The second telegram came from Franklin Bentley in Washington. ‘Have located young Delaney,’ it said. ‘Early years in Pittsburgh, city of steel. Have located local priest who may remember him. My employers have given leave for me to go there tomorrow. Suspect they want to curry favour with Delaney, take his account away from Smith Wasserstein Abrahams up in New York.’
‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, ‘things may be looking up.’ A faint outline of a plan to catch the killer was forming in his brain. It depended on his having Johnny Fitzgerald by his side. And, for once, he wasn’t going to breathe a word of it to his wife.
After dinner they went out to have coffee and drinks at a series of wooden tables at the back of the hotel. This small square had once been the stable block and indeed there were still a number of horses and a few carriages to be seen. A bearded man could be observed lying under the bonnet of a very large and very expensive-looking motor car, a rag in one hand and an oil can in the other, swearing violently from time to time as he encountered further mechanical problems.
It was Powerscourt who saw them first. Flying high above them was a positive armada of small birds, swallows and martins and swifts, with their scythe-like wings and short forked tails. They looked as though they were on parade, medieval knights on tournament duty perhaps, armour burnished, lances polished, standards cleaned till they glowed in the sunlight, trotting along the green field to impress a sovereign or delight a mistress. Hundreds and hundreds of the birds passed overhead, the noise of their wings mingling with their cries and the traffic of the town. Somewhere out of sight, Powerscourt thought, they must wheel round and return, drawn for some unknown reason back to the little square that started as a stable block.
He remembered the excitement in his household the previous year when reports reached England that two Americans had invented a machine that could fly. This was no Montgolfier balloon that had carried the French into the skies before their Revolution, dependent on the wind, uncertain of navigation, symbolic of veering and abrupt changes in political direction. This American contraption, when it was more fully developed, would fly where man wanted it to go. The wings, unlike those of aviation pioneer Icarus, would not melt if taken too close to the sun. Powerscourt’s eldest child, Thomas, had been fascinated by the flying aeroplane. He bought all the newspapers and magazines he could find that contained articles about it. Daily for nearly a month, his father recalled, Thomas had announced at mealtimes, all mealtimes, that he was going to fly one of these devices when he grew up. His sister Olivia, almost as excited as Thomas at the prospect of flying machines, announced that she wasn’t going to bother to learn how to fly the things. This, she implied, was a rather menial task, like mending broken motor cars. Rather she would travel in state and in style, seated in luxury by one of the windows, taking small but sophisticated sips of Kir Royale, a concoction Olivia had been allowed a minute mouthful of in France the year before and regarded as the epitome of chic.
Then the pattern in the heavens above changed. No longer were the birds flying in huge formations, hundreds and hundreds to a regiment. Now they were coming in small attack platoons, fifteen or twenty at a time. Before they had sailed high above the buildings. Now they dived straight for them, only turning away at the last possible second. They skimmed along the sides of the stables a few feet from the solid bricks that would have crushed their skulls. The birds, swifts mostly, Powerscourt thought, headed directly for the chimney tops, twisting out of the way with inches to spare, screaming as they went. There were dark birds, totally black, in the line-up now, which he suspected might be bats. Wave after wave of them came in their demonic flight, skirting along the sides of the square. No human brain, he thought, could have made the lightning calculations needed to tell the birds to turn away from the walls and the turrets now or they would be obliterated. This was, quite literally, for these swifts and swallows and martins, a dance of death.
He looked over to his right and saw the birds still turning and twisting and racing and shrieking and diving across their arena of the roofs of the stable block.
When he turned his gaze back to the hotel, everything had changed. The little birds had stopped, or moved on. Perhaps God or some other celestial seneschal had blown a whistle to announce the end of the match. In their place, high above the playground of the swifts and the swallows, a couple of ravens were beating a regular and steady path across the skies. Pay no attention, they seemed to say, to the frantic antics of these small swifts and swallows. We are the serious characters round here. We shall always be with you. And in place of the shrieking of the little birds he could hear Lady Lucy’s voice asking him if he had gone deaf, surely, she had been trying to talk to him for at least a minute, and did he want another drink before the bar closed up for the night.
Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were sipping their coffee in a corner of another hotel dining room the next morning when a great shout disturbed the breakfast peace.
‘Francis! Lucy! The top of the morning to you both!’ And Johnny Fitzgerald, holding a large dark brown bag very tight in his right hand, strode across the room. He embraced Lady Lucy and held Powerscourt in an enormous bear hug. Only then, as the relief flooded through him, did Powerscourt realize how much he had missed his companion in arms. Lady Lucy felt happier than she had done since she came to France. Francis would be safe now.
‘Coffee,’ said Johnny, seating himself down, still holding on to the bag and signalling to the waitress, ‘I could do with some coffee. I feel it’s too early for a drink, even for me. Now then,’ he tapped his holdall significantly, ‘I’ve brought you the Crown Jewels, Francis. I had to go all the way to Bath to get it, mind you. I think this is the only copy left in England.’
‘Have you read any of it, Johnny?’ asked Lady Lucy.
‘I’ve got to page one hundred and fifty. It’s a very strange book. The subtitle is The Seven Deadly Sins of Michael Delaney, and each of the seven chapters deals with a different crime. Maybe the author hoped it would be serialized in one of the weeklies, a sin a week for a month and a half. But it’s as if the author is two completely different people. The beginning of each chapter is full of detailed financial stuff I didn’t really care about, then at the end he turns into a sort of hellfire preacher man and rants and raves away about how wicked Delaney is and how he is sure to be punished in this world or the next.’
‘And are the crimes bad enough, Johnny, for people to want to kill all his relations?’ asked Powerscourt.
‘Depends on how bad you think all these financial misdemeanours are, I suppose,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, rummaging around in his bag. ‘You know I could never understand anything about money – the financial pages leave me in such a daze that my wits can only be restored by a glass or two of something.’ Johnny handed the book over to Powerscourt who noticed that Johnny had wrapped the cover in plain brown paper so that nobody would know what he was reading.
A glance inside told him that the author was a Robert Preston, one-time reporter with the Wall Street Journal.
‘Well,’ he smiled at his wife and his friend, ‘let’s hope we find some answers in here. Wouldn’t it be odd if the solution to these murders came all the way from Bath.’
19
The pilgrim train was now six carriages long, four for the pilgrims and two extra for the Powerscourts laid on by the Inspector. Leger had called at the hotel soon after Johnny’s arrival to tell them they would be leaving at eleven o’clock.