Death on the Holy Mountain

1

The box was brown and tightly bound with string. It sat happily on a small table in the front hall of the Powerscourt residence in London’s Chelsea. Indeed it looked as if the person in charge of wrapping the parcel believed it would only survive the journey if virtually encased in strong twine. The top had so many lines criss-crossing it that it resembled a master cobweb. Occasional loops under the knots bore witness to the fact that the wrapper might have preferred a different profession, pastry cook perhaps, or ornamental plasterer. Lord Francis Powerscourt approached the object gingerly. The box bore his name on the front. He knew what was inside. He felt reluctant to open it. Maybe, he said to himself, the expectation is always better than the reality. And he knew that one of the many divisions into which the world’s population is split – those who can whistle and those who can’t, those who adore Venice and those who complain about the smell, those who can order drinks in theatre bars at the interval and those who can’t – was the distinction between those who can unwrap parcels neatly and those who can’t. Powerscourt knew that his wife Lucy would have the thing open, the string tied neatly into a ball, the box itself virtually intact and available for reuse, in a minute or two. And he knew, as night followed day, that his own efforts would be similar to those of his three-year-old twins, torn strips of cardboard lying all over the floor, pieces of string also strewn on the ground to trip the unwary, a general sense of mess and disorder. Sighing slightly, he opened the drawer of the table and brought out a pair of scissors. Why did they have to put on so much bloody string? he said to himself after a few minutes, with only three of the fetters broken. And why was the top of the box so hard to open? With growing irritation he forced the lid open at last.

The Cathedrals of England, Volume One, by Francis Powerscourt, it said on the cover of the book. He stared at it in wonder and disbelief. His name. His book. His cathedrals. Had he not visited them all, walked their cloisters and their clerestories, climbed up their towers where the great bells rang out over fen and plain? Had he not worshipped at Matins in the morning and with the sombre beauty of Evensong as the light faded from the day? He began to smile as he unpacked his treasures. There are a few great moments in a man’s life, he said to himself, catching your first fish, scoring your first century, getting married, looking at your own newly arrived children so small and cross in their tiny white clothes. This was another, opening the first book you had written. He remembered his oldest friend and companion in arms, Johnny Fitzgerald, telling him about the intense joy these occasions called forth, how for days afterwards you would be drawn to the place where these very special first editions were being displayed, to touch them, to open them at random, caring little for the content, to smile once more, maybe even to laugh. Johnny had compared it to the first time he tasted Chassagne-Montrachet, a sensation he, Johnny, had described as being akin to being received into heaven with a band of angels serenading you with anthems of celestial glory.

There was a sudden burst of noise coming down the stairs. The twins, Christopher and Juliet Powerscourt, seemed to have escaped the attentions of whoever was meant to be guarding them. They were singing some strange song that might once have been a nursery rhyme. They stopped when they saw the remains of the parcel and the string. Christopher pointed at the box and nudged his sister in the ribs. He looked, his father thought, like a person who has forgotten the word for something in a foreign language.

Juliet eyed the object carefully.

‘Box,’ she said with a great effort, as if some mammoth feat of mental arithmetic had just been performed. ‘Box.’

‘Box good,’ said Christopher and led the charge down the rest of the stairs. Powerscourt noticed that their clothes were still clean even though they had been up for an hour or more, a minor miracle where the twins were concerned. He thought of trying to explain to them that he had written the book but decided that it was no use. He might as well tell them that a man from Mars had just landed in their back garden. They pulled the box on to the floor and Christopher climbed in. Juliet began gathering bits of string and said ‘Pull’ firmly to her father. Quite what they had in mind was not apparent for at that moment two things happened simultaneously. Powerscourt’s wife, Lady Lucy, appeared at the top of the stairs and began summoning the children back to their normal place of confinement at the top of the house, and there was a firm, confident knock at the front door.

Powerscourt ushered into his hall an immaculate footman, clad in black breeches and a black jacket with a rather daring yellow waistcoat and brilliantly polished black boots.

‘Lord Powerscourt?’ said the apparition with the yellow waistcoat.

‘I am he,’ said Powerscourt, smiling at the young man.

‘I have a message for you, my lord.’ The clothes, Powerscourt thought, might be the clothes of Mayfair and the West End, but the vowels were pure Whitechapel. ‘From my lord, my lord,’ and he pulled an envelope from his inside pocket with the panache of a conjuror.

‘Forgive me,’ said Powerscourt, ‘and who might your master be?’

