Death and the Jubilee lfp-2 Page 29

  Captain Powerscourt banned all speech for the first ten minutes of their journey. Then it was only in whispers. They were on a long straight stretch now, trees lining both banks. A barrel overtook them rolling from side to side as it went. They could see a town approaching on their left.

  ‘The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks,’ Powerscourt muttered to himself,

  ‘The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep moans round with many voices.’

  There was a scuffling at the back. Richard Martin was sitting upright at last, rubbing sadly at the bruises on his face.

  ‘Push off,’ he said, smiling through the pain,

  ‘and sitting well in order smite

  The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

  To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

  Of all the western stars, until I die.’

  Fitzgerald was peering back down the river, straining to see what other craft might lie behind. They shot under the centre arch of a great railway bridge.

  ‘It may be that the gulfs will wash us down,’ Powerscourt went on,

  ‘It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

  And see the great Achilles whom we knew.’

  ‘To hell with Achilles for now.’ Johnny Fitzgerald sounded very worried. ‘The gulfs or the Happy Isles would do me fine at this moment. The only thing is, there’s another bloody rowing boat behind and they’re gaining on us. We might meet Achilles sooner than we think. We’re going to need him.’

  He leapt into the central thwart, grabbed a pair of oars and pulled for all he was worth.

  ‘Richard, there,’ said Powerscourt, ‘can you see the others? The other boat I mean.’

  ‘Yes, I can, sir. They’re about two hundred yards away.’

  Nobody spoke as Powerscourt and Fitzgerald tried to widen the gap. They had left the little town behind and were in wide open country, fields and pasture spreading out beside the Thames. The only noise was the splashing of the oars and the ripple of the water beside the boat. Powerscourt was feeling stiff again from his cricket. Twenty-five years have gone since I last rowed a boat in anger, he said to himself. Maybe we’ll reach Henley. We could have our very own regatta in the middle of the night.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry, sir,’ said Richard Martin squinting back up the river, ‘I think they’re gaining on us.’

  Far off to the left a puff of smoke announced the arrival or departure of a late night train. They had entered a long sharp bend so the pursuing boat was lost from sight. Another town materialized out of the gloom, nestling along the river’s edge.

  ‘Steer over to the bank, Johnny, quick as you can. We could get out on the towpath over there and vanish into the streets.’

  ‘That won’t do you much good,’ said Fitzgerald, ‘once they realize this boat is empty they’ll come back and look for us in there.’

  ‘We don’t have much time, Johnny,’ said Powerscourt anxiously.

  ‘Tell you what,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘You and Richard get out right now. I’ll keep going. They won’t know you’re not on board any longer. Quickly now. I’m sure this boat will go better with only one person. And I’m sure I can row faster than those other buggers.’

  Powerscourt and Richard Martin leapt on to the towpath. Powerscourt gave the boat a huge shove and ran into the side streets. Johnny was making good speed, shooting through the central arch of the town bridge. He sounded as if he had begun to sing. Powerscourt thought he recognized the drinking song from La Traviata as Fitzgerald serenaded himself on his night flight down the Thames.

  26

  It was three o’clock in the morning when Powerscourt reached Markham Square. He brought with him not only Richard Martin, but his mother, wrapped up in her best coat and very apprehensive about going to stay at a grand house in Chelsea.

  ‘I’m not happy about leaving your mother here,’ Powerscourt had said to Richard when they reached his little house in North London. ‘I’m going to ask the cab to wait. You go inside and tell your mother to get ready.’

  Mrs Martin thought she was dreaming. First of all here was Richard, back home in the middle of the night with bruises on his face. Now he was telling her to pack a bag and come to Lord Powerscourt’s house at once.

  ‘I can’t do that, Richard. What will the neighbours say to me disappearing like that in the small hours of the morning? I’ll never be able to raise my head in the street again. People will think I’m a criminal being taken away by the police.’

  ‘Just pack your bag, Mother,’ said Richard, ‘and please hurry. There’s a cab waiting outside the door.’

