Death of a Pilgrim (31 page)

Powerscourt assured him that there was no news on that front yet. ‘I wanted to ask you a few questions about your past, Mr Delaney.’

Even as he spoke Powerscourt could see the brows tightening, a slight look of menace crossing the Delaney countenance.

‘Can’t see what my past has to do with anything,’ he said. ‘You’re here to find out about what’s happening now, for God’s sake.’

‘Mr Delaney, before you were married to the late Mrs Delaney, mother of James, were you married to anybody else?’

Delaney laughed. Powerscourt had always thought of laughter in this kind of questioning as a tactic, a means to gain time for the brain to work out the most appropriate lie.

‘No, I was not!’ he said, and Powerscourt wondered if the tycoon was going to hit him.

‘And are there any business dealings in your past that might have left somebody with a grudge against you and members of your family? Forgive me, sir, but I have to eliminate all possible
lines of inquiry.’

‘The answer is no, again, no.’ Powerscourt thought that the tornado might have abated into a severe storm. ‘Of course I have made enemies. You must have made enemies,
Powerscourt. It’s inevitable in a cut-throat world. But I do not believe any of them would be so stupid as to take time out to order a series of murders on a family party on pilgrimage in the
south of France. The whole thing’s ridiculous.’

Johnny Fitzgerald had made inquiries in Hatchard’s. They had been going for a couple of hundred years, after all. No, they could not help him. Their records did not go
back that far. And with an order of only four books it was unlikely that any booksellers in London, however carefully their transactions were logged, would be able to help him. They directed him,
first, to The Antiquarian Booksellers in the Charing Cross Road and, if that failed, to Beggs Brothers in the Strand. Johnny was beginning to think that the proverbial needle might be easier to
find. He had drawn a blank in the Charing Cross Road and was walking into Beggs with a heavy heart. A charming young man greeted him at reception. There was only one person in the firm who might be
able to help, Mr Macdonald. If Johnny would care to wait for a moment? Johnny Fitzgerald sat down under a painting of the Rising of Lazarus in very melodramatic colours. It was as if the miracle
had to be shouted from the rooftops. He expected Mr Macdonald to be an ancient greybeard who had served the firm all his days. The young man led him down two flights of steps into an enormous
basement, lined with bookshelves, and there, seated at a large desk at the far end, was a very thin middle-aged man with fading black hair and spots of dandruff littered all over what had once been
a fashionable suit on the streets of London about 1885.

‘Welcome, you are welcome indeed!’ said Macdonald ‘I believe the youth said your name is Fitzgerald. You’re not related by any chance to the Fitzgerald who translated
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
? Any first editions of that work would be most valuable.’

‘Alas, no,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald with a smile.

‘Pity,’ said Macdonald, brushing a wandering piece of dandruff from his shirtsleeve. ‘Let me tell you about my area of competence here. I love books, Mr Fitzgerald, I always
have. I’ve always preferred them to people as a matter of fact. Perhaps that’s why I never married. I don’t like daylight much either. That’s why I am content down here. My
late father, God rest his soul, left me a large collection of books and I’ve been adding to them ever since. I believe I own first editions of most of the major English novelists since the
middle of the eighteenth century. But I digress. Here, I am the record keeper. I keep details of all the major sales and purchases we make. I file the obituary notices of the rich in case they have
valuable libraries which may have to be sold for tax reasons. I recommend to our young men the auctions they ought to attend and the works they should obtain for us and at what price. I am the
memory of Beggs Brothers, here in my basement, a living archive! How can I help you?’

‘I am interested in an American book that came out about twelve years ago, in 1894 I think, Mr Macdonald. Only four copies of the book were sent over to London by the New York publishers.
I do not know where in London they were sent. Coming here is a long shot, a very long shot indeed.’

‘But you have come to the right place, Mr Fitzgerald! Here at Beggs we like long shots. My late father, God rest his soul, seldom went to the race meetings, but when he did he always used
to bet on the long shots. He claimed it was much more profitable than backing the favourites. Do we have a name for this book? And do we know what became of the American copies? We have contacts in
the United States who could help you, Mr Fitzgerald.’

