Death and the Jubilee lfp-2 Page 24

  A broker friend of Hopwood’s and a discount man followed him rapidly back to the pavilion. With half an hour to go before tea the youthful figure of James Clarke strode to the wicket, the score board showing seventy-four for seven.

  ‘Good luck, James! Good luck!’ Sophie Williams thought she must be more nervous than her new friend.

  ‘Fifty at least!’ said Richard.

  Powerscourt could see after just one over that James Clarke was a very fine cricketer indeed. He faced the bowlers with great assurance and drove them effortlessly round the field. The score advanced rapidly. Powerscourt saw that his own total had reached twenty-five and that if James continued to score at the same rate he would soon be overtaken.

  ‘Just hang in there, sir. We’ll beat the bastards yet,’ Clarke advised him on one of their midwicket conferences as the score rose towards one hundred.

  ‘Bet you that pint of beer,’ said the old gardener with his pipe, ‘bet you this left-handed one, Powerscourt do they call him, bet you he won’t get out at all. He’ll carry his bat.’

  ‘Bet you he won’t,’ said his friend, ‘they get worn out, those people. He’ll try some fancy shot and get himself out. You mark my words.’

  With one over left before tea Powerscourt received the ball he had been waiting for all day. It was short. It was outside the off stump. It was perfect for a late cut. He caressed it to the boundary.

  ‘Capital! Capital!’ croaked Bertrand de Rothschild, seizing Lady Lucy by the arm. ‘That’s his late cut! He’s played it at last! And what a fine stroke it was!’

  Lady Lucy wondered if there were early cuts as well but felt she should not inquire. A prolonged burst of applause ran around the crowd. The City had passed one hundred. Perhaps they could win it after all.

  ‘Do you think we can do it, Mr Burke? Do you think we can win?’ Richard Martin was growing rather fond of his new friend.

  ‘Let us hope so, Richard. If these two can take us to a hundred and fifty or so, we should have a good chance.’

  Aston Hopwood held a council of war with his batsmen behind the pavilion at the tea interval. ‘Well played, both of you, well played. You’ve got to stick at it. Thing is,’ he said a little defensively, ‘I got odds of eight to one against us winning when the score was twenty-two for four. Eight to one. So I put twenty pounds on. The odds looked too good to miss.’

  James Clarke grinned at the stockbroker. ‘Do we get a bonus if we win it for you, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘Cheeky young monkey! That’s what you are!’ Aston Hopwood roared with laughter. ‘Now then,’ he went on, ‘I’ve got the last two batsmen practising non-stop until they go in. Supervising them myself, getting them ready for the fray. Wish I’d done the same for some of the others.’

  Powerscourt managed a quick word with Lady Lucy.

  ‘Are you all right, Francis? You look quite done in to me,’ she smiled.

  ‘Nonsense, Lucy, I’m just getting warmed up. I do hope we can pull it off, that’s all.’

  Bertrand de Rothschild came up, munching happily on an enormous slice of fruit cake.

  ‘Exquisite late cut, sir, exquisite. Are we going to see any more?’

  ‘I hope so,’ said Powerscourt, smiling.

  James Clarke was pulling at his sweater. The two umpires, God and Law and Order, were marching steadily towards the wicket. Some of the Americans were doing physical jerks, one of them performing a dramatic series of cartwheels to the amazement of a group of children.

  James Clarke carried on after tea just as he had before. Powerscourt continued to collect his ones and twos as the score mounted steadily towards one hundred and fifty. Clarke saw that in with a massive six straight down the ground. Then he made his only mistake. With twenty runs more needed for victory he mistimed his stroke. The ball went straight up into the air.

  ‘Mine!’ shouted the wicketkeeper as three fielders converged on the ball. And it was. The Americans clapped him off the field. The crowd rose to their feet. The City were one hundred and fifty-seven for eight.

  Aston Hopwood put his arm round James Clarke as he walked back up the pavilion steps to take his pads off.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ said Clarke. ‘And I’m sorry about the bet.’

  Aston Hopwood roared with laughter.

  ‘Don’t worry about the bet. I managed to place another one, you see. I don’t think I’ll be out of pocket today!’

