David Dickinson - Death of a Pilgrim

‘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.