Death and the Jubilee lfp-2 Page 12

  Powerscourt could sense the tubby little man recoiling from him as they sat in the twin leather armchairs, looking out towards the grey waters where the Spanish Armada had passed by long ago. Maybe he’s wearing that suit as a defence.

  ‘Lord Powerscourt,’ Harrison spoke in clipped tones, ‘the family have insisted that I should see you. How can I be of assistance?’

  Powerscourt thought he should begin with expressions of sympathy. Then he could spring his surprise.

  ‘Naturally, Mr Harrison, I am very sorry about the terrible death of your uncle. I have been asked to investigate the matter.’

  ‘The death has nothing to do with me,’ said Harrison quickly, distancing himself from his family. ‘I was here in Cornwall at the time.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Powerscourt, smiling sympathetically. ‘Tell me about the family feud.’

  There was a silence. Leopold Harrison turned rather red. His paunch seemed to expand with indignation. A little way out to sea, beyond the window, Powerscourt spotted a triumphant cormorant rise to the surface, a small fish wriggling in its beak.

  ‘It was a very long time ago. It wasn’t really a feud. That’s all I wish to say.’ Leopold Harrison sounded guilty.

  ‘Most family feuds go back a long way,’ Powerscourt said gently, wondering if he was about to be thrown out into the street. ‘But they may still be relevant, even today.’

  He waited. Harrison had a superb collection of paintings of sea battles on his walls, Powerscourt noticed, guns blazing, rigging falling into the sea, ships blown up in terrible explosions of red and black as their magazines took a direct hit. In happier times he could have spent a long time looking at them.

  ‘It was a very long time ago. I repeat, that’s all I wish to say.’

  Powerscourt wondered if fear would work on Leopold Harrison. ‘I have to tell you, Mr Harrison, that so far there has been little progress in this inquiry. The murderer or murderers may strike again. They might strike anywhere. Cornwall is not so very far away these days.’

  The cormorant rose to the surface again. This time it had caught nothing.

  ‘I do not see how those matters can have any bearing on the terrible killing,’ said Harrison. ‘I will tell you one thing and one thing only.’

  He thinks I will go away with one small crumb of information, Powerscourt said to himself. He wondered what his morsel would be.

  ‘It had to do with . . .’ Harrison paused. He was finding this very difficult. ‘It had to do with a woman,’ he said finally. He said the word as though it were something terrible like bankruptcy or mental illness. He was panting slightly as if the word woman made him out of breath.

  ‘Who was the woman?’ Powerscourt asked very quietly, wondering if a latterday Medea or Clytemnestra was about to land in Cawsand Bay.

  ‘I cannot say. I have promised not to say. Please.’

  Please leave me alone, he’s asking to be left in peace, Powerscourt said to himself. I’ll just try one more question and then I’ll stop. ‘Did the events surrounding this woman take place here, or in Frankfurt?’

  ‘Both,’ said the little man bleakly, as if he had just broken all the promises he had ever made.

  ‘Thank you for that, Mr Harrison. Could you tell me if the feud had anything to with the two separate branches of the bank being formed?’

  There was another pause. A small sailing boat drifted past the windows. The sea murmured on against the rocks.

  ‘It did and it didn’t,’ said Harrison. ‘Please, please don’t ask me any more about that feud. It makes me so upset. Promise me that,’ he said weakly, ‘and I’ll tell you anything about the bank.’

  Powerscourt wondered briefly if he could now have access to the financial secrets of the great of England, the debts of Cabinet Ministers, the real wealth of the new millionaires, the payments made by the aristocrats to their mistresses in Biarritz or Paris. He desisted.

  ‘All I need to know is why there are two separate parts of the bank. Leaving aside the feud, of course.’

  Leopold Harrison was looking happier now. ‘It’s very simple, really, Lord Powerscourt. It all depends on how you want to make your money.’

  Powerscourt looked confused. The little man’s cheeks were returning to their normal colour. The hands were stroking his stomach in a satisfied fashion, as if he had just eaten a very good dinner.

