Death and the Jubilee lfp-2 Page 38

  ‘What do you think of that, Mr Knox?’

  ‘I think it is very plausible, my lord.’ Knox did not look greatly encouraged by the news.

  ‘Think of it, man,’ said Powerscourt. ‘It may take a lot of manpower to find the answer. But there must be records of the transhipment of a dead body in a coffin. There may be records in Dublin of such a passage. If Seamus Docherty comes into London by train there will be records, manifests or something like that at Euston station, which will show where its final destination was. Once we find out that Father O’Flaherty of the Church of the Holy Cross performed the burial, we will know where the coffin is. If it came by sea, which I doubt, there must be records at the Port of London authority.’

  Powerscourt paused. There was something Johnny Fitzgerald had said when he came home from Berlin, something that didn’t seem to make very much sense at the time. Hotels, something to do with hotels.

  ‘I believe,’ said Powerscourt, ‘that a hotel room was booked for the Jubilee by their German confederates a long time ago. Maybe eight months or more. That must be where the gunman is going to make his attempt, from the hotel. A room, or a suite of rooms overlooking the route of the procession reserved last year. Surely we can find that out. Even if time is very short, we still have several days left.’

  Knox looked up and shook his head.

  ‘I said when you arrived, Lord Powerscourt, that there were two problems. One was the rifles. The other is politics.’

  ‘Politics?’ said Powerscourt. ‘For God’s sake, man, this is a Diamond Jubilee, not a general election!’

  ‘Let me explain myself better,’ said Knox. He went to stare out of his window. ‘I work for the Irish Office. Security for the parade is in the hands of a very stupid general called Arbuthnot. When I told him about the missing rifles, he went apoplectic, my lord. He turned into a sort of human earthquake, face a vivid red, eruptions of bad language, hot molten streams of invective pouring forth about my incompetence. He, in his turn, told the Home Secretary who has overall responsibility for security in the capital. There can be few things, Lord Powerscourt, more guaranteed to bring a promising political career to an ignominious and inglorious end, than somebody taking a shot, maybe even killing the Head of State at a Diamond Jubilee.’

  ‘Losing a war, perhaps, caught embezzling Treasury Funds,’ said Powerscourt flippantly.

  Knox smiled ruefully. ‘The upshot of all this is that I have not been relieved from my post. But I have been relieved of my men. I had sixty operatives, many brought over from Dublin to work with me on this problem. They have all been taken away from me.’

  ‘Where have they gone?’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘The Home Secretary and General Arbuthnot have decided that my methods are not to be trusted. No doubt even now I am being trussed like some dead animal in their minds to be turned into the sacrifice or scapegoat if things go wrong. They have decided that the only way to meet this threat is to have policemen or security operatives watching every entrance that leads into the route of the parade. Where the bus leaves to go to Temple Bar, there you will find my men, or at the entrances of every station in London, waiting to apprehend any person carrying a large package.’

  ‘But what about the Prime Minister? What about Schomberg McDonnell?’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘The Prime Minister,’ said Dominic Knox, ‘has disappeared. He cannot be found. McDonnell has vanished with him. Perhaps they would feel it would be more politic if they were not in London at this time. But he placed great faith in you, my lord, the Prime Minister. He seemed to think you were some sort of miracle worker.’

  Powerscourt contemplated walking on the water or raising the dead from their tombs. Not appropriate, that, just now, he said to himself. Maybe turning water into wine would gain him the eternal gratitude of Johnny Fitzgerald.

  ‘All right, Mr Knox,’ he said ‘tell me the worst. How many people have we got to make these inquiries?’

  ‘Five. Just five,’ Dominic Knox replied. ‘Myself, yourself, and three of my men I’ve managed to keep out of the clutches of that dreadful general.’

  ‘Six,’ said Powerscourt, thinking of the miracle at the wedding feast. ‘There’s Johnny Fitzgerald. I’m going to find him. He’s worth a regiment all on his own, two after a couple of glasses. We’re not beaten yet, Mr Knox, not by a long way.’

  35

  Lord Francis Powerscourt was surrounded by angels, angels with broken wings, angels with no arms, angels with no heads, angels in stone, angels in marble. He was waiting for Johnny Fitzgerald at three o’clock in the afternoon in Kilburn Cemetery in the north-west of the capital.