‘Sorry, my lord,’ said the footman, ‘forgive me, my lord. I work for Lord Brandon, the Earl of Lincoln, my lord. And forgive me,’ the young man began to stammer slightly as if the whole ordeal of two lords in one sentence might be proving too great a burden, ‘my lord wonders if you could give an answer straight away, my lord.’

Powerscourt opened the envelope. ‘Dear Lord Powerscourt,’ he read, ‘I wish to take advantage of your wisdom in a troubling and troublesome matter. I do not feel able to vouchsafe any details in this letter. Ill health leaves me unable to come up to town at present. I would be most grateful if you could feel able to come down and see me here at Kingsclere as soon as possible. The matter appears trifling at present, but I fear greatly for the future. Your experience and your expertise are badly needed. Yours, Lincoln.’

‘Is there any reason, Lucy, why I shouldn’t go to Kingsclere in the morning?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘None at all,’ said Lady Lucy, seizing a twin firmly in each hand.

‘Please send the Earl my best wishes,’ said Powerscourt, ‘and tell him that I will call on him round about eleven o’clock tomorrow morning.’

The young man bowed and took his leave. The twins were transported to the top floor. Powerscourt grabbed half a dozen of his books and brought them up to the drawing room to show his wife. The Cathedrals of England, he read on the title page, by Francis Powerscourt, published by Constable, Orange Street, London, MCMV.

Lord Francis Powerscourt had been an investigator for many years now. He had served in Army Intelligence in India and South Africa and had recently returned from investigating the murder of a British diplomat on the Nevskii Prospekt in St Petersburg. Apart from the twins, he and Lady Lucy had two older children, Thomas, aged twelve, and Olivia, aged ten. He had written the book during a two-year gap when he gave up detection at the request of his wife, after he was nearly killed investigating a couple of deaths in one of London’s Inns of Court.

‘Oh, Francis,’ was all Lady Lucy could say when she saw the books. ‘Oh, Francis,’ she said again, and began to flick through the book and the illustrations. ‘I’m so proud of you, Francis, we’ll have to have a party. But tell me, what did that yellow waistcoat man want with you? Why are you going to Kingsclere in the morning?’

‘I don’t know, my love,’ said Powerscourt, handing over the letter. ‘When you have read that, you will know as much as I do.’

‘A troubling and troublesome matter.’ Lady Lucy looked up at her husband. ‘Do you suppose it has to do with divorce, people running off with other people’s wives and husbands, that sort of thing?’

‘I do hope not,’ said her husband. ‘We shall find out tomorrow.’ Powerscourt stretched out in his favourite armchair by the fire and began to read his book. He began, as is only proper, with the introduction. He did not feel it necessary to tell his wife that, as well as vast properties in the south of England, the Earl of Lincoln also had great estates in Ireland.

Gervase St Clair de Bonneval Brandon, eighth Earl of Lincoln, was waiting for Powerscourt in what the butler told him was the Great Ante Chamber of Kingsclere, a vast Palladian mansion just outside the little town of the same name. Powerscourt had often wondered why most of these people ended up living somewhere other than their names. The Dukes of Norfolk were not to be found near Diss or Fakenham or Cromer, but in the heart of rural Sussex. The Earls of Pembroke were nowhere close to Haverfordwest or Fishguard but outside Salisbury. And these Lincolns you might expect to see near Boston or Grantham or Louth were nestling happily in the peaceful county of Hampshire.

Brandon was in his early sixties with a formidable shock of black hair on top of a broad forehead. His jowls were very heavy, his eyes dark brown. Powerscourt thought they showed a lot of pain. He was wearing dark trousers and a rather raffish black smoking jacket over a cream shirt. Behind him Powerscourt glimpsed a vision of gold leaf and elaborate plasterwork, of proportions made in heaven, of red Chippendale chairs and a painted ceiling, of marble-topped tables and embossed doors, of Axminster carpets and the seventeenth-century heiresses and long-faced aristocrats created by the Court painter to Charles the First, Sir Anthony Van Dyck. Ladders and great planks were being moved around the room and there was a subdued muttering in French which Powerscourt couldn’t quite catch. He felt privileged to have caught even a fleeting sight of one of the great rooms of England, the Double Cube Room, made, he believed, to designs by Inigo Jones. The owner of this slice of earthly paradise stared at Powerscourt from his deep red leather armchair. There was a small table beside him with papers scattered across it as if the Earl had been reading them before Powerscourt’s arrival.

‘Damned doctors!’ said Brandon, trying unsuccessfully to rise from his chair to shake his visitor’s hand. ‘Damned medicines!’ He placed his hands on the side of his chair and made another attempt to lever himself upright. His face grew red from the exertions. Powerscourt felt that offers of help would be inappropriate for this grounded aristocrat.

