Death and the Jubilee

34

‘Do you mind if I join you?’ Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were taking a late breakfast in the Prince Regent the morning after the rescue. Powerscourt had not been able to get all the smoke out of his hair. He felt as if one of Joseph Hardy’s barrels was still smouldering on the top of his skull. Lady Lucy looked tired. The long strain of her ordeal had not yet passed. The man asking to join them was the Prime Minister’s private secretary, Schomberg McDonnell.

‘McDonnell!’ said Powerscourt with an air of great surprise. ‘How very nice to see you. Some coffee? I thought you had gone back to London.’

Powerscourt didn’t recall seeing McDonnell at the impromptu party in the King George the Fourth in the small hours of the morning the night before. Albert Hudson, the manager, had opened his bar in person, serving free drinks to the strange collection of policemen and firemen, departing from his post only to go down to his cellars and fetch more cases of champagne. Powerscourt particularly enjoyed overhearing Hudson asking the Chief Constable to whom he should send the bill for repairs to his hotel. Hudson had blinked several times when told he should post it to Number 10 Downing Street.

Johnny Fitzgerald had commandeered two bottles of the hotel’s finest Burgundy. ‘It tastes fantastic after a long period of abstinence, Francis,’ he had assured Powerscourt and Lady Lucy. ‘Nearly thirty-six hours without a drop. I think I might try this abstaining business again. But not for a while yet.’

The Chief Constable knew a remarkable collection of sea-shanties. Surprisingly the policemen knew all the words. Joe Hardy had wandered round the undamaged sections of the hotel, delighted at how well his plans had worked. ‘Wonderful!’ he had said to all and sundry after a couple of glasses. ‘Wonderful! Best night of my life!’

‘I’m afraid,’ said Schomberg McDonnell, looking carefully at Powerscourt, ‘that when I came down from London last night I had three letters from the Prime Minister in my possession. One was for our friend Mr Hudson. One was for the Chief Constable.’ He paused to demolish part of a kipper. ‘The third one is for you.’

Powerscourt opened the envelope. He felt sick.

‘My dear Lord Powerscourt,’ he read, ‘May I add my congratulations to those you must have already received on the successful liberation of Lady Powerscourt. I always knew you would succeed.

‘But I fear your country has more to ask of you yet. We have a major security crisis over the Queen’s Jubilee Parade. I am not au fait with all the details myself but Mr Dominic Knox of the Irish Office tells me that some German rifles have gone missing. Mr Knox tells me that you know of these rifles, that you were indeed instrumental in tracking them to their place of concealment. Knox thought he had intercepted the people he believed were bringing this weaponry to London. Now he thinks the messengers were merely decoys, designed to throw him off the scent. He believes that one or more of these rifles may be in London where an unknown assassin may be waiting to kill Her Majesty on Jubilee Day itself.

‘I would like you to return to London immediately and assist Mr Knox in his endeavours.’

Powerscourt handed the letter to Lady Lucy. He remembered that terrible night in the Wicklow Mountains where he had feigned death to put his enemies off the scent, two coffins filled with German rifles buried in the grave of Thomas Carew, two more interred in a windswept cemetery high up in the hills where Martha O’Driscoll shared her eternal rest with Mausers or Schneiders.

‘Francis.’ Lady Lucy’s voice was very firm. Many of her vast tribe of relations – enough, Powerscourt had once said, to fill two rotten boroughs in the days before the Great Reform Bill – had served in the military. Maybe the sense of duty passes down the generations. ‘I know it’s terrible,’ she said, ‘but there is no choice. We must go back to London at once. I so much want to see the children anyway. It’s only a few more days.’ She smiled bravely at him. Schomberg McDonnell had nearly demolished his kipper.

‘Can I ask you two questions, McDonnell?’ said Powerscourt thoughtfully. ‘Of course I shall come. But what does Dominic Knox think should happen if he doesn’t find these rifles?’

