Death of a Pilgrim (37 page)

When the last of the apricot tarts had been cleared away, Powerscourt and Lady Lucy went up to their room. Powerscourt stepped out on the balcony and watched night falling slowly over
Aire-sur-l’Adour. Lady Lucy was fiddling with the bolsters, waiting for the signal to start work. Down below Powerscourt could hear the noise of laughter from the bar. He stared at the street
in front of him, wondering if he could see any sign of movement. Then the noises off began to die down. Outside their room he could hear the pilgrims making their way upstairs. Inspector
Léger had a man on every landing, ordered to watch through the night. Silence fell over the Hôtel d’Artagnan.

‘Time to work your magic, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt. The bedclothes were whipped off each bed in turn. Bolsters and pillows were deployed to imitate the curve and the shape of the
human form. Lady Lucy’s model, if that was the right word, was the way her Francis slept at night, back curved, legs drawn up slightly at the knees. She replaced the bedclothes, ruffling them
furiously as she did so, to make it look as if the sleeping figures had tossed and turned in the night. Then she looked at her husband.

‘Would you like to be brown or fair, my love?’ she said, turning the two wigs over in her hands.

‘Brown,’ said Powerscourt with a smile, ‘definitely brown.’

Lady Lucy stepped back to check her handiwork. She ruffled the pillows once more. ‘That’s about as good as I can make it, Francis.’

‘Looks pretty good to me,’ said Powerscourt, pulling out the light bulb and putting it in his pocket. He picked up a suitcase. They closed the door very carefully and tiptoed as
quietly as they could down the back stairs and out into the little square behind the hotel. They crept along a couple of back streets and rejoined the road by the river a couple of hundred yards
from the Hôtel d’Artagnan. Here was another room reserved for them in the Hôtel Mousquetaire. Powerscourt had booked the room at the same time he made the reservations for the
pilgrim party. The hotel manager had been warned that they would be late. Their room was very like the other one with a balcony looking out over the river.

‘How long before you go back, my love?’ Lady Lucy was feeling very nervous.

‘An hour or so, I’m not sure,’ said Powerscourt.

‘You will take great care, Francis? We don’t need any heroics. The Inspector’s men can look after the rough end of things.’ Even as she spoke Lady Lucy knew she was
wasting her energies. If there was a rough end of things then Francis would be in the thick of it.

Just after midnight Powerscourt kissed his wife goodbye. She held him very tight, reluctant to let her man go. ‘Good luck, my own love,’ she said, ‘I shall be waiting for
you.’

Powerscourt made his way back to the Hôtel d’Artagnan very slowly. He was thinking about Alexandre Dumas’s legacy, hotels named after him in this little town and all over
France, small boys all over Europe acting out the adventures of his characters in bedrooms and parks and back gardens. He remembered reading
The Three Musketeers
as a child. His father had
found him a wooden sword and he used to charge around the lawns and shrubberies of Powerscourt House having long battles with his enemies. There was a lone fisherman on the river, his lines draped
over the back of the boat, drifting downstream with the current. Above, the sky was ablaze with stars and the moon was nearly full. He worried about Lady Lucy, left behind with the musketeers and
with no knight errant to protect her.

On his way in he nearly bumped into the Inspector, tiptoeing down the stairs. They did not speak. There was a long corridor running the length of the hotel on all three upper floors. The
bedrooms were off to the left. Every twenty yards or so there was a small alcove set back into the wall where a man would be virtually invisible to anybody coming towards him, a murderer at large
in the night hours. Powerscourt’s position was in one of these niches, some twenty yards from the door of his room. Johnny Fitzgerald was twenty yards behind Powerscourt towards the stairs.
At each end of the corridor there were stairs to the next floor or the floor below. The two former soldiers were united again, waiting for another battle as they had done so often in the past.

Powerscourt was squatting on the ground, his eyes fixed on the further set of stairs. He wondered if this most difficult case might be about to end. He thought briefly about taking Lucy away
somewhere when it was all over. Perhaps they could complete the pilgrim route and go to Santiago de Compostela and stand beneath the Portal de la Gloria in the Cathedral of St James.

Johnny Fitzgerald was trying to remember the names of the
Premiers Crus
of Bordeaux, the most majestic wines in France. Château Lafite Rothschild, Château Latour,
Château Margaux he said to himself, where the hell was the other one? Johnny was fairly sure there were only four of them. He tried to imagine one of those wine maps the tourist industry are
so fond of with vineyards marked out by little bottles. Château Haut-Brion, he remembered at last, and it wasn’t even in Bordeaux, it was in Graves to the south of the city.