‘Damned gout!’ he spluttered. ‘Why does the bloody thing have to come back the day you come to call? Damn my calf! Damn my other calf! Damn the bloody medicine! Damn the bloody doctors!’

‘Please don’t trouble yourself,’ said Powerscourt emolliently. ‘Please stay right where you are,’ and he leaned forward and shook Brandon by the hand in his sitting position.

‘Damned doctors!’ said the irascible Earl. ‘Do you know I once got this bloody gout in my big toe? Not once, twice, now I think about it. Do you think those damned medicine wallahs could do anything about it? Of course not!’

Powerscourt wondered if the whole morning would be spent on an extended philippic against his physicians. There was a loud bang from next door and the sound of a body falling to the floor. A string of French expletives followed, most of them completely new to Powerscourt who would, until now, have described himself as reasonably fluent in Gallic oaths. The accident seemed to cheer the invalid up, somebody perhaps more seriously handicapped than himself and about to be equally dependent on the passing whims of the medical profession.

‘Damned picture restorers!’ he said. ‘Cost me a bloody fortune and all they can do is fall off their ladders all day.’ With enormous effort and a continuous salvo of oaths the Earl managed to put one leg over the other. It appeared to bring some relief.

‘Damn my leg, Powerscourt,’ he said, ‘damn the bloody gout, we’d better get down to business, what!’

‘By all means,’ Powerscourt replied, accompanied by a groan from the picture-restoring department next door.

‘Don’t know if you know this, Powerscourt, but we own large estates in Ireland as well as round here.’ Brandon waved an arm in a circular fashion as if to indicate the range of his English holdings. ‘Good land, Westmeath and places like that, none of your damned peat bogs and perpetual rainfall out there in the mists of County Mayo. Damn this disease!’ The unfortunate Earl had apparently just endured a twitch of great ferocity in his lower leg which he was rubbing incredulously, as if in amazement that a part of his own anatomy could cause him so much distress.

‘Thing is,’ Brandon winced as he carried on, ‘there has recently been a series of robberies. Not just at our place but the one next door as well.’

Powerscourt felt slightly let down. If asked, he would have said he didn’t do burglaries. Murders, yes. Blackmail, yes. Disappearing diplomats, yes. But men with blackened faces climbing through a downstairs window and making off with the family silver, no. Some of his distaste must have made itself apparent. Brandon almost managed a laugh.

‘Don’t go looking down your nose at our little bit of crime yet,’ he said, holding firmly on to his calf. ‘Wait till you hear what they took, these Celtic burglars.’

‘What did they take?’ said Powerscourt, feeling like the feed man in the music hall.

‘They didn’t take the obvious things,’ Brandon carried on, interrupted by a torrent of French from the Double Cube Room. ‘They didn’t take the silver, they didn’t touch any of the antiques, they didn’t look for any cash, they just took paintings.’

‘Paintings?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘What sort of paintings?’

‘In my place, called Butler’s Court, the family is called Butler. We own a great heap of land there, the Butlers own another great heap, they’re our relations, they live there, they farm the land for us. They’ve been there for hundreds of years and they’re related to those other Butlers who own half of Munster. Come to that, they’re related to about half the quality in the south of Ireland. So damned few of them left they’ll all be bloody well interbreeding soon.’ He paused briefly as if contemplating incest rife from Offaly to the Kerry peninsula. ‘I digress,’ he went on. ‘Eight generations of Butlers have disappeared from the walls, going right back to a Sir Thomas Butler in the seventeenth century. Four more Sir Thomases have gone – Butlers win no prizes for originality in naming their sons. And a Caravaggio. And a couple of Rubens.’

‘Do you know, Lord Brandon, if any of these portraits were by famous artists, any Romneys, Gainsboroughs, Reynolds, that sort of thing?’

‘Damned if I know, Powerscourt,’ said Brandon, eyeing his leg suspiciously. ‘I can just about keep it in my head that the stuff on the walls next door is by some character called Van Dyck. Not a clue who did these Irish daubs at all. Funny thing, here I sit, surrounded, they tell me, by all this priceless stuff, and it doesn’t mean a thing to me. My father said they should have bought horses with the money the ancestors spent. His father believed it would have been better invested buying vineyards in France. Never mind.’

Powerscourt wondered if the Caravaggio and a couple of Rubens were the real target and the portraits a diversion. Or was it the other way round?

‘And what about the neighbours, Lord Brandon? Did the same thing happen there?’

‘Ten out of ten, Lord Powerscourt. I can see now where your reputation comes from.’ Powerscourt wasn’t sure if he was being ironic.

