Death of a Pilgrim

11

The police inspector from Figeac arrived very early the next morning. Powerscourt came across him having a quick cup of coffee with Jacques the hotel owner. Nicolas Leger was small for a policeman. Powerscourt wondered briefly if he had stood on tiptoe when they measured the height of aspirant police recruits. He was about thirty-five years old, Nicolas, with a cheerful face, quizzical brown eyes and hair that was beginning to recede inexorably up his forehead. This seemed to be a matter of considerable regret to the Inspector for he sent a hand up to the top of his head at regular intervals as if checking on the damage.

‘Lord Powerscourt,’ he said, ‘what a pleasure to meet you. I heard about your adventures in St Petersburg from a colleague who spent some time attached to our secret service in the Place des Vosges in Paris.’

Powerscourt bowed. ‘I apologize, monsieur, for the trouble we are all causing the French authorities here. I wish it were not so.’

‘Do not trouble yourself, my lord. As long as people are living together they will go round killing each other at one time or another. That is what they told us in the police college. Murder is as much a part of life as love. Look what happened in the Garden of Eden after all. Whole thing started with Cain and Abel. Now then, what can you tell me about these pilgrims? Do you have any suspicions? In half an hour or so when they are taking their breakfast I am going to search their rooms. Just a quick look, you understand. I have a couple of men coming shortly who can turn them inside out during the morning. After they have had their coffee I should like to talk to them all. Perhaps you would do me the honour of translating?’

Powerscourt said that he and Lady Lucy would take it in turns for the translating. It was tiring work. He told the Inspector the little he knew about the pilgrims and their different motives for making the journey to Compostela, ranging from a love of architecture to adventure and a quest for forgiveness of sins or a cure for terminal illness.

‘Come, Lord Powerscourt, while the pilgrims rouse themselves perhaps you could show me the place where the boat was taken? I am most curious to look at one aspect of that.’

Powerscourt led him to the little jetty where the boats were moored. He had to walk as fast as he could for Inspector Leger seemed to be in a great hurry. Perhaps, Powerscourt thought, he was one of those who are always in a great hurry.

‘These little rowing boats,’ said the Inspector, making a lightning check on his hair, ‘I spent far too much time in them on the river of Figeac called the Cele when I should have been at my studies when I was young. Now then.’ He bent down to peer at the cut rope.

‘That knife must have been very sharp, the cut is so clean,’ said Powerscourt, anxious to show that he too had taken note of the rope.

‘How did he do it, I wonder?’ Inspector Leger picked up the end in his left hand and made a quick cutting movement with the index finger of his right. ‘Like that perhaps. Pity we cannot tell if our killer used his left or his right hand. Our work would be nearly over if he was left handed, but no. God is not that kind to us today. But tell me, Lord Powerscourt, what did he do with the knife? Would these pilgrims be carrying round knives this sharp? Would he have pinched it from the hotel kitchen? Perhaps I should ask our friend the hotelkeeper who likes his red wine so early in the morning that his breath smells of it even before breakfast. Would you take such a knife back to the kitchens? Or back to your room? We shall see.’

‘If our murderer was a careful murderer,’ said Powerscourt, looking at the Lot flowing past them, ‘he would have thrown it into the river. Even if it was found, there would be nothing to prove that it was the murderer who put it there.’

Inspector Leger too stared at the river. No sharp knives could be seen glinting on the bottom. ‘Maybe I shall get my men to search the river after they have finished with the rooms. But come, Lord Powerscourt, you can tell from the noise that they are now sat down to breakfast. A quick search of their rooms, I think.’

The Inspector shot through the rooms like a man possessed. Drawers were opened, rucksacks searched, clothes felt and shaken. Powerscourt thought he was hoping to find the knife. In Jack O’Driscoll’s little cell, he found a notebook which he thrust into Powerscourt’s hand. ‘What do we have here? Is this the great novel perhaps? A love letter, a very long love letter?’

‘It’s a diary,’ said Powerscourt, riffling through the entries. ‘There’s an entry for every single day of the pilgrimage, some much longer than others.’

