Death of a Pilgrim

by David Dickinson

  All that morning and into the afternoon Inspector Léger interviewed the pilgrims. Powerscourt and Lady Lucy translated. Not one of them had heard anything unusual in the night. All had slept straight through. They did not learn very much about the dead man, for he had not been popular and had not mixed very much with the others. The Inspector’s men made a thorough search of all the rooms. They waded happily in the river for a couple of hours. They found nothing. Lady Lucy began translating Jack O’Driscoll’s diary. The young newspaperman had been very careful about what he committed to paper after the events in Le Puy. In the late afternoon the Inspector summoned Powerscourt for a conversation in the hotelkeeper’s sitting room.

  ‘It’s not easy,’ he said sadly, sending his right hand on a doomed mission to find more hair on his head, ‘this case, I mean. But then murders seldom are. I could go on talking to the pilgrims for days and days. One of them might crack but I doubt it. My men can make further searches but I do not hold out much hope. We might be able – I shall certainly keep trying – to find the murderer from evidence gathered here but without that knife, without anybody telling us anything, it is very difficult. We are always told to look for motive in these affairs. Who might want the victim dead, that sort of thing. I do not think the motive is to be found in Le Puy or in Espalion, or Estaing, or in Conques.’

  Inspector Léger stared sadly at the frayed carpet on the hotelkeeper’s floor. ‘Where is it, the motive? You tell me, my friend, for I am sure you reached the same conclusion some time ago.’

  ‘I did,’ said Powerscourt, ‘and this is what makes this case so very difficult. The motive is hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of miles from here. It’s in Ballina or Roscommon or Longford or Galway, or it’s in Hammersmith or Kentish Town or in Birmingham or it’s somewhere on the eastern seaboard of America in New York or Boston or Pittsburgh, the city of steel. But it’s not in France.’

  Shortly before dinner Powerscourt found Lady Lucy standing on the little jetty where the rowing boats were tied up. She was staring intently down the river. She smiled at her husband. Powerscourt thought she looked very beautiful this evening.

  ‘Francis, my love,’ she said, ‘I’ve been wondering about that rowing boat. What would happen if you gave it a push from here? Would it float away downstream? Or would it just go round and round?’

  ‘I don’t know, to be honest, Lucy. Tell you what, why don’t we try it? You sit in this one here and I’ll give it a good push. Let’s hope the hotelkeeper can’t see us or he’ll think another of these boats is being stolen.’

  Powerscourt handed Lady Lucy into the vessel. She settled herself gracefully into the centre of the craft. Powerscourt bent down and untied the rope. Then he gave the rowing boat his best shove and sent it out into the river. After a few moments it lost momentum and drifted back into the side. Lady Lucy rowed herself back.

  ‘I thought that would happen,’ she said, looking up at Powerscourt from the middle of the boat. ‘My grandfather told me all about currents in rivers when I was a little girl in Scotland. I can’t have been more than six or seven at the time. He was very good to me, my grandfather, he always talked to me as if I were a grown-up. I think you should try wading out into the river, Francis, and giving me a good shove into the middle of the current.’

  Powerscourt gazed rather sadly at his shoes and his trousers, come to adorn the valley of the Lot from the tailors of Jermyn Street in London. He waded out into the centre of the river where the current was strongest. After his strongest push, Lady Lucy floated away.

  Powerscourt watched her go. ‘Willows whiten, aspens quiver,’ he whispered,

  ‘Little breezes dusk and shiver

  Through the wave that runs for ever

  By the island in the river

  Flowing down to Camelot.’

  ‘And at the closing of the day,’ Lady Lucy carried on,

  ‘She loosed the chain, and down she lay,

  The broad stream bore her far away’

  The Lady of the Lot.’

  Lady Lucy was now moving downstream at something close to walking pace. She sat upright in her boat and stared straight ahead. She carried on with the poem, the words drifting out across the river bank.

  ‘Lying, robed in snowy white

  That loosely flew to left and right –

  The leaves upon her falling light –

  Through the noises of the night

  She floated down to Camelot:

  And as the boat-head wound along

  The willowy hills and fields among

  They heard her singing her last song,

  The Lady of the Lot.