McDonnell drank some of his coffee. ‘He has a very devious mind, that Dominic Knox,’ he began.

God in heaven, thought Powerscourt. What kind of Machiavellian intelligence does the man possess if McDonnell thinks he is devious?

‘We can’t cancel the parade. One of his suggestions is to declare that the Queen has been taken ill. She does not ride through the streets of London at all but merely appears for the Thanksgiving Service at St Paul’s.’

‘And the other?’ Powerscourt was fascinated.

‘The other is that we have a substitute, an old lady of the same shape and size, dressed exactly like Her Majesty, who rides out from Buckingham Palace on the great parade.’

Powerscourt wondered briefly if McDonnell wished he had thought of that one himself. ‘It’s bit tricky,’ he said, ‘if she happens to get shot and the world thinks it was the Queen.’

‘At least the Queen would still be alive,’ said McDonnell frostily. ‘You said you had two questions, Lord Powerscourt. What was the second one?’ McDonnell sounded like a man anxious to get away.

‘You said you brought three letters down to Brighton with you,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I just wonder if you didn’t bring four.’

‘What would the fourth one have been?’ said McDonnell, taking refuge behind a large slice of buttered toast.

‘I think the first paragraph with congratulations about Lucy’s rescue would have turned into a paragraph of commiserations about its failure. But I think the second paragraph, bidding me come to London, would have been exactly the same. Am I right?’

Schomberg McDonnell, private secretary to the Prime Minister, confidant and colleague of the most powerful man in Great Britain, laughed.

‘I’m afraid you’re absolutely right, Lord Powerscourt. I tore the fourth letter into very small pieces first thing this morning.’

Powerscourt smiled. ‘We’d better go,’ he said.

As they made their way out of the hotel dining room they were greeted enthusiastically by Joe Hardy. He embraced Lady Lucy and shook Powerscourt vigorously by the hand.

‘Just wanted to say, Lord Powerscourt, that I’m at your disposal for any further bonfires you may be planning. Gunpowder Plot, re-run of the Great Fire of London, burning down the Houses of Parliament again, I’m your man! Best night of my life!’

Dominic Knox was pacing up and down an office overlooking Horseguards. He was a short, wiry man in his late thirties. Today, Powerscourt thought, as they shook hands by the door, he looked at least fifty. Knox looked as though he hadn’t slept properly for weeks.

‘Thank God you have come, Lord Powerscourt. I fear it is too late. I fear we are all too late now.’ He looked gloomily out of the window. The park was full of visitors for the Jubilee, staring in awe at the soldiers from all over the world who were enjoying the sunshine in St James’s Park.

‘I cannot believe it is too late,’ said Powerscourt, sitting down on the far side of Knox’s enormous desk. ‘McDonnell said there was a problem with the rifles.’

‘I have two problems, Lord Powerscourt,’ said Knox, relieved perhaps to be able to share his problems with a fellow-professional. ‘The first does indeed concern the rifles. You will recall, none better, that two coffins believed to contain rifles were buried in the grave of one Thomas Carew, south of Greystones, and a further two in the grave of Martha O’Driscoll up in the Wicklow Mountains. Both have been watched ever since you left Ireland. We opened one of them up in broad daylight the day after you found them and found four Mausers of the very latest make inside.’

Knox paused and rearranged some papers on his desk. Powerscourt said nothing.

‘Two coffins are still with Thomas Carew. But there is only one coffin with Martha O’Driscoll. Four brand new high-powered rifles have left the Wicklow Mountains and gone I know not where. We only discovered that two days ago, while you were in Brighton.’

‘Christ,’ said Powerscourt. ‘You remember I told you I did not actually see the rifles being placed in the grave? All I saw was the disturbed earth on the top. They could have placed one coffin in the O’Driscoll grave and taken the other one somewhere else.’

