Death of a Pilgrim

19

The pilgrim train was now six carriages long, four for the pilgrims and two extra for the Powerscourts laid on by the Inspector. Leger had called at the hotel soon after Johnny’s arrival to tell them they would be leaving at eleven o’clock.

‘I’ve done all the paperwork,’ he said wearily to Powerscourt, ‘I’ve filled in all the forms. I’ve arranged for the funeral. I had a frightful time with the local police and the Mayor and everybody, mind you. They kept saying these wretched pilgrims should be held here in Moissac, pending further investigations. I asked them how many more dead bodies they wanted on their doorstep. Then they said I couldn’t take the suspects out of the area. I asked if they wanted hordes of newspapermen crowding round their damned cloisters – said I was going to make an appeal via the gentlemen of the press for information from the public that might lead to an arrest. I even, God help me, talked about a reward.’

‘Would you have done that, Inspector?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘Certainly not,’ said the Inspector with a grin. ‘I’m hardly likely to want to advertise our failure to find the murderer. But they weren’t to know that. We’ll conduct the interviews as we go along. If the pilgrims won’t talk to me or to you, Powerscourt, I’m going to tell them they may never get out of France. They could be locked up in a cell for years while the case is investigated. As it is, I’ve talked to the railway authorities. They’ve put a newer and faster engine on the train. The quicker the pilgrims are out of the country the happier I shall be.’

Failure. Our failure. Failure. My failure. Powerscourt wondered if this would be his last case, the shame and ignominy of failure finishing off his reputation for good. His mood was not improved by a summons to see Michael Delaney who seemed to have appropriated one of the extra carriages as his own. The train was now moving towards the south at considerable speed. Johnny Fitzgerald was looking at the birds out of the window, swearing quietly when their speed prevented him from making a proper identification.

Delaney seemed to have obtained a fresh supply of cigars. The great fat one he was smoking now was of a type Powerscourt had not seen him smoke before. He seemed to be in a filthy mood. Powerscourt wondered if his famous temper, admirably held in check until now, was about to explode.

‘Ah, Powerscourt,’ he said, sounding rather like a headmaster Powerscourt had once known, ‘sit down.’ He took another mighty puff on his cigar. ‘In my line of business, Powerscourt, we have to keep an eye on the managers we put in. Are they doing their job properly? Are they fiddling the books? Are they succeeding in bringing in loads of profit for the firm, that sort of thing. Are you with me up to this point?’

Powerscourt said yes, he thought he could manage it so far, thank you.

‘One of the hardest jobs our managers have to perform in the unforgiving world of commerce is to turn around companies that are failing, losing money, losing me money. Let me tell you a story, Powerscourt. Let’s suppose I’ve just bought a little railroad company in upstate New York. It’s not doing well, but there is a lot of potential. In goes the manager, who comes with very high recommendations and references, the best in the business and so on. And he fails. The company is not turned round. It continues to go down the pan. And what do I do? In my innocence I believe that it is not his fault, that he deserves another chance. So I send him to save another company, a ferry business operating out of Long Island Sound that should be making money hand over fist. Again he fails. The citizens of Long Island Sound are not crowding on to his ferries, they’re travelling on the other bastard’s boats. So what do I do? Like a fool, I keep the man on. This time I send him to a printing works that should be flush with dollars with people buying more newspapers and so forth. But no. For the third time the man fails. The order books of the printing works are no better than they were when he came, they are worse. Three times now this man has failed me, he’s failed himself, he’s failed to fulfil his part of the American dream that all businessmen are free to make as much money as they can. I give him one last chance. Another train company. Maybe he was unlucky the first time. Maybe this time all that praise for his abilities will come good. Maybe or maybe not. The fool fails again. So what do you think I should do with him, Powerscourt? You know all about people with superb references and recommendations, after all.’

‘I think that’s entirely a matter for you, Mr Delaney.’ Powerscourt thought he knew what was coming. Under normal circumstances it might be possible to move away from such sulphurous encounters. On a train there was no escape.

‘Quite so, Powerscourt. Now let us suppose we have a different sort of problem. Let us suppose a rich American decides to sponsor a pilgrimage to Europe as a thank-you to God for the saving of his son’s life. God does you a good turn, you do God a good turn back. And let us suppose there is a suspicious death, almost certainly a murder. The French police appear to be hopeless. You launch a search for the finest investigator in France and England who is fluent in both languages. You hire the fellow, perfectly charming, lovely English manners, delightful wife, and with no more clue about finding the killer than the man on the moon. Does he find the murderer of the first victim? He does not.’

