Death of a Pilgrim

18

By the end of the north gallery they came to what had been the refectory. It was completely empty. Next door was the Chapelle St Ferreol with some ancient sculptures but no living pilgrims. The professor had reached the story of David and Goliath from the first Book of Samuel at pillar number twenty-two. Along the east gallery was a series of empty chambers, full of dust with cobwebs circling out from the walls. Powerscourt began to wonder if they hadn’t just miscounted the pilgrims. One of them could have been hemmed in by the taller men in black till he was virtually invisible. The south gallery backed directly on to the side of the church but at the corner where it met the west gallery there was a set of stairs leading upwards.

‘Come on,’ said the Inspector, ‘if he’s not up here we can’t count. We’ll have to go back to school.’

The steps led them into the upper chamber, an extremely tall room with great slim arches. Strips of light were flooding in through a series of openings on an upper level. One side of the room looked directly into the church. Anybody up here could eavesdrop on weddings or baptisms down below without being seen. The vaulting was supported on twelve square ribs radiating out from a central keystone. The room was deserted. Powerscourt and the Inspector tiptoed round it in opposite directions. Then there was a muffled cry from Inspector Leger.

‘My God!’ he said. ‘After all the precautions we’ve taken, there’s been another murder!’

Powerscourt turned round and joined him. At the bottom of a little flight of steps there was a huddled shape. It looked as though somebody had taken all their clothes off and dropped them on the floor. Even in the shadows they could see drops of dark blood oozing from the back of what had once been his head. Lumps of grey matter that might have been brains, Powerscourt thought, were lying on the floor. One hand was still at the back of his head, as if trying to ward off the vicious blows that killed him.

‘Look,’ said the Inspector, pointing to dark marks on the pillar above them, ‘it seems somebody smashed the victim’s head repeatedly into the stone. He might have been gone after a few blows. It must have been like a pummelling from a giant hammer, poor soul. Do you know who he was, Powerscourt?’

Powerscourt peered down at the remains of a human being dumped on the floor of St Peter’s Abbey. ‘Connolly,’ he said quietly, ‘Girvan Connolly, related to Michael Delaney on his mother’s side. He was on the run from his creditors, Inspector, but I don’t suppose they found him here. Whatever his misdemeanours, however large his debts, he hadn’t deserved to die like this.’

‘Could you wait here till I send one of my men up? I’m going to put a man at the bottom of the steps too. All too late, of course, but at least nobody’s going to see him till the doctor gets here. And I’ll tell the priest in charge of all those young men to get them out of here. That’ll be a relief.’

Powerscourt stared sadly into the body of the church. The technique, he realized, was the same in all four murders. God, he thought, there have been four of them and my presence here has been a complete waste of time. Come with me, my friend, up the steps to the Chapel of St Michel in Le Puy, or to the river bank on the Lot, or to the back of the church in Conques, or to this upper chamber, come and I’ll tell you a secret. You’re going to like the secret very much. There was indeed a secret waiting for the person who went with the killer; their own death, always surprising even in more peaceful surroundings. And what was the secret, or the bait? Was it blackmail perhaps, or the promise of some rich pickings from Michael Delaney?

His thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of one of Inspector Leger’s policemen who crossed himself vigorously when he saw the bloodied bundle that had been Girvan Connolly and began saying a series of Hail Marys.

Something in the Inspector’s face must have alerted Monsignor Michelack, the priest in charge.

‘It is something serious up there, Inspector, is it not so?’

‘Yes, I’m afraid it is,’ Leger replied.

‘It is not a sudden illness or you would be running for the doctor. Am I right?’

The Inspector wondered briefly if the Monsignor was not in the wrong profession.

‘It is a dead man?’ Michelack whispered. ‘Another of these murders?’

The Inspector realized that most of the clergy of southern France must know about the chequered progress of the Delaney pilgrims, their passage marked by blood and sudden death. The Church after all had been deeply involved in the discussions about what to do with them.

