Death of a Pilgrim (40 page)

‘Nonsense, man, I’m not scared of what you might have to say.’

Powerscourt wondered briefly if he should not give the details of Delaney’s past crimes. Then he reflected that that would not be fair to the pilgrims. Delaney had been given his
chance.

‘The first murder, the one that brought me here,’ he began, ‘was that of John Delaney, pushed, I believe, off the volcanic rock path of St Michel to his death. The poor man was
scarcely off the train from England. Any suggestion that he might have suffered from vertigo was banished from my mind when I learnt from England that he was employed as a window cleaner. There was
no motive that I could see. You will recall that Lucy and I asked you to fill out various forms about your ancestors, that we tried to engage you in conversation about your parents and
grandparents. We were looking for connections. There were none that we could find.

‘The second murder was another apparently motiveless crime. So, it seemed, was the third. So, it seemed, was the fourth. They did have one thing in common. This was a murderer who operated
on the spur of the moment and at lightning speed. If he saw a chance to lure one of his victims away from the rest of the party, a walk by the river at night perhaps, a look at the upper chamber at
Moissac cloisters maybe, he would seize his moment the instant it appeared. Out would come the knife or the blows against a pillar and the deed would be over in a matter of minutes. There was one
possible interpretation that did present itself to me from this modus operandi. It seemed to me unlikely that the victims were pre-determined. There wasn’t a plan to kill Patrick MacLoughlin
or Stephen Lewis or Girvan Connolly. The victim could as easily have been any one of you here, if you had been in the right place for the killer to strike. If the opportunity arose, the nearest
pilgrim would do. If this theory was right, there were two possible explanations. One, that the man was a serial killer in the manner of Jack the Ripper, that he killed at random because he enjoyed
it or derived some strange satisfaction from the act of murder. The other was that the victims were all killed because they were Delaneys, that the murderer had a huge grudge against every Delaney
he could find. You might ask why, in that case, he didn’t kill Michael Delaney himself and have done with it. My answer, and this, I have to say, is supposition on my part, is that he did
intend to kill Michael Delaney, but as his last victim, not his first.’

Powerscourt paused to take a sip of his coffee. The pilgrims sat spellbound. Jack O’Driscoll was taking notes. Christy Delaney was scribbling away too, though Powerscourt felt it might be
a love letter rather than an account of his theories.

‘All along, all through this case, I have thought that the answer lay somewhere in the chequered past of Michael Delaney. I did, of course, ask him if there were any skeletons in his
cupboard. He denied it. So I have had inquiries made in both Ireland and America about events in Michael Delaney’s past. Let me tell you about them in chronological order. The first of these
events took place during the worst years of the Irish famine. Most of the Delaney family in County Cork were starving. Their potatoes had failed, like everybody else’s, they had no savings
and no crops to plant for the future. Their only option was the workhouse. And almost everybody who went into the workhouse at that time never came out again. But, not far away, there was a family
of more prosperous Delaneys. They had money and food to spare. Time and time again various of the poor Delaneys made appeals for help to their richer relations. Time and time again they were
refused. Twenty-four Delaneys went into the workhouse. Only one, a boy of about twelve, survived. All the rest perished. The richer Delaneys subsequently emigrated to America. Was it possible that
the lone survivor, or his sons, traced Michael Delaney as a descendant of the family who had let their relations die? It seemed to me that this was a very long shot. There were too many variables
and too many unknowns. And the time scale was too long. Corsicans or Sicilians might be able to sustain a vendetta over a period of over sixty years, but I doubted if the Irish would be able to
manage it.

