Powerscourt led the way to the water’s edge and climbed into the boat. ‘Stern for you,’ said Powerscourt, settling himself in the middle of the little craft and rowing as hard as he could. ‘Don’t we look innocent, Lucy,’ he said in his normal voice. ‘Nobody would think anything untoward was going on at all. Two ladies being taken for a row by some young man, probably a servant.’
‘I think it’s quite nice being abducted by you in a rowing boat, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy, trailing a hand in the water. ‘Do you think we should do it more often?’
‘Now then,’ said the villainous Powerscourt, taking his little stick out of his pocket and pointing it at his wife once more, ‘when we get to the far side, do exactly as I say or you’re for it.’
He beached the boat and pointed to a little door that led out into the world beyond the Big House. One hundred yards away was a jetty with two of Dennis Ormonde’s yachts moored close by.
‘Just pretend, Mrs Ormonde,’ he snarled ‘that one of those boats is ours.’ Powerscourt stared out at the blue water and the islands. ‘You could be clean away,’ he said in his normal voice, ‘in five minutes from the first encounter in the garden.’
‘Do you think that’s how they were taken, Francis?’ asked Lady Lucy. ‘It’s quite risky, isn’t it?’
‘Once you’ve got them out of the garden,’ said Powerscourt, ‘it’s plain sailing, if you’ll forgive the expression. With all those Orangemen wandering about nobody’s going to look twice at any strange young man or men roaming about. It’s all quite normal.’
‘So what happened then?’ asked Lady Lucy. ‘Do they sail away for a year and a day to the land where the bong tree grows?’
Powerscourt laughed. ‘I very much doubt it. I don’t think they met any pigs selling rings either. I suspect they met something rather nastier than the pig. We’d better go back, I suppose. I’d better tell my theory to Ormonde though I can’t see for the life of me how it’s going to help finding them.’
Father O’Donovan Brady was on his second sherry of the evening when Cathal Rafferty knocked on his front door. The Father always limited the sherry before his tea on the days when Pronsias Mulcahy came to call with his fresh bottle of John Powers.
‘Good evening, young man, what can I do for you?’ Father O’Donovan Brady did not sound overjoyed at the prospect of his visitor.
‘Good evening, Father,’ said Cathal, wringing his cap in his hands, and falling silent. Somehow it had been easier to rehearse this conversation when there was only one of you. It seemed much more difficult when there were two.
‘Well,’ said the priest, ‘I cannot offer you any guidance if you don’t speak, you know.’
‘You remember, Father, you told me that if I saw or heard of any wickedness going on round here, I was to come and tell you.’
‘The Devil never sleeps, not even in Ireland, that’s what I said,’ said Father O’Donovan Brady, curious now to know what sins this strange young man had witnessed. Sin excited the Father. He found discussion of it stimulating, possibly because the hearing of the sins was as near as he would ever get to committing them. ‘What have you seen, young Cathal?’
This was going to be the difficult bit. ‘Do you know the Head Gardener’s Cottage out there at the back of the demesne?’
‘I do,’ said the priest. ‘I knew the last Head Gardener well. He was a parishioner of mine. But I think the place is empty now.’
‘It wasn’t empty this afternoon, Father. There were two people in there.’
‘And what were they doing? What a strange place to go in the afternoon. Did you see them go in?’
‘That I did not, Father, I saw them through the window.’ Cathal blushed red now, staring at the carpet.
Father Brady sensed that there might be gold, pure gold, if you could use those words for what he suspected was such a terrible sin, in the boy’s account.
‘You saw them through the window, did you now? And what were they doing, Cathal?’
The boy was whispering now. ‘They were putting their clothes on, Father.’
‘Putting their clothes on? God bless my soul. Tell me exactly what you saw. Don’t leave anything out now.’
‘Well,’ said Cathal, feeling relieved that he’d passed the worst, ‘the woman didn’t have anything on at all. She was pulling her stockings up. The man had a shirt and his underpants on but no trousers. He had very hairy legs.’ Cathal seemed to attach great importance to the amount of hair on Johnpeter’s legs.
‘This was in the bedroom, I presume,’ said Father Brady. The hunter had spotted a fox now and was in full pursuit. Cathal nodded.
