David Dickinson: Death on the Holy Mountain

‘And what, Austin,’ said Charlie O’Malley, ‘was the theory that the great vegetable man gave to the world?’

‘Well, you have me there,’ replied Austin Ruddy defensively. ‘I can remember that classroom clearly, I can see that great brute Gilligan in his black soutane or whatever they call it, but the theory of your man with the turnips has gone from my mind. I can’t have been paying attention at the time.’

‘I’ll tell you what it was,’ said Charlie triumphantly. ‘The Rotation of Crops, that was his thing. Turnips one year, carrots the next, then cabbages. All change every year. I had an Uncle Fergus who used to go on about it. His wife used to say that he should rotate his drinks as well as the bloody vegetables for he was a walking whiskey distillery by the end.’

‘It’s just grand to hear about your Uncle Fergus, Charlie,’ said Tim, ‘but what in God’s name has the theory to do with donkeys?’

‘Simple,’ said Charlie. ‘Rotation of donkeys. With three of them you could work them one day in three. Better service from the donkeys. Longer life for the donkeys. Lower replacement costs for me. Just like the man Swede said. Sorry, sorry, not Swede, Turnip. Now with two, if you bastards don’t load them up with too many bits and pieces, they work every other day. Rotation principle, only less of it.’

The animal at the centre of this learned discussion gazed sadly up the mountain as if it were a climb too far. The three men scowled at it.

‘Should we pray?’ asked Austin Ruddy.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Tim.

‘Should I give the beast a good kicking?’ asked Charlie O’Malley.

‘No,’ said Austin quickly, ‘if you kick this brute as hard as you kicked that last beast, it may die on us here and we’ll have to carry all that stuff up ourselves.’ He delved deep into an inside pocket and produced a half-bottle of whiskey, created in a Dublin distillery and rejoicing in the name of John Jameson.

‘Have a sip of the hard stuff here. Maybe we’ll get some ideas.’

As an experiment, Charlie waved the open bottle of John Jameson’s finest under the donkey’s nose. The animal looked about him as if searching for the source of the smell. Charlie set off up the mountain, holding the whiskey in front of the animal. The donkey followed happily. By eleven the three men and the alcoholic donkey had reached the summit. The low cloud began to clear and the sun came out as they worked. Way beneath them Clew Bay was laid out like a magic carpet, the blue waters like glass in the sunlight, the islands winking to each other in the bright morning air.

An outsider, looking at the window and reception area of Hudson’s, the art dealers of Old Bond Street, would not have thought they had anything to do with paintings at all. There was just one picture in the street window, a rather smudgy Impressionist. There was one other in the foyer, a rather dreamy Madonna that Powerscourt thought might have been a Murillo.

Michael Hudson had just celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday but he looked ten years younger. He had light brown hair, regular features and bright blue eyes. He looked as though he could model for a page or a young courtier in a Renaissance painting.

‘What a pleasure to meet you, Lord Powerscourt. Are you returning to detection in the world of art? Many may close down if they hear news of your arrival.’

Powerscourt smiled. Some years before he had been involved in a case involving fakes and forgeries along this very street, culminating in the unmasking of a forger in the Central Criminal Court. He explained his problem to the young man and handed him lists of the paintings which had been taken. ‘These are very rough lists so far,’ he said, ‘but I thought it only sensible to bring you on board at the very beginning. Once I obtain more information about the pictures – size, name of artist, if known, and the subject matter of the Old Masters – I shall, of course, let you know. I have a colleague gone to make discreet inquiries in Dublin.’

‘I only know a little about the Irish art market, Lord Powerscourt. In my youth I was employed for a couple of weeks to make a catalogue of paintings at some castle in Waterford. The owner forgot that he had promised to pay me. Let me tell you first of all of the obvious ways in which we should be able to assist. We shall put the word out in London and the principal centres in Europe about these missing paintings. We shall tell our offices in New York and Boston. I shall write this afternoon to Farrell’s in Dublin. Michael Farrell has a small gallery in Kildare Street. He does a lot of business with the Protestant gentry over there. But tell me, Lord Powerscourt, a man of your reputation is not normally employed to look for a few missing family portraits. Is there something you haven’t told me about yet?’

‘If this was Sussex, or Norfolk,’ said Powerscourt, ‘nobody would be very concerned. But it’s not, it’s Ireland. I think there were letters that accompanied the thefts. Not simultaneous necessarily, maybe a couple of days later. What those letters said I have no idea. I suspect they were blackmail of one sort of another. Violence lies so often just beneath the surface of events in Ireland. It’s like those noises bats make that humans cannot hear. These thefts are a minor form of violence. Worse may follow. The wives in these houses are terrified. That suggests to me that there was a threatening letter and that it was the letter, not the vanishing paintings, that made them lose their courage.’

Michael Hudson had pulled a catalogue from his desk. ‘Let me show you this, Lord Powerscourt. This comes from an exhibition held recently in New York which transferred to Boston and, I believe, Chicago. These people, McGaherns, are very respectable. They operate a long way down the scale from ourselves. The works they sell are cheap and tawdry, they might cost five or ten or twenty pounds rather than the same number with thousands added. They operate,’ and here Hudson looked up from the paintings, ‘in areas with very heavy concentrations of Irish settled in them. I worked in our office in New York for two years and I must have walked all over the city by the end. The pictures they sell in such quantities are never originals, but the subject matter doesn’t change very much, attractive colleens, horses of every shape and size with or without their riders, those wonderful lakes and mountains Ireland is festooned with, small cottages with smoke coming out of them in the wild wastes of Mayo and Connemara. The ancestral home or the fantasy of the ancestral home, no doubt. The real home might have been a Dublin slum. Many, if not most, of these people have never been to Ireland in their lives, but they live very Irish lives in America, Mass, Christian Brothers, walls draped with pictures of the Blessed Virgin Mary, family piety, all that sort of thing. Oddly enough, their Ireland is often a generation or a generation and a half even behind the real one. The parents pass on what they remember of the world they left twenty or thirty years ago. Forgive me, I’m wandering off the point.’

Michael Hudson closed his catalogue and put it on his desk. ‘I have no idea if the McGahern works are turned out in Dublin or New York, but one thing is clear, Lord Powerscourt. There is an artistic connection between the two countries. It is possible there is an innocent – well, not innocent, but certainly non-violent explanation for what has been happening to these portraits.’

‘You mean, they may end up in the McGahern catalogue? And get sold off like that for twenty pounds each?’

‘Not quite, Lord Powerscourt. The Irish who buy the McGaherns are not poor, but they’re not well off either. Sixty years on, some of these Irish families have become quite rich, a number of them very rich. Suppose you’re an ambitious Irish family living in New York. Suppose somebody comes along and offers you a bundle of your ancestors. They’re probably not your ancestors at all, but the neighbours aren’t going to know. Think of eight of these hanging in your parlour or dining room. The prestige would be terrific. In a society composed entirely of immigrants of one sort or another, how great would it be to show off a family history that went back a couple of centuries?’