  Knox’s depleted forces had been remarkably speedy in their negotiations with the keepers of the records. Three coffins had indeed been sent from Dublin to London in the preceding month. Their destinations had been three different firms of undertakers, who had reluctantly told Powerscourt and Fitzgerald their final destination. Henry Joseph McLachlan, aged fifty-four, had been buried here with these angels.

  Sections of the cemetery were overgrown. Weeds and brambles covered the bottom of the graves and giant creepers had entwined themselves round the statuary. Rooks and crows circled above the trees, protesting at the arrival of living humans. Through the foliage occasional crosses could be discerned, almost hidden from view. The other area was not very large, only a couple of hundred souls waiting here for the last trump.

  Powerscourt began making his way round the graves, looking for McLachlan. He was wearing a pair of old trousers and the fisherman’s jersey Chief Inspector Tait had found for him in Brighton. The grave would be clean and fresh, the passing seasons yet to leave their slow marks of creeping decay. Johnny Fitzgerald materialized, in his Mystic Merlin clothes, a spade in his hand, a large bag of tools on his back. He had been very cheerful since Brighton, drinking only the finest wines to compensate for his brief period of abstinence.

  ‘What’s this bugger called, Francis?’ said Fitzgerald.

  ‘McLachlan,’ said Powerscourt, ‘Henry Joseph McLachlan. The earth won’t have settled long enough for him to get a proper tombstone yet. There’ll be a small cross or a stone with his name on it for now.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be grand,’ Fitzgerald was looking down at a bunch of dead flowers, ‘if people actually said what they meant on these bloody tombs.’

  ‘What do you mean, Johnny?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ’Delighted he’s gone,’ said Fitzgerald cheerfully, ‘Thank you, God, for taking the old bastard away. Gone but not remembered. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, not a moment too soon. May her life be as miserable where she’s gone as she made mine here on earth, that sort of thing.’

  ‘You’re a bad person, Johnny,’ Powerscourt laughed. ‘They’ll get their own back on you, all these people here. I expect they’ll leave a message with St Peter that you’re not to be let in. You’re blackballed from heaven, Johnny. Hard luck.’

  Powerscourt stopped. The afternoon sun lit up a row of graves not ten feet from where they were standing. One of them was new, very new with a small cross at the head.

  ‘Here he is, Johnny. Henry Joseph McLachlan. Gone to his Father in Heaven, May 1897.’

  ‘Do we open it up now, Francis,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘or do we wait till it’s dark? That’ll be bloody hours away.’

  ‘We’ve got to do it now,’ said Powerscourt, glancing uneasily round the cemetery. There were no gardeners on duty. No relatives had come for a late afternoon communion with their dead. They were alone.

  Powerscourt borrowed a spade from an open grave nearby, the preparations apparently left half-finished. In a couple of minutes they had removed the earth on top of the coffin. Something moved behind them. Powerscourt and Fitzgerald turned quickly, hands going automatically into trouser pockets. A squirrel eyed them coldly and vanished up a tree.

  ‘I think, Francis, we can open the coffin without taking it out of the grave. Give me that big screwdriver. You keep your eyes
open up top.’

  Fitzgerald lay down beside the grave. He began undoing the four great screws that held the lid in position.

  ‘I don’t suppose,’ he said, panting slightly with the exertion, ‘that you would recognize the coffin we’re looking for? That would be too much to hope for.’

  ‘It was very dark,’ said Powerscourt, his eyes fixed on the main entrance to Kilburn Cemetery, ‘all I could tell was that they were coffins.’

  He was hoping more than anything that this would be the right coffin, if there was a right coffin. He remembered that night in Greystones, following the coffins on their journey from the sea. He wondered if the man with the pipe had been Michael Byrne. Maybe all three were full of dead bodies, not deadly rifles. Maybe he had got it all wrong. Maybe the deadly coffin had been sent to Guildford or Reading, not to London at all.

