And with that he lumbered off in pursuit of the thieves.
‘Bloody fool,’ said Powerscourt bitterly. ‘If he’d planned the thing properly the whole investigation could be over by now. As it was with all the shrieking and wailing the thing was organized like a pack of nuns trying to rob a bank, for God’s sake.’
Fitzgerald tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Look, Francis, here’s our path, right here.’ They ran down the overgrown track as fast as they could. Brambles scratched at their faces. Low branches, virtually invisible in the dark, bumped into their heads. After a couple of hundred yards the path met the beach. Powerscourt pointed dramatically out to sea. In the distance a rowing boat was making good progress away from the shore. Powerscourt thought he could see two figures rowing in the centre and one at either end. The clouds cleared once more. In the ten seconds or so before the moon disappeared Powerscourt noticed two things. The figure at the stern was holding his right shoulder. The figure at the prow seemed to be drinking heavily from a large bottle. The two rowers laid down their oars briefly and waved to the two figures on the beach. A derisive cheer could be heard clearly on the strand. The thieves had got clean away.
‘I am so sorry, Lord Powerscourt.’ Harkness had joined them on the beach, the rowing boat scarcely visible now on the dark waters of the bay. ‘They came as we thought they would. We were there waiting for them. Then that bloody fool Sergeant made a mess of things.’
‘Never mind, Inspector,’ said Powerscourt, ‘we’ll just have to try again.’ He was about to suggest that Harkness might like to remove the informant who had given the false details for a fortnight or so, but the Inspector had vanished back into the night.
Up in the attics Eamonn the junior footman punched his colleague on the shoulder and pointed out towards the ocean. ‘Do you see, Seamus, they’re well away, so they are, in their rowing boat. Isn’t that grand!’
‘It is so,’ said Seamus. ‘Christ, it’s stiff you get lying here on this bloody floor. We’d better celebrate. Won’t they be like a flock of sheep at a narrow gate down there below.’ He groped his way towards a dilapidated bedside cupboard. ‘Is it Jameson’s you’d like now, or a touch of John Powers?’
Lady Lucy was waiting for them when they returned to Ormonde House. She knew, from long experience, that sleep would not come until she saw Francis was back. Dennis Ormonde, she told them, had accompanied her in the earlier stages of her vigil until his claret got the better of him and his tiny wife materialized out of the upper floors to order him to bed.
‘It was a fiasco, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt, drinking deeply from a cup of tea. ‘The thieves turned up all right. The local sergeant and his men made a complete mess of everything and the thieves got away in a rowing boat.’ He filled her in on the details as Johnny wrestled with a recalcitrant corkscrew.
‘Not without its lighter moments, mind you, Lady Lucy,’ Johnny said cheerfully, finally liberating the liquid in one of Ormonde’s finest bottles of burgundy. ‘I’ll always remember the man Burke, in his blue pyjamas, firing down the drive with a rifle that looked as if it last saw service at the Battle of the Boyne. And the thieves safe out there on the water, waving to Francis and me on the beach as if they were taking part in some bloody regatta. I thought that had a certain style.’
‘I have one question for you, Francis, before I go to bed,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘I’ve been thinking about all these robberies, you see, while I waited for you and Johnny to come back. You say there were four of them, four thieves, looking quite young?’ Powerscourt nodded. ‘Do you think they are the same four people who stole the paintings from Mr Moore and Mr Butler?’
‘What do you mean, Lucy?’ Powerscourt sat up in his chair and looked closely at his wife.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I just wondered if there mightn’t be different lots of thieves, you see. These ones tonight must have a lot of local knowledge to be aware of the path up from the beach. The other thieves had special knowledge of the houses they robbed. Could there have been two or three different lots of thieves, Francis, all working to the same master criminal?’
Powerscourt smiled. ‘How very clever of you to have worked that out, Lucy. I’ve been thinking about that for some time but I didn’t want to cause confusion in the people in these houses here. They’re worried enough about one lot of thieves, God knows, heaven knows what they’d be like with two or three sets of them.’
Lady Lucy felt proud to have joined her Francis’s thoughts to her own. She went to sleep happily, one arm draped carelessly across her husband’s shoulder. Powerscourt couldn’t sleep. He was searching for something in his memory, maybe two things. One of them, oddly enough, had been contained in Uncle Peter’s narrative of Parnell’s funeral. What the devil was it? Some detail in there would help unlock his investigation. As he drifted off to sleep, his mind racing between Dublin City Hall and the shooting star at Glasnevin cemetery, he said to himself that he might have to go back to Butler’s Court and borrow Uncle Peter’s book. How appropriate in Ireland, was his final thought, that events of 1891 might contain the key to what happened fourteen years later.
In a small cottage up in the mountains between Westport and Newport a doctor was just finishing his work. There was a peat fire burning in the hearth and a kettle of boiling water ready for further medicinal use if required. The young man whose shoulder had been wounded at Burke Hall was lying on the sofa, great white bandages now wrapped round his wound. Another of his colleagues from the ill-fated mission watched from a chair by the fire.
‘You’re going to be fine. I’ll come and see you here in the early evening in a couple of days,’ said the doctor, packing his equipment back in his bag. ‘I presume you don’t want to come to the surgery.’
‘Not just yet, doctor, thank you, but I will come when people won’t notice the bandages.’
The doctor left. He had asked neither the name nor the age nor the address of his patient. You couldn’t tell what you didn’t know. Much better to keep it that way.
The wounded young man was called Kevin. His colleague was Brendan and they had sat next to each other right through their education from their very first day at primary school.
‘Brendan,’ Kevin began, taking another sip of his glass of stout, ‘you do realize what was going on out there tonight, don’t you? I didn’t like to mention it in front of the other two just yet.’
‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ said Brendan.
‘Can’t you see? Those bastards were waiting for us. They knew we were coming. We’re lucky we’re not locked up.’
‘You can’t be sure. There might have been a change of plan.’
‘Gladstone’s arse a change of plan,’ said Kevin vehemently. ‘Somebody sent us a message that that place wasn’t guarded. That was almost an invitation to turn up. Well, I’m going to find that somebody. And when I do he’ll wish he’d never been born.’
10
The Orangemen surprised everybody. They were well behaved. They had, as yet, started no fights. They were polite to any locals they met. They had brought not a band, but a parson, or a minister as the clergymen of the Presbyterian Church were known. They consumed vast quantities of ham and eggs. The original mountain of potato bread baked in their honour by Dennis Ormonde’s cook had disappeared within hours of their arrival. Toasted, fried, eaten on its own with thick slabs of butter, the stuff disappeared like manna in the desert. Dennis Ormonde was delighted with them. Even Powerscourt, who had entertained great suspicions about their impact on the local community, had to admit that so far the experiment had been a success. Johnny Fitzgerald, who kept taking the pulse of local opinion in Campbell’s public house at the foot of Croagh Patrick and at one or two other drinking establishments nearby, was not so sure.