Death and the Jubilee

2

Lord Francis Powerscourt had turned into a horse. He was trotting slowly along his hall in Markham Square in Chelsea, making clip-clop noises with his tongue and his back teeth. He had practised these in his bath and tested them out to his own satisfaction on his wife Lady Lucy.

‘Clip-clop, Clip-clop,’ said Powerscourt, negotiating his way past a Regency table outside the dining room. Now, he knew, was the time for a strategic decision. Should he go into the dining room and make a round of the chairs, pausing possibly to look at the grass outside the window? Or should he essay the more dangerous, but possibly more entertaining journey up the stairs to the first or the second or even the third floor?

Lord Francis Powerscourt was one of the most successful detectives in England. He had learned his craft in Army Intelligence in India and transferred the skills learnt there to solving murders and mysteries at home. He was in his forties now, the black curly hair still intact, the blue eyes continuing to inspect the world with the same detachment and irony as before.

‘Hold on tight, hold on very tight,’ said Powerscourt, as he began a slow ascent of the stairs. He could feel two small hands hanging on very tightly to his collar. Thomas Powerscourt was four years old, born a year after his parents’ wedding in 1892. Wandering about upstairs was Thomas’s sister, Olivia, who could now tell the world that she was two.

On the wide first-floor landing Powerscourt broke into a trot.

‘Faster, Papa, faster!’ cried the little boy, beating on his shoulder with a small determined fist. ‘Faster, horse, faster!’

The horse was growing weary now and anxious for the human consolations of tea and biscuits downstairs. Coming down, Powerscourt remembered, was always a more dangerous manoeuvre than going up. His passenger was in danger of falling down right over his head and tumbling head over heels to the marble floor below. After a slow, almost funereal trot down the stairs, Powerscourt speeded up along the hall just as the doorbell rang. The maid opened the door before he could resume his human form. He found himself staring into a pair of very brightly polished black boots. Above the boots were sharply pressed trousers. Above the trousers was a uniform jacket resplendent with shining buttons. Above the jacket were a pair of enormous moustaches and a helmet. A policeman’s helmet.

‘Good morning, sir. Would you be Lord Francis Powerscourt?’ said the thin slit underneath the moustaches.

‘I would, Constable, I would.’ Powerscourt laughed happily. ‘Forgive me while I return to human form.’

Thomas Powerscourt began to cry, quietly at first and then with huge quaking sobs that racked his little frame.

‘What’s the matter, Thomas?’ said his father, smiling an apologetic parental smile at the constable. ‘What’s the matter?’

Thomas was not telling. His face was wet with tears and a small wet hand rubbed against his father’s trousers.

‘They can take on for no reason at all,’ began the constable, about to relate the story of the three children of his wife’s sister who bolted the minute he entered the room.

‘He’s a p’liceman,’ said Thomas accurately, pointing a grubby finger at the representative of law and order.

‘That’s right, Thomas. The gentleman here is a policeman.’

‘P’licemen catch bad people and put them in prison,’ sobbed the boy.

Suddenly Powerscourt could sense the anxiety, but before he could speak his son was holding desperately on to his trousers and shouting as loud as he could.

‘P’liceman won’t take my Papa away!’ He held on as if his life, or Powerscourt’s life, depended on it.

Powerscourt bent down and picked him up. The constable coughed apologetically. ‘I have a message from the Commissioner,’ he began.

The little boy clung ever tighter to his father’s neck, tears trickling down a collar that had been immaculate but a few minutes before. The Commissioner seemed to Thomas to be an even bigger, even more hostile form of policeman trying to take his Papa away to the cells or to prison. He didn’t know what a Commissioner was, but it sounded pretty frightening to Thomas.

The constable ploughed bravely on. ‘He would like to see you at once, sir,’ he said. ‘He would like to give you a cup of tea and then he will send you straight back again. I think he wants to take your advice.’

Powerscourt smiled. ‘Thank you, Constable. I have often met with the Commissioner, or rather with his predecessor. I should be delighted to come with you.’

