Death Called to the Bar

Book 5: Lord Francis Powerscourt

by David Dickinson

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

Queen's Inn is London's youngest and most fashionable Inn of Court. On 29th February 1902, at a Feast, senior barrister Alexander Dauntsey collapses into his soup and dies. He has been poisoned. Soon after his friend Woodford Stewart is shot dead, and Lord Francis Powerscourt is summoned to discreetly investigate the matter of the murdered barristers. His inquiries take him into the heart of legal London where the wills of the dead can reveal the crimes of the living. It takes him to the heart of a troubled marriage where lack of children imperils everything. And it takes him to Calne, a mysterious house in the country where the glorious past is boarded up and the treasures of generations hide beneath the dustsheets. There are many suspects: a jealous wife, a mistress fearful of being jilted, a work colleague beaten to the senior role in the Inn and a cuckolded husband who writes books about poisons. Powerscourt himself is put in grave danger before he finally solves the mystery of Death Called to the Bar.

Release date: September 1, 2011

Publisher: C & R Crime

Print pages: 260

Sample

There was a tremendous crash right up against the wall. One carriage, maybe two, had turned on its side and fallen to the ground. Horses were screaming in pain as they too were
pulled down by the harness to street level. Then came the swearing. Lord Francis Powerscourt did not think it would be possible for one man’s voice to penetrate through the thick walls of
Chelsea Old Church, but it was. The words the coachman was speaking were not suitable for any morning of the week, let alone a morning of such importance in the Powerscourt family calendar. And
there was worse. A different voice, presumably that of the other coachman, rang out in the midday air in language that was if anything even riper than the cursing of the first fellow. Powerscourt
realized that he would not be able to give precise meanings to many of these words. They were new to him. He looked down at his two children, hoping they would not ask him what the words meant
afterwards. He looked round at the congregation and saw one or two of the men smiling quietly to themselves and one or two of the maiden aunts covering their ears with their hands, scandalized
expressions on their faces. The fog had claimed another victim, one more road accident to add to all the others earlier that day. All morning it had swirled round London, filling in the gaps
between the people and the buildings, enveloping them in its clammy embrace. There had been accidents like the one outside the church all over the capital. In the West End the omnibuses had given
up the unequal struggle and waited in their depots for the air to clear. On the Thames and in the docks the captains steered their boats very slowly, making frequent use of their hooters and sirens
to warn oncoming traffic of their passage. The noises echoed round the city like trumpet notes, reports and instructions to soldiers in battles fought far away.

Still the shouting went on. The canon of the church, who had at first been overwhelmed by the racket outside his walls, suddenly inserted another hymn into the service.

‘Hymn three hundred and sixty-five,’ he said in his loudest voice, sending a meaningful glance to his organist to take note of the change in plan. ‘The Old Hundredth. All
people that on earth do dwell.’ There were five verses of that, the canon thought to himself; with any luck the noise outside would have finished by the end.

‘The Lord ye know is God indeed,

Without our aid he did us make. . .’

Lord Francis Powerscourt was an investigator. He had made his reputation in Army Intelligence in India and consolidated it by solving a number of murders in England. He was a little short of six
feet tall with unruly black curls and bright blue eyes that inspected the world with detachment and irony.

Powerscourt turned round for another surreptitious inspection of the congregation. He had already conducted his own audit of those present. Anything less than fifty of his wife Lady Lucy’s
relations on parade and her family would regard the event as a catastrophic failure. Seventy-five might be regarded as a break-even point, a pretty poor show really, but not a total disgrace to the
family name. Score a century and the event could be described in future histories of Lady Lucy’s tribe as a modest success. A hundred and thirty-one, which was Powerscourt’s estimate of
the turn-out today, would be a matter for mild congratulation. A hundred and fifty, mind you, would have been better. The hymn was drawing to a close.

‘From men and from the angel host

Be praise and glory evermore.’

It was with something of a shock that Powerscourt realized as the canon was leading them back past the congregation towards the font near the entrance to the church that his numbers were wrong.
Not a hundred and thirty-one at all, but a hundred and thirty-three. He had momentarily forgotten why they had all braved the fog this February morning. For they were all there for the christening
of the two newest additions to the tribe, the twins, his twins, the latest and youngest members of the Powerscourt family. Lady Lucy had given birth before Christmas, and, as Powerscourt said to
himself, if her own children, however tiny, weren’t to be counted as members of the tribe, then who the hell was?

