Death on the Holy Mountain

by David Dickinson

  ‘Don’t think the buggers are up there at all, Francis,’ he said, panting slightly. ‘You remember that noise a few moments ago?’

  Powerscourt nodded.

  ‘I think it might have been a boat,’ said Johnny. ‘The noise was the boat being pulled up on to the beach. Our friends may have come by sea.’

  ‘In which case,’ Powerscourt said, ‘there must be a path off to our left somewhere leading to the beach.’ They moved slowly back down the drive, searching for the track. The moon had gone in again. A figure bumped into them, coming the other way.

  ‘Who the devil are you?’ said the figure.

  ‘Don’t shoot, for God’s sake,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Far too much shooting going on round here, if you ask me. It’s Johnny and I here, Sergeant.’

  ‘And what are you doing, may I ask, going the wrong way, when them thieves are up ahead?’

  ‘It’s terrible cowards we are, don’t you see, Sergeant,’ said Johnny, ‘but we think they came in a boat. We’re looking for a path off this drive towards the beach.’

  ‘Boat?’ shouted the Sergeant, ‘Boat, did you say? What nonsense! You’re holding me up!’

  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.

  ‘There’s a sort of simmering resentment out there, Francis,’ he said, sitting on the lawn at the back of Ormonde House. ‘They don’t like it one little bit, the locals, but they’re not sure what to do. The priests have told them to be patient and to focus their attention on the pilgrimage up the Holy Mountain. That’s not many days off now, so we should have peace until then. I’m not sure about afterwards.’

  Powerscourt had smiled when he heard that the priests had been advising caution. He was not alone. He had a mighty ally, over six feet tall and over five foot wide, in the Archbishop’s Palace in Tuam. As ever, God was on everybody’s side in Ireland. The Catholics had their God with His very own auxiliaries like the Virgin Mary and all the saints. The Orangemen had theirs, a very different deity, a harsh God from the Old Testament. Lady Lucy had caught the end of one of the minister’s sermons when he spoke liberally of hellfire and referred to the Pope in Rome as Auld Red Socks. She was remarkably well informed about Presbyterians, having come across the breed in her youth in Scotland.

  ‘It’s like the other religions turned upside down, Francis,’ she had assured her husband who was anxious to be better informed about these strange people. ‘In the Catholic Church or the Anglican Church authority comes down from the top through the Pope or the archbishops and the ordinary bishops to the clergy. With the Presbyterians power flows out from the congregation. They choose their minister. They don’t have bishops or anything like that, just a man called the Moderator who’s elected every year. You could say it’s not authoritarian, it’s more democratic.’

  Before they had time for further discussion on comparative religions in Ireland, they heard a great shout from Dennis Ormonde, running towards them at full speed from the house.

  ‘Good news by Christ!’ he said, panting from his run. ‘Good news at last!’ He sank into a chair. ‘This letter is from Moore over at Moore Castle. Let me read the important passage to you. “I had meant to write before but I have been confined to bed with a severe attack of influenza. Two days ago, one of my paintings came back.”’ Johnny Fitzgerald stifled a cheer, remembering the return of the Butler picture. ‘“It was left at the bottom of my drive, as was the case with Butler’s, and again heavily wrapped up with stout twine. It is the full-length painting of my grandfather. I have examined it most closely as you can imagine and I do not believe it has been tampered with in any way. Naturally we are all delighted. I have restored it to its rightful place in the dining room. I hope you will be able to come and see it the day after tomorrow when I should have fully recovered. Maybe, by then, the other paintings will have been returned too.”’ Butler folded up the letter and put it in his pocket. ‘Is that not splendid news?’ he said.

  ‘Tremendous,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald. ‘Hurrah for the thieves who brought it back!’

  ‘I’m sure Mrs Moore must be relieved,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Such a worry when your interior decorations get messed around like this.’

  ‘And you, Powerscourt?’ asked Ormonde. ‘What is your reaction?’

  ‘I am afraid I cannot share in the general enthusiasm,’ said Doubting Thomas Powerscourt. ‘Look at the way it was returned, a carbon copy of the Butler painting’s trip back to Butler’s Court, and we all know what happened to that.’

  ‘But Moore says there is nothing wrong with it.’ Dennis Ormonde sounded cross. ‘Surely you accept that?’

  ‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ said Powerscourt. ‘For the moment I would advise caution. They’re not stupid, these thieves. What they did to the Butler hunt was really damned clever.’ Privately he wondered, as he told Lady Lucy later when they were alone, if Moore had paid up, if he had met the ransom demand, or part of it. The return of one picture might be calibrated with the amount of ransom handed over. Pay a quarter and we’ll give you a quarter of the paintings back.