‘Maggie Delaney mentioned a book written some years ago about the organizer of this pilgrimage called
Michael Delaney, Robber Baron
. Delaney was so alarmed at the prospect of this
book being published about him and his alleged misdemeanours that he bought up every copy and had them all pulped. Nobody ever got to read it. What Delaney didn’t know was that four copies
had been sent to England. Johnny Fitzgerald managed to track one of them down and it is now on my bedside table upstairs. There were two pieces of deception that could have given rise to a mighty
hatred of Delaney. On the first occasion he pretended to form a joint railroad company with a man called Wharton. Only it wasn’t a joint company at all. Delaney put all the shares in his own
name, cutting the other man out altogether. The company prospered but Delaney’s so-called partner did not. His other ventures failed. Wharton took to drink. He failed to service his debts.
His wife left him. Then he killed himself, leaving one small son as survivor. This son would now be in his thirties. But there were doubts in my mind as to whether he could have been the murderer.
Why had he waited so long? Why take the trouble to come all the way to France when he could have hired a couple of killers in New York City to murder Delaney? And surely such a killer would begin
with Michael Delaney himself? Why go to the trouble of killing all the other pilgrims? The same objections, I thought, applied to the children of the other people Delaney supposedly swindled in an
oil prospecting business.’

Lady Lucy had been casting surreptitious glances at Michael Delaney as her husband ran through the chronicle of his crimes. His fingers were drumming nervously on the table in front of him. His
face remained impassive. He might, she thought, have been sitting through a rather disagreeable board meeting where the results were not as good as had been expected. She wondered if he guessed at
what was to come. Johnny Fitzgerald winked at the pilgrims and took an enormous draught from his wineskin. Then he passed it over to the pilgrims. Thirsty work, he felt, listening to Powerscourt
describing his theories.

‘It was only very recently that I came across the most promising line of inquiry. It transpired that thirty-odd years ago Michael Delaney had been married for the first time. He was then
living in Pittsburgh. They had a son and then when Delaney’s wife was expecting their second child he walked out without warning and without leaving any means of support for his family and
went to New York, where few questions are asked about newcomers. The wife died in childbirth and the baby, a little girl, was stillborn. The little boy, aged only two, was an orphan. The priests
and nuns who looked after him tracked down every relative they could find and asked them to take on the lost child and bring him up as one of their own. Suffer the little children to come unto you.
They wrote to Delaneys in America, in Ireland and in England. The Delaneys all refused. Every single one of them said no. The little boy was adopted and took on the surname of his adoptive
parents.’

Powerscourt paused and took another sip of his coffee. Out of the corner of his eye he could see that Michael Delaney was totally still, as if he had been turned to stone. Father Kennedy had his
head in his hands. The wineskin was circulating regularly among the pilgrims. They could just hear another band striking up on the street outside.

‘Here, in this news from Pittsburgh,’ Powerscourt was speaking softly now, ‘at last was a motive for killing as many Delaneys as you could. They, or their families, had, after
all, refused to take you in. Here was a motive for killing Michael Delaney, the father who had abandoned you and caused the premature deaths of your own mother and sister. This was not Oedipus
killing his father when he did not know who he was. This was a son deliberately setting out to murder his own father. There was a person of the right age in the pilgrim party and that was Waldo
Mulligan, born Waldo Delaney, son of Michael. He tried to kill me at the running of the bulls this morning. Just before that our eyes met, and I knew and he knew that I knew that he was the killer.
He confirmed as much in the hospital before he died.’

Powerscourt sat down. There was a rumble to his left and Michael Delaney rose to his feet. For a moment Powerscourt wondered if he was going to defend his conduct, but he merely asked Father
Kennedy to accompany him. There were, he said, things he wished to discuss with the priest. The pilgrims watched him go, his bearing still erect, his head held high. Nobody spoke. Delaney’s
departure seemed to leave a hole, a vacuum in the room, as if some of the air had been sucked out. It was Jack O’Driscoll who broke the silence.

‘That is all very clear, Lord Powerscourt,’ he said, ‘but could you answer me a question? You’ve been here all the time. Yet you were also making inquiries in Ireland and
America. How did you manage that?’

Powerscourt smiled. ‘Good question,’ he said. ‘Johnny here did all the work in England and Ireland before he joined us. He actually brought the book
Michael Delaney, Robber
Baron
with him. And I had a very intelligent young man working for us in America but I didn’t like to mention it in Michael Delaney’s presence in case he decided to make life
awkward for our man when he returns to the States. It was Alex Bentley’s brother Franklin, who works for a law firm with offices in New York and Washington. He did the devilling over there,
he found out about Delaney’s first marriage in Pittsburgh.’

