Death and the Jubilee

18

‘Dear Lord Powerscourt,’ the letter read. It was breakfast time in Markham Square. Master Thomas Powerscourt was inspecting a book full of photographs of railway engines, recently purchased by his father. Miss Olivia Powerscourt was smearing her face happily with jam and fragments of toast. Lady Lucy was reading a letter from her brother.

‘I am writing,’ Powerscourt’s correspondent wrote, ‘to invite you to be a member of my team in a forthcoming cricket match. Every year I organize a game near the beginning of the season at my country place in Buckinghamshire.’

‘Big green engine!’ shouted Thomas Powerscourt, pointing to a smoking monster in front of him.

‘Splendid,’ said his father.

‘There is a team from the City and a Visitors Eleven. As you no doubt know, being a keen follower of cricket, there is a touring party of Americans called the Philadelphians coming to our shores this summer. They are the Visitors this year.’

‘Big black engine! Big black one!’ Thomas Powerscourt began making train noises. ‘Chuff,’ he went, ‘chuff, chuff, chuff, chuff, chuff.’

‘I should like you to play for the City Eleven. Their ranks are drawn from banks of all sizes, the discount houses, the insurance people. The wicket-keeper, appropriately enough, comes from the Bank of England.’

‘My brother is going to France for the summer, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘somewhere near Biarritz. He wants to know if we would like to join him.’

‘Blue engine! Blue engine!’

‘Naturally enough, I am proposing that you should open the batting for the City. A special train will be departing from Marylebone station at ten o’clock. Play commences at twelve.’

‘Thomas, Olivia.’ Lady Lucy moved swiftly to restore order. ‘Time to get cleaned up. Nurse Mary Muriel is waiting for you. Francis, my love, haven’t you a train to catch?’

‘Red engine! Big red one. Chuff, chuff.’

Thomas moved slowly out of the dining room station on to the main line upstairs. His sister trotted happily behind him.

‘Please feel free to bring as many members of your family as you would like. Then they can join me in applauding your late cuts. Bertrand de Rothschild.’

There was a small fire going in the centre of the barn. Joseph Hardy had arranged a trestle table at some distance away, covered with two rows of photographs.

‘My little demonstration begins here, gentlemen,’ he announced. The top row were photographs and drawings of the house as it had been before the blaze. Below it were the photographs taken by Hardy’s man the day after the fire. They had been arranged in such a way that the room below corresponded with the one above.

‘Before on the top, gentlemen, after on the bottom. Are you with me so far? Now,’ Hardy went on, ‘I would like you to look closely at the furniture in the picture gallery prior to the blaze. Then would you please cast your eyes on the furniture and the curtains and so forth in Mr Frederick Harrison’s bedroom above.’

Hardy was walking along the side of the table, facing his little audience of Powerscourt, Inspector Wilson and Chief Fire Officer Perkins, pointing now at a painting, now at the wood panelling on either side of the fireplace.

‘Look, if you would, very carefully at the photographs taken after the fire.’

Powerscourt peered closely at the photographs. At first he could see nothing remarkable, only dust and rubble.

‘You will notice, I am sure,’ said Hardy, flattering his audience as he went on, ‘that the fire has taken much more serious hold in some places than it has in others.’ He pointed to a jagged line leading up the wall of the picture gallery. ‘Look here. In all this area the plaster has been burnt completely away. We are right down to the bare brick. But,’ he drew a small ruler from his pocket, ‘along all the rest of the wall, the fire has taken hold, certainly, but the plaster has not been burnt away. What do you deduce from that, gentlemen?’

Hardy put his ruler away and looked directly at Powerscourt.

‘I would deduce that the fire must have been much hotter in that part of the room where the plaster has all gone. Much hotter.’

‘You are absolutely right, of course,’ said Hardy with a smile. ‘Fires never burn evenly but you would not expect to find such a disparity as this.

‘Now look here!’ He sprang round the table and pointed dramatically to the bedroom. ‘This is not a photograph of the room as it was, but a drawing made up of the recollections of the servants and Jones the butler. Jones had a remarkable memory for every detail in the room, I’m glad to say.’

Did he indeed? said Powerscourt to himself. He found it upsetting that the whisky-loving butler should have such an accurate memory. Maybe he had stopped drinking years ago.

‘Look at the fireplace here. There was wood panelling on either side of it, going all the way up to the ceiling, right round the room. To the left of the fire, going away from the door,’ out came Hardy’s ruler again, ‘the wood panelling is severely burnt, but it has not completely disappeared. But to the right of the fireplace it has vanished altogether, totally burnt away. You can see the same with the floorboards. Away from the door, they are severely damaged. Towards the door, the damage is much more severe.

