David Dickinson - Death on the Holy Mountain

‘Let me begin, if I may,’ said Powerscourt, ‘with the theft of the paintings. One obvious reason would have been to sell them. The market for Anglo-Irish ancestors might be limited, but they do have a certain value. Yet all the inquiries Johnny and I set in motion in Dublin and in London and in New York revealed that not a single one had been put on the market. So, unless we were dealing with an obsessive collector who wanted a basement full of dead gentry, there had to be another reason. And here, I think, we come to a question of psychology. It seemed to me that the only people who would understand what these ancestral portraits meant to families like the Butlers and the Moores would be Protestant. Only they would hear the tribal beat that echoes back down the centuries. Catholics tend to have different kinds of paintings on their walls. So my first theory was that a Protestant dreamt up this particular plot. But for what purpose? And in whose interest? Protestant or Catholic? Then we had the return of two pictures, the Moore one that faded away, and The Master of the Hunt that was returned here with a completely different cast of characters on horseback. Whoever thought of that was clever, extremely clever. I don’t think Mulcahy or anybody like him would have thought of either of those ploys in a hundred years. So there had to be somebody behind the Mulcahy figure, Mulcahy’s brains, as it were. But why should anybody volunteer for such a position?’

Powerscourt paused and took a sip of champagne. His little audience was transfixed. Lady Lucy smiled at him from halfway down the table, Thomas Butler, 1726-1788, behind her head. ‘Now we come to the blackmail letters, or the absence of them. I must say that the denial of their existence for a long time caused me considerable problems. For I was sure there were blackmail letters. There had to be. The thieves didn’t want to sell the paintings. They obviously wanted to wound their victims, but surely there was more to it than that. I remember Richard Butler telling me once that he had sworn to his father to preserve all his inheritance and to pass it on to the next generation. The others may have made similar vows, I don’t know, it may be the custom in these families. Only Dennis Ormonde, in his fury, confirmed that there had been such a missive. His anger, incidentally, confirmed to me that the thieves had indeed chosen a powerful weapon in the paintings, guaranteed to destabilize their victims. Even then you all refused to tell me precisely what was in the blackmail letters. I presumed, wrongly, that it had to do with money, and that was a subject any Irish gentleman would be reluctant to discuss with his peers.’

Uncle Peter shuffled slowly into the back of the dining room. He was wearing a tattered blue coat and clutching a bottle of white wine. He nodded amiably to Powerscourt and sat down.

‘Now I would like to address one of the thorniest aspects of the matter,’ Powerscourt went on, ‘put simply, how many lots of thieves were there? One? Two? Three? Four? Eventually I came to the conclusion that there were two. The thefts from here and from Moore and Connolly were all the work of one lot. The proof is in the fact that Moore’s paintings were found in the Mulcahy outhouse. But who were the others? Mulcahy has a brother, one Declan Mulcahy, a solicitor in Swinford with branch offices in Castlebar and Ballinrobe. He specializes in land, you’ll be surprised to hear, and is a rising power in County Mayo. I think our Mulcahy mentioned his plan to his brother and they decided to try it on at Ormonde House, both with the theft and with the kidnap. It was Uncle Peter, oddly enough, who put me on to how the manpower was recruited. In his account of Parnell’s funeral he mentioned the honour guard of young men with hurling sticks from the Gaelic Athletic Association who guarded the coffin all the way through the streets of Dublin to the cemetery. Even then it was thought that they were linked to extreme elements of Irish Republicanism. There were a couple of hurling sticks in the front hall of Butler Lodge. The Archbishop of Tuam told me he was very worried about some of the younger priests and Christian Brothers because their politics are so extreme and they preach their message of violent opposition to English or Anglo-Irish rule to the young. Johnny Fitzgerald had a conversation in Westport with a defrocked Christian Brother who said you could use the young men of the Gaelic Athletic Association, the GAA, to take over Ireland. I believe the Swinford Mulcahy got in touch with these people, maybe through a priest or a Brother who coaches one of the football or hurling teams, and asked for volunteers to strike a blow in Ireland’s cause. Steal a few pictures, make off with a couple of women, that sort of thing. Those kidnappers who took and held the Ormonde ladies were fanatical nationalists to a man. They said we were traitors. I believe the kidnap, incidentally, was in part to do with the blackmail and in part a sort of revenge for the arrival of the Orangemen. The blackmail letters may have said that the women were next after the paintings, I don’t know.’

Outside the windows they could hear the shouts and cries of the children playing, the children who had been so well entertained until recently by Young James.

‘Now I come to the death of the young man whose body was found in the chapel at the summit of Croagh Patrick on the morning of the pilgrimage. He had been shot in the chest and in the back of the head. I will always feel responsible for that. The Inspector and I concocted a plan to lure the thieves of the Westport paintings to a house that they thought wasn’t guarded by Ormonde’s Orangemen, but was, in fact, guarded by a different lot of police. A young man with a father in jail was persuaded to tell the group that contained the thieves that Burke Hall was not guarded. I don’t know what inducement was offered, early release for his parent perhaps, but the message got through. One of the ringleaders of the thieves was shot in their attack but they got away. When they discovered who had betrayed them, they dragged the young man up Croagh Patrick, tortured him and shot him. Inspector Harkness was told the torture had been quite frightful before he died.’

‘You mustn’t punish yourself, my lord,’ said the Inspector. ‘If the plan had worked, we would have captured one half of the thieves and the investigation would have been half over.’

‘But we didn’t catch them,’ said Powerscourt sadly. ‘The young man’s dead.’ He looked down at the table for a moment or two before he continued.

‘It was late in the day when I realized that the motive was not money at all. It was land. It could only be land. The four houses where the paintings were stolen have some of the richest, the most valuable land in Ireland. Irish landlords are selling up in droves after the Wyndham Act, but not these four. Connolly talked to me about a hunger for land round here, a hunger so strong that on market days you could almost smell it. Mulcahy wanted land. I believe he has made offers for some of the Butler and Moore estates in the past and always been rebuffed. The other Mulcahy wanted land. They were desperate for it. Sell them so many hundred acres, or so many thousand, and you get your paintings or your wives back. I’m sure they’d have been happy to pay a reasonable asking price. Connolly paid up. He sold them the land they asked for. The land agent in Athlone admitted to me that he had had recent dealings with Connolly. It’s caused terrible trouble, land in Ireland, lack of it for so many in the famine years, the Land War, the boycotts. Land, the hunger for land, was at the bottom of the whole affair.

‘I have left what I am sure is the most painful part of my account of the affair to the end, painful, that is, to the people in this room. What I am about to say is going to upset many of you. It certainly upsets me. As with so many of my theories in this investigation, I doubt if I could actually prove it in a court of law. You will remember that I raised earlier the question of Mulcahy’s brains, the mind behind much of the enterprise. Young James, as we all know, has now disappeared. Young James said, in a very pointed fashion when we were all playing cards some weeks ago, that he never played cards for money, never. It was said with such feeling that I suspected there was some secret behind it.