Death and the Jubilee lfp-2 Page 37

  Just in front of the great doors of the King George the Fourth the Chief Constable stopped. He drew himself up to his full height. ‘Silence!’ he bellowed. ‘Silence in the name of the law!’ The crowd stopped talking. The firemen went on gesticulating to each other in sign language. Behind him Powerscourt could just hear the sea, rolling softly up the shore. The whistles continued, louder now. The shouting went on. Powerscourt couldn’t hear what they were saying at first. He thought his hearing must have been damaged in the inferno. Then it came to him.

  ‘Powerscourt! Powerscourt!’ He couldn’t see where the shout came from. Then Johnny Fitzgerald pointed up at the roof. At the opposite end to the west wing was a group of five people. One of them had a whistle. The whistling stopped. There was a much smaller figure in the middle of the group. Powerscourt thought he recognized Chief Inspector Tait as the man doing the shouting. The smaller figure was partly hidden by the policemen.

  ‘Powerscourt! Powerscourt!’ The Tait-like figure was pointing now, pointing at the smaller figure who was lifted forward to the front of the group.

  There was another shout, a feeble shout, a thin shout, a shout with a weakened voice that only just carried down to the sea front.

  ‘Francis! Francis!’ The little figure waved at him. It waved as long as it could. ‘Lucy! Lucy!’ Tears of joy were pouring down Powerscourt’s cheeks. ‘Hang on, Lucy,’ he shouted up at the roof, ‘I’m coming. I’m coming.’

  Lord Francis Powerscourt staggered across the road, waving as he went, on a last mission to the upper floors.

  Johnny Fitzgerald went in search of the Chief Constable, still staring defiantly at the crowd by the front door.

  ‘Congratulations, sir,’ said Johnny, ushering the Chief Constable into the main entrance. ‘Would you still be in possession of your emergency powers, sir? The ones that came from the Prime Minister?’

  ‘Don’t need them now,’ said the Chief Constable.

  ‘But they operated for a period of forty-eight hours, if I remember what you said earlier,’ Fitzgerald went on.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ asked the Chief Constable.

  ‘Well,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘it would seem to me that you have the power to override the licensing regulations. Terribly restrictive they are at the best of times, if you don’t mind my saying so. You could request our hotel manager friend Mr Hudson to open the bar. At once. Then Lord Powerscourt and Lady Lucy could have a drink when they come down from the roof, don’t you see?’

  The Chief Constable laughed. He clapped Johnny Fitzgerald on the shoulder. ‘Splendid idea,’ said the Chief Constable. ‘By virtue of the emergency powers vested in me, I shall have the bar opened at once.’ He strode off towards the hotel offices.

  ‘Where is that man Hudson,’ he shouted, ‘when you need him most?’

  Two grinning young policemen guided Powerscourt up the six floors to the roof. They brought him out just behind Chief Inspector Tait and his party. Lady Lucy was looking frail, her eyes dark, her face smeared with marks from the smoke. Powerscourt embraced her briefly.

  ‘Chief Inspector Tait,’ he said, ‘may I thank you and your colleagues here from the bottom of my heart for saving Lucy’s life. I shall always be in your debt. How did you manage it?’

  There was an embarrassed shuffling about from the policemen.

  ‘Well, sir,’ said Tait, ‘I thought we should have a position on the roof above Room 607. If the villains knew there was a way up to the roof, they might try to escape through it. They could have checked it out when they arrived, just in case.’

  Tait paused and waved briefly to one of his colleagues in the street below.

  ‘So we waited on the far side of the trapdoor. Once the smoke got thick in that corridor outside 607 we dropped a man down to hide behind the cupboards. He had a piece of string like that woman in the labyrinth in Crete or Rhodes or wherever it was. One tug meant they were coming up, two tugs meant they were going down. Once we felt the tugs that they were going down we went for those rooms. Lady Powerscourt was waiting for us. I think she thought I was you, my lord.’

  Chief Inspector Robin Tait blushed. ‘I got a great big hug, my lord. But Lady Powerscourt was in rather a bad way. She needed fresh air, so we brought her along the roof. I think she’s better now.’

  ‘I am so grateful to you all,’ said Lady Lucy. Powerscourt was thrilled to hear the sound of her voice again.

