Joseph Hardy was waving cheerily to Powerscourt from the remains of the front porch.
‘Lord Powerscourt, come with me. I think we have something to show you. We’ve rigged up a safe way of getting upstairs for you. My, what a fire this must have been.’
He sounds as though he wished he had been here himself thought Powerscourt. Maybe the normal relations of heaven and hell were reversed for Joseph Hardy – fragments of Miss Harrison’s conversation with Lady Lucy flashed through his mind – so that hell, with its eternal fires, would be heaven for him. There he could tend the Devil’s cauldrons, plan newer and more fiendish ways of roasting the flesh and bones of God’s rejected.
‘Now, there’s not a great deal to see on this floor.’ The Devil’s latest disciple ushered Powerscourt into a room of utter devastation. ‘We think the fire probably started here in what used to be the cabinet room, and then made its way up to the next floor and across to the picture gallery over there.’
He pointed to the shell of the room which had once housed the Harrison collection. Privately Powerscourt thought it was not a great loss. Many of the finest paintings, the Canalettos and the Turners, had been sold some years before.
‘Up the stairs now,’ said the fire investigator. ‘I’m not saying there aren’t a number of unusual features down here, there are, but I have to take some samples away to analyse them in my workshop.’
A ladder had been placed in what had once had been the staircase.
‘Careful, my lord,’ said Hardy, as Powerscourt began his ascent. ‘Chief Fire Officer Perkins is waiting for us up there.’
They emerged into what had once been a corridor. The plaster had gone, the carpets had been reduced to ashes on the ground. Strands of lath hung precariously from the ceiling like stalactites in a cave.
‘At the end, there, that last door, that was Old Mr Harrison’s bedroom. Nobody in there, of course. There are three doors opening off this corridor on each side as you see, my lord.’
Hardy advanced half-way down the passageway. Each door except one had gone, burnt to nothing in the fire. They could hear the wind now, whistling through the open roof. It looked, thought Powerscourt, as though an angry giant had stalked down the corridor, plucking the doors away and flinging them on the flames.
Chief Officer Perkins was waiting by the one door that had not completely vanished. One solitary fragment remained, running from the floor to a couple of feet above the lock.
‘Did you find the key, Chief Fire Officer?’ said Hardy. ‘Any sign of the key?’
Perkins was crawling through the rubble on his hands and knees. The skin on his face was invisible. The dark smudges that concealed his features almost matched the black of his fireman’s jacket.
‘No, I have not,’ said Perkins gloomily. ‘I have crawled over this damned floor three times so far, and I have found nothing. I’ve even asked Bert to have a look. He may not be too bright, my lord, but he has younger eyes than mine.’
Bert was not to be seen. Perhaps he’s crawling over some other floor, looking for a different piece of debris, thought Powerscourt.
‘It was Chief Fire Officer Perkins who drew it to my attention, my lord,’ said Hardy generously. ‘He’d have made a good investigator, no doubt about that.’
Hardy smiled at the fireman, his teeth unnaturally white against the stains that marked his face. His blond hair, Powerscourt noticed, had turned almost black.
‘Forgive me,’ said Powerscourt apologetically, ‘for seeming so stupid. But what is the significance of the key?’ The keys of the kingdom, the keys of heaven and hell, the keys to Lady Lucy’s heart, the keys to this second death perhaps.
‘The point is this, my lord.’ Chief Officer Perkins had risen to his feet, dust falling from his person like thin grey snow. ‘This was Mr Frederick’s bedroom. His door was locked. We cannot tell if it was locked from the inside or the outside. Would you lock your own bedroom door, in your own house, in the middle of your own park, miles from anywhere?’
‘I would not,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I most certainly would not. But what you mean is that he couldn’t get out. Not out of the door anyway.’
He could imagine the dead man now, coughing violently as the smoke got into his lungs and blocked his throat, scrabbling desperately at the door to his own room, trying to escape down the stairs. The smoke would have grown so thick that he would hardly be able to see anything in front of him. Then the collapse on to the floor, the last few choking breaths, the terrible constricting pains in the chest and then oblivion. God knows where he has gone now, Powerscourt said to himself, but his last moments were certainly spent in hell. Hell on earth, hell in a bedroom, hell at Blackwater with the pictures and the house he loved burning down around him.
‘He couldn’t get out,’ said Mr Perkins finally. ‘He may have tried the windows, we don’t know.’ Two well-proportioned holes teased them from across the room. Their secrets had gone, burnt to nothing in the conflagration.
‘We’d better get out of here now,’ said Hardy, still cheerful. ‘The light’s going.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Powerscourt, tiptoeing along the shattered corridor, ‘we could discuss this on the lawn outside. There must be more you have to tell me.’
They found an old table and four rusting chairs in the stables. Surrounded by four handsome horses in their stalls, they held a melancholy conference, Inspector Wilson, his face cleaned except for one dark smear below his left eyelid, Chief Fire Officer Perkins, dust and fragments of ash still falling from his body every time he moved, Fire Investigator Hardy, smiling incronguously as his mind raced through calculations of the temperature and speed of burn of the fire, still taking notes in a book that had turned from red to dark grey, Powerscourt looking troubled. The only noise was the occasional rustling of the horses and the rising whisper of the wind.
‘Inspector Wilson,’ Powerscourt began, ‘let me trespass on your province to begin with a short summary of what we know.
‘Point Number One,’ he rapped his forefinger lightly on the table, ‘at an early stage in the evening there were four people in the house. Miss Harrison, Mr Frederick Harrison, Mr Charles Harrison and Jones the butler in his own quarters in the basement.
‘Point Number Two,’ the finger tapped again, ‘Mr Charles Harrison leaves the house at an unknown time to return to London. Our only evidence for that, if I remember right, is the butler reporting Mr Charles as saying that he would be leaving. He did not see him go.’
‘Correct, my lord,’ said Inspector Wilson.
‘Point Number Three,’ Powerscourt went on, ‘is that at about half-past one in the morning the butler becomes aware of the fire and rushes upstairs to rescue Miss Harrison who sleeps on the other side of the house.
‘Point Number Four is that at some stage in the evening Mr Frederick Harrison retires to bed for the night. And then proceeds to lock himself into his own room, from which he never escapes.’
One of the horses was listening carefully, a noble head and a pair of intelligent brown eyes fixed firmly on the strange quartet. Powerscourt wondered if this was Clytemnestra or Callimachus, Catullus or Cassandra in the Harrison horse naming system. Cassandra, he decided gloomily, prophecies destined never to be taken seriously. The horse listened on.
‘For what it’s worth,’ said Joseph Hardy, ‘I think the fire was started deliberately. I cannot be sure yet,’ he glanced down at his little book, pages and pages of which Powerscourt saw were covered by calculations, ‘but it has all the signs of that. Would you agree with that analysis, Chief Fire Officer Perkins?’
‘I think I would,’ said Perkins, flakes of dust falling from his upraised hand. ‘I mean, I am not an expert in these matters, but there are some very strange circumstances surrounding it.’
‘Let me put some possibilities to you, gentlemen,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Is it possible that Miss Harrison, for reasons best known to herself, decides to start the fire, locks her brother in his room, retires to her own quarters and waits to be rescued by the butler?’