Death of a Pilgrim (35 page)

The rattle of wheels and the clap of horses’ hooves told him that the body must now be on its way to another resting place. The sun was advancing slowly but relentlessly along the south
arcade, highlighting the pillars and the capitals in red and gold. Powerscourt wondered if the stones had a message. Perhaps they were as remote as the broken statue of some long dead Egyptian
potentate, buried in the sands in the Valley of the Kings . Modernity, he thought, would probably want to sweep them all away and build something new, something relevant to the times. The cloister,
indeed, had only just survived an early encounter with modernity when the engineers of the new Bordeaux to Sète railway had wanted to knock the whole complex down and replace it with
gleaming modern railway tracks. It had taken a great campaign to deflect them and even now, as Powerscourt heard the rumble of an approaching express behind him, modernity shook parts of the
building every time a train shot past. Powerscourt walked slowly round the cloisters, a voyage out of light into shadow and back into light again and thought about the monks and the abbots who had
spent their lives here centuries before. The men who walked here then didn’t think about the future, they thought about eternity.

The dull browns burnished into light pink, the weathered red brick wrapped around the cloisters, the great tree reaching up into a deep blue sky, they spoke to Powerscourt of a profound peace.
He would always remember these cloisters, the deep stillness they conveyed even when the arcades were full of chattering pilgrims, the all-pervading calm, their austere and timeless beauty. He
heard footsteps advancing towards him from the south gallery. Lady Lucy was coming to join her husband in his deliberations. As she walked along the row of pillars, the sunlight was dancing in her
hair.

There were two telegrams waiting for Powerscourt when he and Lady Lucy returned to the hotel. The first was from Johnny Fitzgerald and was unusually delphic for Johnny.
‘Am coming in person to join you on holiday in south of France. Bringing one of Knightsbridge’s finest lost and found. Shall expect detailed report on best local vintages for immediate
consumption. Fitzgerald.’

‘My love, what on earth is one of Knightsbridge’s finest lost and found?’ Lady Lucy had been reading the message over her husband’s shoulder.

Powerscourt laughed. ‘It’s a primitive sort of code, Lucy. Look at the first letters of the words after “bringing” and you’ll see it says “book”. Johnny
must have got hold of a copy of that old book about Delaney, the one that was pulped all those years ago. And he’s bringing it himself. Maybe he didn’t like to trust it to the post.
Anyway, he should be here soon. I think that’s tremendous news.’

Lady Lucy was more thrilled than she let on. She had always been very fond of Johnny Fitzgerald. He had been best man at their wedding, scarcely recovered from a bullet wound in the chest. But
when he was there, she felt Francis was safe. Johnny looked after him as he had looked after Johnny for years now. It was as if a blanket of security was about to be thrown over her husband.

The second telegram came from Franklin Bentley in Washington. ‘Have located young Delaney,’ it said. ‘Early years in Pittsburgh, city of steel. Have located local priest who
may remember him. My employers have given leave for me to go there tomorrow. Suspect they want to curry favour with Delaney, take his account away from Smith Wasserstein Abrahams up in New
York.’

‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, ‘things may be looking up.’ A faint outline of a plan to catch the killer was forming in his brain. It depended on his having Johnny Fitzgerald
by his side. And, for once, he wasn’t going to breathe a word of it to his wife.

After dinner they went out to have coffee and drinks at a series of wooden tables at the back of the hotel. This small square had once been the stable block and indeed there
were still a number of horses and a few carriages to be seen. A bearded man could be observed lying under the bonnet of a very large and very expensive-looking motor car, a rag in one hand and an
oil can in the other, swearing violently from time to time as he encountered further mechanical problems.

It was Powerscourt who saw them first. Flying high above them was a positive armada of small birds, swallows and martins and swifts, with their scythe-like wings and short forked tails. They
looked as though they were on parade, medieval knights on tournament duty perhaps, armour burnished, lances polished, standards cleaned till they glowed in the sunlight, trotting along the green
field to impress a sovereign or delight a mistress. Hundreds and hundreds of the birds passed overhead, the noise of their wings mingling with their cries and the traffic of the town. Somewhere out
of sight, Powerscourt thought, they must wheel round and return, drawn for some unknown reason back to the little square that started as a stable block.

