Death of a Pilgrim (25 page)

Memories and regrets for his failed love affair pursued Johnny down to County Cork twenty years later, still carrying out the instructions of the friend who had saved his life and his sanity all
those years before. But one thought haunted Johnny Fitzgerald on this return visit to his native land. He could still see in his mind the black letters in the fateful announcement. Jonathan Henry
Osborne of Macroom Castle, County Cork. Macroom was his destination on this quest for crimes and possible vendettas in the Delaney past. Would Mary Rose still be there? Would he recognize her? What
would he say to her if they met in the street or in society? What would he say to her husband?

The village of Conques lay on a hillside, surrounded by trees. Time had hardly touched it. Modernity with its railways and its factories, its great shopping palaces and its
telegraphs and its obsession with time had made very little impact. It was one of the few places on the entire pilgrimage where the pilgrim could imagine himself back in the Middle Ages. The
pilgrim party entered by the old road over a tiny Roman bridge across the river Dourdou. The Inspector and his colleagues were offering lessons in the chequered history of the place. Conques, they
said to whoever would listen, with Powerscourt and Lady Lucy translating at either end of the pilgrim column, had not always been a major centre on the pilgrim route. Sometime in the eleventh
century an ambitious abbot hatched a daring plan to put his church, literally, on the map. He sent one of his younger monks to enrol in the community centred round the martyr’s church at
Agen. Here were held the remains and a famous statue of Ste Foy, an early Christian martyr beheaded by the Romans for her beliefs and the most celebrated saint of the time in medieval France. The
abbot’s instructions to his man were clear. He was to steal the lot, statue, relics, whatever he could lay his hands on, and bring them back to Conques. The young man waited and waited for
his opportunity. Years passed. Daily at first, and then at ever decreasing intervals, the abbot of Conques would stare out at the road that led to Agen, hoping and praying for the arrival of the
treasure. After seven years he gave up. But the monk had not. After ten years he saw his chance at last when the community was at dinner and the door to the room where the treasure was kept had,
for once, been left unlocked. He stuffed the booty into a sack and fled back to Conques, travelling mainly by night to avoid capture and humiliation. The abbot was overjoyed.

The telling of this tale took them past the slate roofs and into Conques through the western gate, the Porte du Barry with its great red arch, covered with half-timbered houses. Up the steep
slope they went, their boots slipping on the cobblestones. The preserved medieval houses looked small compared to the great church in the centre. Here, day and night, the monks had gathered for
their seven services a day. Here behind the altar stood the reliquary statue of Ste Foy encrusted with jewels and cameos and intaglios donated by the pilgrims. And here above the doorway was the
tympanum, a great semicircular structure depicting the Last Judgement where a majestic Christ ushers the elect into heaven and the damned into hell. Some of the sculptures on the road to Compostela
are delicate, almost ethereal in composition, etiolated saints and ethereal evangelists gazing out at the passing pilgrims. The Conques tympanum is not among them. Its message is direct, simple,
uncompromising. Follow the scriptures and you’ll be saved. Sin and you’ll go to hell. This was the blunt message of Conques. As the pilgrims stared up at the message, Charlie Flanagan,
the young man from Baltimore who carved ships and crucifixes out of wood, took out a small black notebook and began making drawings of the figures. Powerscourt wondered if a tiny Lucifer or an
Abraham would emerge in the days ahead.

A great crowd of schoolchildren enveloped them suddenly. They wriggled their way to the front of the crowd, slipping past the pilgrims, pushing them out of their way and scattering them across
the square. The children seemed to have emerged from nowhere and began pointing excitedly at the little stone figures above. Heaven didn’t seem to interest them very much. It was hell that
appealed.

‘Look at Lucifer with those mad eyes!’

‘They’re hanging one over there upside down!’

‘See that one near the bottom! The devils are putting him into a furnace!’

‘How about that couple below! They must have been very bad. They’re tied together at the neck!’

‘What about this hunchback devil? He’s caught three monks in a sort of fishing net like my father uses!’

