Edward told Sarah later that evening that his host offered him a twin as he might have offered a cucumber sandwich or a slice of cake at afternoon tea. Very gingerly he took a small, well-wrapped bundle in his arms, holding it very delicately.
‘They look about quite a bit now,’ said Powerscourt happily. ‘Sometimes they grab hold of your finger as if they’re a monkey. The nurse will be coming to take them away for their bath in a minute, Edward. You won’t have to last out for very long.’
‘Which one have I got?’ asked Edward.
‘You’ve got the boy, Christopher. The other children are calling him Chris already. I’d much rather he had the full name. If we’d wanted to call him Chris, I keep telling Thomas and Olivia, we’d have christened him that. But they don’t pay any attention. Do you have a view on this?’
Edward had no wish to tread into some diplomatic imbroglio between parent and children. ‘Well,’ he said tactfully, ‘you don’t have to decide yet, do you? Christopher himself might have a view on this?’
At that point a middle-aged nurse, spotless in white, appeared in the doorway. She had two large white towels over one arm.
‘Nurse Mary Muriel,’ said Powerscourt, ‘you have come for the twins, I see. Allow me to introduce Edward, a great friend of the family.’
‘How do you do,’ Mary Muriel said to Edward, and advanced to claim her charges. ‘It’s bath time,’ she said, as if it were some ritual fixed by Royal Decree or Act of Parliament, and swept out of the room towards the upper floors, her tiny charges firmly under her control.
‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, parking himself in his favourite armchair to the left of the sofa in front of the fire, ‘I sometime want to suggest to Mary Muriel that she postpone bath time for ten minutes so I could have more time with the twins. I am their father, after all. And I pay her wages, come to that. But she is terribly good at her job. She looked after Thomas and Olivia when they were little. But her world runs like clockwork. If you check your watch, Edward, I think you’ll find that it is about one minute after six. If bath time does not commence at exactly six o’clock, London will sink below the Thames, there will be a plague of locusts and the waters shall cover the face of the earth.’
Edward smiled. ‘I’m glad I’ve met this titan of the nursery,’ he said, ‘and it is just coming up to two minutes after six.’
‘Now then, young Edward,’ said Powerscourt, ‘time to be serious for a moment. I’ve been reading those wills and I’m very confused. There are a number of people supposed to be receiving money from the Inn who aren’t. Have you ever come across any poor pupils or students being maintained by the munificence of Queen’s and the generosity of its past benchers?’
‘I have not,’ Edward replied, ‘none at all. And I don’t think I’ve ever heard of any money going to retired barristers in straitened circumstances either.’
‘I wonder if they could have changed the statutes,’ said Powerscourt, cocking an ear to sounds of unhappiness floating down from the higher levels, presumably to do with the total immersion in water, ‘but it’s very difficult to change people’s wills after they’ve been proved. It’s almost unheard of.’
‘Do you think there is a connection with the murders, Lord Powerscourt?’
‘Not directly, no. But there is certainly something odd going on and I am most curious to find out what it is. Suppose Dauntsey discovers something strange is going on to do with the money. He tells his friend Stewart. Then he tries a bit of blackmail on Barton Somerville. Or maybe it’s the other way round. I just don’t know.’
‘So how do we find out what’s been happening?’
‘I have a proposition to put to you, Edward. I can’t say it is particularly glamorous or romantic but it could help a great deal.’
‘Anything at all, Lord Powerscourt.’
‘Before I outline the task ahead, Edward, let me explain what is going to happen to these wills.’ He popped a hand under his chair and brought out a bundle of papers, secured, Edward noticed, with legal string.
‘These wills are arranged, first of all, in time order. Then I have tabulated them into categories of payment, help for poor students, help for retired barristers, general discretion of the Inn, that sort of thing. I have put the date of each bequest in brackets before the money. Thank God there weren’t any more of these dead benchers, Edward, we’d have suffocated in paper. My brother-in-law, financial equivalent of W.G. Grace as I said before, is coming to collect them this evening and peruse them in his counting house tomorrow. But I know what he will want before he can come to any conclusion.’
