Richard grinned back at Powerscourt. ‘So you think she might care for me, my lord?’
‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I’m not sure that a slow train, currently passing Slough if I am not mistaken, at two o’clock in the morning, is the best place for a discussion of your prospects. But I should say that she cared for you very much, possibly more than she realized before. Now tell me, Richard, was there anything else they asked you? Did they mention any dates in the near future? Any events they might have wondered if you knew about?’
Richard was lost in thought, more concerned with his next meeting with Sophie than with the questions he had been asked at Blackwater.
‘What was that, my lord? Sorry, yes, they did ask me if I knew anything about next Monday, the day, they called it. They muttered something in a foreign language I didn’t understand. I think it was German, my lord. It sounded like Der Tag, Der Tack, something like that. I’m going to start on the German next term, my lord, at my evening classes. I’ve nearly finished French.’
Powerscourt stared out of the window. The river was just visible in the moonlight. He wondered where Johnny Fitzgerald was, if he had shaken off his pursuers.
‘Next Monday, Richard. That’s the big day. It’s now Wednesday morning. We’ve got five days to stop them, whatever they’re trying to do, one of them a Sunday. Just five days.’
‘What do you make of it all, Francis?’
Powerscourt and William Burke were sitting by the fire in the upstairs drawing room in Markham Square the following morning. Downstairs Lady Lucy was looking after Mrs Martin, offering her round after round of toast and a flood of tea. Richard was still asleep.
‘On one level, William,’ said Powerscourt, ‘it’s kidnap pure and simple. I’m sure the police would be able to arrest Charles Harrison and his associates at Blackwater without any trouble at all. But I’m not sure we should set any of that in motion just yet.’
‘Why ever not, Francis?’ said Burke, growing indignant at crimes committed in broad daylight in the heart of the City.
‘I am certain,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I am absolutely certain that the most important thing just now is to frustrate their plans. How we do it I do not know. But I feel very sure that any arrest would bring publicity and publicity is what they want for their main purpose. Have you found the figures I mentioned to you yesterday afternoon, William? The ones that would confirm my theory of what has been going on all these months?’
‘I have some of them, but not all.’ Burke reached for a paper in his breast pocket. ‘I need to talk to young Richard when he wakes up. I have no doubt that your theory is correct, Francis. I cannot tell you what I think about it. It is the most monstrous thing I have ever encountered in the City of London. And I do not know how we can stop it. I fear it is already too late. Next Monday, did you say, is the vital day? Just three full working days away. God help us all.’
Powerscourt rose from his chair. The grey cat slid from behind the place he had just left. Faintly, from upstairs, there came the sound of Olivia crying.
‘William, you must wake up young Richard and see what details he can fill in. You must send a message to the Governor of the Bank of England asking for a meeting this afternoon. Maybe he should come here.’
‘I am certain he should come here,’ Burke said. ‘Every time the Governor calls on an office in the City the place is filled with rumours within the half-hour. Such and such a firm is going bankrupt, such and such a bank has defaulted on their loans, such and such a broker is about to get hammered. Rumour travels faster than the wind. I shall ask the Governor to meet me here at two o’clock. Where are you going, Francis?’
‘I am going,’ said Powerscourt, ‘to build a bridgehead with the world of politics. I fear that only they may be able to solve the problem once they realize how serious it could become. I am going to call on my friend Rosebery. He may be out of office now but he knows how to pull the levers. God knows, we may have to pull a lot of those.’
Michael Byrne was saying goodbye to one of his travellers in a small flat in one of Dublin’s many slums. Three leaves in a shamrock, Byrne said to himself, three messengers to cross the sea to England. Three messengers to carry a message of hatred from one island to another. Three messengers to announce to the greater world that the cause of Irish freedom had not been extinguished by Victoria’s Jubilee. Three messengers to carry packages across the Irish Sea. Three messengers to deceive his enemies.
‘Go safely now,’ Byrne said to Siobhan McKenna, the second of his envoys to set out on the boat to Liverpool. ‘You know the story?’
‘I know it as well as I know my own name, Michael Byrne,’ replied the girl. ‘It would be too dangerous for me to come and wave you off.’ Byrne was apologetic, worried that his absence at the quayside could be interpreted as cowardice.
‘Don’t you worry. Don’t worry at all.’ The girl gave him a quick kiss on the cheek and set off on her journey. In her pocket she carried an invitation to an interview for the position of assistant teacher at the Convent of Our Lady of Sorrows in Kensington. Byrne hoped that her visit would multiply the sorrows.
Rosebery’s formidable intellect was turned on to the racing papers. He was making notes as he read, as if preparing a memorandum for the Cabinet.
‘Powerscourt!’ He rose to greet his friend. ‘How very good to see you. You find me deep in the study of form on the turf. One of my most expensive animals takes to the race course tomorrow. But come, Francis, sit down, you do not look like a man who has come to talk of horseflesh.’
‘I have not, I’m afraid.’ Powerscourt sank into a deep red armchair at the side of the fire. A series of paintings of Rosebery’s horses adorned the sides of the mantelpiece.
‘Why don’t you tell me the story from the beginning, Francis. The last I heard you were looking into a strange death in the City, a headless man found floating by London Bridge.’
‘Very well,’ said Powerscourt. He suddenly realized that he was incredibly tired after the exertions of the previous evening. He paused while he arranged the facts in his mind.
‘Let me begin with the headless man,’ he said at last. ‘He was found, as you say, floating in the Thames with no head and no hands. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the start of the unravelling of a very great conspiracy.
‘The dead man was Old Mr Harrison, founder and senior partner in Harrison’s Bank, a private bank in the City. He was not the first Harrison to die in strange circumstances. His eldest son perished in a boating accident off the Isle of Wight eighteen months before. There were rumours, never substantiated, that the boat had been tampered with.’
‘Why did he have no head, Old Mr Harrison?’ asked Rosebery. ‘And no hands?’
‘I’m not sure about that,’ said Powerscourt. ‘The head was cut off to make him unrecognizable, I think. I’m not sure about the hands. Maybe the murderer had heard about this new thing called fingerprinting. Johnny Fitzgerald told me the German police are quite advanced with it. You can identify people by their fingerprints. Every one is different. The Army have been using a system like it in India for years to identify people.’ Powerscourt looked down at his thumb for a moment before he continued.
‘They lived in Oxfordshire at a place called Blackwater, these Harrisons. Old Mr Harrison’s sister still lives there. It seemed from talking to her and to the head groom that Old Mr Harrison had grown very worried in the last year or so. He used to ride round the lake on a pony and read and write letters to and from Germany. He got the groom to post the letters he was sending to Berlin and other places to avoid them being seen in the big house. He talked to his sister of conspiracies involving the bank, of secret societies in Germany.’
‘What sort of conspiracies? What sort of secret societies?’
‘I’ll come to that,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I’m just trying to tell the story in the right order. Shortly after that, and after my learning of the secret societies, there was a fire at Blackwater. The fire experts are sure, though they would find it hard to prove, that it was started deliberately. Old Mr Harrison’s other son, Frederick Harrison, was burnt to death in his bedroom in the inferno. The door of the room had been locked from the other side. Nobody ever found the key.’