Death on the Holy Mountain

9

Lord Francis Powerscourt took himself for a walk by the Shannon the next morning. A mist was rising slowly from the waters. He was thinking about the returned painting and the havoc it had caused in Butler’s Court. For Richard Butler, he felt, it must have been like a lash from a whip across his face, an assault this time not upon the faces of his ancestors but on himself and his family, and all the current residents of the Big House. There was, he thought, one small consolation. The painting left at the bottom of the drive was a copy, he was sure of it. He had checked it again early that morning. Where had it been painted? The unknown artist must have taken a good look at Messrs Mulcahy, Horkan, MacSwiggin and the rest of them. Had he been hidden away in the store rooms of the grocery or some unused part of Father O’Donovan Brady’s disagreeable residence? Nobody, he was sure, nobody who was in on the secret would tell him a thing. Down there in the square where they sold sweets to the Butler children, that was now enemy territory. Then another terrible thought struck him. If there was one copy there could be another. Who would be the new faces next time? Would The Master of the Hunt effect a second coming into Butler’s Court, adorned with the faces of Theobald Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmett and Charles Stewart Parnell and the martyred heroes of the nation’s past? Even worse perhaps, would they replace the Master and his companions with the servants, the steward and the footmen now riding off to hounds, the cook and the parlour maids bringing up the rear? God in heaven.

He met Lady Lucy on his way back.

‘Francis,’ she said, smiling rather feebly at him, ‘is there nothing we can do for these poor people? It’s like a funeral in there only the corpse is still in the building. I’ve seldom seen people look so miserable. The only consolation is the children, they think the whole thing is the most enormous joke. They’ve a theory the other pictures will come back soon with famous cricketers in them or stars from the stage and the music hall.’

‘I’ll have to go and talk to Richard Butler about it all,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Maybe he’ll show me the original blackmail letter now, though I rather doubt it. Have you seen him this morning, Lucy? How is he bearing up?’

‘I saw him a few minutes ago. He was picking at his breakfast as if the sausages were poisoned and the tomatoes about to explode. Oh, I nearly forgot, Francis, there’s a letter for you, forwarded from London. I don’t know if it’s important or not.’

‘“Dear Lord Powerscourt,”’ her husband read aloud, ‘“Thank you for sending me the details of the stolen paintings. I am writing to inform you of the results of our fishing expedition in the American art market with the New York firm of Goldman and Rabinowitz. You will recall that they offered eight Irish ancestor portraits for sale, four full-length and four half. So far, they have received sixteen queries about the works, all of them serious, none of them over-concerned about price. For the time being the dealers are fobbing off their potential clients with excuses about complications with customs, that sort of thing. But Goldman’s have asked me to secure a dozen or more of these pictures with all possible speed in case their clients lose interest. I have therefore placed advertisements in a number of Irish newspapers offering good prices for such material. Mr Farrell, of Farrell’s Gallery, is also looking for such portraits for me. Maybe, Lord Powerscourt, we have discovered a new niche in the art market! I trust the Irish air is refreshing, Yours etc, Michael Hudson.”’

‘What does that mean, Francis?’ asked Lady Lucy.

‘I don’t think it takes us much further forward apart from finding this market for Irish ancestors in the United States. But if our thieves reply to the next round of advertisements with some of these stolen paintings, we’ll be home and dry. We’d just have to wait until somebody turned up with them under their arm, as it were, and then we could all go home.’

Powerscourt found Richard Butler half an hour later sitting in his study, the door closed, staring at the horses on his walls, a bottle of Bushmills and a crystal glass sitting on the little table to the side of his desk.

‘Powerscourt,’ he said, and his voice was the voice of a beaten man, ‘do you have any comfort for us all this morning?’

‘Well,’ Powerscourt replied, trying to sound more hopeful than he felt, ‘perhaps you’d be able to show me that letter you had from the thieves now, the blackmail letter.’

Butler shook his head. ‘Can’t do that,’ he said, the words slurring slightly, ‘especially now, can’t do it. Swore an oath, you see. To my father. Promised to keep all we had.’

‘Let me try again in a different way then. Was there a deadline in the letter, a date by which you had to do whatever it is you’re meant to do? I think there must have been a deadline.’

