‘God bless my soul,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Now then, do you know who has the keys?’
Charles Candlesby thought for a moment. ‘Well,’ he said, finally, ‘the p-p-person who should have them is Thorpe the b-b-butler. I’ve never seen inside that room, my lord and I’m not sure I want to do so now either.’
‘Well,’ said Powerscourt diplomatically, ‘why don’t you come with me and you can decide when we get there.’
‘Of course.’
They found Barnabas Thorpe polishing a beautiful pair of Georgian candlesticks. ‘Don’t suppose we’ll see these on the table again in my lifetime,’ he said sadly by way of introduction. ‘Keys, my lord, which keys would those be?’
Powerscourt wondered if deafness was going to be added to the many and varied difficulties of life in Candlesby Hall, but he merely repeated his wish to see the Caravaggio room.
Barnabas Thorpe shuddered slightly. He stared at Powerscourt for some time. ‘Nobody’s been in that room for well over a hundred years, my lord. Earl Edward, he was a right cruel man, they say, he brought those pictures back here in the 1760s or the 1770s and he died the week before Trafalgar. When the nation was celebrating that victory with feasts and bonfires, the people here were thanking God for deliverance from Earl Edward. They weren’t too bothered about Bonaparte, apparently. One man said a French invasion would be a blessing in disguise – at least the people of Candlesby would get rid of their Earl, the Earl from hell some of them called him.’
Thorpe shuffled off into private quarters of his own behind a curtain and could be heard muttering to himself for some considerable time.
‘Here we are,’ he announced finally, and put a large black ring with three huge keys on it on his table. ‘I assume, my lord, that if I don’t agree to open up the room – I’ve no intention of asking this one who calls himself Earl now for any sort of permission – then you will be off to the police station and back inside the hour with a search warrant?’
‘I’m afraid you might be right there, Mr Thorpe.’
‘Very well, on your own head be it, my lord. I am not responsible for your going to this place. I will take you there. I will open the door for you. But I will not go in. When you are finished, you may call for me and I shall lock the room up again.’
With that Barnabas Thorpe led the way very slowly up the back stairs. The banisters were loose and the few windows into the inner courtyard of the Hall were thick with dust. Looking at the back in front of him, Powerscourt thought suddenly of the other aged retainer close to the heart of Candlesby Hall, the steward Walter Savage, with his tales of financial disaster. He remembered Savage’s words about Jack Hayward.
‘This has all been absolutely too terrible for words,’ Jack Hayward had said. ‘I can’t tell you anything about it. One day, please God, I will tell you, but not now.’ And then he had left, with one last word: ‘Goodbye, Walter, and God bless you. Pray for us all. Pray for us every day as long as you live.’
That was it. Surely that was sufficient bait to lure Jack Hayward back across the Irish Sea. All he had to do was to arrest the steward, or rather have the Inspector arrest the steward, and tell Johnny Fitzgerald to do his worst. It might be underhand but Powerscourt thought the subterfuge would be justified if it enabled them to solve the mystery. If Hayward thought he had information that could save his old friend of twenty years or more from jail or even the gallows, he would come back. Surely he would come back. He remembered Johnny Fitzgerald’s last telegram which had arrived that morning. ‘Am now in very expensive hotel near Limerick. Will await instructions. Hotel filled with fish and fishermen. Cellar filled with Chateau d’Yquem. Rather sweet but needs must. Johnny.’
Powerscourt wondered if he should not abandon his crazy mission and reach the Inspector at once. Behind him Charles Candlesby was whistling ‘I do like to be beside the seaside, I do like to be beside the sea’. Powerscourt wondered what strange memories had put that song in his mind. But Powerscourt felt, tramping up the final flight of steps, a grimy mirror reflecting a grimy investigator as he passed, that he had raised so much dust already that it would be folly to go into reverse now.
There was a dull clanking of keys. Barnabas Thorpe selected the largest one he could find and fitted it in the lock. When he tried to turn it, nothing happened. It was as if there was a vice on the other side refusing to let it move.
‘Damn!’ said Thorpe. ‘I’m sure they told me it was that one.’
Powerscourt wondered how long ago the handover of keys had taken place. And who handed them over? Surely not Earl Edward in person. He wondered again what terrible things must have gone on in this room, or what terrible rumours had flown from it that they could still cause tremors nearly a hundred and fifty years later.
Charles Candlesby had stopped whistling now. The seaside seemed very far away. The old butler was breathing heavily. There was no other sound to be heard up here at the top of Candlesby Hall.
‘How about you, then?’ Thorpe was holding conversations with the keys now, as if they might tell him which one would open the door. Powerscourt had a distant memory of nursery rhymes, or was it children’s stories involving locked doors and unsolved mysteries or imprisoned princesses on the other side. In went the other key. It too refused to move.
‘If this next one don’t serve, my lord, we’ll have to beat the retreat for now.’ He put the third one into the lock and turned it. There was a faint sign of movement. ‘Maybe you should try, my lord.’
Powerscourt turned the key with all his strength. Very slowly, with a rasping, creaking sound, the key moved in the lock. Powerscourt looked at the door. To his right Charles Candlesby had turned very pale and was beginning to inch away.
‘If you’ll excuse me, my lord.’ Barnabas Thorpe was feeling some strain. The sweat was pouring down his face and Powerscourt didn’t think it came from the effort of turning the key. It was fear, or something worse. ‘I think I’ll leave you now. I have things to do. If you’ll excuse me, my lord.’
The clattering of boot on board told him that both his companions had fled the field. Powerscourt pushed the door hard with his shoulder and he was in. In with the paintings of Michelangelo Merisi, more commonly known by the name of the village where he was born. Caravaggio.
16
Powerscourt felt like some underground explorer deep below the earth’s crust who rolls away a vast boulder to find himself in an enormous chamber, the walls adorned with cave paintings of strange creatures who no longer roam the earth. The air was filled with dust and a horrid smell, a compound of heaven knew how many dead insects and rotting objects and the passing of time itself. The dust was so thick that when his foot touched what was left of the dingy carpet small clouds billowed out over his shoe.
Powerscourt coughed harshly and tried to find some fresh air. The room was on the top corner of the house with a pair of windows looking out over the garden towards the lake and another pair on the adjacent wall looking out over a dark courtyard. Powerscourt pulled out his penknife and inserted it between the edge of the surround and the wood holding the glass of the window. His blade got stuck every now and then but it did eventually manage to run up and down the sash. He spent a few minutes heaving and shoving at the catch in the middle of the window and pulled as hard as he could. For a moment his coughing grew worse. Then the window shot upwards and fresh air flowed into the room. Powerscourt turned his attention to the other windows. After a quarter of an hour he managed to open two of them. You could, he decided, almost feel the bad air rushing past. A couple of rooks, who could never have seen the windows open in their lifetime, flew past twice as if to make sure their eyes were not deceiving them.
The room was very large. To the right of the door were a couple of tall cupboards. Another two were on the left of the door, with a bed in the corner, the pillows limp and flaccid to the touch, the bedcover, which might once have been a bright yellow, now a dingy brown. In front of the long windows looking over the garden stood a couple of easels, one considerably higher than the other, both festooned in dust and cobwebs. A large mirror was wedged between them. In the corner, still standing to attention, stood a grandfather clock whose face announced the time as twenty minutes past three. Time had not moved in here for over a century. There was an alcove to one side of the bed with the remains of a curtain drawn across the space.