‘Really,’ said the Inspector, staring at the impenetrable English that filled the pages. ‘I think we should ask if we can borrow it, Lord Powerscourt. Maybe you or your good wife would be so kind as to translate it for us.’

Then the Inspector found a knife. It was in a leather case placed beneath an exquisite carving of a model ship. Beside it was a new work, not yet finished, that looked as if was going to be a crucifix of elegant proportions when it was completed.

‘The knife and the carving belong to a young American called Charlie Flanagan,’ Powerscourt told the Inspector. ‘He spent the Atlantic crossing carving a model ship. I believe he has a commission to make another one.’

‘Feel how sharp this knife is, my friend,’ said the Inspector, staring intently at the blade. ‘I cannot see any shards of rope on it, mind you. But then the murderer would probably have wiped it afterwards.’ He began riffling through Charlie Flanagan’s clothes but found nothing of interest. In the Flanagan pack he found a large notebook with pages and pages of sketches. Powerscourt found himself transported back to the cathedral steps of Le Puy, to the bridge at Espalion and the great castle at Estaing. There were drawings too of pillars and stone coffins and the view along the Lot from just outside the hotel. Powerscourt remembered Charlie telling him that his real interest was architecture rather than carpentry.

‘What a good eye the young man has,’ the Inspector murmured, leafing through the notebook and checking on his bald patch once more. ‘There’s nothing incriminating here.’

Powerscourt was relieved to find that all Charlie’s possessions were innocent. He rather liked the young man from Baltimore.

‘Now then,’ said Leger, ‘before I speak to the pilgrims, I must speak to the man in charge in private, I think. M. Delaney, he is the man?’

Powerscourt led the way to a small office behind the dining room and brought in the American millionaire. Delaney looked as though he had passed a troubled night.

‘Inspector,’ he began, ‘our apologies for causing you so much trouble. Rest assured that we will do everything in our power to assist you. Do we need to contact any of the other authorities round here?’

He’s trying to find out if we have to start bribing people again, Powerscourt said to himself. He wondered briefly what it must be like to have unlimited amounts of money to spend. The Inspector’s reply astonished them both.

‘Do not think that we wish to detain you here any longer than is necessary, Mr Delaney. The local priest will be here soon to arrange for the funeral and burial of the unfortunate young man. I believe you have your own cure with you who can liaise with Father Cavagnac. He plans to hold the service tomorrow afternoon. After that you will be free to leave, to continue with your pilgrimage. I and my men will come with you, for I am based in Figeac which is on your route.’

Suddenly Powerscourt thought he could see it all. The Mayor of Entraygues, unwilling to enter into negotiations about a fountain or a series of seats for the elderly and the footsore on the banks of the Lot, saying to the police that he wanted these wretched pilgrims out of his town as fast as possible before there were any more murders. Father Cavagnac, keen to bury one as fast as he could before he had to bury any more. The local police force, unhappy with one murder, unwilling to wait for the next one, handing the responsibility over to the larger force in Figeac. Nobody wanted them. They were pariahs, modern lepers shunned by society, doomed to continue their bloody journey across southern France until they passed into the lands of the Spanish.

All that morning and into the afternoon Inspector Leger 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 Leger 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-Truyere wait for the Second Coming on a hillside above the little town. Beneath them the Lot and the Truyere 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 Leger 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 creme brulee 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.’

‘You don’t sound convinced about that, Father,’ said Lady Lucy.

‘I’m not,’ replied Father Kennedy. ‘I think a spell in one of the poorer parishes of Boston or New York would have served as a more fruitful apprenticeship. I know I have the good fortune to serve in one of the richest parishes in New York City, Lady Powerscourt, but I have applied many times now to be transferred to a less wealthy location. Always I am refused. I don’t know why.’

‘I’m sorry about that, Father. It must be hard if you do not feel at home in your work. Did young Patrick talk about his family, his past at all?’

