Death of a Chancellor Page 7

  ‘Lord Powerscourt, good to see you again.’ The two men had met briefly at the reception after Eustace’s burial. ‘How can I help?’ The doctor was charm personified, clad for the day in a suit of dark green tweed.

  He thinks I’ve come about my health, Powerscourt suddenly realized, a hacking cough perhaps, influenza brought on by the winter rains of Compton.

  ‘Dr Blackstaff, I owe you an apology. I am afraid I am operating under false pretences.’ Powerscourt sank into a chair opposite the doctor by the fire. ‘I have been described as a family friend, and it was under those auspices that we met the other day.’

  Dr Blackstaff wondered what was coming. Was Powerscourt another long-lost relation come to claim his inheritance? Was he a lawyer come to arbitrate about some problem concerning the will?

  ‘I am a private investigator, Dr Blackstaff. I have been hired by Mrs Augusta Cockburn to investigate the circumstances surrounding her brother’s death.’

  Dr Blackstaff looked at Powerscourt for about fifteen seconds. Then he burst out laughing. ‘That bloody woman,’ he said, ‘she’ll be the death of us all. I shouldn’t be at all surprised if she was having us all watched twenty-four hours a day.’ He stopped suddenly and looked closely at Powerscourt. ‘You’re not having me watched twenty-four hours a day, are you, Lord Powerscourt?’

  Powerscourt laughed. ‘Certainly not,’ he said. But he knew, after that meeting in Drake’s the solicitors, he knew even better than the doctor that there were no depths to which Augusta Cockburn would not stoop to conquer her adversaries and retire from the field with one million pounds sterling.

  ‘Perhaps the best thing, Dr Blackstaff, if you could bear it, would be if you could tell me the whole story once again. I apologize for asking you. I know how close you were to John Eustace and that further narration of his last hours will not be easy.’

  So the doctor told his story once more; the late-night visit of his friend; John Eustace’s complaints of feeling unwell; his examination of his patient and his decision to keep him overnight in his own house; his suspicions, already formed, that Eustace was suffering from a heart condition; his death, so sudden and so tragic the following morning. Sometimes Dr Blackstaff looked at Powerscourt. Sometimes he looked into the fire.

  Powerscourt found his eyes wandering to the remarkable collection of medical prints and portraits from the past. To the left of the fireplace four men were holding down a fifth. In the centre of the print a man in a long coat was advancing towards the captive with a vicious pair of forceps in his hand. A fifth man was holding the victim’s mouth open. Just a routine operation in the life of an eighteenth-century dentist, though Powerscourt suspected the bills must have been very high after all the assistants had been paid off.

  ‘Thank you, doctor,’ said Powerscourt when the narrative was complete. ‘I’m sure it must be painful, even for a medical man like yourself, to have to recall all the details once more.’ Mind you, he said to himself, he’s had plenty of practice already. Mrs Cockburn, the coroner – and the Dean, Powerscourt remembered, had told him he’d had a long conversation with Blackstaff about John Eustace’s last hours. ‘I hope you won’t mind,’ he said, ‘if I ask you a few questions?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Dr Blackstaff.

  Powerscourt felt that he needed some unorthodox bowling at this point. Any obvious question about the central points would be easily parried. He needed a googly the ball that spins in the opposite direction to the one expected. Or an inswinging yorker, the ball of very full length that shoots under the bat and spreadeagles the batsman’s wicket.

  ‘Would you say that you were in any financial difficulties at present, Dr Blackstaff?’ said Powerscourt, his eyes wandering towards an oil painting above the fireplace.

  ‘Financial difficulties?’ said Dr Blackstaff, turning slightly red. ‘No. I have no worries about money. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Forgive me, doctor. Let me tell you in confidence that there is a possible bequest to you in John Eustace’s will of fifty thousand pounds. In my profession, we are accustomed to looking for the dark side of the moon, as it were. If you were my current employer, you would look for the dark side of Satan himself. Money is often a motive for murder.’

  ‘I had no knowledge of any such bequest, Lord Powerscourt, please believe me. That is the truth.’

  In which case, Powerscourt said to himself, what about everything else you have been telling me for the last half an hour? He tried another tack.

  ‘What happened to his clothes?’

  ‘His clothes?’ said the doctor, looking slightly lost.

  ‘John Eustace’s clothes, Dr Blackstaff. The clothes he came in. The clothes he died in.’