The Inspector nodded sadly. The priest crossed himself very slowly and deliberately. He closed his eyes and said a brief prayer. Then he turned to address his students.

‘Gentlemen,’ he began, ‘I have a sad announcement to make. In the midst of life there is death. Death came this afternoon for one of these pilgrims in the upper chamber here behind me. Murder strikes in one of the most beautiful buildings in France. Before we go I want us to say the prayers for the dead. I want you to form up in ranks of four abreast. We shall progress round the cloisters in the manner of the monks of old, saying the same prayers they would have said for one of their own, fallen asleep in his cell perhaps, or passing away from old age as he worked in the fields.’

The young men were very solemn as they fell into their ranks. The Monsignor placed himself at the head of the column. He walked slowly, his hands joined together and pointing to the ground. He spoke quietly as he led the young men in their devotions.

‘Hail Mary full of grace, blessed art thou among women, pray for us now and in the hour of our death, Amen.’

Two hundred young voices joined him in the Hail Mary. The pilgrims had prostrated themselves against the walls. Powerscourt and Lady Lucy watched from the entrance to what had once been the monks’ refectory, a place of physical rather than spiritual sustenance.

‘Absolve, Lord, we entreat you, the soul of your servant from every bond of sin . . .’

Only those near the front of the procession could hear the words of the Monsignor. For the rest the seminarians’ voices took over.

‘. . . that he may be raised up in the glory of the resurrection and live among your saints and elect, through Jesus Christ our Lord.’

Powerscourt thought this must be a profound experience for these young men. They will have read in their history books all about the daily life of the monks of centuries past, the seven services, the prescribed ordering of each day in God’s service. Now they were living out one part of it. Surely they would never think about monastic life in the same way again. Today, for them, the past had, quite literally, come to life, walking in order round the four galleries of the Moissac cloisters.

‘Incline your ear, oh Lord,’ the Monsignor went on, ‘to our prayers in which we humbly entreat your mercy, and bring to a place of peace and light the soul of your servant . . . ’

Maggie Delaney, standing very still against a wall near the Pillar of Cain and Abel, was weeping for the beauty of the procession and the soul of Girvan Connolly, sinner and corpse.

‘. . . which you have summoned to go forth from this world,’ the young men carried on, ‘bidding him to be numbered in the fellowship of your saints through Jesus Christ our Lord.’

Powerscourt remembered his earlier conversation with Connolly as they walked the pilgrim trail, the pots and pans that wouldn’t sell, the sheets that collapsed after the first use, the debts that closed around him as death had enveloped him this afternoon. He didn’t think Connolly would have much in common with the saints.

‘Hear us, oh Lord,’ the Monsignor looked as though he could go on praying for ever, ‘and let the soul of your servant profit by this sacrifice, by the offering of which you granted that the sins of the whole world should be forgiven, through Jesus Christ our Lord.’

Half of the cloisters were in shadow now. Shafts of sunlight sent bands of brilliant light across the black of the seminarians. The bricks were glowing pink or almost white. Powerscourt watched in astonishment as the pilgrims began to join the rear of the procession. Brother White, Christy Delaney, Charlie Flanagan and Jack O’Driscoll formed themselves into a line of four and joined the seminarians at the end of their column.

‘Our father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name . . .’

Now the rest of the pilgrims fell into line and progressed round the cloisters with the men in black, with only Maggie Delaney left on the sidelines.

‘Thy kingdom come, thy will be done . . .’

Lady Lucy was whispering to Powerscourt. ‘Should we join in too, Francis? What do you think?’

Powerscourt shook his head. ‘I think not, my love. Not our cloisters, not our religion, not even our pilgrimage.’

‘On earth as it is in heaven . . .’

The sound rose above the cloisters and into the blue skies above. Christy Delaney was crying now. So was Wee Jimmy Delaney, his huge frame racked by sobs.

‘Give us each day our daily bread . . .’

