Death of a Pilgrim (29 page)

One more attack with this corkscrew and I might be through, Powerscourt said to himself, bracing himself for a mighty effort. The music box now gave forth a rather
high-pitched rendering of the Marseillaise. Maybe the fumes of the wine were affecting its inner workings. In went the corkscrew, Powerscourt turned it as hard as he could. It was getting
somewhere. Then it was through. There was a tiny hole in the side of the vat. Powerscourt began to smile. But as he watched the wine trickle out, he knew that it was no good. His trickle was less,
far less than the flow coming in from above. He might have postponed his doom but only for a few seconds. And then he saw that something else had gone terribly wrong. In his last round of pushing,
turning and twisting he had broken the corkscrew. The vital part of it must be lying on the floor outside. The wine was up to his neck. The fumes were much worse. He thought he would pass out
before he died. He would never see Lucy again.

After what seemed an eternity Inspector Léger found some matches. He left the winemaker’s kitchen looking as if it had been ransacked by a burglar in a hurry,
drawers thrown on the floor, cupboards emptied, a whole row of saucepans tossed aside. Lady Lucy clutched his arm as they made their way down the steps, enormous shadows flickering now across the
sides of the cave.

At the bottom the Inspector paused to light another match.

‘Listen, Inspector,’ said Lady Lucy suddenly, straining forwards to catch a noise. ‘Listen!’ Together they tiptoed forwards away from the bottles towards the tiers of
great vats at the end.

‘It’s the Marseillaise, for God’s sake,’ said the Inspector, ‘and its coming from that great vat over there!’

‘And look,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘do you see, there’s a trickle of wine coming down the side!’

The Inspector knew what to do. One of his uncles kept a vineyard in the Loire. He raced over to the vat and pulled back the bolts on the sliding door. A torrent of wine knocked him backwards on
to the floor. Lady Lucy dodged to one side. The music box was still playing. And then, very unsteadily, like a man who has been drinking for days, his clothes dripping red on to the floor, his hand
still clutching his clasp knife, his face deadly pale, came the staggering figure of Lord Francis Powerscourt.

‘Lucy,’ he said, his voice thick from the fumes, ‘I’m so glad to see you.’ And with that he fainted into her arms.

Shortly after nine o’clock in the morning Brother Healey took Johnny Fitzgerald to meet Sean McGurk, the eighty-year-old veteran of the famine. The Christian Brother
stayed for a cup of tea and then left to do his marking. McGurk was a little over five feet tall and his face was lined like a parchment map. His front room had three armchairs, a fire, a couple of
bookcases and pyramids of empty bottles of John Jameson. Johnny did a quick count and reckoned that with twelve empties on the first row, ascending to the summit by eleven, ten, nine and so on to
the single bottle at the top, there were seventy-eight John Jamesons in each pyramid. He wondered if the number seventy-eight held some symbolic significance for the priests of ancient Egypt or the
distillers of Dublin. And there were seven pyramids stretching out from the side of the fire to the opposite wall, a total he thought to be over five hundred.

‘How long did it take you to drink that lot, Mr McGurk?’ asked Johnny Fitzgerald. There was another bottle and a jug of water on the rickety table by the old man’s chair.
Pyramid builders, Johnny reckoned, must work all day.

‘One pyramid every two months or so,’ said Sean McGurk. Christ, said Johnny to himself, that’s over a bottle a day. He was amazed the old man was still alive. The medical
fraternity would have said survival was impossible at those rates of consumption.

‘You’re looking well on it,’ said Johnny cheerfully. ‘It must help to keep the days at bay.’

‘It does that,’ McGurk smiled and the lines on his face grew ever deeper. ‘Now then, Brother Healey said you wanted to know about the famine here in Macroom. Is it any
particular district or any particular workhouse or any particular family you’re interested in?’

Johnny explained about his book, commissioned by a rich Delaney in New York to find out about his ancestors. He almost believed the story by now.

‘There’s one thing I must ask you before we start,’ said McGurk, taking an enormous gulp of John Jameson. ‘Please don’t go asking me about my own experiences in
those terrible times. I swore to God I would never talk about it again after I had three Americans here two years ago it was this August. Four days they spent here, staying in that hotel where
I’m sure you are, and they wouldn’t leave me alone. “Surely there’s something else you can remember, Mr McGurk,” they started saying halfway through the second day and
they carried on like that for another forty-eight hours. I got through two and a half bottles of medicine the evening they left and that’s a fact.’