Just over a mile away, the fog, distributing its favours equally across various sectors of the city, had nearly made Queen’s Inn disappear. It was right on the River
Thames between Westminster and the City of London – both as rich in legal pickings over the centuries as they were now – and the water seemed to give the swirling white-grey mist an
extra depth. A determined student of architecture might have been able to discern a handsome set of eighteenth-century buildings with tall sash windows, and, presumably, grass growing in the
courtyards, though any such growth would have been hard to spot unless you were virtually on top of it.

Queen’s Inn was the smallest and youngest of London’s Inns of Court, training ground and stomping ground for the city’s barristers and High Court judges and Masters of the
Rolls. It did not have the fabulous history of the Inner and Middle Temple with Knights Templar adorning their pedigree way back in the mists of legal history. Nor did it have the splendour of the
Temple Gardens, frequently celebrated in verse, truly one of the most delightful places in London on a summer’s day with the grass and the flowers running down to the Thames. Queen’s
could almost match the austere elegance of Lincoln’s Inn’s New Square or the gardens of Gray’s Inn. It did not claim superiority over the other four Inns. It just claimed to be
slightly different. Slightly more worldly, with close links to some of the richer and grander colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. Slightly richer than the others through a complicated system of
internal finance. Slightly more likely to tolerate eccentrics, Queen’s people would say, proud of the strange dress and sometimes stranger methods of transport adopted by some of its more
flamboyant barristers.

And on this day Queen’s Inn was preparing for a feast. A feast in memory of one of its more distinguished sons, one Theophilus Grattan Whitelock, one-time bencher, or senior member, of
Queen’s, a man twice passed over for the post of Lord Chancellor, a distinguished judge who sentenced so many people to be transported to the colonies that the cynics said he should have a
ship on the route named after him. HMS Whitelock, direct to Botany Bay. He had been born, the man Whitelock, on this day, 28th February, so he missed a leap year birthday by a single day.
The feast he endowed in his memory took place on this day, irrespective of which day of the week the 28th happened to fall on. Whitelock had consulted three expert legal draftsmen before finalizing
the clause which stipulated that if, at any point in the future, carping clergymen or interfering bishops should prevent his feast taking place on the Sabbath, then the bequest would be cancelled
in perpetuity. So generous was the bequest and so splendid the food and wine the Inn was able to provide that the members of Queen’s Inn would have defied the Archbishop of Canterbury or the
Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, or both, if they dared to protest.

Even as early as midday the preparations were well under way. Queen’s had been blessed for many years with a Senior Steward known to all and sundry as Joseph. Few, if any, knew his
surname. Some of the younger students claimed Joseph himself had forgotten it. But he had a genius for efficient organization and over the years had developed a remarkable system of alliances and
understandings with some of London’s finest grocers and butchers and wine merchants so that he could always command the best at very modest prices. Cynics, and what community of lawyers does
not have a good supply of those, claimed that the whole edifice was based on back-handers and would, one day, collapse to general disgrace and a long prison sentence for Joseph. Or, the most
cynical would add at this point, transportation for him in memory of Theophilus Grattan Whitelock. One more for Botany Bay. Direct.

Where on earth did this lot come from, Joseph said to himself, as he inspected his waiters for the day in the Great Hall. The Inn’s normal complement was insufficient for the numbers and
complexity of the feast. Recruitment of these worthies was not his responsibility, but that of the Head Porter, a man with whom Joseph did not share the most cordial of relations. Desperately he
tried to remember how he might have offended the Head Porter. It came to him in a flash. Three nights before there had been a drinks party for the benchers, an elaborate occasion graced with some
of the finest wines of the Queen’s cellars. Custom and practice dictated that two or three bottles from this occasion should have found their way to the Head Porter’s cupboard. Joseph
had genuinely forgotten. So here was the Head Porter’s revenge. Four boys who looked as though they were sixteen or so, an age which found it, as Joseph knew only too well, extraordinarily
difficult to stand still for more than two minutes at a time. Four old men, hovering, Joseph thought, somewhere between sixty and seventy. They might have been waiting at table long before the
Congress of Berlin, but they would need regular and repeated trips to the lavatories to see them through the evening. One of the old men, Joseph noticed to his horror, seemed to be nodding off on
his feet, asleep where he stood. If he could do that in the middle of the day, what, in God’s name, would the greybeard be like in the closing stages of the feast way after ten or even eleven
o’clock in the evening? Comatose in the buttery? Passed out, maybe even passed on, in the pantry?