  ‘How is that?’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘I like money. I am devoted to it.’ Powerscourt thought he could hear greed in Leopold Harrison’s voice. ‘This house here may not seem very much, but I have a house in Chester Square. I have a villa in the hills just north of Nice near Grasse. Do you know Grasse, Lord Powerscourt?’

  ‘Fragonard’s birthplace?’ asked Powerscourt. He couldn’t see Leopold Harrison on a swing, surrounded by the tributes of love and the foliage of desire.

  ‘Fragonard. Exactly,’ said Harrison. ‘I have a couple of them in the hall of my villa. But let me return to money and banking. There are two kinds of banking at present, Lord Powerscourt. Harrison’s City, the parent firm of my own, deals in financial instruments. They trade in bills of exchange. They launch risky foreign loans. They lend money to governments. All of this is complicated and very hazardous. You could be wiped out in a moment. Barings were very nearly wiped out seven years ago. It took the City of London years to recover.’

  ‘So what do you do?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘We lend people money,’ said Harrison happily. ‘We take in money from one lot of people as deposits. We pay them as little interest as we can. Then we lend it out to other people. We charge them as much interest as we can get away with. That’s all.’

  ‘But surely,’ said Powerscourt, ‘the people you lend it to could go broke or refuse to repay it, just like those foreign governments sometimes do?’

  Leopold Harrison laughed. He patted Powerscourt on the shoulder like an uncle with a favourite nephew.

  ‘Not so, Lord Powerscourt. Security, that’s the key, security. Let me put it very simply. Suppose you want to borrow ten thousand pounds from me. Fine, I say. But I must have some security for a loan. You have a house somewhere worth ten thousand pounds? You do? Excellent. Just let me have the deeds of ownership, a mere formality you understand, and then you can have the loan. Would you like the money all at once?’

  ‘What happens then if I don’t pay you back?’

  Harrison roared with laughter. ‘Simple. We sell your house. We get the ten thousand pounds back. We have had such interest as you may have paid, and the arrangement fee for giving you the loan in the first place. You may lose, Lord Powerscourt. We cannot. It’s all so simple!’

  The cormorant was back in the swell beyond the windows. It seemed to be choking on a fish that looked too big to swallow. The cormorant was doing its best.

  ‘Do you find it hard, selling off your customers’ assets?’ Powerscourt was sure he knew the answer.

  ‘No, I do not.’ Harrison laughed again. ‘It is your choice as the customer, not mine. You want the money, you pay the price. And most of our customers repay their loans in the normal way, without anything having to be sold at all.’

  Leopold Harrison sounded as though he preferred the less prudent ones.

  Powerscourt thought he would try one last parting shot. He smiled happily at the little man.

  ‘Just one question about the woman in the feud. Is she still alive?’

  The atmosphere changed very suddenly. Powerscourt felt cold even though the sun had come out and Cawsand Bay was bathed in sunlight.

  ‘She is alive,’ Harrison snarled. ‘I have had enough of your questions. Will you please leave now.’

  Harrison rose to his feet and showed Powerscourt the door. As he walked through the narrow streets of the village he wished he had been able to ask one more question. Where was she, this cause of the Harrison feud? Was she in Germany? Was she in England? Was she – he looked back incredulously at the house he had just left – was she in Cawsand, hid
ing on the upper floors?

  William Burke sat alone at the head of the great table in the boardroom of his bank in Bishopsgate. Another decision had been taken. He and the four colleagues who had just departed had decided to buy another small bank to increase the spread of their own branches. His bank, he sometimes thought, was like a spider or a squid, tentacles reaching out from the City of London to wrap themselves over other enterprises right across London and the Home Counties.

  William Burke often thanked his God that he belonged to a joint stock bank, owned and run on behalf of its shareholders. The beauty of the joint stock bank, in his view, was that it enjoyed limited liability, unlike the private bankers where the partners were personally liable for any losses. The old names of the City, the Couttses, the Hoares, the Adams, might sneer at the joint stock bankers for living on their deposits rather than on their wits. But if a private bank failed, the partners faced financial annihilation – houses, pictures, racehorses, land would all have to be sold. Cautious, conservative, even boring his bank might be, but its owners could never meet such a fate.