‘It’s Delaneys I’m interested in, Mr McGurk,’ said Johnny. ‘I’m sure your experiences are fascinating but I’ll settle for Delaneys.’

The old man hobbled to his bookcase and brought down two blue school exercise books. ‘I’ve written up all my discoveries in these little volumes,’ he said, carrying them back
to his chair. He took another draught of medicine. ‘I’ve been talking to survivors of that dreadful famine for over thirty years now. Somebody had to do it, you know, and I’ve
always liked history. It was my best subject at school.’

The old man began looking through his books. ‘Daly, Davies, Davitt, Davy, that’s no good, here we are, Delaney.’ He took another swig to help his reading. For a moment there
was silence in the little room. Johnny wondered what was coming.

‘I’m not sure your man is going to like this very much,’ said the old man, looking up at Johnny. ‘I don’t think he’ll like it at all.’ He carried on
reading.

‘Right,’ he said at last. ‘Here goes. Are you sure you won’t be taking a drop?’ He nodded at the bottle. Johnny declined.

‘Before the famine,’ McGurk began, peering at his handwriting as if he had never seen it before, ‘there were a lot of Delaneys in these parts, mostly around Clonbeg down the
road. Poor they were, terribly poor, living on the potatoes off their tiny holdings in those dreadful cabins we all lived in during those times. There were three Delaney families with over twenty
children between them living in poverty and one family who had done rather better for themselves here in Macroom. They had a fair bit of land, the Brian Delaneys. When the potato crop failed the
starving ones turned to their cousin for help. Brian Delaney refused. He wouldn’t give them a penny or a potato. Then the time came when they were all going to have to go into the workhouse.
By this stage going to the workhouse was virtually a death sentence, the fever and the dysentery were so bad people were dropping down inside the workhouse gates. One of the poor wives managed to
reach Brian Delaney in his house. They say he wouldn’t even let her through the door in case she infected his family. He gave her nothing. They all died. Or rather I think they all
died.’

‘What do you mean, you think they all died?’ said Johnny, thinking that perhaps a glass of John Jameson might be rather welcome now.

‘Well, this is the strange thing,’ said the old man, pausing to pour himself a refill, ‘they managed to keep some sort of records in these parts, records of the dying, I mean.
Maybe the workhouses got paid for the dead as well as the living. In some parts of the country they’ve no records of the dead at all, it’s as if the poor people had never been here at
all. We know there were twenty-four Delaneys, men, women and children, brought into the workhouse. But there are only records of twenty-three of them dying. One of them managed to get away, to
survive, though God knows how they did it.’

‘Do you know which one it was, Mr McGurk? Man, woman, boy, girl?’

‘That’s a very intelligent question,’ said McGurk. ‘It was a boy of about twelve years.’

‘Do we have a name?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Do you know what happened to the Brian Delaney family? The bad ones? Are their descendants still here?’

‘They’re not. I don’t know if there was bad feeling against them but they left for America a couple of years after the famine.’

‘I don’t suppose you know which part they went to?’ said Johnny.

‘I’m afraid I don’t,’ the old man replied, closing his book. ‘Are you sure you won’t have a drop to keep me company before you go?’

‘That’s very kind of you,’ said Johnny, wondering what size of glass the old soak would pour him. He stared in astonishment as the bottle was tipped up into a fresh tumbler.
Couple of inches, standard measure in an Irish bar, four inches, double, six inches, treble, eight inches and the recipient would probably fall down. McGurk stopped just after eight. ‘I hope
that’s not too small for you,’ he said. ‘I can’t see much point in a half-empty glass myself.’

Johnny could see why Sean McGurk might not be at his best by the evening. As he thanked the old man and left him a five-pound note for his pains, he wondered if the historian would live long
enough to build another pyramid of empties. Maybe he could be buried inside one, like the Egyptian kings all those years before. Making his way back to the hotel, just on the right side of sober,
he saw a well-dressed woman walking down the street towards him. Johnny’s heart began to pound and he didn’t think it was the whiskey. People can change their hairstyles, he said to
himself, their faces change of their own accord, but their walk remains the same. Coming down the street towards him, less than fifty yards away now, was Mary Rose, once the love of his life, now
the wife of another.

