Death and the Jubilee lfp-2 Read online

  Powerscourt smiled. ‘I did, Mr Parker. Some of the tribesmen up there tried to kill me. They were very wild. They were very fond of their horses, though.’

  ‘Were there great mountains, Lord Powerscourt, with snow on them all the year round?’

  Powerscourt thought he could detect the heart of a traveller beating strongly in Samuel Parker, who had spent his entire life in the calm and order of the Oxfordshire countryside.

  ‘The mountains, Mr Parker, are huge. Huge. Nearly thirty thousand feet, some of them, with snow covering the peaks even at the height of summer. I have a book of photographs of the great mountains at home. I shall bring it for you next time I come.’

  Samuel Parker’s honest face lit up with pleasure. ‘That would be so kind, Lord Powerscourt. But I fear we are getting away from our business here. Mr Frederick said you wanted to talk to me about Old Mr Harrison.’

  ‘I do. Perhaps you could just tell me about his time here, how he spent his days, what your own dealings with him were. Take your time, Mr Parker, take your time.’

  ‘Well,’ replied Samuel Parker, trying to arrange his memories into some sort of order for a man who had seen the great mountains of the Himalayas and had a book to prove it. ‘Old Mr Harrison, he’d been living here most of the time for about the last ten years or so. Some of the time he was in London, sometimes he was abroad. For the bank, you understand.’

  He paused. Powerscourt said nothing.

  ‘My duties had to do with him and the horses. Ten years ago he would ride about the country quite a lot, on Caesar or Anchises – he was always very fond of Anchises. Then, these last few years or so, he was only able to make the journey from the house round the lake. He liked to go round it every day. “It looks different every single day of the year, Samuel,” he used to say to me, “and I want to see it changing.”’

  For a moment Samuel Parker vanished into his memories.

  ‘Then, about a year or two ago, something changed. He wasn’t as well as he had been after his accident. It hurt his leg something terrible, that accident, he had to keep on going back to the doctor. I blame that Cleopatra myself, she always was an obstinate beast with a mind of her own. After that, he would ride very slowly, sometimes on a pony. And this was different too.’

  Samuel Parker scratched his head and put some more logs on the fire.

  ‘He began bringing work with him. Letters he had received, papers from the bank, I shouldn’t wonder. You haven’t seen those temples by the lake yet, Lord Powerscourt, have you?’

  Powerscourt shook his head.

  ‘Sometimes he would work in there at his papers. We had a folding table we used to bring and he would work away, writing letters and things inside one of those temples. Sometimes he would give me letters to post for him. He got very slow towards the end, Lord Powerscourt. He was old and his leg was bad but I’m sure his mind still worked faster than his feet if you follow me.’

  Samuel Parker stopped. Powerscourt waited. Perhaps there was more to come. Perhaps Samuel Parker had exhausted his memories.

  ‘That is very interesting,’ he said at length, ‘and admirably told. Perhaps I could just ask you about one or two things, Mr Parker?’

  ‘Of course you can, my lord. I was never very good at long speeches, if you follow me.’

  ‘Can you remember exactly when he began to bring his work down to the lake?’

  Samuel Parker looked into his fire. He shook his head slowly. ‘I don’t think I can, my lord. All I can remember is that it was about the time we began to hear about the plans for this new Jubilee up in London. Mabel reminded me of that the other day. She is very fond of things like Jubilees, my lord. I took her all the way up to London for that other one in ’87. She can remember all the details to this day, can Mabel. I don’t suppose either of us will get there for this one though. Mabel’s legs wouldn’t be up to it, so they wouldn’t.’

  ‘And when Old Mr Harrison took his papers down to the lake,’ Powerscourt sounded his most innocent, ‘do you suppose he left some of them behind sometimes? In one of the temples or somewhere like that?’

  ‘I’d never thought about that, my lord.’ Parker fell silent for a moment. ‘Come to think of it, he could have done, I suppose. Sometimes he didn’t seem to have as many of these papers going back as he did going down, if you follow me.’

