Death and the Jubilee lfp-2 Read online

  ‘Hell,’ said the old lady sadly, ‘I never thought I’d end up there. Oh dear, is it going to be terrible? And you,’ she pointed an old accusing finger at Lady Lucy, ‘what did you do to deserve to come here? What were your sins when you were on the other side?’

  ‘Never mind, Miss Harrison.’ Lady Lucy spoke very gently. ‘Why don’t you drink your tea? Another cup perhaps? I’m sure the doctor will be here soon.’

  Lord Francis Powerscourt had walked down to the lake, where he stared moodily at the inscrutable temples. He had walked round the house time and again, angry shouts from inside escaping occasionally through the great holes in the roof. He watched a bright red fox peering carefully out from the edge of the Blackwater Park. No scarlet-jacketed riders were to be seen. No hunting horns disturbed the Oxfordshire afternoon. The fox trotted slowly off towards the woods.

  He was thinking of a list of questions to send to William Burke on his return to London. Who owned the capital of Harrison’s Bank? Had any share or portion passed to the female line, nieces or sisters whose lives might be in peril? And what of the chief clerk? If he had capital in the bank, then he must be warned, and soon. Powerscourt felt he could not bear another untimely death on his already troubled conscience.

  He was standing in a reverie by the great castellated gateway that marked the entrance to Blackwater when he was hailed by a young man of about thirty years alighting from a cab.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ the newcomer called cheerfully. ‘Would you by any chance be Lord Powerscourt?’

  ‘I would. I mean I am. I am he,’ said Powerscourt, his syntax temporarily confused as he shook the young man by the hand.

  ‘Hardy,’ said the man, ‘Joseph Hardy, fire investigator, at your service, sir.’ He bowed slightly. ‘But everybody calls me Joe.’

  Like Chief Officer Perkins Hardy was clean-shaven. He had tousled blond hair and cheerful blue eyes that looked as though he laughed a lot.

  ‘I got your message this morning,’ Hardy went on, marching purposefully up the drive. ‘But the warehouses meant I couldn’t get away any sooner. Damned warehouses. Forgive my language, my lord.’

  ‘Don’t worry at all,’ said Powerscourt. ‘But why warehouses?’

  ‘There are far too many of the wretched things now, my lord. In the old days you sold your cotton from Alabama to a man in New South Wales, let’s say. The cotton came to London, it was stored in its warehouse, then it was shipped on to Australia. Not any longer. No, sir. Nowadays the man in Alabama sends his cotton direct to New South Wales. There’s no need for it to go to London. There’s no need for the wretched warehouse. It’s all done by telegraph these days, my lord.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ said Powerscourt, ‘but why should the man in Alabama or the man in Australia delay your journey here to Blackwater? Not that I’m complaining, not for a moment. We didn’t expect to see you here today at all.’

  ‘I’m just coming to that, my lord,’ said Hardy cheerfully. ‘When nobody wants your warehouse, what are you to do? I’ll tell you what a lot of them do, my lord. They insure it, and its contents, mostly invented, for a great deal of money. Then they burn it down. Then they claim the insurance.’

  ‘Would I be right in thinking,’ said Powerscourt, deciding he had taken a liking to the young man, ‘that the insurance companies are not happy in these circumstances? And they employ you to show that the claims are fraudulent?’

  ‘How right you are, my lord.’ Joe Hardy grinned. ‘It was another of those fires I was working on this morning. Those insurance companies have very suspicious minds, my lord, almost as suspicious as yours, I shouldn’t wonder.’ Hardy laughed.

  Powerscourt told him about the fire, about the earlier deaths, about his suspicions that the inferno at Blackwater was no accident. He mentioned the policemen and the fire officials already at the scene.

  ‘I see, Lord Powerscourt,’ said Joseph Hardy. ‘Could you just walk me round the outside? Show me the lie of the land?’

  As they went on their melancholy journey round the charred remains of Blackwater House, Hardy pulled a notebook from his pocket and began making quick sketches of the building. The notebook, Powerscourt saw, was red. Red for danger, red for fire. ‘The thing everybody always wants to know,’ said Hardy, sitting down suddenly to study the west front at the back of the house, ‘is how I became a fire investigator in the first place.’ His right hand was working furiously. From time to time he would snatch a different coloured pencil from his jacket until a pile of them made a small pyre on the lawn.