As their teachers appeared to restore order the morning air of Conques was split by a scream. It cut through the excited babble of the schoolchildren. Then there was a second. The teachers began
to gather their children into a huddle under the main door. The pilgrims looked as if they had been turned into stone. Powerscourt turned and ran as fast as he could towards the noise. It came from
the opposite end of the church. The Inspector was close behind him. At the far side of the radiating chapels that led out from the choir were a series of empty stone coffins that looked as if they
might once have been inside holding the bodies of dead saints or warriors. They could be seen clearly from the street. One of them was no longer empty. Blood flowed out of it in streams and ran on
to the grass and spilled over the flagstones below. It looked fresh, as if it had only started to pump out recently. A lone woman in the street carried on screaming. Powerscourt turned and sprinted
back to the tympanum.

‘The children,’ he said to the teachers in a voice he tried to make as normal as he could. ‘Get them out of here as fast as you can. It’s bad back there, very bad.
Whatever you do,’ he pointed dramatically behind him, ‘don’t take them that way up the street. You’ll have to find another route.’

He suggested to the policeman that the pilgrims should all be assembled inside the church and not be allowed out until further notice. He found a young priest and asked him to fetch a doctor.
Then he took Father Kennedy with him and returned to the scene of carnage. The priest knelt down and began whispering the words of extreme unction as best as he could. Lady Lucy appeared to give
moral support to her husband. She looked away quickly when she saw the blood-drenched body, the red flow gushing out over the stone, and stared down at her feet. A thin stream of blood was now
nearing her shoes. A scallop shell seemed to be floating in the blood inside the stone coffin. Inspector Léger was making notes in his police book. There was a sweet almost sickly smell in
the air. In the distance you could hear the voices of the children, complaining about their shortened visit to the statues and the church, wondering what could have happened at the far end of the
abbey. They imagined many things, but not murder.

Powerscourt stared sadly down at the third body dispatched on the route to Compostela. Stephen Lewis the solicitor from Frome would not be going on any more train rides across southern France
and taking lunch in agreeable hotels. Powerscourt tried to work out a connection, any connection, between his latest corpse and the two earlier victims but found that he could not. Lewis would
write no more wills for the citizens of Frome, their secrets secure in the safe behind his desk. He would supervise no more the affairs and the accounts of the local Dramatic Society who had been
urging him for years to take a small part in one of their productions but had always been turned down. Mrs Lewis would sit alone now on her terrace on the summer evenings, with no more gossip and
anecdote from the town to entertain her.

An elderly man who looked as though he had seen all the sins of the world approached with a bag. Dr Bisquet, he said to no one in particular, medical practitioner in Conques these past
thirty-five years. What have we here? He knelt slowly down to examine the body. Powerscourt thought flippantly that you could almost hear the knees creaking.

‘He’s dead, of course,’ he said in a matter-of-fact voice as if he saw death every day, like the sunset. ‘Instantaneous, mind you. That must have been a blessing. One
vicious stroke right across the throat from behind delivered with great force. Monsieur, I show you.’

The doctor seemed to have identified Powerscourt as the principal player in the little group. He stood directly behind Powerscourt, so close that Powerscourt felt the grubby wool of his jacket
on his neck. The doctor shot his right hand to the far side of Powerscourt’s neck and slashed it across to the other side.

‘That’s all it would take, monsieur. The knife must have been very sharp. You find the knife, yes? Not yet? Never mind. It is too late for the poor man here.’

The Inspector sent a man to search the surrounding area.

‘Could you say anything about the height of the killer, Doctor?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘Would he have been taller than his victim? Could he have done it if he had been a couple of
inches shorter?’

Powerscourt was hunting through his memory for the relative height of the pilgrims, the remaining pilgrims, as he reminded himself bitterly.

‘That is an intelligent question, monsieur. I’m afraid I cannot give a definite answer. It would have been easiest if our murderer had been taller. If he had been of the same height
it would have been perfectly possible. A little shorter and it would have been difficult but not impossible. For the dwarf, or the little person, they could not have done it.’

‘And the blood, Doctor? Would any of the blood have stuck to the murderer’s clothes?’

