Death of a Pilgrim (28 page)

Powerscourt wondered what you would do if you were the murderer. Would you tell the truth? Would you make up a totally fictitious past? Could one tell if a person was lying from words written on
a page? It would be, he realized, much easier to tell if a person was lying in a conversation than it would be reading a sheet of paper. What would I do, if I were the murderer? he asked himself. A
clever murderer would know that he, Powerscourt, had no means of checking out the information. He could invent a totally fictitious past and a totally fictitious family. Maybe the whole thing was a
waste of time.

The pilgrims began to drift away after they had finished. Inspector Léger’s men watched their every move. One of these men is a murderer, Powerscourt reminded himself, one of the
most daring murderers he had ever encountered. He wished there was some test he could give, other than this one, like those chemical experiments he dimly remembered from his school days where
things turned blue or green when confronted with another substance.

At last they were all finished. Powerscourt took the papers up to Alex Bentley’s room and together they began turning them into family trees, horizontal and vertical lines joining up the
Delaneys spinning their way down the pages. Then he remembered the local vineyard. The owner had been taking his evening meal at the table next to the Powerscourts the evening before and had
shouted a very loud invitation to visit him in the morning as he left. Normally Powerscourt would have declined but he had promised to go and his head was weary with family trees. ‘I’ll
just pop over for half an hour or so,’ he said to Alex Bentley. ‘Can you tell Lady Lucy where I’ve gone?’

The last of the morning mist was clearing as he set out on the half-mile walk to the vineyard. Thin wisps could be seen disappearing very slowly when you looked at them. A bird of prey, buzzard
or kite, was circling high in the sky. It was going to be a beautiful day. Monsieur Leon’s vineyard was on top of a hill. On the right-hand side the vines ran down the slopes in orderly
well-tended rows. On the left the hill became almost a precipice, tumbling down towards the Lot, the waters dark in the shadows.

Powerscourt knocked on the door of the house and found no reply. In front of him was a set of steps with the word
cave
or cellar written on a piece of wood above the entrance. From
somewhere down below he thought he could hear music, a rather tinny sort of music. As he reached the bottom of the steps he saw that he was in quite a large cave. In the centre a feeble electric
light tried and failed to illuminate all the interior. There were racks and racks filled with wine bottles reaching from floor to ceiling. The music, he realized, was the Marseillaise and it must
be coming from a musical box by one of the enormous wooden vats at the far end of the cellar.

Powerscourt headed towards the noise, his footsteps echoing off the stone floor. The music changed. Now it was playing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. Maybe it was one of those
sophisticated machines that could play three or four different tunes. One of the vats had a sliding door cut into the front, presumable to make the cleaning out of the lees easier. Powerscourt
stepped inside.

Powerscourt hummed the words to the himself as he knelt down to inspect the little box. Some distant memory told him that the most sophisticated of these machines were
manufactured in Switzerland. Just as he had it in his hands the light went out. Then he heard a rasping noise. The sliding door of the vat was moving. There was a harsh clang as it closed and a
bolt was rammed home. Then another one. The music stopped. Powerscourt was trapped in the dark inside a wine vat over ten feet tall with no means of communication with the outside world. The
winemaker Mr Leon seemed to have disappeared.

For a moment he cursed himself for his folly. Why hadn’t he stayed with his family trees, drawing innocent lines of dead Delaneys across the page? Something told him that his ordeal had
only just begun. There would be something else. He prayed that it wasn’t rats, rats about to be released into his wooden tomb through some secret opening. All his life he had been terrified
of rats, rats runnning all over his clothes, patrolling across his face, scratching at his hands, biting, clawing, driving him slowly insane.

Then he heard his fate. It wasn’t rats that were to mark his passing. At first he thought it might be condensation coming off the roof of the wooden vat. There were drips falling on to the
floor. The drips turned into a slow trickle. A couple of them landed on his head. Then he knew. This wasn’t going to be Ordeal by Rat. It wasn’t even going to be Ordeal by Water. It was
going to be Ordeal by Wine. There must be some sort of funnel or entrance up there through which the murderer had released this slow trickle that seemed to be growing more powerful by the second.
Presumably there was a link to some other container that was now being emptied all over him. He couldn’t get out. He doubted if anybody would hear him shout, if there was anybody out there in
the cave who was listening. He remembered some English king who had always delighted junior students of history by dying in a butt of malmsey. Well, unless he was very lucky, he, Powerscourt, was
going to drown in a vat of wine. He hoped flippantly that it was good quality stuff. He didn’t fancy drowing in
vin ordinaire
. He wanted to pass away to
Premier Cru
, maybe even
Grand Cru
. He wondered where Johnny Fitzgerald was. So often in the past he had thought that the two of them would die together on the battlefield.

Powerscourt patted his pockets to see what feeble weapons he might have at his command. He had left his pistol in the little house in the hills. He doubted it would have served him well even if
he had it. The bullets might ricochet off the staves and kill him on the rebound. He had a book of matches. This vat, soaked in wine for heaven knew how many years, would never burn, and even if it
did, he would burn with it. He had a clasp knife, complete with two blades and a corkscrew. The one thing he didn’t need in here, he told himself bitterly, was a bloody corkscrew. The stuff
was lapping at his ankles now. He bent down and picked up the music box. He placed it on a ledge level with the top of his head. He felt for the button or the handle to turn it on. The Marseillaise
sounded forth again. He could meet his end to the song of the men marching from Marseilles to Paris in 1792. He would have a suitably French end.

