Powerscourt thought you could tell which pilgrims had done well at school by the way they filled in his forms. There was a certain amount of pen-sucking in some quarters. Waldo Mulligan polished his off in no time at all and stared out of the window. Christy Delaney, the young man in love, was also well ahead of the pack. He wrote the name Anne Marie on his hand over and over again. Girvan Connolly, the man on the run from his creditors, seemed to be writing an essay in the extra space provided. He was now on the other side of the page.
Powerscourt wondered what you would do if you were the murderer. Would you tell the truth? Would you make up a totally fictitious past? Could one tell if a person was lying from words written on a page? It would be, he realized, much easier to tell if a person was lying in a conversation than it would be reading a sheet of paper. What would I do, if I were the murderer? he asked himself. A clever murderer would know that he, Powerscourt, had no means of checking out the information. He could invent a totally fictitious past and a totally fictitious family. Maybe the whole thing was a waste of time.
The pilgrims began to drift away after they had finished. Inspector Leger’s men watched their every move. One of these men is a murderer, Powerscourt reminded himself, one of the most daring murderers he had ever encountered. He wished there was some test he could give, other than this one, like those chemical experiments he dimly remembered from his school days where things turned blue or green when confronted with another substance.
At last they were all finished. Powerscourt took the papers up to Alex Bentley’s room and together they began turning them into family trees, horizontal and vertical lines joining up the Delaneys spinning their way down the pages. Then he remembered the local vineyard. The owner had been taking his evening meal at the table next to the Powerscourts the evening before and had shouted a very loud invitation to visit him in the morning as he left. Normally Powerscourt would have declined but he had promised to go and his head was weary with family trees. ‘I’ll just pop over for half an hour or so,’ he said to Alex Bentley. ‘Can you tell Lady Lucy where I’ve gone?’
The last of the morning mist was clearing as he set out on the half-mile walk to the vineyard. Thin wisps could be seen disappearing very slowly when you looked at them. A bird of prey, buzzard or kite, was circling high in the sky. It was going to be a beautiful day. Monsieur Leon’s vineyard was on top of a hill. On the right-hand side the vines ran down the slopes in orderly well-tended rows. On the left the hill became almost a precipice, tumbling down towards the Lot, the waters dark in the shadows.
Powerscourt knocked on the door of the house and found no reply. In front of him was a set of steps with the word cave or cellar written on a piece of wood above the entrance. From somewhere down below he thought he could hear music, a rather tinny sort of music. As he reached the bottom of the steps he saw that he was in quite a large cave. In the centre a feeble electric light tried and failed to illuminate all the interior. There were racks and racks filled with wine bottles reaching from floor to ceiling. The music, he realized, was the Marseillaise and it must be coming from a musical box by one of the enormous wooden vats at the far end of the cellar.
Powerscourt headed towards the noise, his footsteps echoing off the stone floor. The music changed. Now it was playing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. Maybe it was one of those sophisticated machines that could play three or four different tunes. One of the vats had a sliding door cut into the front, presumable to make the cleaning out of the lees easier. Powerscourt stepped inside.
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave?
Powerscourt hummed the words to the himself as he knelt down to inspect the little box. Some distant memory told him that the most sophisticated of these machines were manufactured in Switzerland. Just as he had it in his hands the light went out. Then he heard a rasping noise. The sliding door of the vat was moving. There was a harsh clang as it closed and a bolt was rammed home. Then another one. The music stopped. Powerscourt was trapped in the dark inside a wine vat over ten feet tall with no means of communication with the outside world. The winemaker Mr Leon seemed to have disappeared.
For a moment he cursed himself for his folly. Why hadn’t he stayed with his family trees, drawing innocent lines of dead Delaneys across the page? Something told him that his ordeal had only just begun. There would be something else. He prayed that it wasn’t rats, rats about to be released into his wooden tomb through some secret opening. All his life he had been terrified of rats, rats runnning all over his clothes, patrolling across his face, scratching at his hands, biting, clawing, driving him slowly insane.
Then he heard his fate. It wasn’t rats that were to mark his passing. At first he thought it might be condensation coming off the roof of the wooden vat. There were drips falling on to the floor. The drips turned into a slow trickle. A couple of them landed on his head. Then he knew. This wasn’t going to be Ordeal by Rat. It wasn’t even going to be Ordeal by Water. It was going to be Ordeal by Wine. There must be some sort of funnel or entrance up there through which the murderer had released this slow trickle that seemed to be growing more powerful by the second. Presumably there was a link to some other container that was now being emptied all over him. He couldn’t get out. He doubted if anybody would hear him shout, if there was anybody out there in the cave who was listening. He remembered some English king who had always delighted junior students of history by dying in a butt of malmsey. Well, unless he was very lucky, he, Powerscourt, was going to drown in a vat of wine. He hoped flippantly that it was good quality stuff. He didn’t fancy drowing in vin ordinaire. He wanted to pass away to Premier Cru, maybe even Grand Cru. He wondered where Johnny Fitzgerald was. So often in the past he had thought that the two of them would die together on the battlefield.
Powerscourt patted his pockets to see what feeble weapons he might have at his command. He had left his pistol in the little house in the hills. He doubted it would have served him well even if he had it. The bullets might ricochet off the staves and kill him on the rebound. He had a book of matches. This vat, soaked in wine for heaven knew how many years, would never burn, and even if it did, he would burn with it. He had a clasp knife, complete with two blades and a corkscrew. The one thing he didn’t need in here, he told himself bitterly, was a bloody corkscrew. The stuff was lapping at his ankles now. He bent down and picked up the music box. He placed it on a ledge level with the top of his head. He felt for the button or the handle to turn it on. The Marseillaise sounded forth again. He could meet his end to the song of the men marching from Marseilles to Paris in 1792. He would have a suitably French end.
He tried shoulder-charging the walls of his tomb. His only reward was a bruised shoulder. Then he began feeling with his hands along the wooden staves used to build the giant barrel. The cooper who made it would have known all about how to make it waterproof. He tried inserting the stronger blade of his knife into the overlap between the planks. Nothing happened. He wondered if he could make a hole, just a little hole that would let the wine escape. It was up to his calves now. A quick bend down and a dab of his fingers told Powerscourt that he was going to meet his maker in a sea of red rather than a sea of white. Jordan river, for him, would be rouge not blanc. He began working with his knife at the wood about halfway up the side of the vessel. He realized that the corkscrew might be more useful in trying to gouge out tiny sections of wood. With a knife in one hand and the corkscrew in the other he launched a furious assault on the walls of his tomb. The music box played on.