One o’clock passed. Very faintly from the ground floor Powerscourt heard the chime of a ghostly clock, striking out the hours in a ghostly hotel. Only it wasn’t a ghost they were
waiting for tonight, crouching in the dark, but a killer who would come with a knife or a piece of wire to commit another murder. Inspector Léger was worrying about the vegetables in his
garden. He suspected his
haricots verts
would be beyond revival when he eventually reached home. His wife would shrug her shoulders as she always did and proclaim her innocence, saying she
had carried out the written instructions the Inspector always left behind. He never reproached her. She failed because she gardened without love, the Inspector believed. He thought it odd how the
plants and the flowers always seemed to know when they were unloved and then just pined away.

Lady Lucy wondered about going out on to her balcony and looking back to the d’Artagnan. She decided against it. She tried to work out at what time of night she would commit a murder. One
o’clock, probably too soon, she felt. Late readers might still have their lights on and hear you creep by in the corridor outside. Two o’clock? Three o’clock? Surely only an
insomniac would be still awake at such an hour. Three thirty, she decided, that would be a good time. Just over two hours to go. She shivered slightly and wrapped a shawl round her shoulders. She
said another prayer for Francis.

Two o’clock passed and then three. Powerscourt had eliminated three people from his inquiries in his mind. That left five suspects in the frame. Suddenly he wished the murderer would hurry
up. Sleep was washing over him and he didn’t know how much longer he could hold out against it. He tiptoed over to Johnny Fitzgerald and made a couple of signs with his fingers. Johnny
nodded. He, Johnny, would have to watch both sets of stairs until Powerscourt returned. He was just going outside for a breath of air.

Powerscourt crept down the stairs and out into the street. Nothing stirred in Aire-sur-l’Adour. The nocturnal fisherman seemed to have gone home, or drifted further down the river. Perhaps
he would have fish for breakfast. Powerscourt breathed deeply. The air was soft, almost like velvet. A slight breeze was whispering through the trees. He shook his head vigorously and returned to
his position.

The Inspector had carried out a major review of the dispositions in his vegetable garden. Next year, he thought, he would try everything in a different place. He dreamt, as he often did, of
fruit trees, with apples and pears and plums growing on his own land. But he knew his garden faced the wrong way and the trees would not prosper in his little patch. Perhaps Lucille and he should
move house for a south-facing garden. He rubbed at his calves. Much more of this, he said to himself, and I’ll get cramp.

Four dim, distant chimes told the watching three that their vigil would soon be over. Powerscourt wondered who would be who from Alexandre Dumas’s
The Three Musketeers
. Johnny
Fitzgerald would be Porthos, all drink and swagger. He, Powerscourt, would like to have been d’Artagnan, but he felt, if he was honest, that he might be more like Aramis, liable to gloom and
fits of melancholy. The Inspector would have to be an unlikely d’Artagnan, the first d’Artagnan in living memory to be losing his hair.

Lady Lucy had nodded off in her chair. She awoke shortly after half past four. She looked round wildly for Powerscourt but he wasn’t there. What was happening back there at the hotel? Had
the murderer been apprehended, caught, literally, in the act? Were Powerscourt and Johnny Fitzgerald even now toasting their success in the hotel bar with the Inspector? Lady Lucy thought that
would be very unfair, leaving her up here with her terrible knot of anxiety, far from the celebrations. She said another prayer for her husband.

Shortly after six they could hear noises down below as the hotel staff began to prepare for another day. It was hopeless now, Powerscourt said bitterly to himself. No murderer in his right mind
would set out on a killing spree with the hotel maids liable to walk past him in the corridor. He went over to the Inspector and led him and Johnny Fitzgerald into Powerscourt’s bedroom. He
replaced the light bulb he had taken out all those hours before. What they saw left them speechless. The floor had turned virtually white with feathers. They lay in heaps beside the two beds. They
were scattered like confetti all over the floor. Some of them had drifted upwards and stuck to the walls. The housekeeper’s bolsters were no more. They both had great knife slits in their
sides. The two wigs had been slashed and lay in fragments, nestling incongruously among the fallen feathers.

‘
Merde!
’ said the Inspector.

‘Mother of God!’ said Johnny Fitzgerald.

‘Look,’ said Powerscourt, pointing to the balcony door which was wide open, the cold air of dawn flooding into the room. He strode out on to the balcony.

