David Dickinson - Death and the Jubilee

‘God bless my soul, Lord Powerscourt, if you’ll pardon the expression. I’d never have thought of that. I suppose they might be.’ He scratched his head again as if unsure what to believe.

‘And the letters, Mr Parker,’ Powerscourt went on, ‘the ones he gave you to post. Did you think that was unusual, asking you to take charge of them rather than leaving them in the big house for the servants to send off?’

‘I thought it was unusual at first, my lord. Then I sort of got used to it. Mabel used to think Old Mr Harrison was making secret investments somewhere abroad.’

‘Were the letters for abroad?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘Why, yes, I suppose they were. Mostly to Germany, Frankfurt, I remember, and Berlin, wherever that is. And some for a place called Hamburg. Mabel looked that one up in a map at the library.’

Powerscourt wondered if he had a rival in the detection business in Mrs Parker, obviously an assiduous researcher.

‘Did he bring letters with him down to the lake?’ Powerscourt went on. ‘Letters that might have come from these foreign places?’

‘I think he might have, my lord.’ Samuel Parker scratched his head. ‘I do seem to remember that sometimes they weren’t opened. And they had foreign stamps on them. Mabel does like to look at a foreign stamp.’

Powerscourt wondered again about the precise role played by Mrs Mabel Parker in her husband’s affairs but he let it pass.

‘Could I make a suggestion, Mr Parker?’ Powerscourt was already planning another visit to Blackwater House. ‘I have to come back here again very soon, to talk to the people in the big house, you understand. Perhaps we could go on the same walk round the lake you used to take with Old Mr Harrison. Sometimes revisiting the places helps bring back more memories. Not that you haven’t remembered very well already.’

Powerscourt smiled a smile of congratulation.

‘There is just one other thing, my lord,’ said Parker. ‘You’re not the first gentleman to have been round here asking questions about Old Mr Harrison. There was another gentleman round here the other day.’

Samuel Parker paused again.

‘He was a very curious gentleman, my lord. I thought he was almost too curious. Very friendly, of course, but I wouldn’t have said he was as discreet as yourself.’

Powerscourt rejoiced at this description of Johnny Fitzgerald. Not as discreet as himself, he liked that. He would tell Lady Lucy about it this evening. But as he set off for his train back to London one question above all others troubled him.

Why had Old Mr Harrison taken his business down to the lake? Why had he posted his foreign correspondence in this unusual way? Was it normal banker’s caution? Was it merely the whim, the foible of a very old man? Or did he think he was being spied on inside the drawing rooms and the bedrooms of Blackwater House?

Powerscourt found he had company on his return to Markham Square. Johnny Fitzgerald was doing him the honour of sampling the latest delivery to the Powerscourt cellars below.

‘I was just saying to Lady Lucy, Francis,’ Fitzgerald began without the least hint of apology, ‘that you need to sample some of this stuff once it arrives. They might have sent you the wrong year or the feebler stuff from the wrong side of the hill.’ Powerscourt kissed his wife and turned to his friend.

‘And what does this early test show, Johnny?’ He picked up a bottle from the table and noted that two others appeared to have been carried up for inspection.

‘I’m glad to say that you’ve done well with this one. This Chablis is very good, flinty I believe is the word they use in the trade. I’m afraid I may not have the time to sample those two over there as I have to buy dinner for a man I know in the City. On your business, Francis, Fitzgeralds never sleep.’

Lady Lucy laughed.

‘But I must tell you what I found out when I was down south inquiring about boating accidents, Francis.’

Powerscourt stretched out in his favourite red leather armchair and poured himself a small glass of wine. ‘You don’t mind, Johnny, if I just try a glass of my own wine in my own chair in my own house, do you?’

Fitzgerald waved expansively from the fireplace. ‘Help yourself, Francis, help yourself. This is Liberty Hall.’

‘So what have you discovered down south?’

‘Well,’ said Fitzgerald, looking serious now, ‘the first thing to report is that every year the Harrisons take a house near Cowes on the Isle of Wight. A huge house it is too, right on the water with a tennis court at the back and a little jetty at the front where you could keep small yachts. Harrisons from all Europe turn up at this place, Francis. Some of them come to watch the races in Cowes Week. I shouldn’t wonder if the German ones are cheering for the bloody Kaiser rather than the right side.’

‘How many members of the family are there exactly, Johnny?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘There could be up to fifty of them at a time,’ said Fitzgerald, squinting into his wine glass, ‘or so my informant told me. But the accident, Francis, the accident. Nobody down there likes to talk about it at all, I don’t know why. One old seafarer told me it would bring bad luck all round. But a number of the locals don’t think it could have been an accident at all. You can see that they think, though they wouldn’t quite say it, that there was foul play.’

‘What sort of foul play?’ said Powerscourt, unlacing his boots and turning his feet towards the fire.

‘That’s the thing, Francis. I got hold of the people in the boatyard at Cowes that used to look after the boat and they just couldn’t believe it. A different man in another boatyard told me about how you could nobble a boat rather like you nobble a horse. There are so many ways that boat could have been fixed, not that I understood most of them. The most likely was to make a small leak shortly before your victims went out for their sail. The water would come in gradually and nobody would notice. By the time the water came through the floor it would almost certainly be too late. And if you were on your own, you would be hard pressed to bale out and sail the bloody boat at the same time. Or that’s what my man said. So you see, Francis, somebody could have fixed the boat. But it could have been anybody.’ Fitzgerald shrugged his shoulders.

‘An English Harrison, a German Harrison, an Austrian Harrison – that’s just the beginning,’ said Powerscourt, running through his knowledge of the number of different branches of the family.

‘What’s more,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘all that part of the coast is overrun with people in the summer. Nobody would have paid any attention to anybody tinkering about in the inside of a boat. Half the bloody island is doing the same thing.’

Two men were waiting for a third by the side of the lake at Glendalough, thirty miles south-west of Dublin. They were shielded from sight by the trees but they commanded a clear view of the path that led down from the village and the hotel.

‘He’s half an hour late now,’ said Thomas Docherty, the younger man.

‘We’ll give him another fifteen minutes or so,’ replied Michael Byrne. Both men were whispering even though they were the only people to be seen on the fringes of the lake. Both were leaders of small revolutionary bands pledged to the overthrow of English rule in Ireland. Both lived in fear of their lives from the authorities, their secret files in Dublin Castle augmented daily by the reports of the informants, handsomely subsidized at the British Exchequer’s expense.

They heard the third man before they saw him, his footsteps crunching on the path. Behind them small waves were lapping the surface of the lake. The water was still dark blue, fading into black with the coming of the night.