The doctor seemed to have identified Powerscourt as the principal player in the little group. He stood directly behind Powerscourt, so close that Powerscourt felt the grubby wool of his jacket on his neck. The doctor shot his right hand to the far side of Powerscourt’s neck and slashed it across to the other side.
‘That’s all it would take, monsieur. The knife must have been very sharp. You find the knife, yes? Not yet? Never mind. It is too late for the poor man here.’
The Inspector sent a man to search the surrounding area.
‘Could you say anything about the height of the killer, Doctor?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘Would he have been taller than his victim? Could he have done it if he had been a couple of inches shorter?’
Powerscourt was hunting through his memory for the relative height of the pilgrims, the remaining pilgrims, as he reminded himself bitterly.
‘That is an intelligent question, monsieur. I’m afraid I cannot give a definite answer. It would have been easiest if our murderer had been taller. If he had been of the same height it would have been perfectly possible. A little shorter and it would have been difficult but not impossible. For the dwarf, or the little person, they could not have done it.’
‘And the blood, Doctor? Would any of the blood have stuck to the murderer’s clothes?’
‘Ah ha!’ said the doctor, who was a great devotee of detective stories in his leisure hours, although he was careful not to tell his patients. ‘There are a number of ways of stabbing a man to death. If you stab upwards from below the heart, that is a very certain killing stroke. Many would-be murderers don’t understand that it is best to strike from below so the knife goes in under the chest bones. Strike from above in a downwards direction and the blow may not be fatal. Our victim may survive. But with this method here, the rapid slit across the throat,’ the doctor mimed the action once more, ‘the murderer may not have any blood on his clothes at all. He will look like everybody else. There we are.’
Powerscourt looked down at the dead body once more. What had been a human being that morning had turned into a bundle of clothes that might have been left out for the rag and bone man. The blood was still dripping out.
‘Do you know the name of the dead man?’ The doctor looked once more at Powerscourt. ‘You do? Good, perhaps you could come back to my surgery where we can fill in the necessary forms for the authorities with one of these policemen. I will arrange for the removal of the corpse. I will send some kind of shroud so the citizens and pilgrims of Conques do not have to look at something to remind them of their sins and their own futures. We will all end up dead some day.’ The doctor looked as if he told this to his patients on a regular basis. Powerscourt did not think they would find it reassuring. ‘Let us pray that we do not end up like this.’
As they filed past the front of the abbey Powerscourt found himself wondering which side of the great tympanum Stephen Lewis had gone to on his final journey. Was he perhaps in hell, with the devils and the prongs and the halters and the roaring fires? Or was he clothed in white, accompanying the elect into heaven, checking perhaps that they had all left their earthly affairs in order before they set off? On balance, Powerscourt thought, Stephen Lewis, the solicitor from Frome, would be with God’s chosen. Even in heaven, he reminded himself, they must need lawyers.
13
Powerscourt found the great doors into the Abbey Church of Sainte Foy closed on his return. The pilgrims were huddled together, sitting on the ground on the opposite side of the square, guarded by two policemen, like prisoners being taken to the guillotine. Inspector Léger shrugged.
‘We have had a visit from the Mayor while you were away,’ he said. ‘The pilgrims are not welcome here in Conques, he told us. No hotel will give them rooms. Nobody will serve them food. Even the bar up the street will refuse their custom.’
‘He said they had defiled the town,’ Lady Lucy cut in, ‘that a place of God had been turned into a charnel house by people pretending to be pilgrims. I think he runs the wine shop, this Mayor, Francis. He smelt of drink. You could see imaginary rows of onions hanging from his neck and a beret on his head, if you know what I mean. And he had a priest with him.’
Powerscourt wondered suddenly if the priest was a regular customer, checking to see if the Mayor’s wares could be turned into the blood of Christ.
‘And he said more of the same, the priest,’ Lady Lucy went on. ‘Pilgrims not welcome, pilgrims desecrating one of the holiest sites in France, pilgrims defiling the memory of one of her greatest saints. Nothing but sinners and a murderer in the priest’s view. We are meant to leave here within the hour.’