Delaney’s voice was rising.

‘Does he find the killer of the second victim? No, he does not.’

Delaney was shouting now. He banged his great fist on the table in front of him. His cigar had been abandoned in his wrath.

‘Does he find the murderer of the third victim? Of course not!’

Another thump on the table. Powerscourt thought the engine driver and his assistant at the front of the train must be able to hear every word by now. Thank God they wouldn’t understand any of it.

‘Three bodies now, laid out on cold slabs in the French morgues,’ Delaney ranted on, hardly able to control himself, ‘so does the great detective fare any better with the next one? You’d think it should be easy by now with the number of suspects dropping by the day, wouldn’t you? Does he catch the killer of victim number four? No, he does not. I might have been better off employing nobody at all.’

A final thump on the table. Powerscourt said nothing. He wondered if it was going to come to blows. Delaney was a couple of inches taller and a great deal heavier. He looked as if he might pack a fearful punch. But he stayed on his bench. It looked as if the anger was ebbing from him. He picked up his cigar again.

‘Five days more. That’s all. If you haven’t caught the man by then, you’re off this train and out of my sight. And I’ll spend whatever it takes to blacken your reputation in the newspapers back there in England. I’ve done it in New York, I’m sure I can do it in London. Now get out and get on with it before I shout any more.’

Powerscourt had been in real fights in real battles that were much worse than this. But he knew that for his own self-respect he could not let these insults pass.

‘You’re perfectly entitled to your opinion, Mr Delaney, of course you are. But let me tell you this. I may not have caught the murderer yet but I am absolutely certain of one thing. If you had told me the truth about your activities in the past and the enemies you have made throughout your long life in business, the careers you have broken, the men you have destroyed, then I am sure the murderer would have been apprehended by now. Your actions, maybe so far back in the past you have almost forgotten them, are what lie behind these terrible deaths, I’m sure of it. Think about it, Mr Delaney. If there is anything you wish to tell me, I shall be in the next carriage. Good morning to you.’

Delaney picked up his cigar and blew a great cloud of smoke at Powerscourt’s retreating back as if it were a flamethrower. He stared moodily out of the window.

Powerscourt found he was shaking slightly as he told Lady Lucy and Johnny what had happened.

‘Bloody man,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘Maybe the murderer will sort him out. Serve him damn well right, being rude to Francis.’

‘That’s a little uncharitable, Johnny,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘We shouldn’t wish anybody dead, I’m sure, not even Mr Delaney. You’ll survive, my love, you’ve survived much worse before.’

‘Well,’ said her husband, ‘it was a lot better than being stuck in that wine vat, I can tell you.’

The Inspector arrived in search of an interpreter. Powerscourt suggested Lady Lucy should accompany him. The pilgrims might open up more with the wife than they would with the husband. Maggie Delaney had been befriended by two young pilgrims, Jack O’Driscoll and Christy Delaney. They had come to feel sorry for her, usually left on her own, with nobody to talk to apart from the interminable rosary beads. They had been teaching her card games, snap and gin rummy and pontoon. The elderly lady showed a remarkable talent for poker, bluffing her way to victory, her suspicious old eyes never giving anything away.

Powerscourt himself returned to Michael Delaney, Robber Baron. He had reached page forty-five without any revelations that might make a victim commit murder. His right hand fiddled with the paper knife as he read on.

Inspector Leger and Lady Lucy realized after two or three conversations that the pilgrims were still not going to cooperate. Jack O’Driscoll muttered that he was going to write all this up in his newspaper when he reached home. Charlie Flanagan was working on another wooden carving as he spoke to them, punctuating his answers with deft strokes of his knife that set alarm bells ringing in the Inspector’s brain. Yes, they had been in the cloisters. Yes, they had been crushed up against the walls when the seminarians came. No, they had not seen anybody leave to go up to the upper chamber. No, they had not seen Girvan Connolly at all. That didn’t mean he wasn’t there, just that that they hadn’t seen him. That was all they could remember. Yes, they had been in the cloisters. Yes, they had been crushed up against the walls when the seminarians came. Pilgrim after pilgrim repeated exactly the same story in the same words, with the same air of prisoners being interrogated by a hostile power. Lady Lucy could see how united they had become, bonds formed in adversity, together against the foe that was depriving them of decent beds and a glass or two of beer in the evening. They were besieged, Lady Lucy felt, huddled together inside the thick walls of the ruined French castles that were so frequent in these parts. They would parley with the enemy heralds but they would not come out and they would not surrender.