‘Damn and blast these doctors!’ Another spasm had taken over the left leg. Brandon turned very red as he fought the pain and reached into his pocket for a bottle of pills. ‘Not meant to take one of these for another two hours,’ he said bitterly, gulping down his medicine, and washing it down with a glass of red liquid from the lower shelf of his table that might have been claret, or port. ‘Afraid we’ll have to be quick now, Powerscourt. I call these pills Davy Jones’s Lockers. Send you straight down in ten minutes or so.’

‘The other pictures?’ asked Powercourt.

‘Six generations of Connollys gone. One Titian. One Rembrandt. That’s it.’

‘Were the Connollys also in a straight line? Father to son to son without a break?’

‘They were,’ said Brandon.

‘Were there any requests left for the families? Any letters, any demands that they leave the country or anything like that?’

‘Not that I know of. Why should the thieves leave letters? Thieves don’t leave letters. Not as a rule. Not round here.’

‘They might in Ireland,’ said Powerscourt. ‘It could be the first stage in a rebel campaign to get them to hand over their money or their land, or sell it. You can get excellent terms now if you want to dispose of your Irish estates.’

‘Damned if I see why we should have to sell our land if we don’t want to, to some Irish peasant or the Christian Brothers or the bloody Roman Catholic Church. Do you?’

‘I don’t think that’s the point at the moment,’ said Powerscourt, reluctant to plunge into the thickets of the Irish land question where so many had perished before him. ‘How are the families taking it?’

‘That’s just the point, Powerscourt,’ said Brandon. ‘The women are terrified. If the women go, they’ll take the children with them. The families will be destroyed. The bloody rebels will have won without firing a shot. Will you take the case, Lord Powerscourt? I think they would all feel easier if they knew you were coming.’

‘Of course I’ll take the case, Lord Brandon. Be delighted to.’ Powerscourt did not say how ambivalent he felt about the whole thing. In one sense, these were his people. He had been born into that class and that caste and their values must run in his veins. He had, earlier in his life, sold the great house in Ireland that carried his name because he and his sisters could not bear to live there any more after their parents died. With that break had come a different break, a break with the anomalies and injustice that could, from time to time, tear his country apart. Why should one man own fifteen thousand acres and another one only be allowed ten?

‘I’ve had my people make copies for you of all the correspondence so far. All the addresses and so on are in there.’ He handed over a large envelope which, for some reason, reminded Powerscourt of the box with his books. ‘Next time you come,’ he waved a hand dismissively towards the Double Cube Room as if it were the servants’ quarters, ‘I’ll show you all the stuff.’

Brandon rubbed his leg once more. ‘I’m obliged to you, Powerscourt. Any time you need anything, money, influence, the House of Lords, just let me know.’ Powerscourt dimly remembered his friend Lord Rosebery telling him that the gout-ridden aristocrat was a formidable fixer in the Upper House.

As he made his way down the staircase towards the front door he wondered just how strong Lord Brandon’s pills actually were. He was pursued by the familiar cry, ‘Damned doctors! Damned gout! Damned pills!’

‘So there we have it,’ said Lord Francis Powerscourt, as he finished recounting the story of his trip to Kingsclere to Lady Lucy and Johnny Fitzgerald early that evening in the drawing room at Markham Square. He left the documents lying on the table. Johnny had spent the day working on his next book, called Northern Birds. He had just finished the first draft, he told the company, and proposed taking a break from birds before revising it. Powerscourt was astonished to see that his friend, a great consumer and connoisseur of wine, a man with an account at no fewer than three of London’s leading wine merchants, was drinking tea.

‘Francis, Johnny,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘what do you make of it?’ She sensed, even at the very beginning of this case, that there was something about it, perhaps the return to Ireland, that was making her husband uneasy.

Powerscourt looked at Johnny, who seemed to send him a nod that said the floor is yours.

‘It could be any one of a number of things,’ he began. ‘It could be a practical joke. The Irish landlord class are rather better at practical jokes than they are at many other things.’

‘But not twice, surely, Francis?’ said Lady Lucy.

‘If you were a serious practical joker in Ireland, Lady Lucy,’ said Johnny, who was also of Irish extraction, peering sadly at his empty teacup and making a preliminary reconnaissance of a bottle of Fleurie on the sideboard, ‘you could keep going till you’d done four or five or maybe even six houses. It would show people you were serious, if you see what I mean.’

Lady Lucy wasn’t sure that she did see.

