‘I don’t think your Mama would want you in any danger, Robert,’ Powerscourt said. ‘You’ve done most of the work already, now we know where she is.’ He sat down beside Robert and held him very tight. ‘We’re going to find her,‘ he said. ‘We’re definitely going to find her.’
Hold on Lucy, I’m coming, hold on.
29
Lady Lucy didn’t know very much about what was happening to her. Those horrid men kept putting something over her face. Fragments of hymns and prayers from her childhood floated through her mind. Defend us from all perils and dangers of this night. God be with us in our waking and in our sleeping. The day thou gavest Lord has ended, the darkness falls at thy behest. One thought never left her. Francis will find me. Francis will find me. Then she would drift off to sleep.
Johnny Fitzgerald arrived shortly before nine o’clock, clutching a sinister-looking black bag. He took one look at Powerscourt’s face. The joke he had been about to tell dried on his lips.
‘What’s happened, Francis? Christ, you look terrible!’
Powerscourt told him about the abduction of Lady Lucy, about Robert’s heroic pursuit of the villainous pair, of their departure with a drugged Lucy to Brighton. He handed Fitzgerald the note they had left behind.
Johnny Fitzgerald read it quickly. Then he read it again. He looked at his friend, his features drawn now, lines of worry etched across his forehead.
‘Jesus Christ, Francis. The bastards. They’ll pay for this. They bloody well will.’
Fitzgerald helped himself to a monstrous glass of whisky from the sideboard.
‘We must make a plan, Johnny. We’ve never got anywhere without having some sort of idea of what we were trying to do.’
Powerscourt thought bitterly that he and Johnny had never had such a difficult task in all their years together.
‘I don’t think I can go to Brighton tonight, Johnny.’ Powerscourt sounded very sad. ‘I’ve got this meeting here tomorrow morning with the Prime Minister and a man who may save Harrison’s Bank. If that fails, then Harrison’s Bank will fall in a few days time and the reputation of the City of London will be ruined for years to come. But if that happens, Lucy should come back, if those fellows keep their word.’
‘Francis, Francis, do you know what you are saying?’ Fitzgerald was drinking his whisky very fast. ‘You sound as if you want that meeting to succeed. Surely you want it to fail. Otherwise you may never see Lucy again. Can’t you persuade the Prime Minister to call the whole thing off, to let the bank fail and to hell with the consequences?’
‘I’ve thought of that, Johnny,’ said Powerscourt bitterly. ‘I seem to have a choice, don’t I? Professional success means personal failure. Professional failure means personal success, don’t you see? Success in this case could mean death for Lucy. Failure could mean that Lucy lives. So it looks as though I have to choose between the failure of the bank, the collapse of the Jubilee, and my precious Lucy, mother of my children. But I don’t think it works like that. I know which course I would pick, of course. But I also know which course the Prime Minister would take. If he has to choose between one life and national humiliation, he will sacrifice a life. That’s the kind of choice Prime Ministers have to take. Think of the number of lives they throw away when the nation goes to war. One life, just one, isn’t even going to keep him awake at night.’
‘So what do we do, Francis?’ Fitzgerald could see the torture in his friend’s eyes.
‘There’s only one thing we can do,’ said Powerscourt. ‘We’ve got to find Lucy in the next four days, that’s all we’ve got before the final showdown at that bloody bank. I think you should go down to Brighton this minute. There may be somebody left on duty at the station who may remember them, maybe even a cab driver who took them wherever they were going.’
Fitzgerald was looking at a portrait of Lady Lucy, hanging by the fireplace. Whistler had painted her in a pale evening gown against a dark background. Her eyes looked as though she was teasing the painter. Fitzgerald took another medicinal dose of his whisky.
‘I would think they must have gone to a hotel, Francis,’ he said. ‘Think about it. They can’t have known before they started that they were going to have to pull off a stunt like this. They can’t have rented a house in Brighton or anything like that.
‘We do have a problem, Francis.’ Fitzgerald was still staring, as if hypnotized, at Whistler’s version of Lady Lucy’s face. ‘They will have a good idea of what we look like, you and I. I may even have met one or two of our kidnapping friends in Berlin. We can’t use the police. If they see a policeman they may do something to Lady Lucy. Sorry, but it’s true.’
Powerscourt started shaking as he thought about the razors. Another wave of uncontrollable anger was surging through him. He knew he would just have to wait till it passed.
‘And if we send in the policemen in plain clothes,’ Fitzgerald went on quickly, ‘they’ll be recognized. I don’t know what it is about policemen in plain clothes, but they’re even more recognizable than if they had their bloody uniforms on.’
Powerscourt was lost in thought. Uniforms. Something to do with uniforms.
‘Johnny,’ he said, pacing up and down the room again, ‘uniforms can make you almost invisible. If you’re a fireman or somebody like that people don’t really look at you at all. They look at the uniform.’
‘You’re not suggesting, are you,’ Fitzgerald said, ‘that we turn into the Sussex Fire Brigade? Not that I wouldn’t like climbing up those big ladders and waving the hosepipes about.’
‘No, I’m not, Johnny.’ Powerscourt was deadly serious. ‘It was the principle of the thing I was thinking about. Army officers.’ Powerscourt said triumphantly. ‘I’ve still got my uniform. You must still have yours somewhere. We could be a couple of heroes home from the wars.’
Powerscourt looked at Lady Lucy’s favourite clock. He wondered yet again where she was.
‘It’s nearly half-past nine, Johnny,’ he said firmly. ‘This is what we should do. Off you go to Brighton with your uniform. Do you have any medals? Ask at the station about any sightings of Lucy earlier in the evening. In the morning, Captain Fitzgerald begins making discreet inquiries of the hotel managers in Brighton. Begin at the Kemptown end and work your way along the sea front. I shall see you at the railway station at one o’clock tomorrow. I’m going to talk to the Police Commissioner here later on. We may not be able to send the police out into the front line but we shall have a substantial body of reinforcements to call on. God speed, Johnny.’
Fitzgerald fled into the night, whistling the Londonderry Air as he searched for a cab in the soft evening air of Markham Square.
As he tossed in his bed that night, the space beside him empty and cold, Powerscourt sent out another message. He directed it down the Brighton Line.
Hold on, Lucy, I’m coming. Hold on.
‘What in God’s name is keeping him? McDonnell’s been downstairs for nearly half an hour.’
The Prime Minister was growing impatient. An improbable quartet waited nervously in the upstairs drawing room in Number 25 Markham Square. One floor below, in Powerscourt’s study, Mr Franz Augustine Messel, millionaire many times over, was closeted with Schomberg McDonnell, private secretary to the Prime Minister, and the finest tea the Powerscourt household could provide. Messel had travelled down from his Oxfordshire mansion, arriving in Chelsea shortly before ten o’clock.
‘We just have to be patient,’ said William Burke, poring over a book of accounts.
‘We don’t have that much time, you know,’ said the Governor of the Bank of England. ‘We really need to have that money today to make sure we can cope with all the necessary particulars of transfer and so on.’ The Governor was, if anything, even more anxious and uncertain than he had been the night before. He paced up and down the room, wringing his hands. Rosebery was reading the racing papers.