David Dickinson - Death of a Pilgrim

A great crowd of schoolchildren enveloped them suddenly. They wriggled their way to the front of the crowd, slipping past the pilgrims, pushing them out of their way and scattering them across the square. The children seemed to have emerged from nowhere and began pointing excitedly at the little stone figures above. Heaven didn’t seem to interest them very much. It was hell that appealed.

‘Look at Lucifer with those mad eyes!’

‘They’re hanging one over there upside down!’

‘See that one near the bottom! The devils are putting him into a furnace!’

‘How about that couple below! They must have been very bad. They’re tied together at the neck!’

‘What about this hunchback devil? He’s caught three monks in a sort of fishing net like my father uses!’

As their teachers appeared to restore order the morning air of Conques was split by a scream. It cut through the excited babble of the schoolchildren. Then there was a second. The teachers began to gather their children into a huddle under the main door. The pilgrims looked as if they had been turned into stone. Powerscourt turned and ran as fast as he could towards the noise. It came from the opposite end of the church. The Inspector was close behind him. At the far side of the radiating chapels that led out from the choir were a series of empty stone coffins that looked as if they might once have been inside holding the bodies of dead saints or warriors. They could be seen clearly from the street. One of them was no longer empty. Blood flowed out of it in streams and ran on to the grass and spilled over the flagstones below. It looked fresh, as if it had only started to pump out recently. A lone woman in the street carried on screaming. Powerscourt turned and sprinted back to the tympanum.

‘The children,’ he said to the teachers in a voice he tried to make as normal as he could. ‘Get them out of here as fast as you can. It’s bad back there, very bad. Whatever you do,’ he pointed dramatically behind him, ‘don’t take them that way up the street. You’ll have to find another route.’

He suggested to the policeman that the pilgrims should all be assembled inside the church and not be allowed out until further notice. He found a young priest and asked him to fetch a doctor. Then he took Father Kennedy with him and returned to the scene of carnage. The priest knelt down and began whispering the words of extreme unction as best as he could. Lady Lucy appeared to give moral support to her husband. She looked away quickly when she saw the blood-drenched body, the red flow gushing out over the stone, and stared down at her feet. A thin stream of blood was now nearing her shoes. A scallop shell seemed to be floating in the blood inside the stone coffin. Inspector Leger was making notes in his police book. There was a sweet almost sickly smell in the air. In the distance you could hear the voices of the children, complaining about their shortened visit to the statues and the church, wondering what could have happened at the far end of the abbey. They imagined many things, but not murder.

Powerscourt stared sadly down at the third body dispatched on the route to Compostela. Stephen Lewis the solicitor from Frome would not be going on any more train rides across southern France and taking lunch in agreeable hotels. Powerscourt tried to work out a connection, any connection, between his latest corpse and the two earlier victims but found that he could not. Lewis would write no more wills for the citizens of Frome, their secrets secure in the safe behind his desk. He would supervise no more the affairs and the accounts of the local Dramatic Society who had been urging him for years to take a small part in one of their productions but had always been turned down. Mrs Lewis would sit alone now on her terrace on the summer evenings, with no more gossip and anecdote from the town to entertain her.

An elderly man who looked as though he had seen all the sins of the world approached with a bag. Dr Bisquet, he said to no one in particular, medical practitioner in Conques these past thirty-five years. What have we here? He knelt slowly down to examine the body. Powerscourt thought flippantly that you could almost hear the knees creaking.

‘He’s dead, of course,’ he said in a matter-of-fact voice as if he saw death every day, like the sunset. ‘Instantaneous, mind you. That must have been a blessing. One vicious stroke right across the throat from behind delivered with great force. Monsieur, I show you.’

The doctor seemed to have identified Powerscourt as the principal player in the little group. He stood directly behind Powerscourt, so close that Powerscourt felt the grubby wool of his jacket on his neck. The doctor shot his right hand to the far side of Powerscourt’s neck and slashed it across to the other side.

‘That’s all it would take, monsieur. The knife must have been very sharp. You find the knife, yes? Not yet? Never mind. It is too late for the poor man here.’

The Inspector sent a man to search the surrounding area.

‘Could you say anything about the height of the killer, Doctor?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘Would he have been taller than his victim? Could he have done it if he had been a couple of inches shorter?’

Powerscourt was hunting through his memory for the relative height of the pilgrims, the remaining pilgrims, as he reminded himself bitterly.

‘That is an intelligent question, monsieur. I’m afraid I cannot give a definite answer. It would have been easiest if our murderer had been taller. If he had been of the same height it would have been perfectly possible. A little shorter and it would have been difficult but not impossible. For the dwarf, or the little person, they could not have done it.’

‘And the blood, Doctor? Would any of the blood have stuck to the murderer’s clothes?’

‘Ah ha!’ said the doctor, who was a great devotee of detective stories in his leisure hours, although he was careful not to tell his patients. ‘There are a number of ways of stabbing a man to death. If you stab upwards from below the heart, that is a very certain killing stroke. Many would-be murderers don’t understand that it is best to strike from below so the knife goes in under the chest bones. Strike from above in a downwards direction and the blow may not be fatal. Our victim may survive. But with this method here, the rapid slit across the throat,’ the doctor mimed the action once more, ‘the murderer may not have any blood on his clothes at all. He will look like everybody else. There we are.’

Powerscourt looked down at the dead body once more. What had been a human being that morning had turned into a bundle of clothes that might have been left out for the rag and bone man. The blood was still dripping out.

‘Do you know the name of the dead man?’ The doctor looked once more at Powerscourt. ‘You do? Good, perhaps you could come back to my surgery where we can fill in the necessary forms for the authorities with one of these policemen. I will arrange for the removal of the corpse. I will send some kind of shroud so the citizens and pilgrims of Conques do not have to look at something to remind them of their sins and their own futures. We will all end up dead some day.’ The doctor looked as if he told this to his patients on a regular basis. Powerscourt did not think they would find it reassuring. ‘Let us pray that we do not end up like this.’

As they filed past the front of the abbey Powerscourt found himself wondering which side of the great tympanum Stephen Lewis had gone to on his final journey. Was he perhaps in hell, with the devils and the prongs and the halters and the roaring fires? Or was he clothed in white, accompanying the elect into heaven, checking perhaps that they had all left their earthly affairs in order before they set off? On balance, Powerscourt thought, Stephen Lewis, the solicitor from Frome, would be with God’s chosen. Even in heaven, he reminded himself, they must need lawyers.