  ‘What was your other bet, sir?’

  ‘Bet some fool from Burke’s Bank that you’d make fifty. The fellow said if you were any good why were you batting so low down the order. I didn’t tell him I’d seen you play before so I got odds of ten to one off him. And you made fifty-eight!’

  Hopwood clapped him on the shoulder.

  ‘How much did you put on, sir?’

  ‘How much? Twenty pounds. Hardly worth putting on any less, was it!’

  Clarke hurried off to join his friends and William Burke. Ivan the Terrible had reached the crease. He hit his first two balls for four. Thirteen to go. The last ball of the over was despatched for two more. One hundred and sixty-seven, ten runs away from victory.

  Powerscourt was now facing the bowling. The first ball was just where he liked it, short and outside the off stump. He leaned back into his stroke. Another late cut would leave the City six runs short of victory. But the ball bounced higher than he expected. It must have hit a bump in the pitch. He heard the snick as the ball clipped the top of his bat. He heard the smack as it disappeared into the wicketkeeper’s gloves. He heard the appeal, shouted in triumph by the Americans.

  He saw the Bishop’s finger. After batting all through the innings, with victory a couple of blows away, he had thrown it all away.

  ‘Hard luck, oh hard luck!’

  The Americans applauded him off the field. Sixty-two runs he had made, he saw from the scoreboard.

  ‘That late cut!’ Bertrand de Rothschild croaked to Lady Lucy. ‘I warned him about it, you know. I told him what a dangerous shot it was. What a time to play it! What a time!’

  ‘If my husband hadn’t played so well, sir, the match would have been over long ago.’ Lady Lucy rose in search of her husband. Powerscourt didn’t return to the pavilion. He went to share the last moments with Burke and his little party, above all with James Clarke. They had nearly won the match together. Now they could watch until the end. As he flopped down on the grass he saw Charles Harrison lurking behind William Burke. He was partly hidden in the trees. Did he mean to be hidden from view? He was straining forward as if trying to hear what was being said.

  ‘Well done, Francis! Well done!’

  ‘Jolly well played, sir. What rotten luck!’

  The last man made his way slowly to the crease. Aston Hopwood had followed him so far on his way that the Oxfordshire Police umpire had to order him back. He stopped for a brief conference with Ivan the Terrible.

  ‘Man from accounts,’ Aston Hopwood was telling anybody who would listen in the pavilion. ‘One of the big insurance companies. Spends his whole bloody life working with figures. Hope to God he’s grasped the significance of these.’ Hopwood nodded vehemently at the scoreboard. One hundred and sixty-seven for nine. The scorers were leaning forward out of their window to catch the last overs of the match. The small boys had given up their own games in the long grass and were watching intently. A couple of cows from the Rothschild farm had ambled up to the fence at the edge, chewing ruminatively. Sophie Williams was clutching Richard’s arm in her excitement.

  Accounts faced his first ball. It was well wide of the wicket. He missed the next one altogether. The last two balls of the over he blocked defiantly, wiping at his glasses after each one.

  ‘Anyone take ten pounds on a tie?’

  Aston Hopwood found no takers.

  Ivan the Terrible was now facing the American spinner. His balls were slow but liable to turn quite alarmingly. The first ball Ivan left alone. The second he smote for six into the field with the cows.

 
‘Well done, Ivan, well done!’

  The cows moved slowly off back to more peaceful pastures.

  ‘One four would do it,’ James Clarke whispered to Powerscourt. He crossed his fingers. The next ball was well wide. Perhaps the Americans are as nervous as we are, thought Powerscourt.

  ‘Come on, Philadelphians!’ A huge shout rose from the rest of the American party. The bowler took heart. His next ball seemed to land well outside the stumps. Ivan the Terrible gathered himself for one last match-winning blow. But he missed. The ball turned. It removed Ivan the Terrible’s middle stump. The match was over. The Americans had won.

  William Burke rose to return to the pavilion. ‘Remember, Richard, remember,’ he shouted back to the little group as he departed. ‘Come and see me in my office on Monday. We have a lot to talk about.’ He waved cheerfully.

  Powerscourt stared at the trees. Was Charles Harrison still there? Would he have overheard?

