Death and the Jubilee

26

It was three o’clock in the morning when Powerscourt reached Markham Square. He brought with him not only Richard Martin, but his mother, wrapped up in her best coat and very apprehensive about going to stay at a grand house in Chelsea.

‘I’m not happy about leaving your mother here,’ Powerscourt had said to Richard when they reached his little house in North London. ‘I’m going to ask the cab to wait. You go inside and tell your mother to get ready.’

Mrs Martin thought she was dreaming. First of all here was Richard, back home in the middle of the night with bruises on his face. Now he was telling her to pack a bag and come to Lord Powerscourt’s house at once.

‘I can’t do that, Richard. What will the neighbours say to me disappearing like that in the small hours of the morning? I’ll never be able to raise my head in the street again. People will think I’m a criminal being taken away by the police.’

‘Just pack your bag, Mother,’ said Richard, ‘and please hurry. There’s a cab waiting outside the door.’

Richard wrote a note to Sophie while he waited. Powerscourt had told him they could drop it off on the way so she would know he was safe and well in the morning. ‘Dear Sophie,’ he wrote, ‘I am back in London after some very exciting times. I can tell you all about it tomorrow. Lord Powerscourt says you are to call at his house after you finish teaching. That’s 25 Markham Square in Chelsea.’ Richard paused briefly. Then the elation of his escape took over, the dramatic row down the Thames with the enemy in pursuit. ‘Love, Richard.’

Richard had given Powerscourt the details of his incarceration on the train from the Thames Valley to Paddington. He told how he had been summoned to Mr Charles Harrison’s office, how two men had seized him and bundled him into a waiting cab and on to the station for Blackwater.

‘They blindfolded me before we got to that big house, my lord, so I wouldn’t remember where I had been, I suppose. Then they tied me up in that little house where you found me. They used to come and ask questions every couple of hours or so. If I didn’t answer them they would hit me sometimes. Every now and then they would bring me food and a glass of water.’

‘What did they want to know, Richard?’ said Powerscourt, his eyes never leaving the far end of the carriage where any new passengers would appear, his hand deep in his coat pocket.

‘They wanted to know what I had told Mr Burke,’ said Richard, grimacing at his memories. ‘I said I hadn’t told Mr Burke anything. They didn’t believe me. They said I had been seen talking to him at the cricket match. Then they wanted to know if I had talked to anybody else. I said, No, I hadn’t. I wasn’t going to tell them I had talked to Sophie, was I?’

‘Sophie did very well, you know, very well.’ Powerscourt smiled at Richard. ‘If she hadn’t come to tell Mr Burke you had gone missing you could have been locked up in that little cottage for days, if not weeks. She was very brave.’

Richard grinned back at Powerscourt. ‘So you think she might care for me, my lord?’

‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I’m not sure that a slow train, currently passing Slough if I am not mistaken, at two o’clock in the morning, is the best place for a discussion of your prospects. But I should say that she cared for you very much, possibly more than she realized before. Now tell me, Richard, was there anything else they asked you? Did they mention any dates in the near future? Any events they might have wondered if you knew about?’

Richard was lost in thought, more concerned with his next meeting with Sophie than with the questions he had been asked at Blackwater.

‘What was that, my lord? Sorry, yes, they did ask me if I knew anything about next Monday, the day, they called it. They muttered something in a foreign language I didn’t understand. I think it was German, my lord. It sounded like Der Tag, Der Tack, something like that. I’m going to start on the German next term, my lord, at my evening classes. I’ve nearly finished French.’

Powerscourt stared out of the window. The river was just visible in the moonlight. He wondered where Johnny Fitzgerald was, if he had shaken off his pursuers.

‘Next Monday, Richard. That’s the big day. It’s now Wednesday morning. We’ve got five days to stop them, whatever they’re trying to do, one of them a Sunday. Just five days.’

‘What do you make of it all, Francis?’

Powerscourt and William Burke were sitting by the fire in the upstairs drawing room in Markham Square the following morning. Downstairs Lady Lucy was looking after Mrs Martin, offering her round after round of toast and a flood of tea. Richard was still asleep.

‘On one level, William,’ said Powerscourt, ‘it’s kidnap pure and simple. I’m sure the police would be able to arrest Charles Harrison and his associates at Blackwater without any trouble at all. But I’m not sure we should set any of that in motion just yet.’

‘Why ever not, Francis?’ said Burke, growing indignant at crimes committed in broad daylight in the heart of the City.