‘All he ever said was that his mother was overjoyed when he was called to the priesthood. She was very devout. Patrick was an only child, you see. It was the father who complained about the grandchildren he would never see. That was all I can remember him saying about that side of his life. I believe the young think more about the future than the past.’

The road to Espeyrac turned right off the main road. The pilgrims were now on a narrow path that went up and down the hills in a series of sharp curves. Lady Lucy found herself thinking about Mr and Mrs MacLoughlin in Boston mourning for an only son lost twice, once to the call of the priesthood and once to the hands of a murderer. She wondered if they would ever make their own pilgrimage to see his grave on the hill above the Lot, looking out over the river and the valley and the woods on the far side. Her husband had been walking with Waldo Mulligan but Mulligan seemed to prefer his own company and Powerscourt let him go ahead on his own.

Waldo Mulligan knew he should have engaged Powerscourt in conversation. Anything would have been preferable to his own thoughts. But he remained locked inside his own head. Even trying to forget about Caroline, his mistress back in Washington, married to a colleague on the staff of the senator he worked for, involved thinking about her, he had decided. You could only stop remembering her once you had remembered her in the first place. And then there was that other, even darker shadow. He could recall every detail of the day he heard about his parents’ death in a rail crash some six months before, the time of day, just after four o’clock, the clothes he was wearing, the dark blue suit with the white shirt, the weather, a light rain falling, what he had for lunch, a ham roll with melted cheese, his work, a routine meeting with the senator just about to start. And then several days later, opening the desk with his father’s papers so meticulously filed going back nearly forty years and the shock that had changed his life.

At the front of the party marched one of Inspector Leger’s policemen. Another one walked roughly in the centre of the group surrounded by Jack O’Driscoll and Christy Delaney trying to improve their French by learning some of the words you might use when talking to young French women. The Inspector himself brought up the rear, some twenty yards behind Powerscourt. In Le Puy-en-Velay, Powerscourt thought, the French police virtually locked us up inside the hotel. Here we are under a form of mobile house arrest. Certainly the murderer would find it hard to strike here, surrounded by the officers of the law.

Powerscourt was thinking about vendettas and how long they could last. Did they extend down two or even three generations? Would a family be able to maintain a hatred of their enemies that would stretch out over fifty or sixty years? In one of his earlier cases he remembered a vendetta in Corsica, but that had only just started. It certainly hadn’t been running for decades. He dimly recalled the myths of the Ancient Greeks where people wreaked frightful vengeance on their foes across the generations. But they had often been cursed by the gods, ever random and even whimsical in their choice of victims. He looked at the party of pilgrims ahead of him. Which one was carrying a terrible secret with him? Was he, even now, here among the trees and the lowing cows and the sunshine, deciding on his next victim?

Still the road twisted up and down the hills. They passed smaller, overgrown paths that curved their way into the woods and forests. Stepping into one of them Powerscourt realized that he was in a totally green world. This was what everything would look like if the creator had made the skies green instead of blue. Powerscourt bent down and stepped further along the path, dodging the overhanging branches. There were so many different shades in here. Emerald, sea green, olive green, pea green, grass green, apple, mint, forest, lawn green, lime, leaf green, fir, pine, moss, viridian. Dark green, he remembered, is associated with ambition, greed and jealousy. Maybe one of the pilgrims was green at heart. He turned about and made his way back into the blue universe outside and almost bumped into the Inspector.

‘They say there are wild mushrooms growing in these forests, Lord Powerscourt. Did you find any? And tell me, what do you think of our security arrangements? The killer would find it difficult to strike now, is that not so?’

Powerscourt resisted the temptation to say that the killer had struck on the last occasion in the middle of the night. ‘Very fine,’ he replied.

‘I hope to keep some sort of guard during the hours of darkness as well,’ the Inspector went on. ‘I have to work it out with my men later. Maybe we shall take watches like the sailors do but without those damned bells ringing all through the night.’

