Death of a Pilgrim (10 page)

Christy Delaney and Jack O’Driscoll had been making good progress in their French language lessons at the other end of the bar. They could now order glasses of red or white wine, cognac or
pastis. They had advanced to Thank You and Good Afternoon and Good Morning and Good Evening. In his spare time Jack had begun writing his account of recent events for his newspaper. He kept it
factual. Jack always remembered the grizzled chief sub-editor on his first paper, the
Wicklow Times
, telling him, as he struck his red pencil through the offending words, ‘We
don’t want any of your bloody adjectives here, and we don’t want any of your bloody adverbs either.’

Brother White, the Christian Brother who taught at one of the leading Catholic public schools for boys in England, seemed to all who looked at him or spoke with him to be a man at peace with
himself. Inside he was in turmoil. He had a secret, a rather terrible secret. Brother James White liked beating boys. He enjoyed it very much. He could still remember the very first caning he had
administered years before. It had been on a Saturday afternoon in the summer term and the boy had failed to hand in his maths homework three days in a row. Outside he could hear the shouts of the
cricketers as they appealed for leg before wicket or caught behind. Before the first stroke, the boy’s body stretched taut leaning over a chair, Brother White felt a small frisson passing
through him. His first three blows, he remembered, had been wide of the mark, landing on the top of the legs or the very bottom of the back. The last three had struck home, the whish of the cane
alternating with the whimper of the victim. From then on, Brother White beat as many boys as he could. He had a wide selection of instruments now, hidden in his cupboard, the thinnest cane reserved
for the occasions when he wanted to inflict the maximum pain. He had tried to stop. He had prayed for guidance. It was no good. Once he had beaten an entire class in the course of an afternoon as
they failed to own up to breaking a window. On very rare occasions, he beat boys he really disliked with their trousers down and with his thinnest cane. That always gave him special pleasure. He
was always careful not to draw blood. It was now fifteen days since he had last beaten anybody. That last victim had left his room with tears running down his face, only turning at the door to
catch the look of guilty pleasure that had spread all over Brother White’s features. I’m like an alcoholic now, he said to himself sadly, all I can think of is the next beating. Alone
in his spartan room in the Hôtel St Jacques in Le Puy-en-Velay, Brother James White found himself remembering his favourite beatings as others would remember favourite evenings at the theatre
or visits to the National Gallery.

The chef, Michael Delaney would have been the first to admit, had been a major contributor to the bonhomie of his pilgrims. A succession of delicious dinners had been served with delicate tomato
soup or coarse local pâté, roast guinea fowl or navarin of lamb,
tarte tatin
, which the chef felt sure his visitors would never have tasted in their places of culinary darkness.
Father Kennedy rather wished he could stay for ever, or at least until the chef had exhausted his repertoire. Even then, the Father felt, he could have happily gone back to the beginning and
started all over again. The head waiter had been varying the seating plan, tables of four alternating with tables of six or eight. They were all working their way through a
tarte aux
myrtilles
when the doors were flung open by the proprietor, and a tall man with curly brown hair in a dark blue travelling cape and a woman with a very elaborate hat strode into the dining
room.

‘Please don’t get up,’ said the man with a smile, as chairs began edging backwards amid a rustling of feet. ‘My name is Powerscourt, Francis Powerscourt, and this is my
wife Lucy.’ He offered her forward as one might offer a trophy to the winner of the Derby.

‘Why,’ said Michael Delaney, ‘welcome, Lord Powerscourt, Lady Powerscourt! Welcome indeed! I have had these two spaces on either side of mine ready for you for the past two
days.’ He pointed to two empty chairs, places set, as a single place had been set for John Delaney days before. ‘Do you need food? Are you hungry?’

Powerscourt assured him that they were in no need of food and asked for introductions. When he asked Lady Lucy later that evening how many names she could remember from this first encounter, she
managed twelve. Powerscourt had got stuck on nine. Lucy was always better at remembering names than he was. He claimed it was because she belonged to such a large family and would be cast into
outer darkness if she could not recall the name of some distant cousin from the depths of Shropshire. As Powerscourt shook hands with the pilgrims he was saying to himself, One of you is a
murderer. Is it you? But answers came there none. Maggie Delaney simpered over Lady Lucy for some time, delighted to have another woman on the premises. When the pilgrims returned to their
tarte
aux myrtilles
, Powerscourt and Lady Lucy joined Delaney and Alex Bentley and Father Kennedy at a table set back from the others.