  ‘I’ve always been fascinated by fires,’ he went on, glancing up at the parapet from time to time. ‘I was always on at my father to make bonfires. Then I used to inspect the ashes when they went out. I used to do the same thing on bonfire night – that was always the best day of my year when I was small.’

  Powerscourt could see him, a little boy with blond hair and dirty trousers trampling about in the ashes. He wondered if he had a red notebook even then.

  ‘I made a bomb once,’ Hardy laughed. ‘I made it all by myself and took it down to the woods. It made a bloody great bang, it did. I hadn’t got far enough away. I was blown backwards into a tree and knocked out for a couple of minutes.’

  He collected his pencils and closed his book. ‘Right, Lord Powerscourt, I’m going inside now. I think you should stay here. The Commissioner wouldn’t be very pleased with me if you broke your neck on the remains of the stairs. I shall see you in about an hour. The photographer will be here in the morning.’

  With that he disappeared into the gloom, waving happily as he went.

  ‘Francis, how are you?’

  Lady Lucy had come to seek him out, her vigil at the bedside of Miss Harrison temporarily abandoned.

  ‘Lucy, I had almost forgotten you were here. How terrible of me.’

  ‘You have a lot on your mind today,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Who was the very blond gentleman who just went inside?’

  ‘That, Lucy, was Mr Hardy, fire investigator,’ said Powerscourt, ‘and a specialist, he tells me, in bonfires in his youth and warehouses in his adult years. But tell me, how is old Miss Harrison?’

  ‘Oh Francis, it is so sad. Her mind has gone. Dr Compton has given her a draught to make her sleep. She thought she had gone to heaven.’

  ‘In the Parkers’ cottage? That must have seemed a bit of a let-down after a life spent in there.’ He nodded at the wreck of Blackwater House. ‘Did she have any special news about heaven, Lucy? God and the angels well, that sort of thing?’

  ‘You mustn’t be flippant, Francis,’ Lady Lucy smiled. ‘There were no immediate tidings about God or the angels, I fear, but no indication either that your investigative powers were needed up there at present. She was very relieved about the tea.’

  ‘Tea?’ said Powerscourt incredulously. ‘Does God drink tea? Indian? Chinese? Ceylon?’

  ‘It was Mrs Parker’s tea, silly.’ Lady Lucy took her husband’s arm. ‘I’m pretty sure it was Indian.’

  ‘Is she asleep now?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps I should go back and sit with her again. Mrs Parker is looking pretty tired.’

  ‘So would you be,’ said Powerscourt, leading her back down the path to the Parkers’, ‘if your little cottage had been turned into heaven for the day. Welcome to the Kingdom of Heaven, enjoy it before Satan burns it down. The fires of hell have come to Oxfordshire, consuming all in their path.’

  ‘Do shut up, Francis.’ Lady Lucy squeezed his arm. ‘Look, I think your investigator friend wants to speak to you.’

  Joseph Hardy was waving cheerily to Powerscourt from the remains of the front porch.

  ‘Lord Powerscourt, come with me. I think we have something to show you. We’ve rigged up a safe way of getting upstairs for you. My, what a fire this must have been.’

  He sounds as though he wished he had been here himself thought Powerscourt. Maybe the normal relations of heaven and hell were reversed for Joseph Hardy – fragments of Miss H
arrison’s conversation with Lady Lucy flashed through his mind – so that hell, with its eternal fires, would be heaven for him. There he could tend the Devil’s cauldrons, plan newer and more fiendish ways of roasting the flesh and bones of God’s rejected.

  ‘Now, there’s not a great deal to see on this floor.’ The Devil’s latest disciple ushered Powerscourt into a room of utter devastation. ‘We think the fire probably started here in what used to be the cabinet room, and then made its way up to the next floor and across to the picture gallery over there.’

  He pointed to the shell of the room which had once housed the Harrison collection. Privately Powerscourt thought it was not a great loss. Many of the finest paintings, the Canalettos and the Turners, had been sold some years before.

  ‘Up the stairs now,’ said the fire investigator. ‘I’m not saying there aren’t a number of unusual features down here, there are, but I have to take some samples away to analyse them in my workshop.’

