Death of a Chancellor Read online

  ‘It’s a contradiction in terms,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, still inspecting the writing on his bottle. ‘Couvent des Jacobins, it says here. I know my French isn’t world class but couvent says convent, nunnery to me, lots of ladies in black habits and wimples praying all day and all night, that sort of thing. Jacobins says French revolutionaries to me, violent and unstable fellows, their brains addled with cheap red wine and garlic, endlessly denouncing their colleagues and sending them off to the bloody guillotine. What are they doing on the same bottle, Francis? If the nuns had their way they wouldn’t have let any Jacobins inside the nunnery, if the Jacobins had got in there wouldn’t have been any nuns left alive. I don’t understand.’

  Lady Lucy smiled as she handed him the corkscrew. ‘Maybe you can tell from the taste, Johnny. As to Mrs Cockburn, Francis, I think you are morally obliged to pass on your suspicions. I’m not sure but I think that must be the right thing to do.’

  ‘You haven’t met the woman, Lucy. Please God you can get through the next few months without that privilege. Augusta Cockburn is a monster.’

  Johnny Fitzgerald now had a dreamy look on his face. ‘I think the Jacobins must have won out against the nuns,’ he said. ‘It’s sort of spicy, raring to go. Just the thing to sample before you charged a few barricades. I don’t think you have to do anything at all about the Cockburn connection, Francis. Let it wait. Any number of things could happen in the next couple of weeks. You haven’t been engaged on the case for very long. And,’ he went on cheerfully ‘you haven’t had me around to help you. Things are about to look up.’ And with that he took another large mouthful of his Jacobin Couvent.

  ‘Think of it this way,’ said Powerscourt, still wrestling with his conscience. ‘What if the brother did commit suicide? I still think that’s the most likely explanation. Or, much more unlikely, what if he was murdered, though I can’t for the life of me work out how that might have been done. If it was murder, there may be more murders. And if it was suicide and it was your brother wouldn’t you want to know?’

  ‘Francis,’ said Lucy, trying to ease her husband’s way, ‘you don’t actually know any more than this Mrs Cockburn woman. She had her suspicions. You have yours. But there’s nothing more than that, is there? You haven’t got any evidence at all. So why not tell her that you are continuing with your investigations and leave it at that?’

  Powerscourt didn’t look happy with that. Johnny Fitzgerald was looking at the fire through the red in his glass. ‘I’m ready for anything, Francis,’ he said. ‘One or two more glasses of this stuff and I’ll be fit to storm the Bastille single-handed. I do wonder, mind you, if it mightn’t be necessary to sample another bottle of this revolutionary brew. It mightn’t taste quite as uplifting as this one. You do have some more of this stuff, don’t you, Francis?’

  ‘Lots more,’ said Powerscourt, grinning at his friend. ‘But look here, Johnny. There’s the business with the wills. Oliver Drake implied quite strongly at the last meeting that there was something fishy about the Cockburn will that left her all the money. It was as if he didn’t quite believe in it.’

  ‘When was it dated?’ asked Johnny Fitzgerald. ‘How long before he died?’

  ‘It must have been about six or seven months before his death, when he was staying with Mrs Cockburn the sister up in London,’ said Powerscourt. ‘But suppose he wasn’t actually staying with Mrs Cockburn at all. Suppose it happened like this. Here’s Mrs Cockburn, always hard up, always moving house all the time to cheaper property, as one of the servants in Fairfield Park told me so happily. She decides to forge a will for her brother, which leaves most of the money to herself. Even if there is another will she can still use the fake one to contest it. End of money problems for Mrs Cockburn.’

  ‘You’re not suggesting, are you, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy, looking slightly shocked, ‘that Mrs Cockburn was the murderer, or that she organized some hired killers to murder her brother?’

  ‘I don’t think I’d rule it out,’ said Powerscourt after a pause for thought.

  ‘But,’ Lady Lucy went on, ‘there’s a flaw in your argument. If she was the murderer, why did she ask you to investigate the business?’