‘Tell me, Mr Delaney, what has happened since you sent your telegram?’

Delaney grimaced. ‘Not a lot, if I’m honest with you, Lord Powerscourt. We’re still locked up here. We’re not allowed out at all. Nine people have been interviewed so
far. Alex here does his best but it’s very slow work.’

Alex Bentley explained the bizarre method of translating they had been forced to adopt.

‘A book, do you say, Mr Bentley? Are the questions and the answers written down in the same book?’

‘Yes, they are,’ said the young man.

‘And where is the book now? Does the Sergeant take it away with him when he leaves?’

‘He does, usually. But he left it behind today. I think he was in a hurry. He said something, I think, about his wife’s mother coming over.’

‘So do you have this book in your room, or the room where the interviews take place?’

‘I do.’

‘Could you copy it before morning, before the Sergeant comes back?’

‘Of course,’ said Alex Bentley, and rose to begin the process of turning himself into the scribe of Le Puy.

‘Don’t go yet,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Having access to that information could make my life easier, Mr Delaney,’ he added. He didn’t say that he would have access
through the book to what nine of the pilgrims had told the authorities about where they were on the day John Delaney died. He leant forward and helped himself to the last slice of the
tarte aux
myrtilles
. Lady Lucy declined. Father Kennedy watched it go rather wistfully. He thought he had enough room for one more helping.

‘Let me tell you, gentlemen, my current thoughts. I have been thinking about this situation on the train. In one sense, there is a paradox at the centre of affairs. You have employed me,
Mr Delaney, to find out who killed your cousin John. If you are an investigator, what could be better than to have all the suspects cooped up in one place? They can’t go out. They’re in
a sort of sealed box where the investigator can have access to them whenever he wants. But that doesn’t suit your particular circumstances. You are here on pilgrimage. You want to move on,
all of you.’

‘Of course we want to move on,’ said Michael Delaney with feeling. ‘The question is, how do we do it?’

‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, ‘the first thing is to speed up the process of translation. Lady Lucy or I will translate tomorrow for the Sergeant for a start. You see, I
don’t think these people can be persuaded to let you go until the due processes have been completed. I’m not familiar enough with French police procedure to know what is meant to happen
next. But I think the time has come to take the initiative.’

Michael Delaney cheered up at this point. He had always believed that in business, if you didn’t take the initiative, somebody else would do it for you and you would lose the deal. Alex
Bentley was wondering if this Lord Powerscourt might not be as formidable an operator in his special field as Delaney was in his.

‘Tomorrow morning — ’ Powerscourt began, and then stopped as the rest of the pilgrims began drifting out of the room. He turned to face them. ‘Gentlemen, Miss Delaney, my
apologies, I noticed a facility for posting letters in the hotel entrance on my way in here this evening. Have any of you actually posted a message to what we might call the outside world? If you
have, would you be so kind as to let me know before you leave the room?

‘Tomorrow morning’, he continued, looking back at Michael Delaney, ‘I have interviews booked with the Mayor of Le Puy, with the Chief of Police in the town and with the Bishop.
I telegraphed from Calais to a young man who works for the American Ambassador in London and asked him to arrange them. I think the Mayor may be the key, they’re very influential people in
France, these Mayors. With your permission, Mr Delaney, I propose to mention money to them. Obviously it will be your money. Do you have any objections?’

‘None at all,’ said Delaney with a smile. The man had only just arrived and already he was talking about bribing a bishop and a Chief of Police. This was progress indeed. This
Powerscourt could have a great career in American business. Alex Bentley didn’t think anything as crude as bribery was going to be employed. He felt Powerscourt was holding back as much as he
was divulging about his plans.

Powerscourt noticed two pilgrims hanging back rather sheepishly by the door. ‘Excuse me, Lucy, Mr Delaney,’ he said, and walked over to join them. As he talked to the first one, the
second drifted off to a far corner of the dining room.