Lady Lucy appeared suddenly by his side. ‘Good morning, Constable,’ she said with her most graceful smile. ‘So Francis is going to take tea with the Commissioner? I’m sure that will be delightful. And, Francis, you can tell Thomas and me all about it when you get back.’

She whisked Thomas away from his father’s shoulder and began whispering to the little boy. As Powerscourt and the constable closed the door, Thomas was able to manage a small but tear-free wave.

Forty miles away an old man and a pony were waiting outside the stables of the great house. Samuel Parker had worked in these stables for nearly fifty years. He had risen in a series of slow promotions from apprentice undergroom to Head of Stables. His employers had given him a little cottage on the estate to have until he died. But today Samuel was a very worried man.

The house was almost closed down. The younger members had gone back to their great house in Mayfair, leaving the old man and his sister alone on the top floor, except for some servants in the basement. Every day, at ten o’clock in the morning, Old Mr Harrison would come to meet Samuel and the pony by the stables. Together they would make a circuit of the lake. Sometimes the old man would bring letters or papers from the bank with him to read on the way. Then Samuel would strap a small portable chair and table on to the pony and they would wait while their master attended to his business.

Samuel could just remember the family who lived in the great house before Old Mr Harrison bought it thirty-five years ago. The sons had gambled away the family money, the house and the estates all had to be sold, and the Harrisons, originally German bankers in Hamburg and Frankfurt, had moved in. Three generations of them lived in the house now: Carl Harrison known as Old Mr Harrison, his sister Augusta Harrison, known as Miss Harrison, his son Mr Frederick Harrison and his great-nephew, Charles Harrison, Young Mr Harrison as they were known to the servants.

Old Mr Harrison loved the lake and the two-mile walk that ran around its borders. There were strange grottoes and classical temples, funny buildings as Samuel thought of them, dotted around it and sometimes Old Mr Harrison would spend a lot of time inside these Roman buildings, looking at the statues or reading his correspondence beneath some pagan god.

Samuel Parker thought Old Mr Harrison had been worried recently. For the past few months his correspondence had been coming from foreign parts, from Bremen and Berlin, from Paris and Munich and Cologne. He had written a lot of letters too, perched at his table in the temple, a thick cape protecting him from the winds that whipped the waters of the lake and tore the leaves from the trees. And – this was what alarmed Samuel more than anything else – Old Mr Harrison had asked Samuel to post the letters he wrote down by the lake, as if he didn’t want anybody in the big house to know who he was writing to.

The lake would be wreathed in mist this morning, Samuel knew, the great trees and the classical temples swirling in and out of sight like things glimpsed in nightmares. Samuel thought there were strange spirits living around it, older than the house, older than the village, older than the ancient church, older possibly than Christianity itself. Maybe the Druids or the pagan gods had dwelt there long ago, now living uneasily with the worldly deities of Rome.

It was twenty days, maybe more, since Old Mr Harrison had come for his morning ride, walking stiffly down the drive from the house, leaning on his stick. Samuel had lost count. Sometimes they would go round the lake twice or even three times in one day when the weather was good and the sun shone on the water, reflections of pillars and pediments dancing on the surface of the lake. The old pony knew something was wrong. It gazed sadly at the ground, raising a hoof from time to time to paw at the gravel.

Even Samuel’s wife Martha, so crippled now that she could scarcely manage the hundred yards to the church to lay the flowers on Sundays, could not remember how long it was since Old Mr Harrison had disappeared.

‘He’ll have gone to London to see the rest of them, to be sure,’ she would say anxiously, raking over the embers in the fire. But she didn’t sound as though she believed it.

‘None of the servants in the big house say he’s gone to London. And how would he get there? He couldn’t walk to the station, could he, not the way he is. I’ve taken Old Mr Harrison to and from that train every time he’s gone anywhere for over thirty years. And I haven’t taken him to the station, have I?’

‘No, you haven’t, Samuel.’

