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.
‘Not a little cottage, I think, Johnny,’ he said. ‘Big modern place perhaps? Lions on guard outside?’
‘Big, yes. Modern, no. Lions, no,’ said Fitzgerald, searching eagerly in the Powerscourt drinks cabinet. ‘What have we here, Francis? St Aubin? Excellent. May I?’
A glass of white burgundy accompanied Fitzgerald back to his chair.
‘Right on the river it is, that house,’ he said. ‘Middle of the eighteenth century, I should think. Front door’s by the water for the days when the Thames was the main road. Place must be worth a fortune. You couldn’t possibly afford it on his salary. There’s another thing, Francis. Mr and Mrs Johnston only moved there from some little house in North London a couple of years ago. And there’s more.’
‘How did you come by this information, Johnny?’ said Powerscourt.
Johnny Fitzgerald looked appreciatively at his glass. ‘Drink, Francis. Beer rather than wine. The local pubs to be precise. There’s a whole lot of them down there by the river. Boating people, some City men, a few lawyers, the local shopkeepers. Mrs Roderick told the fishmonger the other day that they’ve just come into some more money, left them by a relative. This, Francis,’ Fitzgerald refilled his glass happily, ‘is what she said: “We’ll always be grateful to Mr Raphael for leaving us the money. We might buy a house in the Cotswolds, maybe in Italy.”’
‘Mr Raphael,’ said Powerscourt thoughtfully. ‘I like that. Oh yes, I like that very much. Has Mr Raphael been in London lately, Johnny?’
‘As a matter of fact, he has,’ said Fitzgerald, ‘I’ve been doing a lot of drinking in this investigation. I got friendly with some of the porters at the art dealers when I was carting my auntie’s Leonardo around. I go and see them on Fridays sometimes, they always drink a lot at the end of the week. The Holy Family, by our friend Mr Raphael, was recently sold to an American millionaire for eighty-five thousand pounds. The porters didn’t know what the commission would have been for authenticating it, but they reckoned it would have been between twelve and a half and fifteen per cent. Sometimes more.’
Powerscourt looked thoughtful, his mind busy with mental arithmetic. He hoped he could manage it more successfully than William Burke’s son.
‘Would you kill somebody to keep those commissions, Johnny? Ten and a half thousand pounds or so at the bottom end of that scale, maybe thirteen thousand seven hundred and fifty at the top?’
Johnny Fitzgerald peered into his glass. ‘Think of it like a vineyard, Francis,’ he said at last. ‘You might not kill for one year’s supply of superb white burgundy. But if you thought the murder might guarantee you a lifetime’s supply of the stuff, or the commissions if you like, year after year after year . . .’ Fitzgerald polished off his glass once more and helped himself to a refill. ‘. . . then you might just do it. Particularly if you had an ambitious wife, who likes dropping names in the fishmonger’s.’
Visibility was down to about a hundred yards. A mist had fallen over the waters that separated the port of Calvi, on the north-western side of the island of Corsica, from mainland France. Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were standing on the deck of the steamer peering into the void. Powerscourt was thinking about Corsica’s most famous son, native not of Calvi but of Ajaccio further to the south. Napoleon must have sailed down these passages on his way to Egypt, a disastrous expedition which ended with the future Emperor abandoning his armies in the shadows of the Pyramids and fleeing back to France in case he lost power. Napoleon must have seen his native island looming out of the sea on his left when he made his escape from Elba, the hundred days of glory that ended in the charnel fields of Waterloo, and another sea voyage to the yet more remote island of St Helena.
Gradually the mist began to clear and a watery sun crept out of hiding to light their passage. Very faintly, to the starboard side, he could see the outline of a long strip of land, Cap Corse, the northernmost tip of the island. Then, as the sun broke through, he saw the island clear for the first time.
‘My God, Lucy, it’s very beautiful. Look at the coastline.’ A curling succession of beaches lay peacefully on the shore, small breakers climbing lazily up the sand. Between them were rocky bays where the sea crashed against the rocks, faint lines of spray easily seen from their boat.
‘Look at the mountains, Francis, just look at them.’ Lady Lucy was shivering softly as she spoke. ‘They’re much bigger than anything in Wales or Scotland.’
Ahead of them at the end of a long semicircular bay fringed with pines lay the port of Calvi, its improbable citadel standing guard over the little town. Behind it, behind the beaches, behind the rocky promontories where the spray shot upwards in the late afternoon sun, behind everything were the mountains. Great jagged peaks lay in enfiladed rows behind the plain, bare rocky slopes rising towards the sky. They brooded over the island. We have been here long before the various humans came, they said, before the Greeks, before the Romans, before the Saracens, the Pisans, the Genoese, the French. We shall be here long after you have all gone. Dotted about on the slopes minute villages could be seen, lofty campaniles a place of lookout against invaders from the sea.