Inspector Leger checked his hair again on the way back to the Powerscourt carriage. It was hopeless. Just a couple of days, he said to himself, and he could return home to Lucille and the vegetable patch he tended with such care. Lucille was hopeless with crops, they always went wrong when he wasn’t there.

They found Powerscourt in a state of considerable excitement. He had reached page eighty-six of the book and thought he might be on to something. He explained the complicated history of Michael Delaney, Robber Baron to the Inspector.

‘Now then,’ he put the book in his lap, ‘how about this. I’m not sure how long ago all this was, the author has forgotten to put a date on it, but it must be way back in the past. I won’t read all the relevant passages, we’d be here all day. Michael Delaney owns a small railroad leading out of the city into upstate New York. It’s nothing special. But he realizes that if he could get his hands on another line, they would complement each other and make a great deal of money. This other line belongs to a man called Wharton, James Joseph Wharton. Why don’t we amalgamate the two lines, says Delaney. We’ll both be better off. I think this Wharton may have inherited the business from his father. He was a bookish sort of fellow, apparently, not sharp like Delaney, spent a lot of time in the New York Public Library. Anyway, Delaney says he’ll handle the paperwork, sort everything out for the new company that’s going to own the lines. The only thing is, he puts all the shares in his name. Wharton only finds out after the new company has been floated on the New York Stock Exchange. By then it’s too late.

‘He hires some lawyers, as Americans always do. But they aren’t very good lawyers. Delaney hires better ones. Delaney always does. He swears Wharton agreed to let him put all the shares in his name. Delaney wins. Wharton has lost his livelihood. Listen to what the author says about his fate: “Deprived of his livelihood by the rapacious frauds of one he supposed a friend for life, bereft of funds to support his wife and son, he turned for solace and consolation where so many have turned in times of trouble and tribulation, to the temptations of the demon drink.”’ Powerscourt looked up at Johnny Fitzgerald and shook his head sadly. ‘“Wharton’s health, never strong even in the good times, began to decline. He was banned from the New York Public Library after being sick over a rare volume concerned with the early settlements in Virginia. He began to have hallucinations and blackouts, the punishment sent by nature for alcohol abuse. Had the unfortunate man seen sense and taken the pledge, even at this late stage, as his priest and his wife continually urged him, he might yet have been saved. There was a young son whose early impressions of fathers were of people who fell down the stairs and smelt bad. The house had to be sold to pay for the drinking. The family moved into humbler accommodation where Winifred, the wife, who thought she was marrying upwards into a higher social class, felt ashamed of her position. When she discovered that the money she thought was destined to pay the rent was going to the liquor store instead, she left him and went back to her mother. Three days after that, James Joseph Wharton blew his brains out. Only three people attended the funeral at a pauper’s grave. Michael Delaney was not one of them.”’

‘Does he say what became of the boy, Francis?’ Lady Lucy leaned forward to stare at her husband. ‘Did the mother marry again? Would the boy have a different name now?’

‘The book doesn’t say, Lucy. That’s the end of a chapter. The next one deals with matters a few years later. It may come up further on in the book but I doubt it. What do you think of it as a motive for murder, though?’

‘Well,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘it’d be fine as a motive for killing Delaney, but he’s still here.’

‘Maybe’, said the Inspector, thoughtfully, ‘he nurses a grudge, hatred, not just for Delaney but for all the members of his clan. But without a name it is very difficult.’

‘I shall have to wire to our friend in Washington. And I must give him all the poste restantes where we may be stopping. Inspector, do you think you could arrange for the train to stop briefly in the next town? And could the pilgrims be permitted a night in a hotel rather than a night in the cells? I have a plan to put before the three of you. It is very dangerous. I know you will not like it, Lucy. But it might just enable us to catch our man.’ Powerscourt had reluctantly decided that, however much he might want to keep the plan a secret, he could not keep it from his wife.