‘The real question, in a way,’ said Powerscourt, ‘is who is behind it. If it is a practical joker, then that seems to me, from the point of view of the Butlers and the Connollys, to be tremendous news. An apple pie bed is infinitely preferable to a bullet in the back. One possibility is that the thieves are in it for the money. Either the pictures will turn up in some gallery, probably in America, in the next year or so. Or there will be a blackmail note asking for so many thousands of pounds for the return of the paintings. The Irish landlord class have always been devoted to their ancestors, they believe that the longer the line the more secure their claim to their lands.’

‘Do you think, Francis,’ said Fitzgerald, ‘that the same people would be as interested in buying the portraits as the Old Masters? The Old Masters could be the real target after all, and the portraits just a series of red herrings on canvas. These Americans are paying fabulous prices just now.’

‘Or it could be the other way round,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Tomorrow morning I have an appointment to see a Mr Michael Hudson at the art dealers Hudson’s in Old Bond Street. He is said to be London’s leading expert on the transatlantic market.’ Powerscourt paused to open the bottle of Fleurie and fill three glasses.

‘We’re tiptoeing round the problem, you know,’ he said. ‘We haven’t faced up to the truth that dare not speak its name in this affair. The women in the Connolly and the Butler families are not frightened because one of their ancestors may end up on a wall in Boston or New York. The real issue is quite different.’

‘And it is?’ asked Lady Lucy quietly, wondering if this would provide a clue as to what was upsetting her husband.

‘Violence,’ said Powerscourt and he felt the word change the atmosphere. ‘Men of violence. Men who used to hough or maim cattle or horses in the night when they wanted the landlords to leave. They have had many names, White-boys, Steel Men or Hearts of Steel, raparee men, Fenians, Irish Republican Brotherhood, Clann na Gael if you’re American. They all believe in solving the land question or the political question by violence. They have rebellions or uprisings in Ireland almost as often as the French – 1798, thirty thousand dead, 1848, 1867. Who is to say it is not time for another bout in the long battle against the landlords and the English garrison? This could be a refinement in tactics. You wouldn’t have put money on the Irish inventing something so sophisticated and brutal as the boycott, would you? After all, there was no physical violence associated with boycotts. Maybe this is some further refinement. Paintings go today, maybe people go tomorrow. God knows. And there’s one thing I find very confusing. Lord Brandon with his gout assured me there had been no letters. Letters, whether threatening or warning, have always been associated with agrarian violence in Ireland.’

‘Do you think he was lying, Francis?’ asked Johnny.

‘I don’t think he was lying, I think the people in Ireland may have been lying to him.’

‘So what are your plans, Francis?’ asked Lady Lucy.

‘Well,’ said her husband, ‘I think you should stay here for the time being. When the situation is clearer I hope you will be able to join me. I am going to see the good Mr Hudson in the morning and a day or so after that I shall set off for Holyhead and the Irish Midlands. Johnny,’ he paused to refill his friend’s glass, ‘could you do something for me? Go to Dublin and make a mark with the picture dealers so they will let us know at once if anything appears on the market. Better send it to me care of the Butler house for now.’

‘It’ll be a pleasure,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald cheerfully. ‘I haven’t been to Dublin for years. They say it’s one huge slum nowadays but there are great birds down in the Wicklow Mountains.’

Later that evening Lady Lucy found her husband staring moodily at a map of Ireland spread out on the dining-room table.

‘What’s the matter, Francis?’ she said in what she hoped was her gentlest voice.

‘It’s all this,’ said Powerscourt, waving his hand in the general direction of Powerscourt House, Enniskerry, County Wicklow. ‘This is my past. This is where I was born. This is where my parents lived and died. They’re buried there, for God’s sake. If you could belong to one of the great pillars of the Protestant Ascendancy, the landlord class, the Anglo-Irish, call it what you will, then I belong to it. Don’t get me wrong, Lucy. I love Ireland very deeply. Those Wicklow Mountains where I was brought up, the west with its rivers and lakes and the dark ocean, they are among the most beautiful places in the world to me.’ He paused and looked down at his map again.

‘Forgive me, my love, I don’t see why that should be upsetting you.’

‘Sorry, Lucy. I’m not explaining myself very well.

‘Much have I seen and known: cities of men

And manners, climates, councils, governments . . .

‘I’ve been lucky enough to see all kinds of societies all over the world. But where Ireland is concerned I don’t know whose side I am on. Who am I? Irish or English? Can you be both? History tells me I am one of the Protestant Ascendancy. I should be on their side. But I’m not. Or I think I’m not. I’d like to be neutral. But if that’s not possible I think I’m probably with the other side. In a democratic age, after all, only the Catholic side can win. The Protestants are so heavily outnumbered. But I’m not Catholic. I’m Protestant. Even so, if you think the Catholic side should win, if anybody wins at all in these circumstances, don’t you see that in this case maybe I should be advising the people who stole the paintings rather than the other way round?’