‘I am certain,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I am absolutely certain that the most important thing just now is to frustrate their plans. How we do it I do not know. But I feel very sure that any arrest would bring publicity and publicity is what they want for their main purpose. Have you found the figures I mentioned to you yesterday afternoon, William? The ones that would confirm my theory of what has been going on all these months?’

‘I have some of them, but not all.’ Burke reached for a paper in his breast pocket. ‘I need to talk to young Richard when he wakes up. I have no doubt that your theory is correct, Francis. I cannot tell you what I think about it. It is the most monstrous thing I have ever encountered in the City of London. And I do not know how we can stop it. I fear it is already too late. Next Monday, did you say, is the vital day? Just three full working days away. God help us all.’

Powerscourt rose from his chair. The grey cat slid from behind the place he had just left. Faintly, from upstairs, there came the sound of Olivia crying.

‘William, you must wake up young Richard and see what details he can fill in. You must send a message to the Governor of the Bank of England asking for a meeting this afternoon. Maybe he should come here.’

‘I am certain he should come here,’ Burke said. ‘Every time the Governor calls on an office in the City the place is filled with rumours within the half-hour. Such and such a firm is going bankrupt, such and such a bank has defaulted on their loans, such and such a broker is about to get hammered. Rumour travels faster than the wind. I shall ask the Governor to meet me here at two o’clock. Where are you going, Francis?’

‘I am going,’ said Powerscourt, ‘to build a bridgehead with the world of politics. I fear that only they may be able to solve the problem once they realize how serious it could become. I am going to call on my friend Rosebery. He may be out of office now but he knows how to pull the levers. God knows, we may have to pull a lot of those.’

Michael Byrne was saying goodbye to one of his travellers in a small flat in one of Dublin’s many slums. Three leaves in a shamrock, Byrne said to himself, three messengers to cross the sea to England. Three messengers to carry a message of hatred from one island to another. Three messengers to announce to the greater world that the cause of Irish freedom had not been extinguished by Victoria’s Jubilee. Three messengers to carry packages across the Irish Sea. Three messengers to deceive his enemies.

‘Go safely now,’ Byrne said to Siobhan McKenna, the second of his envoys to set out on the boat to Liverpool. ‘You know the story?’

‘I know it as well as I know my own name, Michael Byrne,’ replied the girl. ‘It would be too dangerous for me to come and wave you off.’ Byrne was apologetic, worried that his absence at the quayside could be interpreted as cowardice.

‘Don’t you worry. Don’t worry at all.’ The girl gave him a quick kiss on the cheek and set off on her journey. In her pocket she carried an invitation to an interview for the position of assistant teacher at the Convent of Our Lady of Sorrows in Kensington. Byrne hoped that her visit would multiply the sorrows.

Rosebery’s formidable intellect was turned on to the racing papers. He was making notes as he read, as if preparing a memorandum for the Cabinet.

‘Powerscourt!’ He rose to greet his friend. ‘How very good to see you. You find me deep in the study of form on the turf. One of my most expensive animals takes to the race course tomorrow. But come, Francis, sit down, you do not look like a man who has come to talk of horseflesh.’

‘I have not, I’m afraid.’ Powerscourt sank into a deep red armchair at the side of the fire. A series of paintings of Rosebery’s horses adorned the sides of the mantelpiece.

‘Why don’t you tell me the story from the beginning, Francis. The last I heard you were looking into a strange death in the City, a headless man found floating by London Bridge.’

‘Very well,’ said Powerscourt. He suddenly realized that he was incredibly tired after the exertions of the previous evening. He paused while he arranged the facts in his mind.

‘Let me begin with the headless man,’ he said at last. ‘He was found, as you say, floating in the Thames with no head and no hands. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the start of the unravelling of a very great conspiracy.

‘The dead man was Old Mr Harrison, founder and senior partner in Harrison’s Bank, a private bank in the City. He was not the first Harrison to die in strange circumstances. His eldest son perished in a boating accident off the Isle of Wight eighteen months before. There were rumours, never substantiated, that the boat had been tampered with.’

‘Why did he have no head, Old Mr Harrison?’ asked Rosebery. ‘And no hands?’

‘I’m not sure about that,’ said Powerscourt. ‘The head was cut off to make him unrecognizable, I think. I’m not sure about the hands. Maybe the murderer had heard about this new thing called fingerprinting. Johnny Fitzgerald told me the German police are quite advanced with it. You can identify people by their fingerprints. Every one is different. The Army have been using a system like it in India for years to identify people.’ Powerscourt looked down at his thumb for a moment before he continued.