  A ladder had been placed in what had once had been the staircase.

  ‘Careful, my lord,’ said Hardy, as Powerscourt began his ascent. ‘Chief Fire Officer Perkins is waiting for us up there.’

  They emerged into what had once been a corridor. The plaster had gone, the carpets had been reduced to ashes on the ground. Strands of lath hung precariously from the ceiling like stalactites in a cave.

  ‘At the end, there, that last door, that was Old Mr Harrison’s bedroom. Nobody in there, of course. There are three doors opening off this corridor on each side as you see, my lord.’

  Hardy advanced half-way down the passageway. Each door except one had gone, burnt to nothing in the fire. They could hear the wind now, whistling through the open roof. It looked, thought Powerscourt, as though an angry giant had stalked down the corridor, plucking the doors away and flinging them on the flames.

  Chief Officer Perkins was waiting by the one door that had not completely vanished. One solitary fragment remained, running from the floor to a couple of feet above the lock.

  ‘Did you find the key, Chief Fire Officer?’ said Hardy. ‘Any sign of the key?’

  Perkins was crawling through the rubble on his hands and knees. The skin on his face was invisible. The dark smudges that concealed his features almost matched the black of his fireman’s jacket.

  ‘No, I have not,’ said Perkins gloomily. ‘I have crawled over this damned floor three times so far, and I have found nothing. I’ve even asked Bert to have a look. He may not be too bright, my lord, but he has younger eyes than mine.’

  Bert was not to be seen. Perhaps he’s crawling over some other floor, looking for a different piece of debris, thought Powerscourt.

  ‘It was Chief Fire Officer Perkins who drew it to my attention, my lord,’ said Hardy generously. ‘He’d have made a good investigator, no doubt about that.’

  Hardy smiled at the fireman, his teeth unnaturally white against the stains that marked his face. His blond hair, Powerscourt noticed, had turned almost black.

  ‘Forgive me,’ said Powerscourt apologetically, ‘for seeming so stupid. But what is the significance of the key?’ The keys of the kingdom, the keys of heaven and hell, the keys to Lady Lucy’s heart, the keys to this second death perhaps.

  ‘The point is this, my lord.’ Chief Officer Perkins had risen to his feet, dust falling from his person like thin grey snow. ‘This was Mr Frederick’s bedroom. His door was locked. We cannot tell if it was locked from the inside or the outside. Would you lock your own bedroom door, in your own house, in the middle of your own park, miles from anywhere?’

  ‘I would not,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I most certainly would not. But what you mean is that he couldn’t get out. Not out of the door anyway.’

  He could imagine the dead man now, coughing violently as the smoke got into his lungs and blocked his throat, scrabbling desperately at the door to his own room, trying to escape down the stairs. The smoke would have grown so thick that he would hardly be able to see anything in front of him. Then the collapse on to the floor, the last few choking breaths, the terrible constricting pains in the chest and then oblivion. God knows where he has gone now, Powerscourt said to himself, but his last moments were certainly spent in hell. Hell on earth, hell in a bedroom, hell at Blackwater with the pictures and the house he loved burning down around him.

  ‘He couldn’t get out,’ said Mr Perkins finally. ‘He may have tried the windows, we don’t know.’ Two well-proportioned holes teased them from across the room. Their secrets had gone, burnt to nothing in the conflagration.

  ‘We’d better get out of here now,’ said Hardy, still cheerful. ‘The light’s going.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Powerscourt, tiptoeing along the shattered corridor, ‘we could discuss this on the lawn outside. There must be more you have to tell me.’

  They found an old table and four rusting chairs in the stables. Surrounded by four handsome horses in their stalls, they held a melancholy conference, Inspector Wilson, his face cleaned except for one dark smear below his left eyelid, Chief Fire Officer Perkins, dust and fragments of ash still falling from his body every time he moved, Fire Investigator Hardy, smiling incronguously as his mind raced through calculations of the temperature and speed of burn of the fire, still taking notes in a book that had turned from red to dark grey, Powerscourt looking troubled. The only noise was the occasional rustling of the horses and the rising whisper of the wind.

  ‘Inspector Wilson,’ Powerscourt began, ‘let me trespass on your province to begin with a short summary of what we know.