Butler nodded and poured himself a Johnny Fitzgerald sized slug of his whiskey. ‘Yes, there was, bloody deadline.’

‘Two more things then, if I may,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Whatever it was that they asked you to do, have you done it?’

Butler shook his head once more. ‘Haven’t done it. Couldn’t do it. Told you. Impossible.’

‘My other question then, has the deadline passed?’

‘No, it hasn’t,’ said Butler, ‘not yet.’

‘But it’s close now?’

‘Very close.’

‘How close is very close, Butler?’

‘Can’t tell you that either. Not safe.’

‘What do you mean, not safe? Have they threatened violence? Have they said they’ll take away some people rather than some pictures?’

‘Can’t say.’

‘Can’t say, won’t say. Damn it, man, how am I supposed to find out what’s going on if I don’t know most of it?’

‘Sorry,’ said Butler, ‘can’t say.’

‘Let me tell you a couple of things which I can say at any rate. That picture that came yesterday is not the one that was taken all those weeks ago. It’s a copy. And, if you think about it, the thieves have got very cocky. I think they must have brought the artist into the town to look at the people and paint their faces unless Pronsias Mulcahy or one of the Delaneys is a dab hand with the paintbrush. He may have spent a couple of days here, staying perhaps in the best room in MacSwiggin’s Hotel and drinking in his bar with the locals. Word may leak out in the next few days. You know, Butler, how everybody in these Big Houses thinks the servants listen in to everything they say? Well, I think the boot’s on the other foot now. We must all listen in to whatever they’re saying whenever we can, without being too obvious about it. You never know what we might find out.’

‘I didn’t sleep last night, Powerscourt,’ said Butler, ‘didn’t sleep at all. Tell me, do you think that because Mulcahy and all those people appear in the painting, that means they are the ones behind it all?’

‘The same thought occurred to me,’ Powerscourt replied, ‘but I don’t think it does mean that. They may know everything that has gone on, some of those people down in the town, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they planned the whole thing.’

‘I suppose I’d better try to cheer everybody up,’ said Butler, locking his bottle of Bushmills away in a cupboard. ‘Can’t go hiding behind the whiskey bottle when times are hard. What would the ancestors have said about such behaviour?’

‘That’s the spirit,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Tell me, how many of those great battles in Ireland’s past did you ancestors actually fight in?’

‘All of them,’ said Richard Butler, ‘every single one that mattered. God save Ireland.’

Only one person in Butler’s Court was grateful for the furore over the return of The Master of the Hunt. Johnpeter Kilross had discovered an empty cottage in a clearing in the woods about a mile from the main buildings. There was, he saw as he peered through the windows, a little sitting room, a kitchen, a tiny bathroom and a bedroom. The bedroom, oddly enough, was the only place that appeared to have clean windows. It was known as the Head Gardener’s Cottage and the Head Gardener had indeed lived there until he secured a position close to Dublin to be near his sick mother. The place had been empty ever since, as the new Head Gardener already had a tiny house of his own near the town. Nothing seemed to have been moved. Johnpeter had infiltrated his way with a stable lad into the room at the back of the scullery where all the keys were kept and had spotted two stout specimens hanging on a hook labelled Head Gardener’s Cottage. Under normal circumstances it was virtually impossible to get into this room alone and unspotted. Kitchen maids were forever bringing things in or taking things out to the scullery. But the curiosity aroused by The Master of the Hunt was so great that every single servant shot out into the hall or pretended to be busy in the gallery above on the first floor. Johnpeter had nipped down the back stairs and removed one of the keys. Now he and Alice would have a place where they could go in the afternoons. Or the mornings come to that. Johnpeter was certain he would be able to persuade her to join him there.

Powerscourt drove himself into Athlone early that afternoon. He had sent a cable to Inspector Harkness in Ormonde House requesting a meeting at three fifteen, the hour when the Westport-Dublin express was due to stop at Athlone. Harkness came striding down the platform, the briefcase with the enormous lock clutched firmly in his left hand.

‘Are you well, Lord Powerscourt? Good to see you again.’

They drove out into the countryside for a couple of minutes and set out to walk by the river. Powerscourt told him about the return of the painting and its dramatic impact on the inhabitants of Butler’s Court.

‘Now then,’ said the Ulsterman, ‘you said you might have a wee bit of a plan to catch the thieves, Lord Powerscourt?’