‘They lived in Oxfordshire at a place called Blackwater, these Harrisons. Old Mr Harrison’s sister still lives there. It seemed from talking to her and to the head groom that Old Mr Harrison had grown very worried in the last year or so. He used to ride round the lake on a pony and read and write letters to and from Germany. He got the groom to post the letters he was sending to Berlin and other places to avoid them being seen in the big house. He talked to his sister of conspiracies involving the bank, of secret societies in Germany.’

‘What sort of conspiracies? What sort of secret societies?’

‘I’ll come to that,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I’m just trying to tell the story in the right order. Shortly after that, and after my learning of the secret societies, there was a fire at Blackwater. The fire experts are sure, though they would find it hard to prove, that it was started deliberately. Old Mr Harrison’s other son, Frederick Harrison, was burnt to death in his bedroom in the inferno. The door of the room had been locked from the other side. Nobody ever found the key.’

‘My God, Francis,’ said Rosebery, ‘this is frightful. It’s like one of those Greek plays where there’s nobody left alive at the end.’

‘It may yet come to that,’ said Powerscourt. ‘It was a very strange house, Blackwater. The original owner had constructed the lake with classical temples all around the side. Hercules and Diana and Apollo peered out at you as you walked round the water. There was a very strange butler who had dealings with the Harrisons before they left Germany and came to London. He could have had motives for revenge.’

‘Don’t talk to me about butlers,’ said Rosebery with feeling. ‘Do you remember that fellow I used to have before I found Leith? Villain by the name of Hall?’

‘The fellow who looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth?’

‘The same,’ said Rosebery, nodding his head. ‘The fellow had been cheating me for years and years. All kinds of bills were grossly inflated. Hall took a cut from every single one. A bad business.’

‘I did wonder about the Blackwater butler,’ Powerscourt smiled at the eccentricities of butlers, Jones’ walls lined with shells, his cupboard lined with empty whisky bottles, ‘but in the end I didn’t think he could have done any of these murders. My attention was drawn, always, to the youngest member of the family, Charles Harrison, great-nephew of Old Mr Harrison, who is now in charge of the family bank. Four people have died to put him there. But I did not think that control of the bank was sufficient motive for all these murders. All he had to do was wait and control would have come to him naturally as the others died off or retired.’

‘So what was going on? Is going on?’ Rosebery was leaning forward in his chair like a jockey rising in his stirrups.

‘There are two other relevant facts, I think.’ Powerscourt was feeling very tired. ‘The first is that I asked my brother-in-law William Burke to find out what was going on inside Harrison’s Bank. One of his young men made friends with a clerk in Harrison’s by the name of Richard Martin. Last Saturday Martin and Burke and I were all at a cricket match at Rothschild’s place in Buckinghamshire. Charles Harrison overheard Burke asking Richard to come and see him in his office in the City on Monday morning. Harrison must have thought Martin was going to tell William Burke about the strange goings on in the bank. But before he could do so Richard Martin was abducted. He was taken to Blackwater and locked up in a little house by the lake. Johnny Fitzgerald and I rescued him from there last night, or this morning. We had to row down the river pursued by another boat before we made good our escape.’

‘God bless my soul. This is frightful, Francis. What is the other thing you spoke of?’

‘The other thing is this.’ Powerscourt rose from the chair and began pacing up and down Rosebery’s library. ‘All through this case I have had the feeling that somebody had been looking at the same questions as me. Old Mr Harrison, endlessly going round his temples, muttering to his sister about conspiracies, sending his letters secretly, had been on the same voyage of discovery. On Monday I found a box of his papers hidden on a little island in the middle of the lake. There were letters from Germany in which he was asking if somebody belonged to a secret society in Berlin, a society attached to the Friedrich Wilhelm University. And there were two separate articles about the fall of Barings Bank seven years ago. I didn’t take them as seriously as I should have done.’

Powerscourt sat down again. As he made his series of points he crossed them off on the fingers of his left hand.