  ‘I think Lady Powerscourt needs to stay up here in the fresh air for a bit longer,’ said Tait firmly. ‘It’s still very smoky down below. And you don’t look too good yourself, my lord.’

  Chief Inspector Tait smiled. As he led his men down the stairs each one was embraced by Lady Lucy. They’re hers for life now, thought Powerscourt.

  ‘Lucy, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I’m so happy. I don’t know what to say.’

  Lady Lucy smiled back at him. She looked around at her strange surroundings, up on the roof with chimney pots and great wires and cables running everywhere. Just beneath them a grey and silver sea stretched out towards the distant horizon. It looked like polished glass.

  ‘Just for the moment, Francis,’ she said, ‘up here on our own with the moon and the stars, you don’t have to say anything at all.’

  34

  ‘Do you mind if I join you?’ Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were taking a late breakfast in the Prince Regent the morning after the rescue. Powerscourt had not been able to get all the smoke out of his hair. He felt as if one of Joseph Hardy’s barrels was still smouldering on the top of his skull. Lady Lucy looked tired. The long strain of her ordeal had not yet passed. The man asking to join them was the Prime Minister’s private secretary, Schomberg McDonnell.

  ‘McDonnell!’ said Powerscourt with an air of great surprise. ‘How very nice to see you. Some coffee? I thought you had gone back to London.’

  Powerscourt didn’t recall seeing McDonnell at the impromptu party in the King George the Fourth in the small hours of the morning the night before. Albert Hudson, the manager, had opened his bar in person, serving free drinks to the strange collection of policemen and firemen, departing from his post only to go down to his cellars and fetch more cases of champagne. Powerscourt particularly enjoyed overhearing Hudson asking the Chief Constable to whom he should send the bill for repairs to his hotel. Hudson had blinked several times when told he should post it to Number 10 Downing Street.

  Johnny Fitzgerald had commandeered two bottles of the hotel’s finest Burgundy. ‘It tastes fantastic after a long period of abstinence, Francis,’ he had assured Powerscourt and Lady Lucy. ‘Nearly thirty-six hours without a drop. I think I might try this abstaining business again. But not for a while yet.’

  The Chief Constable knew a remarkable collection of sea-shanties. Surprisingly the policemen knew all the words. Joe Hardy had wandered round the undamaged sections of the hotel, delighted at how well his plans had worked. ‘Wonderful!’ he had said to all and sundry after a couple of glasses. ‘Wonderful! Best night of my life!’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ said Schomberg McDonnell, looking carefully at Powerscourt, ‘that when I came down from London last night I had three letters from the Prime Minister in my possession. One was for our friend Mr Hudson. One was for the Chief Constable.’ He paused to demolish part of a kipper. ‘The third one is for you.’

  Powerscourt opened the envelope. He felt sick.

  ‘My dear Lord Powerscourt,’ he read, ‘May I add my congratulations to those you must have already received on the successful liberation of Lady Powerscourt. I always knew you would succeed.

  ‘But I fear your country has more to ask of you yet. We have a major security crisis over the Queen’s Jubilee Parade. I am not au fait with all the details myself but Mr Dominic Knox of the Irish Office tells me that some German rifles have gone missing. Mr Knox tells me that you know of these rifles, that you were indeed instrumental in tracking them to their place of concealment. Knox thought he had intercepted the people he belie
ved were bringing this weaponry to London. Now he thinks the messengers were merely decoys, designed to throw him off the scent. He believes that one or more of these rifles may be in London where an unknown assassin may be waiting to kill Her Majesty on Jubilee Day itself.

  ‘I would like you to return to London immediately and assist Mr Knox in his endeavours.’

  Powerscourt handed the letter to Lady Lucy. He remembered that terrible night in the Wicklow Mountains where he had feigned death to put his enemies off the scent, two coffins filled with German rifles buried in the grave of Thomas Carew, two more interred in a windswept cemetery high up in the hills where Martha O’Driscoll shared her eternal rest with Mausers or Schneiders.

