‘Well, I talked to him quite a lot,’ Father Kennedy replied, panting slightly. He wondered if this climb was ever going to end. ‘I think he liked conversing with me, as a fellow practitioner in God’s work here on earth. But I wouldn’t say I got to know him well.’
‘What did he talk about?’
‘Well, he was very interested in pilgrimage and pilgrimages. You could say, I think, that he was interested in them in the way other people are interested in antique furniture or stamp collecting. He had great plans as young men often do. He wanted to go to Rome, and to Jerusalem in the footsteps of the Crusaders. Next year he was intending to walk from London to Canterbury on the track of Chaucer’s pilgrims. If he could have found the route of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress I’m sure he would have followed that too. He seemed to think the pilgrimages would help him in his ministry.’
‘You don’t sound convinced about that, Father,’ said Lady Lucy.
‘I’m not,’ replied Father Kennedy. ‘I think a spell in one of the poorer parishes of Boston or New York would have served as a more fruitful apprenticeship. I know I have the good fortune to serve in one of the richest parishes in New York City, Lady Powerscourt, but I have applied many times now to be transferred to a less wealthy location. Always I am refused. I don’t know why.’
‘I’m sorry about that, Father. It must be hard if you do not feel at home in your work. Did young Patrick talk about his family, his past at all?’
‘All he ever said was that his mother was overjoyed when he was called to the priesthood. She was very devout. Patrick was an only child, you see. It was the father who complained about the grandchildren he would never see. That was all I can remember him saying about that side of his life. I believe the young think more about the future than the past.’
The road to Espeyrac turned right off the main road. The pilgrims were now on a narrow path that went up and down the hills in a series of sharp curves. Lady Lucy found herself thinking about Mr and Mrs MacLoughlin in Boston mourning for an only son lost twice, once to the call of the priesthood and once to the hands of a murderer. She wondered if they would ever make their own pilgrimage to see his grave on the hill above the Lot, looking out over the river and the valley and the woods on the far side. Her husband had been walking with Waldo Mulligan but Mulligan seemed to prefer his own company and Powerscourt let him go ahead on his own.
Waldo Mulligan knew he should have engaged Powerscourt in conversation. Anything would have been preferable to his own thoughts. But he remained locked inside his own head. Even trying to forget about Caroline, his mistress back in Washington, married to a colleague on the staff of the senator he worked for, involved thinking about her, he had decided. You could only stop remembering her once you had remembered her in the first place. And then there was that other, even darker shadow. He could recall every detail of the day he heard about his parents’ death in a rail crash some six months before, the time of day, just after four o’clock, the clothes he was wearing, the dark blue suit with the white shirt, the weather, a light rain falling, what he had for lunch, a ham roll with melted cheese, his work, a routine meeting with the senator just about to start. And then several days later, opening the desk with his father’s papers so meticulously filed going back nearly forty years and the shock that had changed his life.
At the front of the party marched one of Inspector Leger’s policemen. Another one walked roughly in the centre of the group surrounded by Jack O’Driscoll and Christy Delaney trying to improve their French by learning some of the words you might use when talking to young French women. The Inspector himself brought up the rear, some twenty yards behind Powerscourt. In Le Puy-en-Velay, Powerscourt thought, the French police virtually locked us up inside the hotel. Here we are under a form of mobile house arrest. Certainly the murderer would find it hard to strike here, surrounded by the officers of the law.
Powerscourt was thinking about vendettas and how long they could last. Did they extend down two or even three generations? Would a family be able to maintain a hatred of their enemies that would stretch out over fifty or sixty years? In one of his earlier cases he remembered a vendetta in Corsica, but that had only just started. It certainly hadn’t been running for decades. He dimly recalled the myths of the Ancient Greeks where people wreaked frightful vengeance on their foes across the generations. But they had often been cursed by the gods, ever random and even whimsical in their choice of victims. He looked at the party of pilgrims ahead of him. Which one was carrying a terrible secret with him? Was he, even now, here among the trees and the lowing cows and the sunshine, deciding on his next victim?
Still the road twisted up and down the hills. They passed smaller, overgrown paths that curved their way into the woods and forests. Stepping into one of them Powerscourt realized that he was in a totally green world. This was what everything would look like if the creator had made the skies green instead of blue. Powerscourt bent down and stepped further along the path, dodging the overhanging branches. There were so many different shades in here. Emerald, sea green, olive green, pea green, grass green, apple, mint, forest, lawn green, lime, leaf green, fir, pine, moss, viridian. Dark green, he remembered, is associated with ambition, greed and jealousy. Maybe one of the pilgrims was green at heart. He turned about and made his way back into the blue universe outside and almost bumped into the Inspector.
‘They say there are wild mushrooms growing in these forests, Lord Powerscourt. Did you find any? And tell me, what do you think of our security arrangements? The killer would find it difficult to strike now, is that not so?’
Powerscourt resisted the temptation to say that the killer had struck on the last occasion in the middle of the night. ‘Very fine,’ he replied.
‘I hope to keep some sort of guard during the hours of darkness as well,’ the Inspector went on. ‘I have to work it out with my men later. Maybe we shall take watches like the sailors do but without those damned bells ringing all through the night.’
Lady Lucy found herself walking alongside Wee Jimmy Delaney now, the steel worker from Pittsburgh. She reckoned he was nearly a foot taller than she was. He must be at least six foot four, she told herself, with big calloused hands and masses of black curly hair. His eyes were pale blue and hinted that there could be a gentler soul behind them than outside appearances might suggest. Wee Jimmy had a great staff in his hand which seemed a puny thing in his huge fist, like a matchstick.
‘Are you enjoying the pilgrimage so far, Mr Delaney?’ Lady Lucy asked brightly. ‘Maybe enjoy is the wrong word, I don’t know. People have so many different reasons for being here after all.’
‘I like it very much, Lady Powerscourt. I like this rolling countryside hereabouts.’
Lady Lucy paused. She didn’t quite know how to put the substance of her next question without sounding rude or impertinent or both. They walked on. A herd of light brown cattle stared at them from a neighbouring field. The stare, Lady Lucy felt, was exactly the same as the stare from the local French people, impertinent and lasting far too long. In the end Wee Jimmy solved the problem for her.
‘You know, Lady Powerscourt,’ he said, ‘I haven’t told anybody yet why I’m here, why I’ve come on the pilgrimage.’
Lady Lucy waited. The cows were still staring. They looked as if they could stare all day.
‘It’s strange, I think, how we hope we or our loved ones could be made better by walking all this way and going to church in Santiago de Compostela. It’s not rational.’
‘I’m not sure that religion is rational at all, Mr Delaney. We’re meant to have faith and that really means believing in things that aren’t rational at all.’
‘I’ve got a little sister, Lady Powerscourt.’ Wee Jimmy Delaney tucked his staff under his arm and bent down to speak nearer to Lady Lucy’s height. ‘She’s why I’m here.’