‘He must have nerves of steel, our murderer,’ he said. ‘He must have made his way down from his floor on to a balcony, then crept along that ledge to our room. He must have
been in his stockinged feet so as not to make a noise.’

The Inspector looked down at the ledge, just visible in the light from the bedroom. ‘That’s right, that’s how he must have come. What fools we’ve been, fools, all of us.
We have five, no, six people on duty inside and not a soul outside watching the front of the hotel. And he’s got away with it too!’

Powerscourt thought there had been a great deal of violence used on the bolsters and the wigs. Maybe the murderer was venting his frustration when he realized there were no humans in the room or
in the beds. Lady Lucy would have perished too, if she had been there. Both bolsters had been ripped to shreds, great gashes spoiling the linen. He walked back to the balcony. A new day was dawning
over Aquitaine. There was a slight shimmer of mist lying over the river which would soon dissolve in the morning sun. The birds were singing merrily, chattering to each other in the branches of the
tall trees by the Adour. One or two people were already about in the street. It looked as if it was going to be a beautiful day. For Powerscourt, making his sad way back to Lady Lucy, it was yet
another failure. His plan lay in tatters on the bedroom floor, ripped to shreds like the housekeeper’s bolsters. The murderer was still at large to kill again. On Michael Delaney’s
timetable he had four days left to find the murderer. Four days, or face a lifetime of failure.

They reached the Spanish border in the middle of the afternoon. Lady Lucy spent much of the time asleep, hands folded neatly on her lap. Johnny Fitzgerald was reading a small
book called
The Birds of Europe
, checking out what he might find in Spain. Powerscourt continued with
Michael Delaney, Robber Baron
. As they moved out of France the landscape was
dominated by the jagged peaks of the Pyrenees, blessed with many waterfalls and home, as Johnny informed his companions, to large numbers of vultures and brown bears. Inspector Léger came to
say his farewells. He wished Powerscourt all the luck in the world with the rest of his investigation. He was to telegraph immediately once the mystery was solved. He was gallant with Lady Lucy,
saying what a pleasure it had been to meet her. As he led his men out of the border station, he took them first into the nearest bar.

‘I’m going to buy you boys a drink, maybe two,’ he announced. ‘We’ve got rid of those bloody pilgrims at last. Thank God I didn’t listen to those fools in the
Town Hall in Moissac or we’d still be there. France is well shot of them.’

‘Do you know who the murderer is, sir?’ asked one of his men.

‘I haven’t a clue. I don’t think our English friend has either. Let’s hope the pilgrims kill each other before they get to Santiago.’

The Spanish Inspector spoke perfect English. His name was Felipe Mendieta, son of an English mother who had fallen in love with a Spanish waiter and married him in Spain. The father Mendieta had
now graduated to owning his own restaurant. The tapas, his son assured them, were the finest in Navarre. He brought a priest with him, Father Olivares, who opened religious negotiations with Father
Kennedy in Latin. The Spanish authorities, Inspector Mendieta assured them, took the same position as the French as far as the pilgrims were concerned. This train would take them all the way to
Santiago. Nobody else would be allowed on board. Overnight accommodation would once again be in the town jail or the police cells, whichever could accommodate them. Maggie Delaney would be
accommodated in hospital or nunnery as before. It was for their own safety. The Spanish authorities were most anxious that the pilgrims, having endured so much on their journey, should find
spiritual satisfaction at the end. Inspector Mendieta trusted that the presence of Father Olivares would lend spiritual comfort. Powerscourt and his party were, of course, free to come and go as
they pleased.

The Inspector made his way down the train to make himself known to the pilgrims. There was a sudden cry from Powerscourt. ‘Listen to this,’ he said, ‘here’s another
Delaney crime! This author doesn’t treat the subject chronologically, he treats it by industry. We’re in oil now. This must have happened twenty or thirty years ago. Delaney and two
other people, Richard Jackson and Ralph Singer, buy up an oil concession in Ohio. Delaney runs it. He tells the other two after a year or so that it’s no good, the prospector teams
haven’t found anything, they’re not going to get rich this time. So they all agree to sell out to a company called Michigan Oil. So far so good. Three months later Jackson and Singer
discover that the owner of Michigan Oil is none other than Michael Delaney. And, surprise, surprise, the land in the concession is dripping with oil, it’s worth fortunes. Delaney has cheated
them; God, he’s a bad man. I’ll have to ask Father Kennedy if he can be forgiven this many sins.’