  ‘Francis.’ Lady Lucy’s voice was very firm. Many of her vast tribe of relations – enough, Powerscourt had once said, to fill two rotten boroughs in the days before the Great Reform Bill – had served in the military. Maybe the sense of duty passes down the generations. ‘I know it’s terrible,’ she said, ‘but there is no choice. We must go back to London at once. I so much want to see the children anyway. It’s only a few more days.’ She smiled bravely at him. Schomberg McDonnell had nearly demolished his kipper.

  ‘Can I ask you two questions, McDonnell?’ said Powerscourt thoughtfully. ‘Of course I shall come. But what does Dominic Knox think should happen if he doesn’t find these rifles?’

  McDonnell drank some of his coffee. ‘He has a very devious mind, that Dominic Knox,’ he began.

  God in heaven, thought Powerscourt. What kind of Machiavellian intelligence does the man possess if McDonnell thinks he is devious?

  ‘We can’t cancel the parade. One of his suggestions is to declare that the Queen has been taken ill. She does not ride through the streets of London at all but merely appears for the Thanksgiving Service at St Paul’s.’

  ‘And the other?’ Powerscourt was fascinated.

  ‘The other is that we have a substitute, an old lady of the same shape and size, dressed exactly like Her Majesty, who rides out from Buckingham Palace on the great parade.’

  Powerscourt wondered briefly if McDonnell wished he had thought of that one himself. ‘It’s bit tricky,’ he said, ‘if she happens to get shot and the world thinks it was the Queen.’

  ‘At least the Queen would still be alive,’ said McDonnell frostily. ‘You said you had two questions, Lord Powerscourt. What was the second one?’ McDonnell sounded like a man anxious to get away.

  ‘You said you brought three letters down to Brighton with you,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I just wonder if you didn’t bring four.’

  ‘What would the fourth one have been?’ said McDonnell, taking refuge behind a large slice of buttered toast.

  ‘I think the first paragraph with congratulations about Lucy’s rescue would have turned into a paragraph of commiserations about its failure. But I think the second paragraph, bidding me come to London, would have been exactly the same. Am I right?’

  Schomberg McDonnell, private secretary to the Prime Minister, confidant and colleague of the most powerful man in Great Britain, laughed.

  ‘I’m afraid you’re absolutely right, Lord Powerscourt. I tore the fourth letter into very small pieces first thing this morning.’

  Powerscourt smiled. ‘We’d better go,’ he said.

  As they made their way out of the hotel dining room they were greeted enthusiastically by Joe Hardy. He embraced Lady Lucy and shook Powerscourt vigorously by the hand.

  ‘Just wanted to say, Lord Powerscourt, that I’m at your disposal for any further bonfires you may be planning. Gunpowder Plot, re-run of the Great Fire of London, burning down the Houses of Parliament again, I’m your man! Best night of my life!’

  Dominic Knox was pacing up and down an office overlooking Horseguards. He was a short, wiry man in his late thirties. Today, Powerscourt thought, as they shook hands by the door, he looked at least fifty. Knox looked as though he hadn’t slept properly for weeks.

  ‘Thank God you have come, Lord Powerscourt. I fear it is too late. I fear we are all too late now.’ He looked gloomily out of the window. The park was full of visitors for the Jubilee, staring in awe at the soldiers from all over the world who were enjoying the sunshine in St James’s Park.

  ‘I cannot believe it is too late,’ said Powerscourt, sitting down on the far side of Knox’s enormous desk. ‘McDonnell said there was a problem with the rifles.’

  ‘I have two problems, Lord Powerscourt,’ said Knox, relieved perhaps to be able to share his problems with a fellow-professional. ‘The first does indeed concern the rifles. You will recall, none better, that two coffins believed to contain rifles were buried in the grave of one Thomas Carew, south of Greystones, and a further two in the grave of Martha O’Driscoll up in the Wicklow Mountains. Both have been watched ever since you left Ireland. We opened one of them up in broad daylight the day after you found them and found four Mausers of the very latest make inside.’

  Knox paused and rearranged some papers on his desk. Powerscourt said nothing.

  ‘Two coffins are still with Thomas Carew. But there is only one coffin with Martha O’Driscoll. Four brand new high-powered rifles have left the Wicklow Mountains and gone I know not where. We only discovered that two days ago, while you were in Brighton.’