  Cathal Rafferty was not a popular boy at his school in Butler’s Cross. He was a tubby child of thirteen years with very thick spectacles. At sport he was no good at all, so terrified when he received the ball that he froze on the spot and threw it away, usually in the direction of his opponents. In the playground he tried to make himself as inconspicuous as possible in case he was surrounded by his classmates with the chants of Pig or Fat Boy that preceded another beating or another trip to the boys’ lavatories where his head would be unceremoniously dumped in the bowl. In class Brother Riordan had simply given up on Cathal. He had tried kindness for a month, praising his incorrect arithmetic and his dismal spelling, but to no avail. He had tried force, a regular series of assaults with the strap to see if fear might succeed where kindness had failed. Cathal merely reflected that the classroom had become as dangerous a place as the playground. His performance did not improve. So now Brother Riordan ignored him altogether. He addressed no questions to him as he knew the answer would be wrong. Sometimes, in the days before his confession, the Brother wondered if he should not be trying harder with young Rafferty, but the thought of those thick spectacles and the blubbering lips put him off. Cathal had two elder brothers, both of them stars of the Gaelic football team, and they treated him little better than his classmates. Other boys, he knew, had friends they played with, friends who visited each other’s houses, friends they could talk to about their life at school and their dreams for the future. Cathal had only himself. He became his own friend. He turned into a solitary boy, given to roaming alone along the banks of the river or in the outer reaches of the demesne of Butler’s Court. He grew very curious about other people, as he talked to so few of them, often making up stories about their lives. Those two young people, for instance, the ones he’d just seen going into the Head Gardener’s Cottage, there was something strange going on there, he was sure of it. Cathal had known the previous Head Gardener, one of the few people in the county who had ever been kind to him, but now he had gone. Cathal decided to creep round to the back of the cottage where the windows were bigger and have a look inside.

  Johnpeter Kilross and Alice Bracken were getting dressed. This was their third or fourth visit to the place and they felt quite at home now. Soon, Johnpeter reckoned, they would be able to come here once a day.

  ‘Why are you in such a hurry?’ asked Alice, inspecting herself in a rather dirty mirror.

  ‘I’ve been asked to see Richard Butler,’ Johnpeter replied, ‘at five o’clock and I don’t want to be late.’

  ‘Sure, you’ve got plenty of time left,’ said the girl. ‘You don’t suppose he knows about us, do you?’

  ‘I don’t see how he could know anything about it at all. I expect it’s something to do with these paintings. Maybe he wants to ask my advice.’

  ‘The day Richard Butler asks you for your advice, Johnpeter Kilross, I shall ride naked down the drive and out into the main square in Butler’s Cross, so I shall.’

  ‘I expect it’s to do with those paintings,’ said Johnpeter.

  ‘Those wretched paintings,’ said Alice with great feeling. ‘I wish oil paint had never been invented. I did enjoy that one that came back, mind you, with Mr Mulcahy
and the rest of them on horseback. I thought that was really funny.’

  ‘Richard didn’t think it was funny. To this day the man Powerscourt and his friend haven’t told him where they put it.’

  ‘Maybe it’s in here, up in the attic,’ Alice laughed. ‘Maybe the Powerscourt man comes down to look at it first thing in the morning. What do you think of the wife, by the way, Lady Lucy or whatever she’s called? She seems well set on her husband, I’ll say that for her.’

  ‘She’s very attractive,’ said Johnpeter, fiddling with a shirt button.

  ‘Oh, is she now?’ said Alice, turning to reach for her stockings. ‘Is she more attractive than me then, Johnpeter Kilross?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said the young man loyally. He had frequently noticed with women that any praise of another was taken almost as a personal insult.

  Cathal Rafferty was crouching behind the hedge that marked the boundary of the Head Gardener’s Cottage garden. He could hear voices coming from the bedroom but he couldn’t make out the words. He thought it strange that people were in a bedroom in the late afternoon. If he stood up he could take a quick look in the window. The curtains were not properly closed. He was astonished at what he saw. There was a man and a woman getting dressed. The man had no trousers on and had very hairy legs. The woman had almost nothing on at all and was pulling up her stockings. What on earth was going on? Cathal ducked down behind the hedge and began to move away from the cottage as quickly as he could. There was some sort of grown-up secret going on in there. He remembered an overheard conversation between his eldest brother Michael and his friend in which they talked about a whore taking off her clothes faster than the winners at the Galway Races. It was something grown-ups did in private, though he didn’t know what it was. And if it was all above board, why had these two people crept out to the cottage? Why hadn’t they just taken their clothes off in Butler’s Court? Plenty of rooms there for taking your clothes off, at whatever speed you fancied. It must be something bad. Suddenly he remembered something he had been told only very recently. ‘If you see or hear of any wickedness going on round here, you just come and tell me, young Cathal Rafferty. The Devil never sleeps, you know, not even in Ireland.’ As he crept out one of the side entrances of the demesne Cathal made up his mind. He would go and tell everything he had seen to Father O’Donovan Brady. He thought the priest might even pay good money for such promising information.