For once Powerscourt had lost patience.
‘You would appear to have had a murderer in your house for some days. For all we know he may still be there. I can’t see that a pair of eyes and ears below stairs is a matter of much consequence in these circumstances.’
Suter turned red. Shepstone muttered something into his beard. But they had agreed.
Powerscourt had been writing a lot of letters. He wrote to Lord Rosebery asking for names and addresses out of the Government machine. He wrote to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, requesting an interview on a matter of the utmost delicacy. He wrote to the Russian Ambassador. He wrote to the London end of the Irish Office in Dublin, asking for an interview with the senior man engaged in countering terrorism and subversion in that unhappy island. He wrote to Sir William Suter, asking when the equerries at Sandringham at the time of the murder had started their tours of duty. And he wrote to Lady Lucy, accepting an invitation to tea in her little house in Chelsea.
Rosebery was looking very cheerful, seated in the small library at the back of the first floor of the Athenaeum in Pall Mall. The room had no discernible wallpaper, only books. Two dark brown globes sat on either side of the fireplace. A Chinese chess set lay on a table by the window, the game unfinished, White in the ascendant. Powerscourt saw that the Black forces had been reduced to a solitary rook, a couple of pawns and a beleaguered king – all the rest were prisoners, neatly locked up according to importance behind the White lines.
‘I’ve just been spending a great deal of money, Powerscourt,’ said Rosebery happily.
Powerscourt wondered how large a sum would constitute a great deal of money in Rosebery’s book.
‘About ?15,000, since I can see you thinking about it!’ Rosebery laughed. ‘It is a rare library of ancient volumes, many from the Renaissance, that came unexpectedly on to the market in Rome. But come. To more serious business. I have a lot of information for you. First,’ Rosebery delved into a folder in front of him, ‘here are six of these letters. They’re like a blank cheque – you fill in the name and address as you think fit – requesting the recipient to provide all the help and assistance in their power to Lord Francis Powerscourt in the conduct of his current investigation, which is of the highest national importance. They’re signed by the Prime Minister in person. I thought that might be going it a bit strong myself, until Salisbury reminded me that somebody had just murdered the heir presumptive to the throne.’
Powerscourt placed the letters solemnly in his pocketbook.
‘The man you want to see about the Britannia, that naval training ship Prince Eddy and Prince George attended all those years ago, is the Admiralty archivist. He’s called Simkins, I think, and he lives in some obscure place in the Admiralty just down the road. He knows you’re coming. The man you want to see about the Irish up their telegraph poles is called Knox. He’ll be in London tomorrow and will see you in the afternoon – I just thought I would give your own request a bit of a nudge there.’
Rosebery smiled the patronising smile of the man on the inside, helping out a new arrival in the Whitehall jungle.
‘Now, if that is all there is for now, my dear Powerscourt, I had better hasten to my bankers. They will not be best pleased if they discover unexpectedly that I have just written a cheque for ?15,000.’
13
The waiting area at the Admiralty was the largest Powerscourt had ever seen, enough to hold an entire ship’s company. The pictures on the walls, reaching ever higher towards the plastered ceiling, were all of great warships under sail. Not a single vessel was powered by steam, after a mere thirty years still too modern for the First Sea Lord and his lieutenants.
Perhaps, thought Powerscourt, its size was to accommodate all those who waited here in the Navy’s great days a hundred years before during the Napoleonic Wars; gun manufacturers anxious to show off their latest cannon, chartmakers with fresh maps of unknown lands, mad inventors with startling new versions of compasses and sextants, orolobes and longitudinal clocks. Here desperate captains with no commands, living on half pay, their uniforms patched by loyal wives and mistresses, loitered in hope of preferment. Here Howe and St Vincent, Collingwood and Nelson had come for their sealed instructions. Here they had planned the twenty-year-long blockade of Napoleon’s France. Here they had planned Nelson’s funeral, his body brought to the heart of London on its last journey up the River Thames.
‘Lord Powerscourt, sir? This way, if you please.’
A solemn porter broke Powerscourt’s reverie and led him through the labyrinth to his destination. Powerscourt doubted if he could have found his way out unaided. They climbed staircases with yet more paintings of the age of sail. They went past entire departments labelled Navigation, Gunnery, Engines. At last, at the end of a dark corridor lit by a single skylight, they found the door called Archive.
‘Come in, come in. Who are you?’
Everything about the naval archivist was thin. His frame was thin and looked very old, his nose was thin, his long bony fingers were thin. His voice was a thin whine. Even his room was long and thin, like a naval galley; it stretched back for nearly a hundred feet in the gloomy light, files rising towards the roof like midshipmen climbing the top-gallants.
‘Mr Simkins, how kind of you to see me. My name is Powerscourt. I believe you are expecting me.’
‘Are you writing a book? Most of the people who come here are writing books.’ Simkins peered at Powerscourt over his thin spectacles.
‘No, I am not writing a book.’
‘Biography then. You must be one of these biographers.’
‘I’m afraid I am neither of those. I believe you have had a letter about my visit.’
‘An article for one of the naval societies perhaps? The history of a particular ship? I don’t recall an HMS Powerscourt ever gracing the waves, but I could be wrong.’
Powerscourt suspected that Simkins was deaf. The dust had gathered in layers round the edges of his great desk, almost invisible between papers and files from long ago.
‘Can’t believe they’ve sent somebody to see me who isn’t a historian. First time in thirty years apart from some rum manufacturer from the West Indies who got sent up here by mistake. Letter, did you say? Letter from where? Letter from whom?’
‘It’s a letter from the Prime Minister’s office.’
‘Who is the Prime Minister now? I seem to have forgotten.’
Powerscourt wondered if Simkins ever left this office. Maybe he sleeps here as well, he thought, guarding the secrets of the naval past with his bony frame and his peaceful spectacles.
‘It’s Lord Salisbury, Mr Simkins. Lord Salisbury.’
‘I heard you the first time. There’s no need to shout.’ Like many deaf people Simkins had sudden, unexpected bursts of perfect hearing, like the calm in the eye of the storm. ‘Salisbury, you say. Not a naval man, I think. Is he one of those Hatfield Salisburys? Cecils, all that sort of thing?’
It seemed to be easier for the archivist to place the Prime Minister in the sixteenth century rather than the nineteenth.
‘The same,’ said Powerscourt.
‘Here we are. Why didn’t you say what you were about at the beginning? Now then. I see what you are after.’ Simkins peered over his spectacles once again. ‘You are a historian after all. You want to know the names of the officers commanding HMS Britannia, naval training ship, in 1878, 1879, and the captain and officers of the vessel Bacchante which took the two young Princes round the world. Damned strange name for a ship, the Bacchante, don’t you think, Lord Powerscourt? Weren’t the original Bacchantes lusty maidens with very few clothes on who danced about in the Greek islands getting drunk and worse?’