It was only when they had dumped their passenger on a sofa in the library that one of the young men bent down to listen to the KC’s breathing. He looked very pale as he stood up.
‘Mr Joseph, sir,’ he stammered, ‘I think the gentleman’s dead.’
‘Nonsense,’ said one of the regular waiters, ‘he can’t be dead.’
‘He bloody well is,’ said the young man, ‘you see if you can hear him breathing. Look at the colour of him, for God’s sake. It’s a bloody corpse that we’ve just carried in, God help us all.’
Joseph bent down and listened for a breath. There was nothing. Joseph had coped with many crises in his time, drunken students, penniless barristers, people who refused to pay their bills, organizing lunch for a temperamental Balkan prince who was rumoured to shoot the staff if the food didn’t agree with him, but not death. Not death on the 28th of February on a day still afflicted with fog, not death at a feast, not death served with borscht and sour cream and the unpronounceable Russian vodka. He knew he should return to his post.
‘Johnston,’ he chose one of his regulars who knew his way about, ‘would you please go to the Head Porter and tell him what has happened. He’s served in the military so he may know more than we do as to whether Mr Dauntsey is alive or not. Tell him we think we need a doctor, and if he agrees, then could he please send you to fetch one. Tell him that I don’t propose to tell the Treasurer anything yet but that I would welcome his advice.’
Johnston ran off towards the porter’s lodge. Tragedy seemed to have brought about a temporary truce in relations between the steward’s office and the porter’s lodge. Back to the Hall went Joseph and his colleagues. It was time to serve the cheese.
Dr James Chamberlain was in the endgame of a chess match with his brother when the summons came. The timing, perhaps, was good for him. His King was trapped in a corner, he had only a castle and a solitary pawn left under his command. The enemy forces bearing down on him consisted of a Queen, a castle and a knight with an ample draft of pawns if they were required. The doctor reckoned he had only a few moves left before defeat, a loss that would put his brother in the lead by sixty-eight to fifty-nine in this marathon match that had now lasted over two years.
‘Sorry to deny you your victory.’ He smiled at his brother John and departed into the night for Queen’s Inn and the recumbent person of Alexander Dauntsey.
Roland Haydon, the Head Porter, solemnly escorted the doctor to the library. It took him less than a minute to give his diagnosis.
‘Mr Dauntsey is dead, I’m afraid. The Treasurer will have to be informed at once. And the next of kin, of course. Do you know who his regular doctor was, Haydon?’
‘I’m afraid I do not, sir. Mr Dauntsey had chambers here, of course, but his home was in Kent. Maybe his regular doctor was down there, sir.’
The doctor bent down again and looked very closely at Dauntsey’s face. He was still looking at it when Barton Somerville, the Treasurer, was shown in, protesting loudly that Dauntsey couldn’t possibly be dead, why, he had seen him only a couple of hours before.
‘Are you sure, Dr Chamberlain? I think he just had a bit too much to drink, that’s all. He’ll be much better in the morning, what?’
Dr Chamberlain looked at his watch. He didn’t care for a late evening spent disputing a death with a collection of drunken lawyers.
‘I’m afraid there can be absolutely no doubt about it, Mr Somerville.’ The doctor was not to know it, but Barton Somerville had a special weakness for being addressed as Treasurer, rather than by his name. He had even circulated a note on the subject to his colleagues on taking up his office. ‘Mr Dauntsey here has been dead for a couple of hours, I should say.’
Dimly Somerville recalled his own words when the dead man had collapsed. ‘He’s drunk. Bloody fool! Leave him there. He’ll come round in a moment. Carry on.’ He thought it unnecessary to mention this to the doctor. He wondered if medical attention then might have saved his life. He wondered briefly if he was liable to a charge of some kind, manslaughter maybe? Criminal negligence? But he thought not.
‘There is not much more we can do this evening, Mr Somerville. I suggest you take the poor gentleman to his own rooms and put him on the bed for now. I think you should tell the next of kin. Was there a wife and children down there in Kent?’
The Treasurer nodded sadly. ‘Wife, no children.’
‘Well, a wire, or a phone call if they are connected. I shall come back in the morning. I shall inform the coroner. And I shall have to bring the police as well.’
‘The police? Why do we need the police, for heaven’s sake? We’re lawyers here, not criminals.’
‘It is routine procedure, Mr Somerville, that’s all. We have to decide if the death was due to natural causes or not. There may have to be a post-mortem before the inquest.’
‘You don’t think there was anything unnatural about Dauntsey’s death, do you?’ said the Treasurer, consumed with anxiety about his own behaviour.
The doctor had decided that he did not care for Mr Barton Somerville. And he thought the man was hiding something, probably about the circumstances of the death.
‘It’s far too early to say whether your colleague died from natural causes or not,’ he said. ‘From my brief inspection of the man I shouldn’t be at all surprised if there was something unnatural about it, but I could not be sure.’
2
‘Poison,’ said the pathologist, peering sadly at the human organs that had once been Alexander Dauntsey on the slab in front of him.
‘Are you sure?’ said the policeman, waiting respectfully some distance away, twirling his hat in his hands.
‘Yes, I am,’ replied the pathologist, ‘but quite what sort of poison it was or how fast it acts upon the human body, I do not yet know. I shall have to send this lot away for further analysis.’
The two men, their faces pale in the antiseptic colours of the mortuary, were very different. James Willoughby, the pathologist, was old and bald and bent. He had only two more years to go before he retired to the little cottage he had already bought in Norfolk. Chief Inspector Jack Beecham had many many years to go before his retirement. He was tall and slim with light curly hair and he looked even younger than his thirty-two years. His superiors in the Metropolitan Police suspected from the start that Dauntsey had been murdered – the doctor had alerted them – and had assigned one of their most intelligent detectives to the case.
Forty minutes later Beecham was shown into the Treasurer’s quarters in Queen’s Inn. They were on the first floor in Fortune Court, in a glorious room nearly forty feet long, looking out over the Thames with high ceilings and old prints of London adorning the walls. Here you could have seen one of the earliest extant prints of the Temple Church and fine watercolours of the Queen’s Inn and its gardens. Barton Somerville was seated at an enormous desk, with a couple of briefs lying at the corner.
‘Good morning, constable,’ he said, looking with some disdain at the policeman. ‘What can I do for you?’
Jack Beecham was well used to people making the wrong assumptions about him. ‘I stopped being a constable some years ago, sir,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector Beecham now. I’m in charge of the case of the late Mr Dauntsey, sir.’
‘In charge, are you?’ said Somerville incredulously. ‘Are you the most senior person they’ve got?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Beecham, trying to remain polite, ‘I am. And I’m here to tell you that we believe, or rather the pathologist believes, that we are dealing with a case of murder here.’
With difficulty Somerville resisted the temptation to ask how old the pathologist was. Fifteen? Twenty-one? ‘Are you sure it was murder? Are you saying he was poisoned? Do you yet know what sort of poison it was?’