Edward lifted a quizzical eyebrow.
‘Annual accounts or the equivalent, from last year or some other recent year. Now, listen carefully, Edward, and tell me where I go wrong in this description.’ Powerscourt paused. A prolonged wail of great unhappiness shot down the stairs, followed by a second, rather shorter protest.
‘I think she’s washing their hair,’ Powerscourt said, sounding as if he disapproved of the practice. ‘Anyway, there is a bencher in the Inn one of whose tasks is to look after the money but only, you might say, in a tactical sense. The strategic direction rests, as you might expect given his title, with the Treasurer. In symbolic recognition of which fact, the box files relating to the annual accounts are held in his outer office, guarded by that gorgonic female with the mousy grey hair and the long fingernails. I forget the bloody woman’s name.’
‘McKenna,’ said Edward, ‘Bridget McKenna.’
‘She would be called Bridget,’ said Powerscourt bitterly, who had a violent dislike of the name since hostile encounters with a very stupid parlourmaid called Bridget in his youth. ‘But she has the files all right. They stretch round behind her desk on shelves, two or three levels high, in black boxes with the dates of the accounts written on them. I know that, because I inspected them the first time I went to see Somerville and his gang. How am I doing, Edward?’
‘You’re doing fine,’ Edward smiled, suspecting he knew what was coming. ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘I want you to steal some of them,’ said Powerscourt. ‘As many as you can. Preferably tomorrow.’
‘I see,’ said Edward, and scratched his head.
‘Let me give you a suggestion as to the general method I would employ if it was me. I would do it, or Johnny Fitzgerald and I would do it, but I think you would have a better chance if you were caught. You could say you were doing it for a dare or a bet or some other foolish extravagance of youth. I have asked to see them, of course, I asked long ago and was told it was none of my business. I think we may need to involve Sarah, though I leave that to your discretion. There are two ways of approaching the files, what you might call theft or substitution. Theft is self-explanatory, you simply take them off the shelf and walk away. Substitution means that you bring with you a couple of identical files with the same dates as the ones you wish to purloin. You take one out and you pop the other one in. So, at a glance, nobody would know anything had gone. But it all depends on how and when they lock the door.’
There was a faraway look in Edward’s eyes as if he had left Manchester Square and had returned on a piratical mission to the courts and walks of Queen’s Inn.
‘I think it works like this, Lord Powerscourt,’ he said, speaking quite slowly as if his plan hadn’t finally been settled in his mind. ‘If they’re both out to lunch, they make sure the door is locked. Any major departures, they close up behind them. But on minor matters there must be times when it’s empty, even if only for a few minutes.’
‘Does the gorgonic female lock up when she goes to the bathroom, do you suppose?’
‘I don’t think she would, but that might only leave a very little time. How about this, Lord Powerscourt? Mr Kirk, the head of my chambers, has hurt his leg very badly. It’s true. He brought two sticks in with him today. So let’s say he appeals to Somerville to come and see him on some important matter, rather than him going through hell to reach the Treasurer’s quarters. Once he’s arrived, Sarah sets off for the gorgon’s lair, with a terribly sad story. Her typewriter has gone funny. The ribbon is wrapped round the cantilever or whatever the thing is called and can’t be cleared, so it’s now rather like a tangled fishing line. Sarah will know how to do that. The gorgon always prides herself on being Queen Bee or Head Girl to all these stenographers. So if Sarah makes it dramatic enough, wailing away about work that has to be finished by two o’clock that afternoon or whatever it might be, the gorgon will hurry out to help, and she hasn’t time to lock the door. Enter the Artful Dodger, me. I depart half a minute later. I like substitution better than theft, Lord Powerscourt. I think they shift about, those files, and throw up a lot of dust if they’re all moved three boxes to the left. It wouldn’t look right either. I think three is the most you could carry around Queen’s Inn. You see people walking about with one or two or three under their arm, very seldom any more.’