Death and the Jubilee (10 page)

‘So big now, they say, Berlin. And getting bigger all the time,’ the old lady went on. ‘Carl said he could hardly recognize it. Great big buildings for the Parliament and
things. It wasn’t like that when we were young.’

‘Why was he going to Frankfurt and Berlin? Was it a holiday?’ Powerscourt was finding politeness increasingly difficult.

‘You never can take a holiday from a bank, Father used to say. There was something wrong at the bank. Even when you are away you take the worries with you, even to somewhere as beautiful
as the Lakes. Poor Father.’

‘Did Carl think there was something wrong at the bank? Something wrong at his bank in the City?’ Powerscourt was struggling now to hide his irritation.

‘Father used to say the only time a banker could ever feel at peace was when they put him in his grave.’ Old Miss Harrison stared defiantly at Powerscourt. ‘Well, Carl is there
too now. I hope he’s found some peace there. He said there was precious little peace left to him in his last years.’

‘Was it Carl saying that, or your father? About precious little peace?’ Powerscourt realized that he wanted to shake her but he knew it would be hopeless.

‘Father was buried in that big church in the middle of Frankfurt. So many people there, such a fine service. It rained too, I remember, even though it was early summer. Not as bad as the
rain here. I can hear it upstairs, you know, rattling on my window and making noises on the roof. There are very strange noises on the roof sometimes. They seem to have stopped now.’

‘What was Carl worried about?’ I’m on my last throw now, Powerscourt thought to himself, I can’t take much more of this.

‘Mother’s buried there too,’ the old woman said to him, ‘in the same church, just eight months later. She never really recovered, you know. They say that sorrow brought
it on. Do you think that can be true, Lord Powerscourt? If sorrow could kill us there wouldn’t be so many people left in the world, would there?’

‘Indeed,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Was it the bank that Carl was worried about?’

‘Always worries in a bank, Father used to say. Always worries, yes. Worries. All the time.’

‘Did Carl say what it was that worried him about the bank?’

‘Always worries in a Bank, Father used to say . . .’

Powerscourt wondered if the old lady was better in the mornings. Probably she was. Maybe he would ask Lady Lucy to come and speak to her in German. Will I end up like that, he asked himself, my
mind meandering round the past like a stream making its way to the sea? He thought he would rather be dead.

There were only two facts he could take away with him, the confirmation of what Fitzgerald had told him about the trips to Germany and the knowledge that Old Mr Harrison had been worried about
the bank. At the very back of his mind he had filed away what she had said about the noises on the roof, terrible noises that the rain could not have made. But something else could have made the
noises. A body perhaps, being pulled along above a household meant to be asleep, a body due to be decapitated in the woods, a body destined to be dumped in the river, a body destined to be found
many miles away bumping alongside a ship moored by London Bridge.

As he walked the two hundred yards to the head groom’s cottage Powerscourt wondered if Samuel Parker would be better in the mornings too. The light was fading fast now.
He could see the church clearly on his left and below that, partly hidden by the trees, the faint outline of Blackwater lake.

‘Do come in, Lord Powerscourt, please.’ Samuel Parker met him at the door. He was in his seventies now, but still tall and upright in his bearing. Years of work in the open air had
turned his face brown to match his eyes. ‘Mabel isn’t here just now. She’s over at the church helping with the flowers and making sure the place is tidy.’ He showed
Powerscourt a chair by the fire. Blackwater logs burned brightly in the Blackwater grate. The walls were covered with pictures and sketches of horses.

‘Are these splendid animals ones that have passed through your hands over the years, Mr Parker?’ Start with what they know best, Powerscourt reminded himself, wondering if he had
adopted completely the wrong tone with the old lady in the big house.

‘They are, Lord Powerscourt, all of them. Those three just to your right were all born in the same year. Aeneas, Anchises and Achilles, they were. Old Mr Harrison always gave them names
from the past and we had a different letter of the alphabet for each year. One year we had Caesar, Cassius and Cleopatra. Old Mr Harrison used to say to me, “We’ve got to watch these
horses this year, Samuel. The original Cassius went in for stabbing Caesar to death in some great building in Rome and before that Caesar had been carrying on with that Cleopatra woman in
Egypt.” It always used to make him laugh, that, even when he was telling me for the twentieth time.’