  And the joint stock banks had a further advantage in his view. All private banks were plagued by the problem of the succession. It was rather like the monarchy, he felt. A good and prudent heir could ensure the stability of throne or bank. A bad one, a spendthrift or a fool could bring the whole institution to its knees.

  As he waited for his next appointment, Burke glanced round the great boardroom. It was as familiar to him now as his own drawing room at home. The long mahogany table was polished daily till it was almost a mirror in which he could observe the expressions of his colleagues. The walls were lined with pictures of banks and bankers, counting houses and the Bank of England. Lorenzo de Medici stared down on his successors, sandwiched between a view of the opening of the Victoria Dock and a reproduction Canaletto of the Thames by Somerset House. Lorenzo had met the same fate in the end as so many of his successors, imprudent lending with insufficient security, the crime of all crimes in Burke’s private register of banking sins.

  There was a knock at the door.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ Burke called cheerfully.

  ‘Mr Clarke, Mr Burke.’

  The head porter closed the doors carefully behind him. His footsteps faded away in the marble hall outside.

  Burke had remembered Powerscourt suggesting the possibility of his infiltrating somebody into Harrison’s Bank. That he had refused to do in case his own position was compromised. Burke had even considered buying Harrison’s Bank outright but he felt it might bring down his own. So he had asked the senior clerk to find him the brightest, most charming young man his bank employed in the City. Advancing towards him with a nervous smile was one James Clarke, highly recommended by all who knew him.

  ‘Clarke,’ said Burke, rising to his feet, ‘come and sit down. You can be a director for fifteen minutes!’ He waved at the well-padded seat beside him. ‘Mr Bagshaw, our senior clerk, tells me you have been with us for five years.’

  ‘That’s right, sir.’ James Clarke was a tall slim young man, clean shaven, with a mop of brown curly hair. He had no idea why he had been summoned to the presence, if not of God, then at least one of his senior partners.

  ‘And how do you find us? Do you think you will enjoy the business of banking?’

  Burke was resolved to take the mettle of the young man for himself rather than rely on the word of his subordinates, however reliable.

  ‘I do enjoy it, sir,’ James Clarke said, ‘I’ve always liked figures and arithmetic, ever since I was a little boy.’

  Burke smiled at the young man with his best uncle’s smile, friendly but a little firm. ‘And what do you think the most important qualities are for a banker? Not necessarily in one of your age, but a mature banker, a banker of consequence.’

  The young man didn’t know it, but on this answer depended the fate of the interview. James Clarke thought of the books he had read, the sections on interest rates, on foreign lending, on the theory and practice of bookkeeping. He didn’t think the answer lay in their lifeless prose.

  ‘Well, sir,’ he looked thoughtfully at his superior, ‘I don’t think it has to do with figures, the record keeping and all those things. I mean,’ he hurried forward, aware that he might have been seen to deny much of his own work in the bank, ‘those things are important but I think it has more to do with judgement. Especially judgement about people so you don’t put the bank’s money in the wrong place. And discretion, so that people will trust you. And remembering that the money you deal with is not your own.’

  Burke clapped him hard on the shoulder. ‘Capital, Clarke, capital! I couldn’t have put it better myself! Now then, I want to ask you to do something for me. I have to tell you that it does not have directly to do with our bank. It is more of a private matter, but it is of the greatest importance. Before I tell you what it is, I must ask you to promise not to tell a single soul, not even your own family, about it.’

  James Clarke wondered what on earth was going on. Had the old man been losing money on the side? Had he lost his fortune on the Exchange?

  Burke sensed the unease coming from the young man. ‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘it is nothing illegal I would have you do. It may seem perfectly innocent at this stage. Nothing may ever come of it. But I regard it as very important.’

  The young man smiled. This could be rather a lark, a private adventure all of his own.