  ‘Cover, Lucy, it could just be cover. What better proof of your innocence could you offer than hiring an investigator to look into a murder you have committed yourself? It’s the most disarming thing you could do, virtually guaranteed to make everybody believe automatically in your own innocence.’

  ‘Just because you don’t like the woman,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘doesn’t mean that you have to wish she’s going to end up on the gallows.’

  ‘Let me just say one last word on the subject,’ said Powerscourt with a smile. ‘You two have not actually met this virago in the flesh. You have not faced her insults and her rudeness. If you ask me, hanging is far too good for her.’

  6

  Blissfully unaware that he had recently been described as a most unsuitable young man, Patrick Butler sat looking at a set of figures in his office in Compton. To call it an office was to pay it a great compliment, for it was really much more like an attic than a place of business. The command post of the Grafton Mercury was on the top floor of an old building in a side street some distance from the Cathedral Close. To gain admittance visitors had to climb a rickety set of stairs that creaked out the details of every new arrival. Inside there was just enough room for the three people who worked there, and then only one could stand fully upright. There was a large map of the county on one wall and back copies of the newspaper piled up against the others. A small and rather dirty skylight admitted an inadequate amount of natural light. Patrick felt sure that the newspaper editors in the great cities of Britain must have enormous offices with well-tended fires and handsome paintings lining their walls. But he knew that he would never be as proud of any future office he might inhabit as he was of this tiny garret. This was his first command.

  The production of newspapers is a complicated business requiring considerable powers of organization and discipline. Every week Patrick and his colleagues displayed those virtues to the full. In their everyday lives, however, they did not reveal any sign of such powers. Their little office was a shambles. There were scraps of paper, empty bottles, cigarette butts, opened books overdue at the local library, old bills lying all over the floor. The desks, as they referred to the rough trestle tables where they wrote their stories, were virtually invisible. Piles of paper, half-finished articles, draft copies of advertisements, old editions of the national newspapers were scattered about in cheerful abandon. Every now and then Patrick and his colleagues would rouse themselves to action. The floors would be swept, the tables cleared of their accumulated detritus. For days afterwards one or other of them would complain that a piece of paper full of vital information had been lost, or that the full list of all those persons attending the Rotary Club luncheon could not be found. Patrick was a great believer in printing lists of persons attending functions, however humble. He believed that human vanity is always flattered when a person sees his or her name in print. Word of this stupendous fact travels fast round the little community. The person or persons are duty bound to purchase a copy of the Grafton Mercury to see their name in print. Maybe even two copies, as this is such an important edition.

  The figures he was looking at related to the recent sales of his paper. Since his arrival he reckoned that he had increased the circulation by about twenty per cent. But that was not enough for Patrick Butler. There were thousands and thousands of citizens in the county who were not buying his paper. When he saw the good people of Grafton en masse, on market days or attending a local football match, he wanted to harangue them on the error of their ways. Did they know what they were missing by not buying the Grafton Mercury? Did they not realize how their lives would be enriched by reading the pages of his paper? But one recent edition had sold spectacularly well. It was the commemorative special on the death of Queen Victoria which was still on sale all over the coun
ty. It was going to make an enormous profit. What else, Patrick wondered, could merit the same treatment and deliver an equivalent volume of sales?