He remembered the excitement in his household the previous year when reports reached England that two Americans had invented a machine that could fly. This was no Montgolfier balloon that had
carried the French into the skies before their Revolution, dependent on the wind, uncertain of navigation, symbolic of veering and abrupt changes in political direction. This American contraption,
when it was more fully developed, would fly where man wanted it to go. The wings, unlike those of aviation pioneer Icarus, would not melt if taken too close to the sun. Powerscourt’s eldest
child, Thomas, had been fascinated by the flying aeroplane. He bought all the newspapers and magazines he could find that contained articles about it. Daily for nearly a month, his father recalled,
Thomas had announced at mealtimes, all mealtimes, that he was going to fly one of these devices when he grew up. His sister Olivia, almost as excited as Thomas at the prospect of flying machines,
announced that she wasn’t going to bother to learn how to fly the things. This, she implied, was a rather menial task, like mending broken motor cars. Rather she would travel in state and in
style, seated in luxury by one of the windows, taking small but sophisticated sips of Kir Royale, a concoction Olivia had been allowed a minute mouthful of in France the year before and regarded as
the epitome of chic.

Then the pattern in the heavens above changed. No longer were the birds flying in huge formations, hundreds and hundreds to a regiment. Now they were coming in small attack platoons, fifteen or
twenty at a time. Before they had sailed high above the buildings. Now they dived straight for them, only turning away at the last possible second. They skimmed along the sides of the stables a few
feet from the solid bricks that would have crushed their skulls. The birds, swifts mostly, Powerscourt thought, headed directly for the chimney tops, twisting out of the way with inches to spare,
screaming as they went. There were dark birds, totally black, in the line-up now, which he suspected might be bats. Wave after wave of them came in their demonic flight, skirting along the sides of
the square. No human brain, he thought, could have made the lightning calculations needed to tell the birds to turn away from the walls and the turrets now or they would be obliterated. This was,
quite literally, for these swifts and swallows and martins, a dance of death.

He looked over to his right and saw the birds still turning and twisting and racing and shrieking and diving across their arena of the roofs of the stable block.

When he turned his gaze back to the hotel, everything had changed. The little birds had stopped, or moved on. Perhaps God or some other celestial seneschal had blown a whistle to announce the
end of the match. In their place, high above the playground of the swifts and the swallows, a couple of ravens were beating a regular and steady path across the skies. Pay no attention, they seemed
to say, to the frantic antics of these small swifts and swallows. We are the serious characters round here. We shall always be with you. And in place of the shrieking of the little birds he could
hear Lady Lucy’s voice asking him if he had gone deaf, surely, she had been trying to talk to him for at least a minute, and did he want another drink before the bar closed up for the
night.

Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were sipping their coffee in a corner of another hotel dining room the next morning when a great shout disturbed the breakfast peace.

‘Francis! Lucy! The top of the morning to you both!’ And Johnny Fitzgerald, holding a large dark brown bag very tight in his right hand, strode across the room. He embraced Lady Lucy
and held Powerscourt in an enormous bear hug. Only then, as the relief flooded through him, did Powerscourt realize how much he had missed his companion in arms. Lady Lucy felt happier than she had
done since she came to France. Francis would be safe now.

‘Coffee,’ said Johnny, seating himself down, still holding on to the bag and signalling to the waitress, ‘I could do with some coffee. I feel it’s too early for a drink,
even for me. Now then,’ he tapped his holdall significantly, ‘I’ve brought you the Crown Jewels, Francis. I had to go all the way to Bath to get it, mind you. I think this is the
only copy left in England.’

‘Have you read any of it, Johnny?’ asked Lady Lucy.

‘I’ve got to page one hundred and fifty. It’s a very strange book. The subtitle is
The Seven Deadly Sins of Michael Delaney
, and each of the seven chapters deals with a
different crime. Maybe the author hoped it would be serialized in one of the weeklies, a sin a week for a month and a half. But it’s as if the author is two completely different people. The
beginning of each chapter is full of detailed financial stuff I didn’t really care about, then at the end he turns into a sort of hellfire preacher man and rants and raves away about how
wicked Delaney is and how he is sure to be punished in this world or the next.’