The shadows were long as the pilgrims were marched from the train to their hotel, the d’Artagnan, in the little town of Aire-sur-l’Adour. Aire was graced with a cathedral with a saint buried in a white marble tomb in the crypt. Edward the Confessor, Powerscourt dimly remembered, had signed a treaty here with some French bishop. And there was the Adour, another of those rivers that grace the towns of France. The hotel was right on the waterfront, four storeys high and looking as if it might have been a barracks or a convent in earlier times. On the first floor a ledge ran right along the frontage, joining the balconies that gave the more fortunate visitors their own private view of the Adour.

The pilgrims were chattering happily, some looking forward to the meal, others to the beer and wine, the older ones rhapsodizing about the joy of clean sheets and a proper pillow. Father Kennedy hoped the Hotel d’Artagnan had some decent puddings. As the pilgrims dispersed to their single rooms on the third and the fourth floors, Lady Lucy had a long conversation with the hotel housekeeper. It was her husband, she explained. He suffered from a chronic back condition, poor man, and needed special arrangements in his bed. Did the housekeeper have large bolsters? She did? Could Lady Powerscourt have one, maybe even two if they could be spared? While the housekeeper scurried off to her linen cupboard Lady Lucy noticed a couple of wigs lying on a small table by the window. Previous clients must have left them behind. She couldn’t think of how they might be helpful to a man with a chronic back condition, but she still whipped them into her pocket before the housekeeper returned. Lady Lucy declined the housekeeper’s kind offer to carry the bedding upstairs and make the necessary installations. Lucy would do it herself. There was so little, she assured the housekeeper, that she could do to make her husband’s life more comfortable, this was one duty she could perform for him. Lying flat on the back for fifteen minutes three times a day, the housekeeper passed on the local medical wisdom as Lady Lucy disappeared at full speed up the stairs, that’s what had cured the butcher’s chronic back condition only last year. Maybe her husband the milord should try it.

Jack O’Driscoll had been passing on more of his recently acquired French. They were quite near to Bordeaux, he told them knowledgeably, home to the finest red wine in the whole of France.

‘This is how you order it, boys,’ he said. ‘Oon grond vare de van rouge.’

Other pilgrims made experimental flights with Jack’s phrases and were indeed rewarded with fine glasses of red. Johnny Fitzgerald, who had always been regarded as a friend by the pilgrims, was holding forth at one end of the bar, an expensive bottle in front of him. ‘It’s my belief’, he told the company, ‘that my friend Powerscourt has solved the mystery at last. He’s writing a report up there in that big bedroom above the front door with the enormous balcony. He won’t tell anybody about what’s in it. I doubt if the wife knows. But he did say he was going to present it to the Inspector in the morning.’

For the pilgrims, freedom beckoned. Release from jail is always welcome, even if the sojourn has only been for a few days. The young ones hoped they would soon be free to walk the pilgrim route once more, for the walking had taken possession of them and they felt diminished when they couldn’t do it. One or two of the others thought they could go to Mass in the morning and pray for their immortal souls. That, after all, was what had brought them on this strange journey in the first place. They grew elated and drank more red wine. Dinner was uneventful, Powerscourt looking preoccupied and pausing every now and then to make some more notes in a black book he had brought to the table. Lady Lucy’s eyes scanned the diners. One of them was a murderer. One of them had tried to kill her Francis. But the faces gave nothing away.

When the last of the apricot tarts had been cleared away, Powerscourt and Lady Lucy went up to their room. Powerscourt stepped out on the balcony and watched night falling slowly over Aire-sur-l’Adour. Lady Lucy was fiddling with the bolsters, waiting for the signal to start work. Down below Powerscourt could hear the noise of laughter from the bar. He stared at the street in front of him, wondering if he could see any sign of movement. Then the noises off began to die down. Outside their room he could hear the pilgrims making their way upstairs. Inspector Leger had a man on every landing, ordered to watch through the night. Silence fell over the Hotel d’Artagnan.

‘Time to work your magic, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt. The bedclothes were whipped off each bed in turn. Bolsters and pillows were deployed to imitate the curve and the shape of the human form. Lady Lucy’s model, if that was the right word, was the way her Francis slept at night, back curved, legs drawn up slightly at the knees. She replaced the bedclothes, ruffling them furiously as she did so, to make it look as if the sleeping figures had tossed and turned in the night. Then she looked at her husband.

‘Would you like to be brown or fair, my love?’ she said, turning the two wigs over in her hands.

‘Brown,’ said Powerscourt with a smile, ‘definitely brown.’

Lady Lucy stepped back to check her handiwork. She ruffled the pillows once more. ‘That’s about as good as I can make it, Francis.’

