‘I said when you arrived, Lord Powerscourt, that there were two problems. One was the rifles. The other is politics.’
‘Politics?’ said Powerscourt. ‘For God’s sake, man, this is a Diamond Jubilee, not a general election!’
‘Let me explain myself better,’ said Knox. He went to stare out of his window. ‘I work for the Irish Office. Security for the parade is in the hands of a very stupid general called Arbuthnot. When I told him about the missing rifles, he went apoplectic, my lord. He turned into a sort of human earthquake, face a vivid red, eruptions of bad language, hot molten streams of invective pouring forth about my incompetence. He, in his turn, told the Home Secretary who has overall responsibility for security in the capital. There can be few things, Lord Powerscourt, more guaranteed to bring a promising political career to an ignominious and inglorious end, than somebody taking a shot, maybe even killing the Head of State at a Diamond Jubilee.’
‘Losing a war, perhaps, caught embezzling Treasury Funds,’ said Powerscourt flippantly.
Knox smiled ruefully. ‘The upshot of all this is that I have not been relieved from my post. But I have been relieved of my men. I had sixty operatives, many brought over from Dublin to work with me on this problem. They have all been taken away from me.’
‘Where have they gone?’ said Powerscourt.
‘The Home Secretary and General Arbuthnot have decided that my methods are not to be trusted. No doubt even now I am being trussed like some dead animal in their minds to be turned into the sacrifice or scapegoat if things go wrong. They have decided that the only way to meet this threat is to have policemen or security operatives watching every entrance that leads into the route of the parade. Where the bus leaves to go to Temple Bar, there you will find my men, or at the entrances of every station in London, waiting to apprehend any person carrying a large package.’
‘But what about the Prime Minister? What about Schomberg McDonnell?’ said Powerscourt.
‘The Prime Minister,’ said Dominic Knox, ‘has disappeared. He cannot be found. McDonnell has vanished with him. Perhaps they would feel it would be more politic if they were not in London at this time. But he placed great faith in you, my lord, the Prime Minister. He seemed to think you were some sort of miracle worker.’
Powerscourt contemplated walking on the water or raising the dead from their tombs. Not appropriate, that, just now, he said to himself. Maybe turning water into wine would gain him the eternal gratitude of Johnny Fitzgerald.
‘All right, Mr Knox,’ he said ‘tell me the worst. How many people have we got to make these inquiries?’
‘Five. Just five,’ Dominic Knox replied. ‘Myself, yourself, and three of my men I’ve managed to keep out of the clutches of that dreadful general.’
‘Six,’ said Powerscourt, thinking of the miracle at the wedding feast. ‘There’s Johnny Fitzgerald. I’m going to find him. He’s worth a regiment all on his own, two after a couple of glasses. We’re not beaten yet, Mr Knox, not by a long way.’
35
Lord Francis Powerscourt was surrounded by angels, angels with broken wings, angels with no arms, angels with no heads, angels in stone, angels in marble. He was waiting for Johnny Fitzgerald at three o’clock in the afternoon in Kilburn Cemetery in the north-west of the capital.
Knox’s depleted forces had been remarkably speedy in their negotiations with the keepers of the records. Three coffins had indeed been sent from Dublin to London in the preceding month. Their destinations had been three different firms of undertakers, who had reluctantly told Powerscourt and Fitzgerald their final destination. Henry Joseph McLachlan, aged fifty-four, had been buried here with these angels.
Sections of the cemetery were overgrown. Weeds and brambles covered the bottom of the graves and giant creepers had entwined themselves round the statuary. Rooks and crows circled above the trees, protesting at the arrival of living humans. Through the foliage occasional crosses could be discerned, almost hidden from view. The other area was not very large, only a couple of hundred souls waiting here for the last trump.
Powerscourt began making his way round the graves, looking for McLachlan. He was wearing a pair of old trousers and the fisherman’s jersey Chief Inspector Tait had found for him in Brighton. The grave would be clean and fresh, the passing seasons yet to leave their slow marks of creeping decay. Johnny Fitzgerald materialized, in his Mystic Merlin clothes, a spade in his hand, a large bag of tools on his back. He had been very cheerful since Brighton, drinking only the finest wines to compensate for his brief period of abstinence.
‘What’s this bugger called, Francis?’ said Fitzgerald.
‘McLachlan,’ said Powerscourt, ‘Henry Joseph McLachlan. The earth won’t have settled long enough for him to get a proper tombstone yet. There’ll be a small cross or a stone with his name on it for now.’
‘Wouldn’t it be grand,’ Fitzgerald was looking down at a bunch of dead flowers, ‘if people actually said what they meant on these bloody tombs.’
‘What do you mean, Johnny?’ asked Powerscourt.
’Delighted he’s gone,’ said Fitzgerald cheerfully, ‘Thank you, God, for taking the old bastard away. Gone but not remembered. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, not a moment too soon. May her life be as miserable where she’s gone as she made mine here on earth, that sort of thing.’
‘You’re a bad person, Johnny,’ Powerscourt laughed. ‘They’ll get their own back on you, all these people here. I expect they’ll leave a message with St Peter that you’re not to be let in. You’re blackballed from heaven, Johnny. Hard luck.’
Powerscourt stopped. The afternoon sun lit up a row of graves not ten feet from where they were standing. One of them was new, very new with a small cross at the head.
‘Here he is, Johnny. Henry Joseph McLachlan. Gone to his Father in Heaven, May 1897.’
‘Do we open it up now, Francis,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘or do we wait till it’s dark? That’ll be bloody hours away.’
‘We’ve got to do it now,’ said Powerscourt, glancing uneasily round the cemetery. There were no gardeners on duty. No relatives had come for a late afternoon communion with their dead. They were alone.
Powerscourt borrowed a spade from an open grave nearby, the preparations apparently left half-finished. In a couple of minutes they had removed the earth on top of the coffin. Something moved behind them. Powerscourt and Fitzgerald turned quickly, hands going automatically into trouser pockets. A squirrel eyed them coldly and vanished up a tree.
‘I think, Francis, we can open the coffin without taking it out of the grave. Give me that big screwdriver. You keep your eyes open up top.’
Fitzgerald lay down beside the grave. He began undoing the four great screws that held the lid in position.
‘I don’t suppose,’ he said, panting slightly with the exertion, ‘that you would recognize the coffin we’re looking for? That would be too much to hope for.’
‘It was very dark,’ said Powerscourt, his eyes fixed on the main entrance to Kilburn Cemetery, ‘all I could tell was that they were coffins.’
He was hoping more than anything that this would be the right coffin, if there was a right coffin. He remembered that night in Greystones, following the coffins on their journey from the sea. He wondered if the man with the pipe had been Michael Byrne. Maybe all three were full of dead bodies, not deadly rifles. Maybe he had got it all wrong. Maybe the deadly coffin had been sent to Guildford or Reading, not to London at all.
‘Three screws out, one to go,’ Fitzgerald reported. ‘I think I could do with a drink.’ Powerscourt thought of the other corpses he had met in the course of his investigation, Old Mr Harrison with no head and no arms, floating by London Bridge, Mr Frederick Harrison, burnt to death on the top floor of his mansion. Ordeal by Water. Ordeal by Fire.
‘Give me a hand here, Francis. We can just take a peep inside.’