Lady Lucy didn’t know what to say. She took her husband by the hand and led him upstairs. ‘It’s a long time since you’ve been to Ireland, Francis,’ she said brightly, trying to sound more cheerful than she felt. ‘Perhaps it’ll all seem very different when you get there.’

At nine o’clock the following morning a group of three bedraggled men and an even more bedraggled donkey were making their way up Ireland’s Holy Mountain. The mountain was Croagh Patrick, some seven miles outside Westport on the Louisburg road in County Mayo, about as far west as you could go in Ireland without setting sail for the New World. The Reek, as the locals called it, was wreathed in cloud this morning, a light rain falling. Below it the waters of Clew Bay with their three hundred and sixty-five islands, one for every day of the year, were almost invisible. Even before Christian times Croagh Patrick had been a place of pilgrimage and mystery to the inhabitants of ancient Ireland. St Patrick himself, Ireland’s patron saint, had fasted on its barren slopes for forty days and nights, giving the mountain its name. Every year on the last Sunday in July a great throng of pilgrims, many of them brought by boat or by special train, climbed to the summit and celebrated Mass nearly three thousand feet above ground. All of the three men could remember the words of the Archbishop of Tuam, the Most Reverend John Healey, the previous year. He had been standing on the roof of the old, rotten church to address the faithful. The Archbishop was a great bull of a man and within minutes a Westport bookmaker was offering odds on whether he would fall through before he finished. Healey was a passionate believer in pilgrimage, which he linked to the sufferings of his people.

‘Think of this mountain,’ he roared forth to the assembled multitude, over ten thousand strong, ‘as the symbol of Ireland’s enduring faith and of the constancy and success with which the Irish people faced the storms of persecution during many woeful centuries. It is therefore the fitting type of Irish faith and Ireland’s nationhood which nothing has ever shaken and with God’s blessing nothing can ever destroy.’

Charlie O’Malley, Tim Philbin and Austin Ruddy were all builders from Westport. They were part of a team of a dozen men charged with the construction of a new oratory for the celebration of Mass on the summit of Croagh Patrick. Three men, including the contractor, Mr Walter Heneghan, lived in a tent on the summit complete with cooking and cleaning facilities stolen from the British Army. Wages were paid on a Friday afternoon in Campbell’s public house at the foot of the mountain, the tented party descending to make sure that the porter had not changed its taste or been diluted while they had been on vigil at the summit. Everything that could be pre-fabricated or part fabricated was assembled at the bottom of the mountain and carried up by man or beast later.

This morning, as so often, it was Charlie O’Malley’s donkey who raised the standard of revolt. The beast was heavily laden with sand and cement. It sat down and refused to move.

‘For God’s sake, Charlie,’ said Tim Philbin, ‘what’s the matter with your bloody donkey this morning? This isn’t the same beast we had up the mountain yesterday. How many bloody donkeys do you have anyway?’

‘I had three at the beginning,’ said Charlie defensively. Charlie was a well-built man in his early forties, his brown hair growing thin on top. ‘As you well know, I said we shouldn’t have laden one of the animals so heavily last week. It took one look at Saturday morning and passed on straight up to donkey heaven.’

‘What do you want with so many bloody donkeys in the first place?’ said Austin Ruddy.

‘I am operating on a very important principle,’ Charlie replied haughtily, ‘taught at school with great pain from that evil black strap of his by Brother Gilligan.’

‘And what was the principle?’ asked Tim Philbin, poking the donkey’s back to see if he would get up. He didn’t.

‘It was first set out,’ said Charlie rather pompously, as if he had been turned into Brother Gilligan for the morning, ‘by a man with a strange Christian name, like Swede or Carrot, something like that.’

‘Potato?’ said Tim sarcastically.

‘No, it wasn’t Potato,’ said Charlie. ‘Cabbage maybe? Parsnip? Bean? Pea?’

A smile of triumph spread across Austin Ruddy’s face. ‘You boys can’t have been paying attention to Brother Gilligan. I shall have to drop him a line when I’m next in Westport. Turnip, that’s the name of the fellow. Turnip Townsend. Lived in the early 1800s, I believe. No record of him coming on pilgrimage to the mountain.’

‘The christening must have been very strange,’ Charlie mused. ‘John Joseph Turnip Townsend, I baptize thee in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.’

‘It was a nickname, you fool,’ said Tim, giving the donkey another prod.

‘And what, Austin,’ said Charlie O’Malley, ‘was the theory that the great vegetable man gave to the world?’