Lady Lucy was holding her husband’s hand very tightly. Inspector Leger in the corner was now flanked by a man with a bag who might be a doctor and a couple of orderlies with a makeshift stretcher.

‘And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them who trespass against us . . .’

Beads of sweat were forming on the Monsignor’s upper lip as he processed round the cloisters for the last time. Behind him the young men kept their places, eyes down, hands still.

‘And deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever, amen.’

Monsignor Michelack led his men right out of the cloisters, still keeping their ranks of four apiece, and into the square to wait for their transport. Inspector Leger marched the remaining pilgrims out too, pausing for a quick word with Powerscourt.

‘I’m sorry,’ he began, ‘I meant to ask you before but I forgot. I have lost my interpreter. I would be very grateful if you could accompany me on the train. I’ve ordered a couple of extra carriages. Maybe these pilgrims will talk to you more easily than they would to me, my lord. We won’t be asking you to spend the night in the cells with them, mind you.’

Powerscourt said they would be delighted. The doctor and his assistants, the melancholy apparatus of death, hurried off to the upper chamber to remove the body. Lady Lucy went to see if she could offer comfort to the pilgrims. Silence returned to the cloisters of Moissac.

Powerscourt watched as two burly French policemen carried Girvan Connolly’s body down the steps at the northeast corner of the cloisters. At the bottom they placed the corpse on a makeshift stretcher and carried it away to the cathedral square where a Moissac ambulance would take it to the Moissac morgue and into the care of the doctors. Beyond the wall he could still hear sounds of weeping and lament as the remaining pilgrims mourned the loss of yet another of their number.

Powerscourt was now completely alone. Eternal silence had returned. And he had seen this afternoon something approaching a miracle. No monks had walked round these four galleries since the revolutionary upheavals of 1793. But today, he had seen with his own eyes a great column of religious, processing round as their predecessors would have done eight hundred years before, saying the prayers for the dead. The cloisters, Powerscourt thought, were unmoved by murder and violent death. Built in their original form about 1100, they had survived the Black Death, the Crusades against the Cathars, the Hundred Years War, the Wars of Religion, the Revolution and the Terror. One more death would not affect them. As he looked at the four great arcades flanking the central garth – the grass space in the middle where a fountain or a spring had been centuries before – he tried to remember what the fussy little local historian had struggled to tell his party earlier that day. Twenty pillars each in the east and west sides and eighteen on the north and south. So the cloisters were nearly square. The pillars alternating between single and double columns. The great cedar towards the north arcade that would have given shade in the summer. And up here – the chubby Frenchman had grown quite animated at this point – ‘gentlemen, the glory of Moissac! What makes it most unique! The capitals at the top of the pillars! In these middle times, they had the sculptures on the top of the pillars, seventy and six of them, no, showing leaves and foliage and all the different scenes from the Old and New Testaments. For the monks this would have been like a book to read as they went about their work, a book to inspire them and keep them to their callings. And the pilgrims, my friends, the pilgrims would have read them as we read newspapers today!’

The rattle of wheels and the clap of horses’ hooves told him that the body must now be on its way to another resting place. The sun was advancing slowly but relentlessly along the south arcade, highlighting the pillars and the capitals in red and gold. Powerscourt wondered if the stones had a message. Perhaps they were as remote as the broken statue of some long dead Egyptian potentate, buried in the sands in the Valley of the Kings . Modernity, he thought, would probably want to sweep them all away and build something new, something relevant to the times. The cloister, indeed, had only just survived an early encounter with modernity when the engineers of the new Bordeaux to Sete railway had wanted to knock the whole complex down and replace it with gleaming modern railway tracks. It had taken a great campaign to deflect them and even now, as Powerscourt heard the rumble of an approaching express behind him, modernity shook parts of the building every time a train shot past. Powerscourt walked slowly round the cloisters, a voyage out of light into shadow and back into light again and thought about the monks and the abbots who had spent their lives here centuries before. The men who walked here then didn’t think about the future, they thought about eternity.