He tried shoulder-charging the walls of his tomb. His only reward was a bruised shoulder. Then he began feeling with his hands along the wooden staves used to build the giant barrel. The cooper
who made it would have known all about how to make it waterproof. He tried inserting the stronger blade of his knife into the overlap between the planks. Nothing happened. He wondered if he could
make a hole, just a little hole that would let the wine escape. It was up to his calves now. A quick bend down and a dab of his fingers told Powerscourt that he was going to meet his maker in a sea
of red rather than a sea of white. Jordan river, for him, would be
rouge
not
blanc
. He began working with his knife at the wood about halfway up the side of the vessel. He realized
that the corkscrew might be more useful in trying to gouge out tiny sections of wood. With a knife in one hand and the corkscrew in the other he launched a furious assault on the walls of his tomb.
The music box played on.

Powerscourt sang along in French to raise his spirits. He remembered that the soldier who wrote the words in a single night was a captain of engineers. Maybe some of his skills
could be transferred to Powerscourt’s hands.

Lady Lucy felt cold when she heard about her husband’s trip to the vineyard. She could sense danger. She thought of the road between the hotel and the vineyard. She
remembered the words of the Inspector – ‘We’re only letting the pilgrims out one at a time. No pairs, no groups. If they want to kill themselves instead of one of the others, so
much the better.’ The killer might be lying in the wait for her Francis. She remembered all the times in the past when Francis had gone out on potentially dangerous missions accompanied by
Johnny Fitzgerald as friend and protector. Now he was on his own. And they were up against one of the most ruthless murderers they had ever encountered. If the murderer began to see Powerscourt as
a threat, she felt sure that he too would be killed. She remembered Sherlock Holmes’s advice to Dr Watson when he was telling him how to cross London without falling into the clutches of the
evil Professor Moriarty: ‘in the morning you will send for a hansom, desiring your man to take neither the first nor the second that may present itself’. Francis, she thought, had
jumped heedlessly into the first one.

She rushed to find Inspector Léger. Together they ran up the road to Monsieur Leon’s with Lucy praying as she went that her husband would still be alive when she got there.

The wine was well over his knees now. Powerscourt thought that he had only five or ten minutes left. The music box, obviously a deeply patriotic machine, had worked its way
through all seven verses of the Marseillaise. Now it was playing ‘God Save the King’ at a very rapid speed. Powerscourt wondered if he would die happy and glorious. His hands were still
hacking feverishly at the wood. His indentation was about an eighth of an inch deep. He didn’t know how thick the planks were but he doubted he had enough time. He realized suddenly how
difficult it would be to effect a rescue mission. Anybody walking into the cave would think everything was normal, the bottles parked neatly in their rows, the great vats standing to attention at
the end. Nobody would ever know he was inside one of them. He hoped the music box would carry beyond the curved walls of his prison. He thought of Lucy and the years ahead they might never enjoy
together. He thought of his children growing up without a father. He thought of his first wife Caroline, drowned with their little son in a shipwreck on the Irish Sea. He thought about the murderer
in his present case and that drove him to yet more furious efforts with knife and corkscrew. If there was one thing that made him angry, it was the thought of being beaten. This bloody murderer, he
said to himself, is not going to kill me. I won’t have it. As the wine rose to his waist and filled his pockets he began shoving the corkscrew into the wood as if it was a cork in a bottle.
He thought he could drive it in another eighth of an inch. There was still a long way to go. There was now a musty smell in the vat of death, heady fumes rising from the liquid. Powerscourt
realized he might be forced to drink the stuff at the end. An imaginary waiter appeared before him. Would Monsieur like to try the wine?

Inspector Léger and Lady Lucy were halfway there now. The hill had slowed them to a walking pace. Inspector Léger was mopping his brow with a blue handkerchief,
freshly ironed, Lady Lucy observed, wondering about Madame Léger and life in the Léger household. Some of her anxiety had transmitted itself to the policeman. He patted his pocket
from time to time, making sure his gun was still there. A small group of clouds passed overhead, obscuring the sun. A cart, laden with manure, passed them going the other way. On either side the
vines were ripening slowly.

The wine was at Powerscourt’s heart now, The musical box had moved back to the American national anthem. He was beginning to feel dizzy. His clothes were sticking
tightly to his body. He could feel the energy ebbing away from him as his fingers still hacked at the wood of his prison. He cursed the murderer. He thought he was about to cry.

Lady Lucy and the Inspector were only a couple of hundred yards away. Lady Lucy was panting, holding on to her side. She knew she couldn’t slow down. A terrible memory
came back to her, of her husband lying wounded, shot by a killer in the Wallace Collection in London’s Manchester Square and hovering close to death. He lay in a coma, and she recalled all
too vividly the thought that he was going to pass away in front of her and she wouldn’t even know he had gone. Perhaps he’s dead already, Lady Lucy said to herself, for her anxieties
had grown on the journey, and I wasn’t there to say goodbye. Very quietly she began to weep.

Powerscourt thought he was making progress at last: the wood at the end of his corkscrew felt slightly different. It began to yield a little. He though of prisoners in their cells in the Tower
of London in Elizabethan times trying to saw away at the bars of their prison. The wine was by his shoulders now. Every time he rammed his corkscrew into the wood there was a swell in the liquid
around him. At its height the red tide washed up to his ears. His music box was back on ‘God Save the King’. Powerscourt thought the Dead March from
Saul
might be more
appropriate. Very quietly he began to sing the last verse:

Inspector Léger and Lady Lucy had reached the winemaker’s house. They took a lightning tour. They peered into the darkness of the cellar and the Inspector went
back into the kitchen to search for matches. God only knows, he said to himself, where the bloody light switch is. Lady Lucy stood halfway down the steps straining for a noise or a cry or the sound
of some stray dog barking by a human body.