Lady Lucy found herself walking alongside Wee Jimmy Delaney now, the steel worker from Pittsburgh. She reckoned he was nearly a foot taller than she was. He must be at least six foot four, she told herself, with big calloused hands and masses of black curly hair. His eyes were pale blue and hinted that there could be a gentler soul behind them than outside appearances might suggest. Wee Jimmy had a great staff in his hand which seemed a puny thing in his huge fist, like a matchstick.

‘Are you enjoying the pilgrimage so far, Mr Delaney?’ Lady Lucy asked brightly. ‘Maybe enjoy is the wrong word, I don’t know. People have so many different reasons for being here after all.’

‘I like it very much, Lady Powerscourt. I like this rolling countryside hereabouts.’

Lady Lucy paused. She didn’t quite know how to put the substance of her next question without sounding rude or impertinent or both. They walked on. A herd of light brown cattle stared at them from a neighbouring field. The stare, Lady Lucy felt, was exactly the same as the stare from the local French people, impertinent and lasting far too long. In the end Wee Jimmy solved the problem for her.

‘You know, Lady Powerscourt,’ he said, ‘I haven’t told anybody yet why I’m here, why I’ve come on the pilgrimage.’

Lady Lucy waited. The cows were still staring. They looked as if they could stare all day.

‘It’s strange, I think, how we hope we or our loved ones could be made better by walking all this way and going to church in Santiago de Compostela. It’s not rational.’

‘I’m not sure that religion is rational at all, Mr Delaney. We’re meant to have faith and that really means believing in things that aren’t rational at all.’

‘I’ve got a little sister, Lady Powerscourt.’ Wee Jimmy Delaney tucked his staff under his arm and bent down to speak nearer to Lady Lucy’s height. ‘She’s why I’m here.’

Lady Lucy didn’t want to ask if the girl was dying or suffering from some other terrible problem. She waited, walking more slowly now.

A strange look passed over Wee Jimmy’s face. Lady Lucy thought it combined compassion and anger at virtually the same time.

‘She’s deaf and she’s dumb and she’s blind. Has been since the day she was born, poor little thing. Four children before her, all perfectly healthy, three children after her, all perfectly healthy, all faculties in working order. My mother thinks to this day that she is being punished for some crime, only she can’t remember ever having committed a crime the size of this punishment.’

‘How old is your little sister?’ asked Lady Lucy.

‘Marianne? She’s eight years old, she’ll be nine on the Fourth of July. She’s well looked after, all her brothers and sisters would do anything for her. She can still taste.’ Lady Lucy saw a gentle smile on the face of the man from Pittsburgh. ‘Every time you give her a piece of chocolate she smiles this lovely smile. And she can smell. She always knows when I’ve come in from the steelworks and haven’t cleaned myself up yet. You see these hands, Lady Powerscourt.’ Wee Jimmy held out his great clubs for inspection. ‘You could tell that I work in something like a steelworks or a coal mine. It’s very hard work. I don’t mind. I do as much overtime as I can. Sometimes I carry on right through the weekends. I do it to take Marianne to the best doctors in Pennsylvania, God, they’re so expensive, these doctors, but I don’t care about the money. We’ve been to two specialists in Philadelphia but they can’t do anything for Marianne. I’m saving up to take her to a man in New York they say is the best man in America.’

Lady Lucy tried to imagine what it must be like to be the mother of a child who could neither see nor speak nor hear. The knowledge that you had brought this person into this world must be with you every minute of every day, as if you had been cursed by God or whatever deities you believed in.

‘Is that why you’re here?’ she asked quietly, looking up into Wee Jimmy’s face. ‘For Marianne?’

‘Well, it is. I’m here, I suppose, as the representative of our family on this pilgrimage to pray that Marianne may get better. We don’t want everything, you see. It would be unrealistic to expect all three faculties to come back, I think. Just something, however small, some improvement to take her a little way out of the eternal darkness and the eternal silence as my father puts it. It’s strange, our family, Lady Powerscourt. All the children born in even years, 1890, 1892, 1894, are believers, like our mother is a true believer. All the ones born in the odd years, 1895, 1897 and so on, are more doubtful, like our father. They all go to church and so on, the odd-year Delaneys, but they don’t believe like the rest of us do.’