‘Well, you have me there,’ replied Austin Ruddy defensively. ‘I can remember that classroom clearly, I can see that great brute Gilligan in his black soutane or whatever they call it, but the theory of your man with the turnips has gone from my mind. I can’t have been paying attention at the time.’

‘I’ll tell you what it was,’ said Charlie triumphantly. ‘The Rotation of Crops, that was his thing. Turnips one year, carrots the next, then cabbages. All change every year. I had an Uncle Fergus who used to go on about it. His wife used to say that he should rotate his drinks as well as the bloody vegetables for he was a walking whiskey distillery by the end.’

‘It’s just grand to hear about your Uncle Fergus, Charlie,’ said Tim, ‘but what in God’s name has the theory to do with donkeys?’

‘Simple,’ said Charlie. ‘Rotation of donkeys. With three of them you could work them one day in three. Better service from the donkeys. Longer life for the donkeys. Lower replacement costs for me. Just like the man Swede said. Sorry, sorry, not Swede, Turnip. Now with two, if you bastards don’t load them up with too many bits and pieces, they work every other day. Rotation principle, only less of it.’

The animal at the centre of this learned discussion gazed sadly up the mountain as if it were a climb too far. The three men scowled at it.

‘Should we pray?’ asked Austin Ruddy.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Tim.

‘Should I give the beast a good kicking?’ asked Charlie O’Malley.

‘No,’ said Austin quickly, ‘if you kick this brute as hard as you kicked that last beast, it may die on us here and we’ll have to carry all that stuff up ourselves.’ He delved deep into an inside pocket and produced a half-bottle of whiskey, created in a Dublin distillery and rejoicing in the name of John Jameson.

‘Have a sip of the hard stuff here. Maybe we’ll get some ideas.’

As an experiment, Charlie waved the open bottle of John Jameson’s finest under the donkey’s nose. The animal looked about him as if searching for the source of the smell. Charlie set off up the mountain, holding the whiskey in front of the animal. The donkey followed happily. By eleven the three men and the alcoholic donkey had reached the summit. The low cloud began to clear and the sun came out as they worked. Way beneath them Clew Bay was laid out like a magic carpet, the blue waters like glass in the sunlight, the islands winking to each other in the bright morning air.

An outsider, looking at the window and reception area of Hudson’s, the art dealers of Old Bond Street, would not have thought they had anything to do with paintings at all. There was just one picture in the street window, a rather smudgy Impressionist. There was one other in the foyer, a rather dreamy Madonna that Powerscourt thought might have been a Murillo.

Michael Hudson had just celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday but he looked ten years younger. He had light brown hair, regular features and bright blue eyes. He looked as though he could model for a page or a young courtier in a Renaissance painting.

‘What a pleasure to meet you, Lord Powerscourt. Are you returning to detection in the world of art? Many may close down if they hear news of your arrival.’

Powerscourt smiled. Some years before he had been involved in a case involving fakes and forgeries along this very street, culminating in the unmasking of a forger in the Central Criminal Court. He explained his problem to the young man and handed him lists of the paintings which had been taken. ‘These are very rough lists so far,’ he said, ‘but I thought it only sensible to bring you on board at the very beginning. Once I obtain more information about the pictures – size, name of artist, if known, and the subject matter of the Old Masters – I shall, of course, let you know. I have a colleague gone to make discreet inquiries in Dublin.’

‘I only know a little about the Irish art market, Lord Powerscourt. In my youth I was employed for a couple of weeks to make a catalogue of paintings at some castle in Waterford. The owner forgot that he had promised to pay me. Let me tell you first of all of the obvious ways in which we should be able to assist. We shall put the word out in London and the principal centres in Europe about these missing paintings. We shall tell our offices in New York and Boston. I shall write this afternoon to Farrell’s in Dublin. Michael Farrell has a small gallery in Kildare Street. He does a lot of business with the Protestant gentry over there. But tell me, Lord Powerscourt, a man of your reputation is not normally employed to look for a few missing family portraits. Is there something you haven’t told me about yet?’

‘If this was Sussex, or Norfolk,’ said Powerscourt, ‘nobody would be very concerned. But it’s not, it’s Ireland. I think there were letters that accompanied the thefts. Not simultaneous necessarily, maybe a couple of days later. What those letters said I have no idea. I suspect they were blackmail of one sort of another. Violence lies so often just beneath the surface of events in Ireland. It’s like those noises bats make that humans cannot hear. These thefts are a minor form of violence. Worse may follow. The wives in these houses are terrified. That suggests to me that there was a threatening letter and that it was the letter, not the vanishing paintings, that made them lose their courage.’