Good generals know how much depends on their relations with their troops. Joseph would have liked to shout at this ludicrous collection of humanity but he knew it wouldn’t work. Charm,
kindness, that’s what’s needed here, he said to himself, I’ve only got to keep them on their toes for ten hours or so.

‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ Joseph addressed his little army, his perfect teeth gleaming at the heart of his smile. ‘Tell me this, have you all waited at table for a feast like
this one before?’

There was a general chorus of affirmatives.

‘You,’ said Joseph, pointing dramatically to his eldest recruit, ‘you are serving vegetables that accompany the main course. Which side do you serve from?’

A pair of sleepy eyes gazed at Joseph, as if reproaching him for daring to ask such a question. ‘The left, sir.’

‘Excellent,’ said Joseph, flashing a smile at Methesulah, ‘and you, young sir,’ he pointed to a youth with huge sad eyes and curly hair, ‘which wine would we serve
with the fish course, Chablis or Châteauneuf-du-Pape?’

‘Chablis, sir,’ said the youth, and for a brief second his eyes looked happy before returning to sad.

‘Very good,’ said Joseph. ‘I can see we are all going to get along fine. If you suddenly find that you have forgotten something about the distinguished art of waiting, just ask
me and I will tell you the answer. Now, let me tell you the programme for the rest of the afternoon. All around you you can see these canteens of cutlery, with two large cloths and a bottle of
polish beside them. That is the first task for you, to polish these knives and forks and spoons until you could shave in them. Then we will do the same for the glasses, the two wine glasses and the
glass for the liqueur or port. Then we lay the table, under my supervision. Then we all have a rest before the final briefing after supper. Let us show honour today and this evening to the memory
of Theophilus Whitelock, gentlemen. He may not have mentioned us waiters in his bequest, but without us it could not be fulfilled.’

There were nine of them gathered round the font, the cold water very calm inside the marble. The boy twin had two godfathers, Powerscourt’s particular friend and
companion in arms, Johnny Fitzgerald, and his brother-in-law, William Burke the financier. Burke had recently astonished the family by pulling off the roof of his enormous villa in Antibes and
adding a further two storeys to the property. Powerscourt had inquired if he intended accommodating the entire family under this roof at the same time. Powerscourt’s eldest sister was
godmother to the male and various members of Lady Lucy’s tribe did duty for the girl. The canon held his prayer book well away from his face as he read the Exhortation, as if he was losing
his sight.

‘Doubt ye not, therefore, but earnestly believe that Christ will likewise favourably receive these present infants; that he will embrace them with the arms of his mercy; that he will give
unto them the blessing of eternal life, and make them partakers of his everlasting kingdom.’

Powerscourt looked down at the tiny bundle in his arms. The little boy was fast asleep with a blond curl lying on the top of his head. His elder brother and sister had been most eager to attend
this part of the service and had been bitterly disappointed when told it was impossible. In vain had they said they had every right to be there. Olivia, the younger child, had pointed out that she
already had more practice in holding the two babies than her father and that she would, obviously, be closer to the ground to catch her infant brother or sister if their father or the vicar dropped
them. Thomas, the elder, had announced that it was sure to bring bad luck on all of them if he and his sister were not allowed to attend the christening. Lady Lucy had to resort to bribery to buy
them off in the end.

Now the canon was conducting the interrogation of the godparents.

‘Do you, in the name of these children, renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the carnal desires of the
flesh, so that you will not follow nor be led by them?’

There was a general murmuring of ‘I renounce them all.’ Powerscourt thought Johnny Fitzgerald and William Burke were not too emphatic on that one. Burke was not an avaricious fellow
but he did make his living out of the covetous desires for money of his fellow men. Powerscourt felt Lucy’s foot tapping lightly on his shin. She nodded to the pew behind him which had been
empty as they came down the aisle. Kneeling happily on it, their faces wreathed in smiles, Thomas and Olivia had left their place to find the closest spot to the action they could find. Powerscourt
grinned at them and made a further inspection of his infant.

