Patrick Butler was drumming his fingers on the table. He longed to reach inside his pocket for notebook and pen. Anne Herbert was feeling rather faint. Lady Lucy found herself humming one of the arias in the Messiah to herself under her breath. Johnny Fitzgerald had not touched his port for at least a quarter of an hour. Outside a lone owl hooted into the night.
‘Surely Francis,’ Johnny said, ‘this makes the case for the Archbishop and the authorities all the stronger. All this history and stuff about the monasteries before.’
‘That’s the problem.’ Powerscourt surveyed his little audience one by one. ‘I don’t think it does. You see, it seems quite possible to me that the people organizing the return to Catholicism are not the murderers. They may be just as upset and confused by it as we are. The murderer may be somebody completely different, though I doubt it. I suspect the two are so closely linked you couldn’t get a hair between them, but I can’t prove it.’ Powerscourt suddenly realized, looking at Anne Herbert, that she might faint at any moment. Perhaps it had been a mistake inviting them here.
‘And there, I suggest,’ he said, smiling at Lady Lucy, ‘we leave things for now. I was going to ask your advice but that can wait for another time. Just one last point. I think we should all pray very hard that none of those involved in the Catholic Compton conspiracy change their minds between now and Easter Sunday.’
‘Surely, Francis,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘we should be praying the other way round, that they should repent of their ways and remain as Anglicans.’
‘On the contrary,’ said Powerscourt, ‘if they change their minds, then the murderer will treat them in the same way he has treated their predecessors. Anglican or Catholic, even in Compton you’re better off alive than dead.’
As Powerscourt rode into Compton the next morning to confer with Chief Inspector Yates he began thinking about the letters he knew he had to write to the Bishop of Exeter, the Lord Lieutenant and the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Private Secretary. ‘Please forgive me if the contents of this letter seem rather extraordinary,’ he said to himself as his horse trotted down the country lanes. No, that wasn’t quite right. ‘Please rest assured that however bizarre the contents of this letter may appear, I am still in full possession of my faculties.’ That wouldn’t do either. Powerscourt was convinced that once he began telling people he wasn’t mad, they would instantly jump to the opposite conclusion. Maybe he should confine himself to the facts. But a bald narrative of events might not be credible either. One letter he had written before his breakfast that day to one of his employers, Mrs Augusta Cockburn, sister of the late John Eustace, currently residing in a small villa outside Florence. He regretted very much, he told her, having to confirm her suspicions that her brother had been murdered. He did not give details of the manner of his death. He promised to write again shortly with the name of the murderer. He hoped that the Italian postal service was not too quick.
Chief Inspector Yates was reading a pile of reports in his little office at the back of the police station and making notes in a large black book. Inside, Powerscourt knew, the Chief Inspector was collating the movements and the alibis of every single resident of the Close. Powerscourt had already told him about the death of John Eustace. Now he told him about the plans for the mass defection to Rome on Easter Sunday. The Chief Inspector was astonished.
‘God bless my soul, my lord, are you sure? This will tear Compton in half.’
Powerscourt went back over his reasons, the secret of the Archdeacon’s visits to Melbury Clinton, the Canon’s pilgrimages to Mass in Ledbury St John, the connections with the late Cardinal Newman. Above all, he told him about his conversations with Dr Blackstaff.
‘Isn’t it all illegal, this sort of thing?’ said the Chief Inspector vaguely, only too aware that his previous training and experience did not equip him to quote section or subsection of Act of Parliament.
‘I’m sure it’s illegal,’ said Powerscourt. ‘But God knows which Act of Parliament it is. Before Catholic Emancipation I think it was illegal to celebrate Mass in an Anglican church, but I don’t know if this still applies. But at the moment nobody has actually done anything illegal. You can’t arrest people on suspicion of being about to do something in a week’s time.’
‘Do you think it helps with the murders?’ asked the Chief Inspector.
‘I’m not really sure that it does,’ said Powerscourt. ‘It may be that the Catholic conspirators are as upset about the killings as we are. What terrifies me is what the killer may do if we start asking around about the mass conversions. I think he may kill again. I’m sure he might kill again. He’s not like any murderer I have ever come across before, Chief Inspector. I feel he’s driven by a kind of madness that ordinary mortals simply wouldn’t understand.
‘You know as well as I do,’ Powerscourt went on, ‘about the most common motives for murder. Money. Greed. Hatred. Jealousy. Revenge. I’m not sure that any of those work in this case. Hatred perhaps. Revenge maybe.’
‘Seems to me, my lord,’ said the Chief Inspector, ‘that there’s domestic murder, and then there’s state killing in war if that’s the right word. Millions must have been killed in wars in the name of religion, isn’t that right?’
Powerscourt thought of the Christians massacred in the Colosseum, of purges and pogroms throughout the Middle Ages, Cathars despatched in their mountain fortress of Montsegur in the Pyrenees or slaughtered wholesale in the amphitheatre at Verona, the ruinous wars of religion that swept over Europe in the sixteenth century, the list went on and on.
‘I’m sure you’re right, Chief Inspector,’ said Powerscourt. ‘It’s only that the wars of religion seem to have returned to Compton a century or two after they finished everywhere else.’
‘This has just come for you, Lady Powerscourt.’ Andrew McKenna handed over a rather battered envelope with the address written in a childish hand. ‘Lady Powerscourt, Fairfield Park.’
‘Did you see how it got here, McKenna?’ Lady Lucy asked, slitting open her missive.
‘No, I did not, madam. It was found lying inside the front door. It must have been delivered by hand.’
‘Dear Lady Powerscourt,’ Lady Lucy read. The letters were large and sprawled across the page. ‘Could you meet us in the south transept to the side of the choir just before five thirty this afternoon. William and Philip, choirboys.’ McKenna took his leave. Lady Lucy was rejoicing. These were the two choirboys she had managed to speak to on a number of occasions after the rehearsals for the Messiah. Now they were asking for a meeting. Now perhaps she would discover the secrets of their fear and their unhappiness. Now perhaps she would be able to improve their situation. Never had she seen a collection of little boys so constantly crestfallen, so much in need of love and proper food and attention. She checked her watch. It was shortly after half-past four. Should she wait for Francis to return from his visit to the Chief Inspector? She knew how worried he had been about her interest in the choir, how often he had spelt out how dangerous it could be. She knew he might insist on accompanying her. Then she made up her mind. They were her special interest, these children. She had gone out of her way to try to get close to them. The presence of a man might put them off. Maybe the boys would say nothing at all. She scribbled a brief note to her husband, saying she had popped into Compton and hoped to return by half-past six at the latest. She did not specify precisely where she was going.
Lord Francis Powerscourt thought he could manage the first paragraph of his letter to the Prime Minister’s Private Secretary on his ride back to Fairfield Park. He remembered Rosebery telling him that the Prime Minister himself was unwell, his mind now so exhausted by the pressure of work that he had had to give up his beloved Foreign Office, his mighty frame so weary that he frequently fell asleep in cabinet meetings. Schomberg McDonnell, Private Secretary, confidant, intimate, the man who knew where all the Prime Minister’s political enemies were buried, he was the man to write to.