Michael Hudson had pulled a catalogue from his desk. ‘Let me show you this, Lord Powerscourt. This comes from an exhibition held recently in New York which transferred to Boston and, I believe, Chicago. These people, McGaherns, are very respectable. They operate a long way down the scale from ourselves. The works they sell are cheap and tawdry, they might cost five or ten or twenty pounds rather than the same number with thousands added. They operate,’ and here Hudson looked up from the paintings, ‘in areas with very heavy concentrations of Irish settled in them. I worked in our office in New York for two years and I must have walked all over the city by the end. The pictures they sell in such quantities are never originals, but the subject matter doesn’t change very much, attractive colleens, horses of every shape and size with or without their riders, those wonderful lakes and mountains Ireland is festooned with, small cottages with smoke coming out of them in the wild wastes of Mayo and Connemara. The ancestral home or the fantasy of the ancestral home, no doubt. The real home might have been a Dublin slum. Many, if not most, of these people have never been to Ireland in their lives, but they live very Irish lives in America, Mass, Christian Brothers, walls draped with pictures of the Blessed Virgin Mary, family piety, all that sort of thing. Oddly enough, their Ireland is often a generation or a generation and a half even behind the real one. The parents pass on what they remember of the world they left twenty or thirty years ago. Forgive me, I’m wandering off the point.’

Michael Hudson closed his catalogue and put it on his desk. ‘I have no idea if the McGahern works are turned out in Dublin or New York, but one thing is clear, Lord Powerscourt. There is an artistic connection between the two countries. It is possible there is an innocent – well, not innocent, but certainly non-violent explanation for what has been happening to these portraits.’

‘You mean, they may end up in the McGahern catalogue? And get sold off like that for twenty pounds each?’

‘Not quite, Lord Powerscourt. The Irish who buy the McGaherns are not poor, but they’re not well off either. Sixty years on, some of these Irish families have become quite rich, a number of them very rich. Suppose you’re an ambitious Irish family living in New York. Suppose somebody comes along and offers you a bundle of your ancestors. They’re probably not your ancestors at all, but the neighbours aren’t going to know. Think of eight of these hanging in your parlour or dining room. The prestige would be terrific. In a society composed entirely of immigrants of one sort or another, how great would it be to show off a family history that went back a couple of centuries?’

‘You wouldn’t even have to be related to the people in the pictures,’ said Powerscourt. ‘You could say they were O’Shaughnessys or Carrolls from years gone by and nobody would be the wiser.’

‘Exactly so,’ said Hudson, ‘and I suspect you could charge a great deal of money for a complete eight-place-setting set of ancestors, as it were.’

‘I think there’s a snag in this theory,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I’m not sure that the Irish immigrants, who are Catholic, would want to have portraits of Protestant landlords on their walls, however rich they had become. Those people in the Big Houses would be, if not actual enemies, then the oppressors of the poor tenant farmers who had fled to America to find a better life. Somebody in America might like ancestor portraits, mind you. The old might have an appeal for some in the land of the new. How on earth would we find out what the situation is?’

‘At this moment,’ said Michael Hudson, smiling at his visitor, ‘I have no idea. We could,’ a smile spread slowly across his handsome face, ‘try placing a few advertisements in the kind of papers the wealthier Americans might read. Set of eight Irish family portraits, eighteenth to nineteenth century, available, that sort of thing. I think we’d need to put a fairly hefty price on them to deter the McGahern clientele, say fifteen hundred pounds. What do you think of that, Lord Powerscourt?’

‘I think it’s rather clever,’ said Powerscourt, smiling back to the young man, ‘but tell me – what happens if you are inundated with potential customers? Suppose thirty or forty come knocking at your doors? What do we do then?’

‘Find a forger perhaps? That would be a good trade, you know. Forge them all over here, send them to America, I don’t think you could be prosecuted there for something done over here. Your forging friend could do very well. Seriously though, I think we wait and see.’

‘I am most grateful for your time and your help, Mr Hudson,’ said Powerscourt, rising to take his leave. ‘Perhaps you could be so kind as to send any news to my London house with a copy to me at the Butler house whose address is here.’ He handed over a small sheet of paper then paused as he was about to open the door and turned back to the art dealer. ‘One last thing, Mr Hudson. Every time I have anything to do with paintings in a professional capacity, the same questions arise. Is this a real Romney? Did Gainsborough actually paint this portrait? That red mess over there, is that really a Tintoretto? You know the question of attribution far better than I. If it comes up, would you be willing to come to Ireland and help me out?’

‘I would be delighted, Lord Powerscourt. After all, they say Ireland is very beautiful at this time of year.’