  ‘Should I sing something sad, Francis?’ Lady Lucy called back. ‘Some sad song of lost love from the days of the Knights of the Round Table?’

  ‘I think you should remember the end of the poem,’ her husband replied. ‘It bids you bon voyage.

  ‘But Lancelot mused a little space;

  He said, “she has a lovely face;

  God in his mercy lend her grace,

  The Lady of the Lot.”’

  Lady Lucy rowed back and was helped up on to the jetty. ‘Thank you, Francis, and thank you, Lord Tennyson, for your compliment. I’d quite forgotten that bit at the end. But tell me this. What would you do with your trousers, Francis, if you were the murderer? You couldn’t bring them back to the hotel dripping with water and you could never dry them out before morning.’

  ‘If it was me,’ said her husband, looking ruefully at the water still dripping around his ankles, ‘I think I’d take them off and throw them in the river. Probably have to do the same with the shoes and socks. The Inspector and his men didn’t find any wet clothes on their search in the pilgrims’ rooms. So they’re probably downstream from here somewhere.’

  They heard footsteps approaching rapidly from the direction of the Lion d’Or. Michael Delaney was coming to join them on the jetty. Powerscourt thought the American was radiating energy. You could almost sense it flowing around and through him, as if he had a secret generating plant inside his chest hooked into his nervous system. Maybe that was what you needed to become an American millionaire. Maybe they were all like that.

  ‘Look here, Powerscourt, Lady Powerscourt, I want to ask you for your opinion. Can’t say I’m very happy at the way we’re virtually being thrown out of here but it’s better than bribery. Bodyguards, what do you say to bodyguards? Party of a dozen or so, guard the pilgrims day and night, follow any wandering souls, intercept any further acts of murder. I could wire to Pinkerton’s in New York to send us a dozen or so straight away. They’d be here in a week or ten days. Some of us should still be alive in a week or ten days.’

  ‘I’m not sure that the French authorities would look very kindly on that, Delaney,’ said Powerscourt. ‘This is their territory after all.’

  ‘Would they give us the same number of men, do you suppose? I could pay for them, after all, rent them out like taxis in Manhattan.’

  ‘We’d have to ask the Inspector,’ Powerscourt replied. ‘He seems a sensible sort of man to me.’

  ‘We’ve got to find a way to keep everybody safe,’ said Delaney. ‘I feel responsible for all these damned pilgrims. I asked them to come, for God’s sake. We can’t have them being picked off like birds at some great country house shoot in England.’

  Lady Lucy knew what her husband was thinking. She prayed silently to Merlin and the gods of Camelot that he would not say that the only way to guarantee the safety of the pilgrims was for them all to go home.

  ‘I’m going to talk to Alex Bentley after supper,’ said Powerscourt. ‘He did a lot of research into the Delaneys before you sent out all the invitations. I think he may know where all the Delaneys come from in Ireland. We could launch some inquiries there.’

  Powerscourt did not say that he was planning to ask Johnny Fitzgerald to go to Ireland. He thought it unlikely that Michael Delaney was the murderer but you could never be sure.

  ‘And
I did have one thought, Delaney, which is risky,’ Powerscourt went on, ‘but it might solve the problem for us.’

  ‘And what’s that, my friend? I’ll pay for whatever it takes.’

  Lady Lucy found herself wondering if Delaney ever thought about the things money could not buy, love, maybe, hatred perhaps, possibly madness. Surely there were some things that could not be weighed in dollars.

  ‘This wouldn’t cost any money,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Suppose we let it be known early one evening that I know who the murderer is and that I propose to tell the French authorities the name of the killer in the morning. I would not have told anybody else who it is.’

  ‘How does that help?’ said Delaney.

  ‘I can tell you how Francis thinks it would help, Mr Delaney,’ said Lady Lucy, reading her husband’s mind faster than the American and fighting back the tears that threatened to overwhelm her. ‘The murderer would then try to kill Francis. To stop Francis exposing him, don’t you see. So then it becomes a fight to the death between the two of them. I think it’s a terrible plan, I really do.’

