Dominic Knox was pacing up and down an office overlooking Horseguards. He was a short, wiry man in his late thirties. Today, Powerscourt thought, as they shook hands by the door, he looked at least fifty. Knox looked as though he hadn’t slept properly for weeks.
‘Thank God you have come, Lord Powerscourt. I fear it is too late. I fear we are all too late now.’ He looked gloomily out of the window. The park was full of visitors for the Jubilee, staring in awe at the soldiers from all over the world who were enjoying the sunshine in St James’s Park.
‘I cannot believe it is too late,’ said Powerscourt, sitting down on the far side of Knox’s enormous desk. ‘McDonnell said there was a problem with the rifles.’
‘I have two problems, Lord Powerscourt,’ said Knox, relieved perhaps to be able to share his problems with a fellow-professional. ‘The first does indeed concern the rifles. You will recall, none better, that two coffins believed to contain rifles were buried in the grave of one Thomas Carew, south of Greystones, and a further two in the grave of Martha O’Driscoll up in the Wicklow Mountains. Both have been watched ever since you left Ireland. We opened one of them up in broad daylight the day after you found them and found four Mausers of the very latest make inside.’
Knox paused and rearranged some papers on his desk. Powerscourt said nothing.
‘Two coffins are still with Thomas Carew. But there is only one coffin with Martha O’Driscoll. Four brand new high-powered rifles have left the Wicklow Mountains and gone I know not where. We only discovered that two days ago, while you were in Brighton.’
‘Christ,’ said Powerscourt. ‘You remember I told you I did not actually see the rifles being placed in the grave? All I saw was the disturbed earth on the top. They could have placed one coffin in the O’Driscoll grave and taken the other one somewhere else.’
Knox nodded gloomily. ‘Of course I remember you saying that, Lord Powerscourt. We checked the grave the following day. There were three coffins in it, one of the widow O’Driscoll and two more that came out of the sea in the night. We opened one of them and saw these four new rifles inside.’
‘And you have been watching this place ever since, I presume?’
‘We have.’ Knox stopped to swat a fly that was advancing over his desk, trying to read his secrets. ‘I don’t know how they did it. Maybe the watchers got careless or fell asleep. But one coffin has gone. And the problem is this, Lord Powerscourt. Michael Byrne, the man I believe to be responsible for this conspiracy, has been sending messengers to London. Three young women have been apprehended so far. All of them have perfectly legitimate reasons for being here, of course. All of them have gone to the house of an Irish schoolteacher. I believed that Byrne was trying to smuggle one or more of those rifles into London. Broken into pieces, of course, so they could be reassembled. But no. All they brought the teacher was one bottle of Jameson’s whisky, two pots of home-made marmalade and a large quantity of best Irish potato-bread.’
‘So you think they were decoys, despatched to put you off the scent?’
‘Absolutely correct, Lord Powerscourt.’ Knox went over to his window and pulled it firmly shut. ‘You remember Wellington before Waterloo, wondering which direction Napoleon’s armies were going to come from? He thought the Corsican would go round his flank to try to cut him off from the sea. But he didn’t, he drove straight between Wellington and Blucher’s armies. When he found out the truth at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in Brussels, that Napoleon hadn’t taken the expected direction, Wellington said, “Napoleon has humbugged me.” I too feel as if I’ve been humbugged. Humbugged by Michael Byrne.’
‘Wellington won in the end, though, didn’t he,’ said Powerscourt, smiling. He looked at a large print on the wall of Queen Victoria’s previous Jubilee ten years before. Loyal crowds filled the streets. Garlands and banners hung above the route, festooned across lampposts or strung between the buildings. In a carriage a small figure rode in glory through her streets. Powerscourt stared at the windows overlooking the route. Was one of them going to contain an assassin, lurking behind the curtains until it was time to strike and a German rifle, the most deadly, the most accurate in the world, rang out to shatter the climax of an Empress’s reign?
‘The rifles,’ he said suddenly. ‘Did they take the rifles and leave the coffin in the grave, or did they move the coffin with the rifles inside?’
‘They moved the whole bloody coffin,’ Knox replied, ‘there are only two coffins there now. Do you think that is important, my lord?’
‘I’m not sure,’ said Powerscourt. His mind was racing. ‘I have always wondered why they put the rifles in those coffins, you know. At first sight, it looks as though it was a convenient way of hiding them. They could be buried in innocent Irish graves in the middle of the night, disturbing the dead, no doubt, but an excellent hiding place. But suppose that wasn’t the only reason. Suppose there was another reason.’
Powerscourt paused. Dominic Knox said nothing. The silence lasted for twenty seconds or more, faint sounds of merriment forcing their way in through the window from the park outside. Another fly had begun a long march across Knox’s papers.
‘Suppose the real reason for the coffins was this,’ Powerscourt went on. ‘You want to send some guns from Ireland to England. You know the police and security people are watching everything and searching people and premises they suspect. Think how different it is with a coffin. Here we have an English visitor to Ireland, maybe an Irishman who had come to work in London and goes back to see his family. Let’s call him Seamus Docherty. The unfortunate man falls ill in Ireland. He cannot be saved. He passes away. But it is the dearest wish of the Docherty family back in London that father Seamus, husband Seamus, be buried by their local priest in their local church and buried in their local cemetery where they can lay flowers on his grave after Mass on Sundays. So the body of the dead Docherty is put in its coffin and sent over to London. It must happen all the time. Except there isn’t a Seamus Docherty, apart from on the name plate of the coffin. It contains four high quality Mausers, capable of killing man or woman at five hundred yards distance. The weight is presumably made up with bits of lead or some other heavy material so nobody would suspect there wasn’t a body inside.
‘What do you think of that, Mr Knox?’
‘I think it is very plausible, my lord.’ Knox did not look greatly encouraged by the news.
‘Think of it, man,’ said Powerscourt. ‘It may take a lot of manpower to find the answer. But there must be records of the transhipment of a dead body in a coffin. There may be records in Dublin of such a passage. If Seamus Docherty comes into London by train there will be records, manifests or something like that at Euston station, which will show where its final destination was. Once we find out that Father O’Flaherty of the Church of the Holy Cross performed the burial, we will know where the coffin is. If it came by sea, which I doubt, there must be records at the Port of London authority.’
Powerscourt paused. There was something Johnny Fitzgerald had said when he came home from Berlin, something that didn’t seem to make very much sense at the time. Hotels, something to do with hotels.
‘I believe,’ said Powerscourt, ‘that a hotel room was booked for the Jubilee by their German confederates a long time ago. Maybe eight months or more. That must be where the gunman is going to make his attempt, from the hotel. A room, or a suite of rooms overlooking the route of the procession reserved last year. Surely we can find that out. Even if time is very short, we still have several days left.’
Knox looked up and shook his head.