David Dickinson - Death on the Holy Mountain

‘I asked Inspector Harkness here to find out if Young James had incurred any gambling debts in his time at Trinity. He would not be the first. He will not be the last. The Inspector discovered that Young James had run up fifteen hundred pounds of debt, playing at cards for money, in his last year at university. However,’ he could read disbelief in the faces all around him, ‘all those debts were cleared, paid off, in May, before the paintings began to disappear. In Mulcahy’s loan book, which I have in my possession, there is a record of a loan of fifteen hundred pounds to a James of Butler’s Court, also in May. One loan paid off the others. But there is more. I think Young James sold the idea of the robberies of the paintings to Pronsias Mulcahy in return for an alleviation of his debt. James was the brains. Mulcahy supplied the rest. Two days after the Butler paintings were taken, seven hundred and fifty pounds was deducted from Young James’s loan. The day after the Connolly pictures were returned, a further quarter was deducted. It was a bargain, pure and simple.’ The reason I asked, after the abduction of Mrs Moore and her sister, if there was a Butler Lodge in the west, was that I already suspected Young James, and he would have known about Butler’s Lodge. He lived with the Butlers after all.

‘Why did he disappear?’ asked Sylvia Butler, who had been particularly fond of the young man.

‘He disappeared shortly after the body of the young man was found on Croagh Patrick. I don’t know if you are aware of it, but bullets in the back of the head can be the mark of the execution of a traitor in the world of the Fenians or the Irish Republican Brotherhood. I think Young James panicked. He hadn’t intended to have anything to do with these violent characters. He thought it would be better if he cleared off, disappeared in case he was next for the shooting.’

More champagne was circulated. Throughout Powerscourt’s account Richard Butler had been looking at his ancestors on the walls rather than his investigator at the end of his table.

‘I’m nearly through,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I’ve gone on far too long already. I’m sorry it took me so long to find the answers. I was looking at things the wrong way, you see. In most investigations there is one thief, or one murderer, or one blackmailer. Here there was a much larger cast, Young James, the Mulcahy brothers, the young men of the GAA and so on. I’m sure that ghastly priest Father O’Donovan Brady had something to do with it all but I’m damned if I can pin anything on him. Maybe he was the link with the young men with the hurling sticks, I don’t know. Anyway,’ he opened his hands in a gesture that might have been of completion or might have been resignation, ‘it’s finished, it’s all over now.’

‘What about the attempt on your life, Francis?’ said Lucy. ‘When the bicycle was tampered with.’

‘I didn’t think you knew about that, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt, wondering if he had a rival in detection in the person of his wife. ‘I think it was a warning shot from some local hothead. I don’t think they meant to kill me, they just wanted to frighten me.’

That afternoon Powerscourt and Lady Lucy sat under an enormous awning on the Butler lawn and Powerscourt fell asleep. He was roused by a vigorous clap on the back from Dennis Ormonde.

‘Well done, man, I cannot thank you enough! Wife back! Paintings back! Happiness back! Bloody Orangemen can be kitted out with thousands of rounds of potato bread and sent home to bloody Ulster!’

Late that afternoon Ormonde, Butler and Moore all disappeared into Butler’s study for half an hour and then emerged, grinning hugely. As the company were taking drinks before dinner, Richard Butler rose to his feet and appealed for silence.

‘Lord Powerscourt, Lady Powerscourt, I, or rather we,’ he nodded at Ormonde and Moore, ‘wish to make a suggestion. In the normal course of things we would even now be preparing to hand over a most generous cheque in recognition of your services. But this evening we have a different proposal to put before you.’

Powerscourt had no idea what was coming. Were they going to offer him a painting? Please God, not some bloody horse.

‘The name of Powerscourt has been absent for too long from the land registers of this country,’ Butler went on, ‘a name that stretched back to the Normans, a family rich in history and devoted to the service of the state. We want to set that right. We want the name of Powerscourt back where it belongs in the bosom of the Anglo-Irish gentry. Will you accept, for your family and all your descendants, in recognition of your service in this matter, the gift of Butler Lodge and all the land and waters that go with it?’

Powerscourt was astonished. Those wide open skies. The desolate beauty of the lakes and the mountains. Fishing with Thomas. The Atlantic Ocean pounding at the coast. Yachting with the children. The light, so bright in summer that things were impossibly clear.

‘You’re pulling my leg,’ he said at first. ‘You must be pulling my leg.’

All three assured him they were deadly serious. ‘Then I accept,’ said Powerscourt, rising to his feet. ‘I accept with great pleasure on behalf of Lucy and myself and all Powerscourts yet to come. What a very great honour! What a very great privilege! What joy!’ He was almost in tears as he sat down, Lady Lucy moving to his side.

After this investigation Powerscourt and his wife did not go abroad for a holiday as they usually did at the end of a case. They went west to Butler Lodge, shortly to be renamed Powerscourt Lodge by the Archbishop of Tuam with Butlers, Moores and Ormondes as guests of honour. The new proprietor spent his days quietly, pottering about his estate to establish how much land and mountain he actually owned. The new proprietor’s wife began moving the furniture about on the second day, just making the place more comfortable, as she put it, and commencing a detailed inventory of china, bed linen and other necessities of life. They were both supremely happy.

Ten days later Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were back in Markham Square. Powerscourt was peering at an envelope with a strange postmark that had come in the second post. There was something familiar about the handwriting. Then he remembered where he had seen this distinctive, rather ornate hand before. He had noticed it when he picked a page of script up off the floor at the children’s concert in Butler’s Court. He called for Lady Lucy and opened the letter. He smiled.

‘Lucy, he said, ‘you weren’t there for Uncle Peter’s account of Parnell’s funeral, were you? At one point Young James interrupted at the mention of a young woman called Maud Gonne who was a friend of the poet W.B. Yeats.’

‘I was reading Yeats that last day at Butler’s Court, Francis, when you raided Mulcahy’s.’

‘Maybe that’s an omen. Anyway, Young James said Gonne was Yeats’s bitch goddess, she wouldn’t marry him, she wouldn’t leave him alone.’

‘What’s that got to do with this letter, Francis?’ asked Lady Lucy.

Her husband held it up. ‘It comes from Boston, Massachusetts. This is Young James’s handwriting. There’s no precise address, and no date. The front side says Bitch and the back says Goddess. Then the front side says:

‘Fasten your hair with a golden pin,

And bind up every wandering tress;

I bade my heart build these poor rhymes:

It worked at them, day out, day in,

Building a sorrowful loveliness

Out of the battles of old times.

‘You need but lift a pearl-pale hand,

And bind up your long hair and sigh;

And all men’s hearts must burn and beat;

And candle-like foam on the dim sand,