  Richard wrote a note to Sophie while he waited. Powerscourt had told him they could drop it off on the way so she would know he was safe and well in the morning. ‘Dear Sophie,’ he wrote, ‘I am back in London after some very exciting times. I can tell you all about it tomorrow. Lord Powerscourt says you are to call at his house after you finish teaching. That’s 25 Markham Square in Chelsea.’ Richard paused briefly. Then the elation of his escape took over, the dramatic row down the Thames with the enemy in pursuit. ‘Love, Richard.’

  Richard had given Powerscourt the details of his incarceration on the train from the Thames Valley to Paddington. He told how he had been summoned to Mr Charles Harrison’s office, how two men had seized him and bundled him into a waiting cab and on to the station for Blackwater.

  ‘They blindfolded me before we got to that big house, my lord, so I wouldn’t remember where I had been, I suppose. Then they tied me up in that little house where you found me. They used to come and ask questions every couple of hours or so. If I didn’t answer them they would hit me sometimes. Every now and then they would bring me food and a glass of water.’

  ‘What did they want to know, Richard?’ said Powerscourt, his eyes never leaving the far end of the carriage where any new passengers would appear, his hand deep in his coat pocket.

  ‘They wanted to know what I had told Mr Burke,’ said Richard, grimacing at his memories. ‘I said I hadn’t told Mr Burke anything. They didn’t believe me. They said I had been seen talking to him at the cricket match. Then they wanted to know if I had talked to anybody else. I said, No, I hadn’t. I wasn’t going to tell them I had talked to Sophie, was I?’

  ‘Sophie did very well, you know, very well.’ Powerscourt smiled at Richard. ‘If she hadn’t come to tell Mr Burke you had gone missing you could have been locked up in that little cottage for days, if not weeks. She was very brave.’

  Richard grinned back at Powerscourt. ‘So you think she might care for me, my lord?’

  ‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I’m not sure that a slow train, currently passing Slough if I am not mistaken, at two o’clock in the morning, is the best place for a discussion of your prospects. But I should say that she cared for you very much, possibly more than she realized before. Now tell me, Richard, was there anything else they asked you? Did they mention any dates in the near future? Any events they might have wondered if you knew about?’

  Richard was lost in thought, more concerned with his next meeting with Sophie than with the questions he had been asked at Blackwater.

  ‘What was that, my lord? Sorry, yes, they did ask me if I knew anything about next Monday, the day, they called it. They muttered something in a foreign language I didn’t understand. I think it was German, my lord. It sounded like Der Tag, Der Tack, something like that. I’m going to start on the German next term, my lord, at my evening classes. I’ve nearly finished French.’

  Powerscourt stared out of the window. The river was just visible in the moonlight. He wondered where Johnny Fitzgerald was, if he had shaken off his pursuers.

  ‘Next Monday, Richard. That’s the big day. It’s now Wednesday morning. We’ve got five days to stop them, whatever they’re trying to do, one of them a Sunday. Just five days.’

  ‘What do you make of it all, Francis?’

  Powerscourt and William Burke were sitting by the fire in the upstairs drawing room
in Markham Square the following morning. Downstairs Lady Lucy was looking after Mrs Martin, offering her round after round of toast and a flood of tea. Richard was still asleep.

  ‘On one level, William,’ said Powerscourt, ‘it’s kidnap pure and simple. I’m sure the police would be able to arrest Charles Harrison and his associates at Blackwater without any trouble at all. But I’m not sure we should set any of that in motion just yet.’

  ‘Why ever not, Francis?’ said Burke, growing indignant at crimes committed in broad daylight in the heart of the City.

  ‘I am certain,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I am absolutely certain that the most important thing just now is to frustrate their plans. How we do it I do not know. But I feel very sure that any arrest would bring publicity and publicity is what they want for their main purpose. Have you found the figures I mentioned to you yesterday afternoon, William? The ones that would confirm my theory of what has been going on all these months?’