‘I see,’ said Powerscourt wearily. ‘Was Father Kennedy any use? Didn’t he try launching an appeal to Christian charity, to the stuff about forgiveness of sins?’
‘I’m afraid the Father was too preoccupied with consuming some of the creamier products of the bakery up the street, Francis. He tried but it was no good. You can’t take anything seriously if it comes from a man with his mouth full of éclair.’
‘He got his order in before the Mayor arrived, did he?’ said Powerscourt. ‘He must have been quick off the mark.’
‘He was,’ said Lady Lucy sadly. ‘The Inspector has had a conversation with young Alex Bentley about accommodation. They think the best plan is to return to the Auberge des Montagnes in Espeyrac for this night. It would be too far for us to travel on to the next place where he’s booked hotels.’
‘What about the funeral?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘Aren’t the pilgrims allowed to bury their dead? Can’t they even see Stephen Lewis put in the ground and say their farewells?’
‘The authorities will bury him,’ said the Inspector. ‘The priest assured us that they will give him a proper burial in the town cemetery. They don’t want Father Kennedy anywhere near the service, they said. The poor man can’t be buried by a glutton in a dog collar.’
Powerscourt turned and looked at the terrible fate of the stone glutton in the tympanum seven centuries before, being pulled towards a fire under an enormous cooking pot, the fire of hell.
‘We should go now.’ The Inspector took command, searching the top of his head once more for the vanished hair. ‘I have told the pilgrims they are to march in single file. They are not allowed to talk to each other. It should only take a couple of hours.’
Back they went, back past the cobbled streets and the half-timbered houses, back through the Porte du Barry and over the Roman bridge pilgrims had crossed in their thousands centuries before. Those earlier pilgrims, Powerscourt thought, would have left Conques with their spirits high, inspired or terrified by the Last Judgement and the fate of the figures in the tympanum, astonished by the golden wonder of the statue of the saint, blessed by the mystery of the Mass. These pilgrims of 1906 were fleeing Conques like Lot and his family in the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah. If they looked back they would be turned into pillars of salt. Then he remembered that one important part of the story was the wrong way round. In the Bible the refugees were fleeing from the cities of iniquity, Sodom and Gomorrah. Here, on the road to Senergues and Espeyrac, Conques, the city behind them, was totally innocent. Iniquity lay among the pilgrims.
All through the early afternoon the pilgrims marched in silence, lost in their own thoughts or contemplating their sins. Michael Delaney knew what to do with the hotelkeeper to secure their lodging for the night. He felt sure that word of the latest murder would reach the hotel before they did.
‘Offer him double what we paid the night before,’ he said to Powerscourt as Espeyrac and its spire came into view once more. ‘That should keep the fellow quiet.’
Shortly after they arrived the Inspector and Powerscourt began another round of interviews. Where exactly were the pilgrims when the schoolchildren arrived? Could they put a cross on the page with the drawing of the square the Inspector had produced from memory? Did they see Stephen Lewis go round to the side of the building? Did they see anybody go with him? How well did they know
Lewis? Had they ever met him before? Had they seen anybody come back from the part of the church with the fateful coffins? As he wrote down the answers in English while the Inspector wrote them in French, Powerscourt found that his brain had moved off somewhere else even as his pen raced across the page and his voice translated from French into English and back into French again. He had done this so many times already. Perhaps he and Lucy were on an interpreter’s course and this was the final exam, though a part of his brain told him it was certainly not the final test. They might be only halfway through. Maybe they would get a diploma at the end, whenever and wherever that might be. Then he noticed something else, something that worried him very much. The harsh words of the Mayor and the priest of Conques had made the bond between the pilgrims even stronger. They looked at the Inspector as if he was an enemy and at Powerscourt as if he might be an ally who would turn traitor and desert the cause at any moment. There was an air of hostility towards the policeman that there hadn’t been in Le Puy. Powerscourt wondered if the pilgrims were telling them the truth. He wondered if they would lie for a fellow pilgrim even if they thought he might be a murderer. His investigation, never easy in this case, was growing more difficult all the time.