  ‘I didn’t ask you here in order to have you killed in the middle of the night by some crazed pilgrim,’ said Michael Delaney. ‘Surely that becomes a weapon of last resort, one that we never have to use.’

  Later that evening Powerscourt took a walk along the river bank with Alex Bentley. He had decided to break one of his own rules. Earlier on he remembered telling Lady Lucy that he suspected every single person in the pilgrim party. Now desperation had made him abandon his resolution and take Alex Bentley into his confidence. Anybody who admired Lady Lucy as fervently as the young American must have some good in them.

  ‘Alex,’ he began, ‘I want to ask your advice. If I want to make inquiries in England or Ireland I can do it easily. I have come across a lot of people in my previous work, you understand, and I have a special friend who helps me in all my investigations who is helping me there now. But I don’t have anybody in America. I could ask Mr Delaney to call in Pinkerton’s to assist us, but I think they would be answerable to him rather than to me, if you see what I mean. Do you know of anybody who would be able to make intelligent and discreet inquiries on our behalf?’

  The sun had gone down behind the hills. The water in the river was growing darker now, almost black. There was occasional rustling as the breeze ruffled the branches at the top of the trees.

  ‘Do they have to be private detectives, Lord Powerscourt?’

  ‘I don’t know why, but I’ve never really trusted most private detectives, even though I am one myself in a way. I feel they look for what their employer wants to hear all the time.’

  ‘As a matter of fact I think I do know such a person, now I come to think of it. But he’s a lawyer rather than a private detective. They too are trained to report what their clients want to hear a lot of the time.’

  ‘But is he reliable, the person you’re thinking of?’

  ‘Oh yes, he’s reliable all right. You see, he’s my brother, my elder brother. He works for a big law firm with offices in New York and Washington, Adams, Adams and Cutler they’re called.’

  ‘Does he come laden down with degrees like yourself?’ asked Powerscourt with a smile.

  ‘I’m afraid he does. He didn’t go to Princeton, though, he did all his degrees at Harvard.’

  Powerscourt thought Bentley made Harvard sound like a rather disagreeable prep school where they didn’t give you enough food and the teaching was poor. ‘My father wants me to join the firm too. That’s why I went to law school.’

  ‘Would he be able to make inquiries for us? Does he know about the pilgrimage and your work on it?’

  ‘He certainly does,’ said Alex Bentley. ‘I told him all about it in New York. Franklin, my brother, was very entertained at the thought of his little brother travelling all over Europe with a lot of mad pilgrims and a New York millionaire. He always felt they must be a bit touched to take on such a journey. I’m sure he’d be only too happy to help. And I’m sure a lot of the senior people in the firm would know about all kinds of things that might come in useful to you.’

  ‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, sitting on a fallen branch and trying to skim some stones across the river, ‘this is what I think you should ask him about. First, and this is very vague, does he know or could he find out anything suspicious in Michael Delaney’s past, anything that might have given rise to a feud between different branches of the family? I’ve got a couple of clues, though they might be hard to follow up. Many years ago Delaney persuaded an older and a richer man to help him set up a railway company. Delaney fixed it so the other man was cheated out of his money. You could say Delaney swindled him though I’m not sure I would say that to Delaney’s face. Where is this man? What became of him? Does he have any surviving relatives? I believe his name is Wharton. And my other query is equally tenuous, I’m afraid, and it too goes back a long way to 1894. Some newspaperman got interested in Delaney years ago, so interested that he wrote a book which chronicled what the reporter thought were all Delaney’s crimes. A lifetime of sin in one volume if you like. Delaney bought the lot and had them pulped. The author has not been heard of since though he may still be alive. I would be most interested to know if any copies of that book survived. I would be even more interested in getting my hands on a copy if that were possible. It was called Michael Delaney, Robber Baron.’