  ‘I have some of them, but not all.’ Burke reached for a paper in his breast pocket. ‘I need to talk to young Richard when he wakes up. I have no doubt that your theory is correct, Francis. I cannot tell you what I think about it. It is the most monstrous thing I have ever encountered in the City of London. And I do not know how we can stop it. I fear it is already too late. Next Monday, did you say, is the vital day? Just three full working days away. God help us all.’

  Powerscourt rose from his chair. The grey cat slid from behind the place he had just left. Faintly, from upstairs, there came the sound of Olivia crying.

  ‘William, you must wake up young Richard and see what details he can fill in. You must send a message to the Governor of the Bank of England asking for a meeting this afternoon. Maybe he should come here.’

  ‘I am certain he should come here,’ Burke said. ‘Every time the Governor calls on an office in the City the place is filled with rumours within the half-hour. Such and such a firm is going bankrupt, such and such a bank has defaulted on their loans, such and such a broker is about to get hammered. Rumour travels faster than the wind. I shall ask the Governor to meet me here at two o’clock. Where are you going, Francis?’

  ‘I am going,’ said Powerscourt, ‘to build a bridgehead with the world of politics. I fear that only they may be able to solve the problem once they realize how serious it could become. I am going to call on my friend Rosebery. He may be out of office now but he knows how to pull the levers. God knows, we may have to pull a lot of those.’

  Michael Byrne was saying goodbye to one of his travellers in a small flat in one of Dublin’s many slums. Three leaves in a shamrock, Byrne said to himself, three messengers to cross the sea to England. Three messengers to carry a message of hatred from one island to another. Three messengers to announce to the greater world that the cause of Irish freedom had not been extinguished by Victoria’s Jubilee. Three messengers to carry packages across the Irish Sea. Three messengers to deceive his enemies.

  ‘Go safely now,’ Byrne said to Siobhan McKenna, the second of his envoys to set out on the boat to Liverpool. ‘You know the story?’

  ‘I know it as well as I know my own name, Michael Byrne,’ replied the girl. ‘It would be too dangerous for me to come and wave you off.’ Byrne was apologetic, worried that his absence at the quayside could be interpreted as cowardice.

  ‘Don’t you worry. Don’t worry at all.’ The girl gave him a quick kiss on the cheek and set off on her journey. In her pocket she carried an invitation to an interview for the position of assistant teacher at the Convent of Our Lady of Sorrows in Kensington. Byrne hoped that her visit would multiply the sorrows.

  Rosebery’s formidable intellect was turned on to the racing papers. He was making notes as he read, as if preparing a memorandum for the Cabinet.

  ‘Powerscourt!’ He rose to greet his friend. ‘How very good to see you. You find me deep in the study of form on the turf. One of my most expensive animals takes to the race course tomorrow. But come, Francis, sit down, you do not look like a man who has come to talk of horseflesh.’

  ‘I have not, I’m afraid.’ Powerscourt sank into a deep red armchair at the side of the fire. A series of paintings of Rosebery’s horses adorned the sides of the mantelpiece.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me the story from the beginning, Francis. The last I heard you were looking into a strange death in the City, a headless man found floating by London Bridge.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Powerscourt. He suddenly realized that he was incredibly tired after the exertions of the previous evening. He paused while he arranged the facts in his mind.

  ‘Let me begin with the headless man,’ he said at last. ‘He was found, as you say, floating in the Thames with no head and no hands. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the start of the unravelling of a very great conspiracy.

  ‘The dead man was Old Mr Harrison, founder and senior partner in Harrison’s Bank, a private bank in the City. He was not the first Harrison to die in strange circumstances. His eldest son perished in a boating accident off the Isle of Wight eighteen months before. There were rumours, never substantiated, that the boat had been tampered with.’

  ‘Why did he have no head, Old Mr Harrison?’ asked Rosebery. ‘And no hands?’

  ‘I’m not sure about that,’ said Powerscourt. ‘The head was cut off to make him unrecognizable, I think. I’m not sure about the hands. Maybe the murderer had heard about this new thing called fingerprinting. Johnny Fitzgerald told me the German police are quite advanced with it. You can identify people by their fingerprints. Every one is different. The Army have been using a system like it in India for years to identify people.’ Powerscourt looked down at his thumb for a moment before he continued.

