Death on the Holy Mountain (2 page)

Lord Francis Powerscourt had been an investigator for many years now. He had served in Army Intelligence in India and South Africa and had recently returned from investigating the murder of a
British diplomat on the Nevskii Prospekt in St Petersburg. Apart from the twins, he and Lady Lucy had two older children, Thomas, aged twelve, and Olivia, aged ten. He had written the book during a
two-year gap when he gave up detection at the request of his wife, after he was nearly killed investigating a couple of deaths in one of London’s Inns of Court.

‘Oh, Francis,’ was all Lady Lucy could say when she saw the books. ‘Oh, Francis,’ she said again, and began to flick through the book and the illustrations.
‘I’m so proud of you, Francis, we’ll have to have a party. But tell me, what did that yellow waistcoat man want with you? Why are you going to Kingsclere in the
morning?’

‘I don’t know, my love,’ said Powerscourt, handing over the letter. ‘When you have read that, you will know as much as I do.’

‘A troubling and troublesome matter.’ Lady Lucy looked up at her husband. ‘Do you suppose it has to do with divorce, people running off with other people’s wives and
husbands, that sort of thing?’

‘I do hope not,’ said her husband. ‘We shall find out tomorrow.’ Powerscourt stretched out in his favourite armchair by the fire and began to read his book. He began, as
is only proper, with the introduction. He did not feel it necessary to tell his wife that, as well as vast properties in the south of England, the Earl of Lincoln also had great estates in
Ireland.

Gervase St Clair de Bonneval Brandon, eighth Earl of Lincoln, was waiting for Powerscourt in what the butler told him was the Great Ante Chamber of Kingsclere, a vast
Palladian mansion just outside the little town of the same name. Powerscourt had often wondered why most of these people ended up living somewhere other than their names. The Dukes of Norfolk were
not to be found near Diss or Fakenham or Cromer, but in the heart of rural Sussex. The Earls of Pembroke were nowhere close to Haverfordwest or Fishguard but outside Salisbury. And these Lincolns
you might expect to see near Boston or Grantham or Louth were nestling happily in the peaceful county of Hampshire.

Brandon was in his early sixties with a formidable shock of black hair on top of a broad forehead. His jowls were very heavy, his eyes dark brown. Powerscourt thought they showed a lot of pain.
He was wearing dark trousers and a rather raffish black smoking jacket over a cream shirt. Behind him Powerscourt glimpsed a vision of gold leaf and elaborate plasterwork, of proportions made in
heaven, of red Chippendale chairs and a painted ceiling, of marble-topped tables and embossed doors, of Axminster carpets and the seventeenth-century heiresses and long-faced aristocrats created by
the Court painter to Charles the First, Sir Anthony Van Dyck. Ladders and great planks were being moved around the room and there was a subdued muttering in French which Powerscourt couldn’t
quite catch. He felt privileged to have caught even a fleeting sight of one of the great rooms of England, the Double Cube Room, made, he believed, to designs by Inigo Jones. The owner of this
slice of earthly paradise stared at Powerscourt from his deep red leather armchair. There was a small table beside him with papers scattered across it as if the Earl had been reading them before
Powerscourt’s arrival.

‘Damned doctors!’ said Brandon, trying unsuccessfully to rise from his chair to shake his visitor’s hand. ‘Damned medicines!’ He placed his hands on the side of his
chair and made another attempt to lever himself upright. His face grew red from the exertions. Powerscourt felt that offers of help would be inappropriate for this grounded aristocrat.

‘Damned gout!’ he spluttered. ‘Why does the bloody thing have to come back the day you come to call? Damn my calf! Damn my other calf! Damn the bloody medicine! Damn the bloody
doctors!’

‘Please don’t trouble yourself,’ said Powerscourt emolliently. ‘Please stay right where you are,’ and he leaned forward and shook Brandon by the hand in his sitting
position.

‘Damned doctors!’ said the irascible Earl. ‘Do you know I once got this bloody gout in my big toe? Not once, twice, now I think about it. Do you think those damned medicine
wallahs could do anything about it? Of course not!’

Powerscourt wondered if the whole morning would be spent on an extended philippic against his physicians. There was a loud bang from next door and the sound of a body falling to the floor. A
string of French expletives followed, most of them completely new to Powerscourt who would, until now, have described himself as reasonably fluent in Gallic oaths. The accident seemed to cheer the
invalid up, somebody perhaps more seriously handicapped than himself and about to be equally dependent on the passing whims of the medical profession.

