Death Called to the Bar Read Online Free PDF Page A

could do with some new
shirts.’
    ‘Did this Somerville inquire about my age, Charles? You can never be too careful.’
    ‘Must have been the only thing he didn’t mention,’ said Pugh, ‘but it’s a pound to a penny you’re going to get invited into their lair tomorrow and asked to
take the case on.’
    ‘I suppose it’s one way to get out of the chores of moving,’ said Powerscourt ruefully. ‘Whole business bores me to tears and the truth is I’m completely useless at
it. Lucy knows by instinct where everything ought to go while I wander round like the proverbial lost sheep. But tell me, Charles, you know this world, what is your opinion of Queen’s
Inn?’
    ‘Queen’s?’ said Pugh thoughtfully and he stared at the fireplace, temporarily lost for words. ‘The surface things are easy. Smallest Inn of Court. Youngest too, only
about a hundred and forty years old. Founded in 1761 as a tribute to George the Third’s new bride, his Queen a brood mare called Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz who produced fifteen
children for him. Situated right next to the Middle Temple on the river. They think they’re special, those people in Queen’s, they’re arrogant to a man, all of them. I think the
best way I can put it, Francis, is that they’re like a fashionable cavalry regiment that isn’t quite as special or as fashionable as it thinks it is.’
    Powerscourt, who had known many cavalry regiments, fashionable and unfashionable, in his time in the Army, smiled. ‘And what of the dead man? Did you say his name was Dauntsey?’
    ‘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