David Dickinson - Death on the Holy Mountain

‘And how did the family take it?’ asked Butler.

‘Well,’ Moore said, ‘the wife initially didn’t seem to mind very much. Said she’d never really cared for the portraits anyway. She’s always maintained they make the place look like a bloody mausoleum, like the one Victoria built for the dreadful Albert over at Frogmore, all those damned dead men looking at her every time she entered a room. I thought it wasn’t going to bother her very much. She ate a huge breakfast, eggs, bacon, tomatoes, sausages, fried potato bread, mushrooms, toast, and I began to feel a bit better myself. Then I found her an hour later crying on the terrace, saying the rebels were back and we’d all be murdered in our beds. Her people came from Wicklow, you know. They had a terrible time there with those rebels back in ’98. I think three of them were killed.’

‘What are we to do, Lord Powerscourt? What on earth are we going to do now?’

Richard Butler was twisting his hands round and round each other, as if he were in pain. He and Moore looked at Powerscourt with the air of children expecting a parent to rescue them from some especially unpleasant predicament. Powerscourt had no idea what to say. Temporarily, he was lost for words.

‘Let us begin with the practicalities,’ he said at last, trying to sound more authoritative than he felt. ‘The first thing is to decide what to do about the women and the wives. I do think, Butler, that you will have to tell them, and tell them as soon as possible. For all we know Mrs Moore may arrive here at any moment to pour out her woes to your wife. You know what women are like about talking to each other, talk all bloody day if you give them half a chance.’

Richard Butler peered anxiously out of the window in case another carriage was bringing a distraught Mrs Butler to his quarters. All he could see was an old man raking the gravel on the drive.

‘I suggest,’ Powerscourt went on, ‘that Mr Moore should stay the night here, and, with your approval, Johnny and I will accompany him back to Moore Castle in the morning. We can make a full inspection of the house and an inventory of the missing pictures and so on.’

The prospect of another guest and activity of some kind seemed to restore Butler’s spirits slightly.

‘Very well,’ he said, ‘I’ll get that sorted in a moment. But tell me, Powerscourt, are you certain I have to tell Sylvia? Tell her that more paintings have disappeared?’

‘In my opinion,’ replied Powerscourt, sure of this if of nothing else, ‘you have no choice. Or rather, you have two very disagreeable options. Either you tell her yourself, or you wait for rumour to reach her. News, as you know as well as I do, travels very fast over here. You wouldn’t want her to hear about it from the cook as they’re discussing the menus for the week first thing in the morning now, would you?’

Richard Butler looked racked by the choice. ‘I’ll tell her in the morning,’ he said finally. ‘She’ll be able to bear it better in the morning.’

For a moment nobody spoke. The only sound was the methodical swish of rake on gravel.

Then Johnny Fitzgerald tried a diversion. ‘These are wonderful horses you have here on your walls, Mr Butler,’ he said. ‘Are any of them yours?’ Powerscourt wondered briefly if one of the horses lining three walls of the study was the fabled Wolfgang, triple winner at the Punchestown Races. He knew that horses were the only subject that might distract attention from the calamity of the vanished paintings over at Moore Castle. A vigorous debate followed, Butler telling the two strangers to Ireland that all the horses on the walls were, or had been, his and that he thought he had spent far more money on them than his ancestors had on the paintings.

‘There’s a thing,’ said Moore, suddenly animated, ‘why haven’t they taken any of the horses? In Ireland you can turn horseflesh into cash faster than almost anything else. How would anybody know, Richard, if some of your animals turned up in Tipperary, or Waterford or Cork?’

‘It’s a poor eye for a horse they have down there in Cork,’ said Richard Butler darkly. ‘Those buggers wouldn’t know a racehorse from a dray.’

‘Forgive me for bringing the conversation back into the human world, gentlemen,’ said Powerscourt, ‘but did the thieves leave you any kind of message, Mr Moore? A ransom note? Demands for money, that sort of thing?’

William Moore blinked rapidly. ‘No note, no ransom, nothing at all. Do you think it’s going to be like the boycott all over again, Powerscourt? Not that nobody’s going to talk to us, though with some of them that would be a blessing, but a new . . .’ He paused briefly, searching for the right word. ‘. . . a new tactic, a new device to confound the landlords? Do you think it’s that, Powerscourt?’

‘I don’t think we should alarm ourselves with talk of boycotts and fresh campaigns at this stage, Mr Moore,’ said Powerscourt diplomatically, wishing he could believe it. ‘I know this is all very difficult to bear, but only three houses have been affected so far. And nobody’s lives or livelihoods are affected.’

On that note the little party broke up, Butler and Moore going to sort out his accommodation and the loan of a pair of pyjamas, Powerscourt and Fitzgerald to walk by the river in the late afternoon sun.

‘That advertisement from the New York paper, Johnny. How did you get hold of it?’

‘Do you think there’s something wrong with it, Francis?’ said Fitzgerald.

‘I can only answer that when I know how you came by it,’ Powerscourt replied, staring across the Shannon from the bottom of Butler’s gardens.

‘Well,’ said Fitzgerald, ‘I’d made the rounds of most of the Dublin art dealers, shysters most of them. Then there was this man called Farrell in a gallery of the same name in Kildare Street, just along from the Kildare Street Club, Dublin’s answer to the Garrick and the Reform. He thought I was you, to start with, Francis. Seemed most disappointed that I wasn’t you, if you see what I mean. Damned unfair of him, I thought, nothing wrong with me. Anyway, when I said I was a great friend of yours and that we’d worked on all sorts of cases together, he relented a bit. He said nobody had been trying to sell any ancestor paintings at all, so maybe the thieves are keeping their powder dry. Then he gave me the advertisement but he wouldn’t say where it came from. He said, the Farrell man, that he could only tell you in person. It was all very secretive, like we were all trying to sell him a couple of fake Leonardos. He even bolted the door and closed the shop up for a few minutes while he talked to me. What do you make of that, Francis?’

‘I’ll tell you what I think it means, Johnny,’ said Powerscourt, bending down to trail a hand in the water. He told Fitzgerald about his conversation with Michael Hudson in Old Bond Street some time before and Hudson’s idea of placing an advertisement in one of the American newspapers. ‘Appropriately enough, from where we’re standing now, this is a fishing expedition. Hudson’s trying to see if there is a market for these ancestral portraits in New York. If there are a number of replies, then we will know there is a market for these things, a market that the thieves might have known about.’

‘And what happens if they are queuing up round the block to buy the bloody things?’ asked Johnny. ‘Goldman and Rabinowitz don’t have a heap of Irish landowners lying about in their basement, do they?’

‘I don’t think that matters very much,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Paintings gone for cleaning, unavoidable delay in transshipment from Ireland, customs formalities to be finalized, you could keep the ball in play for months.’

‘By God, Francis,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘your lines of communication here are longer than they ever were in South Africa or India. London, New York, London, Dublin. That’s a bloody long way. Are you going to tell them in the Big House about it?’