Jack O’Driscoll had been passing on more of his recently acquired French. They were quite near to Bordeaux, he told them knowledgeably, home to the finest red wine in the whole of France.
‘This is how you order it, boys,’ he said. ‘Oon grond vare de van rouge.’
Other pilgrims made experimental flights with Jack’s phrases and were indeed rewarded with fine glasses of red. Johnny Fitzgerald, who had always been regarded as a friend by the pilgrims, was holding forth at one end of the bar, an expensive bottle in front of him. ‘It’s my belief’, he told the company, ‘that my friend Powerscourt has solved the mystery at last. He’s writing a report up there in that big bedroom above the front door with the enormous balcony. He won’t tell anybody about what’s in it. I doubt if the wife knows. But he did say he was going to present it to the Inspector in the morning.’
For the pilgrims, freedom beckoned. Release from jail is always welcome, even if the sojourn has only been for a few days. The young ones hoped they would soon be free to walk the pilgrim route once more, for the walking had taken possession of them and they felt diminished when they couldn’t do it. One or two of the others thought they could go to Mass in the morning and pray for their immortal souls. That, after all, was what had brought them on this strange journey in the first place. They grew elated and drank more red wine. Dinner was uneventful, Powerscourt looking preoccupied and pausing every now and then to make some more notes in a black book he had brought to the table. Lady Lucy’s eyes scanned the diners. One of them was a murderer. One of them had tried to kill her Francis. But the faces gave nothing away.
When the last of the apricot tarts had been cleared away, Powerscourt and Lady Lucy went up to their room. Powerscourt stepped out on the balcony and watched night falling slowly over Aire-sur-l’Adour. Lady Lucy was fiddling with the bolsters, waiting for the signal to start work. Down below Powerscourt could hear the noise of laughter from the bar. He stared at the street in front of him, wondering if he could see any sign of movement. Then the noises off began to die down. Outside their room he could hear the pilgrims making their way upstairs. Inspector Leger had a man on every landing, ordered to watch through the night. Silence fell over the Hotel d’Artagnan.
‘Time to work your magic, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt. The bedclothes were whipped off each bed in turn. Bolsters and pillows were deployed to imitate the curve and the shape of the human form. Lady Lucy’s model, if that was the right word, was the way her Francis slept at night, back curved, legs drawn up slightly at the knees. She replaced the bedclothes, ruffling them furiously as she did so, to make it look as if the sleeping figures had tossed and turned in the night. Then she looked at her husband.
‘Would you like to be brown or fair, my love?’ she said, turning the two wigs over in her hands.
‘Brown,’ said Powerscourt with a smile, ‘definitely brown.’
Lady Lucy stepped back to check her handiwork. She ruffled the pillows once more. ‘That’s about as good as I can make it, Francis.’
‘Looks pretty good to me,’ said Powerscourt, pulling out the light bulb and putting it in his pocket. He picked up a suitcase. They closed the door very carefully and tiptoed as quietly as they could down the back stairs and out into the little square behind the hotel. They crept along a couple of back streets and rejoined the road by the river a couple of hundred yards from the Hotel d’Artagnan. Here was another room reserved for them in the Hotel Mousquetaire. Powerscourt had booked the room at the same time he made the reservations for the pilgrim party. The hotel manager had been warned that they would be late. Their room was very like the other one with a balcony looking out over the river.
‘How long before you go back, my love?’ Lady Lucy was feeling very nervous.
‘An hour or so, I’m not sure,’ said Powerscourt.
‘You will take great care, Francis? We don’t need any heroics. The Inspector’s men can look after the rough end of things.’ Even as she spoke Lady Lucy knew she was wasting her energies. If there was a rough end of things then Francis would be in the thick of it.
Just after midnight Powerscourt kissed his wife goodbye. She held him very tight, reluctant to let her man go. ‘Good luck, my own love,’ she said, ‘I shall be waiting for you.’
Powerscourt made his way back to the Hotel d’Artagnan very slowly. He was thinking about Alexandre Dumas’s legacy, hotels named after him in this little town and all over France, small boys all over Europe acting out the adventures of his characters in bedrooms and parks and back gardens. He remembered reading The Three Musketeers as a child. His father had found him a wooden sword and he used to charge around the lawns and shrubberies of Powerscourt House having long battles with his enemies. There was a lone fisherman on the river, his lines draped over the back of the boat, drifting downstream with the current. Above, the sky was ablaze with stars and the moon was nearly full. He worried about Lady Lucy, left behind with the musketeers and with no knight errant to protect her.
On his way in he nearly bumped into the Inspector, tiptoeing down the stairs. They did not speak. There was a long corridor running the length of the hotel on all three upper floors. The bedrooms were off to the left. Every twenty yards or so there was a small alcove set back into the wall where a man would be virtually invisible to anybody coming towards him, a murderer at large in the night hours. Powerscourt’s position was in one of these niches, some twenty yards from the door of his room. Johnny Fitzgerald was twenty yards behind Powerscourt towards the stairs. At each end of the corridor there were stairs to the next floor or the floor below. The two former soldiers were united again, waiting for another battle as they had done so often in the past.
Powerscourt was squatting on the ground, his eyes fixed on the further set of stairs. He wondered if this most difficult case might be about to end. He thought briefly about taking Lucy away somewhere when it was all over. Perhaps they could complete the pilgrim route and go to Santiago de Compostela and stand beneath the Portal de la Gloria in the Cathedral of St James.
Johnny Fitzgerald was trying to remember the names of the Premiers Crus of Bordeaux, the most majestic wines in France. Chateau Lafite Rothschild, Chateau Latour, Chateau Margaux he said to himself, where the hell was the other one? Johnny was fairly sure there were only four of them. He tried to imagine one of those wine maps the tourist industry are so fond of with vineyards marked out by little bottles. Chateau Haut-Brion, he remembered at last, and it wasn’t even in Bordeaux, it was in Graves to the south of the city.