‘Damned picture restorers!’ he said. ‘Cost me a bloody fortune and all they can do is fall off their ladders all day.’ With enormous effort and a continuous salvo of
oaths the Earl managed to put one leg over the other. It appeared to bring some relief.

‘Damn my leg, Powerscourt,’ he said, ‘damn the bloody gout, we’d better get down to business, what!’

‘By all means,’ Powerscourt replied, accompanied by a groan from the picture-restoring department next door.

‘Don’t know if you know this, Powerscourt, but we own large estates in Ireland as well as round here.’ Brandon waved an arm in a circular fashion as if to indicate the range of
his English holdings. ‘Good land, Westmeath and places like that, none of your damned peat bogs and perpetual rainfall out there in the mists of County Mayo. Damn this disease!’ The
unfortunate Earl had apparently just endured a twitch of great ferocity in his lower leg which he was rubbing incredulously, as if in amazement that a part of his own anatomy could cause him so
much distress.

‘Thing is,’ Brandon winced as he carried on, ‘there has recently been a series of robberies. Not just at our place but the one next door as well.’

Powerscourt felt slightly let down. If asked, he would have said he didn’t do burglaries. Murders, yes. Blackmail, yes. Disappearing diplomats, yes. But men with blackened faces climbing
through a downstairs window and making off with the family silver, no. Some of his distaste must have made itself apparent. Brandon almost managed a laugh.

‘Don’t go looking down your nose at our little bit of crime yet,’ he said, holding firmly on to his calf. ‘Wait till you hear what they took, these Celtic
burglars.’

‘What did they take?’ said Powerscourt, feeling like the feed man in the music hall.

‘They didn’t take the obvious things,’ Brandon carried on, interrupted by a torrent of French from the Double Cube Room. ‘They didn’t take the silver, they
didn’t touch any of the antiques, they didn’t look for any cash, they just took paintings.’

‘Paintings?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘What sort of paintings?’

‘In my place, called Butler’s Court, the family is called Butler. We own a great heap of land there, the Butlers own another great heap, they’re our relations, they live there,
they farm the land for us. They’ve been there for hundreds of years and they’re related to those other Butlers who own half of Munster. Come to that, they’re related to about half
the quality in the south of Ireland. So damned few of them left they’ll all be bloody well interbreeding soon.’ He paused briefly as if contemplating incest rife from Offaly to the
Kerry peninsula. ‘I digress,’ he went on. ‘Eight generations of Butlers have disappeared from the walls, going right back to a Sir Thomas Butler in the seventeenth century. Four
more Sir Thomases have gone – Butlers win no prizes for originality in naming their sons. And a Caravaggio. And a couple of Rubens.’

‘Do you know, Lord Brandon, if any of these portraits were by famous artists, any Romneys, Gainsboroughs, Reynolds, that sort of thing?’

‘Damned if I know, Powerscourt,’ said Brandon, eyeing his leg suspiciously. ‘I can just about keep it in my head that the stuff on the walls next door is by some character
called Van Dyck. Not a clue who did these Irish daubs at all. Funny thing, here I sit, surrounded, they tell me, by all this priceless stuff, and it doesn’t mean a thing to me. My father said
they should have bought horses with the money the ancestors spent. His father believed it would have been better invested buying vineyards in France. Never mind.’

Powerscourt wondered if the Caravaggio and a couple of Rubens were the real target and the portraits a diversion. Or was it the other way round?

‘And what about the neighbours, Lord Brandon? Did the same thing happen there?’

‘Ten out of ten, Lord Powerscourt. I can see now where your reputation comes from.’ Powerscourt wasn’t sure if he was being ironic.

‘Damn and blast these doctors!’ Another spasm had taken over the left leg. Brandon turned very red as he fought the pain and reached into his pocket for a bottle of pills. ‘Not
meant to take one of these for another two hours,’ he said bitterly, gulping down his medicine, and washing it down with a glass of red liquid from the lower shelf of his table that might
have been claret, or port. ‘Afraid we’ll have to be quick now, Powerscourt. I call these pills Davy Jones’s Lockers. Send you straight down in ten minutes or so.’

‘The other pictures?’ asked Powercourt.

‘Six generations of Connollys gone. One Titian. One Rembrandt. That’s it.’