The dull browns burnished into light pink, the weathered red brick wrapped around the cloisters, the great tree reaching up into a deep blue sky, they spoke to Powerscourt of a profound peace. He would always remember these cloisters, the deep stillness they conveyed even when the arcades were full of chattering pilgrims, the all-pervading calm, their austere and timeless beauty. He heard footsteps advancing towards him from the south gallery. Lady Lucy was coming to join her husband in his deliberations. As she walked along the row of pillars, the sunlight was dancing in her hair.

There were two telegrams waiting for Powerscourt when he and Lady Lucy returned to the hotel. The first was from Johnny Fitzgerald and was unusually delphic for Johnny. ‘Am coming in person to join you on holiday in south of France. Bringing one of Knightsbridge’s finest lost and found. Shall expect detailed report on best local vintages for immediate consumption. Fitzgerald.’

‘My love, what on earth is one of Knightsbridge’s finest lost and found?’ Lady Lucy had been reading the message over her husband’s shoulder.

Powerscourt laughed. ‘It’s a primitive sort of code, Lucy. Look at the first letters of the words after “bringing” and you’ll see it says “book”. Johnny must have got hold of a copy of that old book about Delaney, the one that was pulped all those years ago. And he’s bringing it himself. Maybe he didn’t like to trust it to the post. Anyway, he should be here soon. I think that’s tremendous news.’

Lady Lucy was more thrilled than she let on. She had always been very fond of Johnny Fitzgerald. He had been best man at their wedding, scarcely recovered from a bullet wound in the chest. But when he was there, she felt Francis was safe. Johnny looked after him as he had looked after Johnny for years now. It was as if a blanket of security was about to be thrown over her husband.

The second telegram came from Franklin Bentley in Washington. ‘Have located young Delaney,’ it said. ‘Early years in Pittsburgh, city of steel. Have located local priest who may remember him. My employers have given leave for me to go there tomorrow. Suspect they want to curry favour with Delaney, take his account away from Smith Wasserstein Abrahams up in New York.’

‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, ‘things may be looking up.’ A faint outline of a plan to catch the killer was forming in his brain. It depended on his having Johnny Fitzgerald by his side. And, for once, he wasn’t going to breathe a word of it to his wife.

After dinner they went out to have coffee and drinks at a series of wooden tables at the back of the hotel. This small square had once been the stable block and indeed there were still a number of horses and a few carriages to be seen. A bearded man could be observed lying under the bonnet of a very large and very expensive-looking motor car, a rag in one hand and an oil can in the other, swearing violently from time to time as he encountered further mechanical problems.

It was Powerscourt who saw them first. Flying high above them was a positive armada of small birds, swallows and martins and swifts, with their scythe-like wings and short forked tails. They looked as though they were on parade, medieval knights on tournament duty perhaps, armour burnished, lances polished, standards cleaned till they glowed in the sunlight, trotting along the green field to impress a sovereign or delight a mistress. Hundreds and hundreds of the birds passed overhead, the noise of their wings mingling with their cries and the traffic of the town. Somewhere out of sight, Powerscourt thought, they must wheel round and return, drawn for some unknown reason back to the little square that started as a stable block.

He remembered the excitement in his household the previous year when reports reached England that two Americans had invented a machine that could fly. This was no Montgolfier balloon that had carried the French into the skies before their Revolution, dependent on the wind, uncertain of navigation, symbolic of veering and abrupt changes in political direction. This American contraption, when it was more fully developed, would fly where man wanted it to go. The wings, unlike those of aviation pioneer Icarus, would not melt if taken too close to the sun. Powerscourt’s eldest child, Thomas, had been fascinated by the flying aeroplane. He bought all the newspapers and magazines he could find that contained articles about it. Daily for nearly a month, his father recalled, Thomas had announced at mealtimes, all mealtimes, that he was going to fly one of these devices when he grew up. His sister Olivia, almost as excited as Thomas at the prospect of flying machines, announced that she wasn’t going to bother to learn how to fly the things. This, she implied, was a rather menial task, like mending broken motor cars. Rather she would travel in state and in style, seated in luxury by one of the windows, taking small but sophisticated sips of Kir Royale, a concoction Olivia had been allowed a minute mouthful of in France the year before and regarded as the epitome of chic.

