‘Well, I spent some years in India,’ said Powerscourt, ‘up in the north, near the border with Afghanistan. I was working in Army Intelligence.’
‘Was you now, Lord Powerscourt!’ Samuel Parker leaned forward in his chair. ‘I would have loved to have gone to some of those places and seen some of those wild natives, dervishes and hottentots or whatever they were called. Did you meet some strange foreigners, Lord Powerscourt?’
Powerscourt smiled. ‘I did, Mr Parker. Some of the tribesmen up there tried to kill me. They were very wild. They were very fond of their horses, though.’
‘Were there great mountains, Lord Powerscourt, with snow on them all the year round?’
Powerscourt thought he could detect the heart of a traveller beating strongly in Samuel Parker, who had spent his entire life in the calm and order of the Oxfordshire countryside.
‘The mountains, Mr Parker, are huge. Huge. Nearly thirty thousand feet, some of them, with snow covering the peaks even at the height of summer. I have a book of photographs of the great mountains at home. I shall bring it for you next time I come.’
Samuel Parker’s honest face lit up with pleasure. ‘That would be so kind, Lord Powerscourt. But I fear we are getting away from our business here. Mr Frederick said you wanted to talk to me about Old Mr Harrison.’
‘I do. Perhaps you could just tell me about his time here, how he spent his days, what your own dealings with him were. Take your time, Mr Parker, take your time.’
‘Well,’ replied Samuel Parker, trying to arrange his memories into some sort of order for a man who had seen the great mountains of the Himalayas and had a book to prove it. ‘Old Mr Harrison, he’d been living here most of the time for about the last ten years or so. Some of the time he was in London, sometimes he was abroad. For the bank, you understand.’
He paused. Powerscourt said nothing.
‘My duties had to do with him and the horses. Ten years ago he would ride about the country quite a lot, on Caesar or Anchises – he was always very fond of Anchises. Then, these last few years or so, he was only able to make the journey from the house round the lake. He liked to go round it every day. “It looks different every single day of the year, Samuel,” he used to say to me, “and I want to see it changing.”’
For a moment Samuel Parker vanished into his memories.
‘Then, about a year or two ago, something changed. He wasn’t as well as he had been after his accident. It hurt his leg something terrible, that accident, he had to keep on going back to the doctor. I blame that Cleopatra myself, she always was an obstinate beast with a mind of her own. After that, he would ride very slowly, sometimes on a pony. And this was different too.’
Samuel Parker scratched his head and put some more logs on the fire.
‘He began bringing work with him. Letters he had received, papers from the bank, I shouldn’t wonder. You haven’t seen those temples by the lake yet, Lord Powerscourt, have you?’
Powerscourt shook his head.
‘Sometimes he would work in there at his papers. We had a folding table we used to bring and he would work away, writing letters and things inside one of those temples. Sometimes he would give me letters to post for him. He got very slow towards the end, Lord Powerscourt. He was old and his leg was bad but I’m sure his mind still worked faster than his feet if you follow me.’
Samuel Parker stopped. Powerscourt waited. Perhaps there was more to come. Perhaps Samuel Parker had exhausted his memories.
‘That is very interesting,’ he said at length, ‘and admirably told. Perhaps I could just ask you about one or two things, Mr Parker?’
‘Of course you can, my lord. I was never very good at long speeches, if you follow me.’
‘Can you remember exactly when he began to bring his work down to the lake?’
Samuel Parker looked into his fire. He shook his head slowly. ‘I don’t think I can, my lord. All I can remember is that it was about the time we began to hear about the plans for this new Jubilee up in London. Mabel reminded me of that the other day. She is very fond of things like Jubilees, my lord. I took her all the way up to London for that other one in ’87. She can remember all the details to this day, can Mabel. I don’t suppose either of us will get there for this one though. Mabel’s legs wouldn’t be up to it, so they wouldn’t.’
‘And when Old Mr Harrison took his papers down to the lake,’ Powerscourt sounded his most innocent, ‘do you suppose he left some of them behind sometimes? In one of the temples or somewhere like that?’
‘I’d never thought about that, my lord.’ Parker fell silent for a moment. ‘Come to think of it, he could have done, I suppose. Sometimes he didn’t seem to have as many of these papers going back as he did going down, if you follow me.’
‘And would you know,’ Powerscourt was looking at him intently as the night finally closed in outside, ‘where exactly he left them?’
‘Do you mean, my lord, that they might be still there, these papers?’
‘I do, Mr Parker.’
‘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?