At half-past ten, after half an hour of waiting, Samuel took the pony back to its stall. He gave it some water. ‘He’s not coming today, either. Another day has gone,’ he said to the pony.

As he walked down the path to his cottage Samuel Parker wondered for the hundredth time if he should tell anyone about his vanished master. But he wasn’t sure who to tell. And he knew Old Mr Harrison would not want him to raise the alarm. ‘You can’t trust anybody these days,’ Samuel remembered the old man muttering to himself after a long day with his correspondence by the lake, ‘not even your own flesh and blood.’

Lord Francis Powerscourt was feeling curious as he made his way across London to the Commissioner’s office. Maybe another case was going to begin. Ever since he was a small boy growing up in Ireland he had been fascinated by riddles and puzzles. He had devoted much of his adult life to solving mysteries and murders, codes and cryptograms in Kashmir and Afghanistan and the summer capital of the Raj at Simla during his time in the Army. He had solved a gruesome series of murders in the wine business at Oporto in Portugal where the victims were dumped in barrels of port, their flesh turned purple by the viscous liquor, and a long catalogue of murders in Britain and Ireland. His most important case had come five years before when he had solved the mystery of the strange death of Prince Eddy, the wastrel eldest son of the Prince of Wales.

Sir William Spence, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, rose to meet Powerscourt in his office at Scotland Yard .

‘Lord Powerscourt, how very kind of you to come.’

‘As you know, Sir William, I am in debt to your service and its officers for help rendered me in the past more than I can say.’

This was true. In two of his previous cases Powerscourt had received invaluable help from the police force of the capital. On the last occasion the Commissioner had treated Powerscourt to a magnificent dinner at his club where they had consumed two bottles of the finest claret in the cellars and the old man had told him terrifying tales of army life on the North West Frontier forty years before.

‘Let me come straight to the point.’ Sir William’s moustaches were not quite as formidable as those of his constable, but they were still substantial. Powerscourt wondered if moustache cultivation was now obligatory for all those in police uniform. ‘You will have seen the newspaper coverage of the body found in the Thames.’

‘One could scarcely avoid it,’ said Powerscourt. ‘It has dominated the papers every day since the unfortunate discovery itself.’

‘Most of what you read is made up, of course. The newspaper gentlemen enjoy themselves most when there are no facts at all to be reported, apart from the body itself. I sometimes think how easy it must be to be one of these reporters, making up the most fantastic stories out of your head and then presenting them as the very latest news.’

Sir William shook his head at the sins of the reporters. ‘But let me ask you this, Lord Powerscourt. Have you any idea of how many people have come forward to claim the corpse? To say that it is a long-lost member of their family?’

‘I have no idea, Sir William.’ Powerscourt noticed that the four great maps of London, North South East and West, still adorned the office walls. And he observed that, as before, the East End was covered with small red circles denoting the most recent crimes.

‘So far we have had over one hundred and fifty.’ Sir William nodded to a pile of correspondence spilling out of a file on his desk. ‘Would you believe it? We have kept that figure well out of the newspapers, of course. If they were to print it, we would be deluged under a flood of more claims. Some of them may be genuine, families where the parent or grandparent has disappeared and they would like the reassurance of being able to bury him. But even then there is something greedy about them, as if the urge to wipe away the social disgrace caused by the disappearance could be washed away by a proper funeral. But the others. . . .’ Sir William paused and looked directly at Powerscourt.

‘Insurance claims?’ asked Powerscourt with a smile. ‘Claims that need a body or a proper death certificate to satisfy the insurance companies?’

‘You have it, Lord Powerscourt. Your powers are as strong as ever, I see. The attraction with these insurance claims is, of course, the money payable on the death of the subject of the policy. Without a body there can be no claim. So now we have the entry of the bounty hunters. We have one claim from a wealthy widow whose husband ran off twenty years ago but left her in possession of policies on his life. The widow is certain’ – Sir William reached for a letter from his file – ‘that the corpse by London Bridge is that of her vanished spouse. “Once I read the accounts in the papers,” Mrs Willoughby of Highgate writes, “I knew that it was Alfred come back at last, albeit in unfortunate circumstances. It would be the last act of a sorrowing widow to come and identify the body, however harrowing that might be. I believe I owe it to Alfred’s memory to perform this final act of piety from the living towards the dead”.’