‘Looks pretty good to me,’ said Powerscourt, pulling out the light bulb and putting it in his pocket. He picked up a suitcase. They closed the door very carefully and tiptoed as quietly as they could down the back stairs and out into the little square behind the hotel. They crept along a couple of back streets and rejoined the road by the river a couple of hundred yards from the Hotel d’Artagnan. Here was another room reserved for them in the Hotel Mousquetaire. Powerscourt had booked the room at the same time he made the reservations for the pilgrim party. The hotel manager had been warned that they would be late. Their room was very like the other one with a balcony looking out over the river.

‘How long before you go back, my love?’ Lady Lucy was feeling very nervous.

‘An hour or so, I’m not sure,’ said Powerscourt.

‘You will take great care, Francis? We don’t need any heroics. The Inspector’s men can look after the rough end of things.’ Even as she spoke Lady Lucy knew she was wasting her energies. If there was a rough end of things then Francis would be in the thick of it.

Just after midnight Powerscourt kissed his wife goodbye. She held him very tight, reluctant to let her man go. ‘Good luck, my own love,’ she said, ‘I shall be waiting for you.’

Powerscourt made his way back to the Hotel d’Artagnan very slowly. He was thinking about Alexandre Dumas’s legacy, hotels named after him in this little town and all over France, small boys all over Europe acting out the adventures of his characters in bedrooms and parks and back gardens. He remembered reading The Three Musketeers as a child. His father had found him a wooden sword and he used to charge around the lawns and shrubberies of Powerscourt House having long battles with his enemies. There was a lone fisherman on the river, his lines draped over the back of the boat, drifting downstream with the current. Above, the sky was ablaze with stars and the moon was nearly full. He worried about Lady Lucy, left behind with the musketeers and with no knight errant to protect her.

On his way in he nearly bumped into the Inspector, tiptoeing down the stairs. They did not speak. There was a long corridor running the length of the hotel on all three upper floors. The bedrooms were off to the left. Every twenty yards or so there was a small alcove set back into the wall where a man would be virtually invisible to anybody coming towards him, a murderer at large in the night hours. Powerscourt’s position was in one of these niches, some twenty yards from the door of his room. Johnny Fitzgerald was twenty yards behind Powerscourt towards the stairs. At each end of the corridor there were stairs to the next floor or the floor below. The two former soldiers were united again, waiting for another battle as they had done so often in the past.

Powerscourt was squatting on the ground, his eyes fixed on the further set of stairs. He wondered if this most difficult case might be about to end. He thought briefly about taking Lucy away somewhere when it was all over. Perhaps they could complete the pilgrim route and go to Santiago de Compostela and stand beneath the Portal de la Gloria in the Cathedral of St James.

Johnny Fitzgerald was trying to remember the names of the Premiers Crus of Bordeaux, the most majestic wines in France. Chateau Lafite Rothschild, Chateau Latour, Chateau Margaux he said to himself, where the hell was the other one? Johnny was fairly sure there were only four of them. He tried to imagine one of those wine maps the tourist industry are so fond of with vineyards marked out by little bottles. Chateau Haut-Brion, he remembered at last, and it wasn’t even in Bordeaux, it was in Graves to the south of the city.

One o’clock passed. Very faintly from the ground floor Powerscourt heard the chime of a ghostly clock, striking out the hours in a ghostly hotel. Only it wasn’t a ghost they were waiting for tonight, crouching in the dark, but a killer who would come with a knife or a piece of wire to commit another murder. Inspector Leger was worrying about the vegetables in his garden. He suspected his haricots verts would be beyond revival when he eventually reached home. His wife would shrug her shoulders as she always did and proclaim her innocence, saying she had carried out the written instructions the Inspector always left behind. He never reproached her. She failed because she gardened without love, the Inspector believed. He thought it odd how the plants and the flowers always seemed to know when they were unloved and then just pined away.

Lady Lucy wondered about going out on to her balcony and looking back to the d’Artagnan. She decided against it. She tried to work out at what time of night she would commit a murder. One o’clock, probably too soon, she felt. Late readers might still have their lights on and hear you creep by in the corridor outside. Two o’clock? Three o’clock? Surely only an insomniac would be still awake at such an hour. Three thirty, she decided, that would be a good time. Just over two hours to go. She shivered slightly and wrapped a shawl round her shoulders. She said another prayer for Francis.