Then the pattern in the heavens above changed. No longer were the birds flying in huge formations, hundreds and hundreds to a regiment. Now they were coming in small attack platoons, fifteen or twenty at a time. Before they had sailed high above the buildings. Now they dived straight for them, only turning away at the last possible second. They skimmed along the sides of the stables a few feet from the solid bricks that would have crushed their skulls. The birds, swifts mostly, Powerscourt thought, headed directly for the chimney tops, twisting out of the way with inches to spare, screaming as they went. There were dark birds, totally black, in the line-up now, which he suspected might be bats. Wave after wave of them came in their demonic flight, skirting along the sides of the square. No human brain, he thought, could have made the lightning calculations needed to tell the birds to turn away from the walls and the turrets now or they would be obliterated. This was, quite literally, for these swifts and swallows and martins, a dance of death.

He looked over to his right and saw the birds still turning and twisting and racing and shrieking and diving across their arena of the roofs of the stable block.

When he turned his gaze back to the hotel, everything had changed. The little birds had stopped, or moved on. Perhaps God or some other celestial seneschal had blown a whistle to announce the end of the match. In their place, high above the playground of the swifts and the swallows, a couple of ravens were beating a regular and steady path across the skies. Pay no attention, they seemed to say, to the frantic antics of these small swifts and swallows. We are the serious characters round here. We shall always be with you. And in place of the shrieking of the little birds he could hear Lady Lucy’s voice asking him if he had gone deaf, surely, she had been trying to talk to him for at least a minute, and did he want another drink before the bar closed up for the night.

Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were sipping their coffee in a corner of another hotel dining room the next morning when a great shout disturbed the breakfast peace.

‘Francis! Lucy! The top of the morning to you both!’ And Johnny Fitzgerald, holding a large dark brown bag very tight in his right hand, strode across the room. He embraced Lady Lucy and held Powerscourt in an enormous bear hug. Only then, as the relief flooded through him, did Powerscourt realize how much he had missed his companion in arms. Lady Lucy felt happier than she had done since she came to France. Francis would be safe now.

‘Coffee,’ said Johnny, seating himself down, still holding on to the bag and signalling to the waitress, ‘I could do with some coffee. I feel it’s too early for a drink, even for me. Now then,’ he tapped his holdall significantly, ‘I’ve brought you the Crown Jewels, Francis. I had to go all the way to Bath to get it, mind you. I think this is the only copy left in England.’

‘Have you read any of it, Johnny?’ asked Lady Lucy.

‘I’ve got to page one hundred and fifty. It’s a very strange book. The subtitle is The Seven Deadly Sins of Michael Delaney, and each of the seven chapters deals with a different crime. Maybe the author hoped it would be serialized in one of the weeklies, a sin a week for a month and a half. But it’s as if the author is two completely different people. The beginning of each chapter is full of detailed financial stuff I didn’t really care about, then at the end he turns into a sort of hellfire preacher man and rants and raves away about how wicked Delaney is and how he is sure to be punished in this world or the next.’

‘And are the crimes bad enough, Johnny, for people to want to kill all his relations?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘Depends on how bad you think all these financial misdemeanours are, I suppose,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, rummaging around in his bag. ‘You know I could never understand anything about money – the financial pages leave me in such a daze that my wits can only be restored by a glass or two of something.’ Johnny handed the book over to Powerscourt who noticed that Johnny had wrapped the cover in plain brown paper so that nobody would know what he was reading.

A glance inside told him that the author was a Robert Preston, one-time reporter with the Wall Street Journal.

‘Well,’ he smiled at his wife and his friend, ‘let’s hope we find some answers in here. Wouldn’t it be odd if the solution to these murders came all the way from Bath.’