  ‘I’ll send a wire to Franklin first thing in the morning, Lord Powerscourt,’ said Alex Bentley cheerfully. ‘Things are going to look up now. Two Bentleys are much better than one.’

  Powerscourt too was sending messages early the next morning. He wrote to Johnny Fitzgerald, asking him to go to Ireland as soon as possible, to the area around Macroom in County Cork which Bentley believed was the epicentre of the Delaney clan. Johnny was to search for any feud, fight or other wickedness which might have led one of the Delaney descendants to kill. Powerscourt said he thought Johnny should start in the days of the famine. They had already heard, he told his friend, some terrible stories about one lot of Delaneys refusing to help their relations who later died in the workhouse. There might be other, different crimes from the past that had returned to stain the present sixty years later. Time, he concluded his message, is very short. There could be another murder even before Johnny crossed the Irish Sea.

  The dead of Entraygues-sur-Truyère wait for the Second Coming on a hillside above the little town. Beneath them the Lot and the Truyère join forces and head off towards the distant sea. On the other side of the river wooded hills rise to several hundred feet. To their right, at the top of a very steep gorge, the vineyards of Le Fel produce sustenance and consolation for the living. It was here, after the service in the little church, that Patrick MacLoughlin was laid to rest. All the pilgrim party were present on parade that afternoon having walked along the river from Estaing. The doctor was there and the butcher who had carried him from the river bank on his cart. Madame Roche attended as a mark of respect to the man her son had found dead in a rowing boat. Inspector Léger was present, spending most of his time, as Lady Lucy observed, looking intently at the faces of the pilgrims. Powerscourt had bought a new black tie, observing mordantly to Lady Lucy that he expected it would see a lot of wear in the days ahead. Father Kennedy was thinking how very young the dead man was. He prayed that earth’s loss would be heaven’s gain. Michael Delaney realized that the dead man they were lowering into the earth was only a couple of years older than his James, who had himself come so close to this sad ceremony only months before. Stephen Lewis, the solicitor from Frome in Somerset, found himself wondering if the dead man had left a will. He couldn’t help it. He had been dealing with wills all his life. He wondered if he should offer his services to all the pilgrims in case they were next for the last rites and the funeral service. Business, Lewis thought grimly, might be brisk. Charlie Flanagan, the carving carpenter from Baltimore, had finished his crucifix the evening before. Charlie was not a superstitious young man but he
kept his latest work in his trouser pocket where he hoped it would keep him safe. Looking at the earth being thrown over the remains of the dead man he wondered grimly if his next work should be a coffin. Then, with a shudder, he realized it might be his own.

  The little town of Entraygues lay slightly off the official pilgrim route which crossed the river some miles from Estaing and went up into the hills to Golinhac and then across to Espeyrac. The road to Espeyrac, where the pilgrims planned to rejoin the trail, led over one of Entraygues’ medieval bridges and up into the woods. Lady Lucy was walking this afternoon with Father Kennedy who hoped that periods of violent exercise like the present ascent would erode some of the extra weight he had been acquiring from the local cuisine. He shuddered with a mixture of guilt and delight as he remembered his second helping of crème brûlée the night before.

  ‘Tell me, Father,’ Lady Lucy began, ‘did you get to know Patrick MacLoughlin well? You must have spent a lot of time in his company on the Atlantic crossing and on the journey so far.’

  ‘Well, I talked to him quite a lot,’ Father Kennedy replied, panting slightly. He wondered if this climb was ever going to end. ‘I think he liked conversing with me, as a fellow practitioner in God’s work here on earth. But I wouldn’t say I got to know him well.’

  ‘What did he talk about?’

  ‘Well, he was very interested in pilgrimage and pilgrimages. You could say, I think, that he was interested in them in the way other people are interested in antique furniture or stamp collecting. He had great plans as young men often do. He wanted to go to Rome, and to Jerusalem in the footsteps of the Crusaders. Next year he was intending to walk from London to Canterbury on the track of Chaucer’s pilgrims. If he could have found the route of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress I’m sure he would have followed that too. He seemed to think the pilgrimages would help him in his ministry.’