‘I did,’ said Powerscourt, ‘and this is what makes this case so very difficult. The motive is hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of miles from here. It’s in Ballina or Roscommon or Longford or Galway, or it’s in Hammersmith or Kentish Town or in Birmingham or it’s somewhere on the eastern seaboard of America in New York or Boston or Pittsburgh, the city of steel. But it’s not in France.’
Shortly before dinner Powerscourt found Lady Lucy standing on the little jetty where the rowing boats were tied up. She was staring intently down the river. She smiled at her husband. Powerscourt thought she looked very beautiful this evening.
‘Francis, my love,’ she said, ‘I’ve been wondering about that rowing boat. What would happen if you gave it a push from here? Would it float away downstream? Or would it just go round and round?’
‘I don’t know, to be honest, Lucy. Tell you what, why don’t we try it? You sit in this one here and I’ll give it a good push. Let’s hope the hotelkeeper can’t see us or he’ll think another of these boats is being stolen.’
Powerscourt handed Lady Lucy into the vessel. She settled herself gracefully into the centre of the craft. Powerscourt bent down and untied the rope. Then he gave the rowing boat his best shove and sent it out into the river. After a few moments it lost momentum and drifted back into the side. Lady Lucy rowed herself back.
‘I thought that would happen,’ she said, looking up at Powerscourt from the middle of the boat. ‘My grandfather told me all about currents in rivers when I was a little girl in Scotland. I can’t have been more than six or seven at the time. He was very good to me, my grandfather, he always talked to me as if I were a grown-up. I think you should try wading out into the river, Francis, and giving me a good shove into the middle of the current.’
Powerscourt gazed rather sadly at his shoes and his trousers, come to adorn the valley of the Lot from the tailors of Jermyn Street in London. He waded out into the centre of the river where the current was strongest. After his strongest push, Lady Lucy floated away.
Powerscourt watched her go. ‘Willows whiten, aspens quiver,’ he whispered,
‘Little breezes dusk and shiver
Through the wave that runs for ever
By the island in the river
Flowing down to Camelot.’
‘And at the closing of the day,’ Lady Lucy carried on,
‘She loosed the chain, and down she lay,
The broad stream bore her far away’
The Lady of the Lot.’
Lady Lucy was now moving downstream at something close to walking pace. She sat upright in her boat and stared straight ahead. She carried on with the poem, the words drifting out across the river bank.
‘Lying, robed in snowy white
That loosely flew to left and right –
The leaves upon her falling light –
Through the noises of the night
She floated down to Camelot:
And as the boat-head wound along
The willowy hills and fields among
They heard her singing her last song,
The Lady of the Lot.
‘Should I sing something sad, Francis?’ Lady Lucy called back. ‘Some sad song of lost love from the days of the Knights of the Round Table?’
‘I think you should remember the end of the poem,’ her husband replied. ‘It bids you bon voyage.
‘But Lancelot mused a little space;
He said, “she has a lovely face;
God in his mercy lend her grace,
The Lady of the Lot.”’
Lady Lucy rowed back and was helped up on to the jetty. ‘Thank you, Francis, and thank you, Lord Tennyson, for your compliment. I’d quite forgotten that bit at the end. But tell me this. What would you do with your trousers, Francis, if you were the murderer? You couldn’t bring them back to the hotel dripping with water and you could never dry them out before morning.’
‘If it was me,’ said her husband, looking ruefully at the water still dripping around his ankles, ‘I think I’d take them off and throw them in the river. Probably have to do the same with the shoes and socks. The Inspector and his men didn’t find any wet clothes on their search in the pilgrims’ rooms. So they’re probably downstream from here somewhere.’
They heard footsteps approaching rapidly from the direction of the Lion d’Or. Michael Delaney was coming to join them on the jetty. Powerscourt thought the American was radiating energy. You could almost sense it flowing around and through him, as if he had a secret generating plant inside his chest hooked into his nervous system. Maybe that was what you needed to become an American millionaire. Maybe they were all like that.
‘Look here, Powerscourt, Lady Powerscourt, I want to ask you for your opinion. Can’t say I’m very happy at the way we’re virtually being thrown out of here but it’s better than bribery. Bodyguards, what do you say to bodyguards? Party of a dozen or so, guard the pilgrims day and night, follow any wandering souls, intercept any further acts of murder. I could wire to Pinkerton’s in New York to send us a dozen or so straight away. They’d be here in a week or ten days. Some of us should still be alive in a week or ten days.’
‘I’m not sure that the French authorities would look very kindly on that, Delaney,’ said Powerscourt. ‘This is their territory after all.’
‘Would they give us the same number of men, do you suppose? I could pay for them, after all, rent them out like taxis in Manhattan.’
‘We’d have to ask the Inspector,’ Powerscourt replied. ‘He seems a sensible sort of man to me.’
‘We’ve got to find a way to keep everybody safe,’ said Delaney. ‘I feel responsible for all these damned pilgrims. I asked them to come, for God’s sake. We can’t have them being picked off like birds at some great country house shoot in England.’
Lady Lucy knew what her husband was thinking. She prayed silently to Merlin and the gods of Camelot that he would not say that the only way to guarantee the safety of the pilgrims was for them all to go home.
‘I’m going to talk to Alex Bentley after supper,’ said Powerscourt. ‘He did a lot of research into the Delaneys before you sent out all the invitations. I think he may know where all the Delaneys come from in Ireland. We could launch some inquiries there.’
Powerscourt did not say that he was planning to ask Johnny Fitzgerald to go to Ireland. He thought it unlikely that Michael Delaney was the murderer but you could never be sure.
‘And I did have one thought, Delaney, which is risky,’ Powerscourt went on, ‘but it might solve the problem for us.’
‘And what’s that, my friend? I’ll pay for whatever it takes.’
Lady Lucy found herself wondering if Delaney ever thought about the things money could not buy, love, maybe, hatred perhaps, possibly madness. Surely there were some things that could not be weighed in dollars.
‘This wouldn’t cost any money,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Suppose we let it be known early one evening that I know who the murderer is and that I propose to tell the French authorities the name of the killer in the morning. I would not have told anybody else who it is.’
‘How does that help?’ said Delaney.
‘I can tell you how Francis thinks it would help, Mr Delaney,’ said Lady Lucy, reading her husband’s mind faster than the American and fighting back the tears that threatened to overwhelm her. ‘The murderer would then try to kill Francis. To stop Francis exposing him, don’t you see. So then it becomes a fight to the death between the two of them. I think it’s a terrible plan, I really do.’
‘I didn’t ask you here in order to have you killed in the middle of the night by some crazed pilgrim,’ said Michael Delaney. ‘Surely that becomes a weapon of last resort, one that we never have to use.’
Later that evening Powerscourt took a walk along the river bank with Alex Bentley. He had decided to break one of his own rules. Earlier on he remembered telling Lady Lucy that he suspected every single person in the pilgrim party. Now desperation had made him abandon his resolution and take Alex Bentley into his confidence. Anybody who admired Lady Lucy as fervently as the young American must have some good in them.