‘In fact, gentlemen, the most dramatic way of looking at this is as follows.’ Hardy brought out a piece of chalk and drew a ragged line from the fireplace to the door. Then he drew another ragged line towards the door, following the area of maximum impact of the fire. It looked like a straggly corridor.

‘If you would like to move over here just a moment.’ Hardy led them over to a piece of carpet lying all on its own on the stone floor. There was a label saying, ‘Door’ and another one saying ‘Fireplace’ attached. Powerscourt felt sure that the distance corresponded to the same gap in Frederick Harrison’s bedroom. Hardy took a bottle from his pocket. He walked backwards, quite slowly, from the fireplace, pouring the liquid as he went. When he reached the door he stopped.

‘The pattern is not identical, of course. But you can see the remarkable similarities in the shape between the carpet and the chalk lines on the photograph.’

Outside a couple of horses whinnied. Mr Samuel Parker could be heard talking to them in a low voice.

‘God bless my soul. God bless my soul,’ said Inspector Wilson as the meaning of the chalk lines became apparent to him. ‘Do you mean to say . . .’

Joseph Hardy held up his hand. ‘I haven’t finished yet, Inspector,’ he said, smiling again at his handiwork. ‘Nearly but not quite. Could I ask you to look at the fire for me now, gentlemen? At present it is a perfectly normal blaze. I am going to put on two different sets of wood.’

He bent down to a wooden basket several feet away from his fire. ‘The first is wood panelling of the same type as that found in Mr Harrison’s bedroom. It is about the same age. It was originally painted in the same colours. It is about the same temperature as the wood in the fireplace would have been before the fire took hold.’

‘How did you get the piece of wood? How can you be so sure it is of the same age and so on?’ asked Powerscourt.

Joseph Hardy frowned at the interruption. ‘In my line of work, my lord, you have to take great care.’ Hardy threw two pieces of wood on to the fire. ‘Some of the firemen down in London, my lord, let me keep all kinds of pieces of stuff from all sorts of different fires. I keep them all carefully labelled in my store room.’

They stared at the two pieces of wood. At first nothing happened. Gradually, but quite slowly they began to burn.

‘Now look at these two, gentlemen.’ Hardy tossed another two pieces of wood on to the fire. They burst into flame immediately. They blazed much more fiercely than the others. Powerscourt drew back from the heat.

‘These two have been soaked in inflammable liquid. That is what I believe happened on the night of this fire. The arsonist poured his petrol or his oil down one section of the picture gallery wall. He also poured a whole lot more in Mr Harrison’s bedroom in the area between the door and the fireplace. You will remember, gentlemen, that we never found the key that locked Mr Harrison into his room.’

Inspector Wilson, Chief Fire Officer Perkins and Powerscourt stared at Hardy. Even he had gone serious as he looked at the flames leaping up in his fire.

‘Do I need to say anything more, gentlemen? I am anxious to put this fire out if you have seen enough. We have some buckets of sand prepared for the purpose.’

‘I think we have seen enough, Mr Hardy,’ said Powerscourt.

‘There’s only one thing that has to be said, my lord,’ said Hardy as he and Perkins hurled the sand over the blaze. Thick smoke was pouring up to the roof of the barn now. ‘I think Mr Harrison was murdered. I’m certain of it, in fact. The murderer soaked the key parts of the house in some inflammable liquid and then put a match to it. Mr Harrison must have gone to sleep before the fire began. The murderer then locked him in and disposed of the key. Poor man.’

Hardy paused as he thought of the horrible end, a man burnt to death in his own house, smoke finishing him off, his own bedroom door locked from the other side.

‘But I couldn’t say who did it. That is outside my province altogether.’

Hardy looked at Inspector Wilson and Powerscourt, the Inspector looking sombre after his demonstration, Powerscourt now pacing up and down the barn.

‘That’s up to you gentlemen. That’s up to you now.’

Lord Francis Powerscourt was sitting in total darkness, staring helplessly out to sea. Night had fallen over the east coast of Ireland and the little town showed no signs of movement. This was Greystones, the place Johnny Fitzgerald had identified as the site for the German arms shipments to the Irish revolutionaries. At least Powerscourt thought it was the place. He wondered yet again if he had decoded the message correctly or if Fitzgerald had misheard the information in Berlin. Four days, or four nights, Fitzgerald had said, on which the Germans might land guns and money for the Irish.