They dined on kid and roast potatoes, washed down with the fierce local wine. Powerscourt thought Johnny Fitzgerald would have found it interesting, a word he frequently used when confronted with crude and uncivilized vintages. They walked around the streets of Calvi as the wind rose and brought great breakers hammering on to the sands of Calvi’s beach. Behind the sand the mountains, almost black now, brooded over the Gulf of Calvi.
‘Do you have a plan for tomorrow, Francis?’ said Lady Lucy, walking along the little quayside dotted with fishing boats and a few cafes where the native Calvais were settling down to an evening of cards and wine.
‘I am going to see the police chief in the morning, Lucy. The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police gave me an introduction. He has the most magnificent name. He’s called Antonio Imperiali. What do you think of that?’
‘Do you think he’s descended from the Emperor himself?’ said Lady Lucy, drawing her shawl tight around her neck as the cold wind whipped in from the sea.
‘He may be,’ said Powerscourt, watching a fishing boat cast off its moorings and set out to sea, a villainous crew working busily on deck. ‘I think the Corsicans did pretty well out of Napoleon’s Empire. They fought all over the place, all the way from Austerlitz to Moscow, I think. Seventeen of them became generals in the Grande Armee. Wouldn’t be surprising if some of the natives ended up being called Imperiali.’
The real Captain Imperiali was a swarthy pirate of a man, with a greasy moustache and a self-satisfied manner. He looked carefully at Powerscourt’s introduction.
‘How is it with my colleagues in London?’ he asked. ‘They do not yet catch the Ripper, I think.’ Powerscourt was amazed at how the fame of the Whitechapel murderer had reached the Corsicans and lived on for years after the event. Murders, he thought, had always been a staple of Corsican life if Lady Lucy’s book was to be believed. Maybe they thought there was a vendetta, a blood feud, running through the streets of the East End. Later, not very much later, he was to regret his frankness with Captain Imperiali.
‘I am looking for an English family who live in the area,’ he said. ‘I think they are called de Courcy, although they may be living under a false name. I have reason to believe that they are resident in the neighbourhood of Calvi. There is no suspicion of any crime having being committed by them. And I am looking for a forger, a man who may operate out of the same area, maybe even the same house, I do not know. If there is a forger here, there would be a lot of traffic in canvases and paintings being shipped back to England.’
Captain Imperiali smiled a conspiratorial smile. Powerscourt noticed that his teeth were terrible. There were great gaps in his mouth, like the gaps in the mountains behind his office.
‘See how you come to the right place for your information, Lord Powerscourt,’ he said. ‘I take a look at these papers here.’ He waved at a mountain of apparently unsorted material on the table next to his desk. Outside a police seagull perched cheekily on the window sill. ‘Now then . . .’ Captain Imperiali began a hunt through his documents. ‘My colleagues in the French police, when they come here, always they talk to us about the filing systems, the order, the routines of the police work. But we Corsicans do not like the filing systems, the routine, the order of the police work. I do not even think my countrymen like the police work very much either. Here it is! This is what you need.’
He pulled a large sheet of paper from the surrounding chaos. ‘When they come here to live, the foreigners, they have to register with the authorities. I think I have seen this family in Calvi sometimes. A mother and two daughters, one very pretty, perhaps you will like her, Lord Powerscourt. They are indeed called de Courcy. And they live in a big house called La Giocanda at the back of the main square in Aregno, the Aregno on the hill, not the one on the shore. Oh yes,’ Captain Imperiali leaned back in his chair and took another puff on his cheroot, ‘I think this young milady would certainly like me. Most of the foreign women fall for the charms of the Captain Imperiali!’
A wolfish look crossed his face. Powerscourt wondered if his ancestors had been pirates, carrying protesting maidens away in their marauding expeditions across the Mediterranean.
‘I am most grateful, Captain,’ said Powerscourt, trying to remain charming. ‘And what of the forger? Or paintings sent abroad from here?’
‘I do not know about any forgers operating in the Balagne, our part of Corsica,’ said the Captain. ‘We do not have,’ he began to laugh at his own witticism, ‘we do not have the registration forms for the forgers, you understand! Registration forms for forgers, that would excite the policemen from France, I am sure!’
Powerscourt laughed at the Captain’s little joke. He began thinking it was time to leave. Except for the canvases. Did the man know anything about the canvases?
He did. ‘Paintings being sent away?’ Imperiali said, the gaps between his teeth clearly visible again. ‘There are always paintings being sent away. This English family, I think, they have been sending old canvases with old paintings to London for some time. But what of it? The people in London must have something to hang on their walls. No great artist has yet come forward with the scenes from the life of Jack the Ripper, I think. They would be very popular here in Corsica.’
