David Dickinson - Death of a Pilgrim

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.