‘Lord Powerscourt.’ This time it was Charlie Flanagan from Baltimore. ‘This is a lot to take in all at once. We’re going to have to consider whether we carry on with the
pilgrimage or not. But could we ask you one more favour? Would you and Lady Powerscourt and Johnny Fitzgerald be the pilgrims’ guests at dinner this evening? No Father Kennedy, no Michael
Delaney, just Alex Bentley and ourselves?’

Powerscourt assured them that he and Lady Lucy would be delighted. He would be most interested to hear what they decided about the pilgrimage. Johnny Fitzgerald headed a delegation towards the
latest Fiesta celebrations and the nearest bar.

‘That all went well enough, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy as she led her husband off to their room. ‘But tell me this, my love, what do you think Michael Delaney is going to
do?’

‘I really don’t know, Lucy. Maybe they go through emotional upheavals like that every day on Wall Street, I don’t know. I don’t know enough about his religion, but I
should think he’s going to make his confession. He’s got quite a lot of sins to get through, more than most people I should think. But if I know Michael Delaney, there’ll be more
to it than absolution. He’ll be offering to hand over more money for schools in poor areas, more funds for more medical research, more support for priests and nuns, that sort of
thing.’

‘Do you mean that he’s going to buy his way out of trouble, Francis?’

‘Of course I do. All that stuff about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God is for the innocent and the naive, if
you ask me. If you’re rich enough, you buy up all the camels, you buy up all the needles and you’ve already put down a deposit for buying heaven.’

Dinner with the pilgrims that evening was a boisterous affair. Maggie Delaney was not there. Thirty years of dislike of her cousin Michael had been washed away by the
day’s revelations. She was going, she told Lady Lucy, to see what comfort she could bring him in his time of trouble. Families should stick together after all. So it was the young men who set
the tone for the occasion, behaving like children just let out of school on the last day of the summer term. They had ordered up a great round table in the upstairs room where Powerscourt had
addressed them that morning. Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were at opposite sides of the circle with Johnny Fitzgerald halfway between them. As they made their way through stuffed red peppers and salt
cod, suckling pig and sheep’s cheese from the mountains, the pilgrims plied them with questions about their past investigations, about their children, about their houses in London and
Ireland, about their plans for the future. Shortly before midnight the pilgrims exchanged glances. There was a sudden banging of forks on the table and loud cries for silence. Christy Delaney, now
wearing the white shirt and red neckerchief of the festival of San Fermin, rose to his feet. He looked, Lady Lucy thought, absurdly young.

‘Lady Powerscourt, Lord Powerscourt, let me welcome you to this dinner here tonight. And why I should have been chosen to speak for the pilgrims I do not know. These other characters are
older, and possibly wiser, than me and they should all be making this speech instead of me.’ Christy stared in mock severity at his colleagues. Lady Lucy thought they had chosen well. Christy
had charm, he had grace and he had a voice that some women would have happily listened to all day long.

‘My first duty’, he carried on, ‘is to thank you for keeping us alive. It has been a very difficult time for everybody, but we’re still here, you’re still here and
the pilgrimage is still out there.’ He waved in the direction of the street where the noise of revelry was reaching new heights. ‘We have spent most of the day talking about the
pilgrimage, about whether we should go on or not. I am instructed to let you know what we have decided. I think I can speak for everybody here when I say that pilgrimage takes hold of you in ways
you never expected. It becomes a part of you, or you become a part of it. I know I speak for everyone here when I say that it has played and continues to play a central part in our lives. So we are
not going to turn round and go home. That would devalue the meaning it has come to acquire in our hearts. So we go on, we go on to Santiago itself where the pilgrim trail ends. And, Lord
Powerscourt, Lady Powersourt, Johnny Fitzgerald, we ask you to join us on our journey. Come with us across northern Spain through Burgos and Leon and Rabanal del Camino to Santiago itself. Walk
with us through the heat and the dust and the flies. Lend us your company on the last stages of our journey.’