers of his two hands together and opened them out into a kind of fan or steeple. ‘He’s not in jail,’ he began, ‘though there are many in the City who were astounded when he was given bail. The policeman in charge of the investigation insisted on the Bank of England itself confirming for him that the relevant sum had been posted. And it was an enormous figure, some men claimed to know it was half a million pounds.’
‘How did this crook persuade a judge to give him bail in the first place? Surely they would have wanted him kept under lock and key until he appeared in court?’
William Burke laughed. ‘It was a fearsome combination, Francis. Clever lawyers and clever doctors. God knows how much they were paid. They told the judge that Puncknowle was perfectly willing to appear in court, but that he had a heart condition. This condition made it highly likely that he would not survive a period as a guest of His Majesty. Many of the other inmates after all would have been defrauded by our friend Jeremiah and might not take too kindly to finding him in their midst. They might wish to take physical revenge for their financial suffering.’
‘Why couldn’t they put him in solitary? Leave him alone for the duration?’
‘Simple minds, Francis, simple minds might think along those lines. There was a further ramification to the heart condition, you see. Claustrophobia, from which our Jeremiah suffered acutely, would be brought on by solitary confinement. There could well be a fatal attack in a couple of days at most. And then what would the great British public and the great British newspapers say of the authorities who had, in their intransigence, kept Puncknowle out of the dock and denied the British investor the chance to see some reparations made for his suffering and his losses?’
‘Surely to God there must have been some place the prison authorities could have put him?’
‘I’m sure there was,’ said Burke cheerfully. His fingers were still arching up towards his fireplace. ‘But they had hit on a masterstroke, Puncknowle’s people. They had discovered, or one of the doctors giving evidence on his behalf had discovered – large sums changing hands, no doubt – that the judge suffered from precisely the same heart condition that Puncknowle was supposed to have. So the judge could imagine only too well what his reaction would have been to a bout of solitary. It would have killed him for sure. So he gave the fellow bail.’
Powerscourt laughed. William Burke looked quite pleased with himself. He sent an enormous puff from his cigar directly into his chimney.
‘And the frauds, William? How did they work?’
Once again Burke paused. This time he looked carefully at his ledgers as if checking they had not been infected by the Puncknowle virus of financial irregularity. He knew his brother-in-law was perfectly capable of grasping financial facts, unlike, to his enormous and eternal regret, his wife and his three sons.
‘Very simple really, to begin with, I suppose. Most fraudsters should stick to their original trick. It’s when they become too elaborate that the house falls down.’
‘So where,’ asked Powerscourt, ‘did he start, this Jeremiah Puncknowle?’
‘He started in the West Country, Francis. I don’t know if you were aware of it but there’s a whole host of tiny dissenting religious communities down there, Muggletonians, Shelmerstonians, Babbacombians, Yalbertonians, hundreds and hundreds of them, all only too happy to knock you down if you disagree with their version of the Book of Revelations or the precise order of the reawakening of the saints on Judgement Day.’
‘Did they think that God had some sort of enormous batting order for Peter and Paul and Sebastian and all the rest of the saints when they’d be called to the wicket for the first innings of the new world?’ As a small boy Powerscourt had always been worried about how Sebastian would be able to rise from the dead when his turn came with all those arrows in him. Surely, he had thought, Sebastian might get up, but he would just as surely fall down again.