  ‘And would you know,’ Powerscourt was looking at him intently as the night finally closed in outside, ‘where exactly he left them?’

  ‘Do you mean, my lord, that they might be still there, these papers?’

  ‘I do, Mr Parker.’

  ‘God bless my soul, Lord Powerscourt, if you’ll pardon the expression. I’d never have thought of that. I suppose they might be.’ He scratched his head again as if unsure what to believe.

  ‘And the letters, Mr Parker,’ Powerscourt went on, ‘the ones he gave you to post. Did you think that was unusual, asking you to take charge of them rather than leaving them in the big house for the servants to send off?’

  ‘I thought it was unusual at first, my lord. Then I sort of got used to it. Mabel used to think Old Mr Harrison was making secret investments somewhere abroad.’

  ‘Were the letters for abroad?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘Why, yes, I suppose they were. Mostly to Germany, Frankfurt, I remember, and Berlin, wherever that is. And some for a place called Hamburg. Mabel looked that one up in a map at the library.’

  Powerscourt wondered if he had a rival in the detection business in Mrs Parker, obviously an assiduous researcher.

  ‘Did he bring letters with him down to the lake?’ Powerscourt went on. ‘Letters that might have come from these foreign places?’

  ‘I think he might have, my lord.’ Samuel Parker scratched his head. ‘I do seem to remember that sometimes they weren’t opened. And they had foreign stamps on them. Mabel does like to look at a foreign stamp.’

  Powerscourt wondered again about the precise role played by Mrs Mabel Parker in her husband’s affairs but he let it pass.

  ‘Could I make a suggestion, Mr Parker?’ Powerscourt was already planning another visit to Blackwater House. ‘I have to come back here again very soon, to talk to the people in the big house, you understand. Perhaps we could go on the same walk round the lake you used to take with Old Mr Harrison. Sometimes revisiting the places helps bring back more memories. Not that you haven’t remembered very well already.’

  Powerscourt smiled a smile of congratulation.

  ‘There is just one other thing, my lord,’ said Parker. ‘You’re not the first gentleman to have been round here asking questions about Old Mr Harrison. There was another gentleman round here the other day.’

  Samuel Parker paused again.

  ‘He was a very curious gentleman, my lord. I thought he was almost too curious. Very friendly, of course, but I wouldn’t have said he was as discreet as yourself.’

  Powerscourt rejoiced at this description of Johnny Fitzgerald. Not as discreet as himself, he liked that. He would tell Lady Lucy about it this evening. But as he set off for his train back to London one question above all others troubled him.

  Why had Old Mr Harrison taken his business down to the lake? Why had he posted his foreign correspondence in this unusual way? Was it normal banker’s caution? Was it merely the whim, the foible of a very old man? Or did he think he was being spied on inside the drawing rooms and the bedrooms of Blackwater House?

  8

  Powerscourt found he had company on his return to Markham Square. Johnny Fitzgerald was doing him the honour of sampling the latest delivery to the Powerscourt cellars below.

  ‘I was just saying to Lady Lucy, Francis,’ Fitzgerald began without the least hint of apology, ‘that you need to sample some of this stuff once it arrives. They might have sent you the wrong year or the feebler stuff from the wrong side of the hill.’ Powerscourt kissed his wife and turned to his friend.

  ‘And what does this early test show, Johnny?’ He picked up a bottl
e from the table and noted that two others appeared to have been carried up for inspection.

  ‘I’m glad to say that you’ve done well with this one. This Chablis is very good, flinty I believe is the word they use in the trade. I’m afraid I may not have the time to sample those two over there as I have to buy dinner for a man I know in the City. On your business, Francis, Fitzgeralds never sleep.’

  Lady Lucy laughed.

  ‘But I must tell you what I found out when I was down south inquiring about boating accidents, Francis.’

  Powerscourt stretched out in his favourite red leather armchair and poured himself a small glass of wine. ‘You don’t mind, Johnny, if I just try a glass of my own wine in my own chair in my own house, do you?’

  Fitzgerald waved expansively from the fireplace. ‘Help yourself, Francis, help yourself. This is Liberty Hall.’