  ‘Three screws out, one to go,’ Fitzgerald reported. ‘I think I could do with a drink.’ Powerscourt thought of the other corpses he had met in the course of his investigation, Old Mr Harrison with no head and no arms, floating by London Bridge, Mr Frederick Harrison, burnt to death on the top floor of his mansion. Ordeal by Water. Ordeal by Fire.

  ‘Give me a hand here, Francis. We can just take a peep inside.’

  Fitzgerald made the sign of the cross. Powerscourt lay down beside him. Together they tried to lift the lid. It was stiff. It didn’t want to move.

  ‘Bugger it,’ said Fitzgerald, ‘is there another bloody screw somewhere?’ Anger seemed to give him extra strength. Slowly, with a faint creak, the lid of the coffin came up.

  There were no rifles. Only a white face that looked surprised to be dead, the eyes closed, the hair carefully brushed across the forehead, the hands folded in pious expectation of the second coming.

  ‘Sorry, Mr McLachlan,’ said Fitzgerald quietly, ‘very sorry. We’ll put you back where you belong in no time.’ He replaced the lid and the screws, lying on the ground beside the grave. Powerscourt was whispering to himself. ‘Lord now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word.’ Johnny Fitzgerald was hurling the earth back on top of the coffin as fast as he could.

  ‘For mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all people.’

  Fitzgerald had moved on to the turf now, laying it out in neat rows. He stamped on it to make it flat once more.

  Powerscourt was still whispering. ‘To be a light to lighten the Gentiles and to the glory of thy people Israel.’

  Johnny Fitzgerald jumped off the grave of Henry Joseph McLachlan. He brushed the earth off his clothes. ‘Where now, Francis? I don’t suppose you passed the Gravediggers Arms on your way in here? The Last Trump perhaps? That would be a good name for a pub.’

  Powerscourt was looking at a piece of paper. ‘We’ve got a choice here, Johnny. There are two coffins left. One is in the North London Cemetery somewhere near Islington. The other is the West London Cemetery near the river in Mortlake. Do you have any aesthetic preferences for either of these locations?’

  ‘To hell with Islington,’ said Fitzgerald firmly. ‘There are lots of good pubs near the river in Mortlake. Mortlake gets my vote. I presume your carriage is still waiting near the entrance, Francis? We must be the only grave robbers in Britain to have their very own carriage to carry them round their targets. To horse! To horse!’

  The streets were very busy. Every cab, carriage and brougham of the capital seemed to be full of visitors, inspecting the sights of London before they watched the Jubilee Parade. Powerscourt looked at his watch. It was now twenty minutes past four. He had noticed a sign at Kilburn that said the cemetery shut at five o’clock. If they arrived too late at Mortlake they would have to wait for a quiet moment to climb over the wall. It didn’t look as if there would be any quiet moments in London this evening.

  They made it with fifteen minutes to spare. They picked up their spades and Johnny’s bag. Powerscourt took out two huge fisherman’s bags and hid them inside the entrance.

  ‘One blast on this whistle,’ he said to Wilson his coachman, ‘means come to the entrance as fast as you can. Two blasts means Help.’

  Chief Inspector Tait had given Powerscourt some police whistles as a memento of the night in the King George the Fourth. Powerscourt had asked for three more for the children and regretted it deeply within twenty-four hours. Robert said it would be very useful for refereeing football matches with his friends in the park. Thomas and Olivia blew theirs once to universal delight. But they didn’t stop blowing them. Powerscourt thought their lungs must collapse under the weight of blowing, from the top of the stairs, in the drawing room, in the garden. They crept into the kitchen and blew them right behind the cook and her assistant, causing panic and near mutiny below stairs. They dashed out into the street and frightened little old ladies taking a quiet afternoon walk in Markham Square. Lady Lucy only separated Thomas and Olivia from the whistles by pointing out that she and Francis wanted to play with them as well. Even then Powerscourt had to invent a whole new vocabulary of police whistles. One blast on the whistle meant Go and get into the bath. Two blasts meant Get into bed. Three blasts meant Go to sleep.

  ‘Look at this place, Francis, would you just look at it.’ Johnny Fitzgerald was leaning on his spade, for all the world like a workman taking a well-earned rest, and looking at the vast expanse of cemetery. Well-ordered rows stretched almost as far as the eye could see. North towards the river, west towards Kew, the West London Cemetery was enormous. Thousands, if not tens of thousands of dead must be interred here.

