Free Death of a Chancellor by David Dickinson Page B

held in reverential tribute by their sides, weeping mothers
holding up their children to watch and mourn as the funeral cortège went past, public houses empty and deserted in tribute to the dead. This last touch appealed particularly to the scribes
from the capital. There was no greater testimony to the depth of mourning that they could imagine.
    ‘And what did this London reporter say?’ Anne Herbert had read one of these accounts in a great national daily and been appalled. She hoped that her Patrick was not going to be
contaminated by these strangers who could arrive in a town and tell packs of lies about the inhabitants, secure in the knowledge that they would shortly be on the next train back to London.
    ‘He said, Anne,’ Patrick looked into those green eyes again with great delight, ‘that this Lord Powerscourt is an investigator. He is famous for solving murders and mysteries
of every description! How about that!?’
    ‘Well, he may well be an investigator, Patrick. He may equally well be a friend of the family as everybody says. You mustn’t jump to conclusions.’
    ‘Maybe not,’ said the editor of the Grafton Mercury. ‘But what if he was? What has he come to investigate? Death Comes to the Cathedral? The Curse of Compton
Minster?’
    Anne Herbert had decided long ago that journalists like her friend fell in love with their headlines rather more than they did with the truth.
    ‘That’s all very interesting, Patrick,’ she said, looking at him in rather the same way she looked at her eldest when he came up with some outlandish piece of nonsense.
‘I think you’d better have another biscuit.’
    The subject of Patrick Butler’s speculation let himself quietly out of the side door of Fairfield Park. It was raining heavily again, large puddles threatening to meet
and cover the little road with water. In the distance a lone horseman leant forward in his saddle, trotting peacefully towards his destination. Lord Francis Powerscourt was going to pay his
respects and ask his questions of Dr William Blackstaff, friend of John Eustace, and the last man to see him alive.
    He wondered about the lies and the liars he had known as he splashed his way towards the doctor’s house. Some people were just very bad at lying. He suspected that the butler Andrew
McKenna was one of those. A furtive air came over him any time his late master’s death was mentioned. Others simply convinced themselves that the lie was true, that the falsehoods they were
telling had actually happened. And Powerscourt was certain as he entered the drive of Dr Blackstaff’s house that it was seldom the words that gave the liars away. Rather it was the gestures,
the lack of eye contact, the slight shifting in the chair, the sudden combing of the hair. He remembered one spectacularly successful liar and fraudster in India whose only fault was that the
fingers of his left hand would strum very slowly on his knee when he began to dissemble. The greater the lie, the faster the strumming became.
    A servant showed him into the doctor’s drawing room at the back of the house. Curtained windows led out to where the Blackstaff garden must have been. There were three sofas and a couple
of old armchairs on either side of a great fire.
    ‘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