  Dr Blackstaff looked uncertain. He paused slightly. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘The housekeeper sent them back to Fairfield Park, I’m sure.’

  Where they would have been cleaned, if cleaning were necessary, Powerscourt thought. Or thrown away by the butler.

  ‘Can you remember what your friend was wearing when he came to see you that evening?’

  Again that slight, barely detectable pause. ‘He was wearing a brown suit with a pale blue shirt,’ said Dr Blackstaff. John Eustace had at least fifteen brown suits and a dozen pale blue shirts.

  ‘And when he stayed here overnight, I presume you lent him a nightgown or some pyjamas or something similar?’ Dr Blackstaff nodded. His interrogator went straight on.

  ‘And in the morning, did he get dressed again, or did he, please forgive me, did he die in his nightgown?’

  ‘He passed away in his nightgown, I’m afraid,’ said the doctor. He got up suddenly. ‘I’m finding all this rather a trial, Lord Powerscourt. Can I interest you in a whisky? A glass of port?’

  ‘A whisky would be delightful,’ said Powerscourt, knowing that time was being bought while glasses were found, bottles opened, drinks poured. He looked at an oil painting on the far side of the fireplace. It showed a naval surgeon at work in the height of battle, probably during the Napoleonic Wars. The centre of the painting showed a line of sailors, covered in blood, with different varieties of arm and leg severed or broken, lying on a long table. At the top of the painting there was a small patch of blue sky. The rest was obscured by the smoke of battle. Mentally, if not physically, you could hear the great guns being run out to pound Britain’s enemies into pulp. The surgeon had an enormous knife in his hand. He was covered in blood from the top of his chest. Blood was flowing out of the room as the ship tilted in combat. The surgeon’s assistant was trying to pour something, almost certainly rum, Powerscourt thought, down the patient’s throat. Another sailor was going to have an arm or a leg amputated.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ said Powerscourt, cradling a large glass of whisky as Dr Blackstaff lowered himself into the position opposite. There had been a certain hesitation about the question of clothes. He decided to continue in the same vein.

  ‘Just one last question about Mr Eustace’s last hours here, doctor,’ he said gravely. ‘Was he wearing boots or shoes?’

  Again that slight hesitation. For a fraction of a second Dr William Blackstaff wished to confess. He could tell the truth and this interrogation, none the easier to bear for the studied politeness with which it was carried out, could stop. Then he thought of the scandal. Temptation passed.

  ‘Boots, I think. It was rather a wet day, Lord Powerscourt. It usually is round these parts at this time of year.’

  He’s playing for time again, with these remarks about the weather, Powerscourt felt.

  ‘Black or brown?’

  Blackstaff would have said they were purple with yellow stripes if he thought the questioning might stop.

  ‘Black,’ he said, almost recklessly.

  ‘One last question, doctor, and then I shall trespass on your time and your hospitality no longer,’ said Powerscourt. Dr Blackstaff looked more cheerful. ‘John Eustace’s request that nobody should look at him in his coffin, was that an unusual one? I mean, have other pati
ents of yours asked for the same thing?’

  ‘Unusual, yes. Uncommon, no. Quite a number of my patients have made similar requests in the past. With some of them, I think it is because they believe more in the old superstitions than in the God of the cathedral. There are a number of ancient pagan sites within twenty miles from here.’

  Powerscourt made a mental note to make a pilgrimage to the pagans when time afforded. He looked at his watch. It was five minutes before eight o’clock.

  ‘Thank you so much for your time, doctor,’ he said, finishing his glass and rising to his feet. ‘Perhaps I could call on you again, and we can discuss more pleasant matters, like your collection of medical prints and paintings. I think they’re absolutely fascinating.’

  Dr Blackstaff escorted him to the door. ‘I used to hang some of the prints in my surgery,’ he said, ‘but then I had to take them down.’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Powerscourt with a smile.

  ‘It was all very regrettable,’ Dr Blackstaff replied. ‘I used to get lots of small boys with imaginary illnesses who came to enjoy the blood and gore. Then I had a farmer whose arm had been severed in an accident. He took one look at that naval painting and passed out clean, right in the middle of the surgery floor.’