‘I do, and I would be grateful for your opinion of it. It depends on the list of houses Dennis Ormonde drew up for the Orangemen to guard. You remember the list, Inspector?’

‘I do indeed,’ said Harkness, patting his briefcase. ‘Sure I have two copies of the thing in here.’

‘And you will no doubt recall,’ said Powerscourt, ‘that there is a line drawn across the list. Underneath that line Dennis Ormonde does not have enough Orangemen to guard the houses and the houses do not have many old portraits anyway. Now then, I fully understand your reluctance to tell me the names of your informants, but do you have anybody close to the thieves, somebody who could be used to send them information?’

‘I’m not altogether sure what you’re driving at, Lord Powerscourt, but yes, it’s only a guess, but I do believe there are a couple of lads out there we know about who may move in the same circle as the people who may have stolen the pictures. There’s two in particular I’m thinking of who have fathers and uncles in prison. The promises of early release can work wonders.’

‘Right,’ said Powerscourt cheerfully. ‘Now, one of those houses not to be watched is called Burke Hall. I think it’s on the far side of Louisburg but I’m pretty useless at geography. Suppose now that one of your lads drops the word that Burke Hall is not guarded at all by the Orangemen, it’s wide open, so to speak, for anybody. Only it’s not unguarded at all.’

‘Me and a bundle of policemen are waiting there for them!’ Harkness was slapping Powerscourt on the back in his excitement. ‘It’s an ambush! I like this plan, Lord Powerscourt, I like it very much!’

‘Will it work, Inspector? That’s the thing.’

Harkness paused for a moment. ‘What happens if they don’t want to steal any more paintings? If the theft at Ormonde House was all they were interested in?’

‘I’ve thought about that,’ said Powerscourt. ‘First of all there’s the arrival of the Orangemen some day soon. That’s going to be like a red rag to a bull to the thieves. Think how brave and clever they would look if they pinched some more stuff from right under the Ulstermen’s noses. They’d be heroes overnight. And it would send a message to Dennis Ormonde. Don’t imagine we’re finished because you’ve imported these people from the north. I think all those blackmail letters had a deadline, I don’t know if it’s the same deadline for all four houses, but I do know that the Butler one is pretty close. More stolen pictures would put more pressure on the man from Ormonde House.’

‘Let’s do it, Lord Powerscourt. I’ll think about it some more on the train, but assume we’ll do it. God, it’s a grand wee plan so it is. I’ll have to go back to Westport, wind up the clocks in person if you follow my meaning.’

‘Could you or your people do something for me in Dublin, Inspector? I would send Johnny Fitzgerald but I’d like to keep him close at present.’

‘What can we do for you now?’

‘It’s about moneylenders, plenty of those down in Dublin as you know. I want to know if this person has until fairly recently had large debts outstanding with one or two or maybe even three of these sharks. I’ve put the name and the general description in this letter.’ Powerscourt handed over one of Butler’s Court’s finest envelopes. Harkness put it in his pocket.

‘More reading in the train,’ he said. ‘Regard it as done, Lord Powserscourt. I’ll send you word when I have the answer. Discreet word, of course.’

Walter Heneghan, the contractor responsible for the construction of the new chapel at the summit of Croagh Patrick, was holding a crisis meeting with his staff at the end of the day. In one sense good progress had been made. The exterior of the building was virtually finished. It had a stout roof, fit to withstand the winter storms. It had windows with glass in them. But it had no doors, no pews, no altar, no furniture inside of any kind. Clasping The Skedule in his right hand, Walter addressed his troops like a general before a battle.

‘Men,’ he began, ‘you have done well. We are nearly back on Skedule.’

There was a murmur of appreciation from the little band. Being back on Skedule was like winning a prize at school.

‘However,’ Heneghan went on, ‘we have very little time left. I have been consulting with that old sailor with the disgusting pipe who sits all day under the portrait of the Blessed Oliver Plunket in the saloon bar in Campbell’s public house, the man who says he can foretell the weather. Tomorrow and the next day, the ancient eejit told me, will be fine. Then it is going to get bad, rain, storms, all of that. So I am proposing a series of emergency measures.’

There was a slight groan from his workmen. Emergency measures probably meant only one thing, getting up even earlier in the morning.