‘Was Achilles very fast, Mr Parker?’ Powerscourt saw that the horses were a splendid introduction to Samuel Parker’s world. He had, after all, spent his entire life with
them.

‘Achilles fast, Lord Powerscourt? Fast? That he was not. Oh no. He should have been with a name like that, but he was a slow creature, very slow. Very good-natured, mind you.’

‘We used to have some splendid horses in the Army, Mr Parker, really magnificent.’ Powerscourt thought that Samuel Parker might have served in the Army as a young man. A lot of the
grooms had learnt their trade in the Royal Horse Artillery or the Transport Divisions.

‘Was you in the Army, my lord? I wanted to join when I was young but my mam wouldn’t let me. You’ve got a good steady job here, she used to say, no point in joining up to get
killed in foreign parts. I don’t know but she might have been right. But did you see the world, my lord?’

‘Well, I spent some years in India,’ said Powerscourt, ‘up in the north, near the border with Afghanistan. I was working in Army Intelligence.’

‘Was you now, Lord Powerscourt!’ Samuel Parker leaned forward in his chair. ‘I would have loved to have gone to some of those places and seen some of those wild natives,
dervishes and hottentots or whatever they were called. Did you meet some strange foreigners, Lord Powerscourt?’

Powerscourt smiled. ‘I did, Mr Parker. Some of the tribesmen up there tried to kill me. They were very wild. They were very fond of their horses, though.’

‘Were there great mountains, Lord Powerscourt, with snow on them all the year round?’

Powerscourt thought he could detect the heart of a traveller beating strongly in Samuel Parker, who had spent his entire life in the calm and order of the Oxfordshire countryside.

‘The mountains, Mr Parker, are huge. Huge. Nearly thirty thousand feet, some of them, with snow covering the peaks even at the height of summer. I have a book of photographs of the great
mountains at home. I shall bring it for you next time I come.’

Samuel Parker’s honest face lit up with pleasure. ‘That would be so kind, Lord Powerscourt. But I fear we are getting away from our business here. Mr Frederick said you wanted to
talk to me about Old Mr Harrison.’

‘I do. Perhaps you could just tell me about his time here, how he spent his days, what your own dealings with him were. Take your time, Mr Parker, take your time.’

‘Well,’ replied Samuel Parker, trying to arrange his memories into some sort of order for a man who had seen the great mountains of the Himalayas and had a book to prove it.
‘Old Mr Harrison, he’d been living here most of the time for about the last ten years or so. Some of the time he was in London, sometimes he was abroad. For the bank, you
understand.’

He paused. Powerscourt said nothing.

‘My duties had to do with him and the horses. Ten years ago he would ride about the country quite a lot, on Caesar or Anchises – he was always very fond of Anchises. Then, these last
few years or so, he was only able to make the journey from the house round the lake. He liked to go round it every day. “It looks different every single day of the year, Samuel,” he
used to say to me, “and I want to see it changing.”’

For a moment Samuel Parker vanished into his memories.

‘Then, about a year or two ago, something changed. He wasn’t as well as he had been after his accident. It hurt his leg something terrible, that accident, he had to keep on going
back to the doctor. I blame that Cleopatra myself, she always was an obstinate beast with a mind of her own. After that, he would ride very slowly, sometimes on a pony. And this was different
too.’

Samuel Parker scratched his head and put some more logs on the fire.

‘He began bringing work with him. Letters he had received, papers from the bank, I shouldn’t wonder. You haven’t seen those temples by the lake yet, Lord Powerscourt, have
you?’

Powerscourt shook his head.

‘Sometimes he would work in there at his papers. We had a folding table we used to bring and he would work away, writing letters and things inside one of those temples. Sometimes he would
give me letters to post for him. He got very slow towards the end, Lord Powerscourt. He was old and his leg was bad but I’m sure his mind still worked faster than his feet if you follow
me.’

Samuel Parker stopped. Powerscourt waited. Perhaps there was more to come. Perhaps Samuel Parker had exhausted his memories.

‘That is very interesting,’ he said at length, ‘and admirably told. Perhaps I could just ask you about one or two things, Mr Parker?’