Powerscourt had checked into the Imperial Hotel, Greystones, as James Hamilton, the name of Lucy’s father. He smiled to himself as he thought of it. He couldn’t have brought Lucy with him, not on an assignment as potentially dangerous as this, but she was with him in spirit. He wondered if she had gone to bed yet, back in Markham Square, trying yet again to get to grips with the latest Joseph Conrad.

To Powerscourt’s left, from his windows on the top storey, a miscellaneous collection of cottages curved around one side of the little bay. In front of them was a stony beach, the fishermen’s boats drawn up in random order. To his right a long passage of rocks and gullies marked the way to the other, longer beach that stretched way down the coast towards Wicklow. But the beauty of Greystones, if this indeed was the right place, was a tiny harbour just two hundred yards from Powerscourt’s hotel. Nothing very big could have put in there, but a small boat could easily come in from a mother ship further out to sea. The place was completely deserted. There were no coastguards, no lighthouses, nothing at all, only the water lapping monotonously against the green-covered stone of the quays and the pebbles on the tiny beach.

The moon was almost full, turning the sea into a mass of shimmering grey and silver. Powerscourt had his best field glasses with him, temporarily borrowed from Johnny Fitzgerald. For the tenth time that evening he scanned the wide expanse of the Irish Sea. There was nothing to be seen, not even the dark smudge of a coal steamer heading north towards Dublin. He wondered yet again if he had come to the right place. He thought of Lady Lucy and his children. He wondered if Thomas would like climbing across the rocks. He thought of Lady Lucy’s adopted family, the Farrells, and wondered sadly if any more of them had died. He thought of his investigation, of the headless man found floating by London Bridge, of the strange history of the Harrison family that might yet consume them all. He wondered about Jones the butler and whether he was telling the truth. He thought of Charles Harrison, a sad and embittered little boy, one parent dead, the other fled with her Polish lover, brought up by dutiful but unloving relations. He wondered about the link, if there was one, between the Germans in Berlin and the Harrisons in London and the Irish insurgents in Dublin.

Suddenly he realized that they too must be staring out to sea on this moonlit night, watching for their ship, praying for copious supplies of money and guns and explosives. He turned his glasses on to the streets of Greystones. Was there somebody down there, watching like him for the sign, for the sails? He thought of Theseus’ father, warned that his son’s boat was coming home to Athens, watching desperately from the rocky citadel for the ship to come in. White sails meant he was alive, black that he was dead. Legend said Theseus had forgotten to change the sails so his father hurled himself off the rock to his death, leaving the throne of Athens to the slayer of the Minotaur. Powerscourt thought Theseus had enjoyed power too much on his travels to want to play second fiddle ever again. The failure to change the sails was deliberate. A patricide ruled in Athens, but only the immortal gods would ever know and they came for Theseus in the end. Powerscourt wondered if a returning Harrison would have changed the sails. He thought of more black sails in Turner’s painting of a burial at sea, the great ships riding very still, the body lowered reverently into the water, black sails marking the passage of another English hero.

Every five minutes Powerscourt would scan the horizon from north to south. He checked in the doorways of the cottages to see if his counterpart was lurking there in the shadows, hoping for the weapons that might help bring freedom to the troubled island. He remembered other night watches, on the side of a mountain in India where he and Johnny Fitzgerald had waited for five days and nights for a meeting between rebel tribesmen that must have happened somewhere else. Johnny had discovered another way to make his fortune. Luminous playing cards, playing cards you could see properly in the dark, he had declared, would earn some lucky man his fortune. Nights on duty for soldiers, sailors and sentries would never be the same again. Think of the joy, Johnny said, when you produced the Ace of Spades at three o’clock in the morning when you could hardly see your own hand in front of your face.

From time to time Powerscourt would walk up and down his room, stretching his legs, rubbing his eyes. By four o’clock he had decided that nothing would happen this night. There was no boat or pleasure boat to be seen out to sea. No vessel from Hamburg or Bremen had come to disturb the peace of the waters off Greystones. Powerscourt wondered if they had got it wrong, if he should be in some other desolate cove in Kerry or Connemara, or somewhere on the wild and rugged coast of Donegal, all easier to reach from Germany. He made a final tour with the field glasses. There was nothing there. As dawn began to climb out of the eastern sky, grey-fingered, Powerscourt thought, he went to bed and slept fitfully as a new day dawned over the Irish Sea.