Knox nodded gloomily. ‘Of course I remember you saying that, Lord Powerscourt. We checked the grave the following day. There were three coffins in it, one of the widow O’Driscoll and two more that came out of the sea in the night. We opened one of them and saw these four new rifles inside.’

‘And you have been watching this place ever since, I presume?’

‘We have.’ Knox stopped to swat a fly that was advancing over his desk, trying to read his secrets. ‘I don’t know how they did it. Maybe the watchers got careless or fell asleep. But one coffin has gone. And the problem is this, Lord Powerscourt. Michael Byrne, the man I believe to be responsible for this conspiracy, has been sending messengers to London. Three young women have been apprehended so far. All of them have perfectly legitimate reasons for being here, of course. All of them have gone to the house of an Irish schoolteacher. I believed that Byrne was trying to smuggle one or more of those rifles into London. Broken into pieces, of course, so they could be reassembled. But no. All they brought the teacher was one bottle of Jameson’s whisky, two pots of home-made marmalade and a large quantity of best Irish potato-bread.’

‘So you think they were decoys, despatched to put you off the scent?’

‘Absolutely correct, Lord Powerscourt.’ Knox went over to his window and pulled it firmly shut. ‘You remember Wellington before Waterloo, wondering which direction Napoleon’s armies were going to come from? He thought the Corsican would go round his flank to try to cut him off from the sea. But he didn’t, he drove straight between Wellington and Blucher’s armies. When he found out the truth at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in Brussels, that Napoleon hadn’t taken the expected direction, Wellington said, “Napoleon has humbugged me.” I too feel as if I’ve been humbugged. Humbugged by Michael Byrne.’

‘Wellington won in the end, though, didn’t he,’ said Powerscourt, smiling. He looked at a large print on the wall of Queen Victoria’s previous Jubilee ten years before. Loyal crowds filled the streets. Garlands and banners hung above the route, festooned across lampposts or strung between the buildings. In a carriage a small figure rode in glory through her streets. Powerscourt stared at the windows overlooking the route. Was one of them going to contain an assassin, lurking behind the curtains until it was time to strike and a German rifle, the most deadly, the most accurate in the world, rang out to shatter the climax of an Empress’s reign?

‘The rifles,’ he said suddenly. ‘Did they take the rifles and leave the coffin in the grave, or did they move the coffin with the rifles inside?’

‘They moved the whole bloody coffin,’ Knox replied, ‘there are only two coffins there now. Do you think that is important, my lord?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Powerscourt. His mind was racing. ‘I have always wondered why they put the rifles in those coffins, you know. At first sight, it looks as though it was a convenient way of hiding them. They could be buried in innocent Irish graves in the middle of the night, disturbing the dead, no doubt, but an excellent hiding place. But suppose that wasn’t the only reason. Suppose there was another reason.’

Powerscourt paused. Dominic Knox said nothing. The silence lasted for twenty seconds or more, faint sounds of merriment forcing their way in through the window from the park outside. Another fly had begun a long march across Knox’s papers.

‘Suppose the real reason for the coffins was this,’ Powerscourt went on. ‘You want to send some guns from Ireland to England. You know the police and security people are watching everything and searching people and premises they suspect. Think how different it is with a coffin. Here we have an English visitor to Ireland, maybe an Irishman who had come to work in London and goes back to see his family. Let’s call him Seamus Docherty. The unfortunate man falls ill in Ireland. He cannot be saved. He passes away. But it is the dearest wish of the Docherty family back in London that father Seamus, husband Seamus, be buried by their local priest in their local church and buried in their local cemetery where they can lay flowers on his grave after Mass on Sundays. So the body of the dead Docherty is put in its coffin and sent over to London. It must happen all the time. Except there isn’t a Seamus Docherty, apart from on the name plate of the coffin. It contains four high quality Mausers, capable of killing man or woman at five hundred yards distance. The weight is presumably made up with bits of lead or some other heavy material so nobody would suspect there wasn’t a body inside.

‘What do you think of that, Mr Knox?’

