Death of a Pilgrim (20 page)

‘What do you think is underneath?’ said Jean Pierre. ‘Smugglers’ stuff, maybe? Perhaps it belongs to some gang of smugglers operating in secret all over southern
France.’

Auguste removed the heavy stone that held it down and pulled back the tarpaulin. They stared at Patrick MacLoughlin, his head lying to one side, dressed in the black garments of the novice
priest. MacLoughlin did not speak.

‘He’s asleep,’ said Auguste, ‘better leave him alone. I’m hungry. I want my lunch.’

Jean Pierre did not think the man was asleep. He had seen death recently in his own home, a grandfather who went to sleep in his chair after Sunday lunch and never woke up. That had been a year
ago and Jean Pierre never forgot the strange pallor that spread over the old man’s face. Gingerly, his hand shaking slightly, he reached inside and felt the face of Patrick MacLoughlin. It
was cold, very cold.

‘He’s not sleeping,’ said Jean Pierre, pulling the tarpaulin back over the corpse, ‘he’s dead. I’m going to tell Mama. She’ll know what to do.’ He
started off at full speed back to his house. ‘It’s jolly exciting finding a dead person, don’t you think, Auguste? Maybe we’ll be let off afternoon school. I still
haven’t finished that maths homework.’

‘Do you think there’ll be some reward?’ asked Auguste, keeping pace with his friend rather than overtaking him. ‘I could do with some extra money.’

Madame Daniele Roche was deeply devoted to all her five children, but if you pressed her up against a wall she would probably have said that Jean Pierre was her favourite. He was so quick and so
curious and so bright. But she would have been the first to say that his imagination sometimes got the better of him. Last year he had reported a sighting of a squadron of lancers trotting down the
main street of Entraygues. He had been able to give a perfect description of the details of their resplendent uniforms, but no soldiers had visited the town that day. A month ago he claimed to have
seen Charlemagne himself on a mighty white charger pausing in the middle of the medieval bridge and asking Jean Pierre for directions to Conques. So when her eldest son announced that he and
Auguste had found a dead body in a rowing boat by the river she paid no attention at all.

‘Come along, it’s lunchtime, Jean Pierre. Auguste, you’d better run off home. Your mother will be worried.’

Jean Pierre made no move towards the lunch table where his younger siblings and his elder sister were preparing to tuck into a fragrant stew, made to a recipe from Jean Pierre’s
grandmother. Auguste too held his ground.

‘Please, Mama,’ said the boy, ‘I’m not making this up, I promise you. There is a dead man in a boat by the edge of the river. I don’t think he’s French
either. I think he’s foreign.’

‘And what would a foreigner be doing lying dead by the Lot in our little town? We hardly ever see any foreigners round here. Come and sit down, Jean Pierre.’

‘Please, Mama.’ Jean Pierre was holding on to her arm. ‘You’ve got to believe me. I’m not making it up. He might be important, this dead man. Maybe the police are
looking for him already.’

‘Your father always says, as you well know, that respectable people like us should have nothing to do with the police.’

‘Jean Pierre is right,’ said Auguste, entering the lists on his friend’s behalf. Mothers could be so unreasonable at times. ‘I saw it too, the dead body, I
mean.’

Oddly enough the support and testimony of Auguste weighed heavily with Daniele Roche. Jean Pierre was capable of any feats of fancy but she had known Auguste since he and Jean Pierre started
school together. Solid, yes, she would have said, reliable, yes, but about as much imagination as a dried raisin. That was what made him an ideal foil for Jean Pierre.

‘Well, maybe,’ she said, beginning to relent, ‘but you must eat your lunch first. Auguste, you’re more than welcome to join us as you’re so late.’

‘Please, Mama,’ said Jean Pierre, tugging at her arm. ‘We must go now. It could be important. How would you feel if one of your children was lying dead in a boat and some
mother refused to help because of a plate of stew?’

Daniele Roche restrained herself from pointing out that the only member of her family she could imagine being found dead in a rowing boat was Jean Pierre himself. She entrusted her children to
the care of her eldest girl and followed the boys towards the boat. Once there she too touched the dead man’s face. Then she crossed herself and knelt down to say a battery of Hail Marys. She
sent the boys to run as fast as they could to tell the doctor, who lived on the far side of the town square, and the local policeman. The two of them, she thought, would be believed. Jean Pierre on
his own would not be regarded as a credible witness. About forty minutes later the butcher’s cart, with the doctor on board, could be seen carrying a package wrapped in a tarpaulin towards
the doctor’s surgery. The rumours were flying round Entraygues faster than the wind. The body of a top politician from Lyon had been found in the boat. Nonsense, said the more fanciful
citizens, it was a mass murderer from Toulouse the police had been trying to apprehend for months. Rubbish, said the party that took its news from the boulangerie, everybody knew that the dead man
was American, on the run from the terrible gangsters in New York City.