There were more problems later that day when Jack O’Driscoll, the young newspaperman from Dublin, asked if he could have a word in the hotelkeeper’s office. The reporter looked anxious.
‘Please forgive me for troubling you, Lord Powerscourt,’ he began. ‘I’ve got something on my mind.’
For a brief second Powerscourt felt hope flooding through him. The young man knew who the murderer was. Jack O’Driscoll had the answers. A day or two more and he and Lucy could go home to their children.
‘You remember I’m a reporter, Lord Powerscourt, with one of the big papers in Dublin?’
Powerscourt thought he knew what was coming. He had been expecting it. ‘Of course I do, I remember you telling me all about it.’
‘It was my editor who sent me here,’ Jack O’Driscoll went on. ‘He said it would be good for me. They’ve always been good to me on the paper.’
Powerscourt thought that the customary cynicism of the newspaperman had not yet wormed its way into the O’Driscoll soul.
‘Now I think I’m letting them down, Lord Powerscourt, so I do.’
‘And why is that?’ asked Powerscourt with a smile.
‘I think you know just as well as I do.’ O’Driscoll grinned back, a rather naughty grin. ‘Here we are sitting on one of the best newspaper stories of the twentieth century. I promised you before that I wouldn’t do anything or write anything without your approval. Well, I would like to ask you to reconsider, I really would.’
‘What do you think has changed since we spoke about this before?’ Powerscourt wasn’t going to make the young man’s life too easy.
‘It’s obvious, Lord Powerscourt. Forgive me if I talk in newspaper speak for a moment. The last time we had one dead body, thrown off the twisting path up to that little chapel in Le Puy. One murder, even of an Englishman or an Irishman, in foreign parts doesn’t rate too highly. Small para in the news round-up on an inside page at best. Two deaths in the south of France, a dead American added to the mix, that’s better. Mysterious murders. Corpses sent floating down French rivers in the middle of the night. That might get you half a page and a lot of words, four or five hundred, maybe more. But three! Three dead men, sent to their end by a maniac who leaves scallop shells on the bodies of his victims. It’ll be the best murder story since Jack the Ripper stalked the tenements of Whitechapel all those years ago. Think of the ingredients, Lord Powerscourt. American millionaire. Dying son saved from death by a miracle. A pilgrimage paid for by Croesus for members of his family. A pastry priest from Manhattan, keener on his stomach than on the salvation of souls. Some of the most sacred places in France. A Black Madonna. A stolen saint. Three victims all killed in different ways. A famous Anglo-Irish investigator and his wife, summoned from London to solve the mystery. The pilgrims themselves, a dying man, another on the staff of a senator in Washington, another on the run from his creditors. What a cast! What a story! The Psychopath from Le Puy!’
Jack O’Driscoll paused, and took a deep draught of the beer he had brought with him.
‘And how would you tell the story?’ Powerscourt asked.
‘I thought about that this afternoon as a matter of fact,’ the young man said. ‘Nothing like being force-marched along the road like a bloody convict to concentrate the mind. Originally I was going to write it up as one very long story. Then I thought of the boys in the circulation department. There’s nothing they like better than splitting a story up. If they thought they could get away with it, they’d carry the reports of the football matches on successive days rather than the whole thing on the day after the game. Make the readers hungry for more, they say down in circulation. Make them want to buy the paper again the next day. Then we’ll sell more copies, charge more for the advertisements. They’d love this story, Lord Powerscourt, they’d just love it. Maybe I could write one general piece at the front about Mr Delaney’s son and the decision to make the pilgrimage. Some colour stuff about the pilgrim routes through France. Warning in the last paragraph that things are about to go terribly wrong as they reach Le Puy. Murder starts in tomorrow’s paper. Reserve your copy of the Irish Times now, that sort of thing. Then it’s a dead body a day. The Scallop Shell Murders, I quite like that for a title. What do you think, Lord Powerscourt?’