Then the preliminaries were over. Very gently the canon leant over and took Powerscourt’s bundle from him. Powerscourt felt a sudden, irrational spurt of alarm when he remembered how far
away the prayer book had been. Would Olivia’s worst fears be recognized as the canon dropped his charge on the hard floor? Looking slowly round the assembled godparents the canon said,
‘Name this child.’

‘Christopher John Wingfield Powerscourt,’ they chorused. Very gently and very slowly the canon dipped the head into the font. A mighty wail of protest followed. Powerscourt wondered
if the child would be able to make more noise later in life than the two coachmen outside.

‘Christopher John Wingfield Powerscourt, I baptize thee in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.’

The wailing bundle was handed back to the earthly father. Then it was the turn of the other twin. Elizabeth Juliet Macleod was added to the Powerscourt family in total silence. Powerscourt could
hear Olivia whispering to Thomas that girls were much braver than boys as her sister hadn’t made a single squawk during the ordeal.

Six weeks or so after the end of one of Powerscourt’s cases the year before, a dramatic and dangerous affair in a West Country cathedral, he had taken Lady Lucy to St Petersburg. It was
there, in their beautiful hotel bedroom overlooking the Nevsky Prospekt, that Lucy believed the twins had been conceived. She was absolutely certain of it. Johnny Fitzgerald had suggested calling
them Nicholas and Alexandra after the Tsar and his wife but Powerscourt had demurred, pointing out that at some point in the future Britain might be at war with Russia and two children wandering
about the country lumbered with the Christian names of the Russian royal house might not be a good idea.

By the end of the first course of the Whitelock Feast Joseph, the steward of Queen’s Inn, was reasonably pleased with the evening so far. The Hall looked magnificent. The
candles were glittering in their places on the tables and the walls. The portraits of the great lawyers of the past looked down on their successors. Along the bulk of the great room were trestle
tables of oak, supposed to be as old as the foundation itself. On the raised area at the north end was the High Table reserved for the benchers of the Inn. On the walls behind them two full-length
Gainsboroughs of previous Lord Chancellors, sombre and forbidding in their dark robes, presided over the proceedings. And above them hung one of the treasures of the Inn, Rubens’ The
Judgement of Paris, where a bucolic-looking Paris, son of the King of Troy, held up a ruddy apple in front of three scantily clad goddesses. So popular was this painting with the citizens of
the capital, its great appeal possibly residing in the nakedness of the ladies, that the Hall was opened to the public once a week during term-time so the pilgrims could pay tribute in person.
American visitors sometimes expressed surprise that it was not a courtroom scene they were seeing, with learned friends appearing before some frosty judge, but they seemed to recover quite quickly.
A plaque beneath it announced that the painting was paid for by the generosity of past and current benchers and benefactors.

The first course had been a terrine, a rather intricate terrine principally composed of glazed cured salmon and Beaufort cheese. That had been easy for Joseph’s motley army of waiters to
serve. The more active service of bringing the plates with the food already in place from the kitchen to the Hall was shared between his regular forces and the young auxiliaries. Joseph had been
more impressed by the old than the young. They shuffled about their tasks very slowly but they didn’t speak too loudly or nearly drop the plates like the young.

It was the soup that really worried Joseph. It was one of the new chef’s special favourites which he claimed to have devised for the members of the Imperial Family in St Petersburg,
Borscht Romanov, a beetroot-based broth laced with herbs and a Russian vodka whose name even the chef could not pronounce and lashings of sour cream. Joseph watched with dread as his waiters began
the long march with a soup bowl in each hand from the kitchens, over a wet floor, into the Hall and onwards for what was, at its longest, a journey of over a hundred and fifty yards. One hundred
and sixty-two guests, eighty-one voyages of the Borscht Romanov. One man tripped in the kitchen and had to be removed from duty altogether as he had pink stains right down his shirt front. Two of
Joseph’s young men had watched the regular waiters and imitated them, gliding rather than walking with the elbows tucked in tight to the body. The other two held the bowls too far away and
were in permanent danger of tipping forward.

