He bent down to a wooden basket several feet away from his fire. ‘The first is wood panelling of the same type as that found in Mr Harrison’s bedroom. It is about the same age. It was originally painted in the same colours. It is about the same temperature as the wood in the fireplace would have been before the fire took hold.’
‘How did you get the piece of wood? How can you be so sure it is of the same age and so on?’ asked Powerscourt.
Joseph Hardy frowned at the interruption. ‘In my line of work, my lord, you have to take great care.’ Hardy threw two pieces of wood on to the fire. ‘Some of the firemen down in London, my lord, let me keep all kinds of pieces of stuff from all sorts of different fires. I keep them all carefully labelled in my store room.’
They stared at the two pieces of wood. At first nothing happened. Gradually, but quite slowly they began to burn.
‘Now look at these two, gentlemen.’ Hardy tossed another two pieces of wood on to the fire. They burst into flame immediately. They blazed much more fiercely than the others. Powerscourt drew back from the heat.
‘These two have been soaked in inflammable liquid. That is what I believe happened on the night of this fire. The arsonist poured his petrol or his oil down one section of the picture gallery wall. He also poured a whole lot more in Mr Harrison’s bedroom in the area between the door and the fireplace. You will remember, gentlemen, that we never found the key that locked Mr Harrison into his room.’
Inspector Wilson, Chief Fire Officer Perkins and Powerscourt stared at Hardy. Even he had gone serious as he looked at the flames leaping up in his fire.
‘Do I need to say anything more, gentlemen? I am anxious to put this fire out if you have seen enough. We have some buckets of sand prepared for the purpose.’
‘I think we have seen enough, Mr Hardy,’ said Powerscourt.
‘There’s only one thing that has to be said, my lord,’ said Hardy as he and Perkins hurled the sand over the blaze. Thick smoke was pouring up to the roof of the barn now. ‘I think Mr Harrison was murdered. I’m certain of it, in fact. The murderer soaked the key parts of the house in some inflammable liquid and then put a match to it. Mr Harrison must have gone to sleep before the fire began. The murderer then locked him in and disposed of the key. Poor man.’
Hardy paused as he thought of the horrible end, a man burnt to death in his own house, smoke finishing him off, his own bedroom door locked from the other side.
‘But I couldn’t say who did it. That is outside my province altogether.’
Hardy looked at Inspector Wilson and Powerscourt, the Inspector looking sombre after his demonstration, Powerscourt now pacing up and down the barn.
‘That’s up to you gentlemen. That’s up to you now.’
Lord Francis Powerscourt was sitting in total darkness, staring helplessly out to sea. Night had fallen over the east coast of Ireland and the little town showed no signs of movement. This was Greystones, the place Johnny Fitzgerald had identified as the site for the German arms shipments to the Irish revolutionaries. At least Powerscourt thought it was the place. He wondered yet again if he had decoded the message correctly or if Fitzgerald had misheard the information in Berlin. Four days, or four nights, Fitzgerald had said, on which the Germans might land guns and money for the Irish.
Powerscourt had checked into the Imperial Hotel, Greystones, as James Hamilton, the name of Lucy’s father. He smiled to himself as he thought of it. He couldn’t have brought Lucy with him, not on an assignment as potentially dangerous as this, but she was with him in spirit. He wondered if she had gone to bed yet, back in Markham Square, trying yet again to get to grips with the latest Joseph Conrad.
To Powerscourt’s left, from his windows on the top storey, a miscellaneous collection of cottages curved around one side of the little bay. In front of them was a stony beach, the fishermen’s boats drawn up in random order. To his right a long passage of rocks and gullies marked the way to the other, longer beach that stretched way down the coast towards Wicklow. But the beauty of Greystones, if this indeed was the right place, was a tiny harbour just two hundred yards from Powerscourt’s hotel. Nothing very big could have put in there, but a small boat could easily come in from a mother ship further out to sea. The place was completely deserted. There were no coastguards, no lighthouses, nothing at all, only the water lapping monotonously against the green-covered stone of the quays and the pebbles on the tiny beach.
The moon was almost full, turning the sea into a mass of shimmering grey and silver. Powerscourt had his best field glasses with him, temporarily borrowed from Johnny Fitzgerald. For the tenth time that evening he scanned the wide expanse of the Irish Sea. There was nothing to be seen, not even the dark smudge of a coal steamer heading north towards Dublin. He wondered yet again if he had come to the right place. He thought of Lady Lucy and his children. He wondered if Thomas would like climbing across the rocks. He thought of Lady Lucy’s adopted family, the Farrells, and wondered sadly if any more of them had died. He thought of his investigation, of the headless man found floating by London Bridge, of the strange history of the Harrison family that might yet consume them all. He wondered about Jones the butler and whether he was telling the truth. He thought of Charles Harrison, a sad and embittered little boy, one parent dead, the other fled with her Polish lover, brought up by dutiful but unloving relations. He wondered about the link, if there was one, between the Germans in Berlin and the Harrisons in London and the Irish insurgents in Dublin.
Suddenly he realized that they too must be staring out to sea on this moonlit night, watching for their ship, praying for copious supplies of money and guns and explosives. He turned his glasses on to the streets of Greystones. Was there somebody down there, watching like him for the sign, for the sails? He thought of Theseus’ father, warned that his son’s boat was coming home to Athens, watching desperately from the rocky citadel for the ship to come in. White sails meant he was alive, black that he was dead. Legend said Theseus had forgotten to change the sails so his father hurled himself off the rock to his death, leaving the throne of Athens to the slayer of the Minotaur. Powerscourt thought Theseus had enjoyed power too much on his travels to want to play second fiddle ever again. The failure to change the sails was deliberate. A patricide ruled in Athens, but only the immortal gods would ever know and they came for Theseus in the end. Powerscourt wondered if a returning Harrison would have changed the sails. He thought of more black sails in Turner’s painting of a burial at sea, the great ships riding very still, the body lowered reverently into the water, black sails marking the passage of another English hero.
Every five minutes Powerscourt would scan the horizon from north to south. He checked in the doorways of the cottages to see if his counterpart was lurking there in the shadows, hoping for the weapons that might help bring freedom to the troubled island. He remembered other night watches, on the side of a mountain in India where he and Johnny Fitzgerald had waited for five days and nights for a meeting between rebel tribesmen that must have happened somewhere else. Johnny had discovered another way to make his fortune. Luminous playing cards, playing cards you could see properly in the dark, he had declared, would earn some lucky man his fortune. Nights on duty for soldiers, sailors and sentries would never be the same again. Think of the joy, Johnny said, when you produced the Ace of Spades at three o’clock in the morning when you could hardly see your own hand in front of your face.
From time to time Powerscourt would walk up and down his room, stretching his legs, rubbing his eyes. By four o’clock he had decided that nothing would happen this night. There was no boat or pleasure boat to be seen out to sea. No vessel from Hamburg or Bremen had come to disturb the peace of the waters off Greystones. Powerscourt wondered if they had got it wrong, if he should be in some other desolate cove in Kerry or Connemara, or somewhere on the wild and rugged coast of Donegal, all easier to reach from Germany. He made a final tour with the field glasses. There was nothing there. As dawn began to climb out of the eastern sky, grey-fingered, Powerscourt thought, he went to bed and slept fitfully as a new day dawned over the Irish Sea.