  ‘They lived in Oxfordshire at a place called Blackwater, these Harrisons. Old Mr Harrison’s sister still lives there. It seemed from talking to her and to the head groom that Old Mr Harrison had grown very worried in the last year or so. He used to ride round the lake on a pony and read and write letters to and from Germany. He got the groom to post the letters he was sending to Berlin and other places to avoid them being seen in the big house. He talked to his sister of conspiracies involving the bank, of secret societies in Germany.’

  ‘What sort of conspiracies? What sort of secret societies?’

  ‘I’ll come to that,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I’m just trying to tell the story in the right order. Shortly after that, and after my learning of the secret societies, there was a fire at Blackwater. The fire experts are sure, though they would find it hard to prove, that it was started deliberately. Old Mr Harrison’s other son, Frederick Harrison, was burnt to death in his bedroom in the inferno. The door of the room had been locked from the other side. Nobody ever found the key.’

  ‘My God, Francis,’ said Rosebery, ‘this is frightful. It’s like one of those Greek plays where there’s nobody left alive at the end.’

  ‘It may yet come to that,’ said Powerscourt. ‘It was a very strange house, Blackwater. The original owner had constructed the lake with classical temples all around the side. Hercules and Diana and Apollo peered out at you as you walked round the water. There was a very strange butler who had dealings with the Harrisons before they left Germany and came to London. He could have had motives for revenge.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about butlers,’ said Rosebery with feeling. ‘Do you remember that fellow I used to have before I found Leith? Villain by the name of Hall?’

  ‘The fellow who looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth?’

  ‘The same,’ said Rosebery, nodding his head. ‘The fellow had been cheating me for years and years. All kinds of bills were grossly inflated. Hall took a cut from every single one. A bad business.’

  ‘I did wonder about the Blackwater butler,’ Powerscourt smiled at the eccentricities of butlers, Jones’ walls lined with shells, his cupboard lined with empty whisky bottles, ‘but in the end I didn’t think he could have done any of these murders. My attention was drawn, always, to
the youngest member of the family, Charles Harrison, great-nephew of Old Mr Harrison, who is now in charge of the family bank. Four people have died to put him there. But I did not think that control of the bank was sufficient motive for all these murders. All he had to do was wait and control would have come to him naturally as the others died off or retired.’

  ‘So what was going on? Is going on?’ Rosebery was leaning forward in his chair like a jockey rising in his stirrups.

  ‘There are two other relevant facts, I think.’ Powerscourt was feeling very tired. ‘The first is that I asked my brother-in-law William Burke to find out what was going on inside Harrison’s Bank. One of his young men made friends with a clerk in Harrison’s by the name of Richard Martin. Last Saturday Martin and Burke and I were all at a cricket match at Rothschild’s place in Buckinghamshire. Charles Harrison overheard Burke asking Richard to come and see him in his office in the City on Monday morning. Harrison must have thought Martin was going to tell William Burke about the strange goings on in the bank. But before he could do so Richard Martin was abducted. He was taken to Blackwater and locked up in a little house by the lake. Johnny Fitzgerald and I rescued him from there last night, or this morning. We had to row down the river pursued by another boat before we made good our escape.’

  ‘God bless my soul. This is frightful, Francis. What is the other thing you spoke of?’

  ‘The other thing is this.’ Powerscourt rose from the chair and began pacing up and down Rosebery’s library. ‘All through this case I have had the feeling that somebody had been looking at the same questions as me. Old Mr Harrison, endlessly going round his temples, muttering to his sister about conspiracies, sending his letters secretly, had been on the same voyage of discovery. On Monday I found a box of his papers hidden on a little island in the middle of the lake. There were letters from Germany in which he was asking if somebody belonged to a secret society in Berlin, a society attached to the Friedrich Wilhelm University. And there were two separate articles about the fall of Barings Bank seven years ago. I didn’t take them as seriously as I should have done.’