‘I think it is very plausible, my lord.’ Knox did not look greatly encouraged by the news.

‘Think of it, man,’ said Powerscourt. ‘It may take a lot of manpower to find the answer. But there must be records of the transhipment of a dead body in a coffin. There may be records in Dublin of such a passage. If Seamus Docherty comes into London by train there will be records, manifests or something like that at Euston station, which will show where its final destination was. Once we find out that Father O’Flaherty of the Church of the Holy Cross performed the burial, we will know where the coffin is. If it came by sea, which I doubt, there must be records at the Port of London authority.’

Powerscourt paused. There was something Johnny Fitzgerald had said when he came home from Berlin, something that didn’t seem to make very much sense at the time. Hotels, something to do with hotels.

‘I believe,’ said Powerscourt, ‘that a hotel room was booked for the Jubilee by their German confederates a long time ago. Maybe eight months or more. That must be where the gunman is going to make his attempt, from the hotel. A room, or a suite of rooms overlooking the route of the procession reserved last year. Surely we can find that out. Even if time is very short, we still have several days left.’

Knox looked up and shook his head.

‘I said when you arrived, Lord Powerscourt, that there were two problems. One was the rifles. The other is politics.’

‘Politics?’ said Powerscourt. ‘For God’s sake, man, this is a Diamond Jubilee, not a general election!’

‘Let me explain myself better,’ said Knox. He went to stare out of his window. ‘I work for the Irish Office. Security for the parade is in the hands of a very stupid general called Arbuthnot. When I told him about the missing rifles, he went apoplectic, my lord. He turned into a sort of human earthquake, face a vivid red, eruptions of bad language, hot molten streams of invective pouring forth about my incompetence. He, in his turn, told the Home Secretary who has overall responsibility for security in the capital. There can be few things, Lord Powerscourt, more guaranteed to bring a promising political career to an ignominious and inglorious end, than somebody taking a shot, maybe even killing the Head of State at a Diamond Jubilee.’

‘Losing a war, perhaps, caught embezzling Treasury Funds,’ said Powerscourt flippantly.

Knox smiled ruefully. ‘The upshot of all this is that I have not been relieved from my post. But I have been relieved of my men. I had sixty operatives, many brought over from Dublin to work with me on this problem. They have all been taken away from me.’

‘Where have they gone?’ said Powerscourt.

‘The Home Secretary and General Arbuthnot have decided that my methods are not to be trusted. No doubt even now I am being trussed like some dead animal in their minds to be turned into the sacrifice or scapegoat if things go wrong. They have decided that the only way to meet this threat is to have policemen or security operatives watching every entrance that leads into the route of the parade. Where the bus leaves to go to Temple Bar, there you will find my men, or at the entrances of every station in London, waiting to apprehend any person carrying a large package.’

‘But what about the Prime Minister? What about Schomberg McDonnell?’ said Powerscourt.

‘The Prime Minister,’ said Dominic Knox, ‘has disappeared. He cannot be found. McDonnell has vanished with him. Perhaps they would feel it would be more politic if they were not in London at this time. But he placed great faith in you, my lord, the Prime Minister. He seemed to think you were some sort of miracle worker.’

Powerscourt contemplated walking on the water or raising the dead from their tombs. Not appropriate, that, just now, he said to himself. Maybe turning water into wine would gain him the eternal gratitude of Johnny Fitzgerald.

‘All right, Mr Knox,’ he said ‘tell me the worst. How many people have we got to make these inquiries?’

‘Five. Just five,’ Dominic Knox replied. ‘Myself, yourself, and three of my men I’ve managed to keep out of the clutches of that dreadful general.’

‘Six,’ said Powerscourt, thinking of the miracle at the wedding feast. ‘There’s Johnny Fitzgerald. I’m going to find him. He’s worth a regiment all on his own, two after a couple of glasses. We’re not beaten yet, Mr Knox, not by a long way.’