  ‘My God!’ said Powerscourt, horrified at the prospect of searching for one grave among so many. ‘It looks to be about the same size as Hyde Park, Johnny.’

  To their left was the Belgravia of this country of the dead. Avenues of great stone catafalques, temples to the departed, stretched out towards the rear wall of the cemetery. Even in death, Powerscourt thought, the rich had to be better housed than the poor. If you had money in this life, then you had to show it when you were gone, neoclassical temples with shelves and closed chambers to contain the dynasties of the wealthy. Iron grilles barred the entrance to these last resting places of London’s better postal districts. Inside spiders wove their webs very thickly. The air was musty. Bats no doubt came out at night to guard the money and the dead.

  Powerscourt pointed this necropolis out to Johnny Fitzgerald. ‘In here, Johnny. We can wait till the place closes up. Nobody would find us in here.’

  Crouching down beside the catafalque of the Williams family of Chester Square, five of them interred in their five star luxury, Powerscourt and Fitzgerald waited in silence until they knew the cemetery was closed. Powerscourt felt claustrophobic, choked. Fitzgerald was drawing something with his finger on the dust of the side wall. Powerscourt thought it was a wine bottle. At last they heard the bolts being pulled and the keys turning in the great locks of the main entrance. Until the morning they were alone. Alone with thousands of the dead, one of whose coffins might not contain a corpse.

  ‘We’d better have a plan, Johnny,’ said Powerscourt as they emerged from the dank air of Belgravia. ‘Should we start at the middle and work out, or begin round the edges and make our way into the centre?’

  ‘Maybe there’s one section where they put all the new arrivals, Francis. Like new boys at school. What’s this bugger called anyway?’ Johnny Fitzgerald pointed his spade into the middle distance as if the newest graves were there.

  ‘This bugger is called Freely,’ said Powerscourt, checking his piece of paper again, ‘Dermot Sebastian Freely.’

  The sky was mostly blue. Small clouds drifted overhead. The tombstones were warm from the late afternoon sun. ‘Let’s begin round the edges,’ said Powerscourt, ‘and work our way in towards the centre.’

  ‘All right,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘Dermot Sebastian Freely,’ he muttered to himself, ‘where the hell are you?’

  By seven o’clock, after an hour and a half of searching, they had found nothing. P
owerscourt reckoned they had covered less than a tenth of the territory. He began to worry that they might not find Dermot Sebastian Freely before it was dark.

  The whole century is enclosed here, in this enormous cemetery, he thought. He passed the grave of a man born in the year of Trafalgar, 1805, when England was saved from invasion. He passed the grave of a woman born in 1837, the year of Victoria’s accession to the throne. He passed an ornate headstone commemorating a man who had been born in the year of the Great Reform Bill in 1832 and passed away in the year of the Second Reform Act of 1867. He passed the last resting place of men who had been soldiers, who had fought in the Crimea or in Africa or in India, servants of the Queen who had turned into an Empress and whose dominions now stretched across the globe. He doubted if they had been heroes, these bodies sleeping peacefully in the evening sun, but as it said so frequently on the tombstones, they had fought the good fight, remembered most often by the loving tributes of husbands and wives, sons and daughters. Powerscourt thought of the ending of Middlemarch, Lady Lucy’s favourite novel: ‘for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts: and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’

  By eight o’clock Johnny Fitzgerald was getting thirsty, muttering to himself the names of the pubs he knew along the river, the Dove, the Blue Anchor, the Old Ship as if it were a final blessing on the dead.

  ‘Who the hell was Zachariah?’ he asked Powerscourt at one of their occasional conferences. ‘I’ve seen quotations from the old bugger about five times in the last half an hour.’

  ‘Old Testament,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Prophet. Long white beard.’

  Fitzgerald looked at him doubtfully but returned to his stretch of tombs. There was a breeze coming off the river, rustling the leaves of the trees, whispering its way through the tombstones. At nine o’clock they failed to notice a small boy who had climbed into the cemetery by a tree at the southern end and hid himself in its branches, keeping a careful eye on the two interlopers.