‘Now we come to the denouement, Rosebery, or almost the denouement. Point One, Charles Harrison went to the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. I am certain he belonged to a secret society there. Point Two, the society was founded by the followers of a historian called von Treitschke. The historian died last year but the society lives on. Point Three, von Treitschke was a fanatical German nationalist. He believes that the true enemy of Germany is not Russia or France, but England. Point Four, I sent Johnny Fitzgerald to Berlin to see what he could find out about secret societies. He warned me that a shipment of weapons was being sent to Ireland from Germany, presumably by this secret society. Then, just as he was getting close to his quarry in Berlin, a young man calls at my front door in London asking where Johnny is and whether he is a friend of mine. The butler tells the caller that Johnny is in Berlin and confirms our friendship. Immediately Johnny is frozen out in Berlin. Whether the high command is in Berlin or in London I do not know, I am not sure it matters. Point Five is that all the members of the society have to swear to further Germany’s interests by whatever means they can. Point Six . . .’ Powerscourt paused. There was a faint shuffling behind the wainscoting as if mice were trying to break through to read Rosebery’s books.

‘Point Six is why I am here today. Our young man in Harrison’s Bank reported that the money was being taken out of Harrison’s Bank very fast indeed. The people who questioned him in Blackwater referred to next Monday as being the important day, the day that counts. A week before the Jubilee.’

Powerscourt looked at Rosebery, as if he was reluctant to complete his story.

‘Out with it, man, out with it,’ said Rosebery.

‘I know this sounds incredible, Rosebery. William Burke could scarcely believe it. But he does now. Charles Harrison is trying to do a Barings in reverse. Barings collapsed because of imprudent lending to Argentina. They didn’t want it to happen at all. But Harrison is trying to make sure his bank fails. Deliberately. He is trying to make sure his bank fails in the week before the Jubilee. He is trying to make sure that other financial institutions come down with him. In the days before the Jubilee London will be full of newspapermen from every country on earth, all of them having trading relations with the City of London. There will be financial collapse as the Queen prepares to ride out in glory to St Paul’s. One of the sentences that Old Mr Harrison highlighted in the articles about Barings in his strong box was this.’

Powerscourt pulled a battered copy of the Economist from his pocket.

‘It is a quote from Lord Rothschild, a key participant in the Barings rescue, I seem to remember. “If Barings fails, it will bring to an end the custom of all the world of drawing their bills and doing their finance in London.”’

Rosebery turned pale. He went to the long table in the centre of the room and poured himself a large drink.

‘Drink, Francis? Drink before the catastrophe? Monday, you said, next Monday. What happens then?’

‘Next Monday is the appointed day for the second payment of Harrison’s Venezuelan loan. They brought it out two years ago with a syndicate of other banks. It didn’t do very well and Harrison’s were believed to have placed it with a consortium of other European banks. They haven’t asked for any assistance for this second tranche.’

‘How much is it for,’ Rosebery spoke very quietly,’ this second tranche?’

Powerscourt looked again at the racehorses on Rosebery’s walls. Maybe it would be safer to invest in them than in Venezuelan bonds sponsored by Harrison’s Bank.

‘Four million pounds,’ he said, ‘but this is what matters. If Richard Martin is to be believed, and I am sure he is, Harrison’s won’t have the money to pay it. The money has been shipped abroad. And God knows how many other bills they may have engineered to come due on the following week.’

‘Was the loan underwritten?’ asked Rosebery. ‘That’s what did for Revelstoke in the Barings crash, you know. The arrogant fellow thought he didn’t need to underwrite his Argentine adventures.’

‘It was underwritten, by a variety of other financial institutions,’ said Powerscourt. ‘William Burke is trying to find out who they are. Some of them may go under as well.’

Rosebery stared into his glass as if financial rescue might be found in the crystal.

‘It is impossible, Francis, to underestimate the seriousness of the situation. It is like a dagger pointed at the success of the Jubilee itself. Barings, as you well know, were saved by the Bank of England going round with their begging bowl and by the fact that enough of the money people felt it was in their interest to bail them out. But they might not feel that with Harrison’s. When that discount house Overend and Gurney went down forty years ago nobody lifted a finger to save them. Nobody liked them. And, Francis, think of this. It is almost as bad for the Jubilee if they are rescued or if they fail. You mentioned the newspapermen. The ambassadors and other representatives of the world’s powers will be here as well. Think what they will make of the week before the Great Imperial Pageant if our own papers are full of crisis and collapse in the City of London. Think of the national humiliation if we have a second banking disaster in seven years. Think of the flight of business out of London to New York and Paris, all of them wringing their hands as they go, of course, but going all the same. The Jubilee will not be a celebration of the greatness of Victoria’s Empire, it will be a funeral, the beginning of the end of Rule Britannia.’

Rosebery sprang from his chair and headed for the door.

‘I must see the Prime Minister at once. You’d better come too, Francis. Maybe the Government can save the day. But I doubt it. I very much doubt it.’