Sir William looked up with a ghost of a smile disturbing his moustaches. ‘That might or might not be satisfactory. But then Mrs Willoughby rather gives the game away. “I believe it is customary in these circumstances for the next of kin to be given a copy of the death certificate so it can be forwarded to the appropriate authorities and the insurance companies.”’

‘Insurance companies plural?’ said Powerscourt quickly. ‘Was she going to cash him in twice, or even three times?’

‘We cannot tell.’ The Commissioner shrugged his shoulders. ‘But we do know this. We could have positive identifications of that corpse one hundred and fifty times over, and not one of them would be right. Not one.’

‘You don’t mean to say that you know who the corpse is, or rather was?’ Powerscourt was leaning forward in his chair, his mind racing through the possibilities of the case.

‘No, we don’t. But don’t you see how difficult our position is? Here are all these widows and orphans desperate to identify the body as their Alfred or Uncle Richard or Grandfather Matthew. Soon they will start writing to the papers saying the heartless police have refused to let them identify their loved ones. The longer the mystery remains a mystery the more hostile public opinion will become, the greater the pressure to open the floodgates and allow these bounty hunters to claim their prize. Unless we know who the dead man is, we cannot refuse them.’

‘What can I do to help?’ said Powerscourt, anxious to offer his services. ‘I mean to say, I cannot see how I could be of service, but I am more than willing to try.’

‘Lord Powerscourt, how very kind of you.’ The Commissioner fingered his moustaches. ‘And forgive me for burdening you with our troubles. Let me tell you what we do know that has not appeared in the newspapers and has not been made up.’

Once more the Commissioner reached down to the mass of papers on his desk. ‘This is what the medical men who have examined the body have to say. All the usual disclaimers, of course, three paragraphs of them. Why can’t these people ever tell you anything straight?’

He frowned as he read through the circumspection of the medical profession.

‘They believe the man was between seventy-five and eighty years old, though they could, of course, be wrong. They believe he may have been killed by a bullet wound to the head, though as we have no head, they may be right in their caution on that score. They believe he had been dead for a period of two to four weeks before ending up in the Thames. Though they could, of course, be wrong. And here, Lord Powerscourt, is the only useful thing they have to say. They believe that he was not poor, or destitute. Quite the contrary. Examination of the stomach and other organs gives reason to believe that the dead man may have been comfortably off at least, if not rich. I presume they worked out that he hadn’t been living on tripe and onions. When I talked to these doctors they said that although they wouldn’t like to put it down on paper, they thought he was a rich old man. Mind you, that’s probably another reason why somebody wanted to kill him off.’ Sir William nodded grimly at his file of one hundred and fifty bounty hunters.

‘I don’t suppose the internal organs indicate how many life assurance policies he had,’ said Powerscourt, wondering if his flippancy was out of place.

‘Very good.’ The Commissioner laughed a laugh that turned into a strange braying noise at the end. ‘This is what we would like you to do for us, Lord Powerscourt. You move in the best society. You have connections with the aristocracy, with the City of London where our unfortunate cadaver made his last resting place. Could you put out discreet inquiries about anybody who might have gone missing, anybody who has just disappeared? These people are not very likely to come to us as their first port of call. They would much more likely come to you. But if you could help us, the Metropolitan Police would be in your debt. We must clear this matter up as quickly as possibly.’

‘I can assure you,’ Powerscourt replied, ‘that nobody has made any approaches to me, none at all. But I shall be only too pleased to help.’

As he left the Commissioner’s office Powerscourt paused briefly by the map of the East End. He noticed a fresh-looking circle which appeared to have been added in the last few days.

It was right across London Bridge.