The bookseller smiled at his customer. Johnny saw that his teeth were almost yellow. Perhaps it was the lack of fresh air. Another small cloud of dandruff escaped from his head and floated to
the floor.

‘The book was called
Michael Delaney, Robber Baron
. The Michael Delaney in the title was a rich businessman who did not like the thought of what might be in the book. So he bought
the whole lot and pulped them.’

‘My goodness me,’ said Macdonald, ‘does that mean these four copies are the only ones left in existence? They might be worth a fortune today. What a splendid puzzle you have
brought me, Mr Fitzgerald! Now then, let me see.’

He turned and opened a cupboard behind him. Johnny saw that it was filled with row upon row of great ledgers that might have been used for the accounts of some mighty insurance company.

‘Each one of these contains the record of a fortnight. What we bought, when it sold, what the price was, whether we reordered any more from the publishers. Did you say 1894?’

‘I did.’

Macdonald began rummaging through the past. ‘Forgive me for the delay,’ he said. ‘I’ll let you know once I’ve found anything.’

Five minutes passed, then ten. There were occasional grunts from Macdonald. ‘Don’t despair,’ Macdonald advised after a few minutes, ‘it just takes time, and time, as my
late father, God rest his soul, used to say, is the one thing we can never hurry.’

Johnny looked round the bookshelves and wondered if Macdonald had read all the volumes in this basement room. Perhaps he had. There was a comfortable-looking chair in the corner, by a powerful
lamp. Maybe Macdonald neglected his filing and archiving duties when he was on his own and buried himself in Plato or Plautus or Petrarch. He could always hear the footsteps of anybody coming down
the stairs and return to his desk.

‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ Johnny Fitzgerald thought Macdonald sounded as if his long shot at the races had just turned into a winner. ‘They were here!
Michael Delaney, Robber
Baron
, four copies, received from New York, the fifteen of October 1894! See the beauty of the archives and the ledgers!’

‘And what happened to them, Mr Macdonald? Don’t tell me that you still have one or two of them here?’

‘All gone,’ said the archivist, turning back to face Johnny once more, clutching an enormous ledger in his right hand. ‘There are none left. But I’m not through yet, Mr
Fitzgerald. Did you say how much you would be prepared to pay for one of these
Robber Barons
if we could locate one?’

‘I don’t think price would be an issue,’ said Johnny loftily.

‘If we sell these books over the counter, you see, we have no idea who bought them. But consider this. Most of the population of these islands do not live in London, thank God. They may
live in the Home Counties or in East Anglia or anywhere at all. Well over half of our customers are country members, as we call them. They write in, asking us to find a book or to recommend some of
the latest history works, whatever it might be. We oblige. But with these customers we do keep records of the purchases, filed by both book and customer.’

Macdonald, accompanied by another snow flurry of dandruff, disappeared back into his cupboard. ‘You see, Mr Fitzgerald, we often find that some of the books our country customers buy are
sought after by other clients. Maybe they have gone up in value. The customers can resell the books at a handsome profit if they wish.’

He reappeared with another enormous ledger and riffled through the pages. ‘
Michael Delaney
,
Robber Baron
,’ he said triumphantly, ‘bought by a Mr Ralph Daniel, 4
Royal Crescent, Bath. Pity he lives in Bath, mind you. My late father, God rest his soul, used to warn me about places beginning with B. Bath, Biarritz, Brighton. Fast, he used to say, fast, very
fast.’

‘You don’t by any chance know if this Mr Daniel is still in the same place?’ asked Johnny.

‘But we do, Mr Fitzgerald, we do. Only last week he ordered some works by that man who writes about the sea, Joseph Conrad. Would you like me to write a letter of introduction for
you?’

‘Please do,’ said Johnny, ‘and could you write it now? If I’m lucky I could be in Bath tomorrow morning.’

‘God bless my soul,’ said Macdonald, ‘the book is unknown and unloved for years and you have to track it down in twenty-four hours. You must want it very badly.’

‘Let me tell you, Mr Macdonald,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘and I’m not joking. This book may be a matter of life or death.’

Lord Francis Powerscourt and his wife were sitting on the terrace outside their little house in the hills. The French authorities had still not decided what to do with the
pilgrims.