  ‘Point Number One,’ he rapped his forefinger lightly on the table, ‘at an early stage in the evening there were four people in the house. Miss Harrison, Mr Frederick Harrison, Mr Charles Harrison and Jones the butler in his own quarters in the basement.

  ‘Point Number Two,’ the finger tapped again, ‘Mr Charles Harrison leaves the house at an unknown time to return to London. Our only evidence for that, if I remember right, is the butler reporting Mr Charles as saying that he would be leaving. He did not see him go.’

  ‘Correct, my lord,’ said Inspector Wilson.

  ‘Point Number Three,’ Powerscourt went on, ‘is that at about half-past one in the morning the butler becomes aware of the fire and rushes upstairs to rescue Miss Harrison who sleeps on the other side of the house.

  ‘Point Number Four is that at some stage in the evening Mr Frederick Harrison retires to bed for the night. And then proceeds to lock himself into his own room, from which he never escapes.’

  One of the horses was listening carefully, a noble head and a pair of intelligent brown eyes fixed firmly on the strange quartet. Powerscourt wondered if this was Clytemnestra or Callimachus, Catullus or Cassandra in the Harrison horse naming system. Cassandra, he decided gloomily, prophecies destined never to be taken seriously. The horse listened on.

  ‘For what it’s worth,’ said Joseph Hardy, ‘I think the fire was started deliberately. I cannot be sure yet,’ he glanced down at his little book, pages and pages of which Powerscourt saw were covered by calculations, ‘but it has all the signs of that. Would you agree with that analysis, Chief Fire Officer Perkins?’

  ‘I think I would,’ said Perkins, flakes of dust falling from his upraised hand. ‘I mean, I am not an expert in these matters, but there are some very strange circumstances surrounding it.’

  ‘Let me put some possibilities to you, gentlemen,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Is it possible that Miss Harrison, for reasons best known to herself, decides to start the fire, locks her brother in his room, retires to her own quarters and waits to be rescued by the butler?’

  Hardy was listening intently, still making notes in his book.

  ‘Or is it possible that the butler is the villain of the piece? He goes upstairs to check Mr Frederick has retired, starts the fire downstairs, pops back upstairs to lock Mr Frederick in and then earns his hero’s reward by carrying Miss Harrison to safety.’

  Inspector Wilson too had extracted his notebook fro
m about his person. He was following Hardy’s example, scribbling furiously.

  ‘Or is it possible that a person or persons unknown enters the house after everybody has gone to bed, starts the fire, locks Mr Frederick in and flees into the night?’

  Hardy looked up suddenly. ‘The key. The key, my lord,’ he said, looking at Powerscourt with a pleading look, ‘the key is the key. Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. If we knew where that key was, then surely we would be well on our way to solving part of the mystery. We must search for it tomorrow. We must search everywhere.’

  Powerscourt looked at the Inspector to his left. He had just turned a new page and had written the word KEY in large block capitals at the top.

  Two of the horses neighed suddenly. A couple of wood pigeons took off from the roof of the stables and vanished into the trees above the lake.

  ‘There is another possibility,’ Powerscourt began. ‘And that is as follows . . .’

  He never finished the sentence. From the bottom of the drive, less than a hundred yards away, the wheels of a carriage could be heard. The little group rose from their chairs and began to move towards the main house.

  ‘Wait, wait,’ whispered Powerscourt, restraining Chief Fire Officer Perkins. Another cloud of dust fluttered off his trousers on to the ground. ‘Let’s just see who it is.’

  He knew who it was. All day he had been waiting for this latest visitor to the House of Harrison. Rejoice more in the lost sheep who is found than in the ninety and nine who did not stray.

  Above all Powerscourt wanted to see what Charles Harrison would do. He probably knew already about the fire. Heaven knew enough messages had been sent after him all day. But if he didn’t know how bad it was then surely he would pause and look at the front of his house, to survey the damage. He would walk round the side to the west wing at the rear to check on the devastation there. He might just stand and stare at the terrible ruin at the front, the gaping holes where the windows had been, the blackened stone, parts of the roof open to the sky.

  Charles Harrison did none of these things. He walked straight in through what had been his front door. Even in the stables they could hear him shout.