‘Ah ha!’ said the doctor, who was a great devotee of detective stories in his leisure hours, although he was careful not to tell his patients. ‘There are a number of ways of
stabbing a man to death. If you stab upwards from below the heart, that is a very certain killing stroke. Many would-be murderers don’t understand that it is best to strike from below so the
knife goes in under the chest bones. Strike from above in a downwards direction and the blow may not be fatal. Our victim may survive. But with this method here, the rapid slit across the
throat,’ the doctor mimed the action once more, ‘the murderer may not have any blood on his clothes at all. He will look like everybody else. There we are.’

Powerscourt looked down at the dead body once more. What had been a human being that morning had turned into a bundle of clothes that might have been left out for the rag and bone man. The blood
was still dripping out.

‘Do you know the name of the dead man?’ The doctor looked once more at Powerscourt. ‘You do? Good, perhaps you could come back to my surgery where we can fill in the necessary
forms for the authorities with one of these policemen. I will arrange for the removal of the corpse. I will send some kind of shroud so the citizens and pilgrims of Conques do not have to look at
something to remind them of their sins and their own futures. We will all end up dead some day.’ The doctor looked as if he told this to his patients on a regular basis. Powerscourt did not
think they would find it reassuring. ‘Let us pray that we do not end up like this.’

As they filed past the front of the abbey Powerscourt found himself wondering which side of the great tympanum Stephen Lewis had gone to on his final journey. Was he perhaps in hell, with the
devils and the prongs and the halters and the roaring fires? Or was he clothed in white, accompanying the elect into heaven, checking perhaps that they had all left their earthly affairs in order
before they set off? On balance, Powerscourt thought, Stephen Lewis, the solicitor from Frome, would be with God’s chosen. Even in heaven, he reminded himself, they must need lawyers.

Powerscourt found the great doors into the Abbey Church of Sainte Foy closed on his return. The pilgrims were huddled together, sitting on the ground on the opposite side of
the square, guarded by two policemen, like prisoners being taken to the guillotine. Inspector Léger shrugged.

‘We have had a visit from the Mayor while you were away,’ he said. ‘The pilgrims are not welcome here in Conques, he told us. No hotel will give them rooms. Nobody will serve
them food. Even the bar up the street will refuse their custom.’

‘He said they had defiled the town,’ Lady Lucy cut in, ‘that a place of God had been turned into a charnel house by people pretending to be pilgrims. I think he runs the wine
shop, this Mayor, Francis. He smelt of drink. You could see imaginary rows of onions hanging from his neck and a beret on his head, if you know what I mean. And he had a priest with him.’

Powerscourt wondered suddenly if the priest was a regular customer, checking to see if the Mayor’s wares could be turned into the blood of Christ.

‘And he said more of the same, the priest,’ Lady Lucy went on. ‘Pilgrims not welcome, pilgrims desecrating one of the holiest sites in France, pilgrims defiling the memory of
one of her greatest saints. Nothing but sinners and a murderer in the priest’s view. We are meant to leave here within the hour.’

‘I see,’ said Powerscourt wearily. ‘Was Father Kennedy any use? Didn’t he try launching an appeal to Christian charity, to the stuff about forgiveness of sins?’

‘I’m afraid the Father was too preoccupied with consuming some of the creamier products of the bakery up the street, Francis. He tried but it was no good. You can’t take
anything seriously if it comes from a man with his mouth full of éclair.’

‘He got his order in before the Mayor arrived, did he?’ said Powerscourt. ‘He must have been quick off the mark.’

‘He was,’ said Lady Lucy sadly. ‘The Inspector has had a conversation with young Alex Bentley about accommodation. They think the best plan is to return to the Auberge des
Montagnes in Espeyrac for this night. It would be too far for us to travel on to the next place where he’s booked hotels.’

‘What about the funeral?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘Aren’t the pilgrims allowed to bury their dead? Can’t they even see Stephen Lewis put in the ground and say their
farewells?’

‘The authorities will bury him,’ said the Inspector. ‘The priest assured us that they will give him a proper burial in the town cemetery. They don’t want Father Kennedy
anywhere near the service, they said. The poor man can’t be buried by a glutton in a dog collar.’