Lord Francis Powerscourt noticed the tarpaulin as he rode back into town on the Estaing road. He raced up to the melancholy party. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘please forgive me. My
name is Powerscourt. I am an investigator from England, currently attached to a party of American pilgrims, at present resident in Estaing up the road.’ He lowered his voice slightly.
‘One of these Americans is missing. If you have what I think you have under that tarpaulin, I may be able to identify it for you.’

Half an hour later the business was complete. Dr Lafont informed Powerscourt that the dead man had been strangled before being placed in the rowing boat. After Powerscourt’s identification
a label was attached to the dead man proclaiming him to be Patrick MacLoughlin, twenty-two years old, resident in the city of Boston in the State of Massachusetts, United States of America, an
American citizen. The only other thing found in the boat, apart from the corpse, was a scallop shell, solemnly handed over to Powerscourt. A police sergeant had appeared. He informed Powerscourt
that the local officers had all been informed about the pilgrims by their colleagues in Le Puy. An inspector was on his way from the neighbouring town of Figeac to take charge of the investigation.
He requested that the pilgrim party remain in the hotel in Estaing and its environs until further notice. Here we go again, Powerscourt thought bitterly as he rode back. Who do we start bribing
first? The Mayor of Estaing, whoever he might be? The local curé or his superiors from Conques? More contributions to the widows’ and orphans’ fund of the police force in
Figeac?

‘My God, Powerscourt,’ said Michael Delaney when he heard the news. ‘To lose two, as that perverted playwright put it, looks like carelessness. I’ve
taken to counting them every time I see them now, the pilgrims, I mean. I did a run-through at lunchtime when they all sat down here. Tell me, Powerscourt, do you have any idea what we are going to
do? Do we have to start bribing the local worthies as we did in Le Puy? I find it hard to believe we can pull off the same trick twice. Have you, as yet, any idea what is going on?’

‘I have no more idea who killed Patrick MacLoughlin than I do of who killed John Delaney back there in Le Puy. I’m sure it’s the same person, that’s all.’

‘How many people did we have to start with?’ asked Delaney. ‘Sixteen? Now it’s down to fourteen and we’ve travelled less than a hundred miles. At this rate
we’ll be lucky if there’s anybody left alive by the time we reach the Pyrenees. It reminds me of a great friend of mine, used to be much richer than me but not any more. Horses were his
thing. Four or five years ago he had the finest collection of racehorses in America. He was aiming to win as many of the premier events as possible, the Travers Stakes in Saratoga, the Kentucky
Oaks in Louisville, the Belmont Stakes in New York. At the beginning of the season all his animals were in tip-top condition. Raring to race, he told me. Then they started to go. A fetlock here, a
splint there, I’m not an expert on equine diseases, but whatever could lay you low if you were a horse his lot got it. By the middle of June they were all limping or hobbling or off their
food or off their saddles or off their wits. Man never got over it. Sold all his horses on the first of July and took to stamp collecting. No bloody fetlocks there, Penny Blacks not likely to
suffer from equine flu.’

Delaney paused and looked at Powerscourt. ‘Sorry, I digress. What do you think we should do?’

‘I think we need to have a meeting. I think we need to have a meeting with all the pilgrims and everybody. Obviously we all have to wait to talk to the inspector from Figeac. But I feel
you should ask the pilgrims if they wish to go on. You have your very special reasons, I know, Mr Delaney, for wanting to continue. But the others may not want to. We have to give them the option
of going home. I think we should put it to the vote.’

‘Vote?’ said Delaney suspiciously. ‘Ask the pilgrims? Isn’t that a bit democratic? Nothing wrong with democracy, of course, you just have to make sure your own candidates
are the only ones allowed to stand.’

Powerscourt thought that the workers’ councils so beloved of extreme left-wingers right across Europe might not get off the starting line on the Delaney factory floor. He held his
peace.