‘I don’t suppose,’ the priest went on, ‘that you managed to catch sight of what had been going on before they put their clothes on?’
‘No,’ said the boy.
‘Pity, that.’ Father Brady finished his sherry. ‘What sort of people were they? Butler’s Court people? Young? Middle-aged?’
‘Oh, they were young, Father. I should say they were in their early twenties. And I’m sure they came from the Big House.’
‘And I don’t suppose you know their names? Protestants, I presume, seeing where they were.’
‘They looked like Protestants all right,’ said Cathal, ‘but I don’t know their names, I’m afraid.’
Father Brady dug into his pocket and handed over five shillings. ‘That is your reward, young man. I fear great sin is taking place in our midst. I want you to do two things, young Cathal. I want you to find out their names and if they are married or not. And I want you to see if you can watch them before they put their clothes back on. Before we name the Devil’s work, we have to know precisely what it is. You did well to come to me today.’ He showed the young man to the front door. ‘I’m very pleased with you. Remember, Cathal, if doubts should come, that you are doing the Lord’s work.’
Johnny Fitzgerald returned late that evening to a depressed Ormonde House. The host had retired to bed early with a bottle of Armagnac. Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were having a disconsolate conversation about where you might hide two women of the Protestant Ascendancy.
‘Word of the kidnap reached Westport about five o’clock in the afternoon, Francis,’ said Johnny. ‘Must have travelled round the town in about half an hour flat, I should think. Probably reached Galway by now. Limerick tomorrow morning, I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘What of your defrocked Christian Brother, Johnny?’ asked Lady Lucy.
‘He was rather disappointing, really,’ said Johnny with a laugh. ‘I’d imagined all sorts of terrible crimes he might have committed but all he’d done was to fall in love with a young widow whose son was in his class. He was going to resign but the authorities got in first. They said he must have broken his vow of celibacy with this woman before he handed in his resignation. He said it would be difficult to maintain your vows in the company of this girl. She was very beautiful. He did have one interesting theory, though, about how to start a revolution in Ireland.’
‘And what was that?’ asked Powerscourt.
‘All you needed, the former Brother Mooney maintained, was the Christian Brothers and all the young men from the Gaelic Athletic Association on your side. You take over the towns of Ireland one by one. Then you march on Dublin. It’s revolution by hurling sticks, if you follow me. The only snag, as your man pointed out, was that the whole bloody country would end up being run by the Christian Brothers. He didn’t fancy that too much.’
‘What do you think about this pilgrimage?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘It’s two days away now and I’m not sure we should do it with all this fuss about the missing women. It wouldn’t look right, would it?’
‘But I thought you promised the Archbishop, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘that you and some friends were going to accept his invitation.’
‘That was before this latest tragedy.’
‘I think we should do it,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald.
‘So do I,’ said Lady Lucy.
‘Very wel
l,’ said Powerscourt. ‘We’ll have to look out our stoutest boots and walking sticks. I want to go anyway. Perhaps I’ll find inspiration half-way up the Holy Mountain.’
11
They didn’t find the Ormonde women the next day. Hundreds of policemen knocked on doors, checked rooms, wrote down details of who might be absent from the house in case they should prove to be the kidnappers. All of this information was laboriously copied into great ledgers whose pages began to resemble the early stages of a census, a Domesday Book of Westport and the surrounding countryside in 1905. More policemen were expected the following day and on the Monday, although their work would inevitably be confused by the pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick. The Chief Constable himself made periodic inspections of the information, making sure his systems were working properly and had not been diluted by human weakness.
Powerscourt roamed round the gardens of Ormonde House. The last Orangemen not out on the hillsides were completing the search of the woods, singing strange Orange hymns and ballads as they worked. He would sit in the meagre library from time to time, cursing himself for his failure. Lord Francis Powerscourt did not like failure. He had rarely experienced it in his professional life. For him, failure in this case would be a scar on his reputation, something he would never be able to erase. Lady Lucy tried to console him, to appease his restlessness. She knew from experience that if Francis worried away at a problem with the front of his mind, as it were, little would happen. The mysteries he set himself to solve did not often yield to a full frontal assault. In Lady Lucy’s opinion it would not be the siege engines that broke the defenders, but a flash of insight that said there must be a path up the cliff at the rear end of the castle.