‘Lucy,’ said Powerscourt, staring at a herd of sleek cattle in a field opposite, ‘let me try a few theories on you about what’s going on.’

‘Of course.’ Lady Lucy put down her lists of family trees which she had been reading as if she were about to take an exam in them. She was used to these sessions by now. They often
involved her husband walking up and down their drawing room in Markham Square, ticking points off with his hands as he went.

‘Theory number one, and this does seem quite possible, is that we are dealing with a madman, a psychopath who has come on pilgrimage simply to kill as many people as he can. Now he’s
well on his way, he can’t stop. He’ll just keep killing until somebody catches him.

‘Theory number two goes something like this. The real victim was the first one, our window-cleaning friend from Acton who was sent to meet his maker scarcely off the train. But let’s
suppose something goes wrong. Maybe he’s seen leaving the hotel with the victim minutes before the murder. Whoever saw him, if that’s what happened, has to go. So they are sent on a
river cruise down the Lot. Maybe two people saw him, or maybe the third victim saw him go out in the middle of the night to put his second victim in the rowing boat. He’s for it. On this
theory we could have come to the end. But there’s one flaw in it. There are probably dozens of flaws for all I know.’

‘The flaw being that we know of nobody who might want to kill a man who spent his working life going up and down ladders?’ asked Lady Lucy.

‘Precisely, Lucy. How right you are. You see, we have assumed all along that the murders must have something to do with Michael Delaney. Perhaps they haven’t.’

‘But you’d have to say that he was the most likely person to provide the key. I don’t think you make that many enemies with your mop and bucket. Well, people might get cross if
you overcharged them, or left their windows smudgy, but they wouldn’t want to throw you off the side of the Rock of Ages.’

‘Which brings us back to Michael Delaney. Let’s take things in chronological order. Theory number three takes us back to the goings-on at the time of the famine. There must be lots
of stories about people abandoning their relatives to save themselves, like pushing them out of the lifeboat because it was too full. But it’s a very long way from one survivor, if he did
survive, and a man with a grudge against Delaney. Why wait all this time, if you’re that lone survivor? And if you were the son of the survivor, why would you wait all these years?’

‘Maybe’, said Lady Lucy, ‘he didn’t know about the New York Delaney and all the other Delaneys until Alex Bentley began looking for them. If you lived on the edge of some
rain-drenched Irish bog you’d hardly know what was happening in Dublin, never mind the other side of the world. And I think there’s another flaw.’

‘What’s that, my love?’

‘Well, if you look closely at these family trees you realize something fairly obvious. One single Delaney couldn’t have produced this pack of cousins and second cousins we have down
at the hotel. It’s impossible given the way reproduction works. There were lots of other Delaneys who will have gone from Ireland to England or America in those times.’ Lady Lucy looked
down again at her family trees, handwriting legible and not so legible, letters large and letters small, some of the words in capitals, some of them underlined. ‘We’ve got Delaneys here
from Macroom and Mullingar and Newport and all over the place.’

‘You forget’, said Powerscourt, keen to hang on to the shreds of his theory before it was completely demolished, ‘that it was Maggie Delaney herself who mentioned a saga of
betrayal and death in the famine years in Macroom, the place where Johnny has just been to confirm the story. Anyway, let’s mark that theory as doubtful. Theory number four is that it has to
do with the ruined businessman, the one Delaney stole all the money from. Let’s suppose he ends up poor, a broken man, and his son sets out to take revenge, inspired again by Alex
Bentley’s researches. This too suffers from the why wait until now problem. I don’t think we’re doing very well here, Lucy. Theory number five says it has to do with the
hypothetical earlier marriage, though how that fits in I have no idea. It could be, of course, that one of these pilgrims is actually a hired killer, sent by some person or persons unknown, to
commit these crimes. But that’s not very likely either.’

‘If it’s any consolation, my love, I get more confused every time I study these family trees. Some, maybe all of these people are related to one another, we just need to go one more
generation back. But that’s the bit they don’t know about. Do you suppose, Francis, that somewhere, probably in Ireland, there was once a prototype Delaney, the first one of all, from
whom the rest are descended? I like to think he looks something like Michael Delaney does today.’