  ‘So what have you discovered down south?’

  ‘Well,’ said Fitzgerald, looking serious now, ‘the first thing to report is that every year the Harrisons take a house near Cowes on the Isle of Wight. A huge house it is too, right on the water with a tennis court at the back and a little jetty at the front where you could keep small yachts. Harrisons from all Europe turn up at this place, Francis. Some of them come to watch the races in Cowes Week. I shouldn’t wonder if the German ones are cheering for the bloody Kaiser rather than the right side.’

  ‘How many members of the family are there exactly, Johnny?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘There could be up to fifty of them at a time,’ said Fitzgerald, squinting into his wine glass, ‘or so my informant told me. But the accident, Francis, the accident. Nobody down there likes to talk about it at all, I don’t know why. One old seafarer told me it would bring bad luck all round. But a number of the locals don’t think it could have been an accident at all. You can see that they think, though they wouldn’t quite say it, that there was foul play.’

  ‘What sort of foul play?’ said Powerscourt, unlacing his boots and turning his feet towards the fire.

  ‘That’s the thing, Francis. I got hold of the people in the boatyard at Cowes that used to look after the boat and they just couldn’t believe it. A different man in another boatyard told me about how you could nobble a boat rather like you nobble a horse. There are so many ways that boat could have been fixed, not that I understood most of them. The most likely was to make a small leak shortly before your victims went out for their sail. The water would come in gradually and nobody would notice. By the time the water came through the floor it would almost certainly be too late. And if you were on your own, you would be hard pressed to bale out and sail the bloody boat at the same time. Or that’s what my man said. So you see, Francis, somebody could have fixed the boat. But it could have been anybody.’ Fitzgerald shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘An English Harrison, a German Harrison, an Austrian Harrison – that’s just the beginning,’ said Powerscourt, running through his knowledge of the number of different branches of the family.

  ‘What’s more,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘all that part of the coast is overrun with people in the summer. Nobody would have paid any attention to anybody tinkering about in the inside of a boat. Half the bloody island is doing the same thing.’

  Two men were waiting for a third by the side of the lake at Glendalough, thirty miles south-west of Dublin. They were shielded from sight by the trees but they commanded a clear view of the path that led down from the village and the hotel.

  ‘He’s half an hour late now,’ said Thomas Docherty, the younger man.

  ‘We’ll give him another fifteen minutes or so,’ replied Michael Byrne. Both men were whispering even though they were the only people to be seen on the fringes of the lake. Both were leaders of small revolutionary bands pledged to the overthrow of English rule in Ireland. Both lived in fear of their lives from the authorities, their secret files in Dublin Castle augmented daily by the reports of the informants, handsomely subsidized at the British Exchequer’s expense.

  They heard the third man before they saw him, his footsteps crunching on the path. Behind them small waves were lapping the surface of the lake. The water was still dark blue, fading into black with the coming of the night.

  ‘Should we go and let him know we’re here?’ whispered Docherty.

  ‘He knows. He knows exactly where we are going to be. Don’t move. I don’t think we were followed here but you cannot be too careful.’

  The three conspirators had chosen Glendalough for its innocence. Any trip there could be excused as a visit to one of the ancient seats of Irish learning, the fifth-century tower further up the hill still visible like a beacon against the Wicklow hills, a lighthouse placed by God to illuminate the journeys of his people. Even a clandestine conspiratorial assembly like this could be excused by the need to pray at the lakeside. And Glendalough had a further advantage. It was a largely Protestant village, its loyalty rewarded by the visit some years before of the Prince of Wales himself with a large party of friends. It was one of the most unlikely places in Ireland for a Catholic conspiracy to be launched.

  ‘God be with you, Michael Byrne. God be with you, Thomas Docherty.’ Fergus Finn, the last arrival, made his apologies. Docherty worked on the railways, Byrne was a schoolteacher and Finn was a clerk in a solicitor’s office in Dublin.

