He wondered, as he made his way out towards Bedford Square and Queen’s Inn, what had happened to Woodford Stewart. Had he too been poisoned? Or had the murderer turned to an easier and older means of death, a mighty blow from a steel sword, a thrust through the throat with a scimitar, a fatal stab with a dagger or kris?
The reception area for Plunkett Marlowe and Plunkett was pretty standard stuff, Powerscourt thought, as he surveyed the comfortable but fading chairs, the anonymous carpet, the prints of hunting and other rural pursuits on the walls. It was as though heaven for the solicitor breed was to be found somewhere in the hunting territory of Hampshire or Gloucestershire. The barristers, he thought, would prefer something more confrontational, perhaps some secret county with cock fighting and bear baiting. But Mr Plunkett, the younger Mr Plunkett as he had been referred to by the receptionist, was certainly a surprise. He was young for a start, very young. Powerscourt thought he could not have been out of university very long. He wondered, indeed, if the young man had started shaving yet as his cheeks were as smooth as silk. He positively bounded across the room to greet Powerscourt warmly.
‘Lord Powerscourt, welcome. Matthew Plunkett. What an honour to meet you in person! Come with me!’
With that the young man led his visitor at breakneck speed up two flights of stairs, along a corridor, past a small library and into Mr Plunkett the younger’s spacious office, decorated with prints of London. At least this one wants to stay where he is, Powerscourt said to himself, rather than escape to the Elysian Fields of horn and fox.
‘Now then, please take a seat across my desk, Lord Powerscourt, and we can get down to business.’
Powerscourt thought this was the youngest solicitor he had ever seen . Normally they were middle-aged or elderly citizens. Perhaps the younger ones were sent away to practise elsewhere until they came of age, hidden away in the attics until sometime beyond their fortieth birthdays.
‘Mrs Dauntsey has given me full discretion in what I tell you about the will,’ he said cheerfully, smiling at Powerscourt. ‘In some ways it’s a simple document, but it does have one fascinating oddity.’ He collected a group of papers together on his desk but Powerscourt noticed that he did not refer to them once as he gave his description of Dauntsey’s last will and testament.
‘The estate itself, the house, the land, the paintings and so on are all covered by the family trust. I believe that this document was started at about the same time Moses was found among the bulrushes in Egypt. It covers every possible eventuality and it stipulates, quite simply, that in this case of an owner dying with no children, the estate should pass to the eldest brother, if there is one, in this case Nicholas Dauntsey, currently thought to be resident in Manitoba and expected back to claim his little kingdom in the next month or so.’
Matthew Plunkett paused to inspect a tattered seagull that had taken up temporary residence on his window sill.
‘Mrs Dauntsey, of course, is well provided for, with accommodation inside the house if that should suit, or in one of the decent houses on the fringes of the estate. There is ample financial provision, as we lawyers like to say. There are a number of small bequests to staff or local institutions like the cricket club. And then we come to the mystery bequest.’
Matthew Plunkett was enjoying this. He leaned forward and addressed Powerscourt directly.
‘After the ten pounds here, and the five pounds there, Lord Powerscourt, we have the spectacular sum of twenty thousand pounds left to one F.L. Maxfield. Maxfield the mystery man we call him here now, my lord.’
‘You can’t find him?’ said Powerscourt.
‘Correct. Now you know as well as I do that solicitors have to spend a lot of time tracing people in cases like this. Plunkett Marlowe and Plunkett is also a founder member of a specialist firm devoted to finding persons like this Maxfield. We can’t find him. They can’t find him. We’ve tried Mr Dauntsey’s old school, his Cambridge college, his regiment in the Army, every single chambers he’s ever served in. We can’t find a birth certificate but they do get mislaid sometimes, or he might have been born abroad. We can’t, you won’t be surprised to hear, find any evidence of marriage or even death which would make our lives easier.’
‘Are you sure it’s a man? Might this be a Miss Maxfield or a Mrs Maxfield, an old flame from days gone by?’
‘We’ve talked about that a lot, Lord Powerscourt. My view is this. Mr Dauntsey was a lawyer, trained to be precise in his use of language. If the Maxfield was a woman, he would have put Miss or Mrs in the document, I’m sure of it.’
Busloads of Maxfields, Maxfields old, Maxfields young, Maxfields rich, Maxfields poor, floated past Powerscourt’s brain and disappeared.
‘When did he make this will, Mr Plunkett? Was it the first one or an updated version of a will that had existed before? And did he make it here, with one of you gentlemen present?’
‘My goodness me, Lord Powerscourt, you do ask a lot of questions. To take them in order, he made the will three years ago and we think he wrote it in his chambers. It was the latest in a series of wills the trustees encouraged him to make ever since his twenty-first birthday. That, I fear, is rather the kind of thing the trustees go in for.’
Powerscourt smiled. The young man was not completely indoctrinated with the solicitor’s mindset, or not yet at any rate.
‘He’d been in to talk to my uncle, the one they call Killer Plunkett, the day before he wrote this will. This latest one, dated 1899, was the first appearance of the wretched Maxfield.’
Powerscourt wondered what this perfectly law-abiding Plunkett had done to earn the nickname Killer. ‘So whoever Maxfield is or was,’ he said, ‘his association with Dauntsey must have been complete, so to speak, three years ago. I mean, whatever the reason for giving him the money, it was all there then. Do you know, Mr Plunkett, if Dauntsey told his beneficiary about his plans? Did Maxfield, not to put too fine a point on it, know that he would get twenty thousand pounds if Dauntsey fell into his borscht?’
‘I’m afraid he did,’ Matthew Plunkett grimaced slightly, ‘or rather he said he was going to. He told Killer he was going to write to Maxfield and give him the good news.’