Half an hour later the pilgrim company assembled at the far end of the hotel dining room. Already Powerscourt, as he told Lady Lucy later, was beginning to feel that he could happily go to his
grave without any further assemblies in the dining rooms of French hotels. Delaney sat at the centre of a table to the front, flanked by Father Kennedy – always happy to be in hotel dining
rooms – on his right with Powerscourt on his left and then Lady Lucy. Alex Bentley basked in the sunshine on the far side of Lady Lucy. The pilgrims sat in two semicircular rows in front of
Michael Delaney.

A black hotel cat shot across the floor as Delaney rose to speak. ‘My friends, fellow pilgrims,’ he began, ‘I have to tell you that another of our number has passed away. First
there was John Delaney in Le Puy. This morning the body of Patrick MacLoughlin was found in Entraygues-sur-Truyère, the next town on the banks of the Lot, lying in the bottom of a rowing
boat that had been dispatched downstream from this hotel. The authorities believe he had been strangled before his last journey. We have to stay here in Estaing to speak to an inspector from the
French police. We are here tonight to consider what we should do next. I believe Lord Powerscourt has some thoughts he would like to share with you.’

Maggie Delaney was torn between a delicious mixture of joy and sorrow, joy that further affliction had come on her hated cousin, Michael Delaney, sorrow that a young man of
God with so much life in front of him should have been taken away. She began to pray for the dead man’s soul. Powerscourt had told Lady Lucy beforehand that he wasn’t going to mince his
words. He felt very strongly indeed about this question.

‘Pilgrims, friends,’ he began, ‘I was called here to look into the death of John Delaney on the rock of St Michel. Now we have a second death. I have to say that I have no idea
who is responsible for these murders. They are linked by one small thread. On both bodies was found a scallop shell, symbol and guide to the pilgrims to Compostela through the ages. And Alex
Bentley tells me that the body sent in a boat to Entraygues may echo the arrival of St James the Great in northern Spain, where his body was discovered in a stone boat near a place on the coast
called Padron. Be that as it may, both of these young men died horrible deaths. People have asked me earlier this evening if I think there will be any further murders on the route. I have to tell
you I think it is very likely, that it is almost certain.’

Powerscourt paused. There was a murmur from the pilgrims. He glanced briefly at Lady Lucy for reassurance.

‘One of you in this room here tonight is a murderer.’ He spoke very quietly. ‘It might be you,’ his finger shot out towards the middle of the second row, ‘or you or
you or you or you.’ His finger travelled along the entire length of the front row and continued across the top table to take in Father Kennedy and Michael Delaney himself. ‘Only one
person can feel safe in this company and that is the killer himself. Only he knows who he intends to murder next. Only he knows where he intends to do it. Only he knows when he intends to carry out
his next murder. Do not console yourself with the thought that there may only be one more victim. We do not know. There could be two or three or four. The most dangerous place in any battle is in
the heart of the front line waiting for an enemy attack. Tonight you are all in the heart of that front line. All of your lives are in danger.’

Powerscourt wondered if he had said enough. He carried on. It was a long time since he had felt so strongly about one of his cases.

‘So what would my advice be? My advice is very simple. Call off your pilgrimage. Go home, separately I should advise, once the police have completed their inquiries. Go home and see your
loved ones. Go home to safety for this gathering is currently one of the most dangerous places in Europe. Go home while you can. Go home while you are still alive. Go home before you are thrown off
some huge volcanic rock or sent strangled in a rowing boat down the Lot. In this case discretion is not merely the better part of valour. Discretion is the only way to stay alive.’

Powerscourt sat down. Lady Lucy squeezed his hand. There was a long silence. Then Michael Delaney rose to his feet once more. ‘Does anybody wish to speak?’ he asked. Powerscourt
wondered cynically if this was the first time in his life that Michael Delaney had asked for contributions from the floor. There was a rustling among the pilgrims.

‘Begging your pardon, sir.’ Shane Delaney from Swindon, the man with a dying wife, had risen from his chair, shuffling nervously from foot to foot. ‘I think Lord Powerscourt
forgets something. We’re not here on some walking holiday, we’re here on pilgrimage. Christian didn’t turn back, sir, because of his troubles and temptations on the way to the
Celestial City. He went on. I promised my Sinead, so I did, that I would carry out this pilgrimage on her behalf. I’m here because she’s too sick to do it. It might save her life, so
the priests told me, not a great chance but it might. I can’t go back, sir. I’d be letting her down. I couldn’t look her in the eye if I ran away. We have all these difficulties,
like Christian. But I for one have got to go on. Like him.’