‘And are the crimes bad enough, Johnny, for people to want to kill all his relations?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘Depends on how bad you think all these financial misdemeanours are, I suppose,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, rummaging around in his bag. ‘You know I could never understand
anything about money – the financial pages leave me in such a daze that my wits can only be restored by a glass or two of something.’ Johnny handed the book over to Powerscourt who
noticed that Johnny had wrapped the cover in plain brown paper so that nobody would know what he was reading.

A glance inside told him that the author was a Robert Preston, one-time reporter with the
Wall Street Journal
.

‘Well,’ he smiled at his wife and his friend, ‘let’s hope we find some answers in here. Wouldn’t it be odd if the solution to these murders came all the way from
Bath.’

The pilgrim train was now six carriages long, four for the pilgrims and two extra for the Powerscourts laid on by the Inspector. Léger had called at the hotel soon after
Johnny’s arrival to tell them they would be leaving at eleven o’clock.

‘I’ve done all the paperwork,’ he said wearily to Powerscourt, ‘I’ve filled in all the forms. I’ve arranged for the funeral. I had a frightful time with the
local police and the Mayor and everybody, mind you. They kept saying these wretched pilgrims should be held here in Moissac, pending further investigations. I asked them how many more dead bodies
they wanted on their doorstep. Then they said I couldn’t take the suspects out of the area. I asked if they wanted hordes of newspapermen crowding round their damned cloisters – said I
was going to make an appeal via the gentlemen of the press for information from the public that might lead to an arrest. I even, God help me, talked about a reward.’

‘Would you have done that, Inspector?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘Certainly not,’ said the Inspector with a grin. ‘I’m hardly likely to want to advertise our failure to find the murderer. But they weren’t to know that.
We’ll conduct the interviews as we go along. If the pilgrims won’t talk to me or to you, Powerscourt, I’m going to tell them they may never get out of France. They could be locked
up in a cell for years while the case is investigated. As it is, I’ve talked to the railway authorities. They’ve put a newer and faster engine on the train. The quicker the pilgrims are
out of the country the happier I shall be.’

Failure. Our failure. Failure. My failure. Powerscourt wondered if this would be his last case, the shame and ignominy of failure finishing off his reputation for good. His mood was not improved
by a summons to see Michael Delaney who seemed to have appropriated one of the extra carriages as his own. The train was now moving towards the south at considerable speed. Johnny Fitzgerald was
looking at the birds out of the window, swearing quietly when their speed prevented him from making a proper identification.

Delaney seemed to have obtained a fresh supply of cigars. The great fat one he was smoking now was of a type Powerscourt had not seen him smoke before. He seemed to be in a filthy mood.
Powerscourt wondered if his famous temper, admirably held in check until now, was about to explode.

‘Ah, Powerscourt,’ he said, sounding rather like a headmaster Powerscourt had once known, ‘sit down.’ He took another mighty puff on his cigar. ‘In my line of
business, Powerscourt, we have to keep an eye on the managers we put in. Are they doing their job properly? Are they fiddling the books? Are they succeeding in bringing in loads of profit for the
firm, that sort of thing. Are you with me up to this point?’

Powerscourt said yes, he thought he could manage it so far, thank you.

‘One of the hardest jobs our managers have to perform in the unforgiving world of commerce is to turn around companies that are failing, losing money, losing me money. Let me tell you a
story, Powerscourt. Let’s suppose I’ve just bought a little railroad company in upstate New York. It’s not doing well, but there is a lot of potential. In goes the manager, who
comes with very high recommendations and references, the best in the business and so on. And he fails. The company is not turned round. It continues to go down the pan. And what do I do? In my
innocence I believe that it is not his fault, that he deserves another chance. So I send him to save another company, a ferry business operating out of Long Island Sound that should be making money
hand over fist. Again he fails. The citizens of Long Island Sound are not crowding on to his ferries, they’re travelling on the other bastard’s boats. So what do I do? Like a fool, I
keep the man on. This time I send him to a printing works that should be flush with dollars with people buying more newspapers and so forth. But no. For the third time the man fails. The order
books of the printing works are no better than they were when he came, they are worse. Three times now this man has failed me, he’s failed himself, he’s failed to fulfil his part of the
American dream that all businessmen are free to make as much money as they can. I give him one last chance. Another train company. Maybe he was unlucky the first time. Maybe this time all that
praise for his abilities will come good. Maybe or maybe not. The fool fails again. So what do you think I should do with him, Powerscourt? You know all about people with superb references and
recommendations, after all.’