‘Delaney, Lord Powerscourt, sir, Shane Delaney from Swindon in England, sir. I’m very sorry sir, but I wrote a letter to my wife, Sinead. She’s dying, you see, sir, of some
incurable disease and I’m here to take her place. She’s too ill to travel. She can only just get down the road to her mother’s, if you follow me.’

‘My sympathy goes out to you and your wife,’ said Powerscourt solemnly. ‘May I ask what the letter said? In general terms, of course.’

‘Well, sir, in the first version I talked about the food a lot. Your man the chef here is a wizard in the kitchen, as you will see. Then I thought she might get mad at me, filling my face
with fancy cooking while she’s dying slowly back there in Swindon. So I tore that one up, sir. The one I did send I just talked about praying with Father Kennedy and the Black Madonna up
there in the cathedral and how the Bishop might come and see us. That’s all, sir, cross my heart and hope to die.’

‘You didn’t mention the death of John Delaney at all?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘Good God no, sir. She’d have had me on the next train home if I had, so she would.’

Powerscourt smiled and said no harm would come of it. Jack O’Driscoll was unrepentant about writing an article for his paper, which included a lot of detail about the death. But, he
assured Powerscourt, he hadn’t sent it yet. Indeed, he hadn’t finished it. ‘The trouble with stories like this, Lord Powerscourt,’ said Jack in his most man of the world
voice, ‘is that the readers expect a proper ending, so they do. They don’t like being left hanging in the air.’

Powerscourt nodded his agreement. He said he could see the difficulty. But he made the young man promise that he would only send the article after he, Lord Powerscourt, had seen it and approved
it. Jack O’Driscoll showed unusual maturity for a young reporter. ‘Of course, Lord Powerscourt, I can see that. I wouldn’t want to get in the way of a murder investigation, if
this is a murder investigation. That’s much more important than a newspaper article.’

As Powerscourt watched Jack O’Driscoll take the stairs two at a time he thought he had found another weapon in his quest, one that might prove much more potent than the young reporter
knew. And then he remembered, one or other of the two people he had just spoken to might be a murderer.

‘Francis,’ said Lady Lucy later, in bed reading a book about pilgrimages, ‘you’re not really going to bribe these people in the morning, are you?’

Her husband was staring at the ceiling, his mind far away. ‘What’s that, Lucy?’ he said, returning to earth. ‘Of course I’m not going to bribe them. Not in the
orthodox way at any rate. We have to convince the authorities, Lucy, that it’s their idea, or in their best interests, to let the pilgrims go, not ours. We have to work things so that they
think they have thought of it first.’

‘And just how are you going to do it, my love?’ said Lady Lucy, taking temporary possession of her husband’s left shoulder.

‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, ‘it
might work out like this . . . ’

Early the next morning Lord Francis Powerscourt wrapped his dark blue cape round his shoulders and set off for a quick look round Le Puy-en-Velay. He bought two large black
notebooks in a Maison de la Presse, a French newsagent, the pages filled with those irritating squares. He checked out the Town Hall – the Hôtel de Ville – the French tricolour
flying from the flagpole, in the Place du Martouret, a handsome square with a plaque that told him that the guillotine had been installed here during the Revolution between March 1793 and January
1795. Forty-one citizens had been put to death in this little town. The memory of the French Revolution was everywhere, Powerscourt thought. It might have happened over a century before but the
footprints were still there, all over the Republic it had created, wading through blood and terror.

There was a gasp in the dining room of the Hôtel St Jacques when Powerscourt took off his cape and sat down to breakfast. He was wearing full military uniform, the black trousers and
scarlet jacket of a colonel in the Irish Guards, medals marching across his chest, gold epaulettes on his shoulders. Lady Lucy smiled when she saw the effect. She thought her Francis looked very
handsome. Charlie Flanagan dropped a croissant on the floor. Christy Delaney was in the middle of ordering more
pain au chocolat
and coffee from a pretty waitress, and his newfound French
deserted him.

‘It’s for the Sergeant,’ Powerscourt assured Delaney. ‘Pound to a penny he was in the military before he joined the police. Uniforms always impress other people in
uniform. Mine’s more important than his. Colonel in the Irish Guards beats French police sergeant any day of the week. So he’s supposed to think I am, so to speak, the superior
officer.’