  He rose cautiously to his feet and crouched under the grimy skylight. If he craned his neck, he could just see the spire of the minster off to his right. Something was stirring in his restless brain. The cathedral, something to do with the cathedral. Then he had it. The anniversary, the one thousandth anniversary of the cathedral was to come at Easter. There had been announcements in the paper already, details of the plans for the celebrations, of course. But what a perfect opportunity for another anniversary edition. The articles and headlines began to roll through the printing presses in his mind. A Day in the Life of a Medieval Monk. The Role and Responsibilities of an Abbot. Patrick thought the Dean might enjoy writing that one. The Hands of Time, he could find somebody to tell the story of the medieval clock, said to be the oldest in England. The Bells of God, one of the fraternity of bell ringers who still met after practice in the Bell tavern could provide that one. He wondered briefly about the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the Reformation. Had there been any executions at that time? Terror Stalks Compton as Friars Burn, he particularly liked that headline. Then there had been the corrupt and venial Dean early in the last century who had packed the offices of the cathedral with no fewer than fourteen of his own relatives. Corruption in the Chapter. Perhaps that was a bit strong, but the article would please the dissenters and the Nonconformists. Something for everybody in the broad church of the Grafton Mercury. As he pulled his head back inside his attic Patrick forgot to duck. He cracked his head loudly and painfully on one of the rafters. ‘Damn,’ he said very loudly. ‘Damn.’ He checked his watch. It was nearly half-past four. Maybe he should call on the Dean to ask him to deliver his thoughts on the managerial and administrative role of an abbot in the reign of Edward the Confessor. His route, he realized, would take him right past the front door of Anne Herbert’s little house on the edge of the Cathedral Close. And it was tea time.

  Mr Archibald Matlock was the proud owner of an office considerably larger and more opulent than that of the Editor of the Grafton Mercury. His was on the second floor of a handsome old building on Chancery Lane. Prints of lawyers, old and modern, lined the walls. There were lawyers with enormous pens, lawyers with enormous faces, lawyers with enormous noses, lawyers with enormous bellies. There was even one, Powerscourt noticed, almost hidden on the top rank of this rogues’ gallery, hanging from an enormous gibbet for his crimes against humanity. Powerscourt rather liked that one.

  ‘I have come about a will,’ said Powerscourt, ‘the will of a clergyman called Charles John Whitney Eustace.’ Archibald Matlock did not look like a man who might feature in the prints on his walls. He was of regulation height, with a regulation dark grey suit, and a regulation dark blue tie. The most noticeable thing about the man was his hair, or the lack of it. Archibald Matlock was completely bald. Every now and then he would rub the top of his head as if checking to see if his earlier complement of hair had returned.

  ‘Lord Powerscourt, it is not our custom to discuss the wills of our clients with anybody else, however distinguished they may be.’ With that he smiled a deprecating smile.

  ‘Forgive me,’ said Powerscourt, smiling back, ‘I should have said. I have a letter here from Mr Oliver Drake, solicitor of Compton. He is the executor of Mr Eustace’s will.’

  Matlock took out a small pair of glasses and scanned the document. ‘I see. So you are an investigator, Lord Powerscourt. Is there, may I ask, trouble about the will?’

  Powerscourt felt sorely tempted to reply that he was not in the habit of discussing his client’s affairs with outsiders, however bald they might be, but he refrained.

  ‘There is indeed trouble about the will,’ he said. ‘The trouble is that there are three of them.’

  ‘Three wills?’ said Matlock incredulously. ‘I have heard of cases with two wills, but never three. Is it true that the late Mr Eustace was one of the richest men in England? I seem to remember reading about it in the newspapers but you can never really believe what they tell you.’

  ‘I believe it is true,’ said Powerscourt, his eye suddenly caught by one of Matlock’s lawyers on the wall, who appeared to be reading out to a greedy-looking company from an enormously long piece of paper with the legend Will inscribed at the top.

  ‘It would help me,’ he went on, ‘if you could tell me everything you can remember about the composition of this will. I believe it was written about six or seven months ago, all of it, except the signatures, typewritten.’

  Archibald Matlock paused. He went to a large cupboard at the back of his office. ‘We keep copies of all the wills that pass through our hands,’ he said. ‘These ones here should really be locked up in the basement safe. I shall make a note to have them removed.’ Powerscourt noticed that above his head was a splendid print of two eighteenth-century lawyers, wigs slightly adrift, consuming an enormous meal. Discarded bones are lying on the floor. Two empty bottles are lying on the table, a phalanx of further bottles waiting to one side. An elderly, very fat lawyer is just about to carve an enormous side of roast beef.