  ‘Come on, Lord Powerscourt. I think we should get a glass of beer now!’ James Clarke looked at his batting partner. He had turned white.

  Hurrying away to the other side of the ground, his face as black as thunder, was Charles Harrison. Powerscourt felt sure he had heard Burke’s parting words. If only he had said something, if only he had warned his brother-in-law, this could have been avoided.

  A huge shout now came across the pitch. Somebody was hurrying across to join them.

  ‘Francis!’ said the voice, ‘I hear there’s been a bloody miracle. I hear you actually made some runs today!’

  Powerscourt felt that there had indeed been a miracle at this cricket ground. For there, advancing towards them with an enormous grin, was a face he had not seen for some time, a face he had missed more than he cared to admit. He might have come too late for the match, but Johnny Fitzgerald was in time for the beer.

  Part Three

  Jubilee

  23

  ‘I’ve brought back two new pieces of information from Berlin.’ Johnny Fitzgerald was back in the Powerscourt house in Markham Square later that evening, Lady Lucy pouring tea. Powerscourt felt stiff, his limbs aching from all that running between the wickets. Secretly he felt very proud of himself, over sixty runs to his name and a good slip catch. Maybe now at last, with Johnny Fitzgerald back home again, his luck would turn for the better.

  ‘God knows what they mean, mind you. The secret society people are obsessed with Jubilee Day. I overheard them talking about it more than once. One of them said he was going for a holiday, but only after Jubilee Day. They all laughed at that. And they talked a lot about the hotel room. No idea which city or which hotel or which room. But one of them was checking with another that he had booked it last October. That’s eight months ago now. What do you make of that, Francis?’

  Powerscourt laughed. ‘I have absolutely no idea. Maybe its importance will become clearer later.’

  Powerscourt told Fitzgerald about the rifles in the coffins that had made the journey to Ireland. Fitzgerald explained there was a bar in Berlin divided into little sections where the people he suspected of belonging to the secret society went to drink.

  ‘I heard this very strange conversation in the next booth in there one day, Francis. The fellows were whispering. I had to press my ear against a crack in the panelling to catch what they were saying.

  ‘I am absolutely certain there are secret societies in Berlin,’ Fitzgerald went on. ‘They’re based round the university. And I’m pretty sure I got very close to them. I’d been trailing my coat pretty hard with all my rhetoric about being an Irish revolutionary and hating the English. I think I was getting fairly close to an exploratory conversation with one or two people. We’d skirted round things a bit already, how would I feel about working for the Fatherland against England, that sort of question. Then all the wires were cut. My contacts disappeared. The people I knew treated me as though I had the plague.’

  ‘How long ago was that, Johnny?’

  ‘It must have been over a fortnight ago.’

  ‘Lucy,’ said Powerscourt, ‘how long ago since that German character came to our front door asking for Johnny?’

  ‘Oh, it was just after the fire,’ said Lucy.

  ‘What was that, Lucy?’ Johnny Fitzgerald leant forward in his chair. ‘Some fellow came to the door and asked for me? How did he put it? What did he say?’

  Lady Lucy thought carefully. ‘He came to the door and said he was trying to get in touch with you. He asked if you were a friend of Francis’s. He was polite but very insistent. Rhys told him you were in Berlin.’

  ‘And that I was a friend of Francis’?’ Fitzgerald said. ‘Rhys confirmed that?’

  Lady Lucy nodded.

  ‘What do you think was going on, Francis?’ asked Fitzgerald. ‘I mean it’s always nice to be popular, but this might be going a bit too far.’

  Powerscourt was rubbing carefully at the inside of his thigh. He thought he might be getting cramp.

  ‘It all depends which way the link goes,’ he said finally, his mind racing from Blackwater to the City to the German capital. ‘Is it Berlin to London or London to Berlin?’

  ‘Do you remember, Francis?’ Lady Lucy interrupted the riddle, suddenly remembering a titbit of gossip from the cricket match. ‘Mr Charles Harrison went to university in Berlin. He didn’t go to one here in England or anything. The Friedrich Wilhelm University, he said. Maybe he belongs to this secret society. They don’t play cricket there, he told me. And then he looked cross with himself as if he hadn’t meant to tell me.’