  ‘Christ,’ said Powerscourt. ‘You remember I told you I did not actually see the rifles being placed in the grave? All I saw was the disturbed earth on the top. They could have placed one coffin in the O’Driscoll grave and taken the other one somewhere else.’

  Knox nodded gloomily. ‘Of course I remember you saying that, Lord Powerscourt. We checked the grave the following day. There were three coffins in it, one of the widow O’Driscoll and two more that came out of the sea in the night. We opened one of them and saw these four new rifles inside.’

  ‘And you have been watching this place ever since, I presume?’

  ‘We have.’ Knox stopped to swat a fly that was advancing over his desk, trying to read his secrets. ‘I don’t know how they did it. Maybe the watchers got careless or fell asleep. But one coffin has gone. And the problem is this, Lord Powerscourt. Michael Byrne, the man I believe to be responsible for this conspiracy, has been sending messengers to London. Three young women have been apprehended so far. All of them have perfectly legitimate reasons for being here, of course. All of them have gone to the house of an Irish schoolteacher. I believed that Byrne was trying to smuggle one or more of those rifles into London. Broken into pieces, of course, so they could be reassembled. But no. All they brought the teacher was one bottle of Jameson’s whisky, two pots of home-made marmalade and a large quantity of best Irish potato-bread.’

  ‘So you think they were decoys, despatched to put you off the scent?’

  ‘Absolutely correct, Lord Powerscourt.’ Knox went over to his window and pulled it firmly shut. ‘You remember Wellington before Waterloo, wondering which direction Napoleon’s armies were going to come from? He thought the Corsican would go round his flank to try to cut him off from the sea. But he didn’t, he drove straight between Wellington and Blucher’s armies. When he found out the truth at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in Brussels, that Napoleon hadn’t taken the expected direction, Wellington said, “Napoleon has humbugged me.” I too feel as if I’ve been humbugged. Humbugged by Michael Byrne.’

  ‘Wellington won in the end, though, didn’t he,’ said Powerscourt, smiling. He looked at a large print on the wall of Queen Victoria’s previous Jubilee ten years before. Loyal crowds filled the streets. Garlands and banners hung above the route, festooned across lampposts or strung between the buildings. In a carriage a small figure rode in glory through her streets. Powerscourt stared at the windows overlooking the route. Was one of them going to contain an assassin, lurking behind the curtains until it was time to strike and a German rifle, the most deadly, the most accurate in the world, rang out to shatter the climax of an Empress’s reign?

  ‘The rifles,’ he said suddenly. ‘Did they take th
e rifles and leave the coffin in the grave, or did they move the coffin with the rifles inside?’

  ‘They moved the whole bloody coffin,’ Knox replied, ‘there are only two coffins there now. Do you think that is important, my lord?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Powerscourt. His mind was racing. ‘I have always wondered why they put the rifles in those coffins, you know. At first sight, it looks as though it was a convenient way of hiding them. They could be buried in innocent Irish graves in the middle of the night, disturbing the dead, no doubt, but an excellent hiding place. But suppose that wasn’t the only reason. Suppose there was another reason.’

  Powerscourt paused. Dominic Knox said nothing. The silence lasted for twenty seconds or more, faint sounds of merriment forcing their way in through the window from the park outside. Another fly had begun a long march across Knox’s papers.

  ‘Suppose the real reason for the coffins was this,’ Powerscourt went on. ‘You want to send some guns from Ireland to England. You know the police and security people are watching everything and searching people and premises they suspect. Think how different it is with a coffin. Here we have an English visitor to Ireland, maybe an Irishman who had come to work in London and goes back to see his family. Let’s call him Seamus Docherty. The unfortunate man falls ill in Ireland. He cannot be saved. He passes away. But it is the dearest wish of the Docherty family back in London that father Seamus, husband Seamus, be buried by their local priest in their local church and buried in their local cemetery where they can lay flowers on his grave after Mass on Sundays. So the body of the dead Docherty is put in its coffin and sent over to London. It must happen all the time. Except there isn’t a Seamus Docherty, apart from on the name plate of the coffin. It contains four high quality Mausers, capable of killing man or woman at five hundred yards distance. The weight is presumably made up with bits of lead or some other heavy material so nobody would suspect there wasn’t a body inside.