All of the Maxfield replies were now with Powerscourt in Manchester Square with the Army and Calne bringing up the rear. No from Cambridge, he read, no from the Army, no from his old school. Only one reply offered any sort of hope and even that looked pretty slim. It came from the head groundsman at Calne. He himself, he wrote, was unable to be of assistance as he had only been in the post for five years and had no knowledge of Mr Dauntsey growing up. He had, however, discussed it with his predecessor, who believed he might be able to help. If Lord Powerscourt could confirm by return of post, Matthew Jenkins, who had been head groundsman for almost fifty years, would meet him at the Calne cricket pavilion at three o’clock in the afternoon in two days’ time.
Johnny Fitzgerald had almost persuaded Powerscourt that Maxfield was a blackmailer, spacing out his demands over the decades to avoid detection. Chief Inspector Beecham’s theory was that Maxfield had lent Dauntsey a great sum of money to pay off youthful indiscretions and the cash was now being returned with interest. Lady Lucy believed the bequest was a reward. Maybe Maxfield had saved Dauntsey’s life in the past and this was a thank you from beyond the grave. Powerscourt just hoped that this was his last trip to Calne. I should have bought a season ticket when this investigation started, he said to himself, peering anxiously round the estate for armed assassins come to finish him off.
Matthew Jenkins had brought two chairs and a small table on to the verandah of the cricket pavilion. There were a number of notebooks lying roughly beside one of the chairs. Jenkins was a small wrinkled old gentleman with a full head of white hair. His hands and his arms were very brown from years in the open air. His face was clean-shaven and looked to Powerscourt like a nut with human features attached. He spoke slowly and seemed to think quite hard before he opened his mouth.
‘Good afternoon, Mr Jenkins,’ said Powerscourt, opening the batting. ‘Thank you very much for seeing me.’
‘If there’s anything I could do for Mr Dauntsey, sir, I’d walk through hellfire to do it for him, I would.’ And with that, Matthew Jenkins nodded his white hair for what seemed to Powerscourt to be almost a minute.
‘You told John James, your successor, that you might be able to help me with this missing Maxfield, Mr Jenkins.’
‘I can, sir.’ The old man stopped there and stared out at the pitch as if remembering matches from long ago. A couple of deer were inspecting them from the far boundary. ‘You mentioned nicknames in your letter, sir. Well, that was what set me thinking. You see, we did have a boy and man, contemporary of Mr Dauntsey, with a nickname. Squirrel, he was called. I can’t remember, if I ever knew, why he was called Squirrel. Maybe he hoarded things and buried them in secret places. He was born here, his father worked on the estate. He must have been about the same age as Mr Dauntsey. They grew up together, played together, chased the deer together.’ This brought another of those long-drawn-out noddings of the Jenkins head. Powerscourt watched it move slowly up and down, the eyes still staring out at the wicket.
‘Did everybody call him Squirrel, Mr Jenkins?’
‘Somebody told me the other day, sir, that they thought even his own family must have called him Squirrel. But I’m losing my way, Lord Powerscourt. The reason I asked to meet you here was that Mr Dauntsey and Squirrel played cricket together. They opened the batting for the junior team, then the senior team, they even had a trial together for the County. And the scorer for the Calne cricket team was the estate steward, a miserable man who’d been in the Army called Buchanan-Smith. A real stickler for formality, he was, sir. There was no way he would have put just Squirrel in his score book.’
Matthew Jenkins bent down and picked up a faded green volume. ‘Here we are, sir, A.M. Dauntsey, caught Pollard, bowled Keyes, thirty-four, Squirrel Maxfield, bowled Hawkins, forty-two.’
Powerscourt picked up another book for another year and found more records of successful partnerships between the two men.
Powerscourt was as interested as the next man in cricket records but he felt he should press on.
‘Is he still here, Squirrel Maxfield? Is he still opening the batting for Calne?’
Matthew Jenkins looked so sad, Powerscourt thought he might burst into tears. ‘No, my lord, he’s not here. He left soon after the catastrophe. You know how they say some people are marked out for disaster, for the vengeance of the gods – well, I think he was one of them.’
The white head was off again. Powerscourt waited. ‘He married late, this Squirrel,’ Jenkins went on, leafing absent-mindedly through another of the score books, ‘must have been about five or six years ago. They had a son, lovely little boy he was, with blond hair and big green eyes. Until he was one and a half, nearly two, everything was fine. Then things began to go wrong with the boy. They took him to a lot of doctors but there was no cure. Epilepsy and mental deficiency, that’s what they said it was. Just when they were taking all that in, the wife was pregnant again. Same thing. Another little boy, same problem, same illness. The doctors shook their heads. They needed extra help to look after the little ones. Worst thing was, these children would never get better, they’d need looking after all their lives. People said there were special hospitals and places you could send them. Squirrel Maxfield said nobody ever came out alive from those places. He said if they could just keep them alive long enough somebody would come up with a cure. Squirrel said he didn’t believe God could send people out into this world who weren’t well without intending to cure them.’
‘Did they receive help from anywhere, Mr Jenkins? Financial help?’
‘Well, my lord, you know how it is in small communities like ours. Gossip going everywhere, like a weed. People said Mr Dauntsey gave them money, a lot of money, but nobody knew. They all went off to the South of France. Maybe the climate would be better, I don’t know. People say it’s cheaper to live there, I wouldn’t know, I sometimes think I haven’t much time left here myself.’
‘Nonsense, Mr Jenkins,’ said Powerscourt, ‘you’ll be here for years yet. But tell me, what did you make of the two of them, Dauntsey and Maxfield?’
The old man looked at him carefully and began extracting pipe, tobacco pouch and matches from various pockets.
‘Squirrel Maxfield, I didn’t know him well. He worked in the town as a carpenter so we did see him here from time to time. Very pleasant gentleman, always polite to me. Mr Dauntsey, mind you, I watched him grow up. I never knew a more considerate man, always happy to help the people on the estate in bad times. He was a real loss, sir.’
‘I don’t suppose,’ said Powerscourt, anxious to remove all possible ambiguity, ‘that Mr Maxfield has been back here in the last couple of months or so?’ Not on a feast day in Queen’s Inn at the end of February, he said to himself.
‘No, sir, he’s not been back. I’m sure he would have come back for the funeral if he’d heard about it in time. Don’t suppose the posts and things work very well over there. And if he’d been back he’d have come down to see his old mother who’s still alive in the town and we’d have heard all about it.’
On his train back to London Powerscourt felt relieved that F.L. Maxfield could at last be removed from their inquiries. And he wondered again about the nature of his first murder victim, Alexander Dauntsey, a man whose generosity to his friends extended beyond the grave.
14
Edward found Lord Francis Powerscourt pacing up and down his drawing room with the twins nestling against his chest. Edward could have sworn he was talking to them about Pericles’ funeral speech in Book Two of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War.
‘You’ve got to talk to them about something,’ said Powerscourt cheerfully. ‘Johnny Fitzgerald has told them already about all the birds of London and their breeding habits. Would you like one?’