‘Of course you can, my lord. I was never very good at long speeches, if you follow me.’

‘Can you remember exactly when he began to bring his work down to the lake?’

Samuel Parker looked into his fire. He shook his head slowly. ‘I don’t think I can, my lord. All I can remember is that it was about the time we began to hear about the plans for
this new Jubilee up in London. Mabel reminded me of that the other day. She is very fond of things like Jubilees, my lord. I took her all the way up to London for that other one in ’87. She
can remember all the details to this day, can Mabel. I don’t suppose either of us will get there for this one though. Mabel’s legs wouldn’t be up to it, so they
wouldn’t.’

‘And when Old Mr Harrison took his papers down to the lake,’ Powerscourt sounded his most innocent, ‘do you suppose he left some of them behind sometimes? In one of the temples
or somewhere like that?’

‘I’d never thought about that, my lord.’ Parker fell silent for a moment. ‘Come to think of it, he could have done, I suppose. Sometimes he didn’t seem to have as
many of these papers going back as he did going down, if you follow me.’

‘And would you know,’ Powerscourt was looking at him intently as the night finally closed in outside, ‘where exactly he left them?’

‘Do you mean, my lord, that they might be still there, these papers?’

‘I do, Mr Parker.’

‘God bless my soul, Lord Powerscourt, if you’ll pardon the expression. I’d never have thought of that. I suppose they might be.’ He scratched his head again as if unsure
what to believe.

‘And the letters, Mr Parker,’ Powerscourt went on, ‘the ones he gave you to post. Did you think that was unusual, asking you to take charge of them rather than leaving them in
the big house for the servants to send off?’

‘I thought it was unusual at first, my lord. Then I sort of got used to it. Mabel used to think Old Mr Harrison was making secret investments somewhere abroad.’

‘Were the letters for abroad?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘Why, yes, I suppose they were. Mostly to Germany, Frankfurt, I remember, and Berlin, wherever that is. And some for a place called Hamburg. Mabel looked that one up in a map at the
library.’

Powerscourt wondered if he had a rival in the detection business in Mrs Parker, obviously an assiduous researcher.

‘Did he bring letters with him down to the lake?’ Powerscourt went on. ‘Letters that might have come from these foreign places?’

‘I think he might have, my lord.’ Samuel Parker scratched his head. ‘I do seem to remember that sometimes they weren’t opened. And they had foreign stamps on them. Mabel
does like to look at a foreign stamp.’

Powerscourt wondered again about the precise role played by Mrs Mabel Parker in her husband’s affairs but he let it pass.

‘Could I make a suggestion, Mr Parker?’ Powerscourt was already planning another visit to Blackwater House. ‘I have to come back here again very soon, to talk to the people in
the big house, you understand. Perhaps we could go on the same walk round the lake you used to take with Old Mr Harrison. Sometimes revisiting the places helps bring back more memories. Not that
you haven’t remembered very well already.’

Powerscourt smiled a smile of congratulation.

‘There is just one other thing, my lord,’ said Parker. ‘You’re not the first gentleman to have been round here asking questions about Old Mr Harrison. There was another
gentleman round here the other day.’

Samuel Parker paused again.

‘He was a very curious gentleman, my lord. I thought he was almost too curious. Very friendly, of course, but I wouldn’t have said he was as discreet as yourself.’

Powerscourt rejoiced at this description of Johnny Fitzgerald. Not as discreet as himself, he liked that. He would tell Lady Lucy about it this evening. But as he set off for his train back to
London one question above all others troubled him.

Why had Old Mr Harrison taken his business down to the lake? Why had he posted his foreign correspondence in this unusual way? Was it normal banker’s caution? Was it merely the whim, the
foible of a very old man? Or did he think he was being spied on inside the drawing rooms and the bedrooms of Blackwater House?

Powerscourt found he had company on his return to Markham Square. Johnny Fitzgerald was doing him the honour of sampling the latest delivery to the Powerscourt cellars
below.

‘I was just saying to Lady Lucy, Francis,’ Fitzgerald began without the least hint of apology, ‘that you need to sample some of this stuff once it arrives. They might have sent
you the wrong year or the feebler stuff from the wrong side of the hill.’ Powerscourt kissed his wife and turned to his friend.