Free Death Called to the Bar by David Dickinson Page B

Table at the
top of the room where the benchers and their guests were sitting. Down there, at right angles to us up here, are three other long trestle tables housing the rest of the barristers.’
Powerscourt waved airily at the imaginary area below him. ‘Now, Chief Inspector, if you would, if we place you here at the very end of our High Table you could be Mr Dauntsey. Sergeant, would
you like to be a waiter, or Mr Dauntsey’s neighbour?’
    The sergeant grinned. ‘Don’t think I’d like to be next to Mr Dauntsey when he goes off, sir. Might be a suspect. Think I’ll have to be a waiter.’
    Powerscourt managed to lay a primitive place setting for the Chief Inspector, mat, two sets of knife and fork, a couple of spoons, a cheese knife. He thrust two soup bowls into the
sergeant’s hands.
    ‘The important thing,’ said Powerscourt, ‘about the service at the feast, gentlemen, according to my man, is that it is served from two ends.’ He took the sergeant down
to the bottom of the room, at the opposite end to the dining table. ‘The food comes from down here. The kitchens are on the far side of that wall with a passage between them and the Hall.
Don’t come to serve the soup until I say so, sergeant.’ Powerscourt strode back to the other end of the room and grinned at Jack Beecham. ‘But the drink,’ Powerscourt had
found a couple of empty bottles at the back of his cupboard and carried them, one in each hand, to the door into the dining room, ‘the drink comes from the opposite end, what they called the
buttery in my college in Cambridge. The white wine will have been kept cool and opened as late as possible. It will, my man informs me, have been served in its original bottles. The red would have
been decanted and placed in those elegant French containers the benchers are so proud of. But, alas, we are not concerned with the red here, for Dauntsey was dead before it came on the scene. The
bottles will have been lined up on a great bench on the far side of the two Gainsboroughs here on the Inn walls, gentlemen. The only people allowed in there would have been the waiters. Anybody
else would have been suspected of wanting to steal some of the Inn’s finest wine and kicked out. If you were a murderous waiter, you could pop your poison into a bottle at a special place,
but you could not be sure that somebody else would not pick it up first and kill the wrong person. I am just going to pop out and return as a wine waiter complete with bottle.’
    The Chief Inspector smiled. The sergeant waited patiently, his two soup plates filled with imaginary soup. Powerscourt looked quickly up his hall. It was empty. He returned with the bottle in
his right hand.
    ‘Right, gentlemen, let us suppose I am the murderous waiter. I have managed to pop the poison into this bottle in the few seconds it takes to pass from the buttery into the top of the Hall
here. But the gentlemen are drinking at different speeds. Maybe Mr Dauntsey’s glass is still full, refilled by one of my colleagues. Let us further suppose that I have come back with just one
glassful in my bottle. Mr Dauntsey doesn’t want any of it. But two places away the Treasurer himself beckons you over. He likes this Meursault very much. He would like some more. He would
like some more this minute. Do you kill the wrong man?’
    The Chief Inspector looked in horror at Powerscourt. ‘My God, Powerscourt, you don’t suppose that it happened as you describe? Only Dauntsey was the wrong man. Some other bencher was
meant to be murdered.’
    Powerscourt paused. ‘I think not. I don’t know why. If I could complete the demonstration, I think the same problem applies to the soup. The soup is served at the top end of the
kitchen. There is a parade of four to six waiters bringing it up in relays.’ Powerscourt waved at his very own waiter to come forward. ‘Suppose you have somehow managed to drop the
poison into one of your soup plates, gentlemen.