Two days later Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were trotting along the main road from Calvi to Ile Rousse. The turn-off, a track rather than a road, Powerscourt suspected, would be about half-way along. A card had been despatched to the de Courcy family in their hilltop mansion, saying that Lord and Lady Powerscourt were visiting the area and would like to consult Mrs de Courcy about the problems of living here as an expatriate. Their coachman, a short swarthy man who did not smile or speak, concentrated on steering his horses round the potholes in the road.
The day before Powerscourt had taken Lady Lucy on a pilgrimage. A couple of miles to the south of Calvi a long thin rocky promontory stretched out into the waters of the Mediterranean. The land was rough, the sea crashing in on all sides, adventurous seagulls flying low beneath the cliffs. ‘They call this place La Revellata, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I want you to imagine you are a British sailor about a hundred years ago. Britain is at war with revolutionary France. Corsica is a place of supreme strategic importance in the Mediterranean. Whoever controls it can control the sea lanes, the traffic, not just of men of war and ships of the line, but the ordinary produce of the neighbouring areas. No olive oil, no timber for export. So, the British need to capture the rocky outpost. They need to control Calvi.’
Powerscourt paused and waved at the vast expanse of grey sea stretching out to a distant horizon. ‘You are the captain of an English ship, Lucy. Your admiral tells you to make a landing on this patch of coast. And to bring some of the ships’ guns with you. Where would you bring them ashore?’
‘I don’t think I’d be very good as a sailor, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘My family have always suffered from seasickness. That’s why they all joined the army.’
‘Pretend you’re a good sailor, Lucy. Where would you land?’
‘There’s only one place where you could bring things ashore without being crushed to pieces on the rocks,’ Lady Lucy said sensibly, pointing to a tiny beach a hundred yards away. ‘There. On that little patch of sand.’
‘Very good, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt, pulling her down towards the inlet. ‘So, maybe in the daytime, maybe in the dark when the Corsicans aren’t looking, you bring your men and your guns ashore. You haul the guns up this terrible slope – think how long that must have taken, the sailors pulling at the ropes, swearing viciously as they lost their foothold, sometimes perhaps the guns too heavy to move at all. You reach the top. You move them along the coast until they overlook the town of Calvi on that hill over there.’ Powerscourt pointed upwards to a rise in the ground which looked down at the citadel on the other side.
‘Come, Lucy,’ he said, a wave covering his boots as he stood on the tiny beach, ‘we must gain the rise over there. Maybe it was dark.’ Powerscourt was panting slightly now as he hastened up the track back the way they had come, holding firmly on to Lady Lucy’s hand, warm and soft to his touch. ‘Maybe the orders said the guns had to be in position by dawn. Somewhere over there,’ he pointed at a towering flotilla of mountains, staring imperturbably down on to their island, ‘somewhere behind the highest peak, you see streaks of faint green or blue. As the sun comes up the battery is in position, staring down at the unsuspecting inhabitants of Calvi, soon to huddle together inside their citadel. You fire two shots to tell the fleet out there in the bay,’ he pointed to an empty sea, ‘that you have arrived. The sailors build a tower so the signal midshipman can send his messages to the admiral. Then you start the bombardment.’
‘How long did it last?’ said Lady Lucy, suddenly deciding to sit down on a convenient lump of granite. Hot work pulling all those guns up the hill. Powerscourt was lying on the ground, inspecting the seagulls who whirled in the clouds above him.
‘It lasted four weeks. The English poured eleven thousand shot and three thousand shells down into the tiny town. But that’s not the important bit.’ He rose and pulled Lady Lucy to her feet.
‘You, as I said, are the captain in charge. One day you are bending to your work again, aligning the guns perhaps, or inspecting the mountings to see they haven’t fallen out of true. There is a terrible accident. You, the captain, are hit in the face by an explosion of stones. The surgeon, a man more used to sawing limbs off in the heat of battle than tending people’s faces, is summoned from the fleet. Grave doubts are expressed as to whether you will ever see again. You may be blind for life, that impossible person, a sightless sailor, doomed to eke out your days on half-pay in some forgotten village or begging for your daily bread on the streets of Portsmouth.’
‘So what happened, Francis?’ Lady Lucy looked concerned at the prospect of life as a blinded sea captain.
‘He only lost his right eye,’ said Powerscourt, smiling.
‘And who was this sea captain, Francis?’
‘I’ve always thought it remarkable that he was nearly put out of action here on the island of his greatest enemy,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Down there,’ he gestured vaguely to the south, ‘was Napoleon’s birthplace. Here Horatio Nelson, the man who stopped him invading England at Trafalgar, nearly lost his sight.’