  As Powerscourt made his way back to Fairfield Park, he was sure of one thing, that Dr Blackstaff had been lying for some if not all of the time. The uncertainty about the clothes convinced him on that point. And there had been that very strange comment right at the beginning of the interview: ‘That bloody woman,’ Dr Blackstaff had said, ‘she’ll be the death of us all. I shouldn’t be at all surprised if she was having us all watched twenty-four hours a day.’ Us all . . . Powerscourt said it to himself a number of times as he tramped the couple of hundred yards up the rain-drenched road. Who is us? Or rather who are us? More than one person? A single accomplice? A number of accomplices?

  In one minute’s time, Powerscourt said to himself, I am due to talk to Andrew McKenna, the last man in Fairfield Park to see his master alive. Powerscourt had timed the interview so there could be no opportunity for doctor to confer with butler. He felt an almost overwhelming curiosity coming over him. An overwhelming curiosity about suits and shirts and boots and shoes.

  5

  Andrew McKenna was waiting for Powerscourt in the drawing room. Outside the wind was rattling the windows and the rain was lying in puddles on the steps of the stone staircase. Powerscourt took a careful look at the Fairfield butler. McKenna was in his forties, cleanshaven, with very dark hair that was beginning to thin on top. His pale brown eyes, Powerscourt thought, were frightened.

  ‘First of all, McKenna, I must make a confession to you and to everybody else in this house. I am not a family friend of the Eustaces’ or the Cockburns’. I am a private investigator, employed by Mrs Augusta Cockburn to look into the circumstances surrounding her brother’s death.’

  ‘Very good, sir,’ said McKenna in a quiet voice. Inwardly he was terrified. This, or something like this, was what he had been dreading ever since the events of that terrible night. At least this Lord Powerscourt wasn’t wearing a police uniform.

  ‘I’m sure we can clear things up very quickly, McKenna. There’s no cause for any alarm,’ said Powerscourt with a smile. He was beginning to feel sorry for Andrew McKenna. ‘Can you remember what Mr Eustace was wearing the last time you saw him?’

  ‘Wearing?’ said McKenna in a mystified voice. Powerscourt thought that both the butler and the doctor seemed to have trouble with clothes.

  ‘What sort of a suit, if he was wearing a suit that day, what sort of shirt, that sort of thing?’

  ‘Sorry, my lord,’ said McKenna, seeming to recover himself. But then a terrible thought struck him. Powerscourt had just come from the doctor’s house. He must have asked the doctor the same questions. If his answer wasn’t the same, then the police might come and take him away. What would the doctor have said? Why hadn’t the doctor worked out that somebody might ask this question?

  ‘He was wearing a brown suit, my lord,’ said McKenna, but he didn’t sound convinced.

  ‘And the shirt?’ asked Powerscourt. Once more there was a pause.

  ‘I think it was a grey shirt, my lord.’

  ‘Grey, you say,’ said Powerscourt thoughtfully. Up the road in the doctor’s house John Eustace had been wearing pale blue.

  ‘And was he wearing boots or shoes, can you recall?’

  Again Andrew McKenna paused. Powerscourt could hear John Eustace’s eighteenth-century clock ticking on the mantelpiece. McKenna, he noticed, had turned rather red during the interrogation.

  ‘As far as I remember, it was boots,’ he said finally. Powerscourt suddenly remembered the dental print on Dr Blackstaff’s wall. McKenna was the victim, held down by four men, a fifth forcing open his jaws, while he, Powerscourt, was advancing towards him, fearful pliers in hand.

  ‘What colour of boots, McKenna?’

  ‘Brown, my lord. Mr Eustace didn’t like black boots for some reason. Black shoes were acceptable, but not boots.’

  ‘I see,’ said Powerscourt as gently as he could. ‘Perhaps you could you just describe the last evening he spent here in this house. Before he went to the doctor’s.’

  Andrew McKenna began the same narrative he had given to Mrs Cockburn some time before. He was word perfect on this part of the story. He repeated it to himself many times every night in case he had to tell it again. He had even written it all out on three sheets of paper and hidden them under his floorboards.

  Powerscourt wasn’t really listening. He knew. Well, he didn’t actually know in any sense that would stand up in a court of law. It wasn’t just the discrepancy between the colour of the boots and the shirts in the two accounts. It was the demeanour of the two men.

  ‘Shortly after he finished his dinner, my lord, Mr Eustace went to his study,’ McKenna was still going, telling his story like children at school reciting a poem they had been made to learn for their homework the night before, struggling occasionally to remember the next line. Powerscourt wasn’t sure what to do. ‘I went to see him some time after that and he told me not to wait up for him . . .’