‘I’m useless, Lucy,’ he said as they took tea in the library. ‘The only reason these people haven’t pensioned me off is that they’re too polite. I’ll become a tolerated guest, rather like Uncle Peter back at Butler’s Court. Maybe I should start work on the rest of his history of Ireland. He stopped in 1891, you see. That would keep me out of mischief. I couldn’t raise anybody’s hopes that I might actually improve their lot by solving the mysteries that are ruining their lives then.’
‘What nonsense, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy, who had seen him in these moods before. ‘You know you’ll solve the mystery, you know you will. You mustn’t be so hard on yourself, my love.’
‘Hard on myself?’ said Powerscourt bitterly. ‘How can I not be hard on myself when I can’t even solve the mystery of a few disappearing pictures, for Christ’s sake. It’s pathetic.’
Lady Lucy suspected that Powerscourt’s sense of himself would take a severe blow if he ever failed in a case. But then he never had. Not yet, anyway. Perhaps, she said to herself, anxious to find something that would cheer up her husband, perhaps the pilgrimage would do him good.
It was Charlie O’Malley who found the body in the oratory on top of Croagh Patrick at a quarter to four in the morning. Charlie, accompanied by two of his fleet of donkeys, Bushmills and Jack Daniels, had been making a last push towards profit from the stout. His donkeys had reached the summit laden with the stuff. The dead man was young, not more than eighteen or twenty in Charlie’s view, slight of build and with black hair. He had been shot twice, once in the chest and once in the back of the head. Dark matter from these wounds had congealed on his clothing. He had been placed, in a sitting position, with his back to the altar. Dead eyes gazed down at the empty pews and the non-existent congregation. ‘Jesus Mary and Joseph!’ Charlie had said and knelt down beside the corpse. He said two Hail Marys and one Our Father. At first Charlie thought it was a punishment sent by God to warn him of his sins and wickedness in intending to sell alcohol at greatly inflated prices to the penitents after they had attended Mass on the summit. Perhaps he should bring his prices down to those at ground level. That thought didn’t last for long as Charlie reasoned that God would not have bothered to have somebody killed just to reprove him for a few bottles of stout. He said a Creed and a couple more Our Fathers and staggered out into the open air.
The omens were not good for the pilgrims that day. Low cloud enveloped the mountain from about halfway up. A fine but persistent rain was falling. Five to four in the morning on Reek Sunday, Charlie said to himself, surely to God somebody is going to arrive soon. Charlie knew that the body would have to be moved out of the church. It couldn’t be left there, not on this day, of all days, but he felt reluctant to take the responsibility himself. And what would they do with the body when it was outside the church, for God’s sake? You couldn’t take it down the mountain to meet all these pilgrims coming the other way. Some of these buggers, religious maniacs in Charlie’s view, liked to come to the summit very early to pray. There were even, Charlie knew, some fanatics come from Australia for this pilgrimage today. Charlie wasn’t quite sure where Australia was as a matter of fact, come to think of it he didn’t think the geography Christian Brother, whose name Charlie could never remember, knew where it was either, he always shifty about the place, but Charlie did know Australia was inhabited by convicts who liked playing cricket and counting sheep. You couldn’t very well pass the time of day with one of these devout Australians or some other zealot, ‘Have a good pilgrimage, I’ve just got to take this corpse to the morgue if you don’t mind.’
Charlie thought it was an insoluble problem. He went to check his two donkeys had not run away. Then he heard a wheezing sound, as if from a man very short of breath from the climb. Walter Heneghan materialized out of the cloud. For the first and last time in his life Charlie was glad to see him. Walter Heneghan of Louisburg, chief contractor for the little chapel, had lived for most of the construction work in a tent at the top. His men were unaware of the reasons for his residence on the spot. His doctor had told him that if he went up and down Croagh Patrick twice a day for six months he would probably be dead before it was finished. And his wife, a woman with a fearful tongue, had told Walter with the candour that had so endeared her to him over the years that as far she was concerned, he, Walter, would be much more use to her living in a tent on top of a bloody mountain than he would be cluttering up her house in Louisburg. Walter did travel up and down the mountain occasionally for meetings with Father Macdonald about The Skedule but he had not attained the expertise or the fitness of Charlie O’Malley and the rest who could go up and down at speeds they never spoke of to Walter in case the working day grew even longer.