  ‘Let’s get down to it,’ said Byrne, the acknowledged leader of the group. They sat on the damp grass beneath the trees, even more invisible to any watchers from Dublin Castle. Behind them the water lapped as it had done for thousands of years. The circle of hills around Glendalough, the glen of the two lakes, was black.

  ‘This Jubilee. Two months from now,’ Byrne went on. ‘Should we make a noise in Dublin or in London?’

  The others knew perfectly well what he meant by noise, an assassination, a bomb, a terrorist outrage that would bring their cause on to the front pages of all the countries of the known world.

  ‘London,’ said Finn. ‘There will be enormous crowds there. Surely it would be easy to send a couple of our people in without the police knowing. They couldn’t possibly vet every single citizen arriving in the city. It’s beyond reason.’

  ‘Dublin,’ said Docherty. ‘Sure, it has to be Dublin. However big the crowds are over there, it would still be impossible to get away. Whether it’s a bomb or a bullet we are thinking of, the man doing it would be seized by the Londoners themselves. In Dublin there’s more chance of getting our man away, of being able to hide him decently afterwards.’

  ‘But it wouldn’t have the same impact in Dublin as it would in London.’ Finn was making his point emphatically, punching his right fist into his left palm as if he were addressing a public meeting. ‘Think of all those troops from across the Empire marching through the city. Think of the crowds hanging off every balcony, sitting in their stands in Piccadilly, lining the rooftops to get a better view. And then an incident somewhere just away from the main parade, a great explosion. That would make them sit up a bit. It would be grand, wouldn’t it?’

  Docherty was not impressed. ‘You’d never get away,’ he said dismissively. ‘They may all be watching the parade but there will still be thousands of them milling about the streets, trying to get as close as they can. A good bomb in Dublin would do just as well. Michael Byrne, what is your opinion on the matter?’

  Byrne paused before he replied. He pulled a small branch from the tree above him and peeled the twigs off one by one as he made his points.

  ‘I think it should be a bomb. We’ve got four lads just discharged with good records from the Royal Engineers. They’ve served all over the place and they know all there is to know about making bombs. Two of them have settled in Hammersmith, not far from the bridge. Two more have come back to Dublin and they’re living beyond the brewery.’

  He paused. A sudden gust of wind ruffled the surface of the lake and sighed its way around the trees that guarded its presence.

  ‘I think it has to be Dublin,’ he said finally. �
�It will be easier to organize in our own city. A bomb early in the morning of Jubilee Day. There must be some bloody statue we could blow up. Then the Castle people will be worried all day in case there are more to come. Maybe even in London. I think that is going to be our best plan.’

  He held his hand to his lips suddenly.

  ‘What was that noise?’ he said ever so softly. Three pairs of ears bent to one side, straining for the noise of policemen on the march, soldiers on patrol. Behind them the lake continued to murmur, the roar of the waterfall on the other side occasionally breaking through.

  ‘Nothing, Michael, it was just the wind in the trees,’ said Finn, rather loudly.

  ‘We’re all too jumpy. Even here.’ Byrne began demolishing another branch. ‘There have been too many arrests in the last six months. Too many of them the right people too. I think we should go. Could you both draw up some possible targets before the next meeting on the beach at Greystones?’

  Finn and Docherty left at five-minute intervals to return to their homes. Byrne heard their steps gradually fading on the path back to the village. He turned and looked at the dark waters of the lake. For months now he had suspected that Finn was an informer. He had set the meeting up as a trap. All informers were encouraged to press for the most extreme action, to provoke the terrorists to the most violent measures. He had learnt this from two members of his own organization whom he had encouraged to sell their services to Dublin Castle. The information he obtained from their instructions was invaluable; the payments the two men received strengthened the terrorists’ arsenal. Within two days, he thought, possibly three, news of this meeting would have reached the authorities. He hoped they would believe what Finn had to tell them.

  For Michael Byrne, implacable opponent of English rule, rated by his enemies as the cleverest foe they had, intended to make a noise in London all along.

  He knelt down to the water’s edge and splashed his face. He made the sign of the cross. He tapped his jacket pocket to make sure his pipe was inside. Then, like the others, he left the lake to make his plans.