‘Were the Connollys also in a straight line? Father to son to son without a break?’

‘They were,’ said Brandon.

‘Were there any requests left for the families? Any letters, any demands that they leave the country or anything like that?’

‘Not that I know of. Why should the thieves leave letters? Thieves don’t leave letters. Not as a rule. Not round here.’

‘They might in Ireland,’ said Powerscourt. ‘It could be the first stage in a rebel campaign to get them to hand over their money or their land, or sell it. You can get
excellent terms now if you want to dispose of your Irish estates.’

‘Damned if I see why we should have to sell our land if we don’t want to, to some Irish peasant or the Christian Brothers or the bloody Roman Catholic Church. Do you?’

‘I don’t think that’s the point at the moment,’ said Powerscourt, reluctant to plunge into the thickets of the Irish land question where so many had perished before him.
‘How are the families taking it?’

‘That’s just the point, Powerscourt,’ said Brandon. ‘The women are terrified. If the women go, they’ll take the children with them. The families will be destroyed.
The bloody rebels will have won without firing a shot. Will you take the case, Lord Powerscourt? I think they would all feel easier if they knew you were coming.’

‘Of course I’ll take the case, Lord Brandon. Be delighted to.’ Powerscourt did not say how ambivalent he felt about the whole thing. In one sense, these were his people. He had
been born into that class and that caste and their values must run in his veins. He had, earlier in his life, sold the great house in Ireland that carried his name because he and his sisters could
not bear to live there any more after their parents died. With that break had come a different break, a break with the anomalies and injustice that could, from time to time, tear his country apart.
Why should one man own fifteen thousand acres and another one only be allowed ten?

‘I’ve had my people make copies for you of all the correspondence so far. All the addresses and so on are in there.’ He handed over a large envelope which, for some reason,
reminded Powerscourt of the box with his books. ‘Next time you come,’ he waved a hand dismissively towards the Double Cube Room as if it were the servants’ quarters,
‘I’ll show you all the stuff.’

Brandon rubbed his leg once more. ‘I’m obliged to you, Powerscourt. Any time you need anything, money, influence, the House of Lords, just let me know.’ Powerscourt dimly
remembered his friend Lord Rosebery telling him that the gout-ridden aristocrat was a formidable fixer in the Upper House.

As he made his way down the staircase towards the front door he wondered just how strong Lord Brandon’s pills actually were. He was pursued by the familiar cry, ‘Damned doctors!
Damned gout! Damned pills!’

‘So there we have it,’ said Lord Francis Powerscourt, as he finished recounting the story of his trip to Kingsclere to Lady Lucy and Johnny Fitzgerald early that
evening in the drawing room at Markham Square. He left the documents lying on the table. Johnny had spent the day working on his next book, called
Northern Birds
. He had just finished the
first draft, he told the company, and proposed taking a break from birds before revising it. Powerscourt was astonished to see that his friend, a great consumer and connoisseur of wine, a man with
an account at no fewer than three of London’s leading wine merchants, was drinking tea.

‘Francis, Johnny,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘what do you make of it?’ She sensed, even at the very beginning of this case, that there was something about it, perhaps the return to
Ireland, that was making her husband uneasy.

Powerscourt looked at Johnny, who seemed to send him a nod that said the floor is yours.

‘It could be any one of a number of things,’ he began. ‘It could be a practical joke. The Irish landlord class are rather better at practical jokes than they are at many other
things.’

‘But not twice, surely, Francis?’ said Lady Lucy.

‘If you were a serious practical joker in Ireland, Lady Lucy,’ said Johnny, who was also of Irish extraction, peering sadly at his empty teacup and making a preliminary
reconnaissance of a bottle of Fleurie on the sideboard, ‘you could keep going till you’d done four or five or maybe even six houses. It would show people you were serious, if you see
what I mean.’

Lady Lucy wasn’t sure that she did see.

‘The real question, in a way,’ said Powerscourt, ‘is who is behind it. If it is a practical joker, then that seems to me, from the point of view of the Butlers and the
Connollys, to be tremendous news. An apple pie bed is infinitely preferable to a bullet in the back. One possibility is that the thieves are in it for the money. Either the pictures will turn up in
some gallery, probably in America, in the next year or so. Or there will be a blackmail note asking for so many thousands of pounds for the return of the paintings. The Irish landlord class have
always been devoted to their ancestors, they believe that the longer the line the more secure their claim to their lands.’