‘Alexander Dauntsey, he was. About our sort of age, been a KC for about six years, I think, recently elected a bencher – sort of senior prefect – of his Inn. Unusual sort of barrister, he was. On his day he was quite brilliant. He did all sorts of cases, criminal, divorce, Chancery, he could handle the lot. When he was on form he could have got Jack the Ripper off. On a bad day, he was simply hopeless. It made the instructing solicitors rather nervous as they were never sure which Dauntsey they were going to get.’
‘Did he have any vices you heard about?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘Women, gambling, expensive clothes?’
Charles Augustus Pugh laughed. ‘There were always whispers about Dauntsey and the women. Nothing you could get your teeth into, but then there never is unless people are foolish enough to land themselves in the divorce courts.’
‘Married?’ said Powerscourt.
‘Yes, he was, very beautiful woman he married too. That was another thing about Dauntsey. He had this enormous house in the country, in Kent I think, hundreds of rooms, ancient deer park with hundreds of bloody deer roaming all over the place. Wonderful art collection.’ Pugh paused and smiled to himself briefly. ‘Man told me last year that all his relatives thought Dauntsey was mad. He was taking down the Van Dycks and the Rubens and replacing them with those French Impressionist people, water lilies in the garden, strange wiggly lines pretending to be fields or mountains, you know the sort of thing.’
‘I’m not sure I like the sound of this case very much,’ said Powerscourt thoughtfully. ‘I don’t mean the man’s taste in pictures, he can put whatever he likes on his own walls. It’s the thought of all those people who think they’re in the fashionable cavalry regiment. I’ve had enough of those to last me a lifetime. If you were me, Charles, would you take it on? I don’t have to.’
‘I think,’ Pugh replied, ‘that it is entirely a matter for yourself. But think about it. If you hadn’t become involved in that art forgery case a couple of years ago, Horace Aloysius Buckley, an innocent man, on trial for murder at the Central Criminal Court, would have been hanged by the neck until he was dead.’
There was one small corner, with room for four chairs, left fit for human rather than packing case habitation in the Powerscourt dining room. There was one day left before the removals men came to take them to their temporary home in Manchester Square. As they took their breakfast Lady Lucy looked like a general on the eve of a great engagement. Powerscourt was turning an envelope over and over in his hand. It was a very expensive envelope, the stationery equivalent of one of Charles Augustus Pugh’s shirts. He wasn’t going to open it yet. He had told Lady Lucy about Pugh’s visit and his news the night before.
‘For heaven’s sake, Francis,’ she said, irritated perhaps that while she was being so decisive about the move, the man of the house couldn’t even make up his mind whether to open an envelope or not, ‘there isn’t a bomb in there. It’s not going to explode.’
‘Sorry, Lucy, sorry,’ said Powerscourt, ‘it’s just that I know what’s inside.’ With a grimace rather like somebody plunging into a cold bath, he opened his envelope and peered sadly at its contents. ‘Pretty pompous,’ he said and handed it over to his wife.
‘“Dear Lord Powerscourt,”’ Lady Lucy read it aloud, ‘“I write as the Treasurer of Queen’s Inn. On 28th February at an Inn feast, Mr Alexander Dauntsey KC, one of our benchers, dropped dead. The post-mortem produced evidence that he had been murdered. I am not satisfied with the personnel, the methods or the attitude of the officers of the Metropolitan Police assigned to investigate this matter. I have written to the Commissioner to convey my most serious reservations. I understand that you are one of the most distinguished private investigators in London and I am writing to ask if you would be able to come and discuss the necessary measures with us. If so, I would be grateful if you could call on me at my chambers at noon today.”’
Lady Lucy put the letter back in its envelope. ‘I don’t think he’s very taken with the police, Francis, what do you think?’
‘No, he’s not. What am I to do, Lucy? I don’t want to take this on. I don’t like the sound of all these lawyers. And it couldn’t have come at a worse time, with the move and everything.’
Privately Lucy thought it couldn’t have come at a better time. She was certain she would sort out the move much more quickly and efficiently without Francis hanging around and getting in the way. She thought the case came from providence but she wasn’t going to say so.
‘You know my views, Francis.’ However bad the circumstances, however dangerous the situation, Lady Lucy Powerscourt had never suggested that Francis and Johnny Fitzgerald should abandon an investigation. ‘Somebody has killed Mr Dauntsey. That person may kill more people unless you go and find them. Don’t worry about the move.’ She leant over and covered his hand with her smaller one. ‘We’ll manage somehow.’
The mood was subdued in the Dauntsey chambers after his death. The young men stopped skylarking on the stairs and having paper fights in the library. The seniors looked grave and conversed with each other in hushed tones about the particular kind of poison that had disposed of their colleague. At the very top of the chambers there was one person who mourned him particularly. Sarah Henderson was their stenographer, secretary and mascot. She was twenty years old, tall and slim with a shock of red hair and bright green eyes. She repulsed all the advances of the Queen’s males of whatever age with the same apologetic tone, as if she was greatly flattered to be invited to the theatre, the opera, lunch, dinner, the ballet, but her mind was on other things. The one crucial fact installed in her and all her fellow students at the secretarial college she had attended in Finsbury was that emotional entanglements with people at work were to be avoided like the plague. Nothing, not even bad spelling or mistakes in dictation or arriving at work improperly dressed, was likely to cause such complication or such unhappiness. The lecturer who had warned them of these terrible perils was herself a spinster of over fifty. There was much speculation among the girls that some such error might have wrecked her life, a long affair with a married man who refused to leave his wife perhaps, a lover who ran away and deserted her at the advanced age of twenty-eight.
Sarah had been very fond of Dauntsey. She adored the sound of his voice, quite light, not one to dominate a courtroom by sheer power of delivery, but it had great variety. It danced, she used to say, as he leant back in his chair, feet caressing the desk, and dictated the course of an opening or closing speech. Unlike many of his colleagues, he seemed to find dictating the most natural thing in the world. Sarah knew that he always had one eye on the movement of her pencil, waiting till it stopped before he carried on. He had charm, lots of charm, Sarah thought, remembering how polite he always was and how he took the time and trouble to inquire after her sick mother.
Had Dauntsey or any of the other barristers known how central a role Queen’s Inn in general or their chambers in particular played in Mrs Bertha Henderson’s life they would have been astonished. Every evening Sarah had worked there she was quizzed on the day’s events when she went home. It wasn’t intrusive, the questioning, it wasn’t rude but it was persistent. Her mother was almost bedridden with arthritis in her early fifties and could only just get around their small house in Acton. She also suffered from a rare form of cancer which meant she might only have two or three years left to live. Queen’s Inn had become an alternative world, a world she could escape to in her imagination during the daytime when the external world of London’s shops and buses and traffic and movement was closed to her. She could have told you, Mrs Henderson, what prints were on the wall of every room on her daughter’s staircase. She could have told you what cases the various gentlemen were currently engaged on. Sarah would bring law journals home so her mother could read about her heroes in print. By now, her daughter suspected, she could have carried out a perfectly respectable prosecution or defence in a simple case in the county court. Queen’s had become for her a serial story like the ones they published in such quantities in the women’s magazines she read so avidly.