‘Charlie O’Malley, where the devil are you?’ Heneghan peered at the faces in front of him.

‘Here, sir,’ said Charlie, who had been thinking of the days of rest that lay ahead of him.

‘I’m afraid that the rotation policy with the donkeys will have to stop. We must have Jameson and Powers in action every day now. And I want to see if you can lay your hands on a couple more of the beasts for a week or so. The Church will provide.’

At least, Charlie thought, even though the donkey rotation policy, one day working, one day resting, carried out according to the precepts of the great agriculturalist Turnip Townsend, might have to stop, now he would be able to add a beast called Bushmills to his stable. But he didn’t think there were any more whiskey distilleries in Ireland. What on earth was he going to christen the last one?

‘For tomorrow and the next day I have hired another six men, three of them carpenters,’ Walter went on. ‘The pews and the altar are all ready in bits in the Westport workshops to be brought to the bottom of the mountain this evening. I want to see you all up here at the summit by nine o’clock tomorrow morning at the latest. Including the donkeys carrying the pews and stuff.’

You could almost hear the calculations being done by the workmen. They would have to leave home at six or even earlier. Another murmur of rebellion rose from the ranks.

‘The day after tomorrow,’ Heneghan said, raising his hand to quell the muttering, ‘your man Father Macdonald from Westport is coming on a mission of inspection. Some of you may have seen this priest. He’s a bundle of nerves, no more courage in him than a brindled cat. Behind him is that great bullock of an Archbishop from Tuam who’s coming to consecrate the building on Reek Sunday. He’s not a man to cross, Dr Healey. He looks like he could be the model for Goliath in a holy picture, so he does. Or maybe Samson before he had his hair cut.’

Walter was a great devotee of the religious paintings on display in the bars of Mayo.

‘So we don’t want to upset the man Macdonald from Westport or the big man from Tuam who could throw us all down the mountain with his bare hands. And there’s one last thing, lads.’ Walter Heneghan was keeping the good news to the end. ‘If the pews and everything are in place by the day after tomorrow Father Macdonald will be providing a small thank-you. Free drinks all evening in Campbell’s public house at the bottom of the mountain.’

Charlie O’Malley escorted Jameson back down the mountain, thinking desperately about what to call the fourth member of his fleet. Salvation, in the shape of Campbell’s public house, was in sight before the answer came to him. He remembered a relation of his wife’s, a cousin, he thought, who had done well in America and had come home to show off to his relations. He had brought a couple of bottles of spirits from Tennessee with him to show what native American industry could produce. Charlie felt rather proud suddenly. The links between Mayo and the mighty continent of America had always been close. He would add a transatlantic flavour to his team of donkeys. He would christen the last one Jack Daniels.

Lord Francis Powerscourt and Johnny Fitzgerald were crouching on the hard stone floor of a little tower to the left of Burke Hall on the far side of Louisburg, peering out through the turrets. This was where Inspector Harkness of the Special Branch in Dublin Castle hoped to spring his ambush on the thieves who had been stealing paintings from the houses of the Anglo-Irish gentry. It was shortly before two o’clock in the morning. Burke Hall itself was a fine Georgian mansion with all the usual great windows and fine plasterwork. About eighty years before an ambitious Burke, conscious of the fashion for Gothic revival sweeping through Irish country houses, decided to add a section to his inheritance of two wings with two round towers each, both linked to a square fortification topped with battlements at the end. Work was started but never finished. This Burke consumed so much of his inheritance on the gambling tables of Dublin that the builders downed tools, great piles of stones were still stored at the back of the house to this day, and only one single tower remained. The Burkes called it the Pepper Pot. The locals called it The Stump. It was commemorated in a local ballad as the Divil’s Thumb.

From time to time Powerscourt or Fitzgerald would shift in their position, rubbing at a leg or an arm. To their left was Burke Hall. To their right a curved drive, flanked by beech trees, stretched out towards what passed for the main road a mile or so away. In front of Burke Hall lay a great expanse of grass with tight clumps of trees at the end of the lawn. Beyond the trees, invisible from the house, lay a long beach, marked with great stones and piles of dank weed, and the sea.