  Just what had happened to John Eustace? Had one of these two men killed him? Killed him for the doctor’s cut of the will? Fifty thousand pounds would go a long way, even after you had paid off your accomplice. Andrew McKenna might be a very poor liar but he didn’t look like a murderer. But then, as Powerscourt remembered from some of his previous cases, murderers seldom do look like murderers.

  ‘The next time we heard of Mr Eustace, my lord, was when the doctor came round the following morning and told me he was dead.’ McKenna’s recital was almost over.

  Had Eustace killed himself? Powerscourt wondered. Blown the top of his head off with a pistol, rendering himself so disfigured that nobody could have endured the sight of him lying in his coffin, half of his face blown away in the blast? That would explain why the coffin lid was sealed so early. Maybe the shame of a suicide had to be covered up. Powerscourt wondered briefly if he should put this very question right now to Andrew McKenna. ‘Did Mr Eustace commit suicide, McKenna? Did you find him with the top of his head blown off and then go to the doctor who concocted this cover story?’ He decided against it.

  ‘I got all the servants together – we had to wait a while, my lord, for the gardeners to come in from outside – and I told them the terrible news.’

  McKenna stopped. Powerscourt found himself looking closely at McKenna’s hands. They were clasped together very tightly, as if to stop them from shaking.

  ‘Very good, McKenna,’ said Powerscourt in his most emollient manner. ‘Could I just ask you one more thing? Would you have said that Mr Eustace was upset or depressed about anything in the days and weeks before his death?’

  McKenna thought for a moment or two. ‘I wouldn’t have said he was depressed, my lord. He was always a very cheerful gentleman, at least to us servants. Maybe preoccupied would be the wo
rd, my lord. But then he was often preoccupied if he had to preach an important sermon or something like that.’

  ‘Thank you so much, McKenna. I am much obliged to you for that account. And now, perhaps, you could be so kind as to bring me a whisky. I shall be in Mr Eustace’s study.’

  Without realizing at first what he was doing Powerscourt began pacing restlessly up and down the drawing room. Lady Lucy would have smiled had she seen the habits of Markham Square reproduced so perfectly in a country house nearly two hundred miles away, the same abstracted air, the same sense of having completely departed from the immediate surroundings. Suppose it wasn’t suicide, he said to himself. Suppose John Eustace was murdered. But by whom? By the butler? By the doctor? By another of the servants with a grudge against his master? By an outside hand, by a person or persons unknown? But how did they get in? How did they get out? McKenna had told him very clearly on his first afternoon in the house that none of the doors or windows had been disturbed during the night of John Eustace’s death. The whole household would have had to be involved in such a conspiracy. And what should he tell the ferocious Augusta Cockburn? She was, after all, his employer. Was he bound to pass on his suspicions to her? Powerscourt dreaded to think of the mayhem her tongue and her malevolence could cause if she thought her brother had committed suicide or been murdered.

  Andrew McKenna was waiting in the study with the whisky. Powerscourt told the butler he could go, and not to wait for him. He checked his watch. He had just given McKenna the same instructions at virtually the same time as his previous master had done some days before. And in virtually the same place. Maybe, thought Powerscourt fancifully, this is my last evening on earth. Maybe I shall meet a mysterious death in this very house tonight. Maybe my body too will be sealed in its coffin before its time, leaving Johnny Fitzgerald to conduct an investigation into the circumstances of my demise.

  ‘Shut up,’ he said quietly to himself and took a drink from his whisky. He sat down at the Eustace desk. Hanging on the wall directly in front of him was a reproduction of a Raphael. Powerscourt remembered reading about this painting. It showed Pope Leo the Tenth flanked by two other cardinals who just happened to be his nephews. The Pope, a powerful figure of a man, is wearing a red cape over an ornate white cassock. The fleshy jowls on his face reveal that whoever may have been his favourite saint it was not one of the ascetic ones like St Francis of Assisi. Leo is seated at a desk, covered with a rich red cloth, examining an illustrated book with a magnifying glass. One of his nephews is to his right-hand side, staring into space, possibly praying. The other, a rather shifty-looking prelate in Powerscourt’s view, is looking directly at the painter. Powerscourt shuddered as he remembered that Raphael painted it shortly after a murder plot against Leo had been unearthed in the College of Cardinals. This was Leo’s way of telling the world, and the College of Cardinals in particular, that he was still at large. The whole canvas, dominated by reds and scarlets against an almost black background, reeked with pomp and power and privilege.