Powerscourt smiled. ‘When you put it like that, it is indeed a tremendous story, even if it does deal with the death of people we know. And I can imagine how anxious you must be to see the story in print before anybody else gets wind of it. By all means, write the story if that is what you think best. But I must ask you not to publish it, not yet any rate.’ Even as he spoke Powerscourt was desperately trying to think of an argument that would convince the young man to hold his fire.
‘Of course I shall pay great attention to your views, Lord Powerscourt.’ Powerscourt knew immediately what that meant. If Jack O’Driscoll decided to publish, his views would be politely ignored.
‘Let me tell you what I think would happen, Jack.’ Powerscourt pushed out the Christian name, like an exploratory pawn. ‘There would be a tremendous fuss. The other papers would have to decide whether to ignore it, because it came from a rival, or to send their own reporters out. English papers, French papers, American papers, the route to Compostela would soon be as packed as a Fleet Street pub. And what would happen then? I think the French would throw us out. A few dead pilgrims in holy places, that’s a minor irritant. France mocked because its detectives cannot solve a crime, the murderer still on French soil, there would be an outcry. And these pilgrims, who you know far better than I, would they not be cheated of their mission? Michael Delaney would not have offered proper thanks for the salvation of his son. Shane Delaney with the dying wife, how is he going to face his Sinead when he comes home without fulfilling his goal, and her hopes of a miracle to save her life, however improbable they might be, are dashed to the ground? A bitter cup that would be for Mrs Delaney. And what of the others whose motives are less clear? Are they to be denied what they hoped for from the pilgrimage? And all for a few newspaper articles which might make your name but would be soon forgotten when another scandal came along to knock it off the front pages.’
Powerscourt wondered if this would work. He felt that only an appeal to the wishes of his fellow pilgrims might succeed in stopping the young man and his story. To his astonishment Jack O’Driscoll laughed.
‘There’s a very old sub-editor on the paper, Lord Powerscourt, who’s always telling us not to take the business of journalism and newspapers too seriously. Remember it’ll be wrapping up somebody’s fish and chips or lining their knicker drawers tomorrow, he says. You’re right about Shane Delaney’s wife, of course. She’s much more important than the words in a newspaper article.’
The young man looked sad all of a sudden.
Powerscourt couldn’t decide whether it was because of Mrs Delaney or because he was going to have to postpone publication yet again.
‘Why don’t you write as much of it as you can?’ he suggested. ‘It can’t be easy to get the tone right first time round.’
Jack O’Driscoll looked at him carefully. ‘I might just do that, Lord Powerscourt. But tell me this, do you know who the murderer is now?’
‘Not yet,’ said Powerscourt delphically. As the young man took his leave he wondered if he had said the right thing. ‘Not yet’ implied that he might be on the verge of a breakthrough. He didn’t want word to get round the pilgrim grapevine that he was on the verge of solving the mystery. That might not be good for his health. Maybe he should have said that he hadn’t a clue. But that might find its way into the newspaper article and he would be made to look a fool. One other thought struck him as he went in search of Alex Bentley. He wondered if young Jack O’Driscoll might have too soft a heart for ultimate success in his chosen profession.
Lady Lucy Powerscourt was having a very different sort of conversation with another of the pilgrims, Christy Delaney, the young man from Ireland due to go up to Cambridge in the autumn. Christy had asked Lady Lucy to take a walk with him. He wanted some advice.
‘Now then, Christy.’ Lady Lucy smiled at the young man as they left the village and headed up the twisting road towards Entraygues. ‘How can I help?’
The young man took a deep breath. ‘I’m in love, Lady Powerscourt, I’m sure of it.’
Lady Lucy resisted the urge to laugh at his solemnity. I shall have to be very careful, she said to herself. Love can be a very serious business when you’re all of eighteen years old and in a foreign country.
‘Might I ask who the young lady is?’
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