  ‘Of course I will help, sir. And I promise I won’t tell a single soul. What would you like me to do?’

  William Burke rose from his chair and walked quickly to the great window above the street. Below him the hawkers and the telegraph boys, the messengers and the carriages continued the daily dance of the toiling City.

  ‘I want you to make friends with somebody of your own age in Harrison’s Bank. Somebody in the same position. You know Harrison’s Bank, of course?’

  The young man nodded. Old Mr Harrison’s death, the cynics said, had done what no advertising campaign or publicity spree in the newspapers could have ever achieved. It had made Harrison’s Bank universally known down to the last costermonger in the City of London.

  ‘Yes, I know the bank, sir. I don’t know anybody who works there. But I am sure I could manage it. Is that all you want me to do? Just to make a friend of someone who works there?’

  ‘It is for the present,’ Burke was going to take things step by step, ‘but when you have got to know this young man, could you let me know at once? At once, I say. It is a matter of great importance.’

  On his journey back to London Powerscourt was wondering about the Harrison feud. Did that hold the key to the mystery?

  As his train drew out of Exeter St David’s station, he thought about going away with Lucy when this case was finished. Two or three times a year he took Lucy on a Journey into the Unknown, as he called them. He would tell her six weeks or more in advance so she could make her plans. But he never told her where they were going. Lady Lucy would use a whole variety of ruses to discover their destination before they departed. ‘Hot or cold, Francis?’ was the most obvious one to which he always gave some sort of an answer in case their holiday was ruined by Lucy having the wrong clothes. ‘Should I be reading Balzac or Dante, do you think, Francis?’ ‘Will we be needing any art history books for the journey?’ ‘I just happen to be going to the milliner’s today, Francis. What sort of hat would be appropriate for the trip?’ And Powerscourt would smile his most enigmatic smile and leave the room.

  Eighteen months before, they had gone to Florence. Powerscourt had threatened to blindfold her at the railway stations on the way so she could not read what might be their final destination. He remembered taking her to the cathedral and telling her about the murder.

  ‘Honestly, Francis,’ she had laughed at him, ‘do you have to bring your occupation away with you on holiday? Could you have solved the murder easily?’

  He had led her up to the front of Florence’s cathedral, the inside bi
gger than a football pitch. ‘Imagine it, Lucy,’ he whispered, taking her arm and holding her tight. ‘It is Sunday, 26th April 1478. It is High Mass, the most sacred point of the week. Up there near the altar are the Archbishop and the priests. The smell of the incense is very thick. The candles are gleaming on the altar. All around us are the Florentines. Imagine they have walked out of the frescoes in the churches of the city and make up the worshippers today, the bent old men, the sober bankers, the dashing young blades, the pious wives. There was trouble brewing in the city, Lucy.’

  Bankers, money and murder, he said to himself, the same lethal cocktail that I am investigating today. He told her how the Medici had done something almost unheard of; they had refused the Pope a loan, perhaps because he owed them so much already. A rival Florentine family, the Pazzi, had lent the Pontiff what he wanted. The Pazzi were trying to replace the Medici as the most powerful family in Florence.

  ‘Nobody knows exactly when the murderers struck. Sometimes they killed people in churches when they bent their heads in prayer, giving a better target for the sword or the knife. On this Sunday some say the attack was triggered by the ringing of the Sanctus bell, others that it was during the Agnus Dei, others again that it was the words Ite missa est. The conspirators stabbed Lorenzo de Medici’s brother Giuliano to death. They tried to make a start on Lorenzo but he jumped over the wooden rail into the choir and made his escape.’

  ‘How long did it take Francesco di Powerscorto to find the assassins?’ said Lady Lucy, gazing up at her husband.

  ‘I don’t think Francesco was ever summoned to investigate.’ Powerscourt smiled. ‘By the next day the Pazzi conspirators were hanging from the windows of the Palazzo Vecchio in the main square down the street. They say the crowds were very taken by the red stockings of Archbishop Salviati kicking in the air before he passed on.’