Johnny Fitzgerald had left a message for Powerscourt at Markham Square while he was away. It said that he had returned from his bird watching and would call on them in the evening. He would bring his own packing case to sit on. Birds and bird watching had become a major, if not the principal, interest in Johnny’s life. All his days he had been interested in them, once endangering his and Powerscourt’s life in the Punjab when he had refused to take evasive action because some exotic Indian vulture was passing overhead. Now he followed them everywhere, not just in Great Britain but across Europe as well. Birds migrating, birds nesting, yellow-flanked and yellow-nosed, red-vented and blue-cheeked, black-headed, black-faced and black-crowned, crested honey and double-crested, spotted, striped, great spotted, lesser whistling, Johnny loved them all. Powerscourt had accompanied him for part of a day the year before, rising in the dark to stride out to a position on the edge of a marsh near the sea in Norfolk. There were plenty of birds but Powerscourt did not feel the appeal. Johnny could never explain it. He liked to see them fly and soar and swoop, he would say. He liked knowing where they had come from and where they were going. He liked watching the young ones taking their first experimental flights under the watchful eye of their parents. But he could never transmit the secret of the appeal, if there was one, any more than some lovers of classical music could explain their devotion. Lady Lucy wondered if it all had to do with Johnny being single. He had simply adopted an enormous airborne family with wings, she would say, to compensate for the lack of a two-footed one rooted to the earth.
It was the patience Powerscourt admired most. Johnny seemed to pass into a world on the other side of time, lying there for hours and hours with never a pang of hunger. And sometimes he would talk of the exotic birds he wanted to see one day, a list as romantic as those of the train fanatics who wish to visit the last station on the remotest train lines in the world, somewhere out in the remote snows of Siberia or the mountains of the Hindu Kush. The short-toed eagle, he would murmur, the king eider, the spectacled eider. Then the birds would become more exotic yet. Johnny would enthuse about masked and brown boobies, about Chinese pond herons and goliath herons or the semi-collared sometimes double-spurred francolin, the magnificent frigate bird, the black-winged pratincole. Some might be able to recite the names of the major English football clubs. Johnny could respond with yet more species on his journey of discovery. Some day, he promised, he would be able to tick them all off his list, sapsuckers, shelducks, shrike, snowcocks, stonechats, silverbills, smews, scaups, shikras and shovelers, sanderlings and shearwaters, siskins and sprossers.
‘It’s like a rather bad public school,’ Powerscourt said to Johnny and Lady Lucy in the early evening in Markham Square, ‘one where they concentrate on the games because they haven’t got any good teachers, and they beat the boys too much. This man Barton Somerville is the headmaster, and those other two are his housemasters. Like schoolmasters everywhere they can’t bear not being in control.’
Powerscourt had explained his lunchtime encounter with the benchers of Queen’s Inn. In his heart he knew, and he knew the other two knew, what he was going to do, but he wanted to hear what they had to say.
‘It’s almost as though they have something to hide,’ he went on. ‘There was an obsession with control. The policeman, Chief Inspector Beecham, mentioned it to me this afternoon. He noticed it as well.’
‘Do you think they know who killed Mr Dauntsey?’ asked Lady Lucy. ‘And that they’re worried you would find out the truth?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Powerscourt.
‘Institutions can go very strange when they’ve got something to hide,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, scratching his head as he spoke. ‘Do you remember that terrible case in India, Francis, where half the regiment were carrying on with the Colonel’s wife and everybody knew except the Colonel? Very strange atmosphere there.’
‘Even stranger,’ said Powerscourt, ‘when the Colonel found out what was going on and began shooting the officers one by one. Regimental Sergeant Major, only sane man in the place, put it down to the heat.’
‘God bless my soul,’ said Lady Lucy, who had always believed that the main danger in the sub-continent came from rebellious or ambitious native warlords rather than fellow officers of the regiment. ‘Are you going to take the case, Francis? That’s what we all want to hear.’
‘Do you think I should, Lucy? Even with these dreadful people?’
‘You know my views.’ Lady Lucy looked steadily at her husband. ‘However dreadful they are, you must do it. You may save some lives. We don’t want any more people collapsing into their soup.’
‘Johnny?’ said Powerscourt, turning to his friend.
‘Well, Francis, I don’t know a lot about this case yet. No doubt if you accept you will write them a most ferocious note, sounding like the Lord Chancellor himself, outlining your terms of reference and reserving the way you conduct the investigation to yourself. I can think of three reasons for taking it on.’ Lady Lucy was hugging herself secretly. Surely an investigation like this couldn’t be very dangerous. She would have felt differently if it was. But she felt sure that Francis would be out of her way and the move could be accomplished in peace and efficiency.
‘The first one, I think, is rather childish,’ Johnny Fitzgerald went on, ‘but at some point in our inquiries I am sure there will be an opportunity to pay back those bastards – forgive me, Lucy – for the way they treated you. Petty maybe but valid nonetheless. And the second is to do with our reputation. Think of it. We have conducted investigations into the secrets of the Royal Family, into the machinations of the City of London, into the world of fine art and fraudsters and into the strange intrigues of a Church of England cathedral. Now we could add the law to our list of successes – if we succeed, that is.’
Johnny Fitzgerald paused for a moment.
‘And the third reason, Johnny?’ asked Powerscourt, feeling rather important suddenly as their investigations were rolled out one after the other.
‘The third reason,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘is the most important of all. A man told me years ago, I can’t remember where, that if you want to drink the finest wine in London, you have to go to the Grosvenor Club, or to any one of the Inns of Court. Any one of them, Francis. Bloody great cellars they all have under those pretty buildings. A chap might get very thirsty wandering around and talking to counsel, don’t you think?’
Powerscourt laughed. ‘I’m afraid I don’t think you will be anywhere near the Strand or the Inner Temple for a while, Johnny,’ he said. ‘You see, even after that dreadful meeting I knew I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t take it on. So when I had calmed down I had a long chat with the clerk who looks after Dauntsey’s chambers. He drew up a list of his major cases over the last seven years, concentrating on the criminal trials. The clerk was concerned with the case of a man called Howard, Winston Howard, who’d been on trial for armed robbery at the Old Bailey. Dauntsey defended him on the instructions of the solicitors, firm called Hooper. The solicitors implied to the robber Howard that Dauntsey would get him off. And he was innocent, it would seem, of this particular bit of armed robbery. Done lots of it before and not been caught, too smart for that. But Dauntsey didn’t get him off. Howard went down, apparently absolutely livid about the injustice. He swore he’d get even with the fools who’d sent him down.’
‘This is all very interesting, Francis,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘but what has it to do with me?’