Earlier that evening there had been a frightful row about authority and precedence between the policemen. Powerscourt, keeping well in the background, saw at once that it was one of those who’s in charge arguments that must have begun when Eve was trying to persuade Adam to eat of the apple in the Garden of Eden. The local Mayo policemen came with their very own sergeant, one Sean O’Callaghan, a man even taller and broader than the Archbishop of Tuam, though not endowed with many mental blessings from the Almighty. O’Callaghan had been a sergeant for fifteen years now. Even his own wife thought further promotion was beyond him. His own mother, after all, had once described her Sean as a little slow sometimes. In spite of, or perhaps because of his limitations, Sergeant Sean had a very acute sense of his own position and his own role. Mayo men, he told Harkness, should come under the command of a Mayo man. When the Special Branch Inspector pointed out that he outranked a mere sergeant from Castlebar, it was like a red rag to a bull. Here was a stranger, a younger man, with the very rank he had aspired to for all these years, giving him orders. The Dublin men, he assured his visitor, could all go and jump into the biggest vat in Guinness’s brewery as far as he was concerned. Eventually Harkness gave way, fearful that all the policemen would be marched off if he did not. So it was the Sergeant who made the dispositions. He placed two of his men at the front of the house. His own command post was in the hall inside, next to the dining room where two Burke ancestors, one of them the great gambler, lined the walls. Harkness was with him. One hundred yards up the drive, Harkness’s assistant O’Gara and a colleague waited for their visitors. If the thieves thought the place wasn’t guarded, O’Callaghan reckoned, they would head straight up the drive for the front door. He believed the visitors might display as little finesse as himself. Two further men guarded the back of the house, with a further two in reserve inside. The Burke family and their friends had been sent early to bed, but they were behaving like naughty children, forever leaning out of their windows to whisper to each other and peering up their drive. Silence only arrived on the upper floors when O’Callaghan threatened to remove himself and his men at once and leave them to their fate. Up in the attics the butler and the footmen kept as still and as quiet as mice. They were lying on the floorboards, staring out of their attic windows into the night. The moon and the stars were hidden beneath thick clouds. There was scarcely any wind. At least, the watchers felt, it wasn’t raining.

There had been a couple of false alarms already. Shortly after midnight some animal had charged across the path at great speed, followed rapidly by O’Gara’s assistant who thought the beast was a burglar and made so much noise blundering through the bushes that O’Callaghan himself had to come out to restore order. Just before one a man at the back, who had been taking a sip of whiskey to keep awake, just a sip as he had told Harkness afterwards, swallowed too much and had a great coughing fit, sounding, the Inspector told him, like a man on the terminal ward of the Westport Hospital rather than a policeman on duty on a dangerous and difficult mission. Johnny Fitzgerald had smiled at the coughing fit. He too had kept awake on night watch with little helpings of John Jameson. Powerscourt felt glum and responsible. This, after all, had been his plan, his idea, outlined to the Inspector by the banks of the Shannon a short while before. Now he wondered if the thieves weren’t coming. Maybe they had smelt a rat. Maybe they were a day too soon. Maybe the robbers knew they had been given false information. Maybe this whole expedition was going to end in failure. Maybe the Sergeant’s plan wasn’t the best on offer.

Shortly before three o’clock Johnny Fitzgerald nudged Powerscourt in the arm and pointed to his ear. Johnny had heard something. All Powerscourt had noticed was a very faint scraping noise far away as if somebody was dragging a screwdriver up a wall covered in ivy. Silence fell again. Johnny’s ears may have been better than Powerscourt’s but Powerscourt’s eyes were sharper. Five minutes or so after the scraping sound he prodded Fitzgerald and pointed down the drive. Unfortunately for the thieves the clouds had broken and a faint moonlight now shone out over Burke Hall. Coming very slowly, walking in pairs on either side of the grass, a party of four young men were coming down the drive. Powerscourt felt certain suddenly that things were about to go wrong. From his command post inside the house O’Callaghan had no idea they had visitors. He could make no deployments. The coughing man and his colleague at the back could not see the thieves either. O’Gara and his colleague were outnumbered two to one. But instead of sinking back into the trees and letting the thieves go past and so surrounding them, they panicked. O’Gara sprang into the middle of the drive and shouted ‘Halt!’ for all the world, as Johnny said afterwards, as though he was conducting the traffic on Sackville Street in Dublin. His colleague fumbled in his pockets for his pistol. ‘Halt! In the name of the law!’ O’Gara tried again. The four figures turned and fled at full speed back the way they had come. O’Gara’s colleague fired two shots at the retreating figures and was rewarded by a shriek that turned into a scream.