‘Was it a family decision, then, that you should come?’ said Lady Lucy trying to hold a picture of Marianne in her mind.

‘It was my father who suggested it, oddly enough. He’d heard about the pilgrimage and Michael Delaney paying for everyone. He said to me that we’d tried all these doctors, we’d probably have to try some more later on. “Science hasn’t worked for us,” he said, he’s a great reader, my father, always getting books out of the library, “so let’s try religion.” Here I am, Lady Powerscourt, praying for Marianne in every church we pass and out in the open too.’

‘Can I ask you a favour, Mr Delaney?’ said Lady Lucy.

‘Of course.’

‘Can I pray for her too?’

The village of Espeyrac boasted yet another river, the Daz, now a thin trickle running down the valley below the hotel, the Auberge des Montagnes. The place did not have enough rooms so Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were to stay in a house owned by the hotelkeeper’s brother a mile or so outside. A long track led up to it past a couple of empty houses and a number of barns. Powerscourt noticed the roofs, all of which, whether designed for man or beast, had a slight outwards curve at the bottom rather than running straight down to the gutters. It gave them a slightly feminine appearance as if the male builders had been thinking of their wives or their lovers or their mistresses as they worked.

‘What a charming little place,’ said Lady Lucy, disturbing a couple of goldfinches minding their own business in the little courtyard outside the house, and opening the front door with the hotel proprietor’s key. The house was on four floors with an attic at the top and a fine sitting room. But it was the view from the terrace at the back that really delighted them, a view that could also be seen, in different sections, from various windows on the other floors. The countryside, a mixture of clumps of trees and rolling pastureland, spread out down towards a valley. Over to the left the spire of the Espeyrac church seemed to hold the picture together like the altarpieces in the paintings of Renaissance Madonnas. On the far side the hills rolled upwards again. Behind them, their own hill climbed to a rocky peak. Later that evening, before they made their way to the hotel for supper, Powerscourt and Lady Lucy walked back up the road towards Entraygues. A smaller road led off to the right at the top of a crest in the hills. The sun was going down fast. They watched, hypnotized, as the colours faded from the bottom of the valleys while the tops were still bathed in sunlight. The lower half of some of the trees was a black and white etching, the rest still coloured by the sun. Soon only the highest parts of the trees and the ground were bright. Shadow and dark grey were covering the rest of the landscape that rolled away in great folds in front of them. The sun eventually sank behind the top of one of the hills, a blazing ball of yellow and gold, gone to light up another part of the world. Powerscourt took Lady Lucy’s hand as they walked down the hill to the Espeyrac hotel. They were both too humbled to speak.

In the Auberge they found themselves translating in an animated discussion between the hotel owner, Michael Delaney and Alex Bentley. The hotel proprietor was expounding on the need for more pilgrims, more visitors, more money to pass through his little village. ‘So many of the towns on the pilgrim route grew rich and ever richer from the proceeds of those pilgrims hundreds of years ago,’ he said, the bright light of profit in his eye. ‘When the wars of religion and that terrible man Napoleon came along it all got too dangerous for the people. But we have peace now. Why can’t we do it again? Why can’t the pilgrims come back?’

‘Why not?’ said Michael Delaney, scenting perhaps or playing with a possible business opportunity. ‘Tell me, Alex, how many Catholics are there in France? How many in Spain? How many in Germany? And how many in America, for God’s sake? Just think of the size of the potential market!’

‘Millions of them,’ said Alex Bentley, ‘probably tens of millions across Europe and the United States. Enormous numbers.’

‘It just needs some proper marketing, that’s all.’ Delaney was warming to his theme now. ‘They say that the art of advertising is to make people buy things they never knew they wanted. Well, imagine what they could do with the pilgrim route to Compostela! Come save your soul in Spain! Forgiveness of Sins! Salvation of Souls! Pilgrim’s Progress! Redemption on Route! French food on the road to God! French wines on the Pilgrim Path! Just think what those early Christians did in terms of marketing when all they had were those four little Gospels and some of them pretty hard to understand. They converted most of the bloody Roman Empire in a couple of hundred years. All done with no proper slogans. No billboards. No newspapers to place advertisements in, for God’s sake. Surely modern American methods can do better than that.’