‘Is that you, Walter?’ cried Charlie O’Malley.
‘Who else would it be at this terrible hour?’ said Heneghan, sinking down for a rest by the side of the chapel.
‘Walter, brace yourself now. It’s God’s truth I’m going to tell you, so I am.’ Charlie peered at Walter to make sure he was ready for the news.
‘What is it, Charlie?’ Heneghan was rubbing his leg vigorously as if he had cramp.
‘As God is my witness, Walter, there’s a dead body in that chapel, so there is, God rest his soul.’
‘A dead body? In my chapel? How the divil did it get here? Did it walk?’
‘Can’t have walked when it was dead, Walter, might have walked up when it was alive, I suppose. Hard to tell.’
‘Come on.’ Walter rose to his feet with difficulty. ‘Show me.’
The two men tiptoed into the little church. The body was still there, like a ghost at a feast.
‘God in heaven!’ said Walter and he rattled off a quick volley of Hail Marys. ‘He’s very dead, isn’t he?’ he went on as he knelt beside the corpse.
‘What are we going to do, Walter? We can’t leave the dead bugger in here. Do you have the boy with you?’
‘He’s hanging round the summit somewhere, eating an apple.’ Heneghan made it sound as if his son had brought the Garden of Eden up to the top of the Holy Mountain. Maybe Eve was hidden in the clouds. Walter’s son Matthew had frequently been used as a runner to take messages up and down the mountain during the construction work and sometimes even spent the night in the tent.
‘Loo
k here,’ said Heneghan, ‘we’ve got to get the body away from here. It’s no good trying to hide him a couple of hundred yards away, there’s nothing higher than a grasshopper’s knee for miles. I didn’t spend six months of my life building this damned chapel, some of it in the month of February in Christ’s name, to have the opening day ruined. It’s not for us, Charlie, to say whether or not the bloody pilgrims get told about it, that’s for Father Macdonald and the Archbishop man. I’ll send Matthew off at full speed this minute to the priest’s house in Westport. I think the big man is staying there too.’
‘You said we’ve got to get the body away from here, Walter. How do you propose to do that?’ Charlie had a sick feeling in his stomach. He didn’t know what was coming, but he knew he wasn’t going to like it. They heard a whistling noise coming up the final stretch.
‘Tim Philbin, is that you?’ Walter Heneghan shouted into the murk.
‘It is,’ said Tim.
‘Thank God you’ve come,’ said Heneghan. ‘You’re just in time to help Charlie here carry a corpse down the mountain the other way, the Louisburg route. You and Charlie and two bloody donkeys are to take our dead friend down to ground level and into the nearest police station. That’s your mission for the day.’
‘Fine, Walter,’ said Tim, fully visible now. ‘You did say corpse, didn’t you? Corpse as in dead man?’
‘I did,’ said Walter. ‘Doesn’t look too heavy a chap to me. Slight sort of corpse. You’ll be down the bottom in no time.’
News reached the clergy shortly before seven o’clock. Father Macdonald, the Administrator of Westport, and the Very Reverend Dr Healey the Archbishop of Tuam were finishing a hearty breakfast when the housekeeper showed in a rather dishevelled Matthew Heneghan. One look at him plunged Father Macdonald into despair. You knew, he thought, you just knew, looking at this sad face, that here was bad news. Terrible memories of his disastrous role in the construction of the new convent outside Ballinrobe in his previous post came flooding back to him, the building unfinished by the day of the opening, the ceremony postponed, the windows with no glass, the kitchen with no cooking facilities, the unfinished cells for the sisters. He remembered the rebukes of his superiors and the articles in the local newspaper which more or less accused him of being a fool. Well, it was just about to happen again. He felt his heart beating faster already, even before he had heard the news, and he felt certain that one of his nervous headaches was going to start very soon.
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