As Powerscourt and Fitzgerald reached the bottom of their little tower, they heard one of the great windows open on the first floor. ‘Bastards! Thieving bastards!’ yelled the senior male Burke figure, leaning out of his bedroom in his finest silk pyjamas and firing three shots from an ancient rifle at the disappearing quartet as they fled up the drive. Powerscourt and Fitzgerald overtook a shaken O’Gara and his trembling colleague a hundred yards from the house. Around the bend the drive stretched straight ahead for another hundred yards or so. There was nobody there. Another three shots sounded out from the first floor of Burke Hall. ‘Cease firing! You bloody fool! You could kill one of our own!’ Sergeant O’Callaghan had arrived at last to take command. Now the sounds of weeping women replaced the noise of gunfire. At the end of the hundred-yard stretch another bend led into an even longer straight section of drive. O’Gara and his colleague staggered off, O’Gara holding on to a stitch in his leg, his companion wheezing and making slow progress. Johnny Fitzgerald motioned Powerscourt to stop.

‘Don’t think the buggers are up there at all, Francis,’ he said, panting slightly. ‘You remember that noise a few moments ago?’

Powerscourt nodded.

‘I think it might have been a boat,’ said Johnny. ‘The noise was the boat being pulled up on to the beach. Our friends may have come by sea.’

‘In which case,’ Powerscourt said, ‘there must be a path off to our left somewhere leading to the beach.’ They moved slowly back down the drive, searching for the track. The moon had gone in again. A figure bumped into them, coming the other way.

‘Who the devil are you?’ said the figure.

‘Don’t shoot, for God’s sake,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Far too much shooting going on round here, if you ask me. It’s Johnny and I here, Sergeant.’

‘And what are you doing, may I ask, going the wrong way, when them thieves are up ahead?’

‘It’s terrible cowards we are, don’t you see, Sergeant,’ said Johnny, ‘but we think they came in a boat. We’re looking for a path off this drive towards the beach.’

‘Boat?’ shouted the Sergeant, ‘Boat, did you say? What nonsense! You’re holding me up!’

And with that he lumbered off in pursuit of the thieves.

‘Bloody fool,’ said Powerscourt bitterly. ‘If he’d planned the thing properly the whole investigation could be over by now. As it was with all the shrieking and wailing the thing was organized like a pack of nuns trying to rob a bank, for God’s sake.’

Fitzgerald tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Look, Francis, here’s our path, right here.’ They ran down the overgrown track as fast as they could. Brambles scratched at their faces. Low branches, virtually invisible in the dark, bumped into their heads. After a couple of hundred yards the path met the beach. Powerscourt pointed dramatically out to sea. In the distance a rowing boat was making good progress away from the shore. Powerscourt thought he could see two figures rowing in the centre and one at either end. The clouds cleared once more. In the ten seconds or so before the moon disappeared Powerscourt noticed two things. The figure at the stern was holding his right shoulder. The figure at the prow seemed to be drinking heavily from a large bottle. The two rowers laid down their oars briefly and waved to the two figures on the beach. A derisive cheer could be heard clearly on the strand. The thieves had got clean away.

‘I am so sorry, Lord Powerscourt.’ Harkness had joined them on the beach, the rowing boat scarcely visible now on the dark waters of the bay. ‘They came as we thought they would. We were there waiting for them. Then that bloody fool Sergeant made a mess of things.’

‘Never mind, Inspector,’ said Powerscourt, ‘we’ll just have to try again.’ He was about to suggest that Harkness might like to remove the informant who had given the false details for a fortnight or so, but the Inspector had vanished back into the night.

Up in the attics Eamonn the junior footman punched his colleague on the shoulder and pointed out towards the ocean. ‘Do you see, Seamus, they’re well away, so they are, in their rowing boat. Isn’t that grand!’

‘It is so,’ said Seamus. ‘Christ, it’s stiff you get lying here on this bloody floor. We’d better celebrate. Won’t they be like a flock of sheep at a narrow gate down there below.’ He groped his way towards a dilapidated bedside cupboard. ‘Is it Jameson’s you’d like now, or a touch of John Powers?’

