‘Do you need a lawyer, if they do arrest you?’ said Powerscourt. He saw two of the policemen had arrived at the north end of the choir and were waiting for them to leave. A guard of honour to take Horace Aloysius Buckley from the house of God to the police cells of Lincoln.
‘I am a lawyer,’ Buckley replied with a bitter smile. ‘Let me ask you one question. Do you think I am guilty?’
Powerscourt paused. The policemen were shuffling anxiously from foot to foot. The bell was tolling again.
‘No, Mr Buckley,’ he said at last, ‘I do not think you are guilty.’
One of the policemen coughed, loudly, as if ordering them out of the sanctuary of the choir. Horace Aloysius Buckley rose from his seat. Powerscourt accompanied him to the door. Buckley went with courage, Powerscourt felt, his head held high for the ordeal that was to come.
Chief Inspector Wilson waited until they were just outside the west front, pygmies once more in front of the great building.
‘Horace Aloysius Buckley,’ he said in his official voice, ‘I am arresting you in connection with the murders of Christopher Montague and Thomas Jenkins. I must warn you that anything you say may be taken down and used in evidence.’
They bundled Buckley into a waiting carriage and rattled off over the cobblestones. The choir were practising again, the sound louder outside the great walls. They must have gone straight from Evensong back to the rehearsal. This time the words were bitter to a listening Powerscourt.
‘I know that my Redeemer liveth,’ the beautiful treble voice soared above the towers and the statues of Lincoln Minster, ‘and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth.’
16
A familiar voice greeted Powerscourt on his return to Markham Square. The voice was accompanied by heavy footsteps across the first floor landing.
‘Is little Olivia hiding in this room?’ There was a sound of chairs being moved. ‘No, she’s not,’ said the voice. More footsteps. The voice was in the drawing room now, Powerscourt himself half-way up the stairs.
‘Maybe she’s in this room instead,’ said the voice. ‘I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to find her, I shall have to look for her until midnight at least.’
There was a very faint squeak as if Olivia Eleanor Hamilton Powerscourt, now five years old, might indeed be in that room. Hide and seek, Powerscourt thought, Olivia’s favourite game. He had once lost her for an entire afternoon playing hide and seek at his country house in Northamptonshire when Olivia had hidden so successfully in the branches of a tree that she was virtually invisible from ground level. Hide and seek, it must be hereditary, he had been playing hide and seek with murderers for years.
‘Is she behind this chair? That would be a very good place to hide. No, she’s not.’ Johnny Fitzgerald grinned at Powerscourt and put his index finger to his lips, requesting silence.
‘There’s a great big sort of trunk thing over here. I wonder if she’s inside there. Let me see if I can get the lid off. My word, it’s very heavy.’ Johnny Fitzgerald made heaving and groaning noises as if he was pulling a carriage and four up the King’s Road single-handed.
‘No, she’s not. She’s lost. I shall never find her at all.’ Johnny’s voice sounded sad now.
‘Ah ha,’ he said more cheerfully, ‘I know where she must be. She’s underneath this little table with the big cloth over it that reaches right down to the floor. I’ll just bend down now, I’m going to lift this cloth up and then Olivia will be found. Here we go. Up it comes. This is where she must be . . . But she’s not there!’
A note of astonishment brought out another faint squeak from over by the windows. Powerscourt made a sign to his friend. He pointed first to the double doors that divided the drawing room in two. They were not wide open, but not completely closed. There was just enough room behind the door for a little person to hide. Then he pointed to the window.
‘How silly of me,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, who never tired of playing games with the Powerscourt children, ‘of course I know where she is. I should have thought of it before. She’s hiding behind those doors over there.’ He made especially noisy footsteps as he crossed the room. ‘It’s no good, Olivia,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Time’s up. Going to get you now. This is where you are.’
Johnny opened the doors with a great flourish. ‘Goodness me,’ he said, ‘she’s not here either. I shall have to give up.’ Powerscourt by now had tiptoed over to the curtains. He made another sign to Johnny, pointing first to himself, then to a space behind the rocking chair in the corner.
Fitzgerald winked at his friend. ‘How could I be so stupid?’ he said loudly. ‘I know where she is. I know exactly where she is. She’s over here, hiding behind the curtains. I’m just going to run my hands down them and see what I can find. Here I come.’
With that Fitzgerald himself hid behind the rocking chair. Powerscourt’s hands began to run down the curtains. He felt the top of a head. He knew exactly where she was ticklish. He wondered if it would work through the heavy material of Lucy’s new curtains. There was a stream of giggles. A small girl, with the same blonde hair as her mother, sprang from behind the curtains. ‘Papa!’ she said. ‘Papa!’ and she jumped into his arms. ‘I thought you were Johnny Fitzgerald. He was here a minute ago. Have you magicked him away?’
‘Boo!’ said Fitzgerald leaping up from behind his hiding place. ‘Boo!’
All three dissolved into laughter, Olivia eventually trotting off downstairs for a cold drink. She said she got very hot and a bit frightened behind the curtains.
‘I often wish,’ said her father, sinking into a chair by the fireplace, ‘that finding murderers was as easy as finding Olivia playing hide and seek.’
He told Johnny about his trip to Lincoln, about the arrest of Horace Aloysius Buckley. He told him about Lucy’s discovery that de Courcy’s mother and sisters were in Corsica.
‘Are you going to go, Francis? To Corsica, I mean.’
‘I think so,’ said Powerscourt, ‘Lucy’s very excited about it. She’s got hold of some book which is full of spine-chilling stories about blood feuds that can go on for generations, families murdering each other over trivial things like who owns an olive tree, for heaven’s sake.’
‘De Courcy and Piper have a porter who comes from Corsica,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald. ‘Little swarthy fellow but strong as a goat. All roads lead to Corsica all of a sudden. I think I should come with you, Francis. I think it might be very dangerous. But let me tell you what I have discovered about our mutual friend Johnston, the man who works at the National Gallery.’
Nathaniel Roderick Johnston, senior curator in Renaissance paintings at the National Gallery, known to work in secret for the art dealers of Old Bond Street as an authenticator of Old Masters, a man who could well have lost those valuable commissions if Christopher Montague had lived. A suspect for the murders, believed to be the last man to see Montague alive.
‘I followed him home one day, Francis, just to see the kind of house he lived in. And the funny thing was this. I waited for a long time for him to come out of the National Gallery one evening. And who do you think I saw him come out with, virtually arm in arm, practically embracing each other at the top of those steps?’
Powerscourt looked at his friend. ‘Piper?’ he said with a smile. ‘William Alaric Piper?’
‘Well done, Francis, absolutely correct. Rather impressive, I may say. Anyway, I followed our Roderick back to his house in Barnes, or maybe Mortlake. I’m not sure where one stops and the other begins. Now then, what sort of house do you think our friend lives in? A little cottage by the river perhaps?’
Powerscourt remembered visiting the French Ambassador at his home in Barnes some years before. The place was full of great big modern houses with rather superior lions guarding the front gates.