Part Three
23
‘I’ve brought back two new pieces of information from Berlin.’ Johnny Fitzgerald was back in the Powerscourt house in Markham Square later that evening, Lady Lucy pouring tea. Powerscourt felt stiff, his limbs aching from all that running between the wickets. Secretly he felt very proud of himself, over sixty runs to his name and a good slip catch. Maybe now at last, with Johnny Fitzgerald back home again, his luck would turn for the better.
‘God knows what they mean, mind you. The secret society people are obsessed with Jubilee Day. I overheard them talking about it more than once. One of them said he was going for a holiday, but only after Jubilee Day. They all laughed at that. And they talked a lot about the hotel room. No idea which city or which hotel or which room. But one of them was checking with another that he had booked it last October. That’s eight months ago now. What do you make of that, Francis?’
Powerscourt laughed. ‘I have absolutely no idea. Maybe its importance will become clearer later.’
Powerscourt told Fitzgerald about the rifles in the coffins that had made the journey to Ireland. Fitzgerald explained there was a bar in Berlin divided into little sections where the people he suspected of belonging to the secret society went to drink.
‘I heard this very strange conversation in the next booth in there one day, Francis. The fellows were whispering. I had to press my ear against a crack in the panelling to catch what they were saying.
‘I am absolutely certain there are secret societies in Berlin,’ Fitzgerald went on. ‘They’re based round the university. And I’m pretty sure I got very close to them. I’d been trailing my coat pretty hard with all my rhetoric about being an Irish revolutionary and hating the English. I think I was getting fairly close to an exploratory conversation with one or two people. We’d skirted round things a bit already, how would I feel about working for the Fatherland against England, that sort of question. Then all the wires were cut. My contacts disappeared. The people I knew treated me as though I had the plague.’
‘How long ago was that, Johnny?’
‘It must have been over a fortnight ago.’
‘Lucy,’ said Powerscourt, ‘how long ago since that German character came to our front door asking for Johnny?’
‘Oh, it was just after the fire,’ said Lucy.
‘What was that, Lucy?’ Johnny Fitzgerald leant forward in his chair. ‘Some fellow came to the door and asked for me? How did he put it? What did he say?’
Lady Lucy thought carefully. ‘He came to the door and said he was trying to get in touch with you. He asked if you were a friend of Francis’s. He was polite but very insistent. Rhys told him you were in Berlin.’
‘And that I was a friend of Francis’?’ Fitzgerald said. ‘Rhys confirmed that?’
Lady Lucy nodded.
‘What do you think was going on, Francis?’ asked Fitzgerald. ‘I mean it’s always nice to be popular, but this might be going a bit too far.’
Powerscourt was rubbing carefully at the inside of his thigh. He thought he might be getting cramp.
‘It all depends which way the link goes,’ he said finally, his mind racing from Blackwater to the City to the German capital. ‘Is it Berlin to London or London to Berlin?’
‘Do you remember, Francis?’ Lady Lucy interrupted the riddle, suddenly remembering a titbit of gossip from the cricket match. ‘Mr Charles Harrison went to university in Berlin. He didn’t go to one here in England or anything. The Friedrich Wilhelm University, he said. Maybe he belongs to this secret society. They don’t play cricket there, he told me. And then he looked cross with himself as if he hadn’t meant to tell me.’
Powerscourt stared at his wife. He already knew that, but the significance might have escaped him.
‘They don’t play cricket there, he said,’ Lady Lucy went on. ‘I wonder what sort of games they do play.’
‘What does the riddle mean, Francis?’ said Fitzgerald. ‘The link you were talking about just now. Berlin London, London Berlin. Do we change at Paris or Frankfurt?’
Powerscourt smiled. ‘It could work two ways. Let’s assume that there is a connection between recent events at Harrison’s Bank and a person or persons in Berlin. Suppose Charles Harrison is a member of this secret society from his time at the university. He knows that I am investigating the death of his uncle. He knows that you are a colleague of mine and that you are not in London. Perhaps you are in Berlin. He decides to find out. So he sends his young man round to knock on our front door where he learns that you are not here but in Berlin. He wires this news to Berlin. Fitzgerald is in town. He must be doing Powerscourt’s business. So they stop talking to you. You are frozen out, as you say. Probably just as well that’s all they did.’
Powerscourt wondered if they had thought of more offensive measures against Johnny Fitzgerald.
‘Or,’ he went on, ‘it could work the other way round. The messages begin in Berlin. They go to Charles Harrison in London. We have this curious customer here, Fitzgerald. He seems to want to know all about our secret society. Do we trust him or not? Is he friend or foe? Supporter or spy?’
Lady Lucy poured some more tea. Fitzgerald was thinking back to his last contact with the man from the secret society.
‘The chap did go very frosty at the end,’ he said, ‘man by the name of Munster. Creepy sort of character. I didn’t quite trust him. Mind you, it sounds as if he would have trusted me even less.’
Powerscourt’s leg was going numb. If he sat still any longer he would be locked into his chair. He rose and began to hobble stiffly around the room. ‘The question is this,’ he said with a grimace as the cramp shot up his leg. ‘Who’s in charge of whatever is going on? London or Berlin? Who is calling the shots?’
He came back to his chair and sank slowly down. He continued rubbing his thigh. ‘If we knew the answer to that, we might, we might just know the answer to everything.’
There was a firm knock at the drawing room door. Rhys the butler came in with a letter on a tray.
‘This has just come for you, my lord,’ he said. ‘The man said it was very urgent.’
Lady Lucy watched her husband’s face as his eyes flickered down the letter. She watched them go back to the top and read it again. She watched him turn pale, very pale.
‘Bad news, Francis?’ said Lady Lucy.
‘Tell us what it says,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald.
‘Williamson is dead,’ said Powerscourt very quietly. He paused and looked down again at his letter. ‘The clerk at Harrison’s Bank who still had some shares in the business. The one man who stood between Charles Harrison and total control of the bank. Run over by an underground train at Bank station this evening. It’s not clear at all if he fell, or if he was pushed. The Commissioner says their man meant to be looking after Williamson lost him in the crush. Death would have been instantaneous.’
Powerscourt remembered the only time he had met Williamson, a careful, rather worried old gentleman anxious to secure the best for his bank and its clients. He need worry no more.
‘How terrible,’ said Lady Lucy.
‘That makes a quartet of death now,’ said Powerscourt. ‘One in the yacht, one in the Thames, one in the inferno at Blackwater, one under the wheels of a train. There’s only one person left in charge of Harrison’s Bank. Nobody else can stop him now. He’s on his own.’
London was filling up for the Jubilee. Many of the fifty thousand troops from all corners of Victoria’s Empire had arrived. They walked open-mouthed around the great shopping streets, dazzled by the wealth on show. Some of them went to the Victorian era exhibition at Earl’s Court displaying sixty years of British art and music, women’s work and sport. Stands were being erected all along the route with the newspapers complaining that large sections of the West End had been turned into a timber yard.