‘My little hotel here might be full for most of the summer,’ the owner enthused, doing complicated calculations of potential gains in his head. ‘We might never be poor again. My Yvonne could have a carriage of her own!’

‘Hotels?’ said Delaney. ‘A man might do very well with hotels. I could buy or build a whole chain right across the routes from France and Spain. All called the St Jacques with a statue of the saint fellow with his staff and his sandals right above the main entrance. I know a man in stonework up in Westchester County who could knock those off at a reasonable price. Discount for large numbers, of course. Scallop shells in every bedroom. Pilgrim food, maybe not, now I think about it, that was probably inedible and the Americans wouldn’t eat it. We could have shops in all the hotels selling staffs and rosary beads and maps and special prayer books for the pilgrims. I’m sure some medieval professor could dig us out a lot of the old prayers the people said along the way. If not, the Jesuits or some order or another could run off a few for us at a good fee. And once you had the whole system up and running you wouldn’t have to do another thing. The business would look after itself, it’d be like selling water in the desert. It could be tremendous, simply tremendous. Have to get the Church on side, of course. I’m sure Father Kennedy could work out how to buy a couple of bishops, maybe even a cardinal or two. God bless the pilgrims. Confession en route. Absolution in the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela. We’d probably have to work out an easier means of transport for the older citizens, mind you. Should appeal to the old, pilgrimage, when they’re so close to the exit themselves. Not long to go now. Pilgrim’s passport to the next world. Maybe we could get some of those liners to make special cruises from New York, dropping the elderly close to the final destination so they didn’t have far to walk.’

Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were walking back to their little house in the hills when they heard footsteps behind them. It was Stephen Lewis, the solicitor from Frome. He paused every now and then to look behind him, as if to make sure he was alone. ‘I had to catch you on your own, Lord Powerscourt, forgive me, Lady Powerscourt, I didn’t want anybody listening in to what I have to say.’ He paused.

‘You can speak freely in front of Lucy, Mr Lewis,’ said Powerscourt. ‘She’s tougher than she looks.’

‘It’s probably nothing,’ said Lewis, panting slightly as they climbed up the hill out of Espeyrac, ‘but I felt I should tell you all the same. It’s only a fragment of conversation, but I think you ought to know about it.’

Powerscourt remembered that Lewis was a solicitor by profession. Heaven only knew what secrets he held about the inhabitants of Frome locked up in his office safe.

‘The other evening, in the hotel at Estaing, I felt unwell last thing at night. I thought I’d try a glass of brandy to settle the stomach. That’s often worked for me in the past. Maybe the local cooking is too rich for me. Mabel, that’s my wife, always likes to put plain food on the table. Anyway, the bar was still serving customers and I took my drink out on to the terrace. The windows were open and I could hear two men having a heated discussion at the other end of the bar. They were quite drunk, the barman didn’t understand a word of English, they had no idea I was there. I could only hear fragments of what they said.’

‘And what were they talking about, Mr Lewis?’ Powerscourt too looked back down the road. He could see nobody, only the dark shapes of the buildings and the outlines of the trees.

‘They were having an argument, I think. That’s how it came across anyway. I couldn’t even tell who they were, the voices were so thick. But one of them said something like, “God, how I hate Michael Delaney.” At least I think that’s what he said and he said it twice. I finished my brandy and crept away. I didn’t think they’d be very happy if they knew I had overheard them, and they were drunk enough for anything.’

‘Are you absolutely sure you don’t know who they were, Mr Lewis?’

‘I’m afraid I didn’t. Would it be important if I had recognized the voices?’

‘Oh yes, Mr Lewis,’ said Powerscourt, ‘it might have been very important indeed.’