  Powerscourt stared at his wife. He already knew that, but the significance might have escaped him.

  ‘They don’t play cricket there, he said,’ Lady Lucy went on. ‘I wonder what sort of games they do play.’

  ‘What does the riddle mean, Francis?’ said Fitzgerald. ‘The link you were talking about just now. Berlin London, London Berlin. Do we change at Paris or Frankfurt?’

  Powerscourt smiled. ‘It could work two ways. Let’s assume that there is a connection between recent events at Harrison’s Bank and a person or persons in Berlin. Suppose Charles Harrison is a member of this secret society from his time at the university. He knows that I am investigating the death of his uncle. He knows that you are a colleague of mine and that you are not in London. Perhaps you are in Berlin. He decides to find out. So he sends his young man round to knock on our front door where he learns that you are not here but in Berlin. He wires this news to Berlin. Fitzgerald is in town. He must be doing Powerscourt’s business. So they stop talking to you. You are frozen out, as you say. Probably just as well that’s all they did.’

  Powerscourt wondered if they had thought of more offensive measures against Johnny Fitzgerald.

  ‘Or,’ he went on, ‘it could work the other way round. The messages begin in Berlin. They go to Charles Harrison in London. We have this curious customer here, Fitzgerald. He seems to want to know all about our secret society. Do we trust him or not? Is he friend or foe? Supporter or spy?’

  Lady Lucy poured some more tea. Fitzgerald was thinking back to his last contact with the man from the secret society.

  ‘The chap did go very frosty at the end,’ he said, ‘man by the name of Munster. Creepy sort of character. I didn’t quite trust him. Mind you, it sounds as if he would have trusted me even less.’

  Powerscourt’s leg was going numb. If he sat still any longer he would be locked into his chair. He rose and began to hobble stiffly around the room. ‘The question is this,’ he said with a grimace as the cramp shot up his leg. ‘Who’s in charge of whatever is going on? London or Berlin? Who is calling the shots?’

  He came back to his chair and sank slowly down. He continued rubbing his thigh. ‘If we knew the answer to that, we might, we might just know the answer to everything.’

  There was a firm knock at the drawing room door. Rhys the butler came in with a letter on a tray.

  ‘This has just come for you, my lord,’ he said. ‘The man said it was very urgen
t.’

  Lady Lucy watched her husband’s face as his eyes flickered down the letter. She watched them go back to the top and read it again. She watched him turn pale, very pale.

  ‘Bad news, Francis?’ said Lady Lucy.

  ‘Tell us what it says,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald.

  ‘Williamson is dead,’ said Powerscourt very quietly. He paused and looked down again at his letter. ‘The clerk at Harrison’s Bank who still had some shares in the business. The one man who stood between Charles Harrison and total control of the bank. Run over by an underground train at Bank station this evening. It’s not clear at all if he fell, or if he was pushed. The Commissioner says their man meant to be looking after Williamson lost him in the crush. Death would have been instantaneous.’

  Powerscourt remembered the only time he had met Williamson, a careful, rather worried old gentleman anxious to secure the best for his bank and its clients. He need worry no more.

  ‘How terrible,’ said Lady Lucy.

  ‘That makes a quartet of death now,’ said Powerscourt. ‘One in the yacht, one in the Thames, one in the inferno at Blackwater, one under the wheels of a train. There’s only one person left in charge of Harrison’s Bank. Nobody else can stop him now. He’s on his own.’

  London was filling up for the Jubilee. Many of the fifty thousand troops from all corners of Victoria’s Empire had arrived. They walked open-mouthed around the great shopping streets, dazzled by the wealth on show. Some of them went to the Victorian era exhibition at Earl’s Court displaying sixty years of British art and music, women’s work and sport. Stands were being erected all along the route with the newspapers complaining that large sections of the West End had been turned into a timber yard.

  At the War Office General Arbuthnot was holding a final meeting with the Metropolitan Police and Dominic Knox of the Intelligence Department of the Irish Office.

  ‘What do you think, Knox? Are we to expect a terrorist attack or not?’