Two o’clock passed and then three. Powerscourt had eliminated three people from his inquiries in his mind. That left five suspects in the frame. Suddenly he wished the murderer would hurry up. Sleep was washing over him and he didn’t know how much longer he could hold out against it. He tiptoed over to Johnny Fitzgerald and made a couple of signs with his fingers. Johnny nodded. He, Johnny, would have to watch both sets of stairs until Powerscourt returned. He was just going outside for a breath of air.

Powerscourt crept down the stairs and out into the street. Nothing stirred in Aire-sur-l’Adour. The nocturnal fisherman seemed to have gone home, or drifted further down the river. Perhaps he would have fish for breakfast. Powerscourt breathed deeply. The air was soft, almost like velvet. A slight breeze was whispering through the trees. He shook his head vigorously and returned to his position.

The Inspector had carried out a major review of the dispositions in his vegetable garden. Next year, he thought, he would try everything in a different place. He dreamt, as he often did, of fruit trees, with apples and pears and plums growing on his own land. But he knew his garden faced the wrong way and the trees would not prosper in his little patch. Perhaps Lucille and he should move house for a south-facing garden. He rubbed at his calves. Much more of this, he said to himself, and I’ll get cramp.

Four dim, distant chimes told the watching three that their vigil would soon be over. Powerscourt wondered who would be who from Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. Johnny Fitzgerald would be Porthos, all drink and swagger. He, Powerscourt, would like to have been d’Artagnan, but he felt, if he was honest, that he might be more like Aramis, liable to gloom and fits of melancholy. The Inspector would have to be an unlikely d’Artagnan, the first d’Artagnan in living memory to be losing his hair.

Lady Lucy had nodded off in her chair. She awoke shortly after half past four. She looked round wildly for Powerscourt but he wasn’t there. What was happening back there at the hotel? Had the murderer been apprehended, caught, literally, in the act? Were Powerscourt and Johnny Fitzgerald even now toasting their success in the hotel bar with the Inspector? Lady Lucy thought that would be very unfair, leaving her up here with her terrible knot of anxiety, far from the celebrations. She said another prayer for her husband.

Shortly after six they could hear noises down below as the hotel staff began to prepare for another day. It was hopeless now, Powerscourt said bitterly to himself. No murderer in his right mind would set out on a killing spree with the hotel maids liable to walk past him in the corridor. He went over to the Inspector and led him and Johnny Fitzgerald into Powerscourt’s bedroom. He replaced the light bulb he had taken out all those hours before. What they saw left them speechless. The floor had turned virtually white with feathers. They lay in heaps beside the two beds. They were scattered like confetti all over the floor. Some of them had drifted upwards and stuck to the walls. The housekeeper’s bolsters were no more. They both had great knife slits in their sides. The two wigs had been slashed and lay in fragments, nestling incongruously among the fallen feathers.

‘Merde!’ said the Inspector.

‘Mother of God!’ said Johnny Fitzgerald.

‘Look,’ said Powerscourt, pointing to the balcony door which was wide open, the cold air of dawn flooding into the room. He strode out on to the balcony.

‘He must have nerves of steel, our murderer,’ he said. ‘He must have made his way down from his floor on to a balcony, then crept along that ledge to our room. He must have been in his stockinged feet so as not to make a noise.’

The Inspector looked down at the ledge, just visible in the light from the bedroom. ‘That’s right, that’s how he must have come. What fools we’ve been, fools, all of us. We have five, no, six people on duty inside and not a soul outside watching the front of the hotel. And he’s got away with it too!’

Powerscourt thought there had been a great deal of violence used on the bolsters and the wigs. Maybe the murderer was venting his frustration when he realized there were no humans in the room or in the beds. Lady Lucy would have perished too, if she had been there. Both bolsters had been ripped to shreds, great gashes spoiling the linen. He walked back to the balcony. A new day was dawning over Aquitaine. There was a slight shimmer of mist lying over the river which would soon dissolve in the morning sun. The birds were singing merrily, chattering to each other in the branches of the tall trees by the Adour. One or two people were already about in the street. It looked as if it was going to be a beautiful day. For Powerscourt, making his sad way back to Lady Lucy, it was yet another failure. His plan lay in tatters on the bedroom floor, ripped to shreds like the housekeeper’s bolsters. The murderer was still at large to kill again. On Michael Delaney’s timetable he had four days left to find the murderer. Four days, or face a lifetime of failure.