  ‘I remember this will very clearly,’ said Matlock, returning to his desk with a piece of paper. ‘The whole process began when Mrs Augusta Cockburn – do you know Mrs Cockburn, Lord Powerscourt?’ A faint tremor of distaste, it might even have been fear, passed over the Matlock countenance. Powerscourt nodded. It looked as if the woman was as ferocious in Chancery Lane as she was in Compton. ‘Anyway the whole process began, as I was saying, when Mrs Cockburn turned forty. In my experience, turning forty can be a pretty traumatic event, particularly for women.’ Powerscourt wondered briefly how many forty-year-old females Archibald Matlock had helped cross this particular threshold. ‘Mrs Cockburn decided it was time to make her will. She grew very excited about the making of wills. She decided it was time for her husband to make his will, though there was nothing there to leave to anybody at all. And she decided that it was time for her brother to make his will. He was staying with her at the time of this particular onslaught.’ Powerscourt suspected the moon must have been full at the time, Augusta Cockburn rampant across heaven and earth.

  ‘Both Mr and Mrs Cockburn’s wills were made here in this office. They wrote out what they wanted, one of our young women typed it up on the machines downstairs, they were signed here in this office.’ Archibald Matlock paused. ‘Did you know Mr Eustace, Lord Powerscourt? Did you meet him in the flesh?’

  ‘I have only met his twin brother,’ Powerscourt said, ‘and he is rather dissolute, to put it mildly. I never met Mr John Eustace in person. But why do you ask, Mr Matlock?’

  ‘Well,’ said Archibald Matlock, running the hourly check on his bald patch with his right hand, ‘for the Eustace will, there was no signature in this office. Mrs Cockburn brought in her brother’s dispositions and we prepared them in the normal way. She asked if I could go to the house to witness the signature and make sure everything was in order. She said her brother was unwell.’

  ‘Why could it not wait until he was better?’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘I’m coming to that. Mrs Cockburn explained that he had to return to Compton very soon, but that he was anxious to sign the will before he left London. She said it was preying on his mind, that he would make a better recovery once he had finished the business.’

  ‘Did any of this strike you as odd, Mr Matlock?’

  ‘After twenty-five years in this profession, Lord Powerscourt, nothing strikes me as odd any more. Subsequent events, I have to say, were odder still. May I tell you something in confidence?’ Powerscourt nodded. He thought he knew what was coming. ‘I have never found Mrs Cockburn to be one of my easier clients. She can be very difficult. At this time, I recall, she was very excited, almost hysterical, particularly about her brother’s will. But Matlock Robinson have looked after the family’s affairs for as long as I can remember. Obligations have to be respected. It was not the cu
stom to go to the clients’ houses for the signing of wills. Much better for them to come here.’ And the lawyers can remain in their offices, earning their fees, Powerscourt thought, rather than wasting their time travelling through the crowded streets of the capital.

  ‘At this time,’ Matlock went on, ‘the Cockburns were living somewhere in West Kensington or Hammersmith, well out in the west. Mrs Cockburn showed me into what might at one time have been her husband’s study. Mr Eustace was wearing a large coat with a muffler round his neck. His sister said he was feeling the cold because of his illness. There was very little light in the room as Mrs Cockburn said it was hurting his eyes. She brought in a couple of neighbours as witnesses. Mr Eustace signed it, I signed it and the whole thing was over in less than three minutes. I brought the will back to the office, of course, and despatched it, as requested, to my colleague Mr Drake at the appropriate time.’

  ‘Did John Eustace speak at all?’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘He may have muttered good afternoon, I’m not sure. Apart from that, if indeed he did say that, he said nothing at all.’

  ‘Did you see his face?’

  ‘Not properly, no.’

  ‘If he walked into this office now, Mr Matlock, would you recognize him?’

  ‘I very much doubt it. He was so heavily wrapped up.’

  Powerscourt wondered if Matlock had reached the same conclusions as himself.

  ‘Did you think at all about what had happened, Mr Matlock?’

  ‘I can’t say that I did, Lord Powerscourt. I was in a great hurry that day. It was my wife’s birthday and I had sworn to be home early. Then the firm was very busy with a very difficult case. But can I ask you, Lord Powerscourt, what you think was going on?’