‘I would have come round last night, but I thought you were best left to tell Tamasin – to tell her – ’
‘A pack of lies,’ he finished heavily. ‘Yes, you are right. So far as she is concerned I had an accident at the office. I was making a hole in a pile of papers with a knife, to thread a tag through, when my hand slipped. Tammy was full of sympathy, which makes it worse. Listen, when Nick gets in we need to meet to make sure we have the story straight between the three of us. You’ll be seeing Tamasin next week at George’s party. Please.’
‘Yes, we will do that.’ I closed my eyes a moment. ‘Once again, I am sorry.’
He gave me his most piercing look. ‘I just wish I knew what was going on.’
I shook my head. ‘No. Safer not. How is your hand?’
‘Sore as hell. But I have to play it down for Tamasin’s sake, that’s why I came in today. I’ll survive,’ he added.
‘Any word from Nicholas?’
‘He got but a flesh wound,’ Barak said unsympathetically. ‘By the way, there’s a message for you, from Treasurer Rowland. He wants you to see him this morning. Before ten; he has a meeting then.’
‘I’ll go now. He did mention he had another task for me.’ I got up. ‘Dear God, I hope it’s nothing like what he had me do last week.’
ROWLAND WAS SEATED behind his desk again, writing. He raised his head, a cold look on his thin face. He had worn a similar expression when I had reported back to him after Anne Askew’s burning, complimenting me on finding a place at Smithfield where my presence would be noted. I had, of course, not told him of Rich’s glare at me. Looking at his white hair and long beard, I wished that, like Martin Brocket’s old employer, he would retire. But he was the sort who savoured power, and would probably die at his desk.
‘Serjeant Shardlake,’ he said. ‘Sit down.’ He tapped the paper on his desk with a bony, inky finger. ‘You knew the late Brother Bealknap, I believe. Had more than one passage of arms with him, I think.’
‘Indeed I did.’
‘I have just been composing a note to send round the Inn about his funeral. I am having to make the arrangements; his executor is not interested and there is no family. It will be in two days’ time, the twenty-fourth, in the chapel. I doubt many will come.’
‘No.’ Certainly I would not, after Bealknap’s piece of deathbed spite.
‘You will appreciate this,’ Rowland said. ‘Bealknap left a vast sum of money to build what amounts to a mausoleum in the Inn chapel. With a marble image of himself, decorated and gilded and heaven knows what. He paid the Inn a good deal of money to agree to have it done.’
‘So he told me. I saw him the day he died.’
Rowland raised his white eyebrows. ‘Did you, by Mary?’
‘He asked me to visit him.’
‘A deathbed repentance?’ Rowland’s eyes narrowed with malicious curiosity.
‘No.’ I sighed. ‘Not really.’
‘You remember all the rumours that he had a great chest of gold in his chambers? Well, it was my duty to go and look for it. That chest did indeed exist, and contained several hundred sovereigns. But it wasn’t at his chambers. Bealknap had had the sense to deposit it with one of the goldsmiths, for security. According to this goldsmith, Bealknap used to go there and sit with it of an evening.’
‘He was a strange man.’
‘There was certainly enough in the chest to pay for this mausoleum. However, many of the benchers have objected. Bealknap was not, after all, a great credit to the Inn, and this thing is hardly in the chapel style. They are refusing point-blank to sanction it. As I suspected they would, at the time I made the bargain with Bealknap. He can lie under a marble slab in the chapel like a reasonable man.’ Rowland gave that cynical smile of his, world-weary but also cruel; proud of his outwitting of a dying man.
I said, ‘But if it is in his Will – ’
Rowland spread his arms, black silk robe rustling. ‘If the benchers will not agree, the legacy becomes impossible of execution.’
‘Who is his executor?’
‘Sir Richard Rich.’ I looked at him sharply. ‘It is an old Will. I know for a fact he hasn’t worked cases for Rich for over a year. Rich stopped using him when he began to get ill.’ I wondered, was that why Bealknap had come cosying up to me at the end of last year, in the hope that I could get him some work? I remember him saying he was not getting as much work from one of his clients. It must have been Rich. Rowland inclined his head. ‘I keep an eye on which of the great ones of the realm give work to Lincoln’s Inn barristers. As the Queen used to do with you. I have been in touch with Rich’s secretary, and he said Sir Richard couldn’t care less about the mausoleum.’ He shrugged. ‘And the Will specifically excludes members of his family from having a say. So, this thing will not be built, and all Bealknap’s gold will be bona vacantia. So in the absence of anyone else, his fortune will go to – ?’ He paused on a questioning note, as though I were a law student.