Disaster struck the feast shortly after eight thirty, but it didn’t come from the waiters. Just as Joseph was congratulating himself on the safe arrival of the soup, he glanced up towards
High Table. The benchers were arranged in order of seniority, radiating outwards on either side of the Treasurer in the centre, the top official of the Inn. At the edge, in the most junior
position, sat one Alexander McKendrick Dauntsey, KC, right in front of one of Gainsborough’s Lord Chancellors. Dauntsey, to Joseph’s experienced eye, looked like a man who might have
been drinking heavily before the feast. He was perspiring freely and his face was turning grey rather than white. Joseph watched as he took three mouthfuls of his soup, and then, very suddenly, and
very violently, pitched forward on to the table, his bowl of soup tipping forward in a pink stream across the white tablecloth and on to the floor. There was a crack as Dauntsey’s face hit
the wood and a trickle of blood ran from his chin to join the beetroot broth, Borscht Sanguinaire rather than Borscht Romanov. The mixture of blood and borscht continued to drip slowly on to the
floor, a pinkish red that looked like watered blood. After a couple of minutes the Hall had fallen completely quiet, only for the silence to be broken by the Treasurer in what seemed to be a very
loud voice.

‘He’s drunk. Bloody fool! Leave him there. He’ll come round in a moment. Carry on.’

Two of Joseph’s waiters were on hand with mops and cloths to clear up the mess. Joseph indicated with pouring signals that all the glasses were to be topped up to help restore the mood.
Soon the noise levels were back to normal and the soup was being cleared away. As the feast progressed through roast venison with juniper, tiramisu with dark and white chocolate sauce, accompanied
by Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Domaine du Vieux Télégraphe, Joseph became increasingly worried about Dauntsey. He made no move of any kind. Everybody else in the Hall was growing
redder or pinker by the hour. Dauntsey’s face had turned a sort of chalky white. Nobody took any notice of him at all, as though collapsed drunks or worse were a regular feature of the
Whitelock Feast. Joseph knew how much store the Treasurer set by tradition, how he would hate to disturb the glittering occasion. This particular feast after all, the finest one in the
Queen’s Inn calendar, was his favourite.

Yet Joseph too had as much loyalty to the Inn as the Treasurer or anybody else present. Perhaps it was because he had come to London from Italy looking for work over thirty years before and had
found a job as a temporary waiter at the Inn. Now, of course, he was a permanent fixture, who had watched many of the silks progress from nervous lisping students to giants of the Old Bailey and
the Royal Courts of Justice. He knew how damaging it could be to the Inn’s reputation if word flew round the gossip-ridden world of London’s barristers that the people of Queen’s
had been eating reindeer and drinking some of the finest burgundy in the capital while one of their number had collapsed into his soup and been left to rot by his peers as they carried on with
their feast. Joseph knew that if he consulted the Treasurer, then the other benchers would all have to give their views. That was what it was like working in a place full of lawyers. Every last one
of them had to have their say. Invisible judges and imaginary juries were ever present in the deliberations of Queen’s Inn. Nothing could have been guaranteed to destroy the atmosphere
faster. But, Joseph reasoned, if Dauntsey was simply removed, as if he were an empty dish of potatoes or vegetables, so to speak, it would attract much less attention. It was only that Dauntsey was
considerably larger than the Inn’s best serving dishes. Joseph took the four strongest men in his command into a little alcove between the Hall and the kitchens.

‘Listen very carefully,’ he said. ‘We’re going to move Mr Dauntsey. He’s the gentleman who has fallen into his soup at the top table. I want to stick to the usual
channels we’ve been using this evening. So I want you two,’ he pointed to two of his regulars, ‘to go up behind the top table, as if you were going to serve the benchers, and I
want you two,’ he nodded to a couple of his young recruits for the evening here, ‘to go round the back of the right-hand bench, as you have been doing all evening, and reach Mr Dauntsey
that way. Don’t rush but don’t stop until you have got him into the library. I shall hold the door at the back of the benchers’ table open for you. Good luck.’

Joseph led his pincer movement up the Hall. He suspected that his waiters were more or less invisible to the barristers by now. Benchers, for some strange reason, sit on chairs at the Whitelock
Feast. It was stipulated in the original bequest. Joseph’s plan was that they should simply lift the chair and Dauntsey all in one movement and take him out. It went without a hitch. Nobody
asked what they were doing. Nobody challenged them at all. The Treasurer, in charge at his top table, did not even look sideways as his colleague was swiftly and silently removed. It was as if the
waters had closed over a sinking ship. The surface of the ocean returned to normal.

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 S. . .