Two hours after his escape from the cellar, Powerscourt was discussing his ordeal with Lady Lucy as they walked from the little house in the hills down to the Espeyrac hotel.
The Inspector had discovered the winemaker bound and gagged in a barn beside his house. He told the policeman he had no idea who his assailant had been.

‘That invitation last night was so loud that anybody could have heard it, anybody at all,’ said Powerscourt, smelling his collar anxiously to make sure his clean clothes didn’t
also reek of drink.

‘But why should the murderer decide to kill you now?’ said Lady Lucy. She wished more than anything that she could spirit Johnny Fitzgerald to her husband’s side. The knot of
anxiety that tormented her when she knew Francis was in danger was churning round inside her. ‘What has changed in the last day or so? He could have made the attempt a long time
ago.’

‘I’ve no idea. Maybe it was saying to Jack O’Driscoll that I don’t know who the murderer is. I think I said not yet. Maybe that got around among the pilgrims. Maybe the
murderer interpreted not yet as meaning that I was on the verge of a breakthrough.’

The hotel keeper greeted them anxiously as they reached the Auberge des Montagnes. ‘Monsieur, monsieur,’ he said in a worried tone, ‘Mr Delaney is most anxious to speak with
you. Immediately. And this cable came for you first thing this morning, monsieur. I’m afraid it seems to have been opened by mistake. I’m truly sorry, monsieur. Let us hope the message
is not important?’

‘Do you know who opened it?’ said Powerscourt sternly.

‘I’m afraid not, monsieur, it was lying on the front desk in the reception. I suppose anybody could have read it.’

Powerscourt didn’t think anybody could have mistaken the name Powerscourt for the names of any of the pilgrims. Delaney, Mulligan, O’Driscoll, Flanagan, even a Frenchman would not be
likely to mix those up. So, maybe the enemy was reading his post. He, Powerscourt, had often opened other people’s mail during his years in Army Intelligence. But then, he said to himself,
Johnny Fitzgerald and I always covered our tracks. Nobody would have known we were reading their letters and sealing them up again. That way, you kept the advantage. Once the enemy knew you were
intercepting their messages, the exercise lost all its value and could even become counter-productive if your opponents arranged to have false information sent to themselves through a third party.
This could completely fool the interceptors, who would believe it to be genuine. Then the tables would be turned indeed. Powerscourt stared down at his cable. An intelligent man, he reckoned, could
have sealed it up again quite easily, or sealed it up so the recipient could not be sure whether it had been tampered with or not. He wondered if the message was so dangerous for the murderer that
he had to take immediate action, that his own position was now so exposed that he didn’t think about sealing it up again.

I don’t suppose I’ll ever know the answer, he said to himself, leading Lady Lucy to a seat in the sunshine some hundred yards from the Auberge des Montagnes. The message came from
Franklin Bentley, Alex’s brother who worked for a law firm with offices in New York and Washington. ‘Some progress,’ it began. ‘Copies of book on Delaney’s life that
was pulped years ago may still be at large. Total of four sent to London dealers before Delaney intervened. Publishers presumably hoped for sale to Americans in London. New York firm that published
it went bankrupt years ago. No records found so far. Presume you investigate London end. Waldo Mulligan believed by rumour to be having affair with colleague’s wife. Not clear if sent away by
senator who knew about it, or left in fit of morality. Morality fit unlikely behaviour in Washington DC. Unconfirmed, very unconfirmed rumour that Michael Delaney was married before the arrival of
the second wife, mother of James. Not clear what happened. Wife dead? Couple divorced? Delaney bigamist? Inquiries continue. Good luck. Franklin Bentley.’

‘God bless my soul,’ said Powerscourt, and handed the cable over to Lady Lucy. ‘I’ll say this for Alex Bentley’s brother, he’s a good worker, and a quick
one.’

The sun was bright overhead as Lady Lucy read the message. ‘Do you think we’ll be able to find one of those books in London, Francis?’

‘I suppose we’ll have to wait until Johnny gets back,’ said Powerscourt sadly. ‘I would love to get my hands on a copy of that book. Let’s hope he makes good
progress over there in Ireland.’