Lady Lucy was waiting for them when they returned to Ormonde House. She knew, from long experience, that sleep would not come until she saw Francis was back. Dennis Ormonde, she told them, had accompanied her in the earlier stages of her vigil until his claret got the better of him and his tiny wife materialized out of the upper floors to order him to bed.

‘It was a fiasco, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt, drinking deeply from a cup of tea. ‘The thieves turned up all right. The local sergeant and his men made a complete mess of everything and the thieves got away in a rowing boat.’ He filled her in on the details as Johnny wrestled with a recalcitrant corkscrew.

‘Not without its lighter moments, mind you, Lady Lucy,’ Johnny said cheerfully, finally liberating the liquid in one of Ormonde’s finest bottles of burgundy. ‘I’ll always remember the man Burke, in his blue pyjamas, firing down the drive with a rifle that looked as if it last saw service at the Battle of the Boyne. And the thieves safe out there on the water, waving to Francis and me on the beach as if they were taking part in some bloody regatta. I thought that had a certain style.’

‘I have one question for you, Francis, before I go to bed,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘I’ve been thinking about all these robberies, you see, while I waited for you and Johnny to come back. You say there were four of them, four thieves, looking quite young?’ Powerscourt nodded. ‘Do you think they are the same four people who stole the paintings from Mr Moore and Mr Butler?’

‘What do you mean, Lucy?’ Powerscourt sat up in his chair and looked closely at his wife.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I just wondered if there mightn’t be different lots of thieves, you see. These ones tonight must have a lot of local knowledge to be aware of the path up from the beach. The other thieves had special knowledge of the houses they robbed. Could there have been two or three different lots of thieves, Francis, all working to the same master criminal?’

Powerscourt smiled. ‘How very clever of you to have worked that out, Lucy. I’ve been thinking about that for some time but I didn’t want to cause confusion in the people in these houses here. They’re worried enough about one lot of thieves, God knows, heaven knows what they’d be like with two or three sets of them.’

Lady Lucy felt proud to have joined her Francis’s thoughts to her own. She went to sleep happily, one arm draped carelessly across her husband’s shoulder. Powerscourt couldn’t sleep. He was searching for something in his memory, maybe two things. One of them, oddly enough, had been contained in Uncle Peter’s narrative of Parnell’s funeral. What the devil was it? Some detail in there would help unlock his investigation. As he drifted off to sleep, his mind racing between Dublin City Hall and the shooting star at Glasnevin cemetery, he said to himself that he might have to go back to Butler’s Court and borrow Uncle Peter’s book. How appropriate in Ireland, was his final thought, that events of 1891 might contain the key to what happened fourteen years later.

In a small cottage up in the mountains between Westport and Newport a doctor was just finishing his work. There was a peat fire burning in the hearth and a kettle of boiling water ready for further medicinal use if required. The young man whose shoulder had been wounded at Burke Hall was lying on the sofa, great white bandages now wrapped round his wound. Another of his colleagues from the ill-fated mission watched from a chair by the fire.

‘You’re going to be fine. I’ll come and see you here in the early evening in a couple of days,’ said the doctor, packing his equipment back in his bag. ‘I presume you don’t want to come to the surgery.’

‘Not just yet, doctor, thank you, but I will come when people won’t notice the bandages.’

The doctor left. He had asked neither the name nor the age nor the address of his patient. You couldn’t tell what you didn’t know. Much better to keep it that way.

The wounded young man was called Kevin. His colleague was Brendan and they had sat next to each other right through their education from their very first day at primary school.

‘Brendan,’ Kevin began, taking another sip of his glass of stout, ‘you do realize what was going on out there tonight, don’t you? I didn’t like to mention it in front of the other two just yet.’

‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ said Brendan.

‘Can’t you see? Those bastards were waiting for us. They knew we were coming. We’re lucky we’re not locked up.’

‘You can’t be sure. There might have been a change of plan.’

‘Gladstone’s arse a change of plan,’ said Kevin vehemently. ‘Somebody sent us a message that that place wasn’t guarded. That was almost an invitation to turn up. Well, I’m going to find that somebody. And when I do he’ll wish he’d never been born.’