Death of a Pilgrim

by David Dickinson

  Father Kennedy had enjoyed the soup. He took a second helping. He was fond of his food, Father Kennedy, punishing himself from time to time with days of fasting, but he never seemed to last out the full week he had promised himself at the start. Now the doors into the kitchen were opening again. Great dishes of vegetables were being brought in and placed on the tables. Then the three waiters reappeared, each bearing an enormous earthenware pot. Even with the lids firmly on, the smell began to percolate through the dining room. One pot was placed in the centre of each table and the waiters whipped off the lids simultaneously. Steam now rose up to join the cooking aromas and the pilgrims peered forward to inspect the contents, a stew in a light brown sauce with all kinds of appetizing things floating on the surface.

  ‘This’, Alex Bentley began, reading from a note in front of him, ‘is a delicacy of the region. Its name is potée or pork stew, and the original recipe comes from a local poet. This’, he looked up brightly at his audience, ‘is what it says: “Take a cabbage, a large succulent cabbage, firm and close and not too damaged by frost, a knuckle of pork with its bristle just singed, two lumps of pork fat, two good lumps, some fat and thin bacon on the turn but only just, turnips from the Planèze, Ussel or Lusclade.”’ The waiters were ladling out great helpings of the stuff. The young man Christy Delaney thought the recipe sounded more practical than poetic. Shane Delaney thought, disloyally, that this looked far better than anything his Sinead had ever produced in all their years of marriage. ‘“Add to the pot”’, Bentley went on, ‘“a well-stuffed cockerel or an old hen, a knuckle of veal, a rib of beef. Put the meat in the pot, a goodly amount, don’t be afraid, add some water, not too much, and some red wine and stew gently over a wood fire for four to five hours.”’

  There was a brief ripple of applause and then the pilgrims fell to, comparing notes on the taste and taking comforting gulps of their wine. It was Jack O’Driscoll who first noticed that something was wrong. He was sitting closest to the other set of doors that led out into the entrance foyer and he could hear raised voices. He thought one of them might belong to the hotel owner. Whatever else he was doing, Jack reflected ruefully, he didn’t think the man was ordering a beer. Then the doors opened and the proprietor walked in, rather sheepishly. Nobody likes their guests being disturbed in the middle of the finest meal in the hotel repertoire. But it was his companions, a large elderly Sergeant of Police and two constables, who caused the decibel level to rise as the pilgrims gasped and asked each other what on earth was going on.

  ‘Silence!’ boomed the Sergeant. Alex Bentley thought he had grasped that bit. But most of what followed he did not, though the words he did understand filled him with horror. The Sergeant spoke for over a minute in thick guttural French. Then he looked round the room, waiting for a response. He spoke again, in a louder voice than before. Everybody looked at Alex Bentley.

  ‘Je ne comprends pas,’ he managed to blurt out at last, ‘I don’t understand.’ The Sergeant spoke again. He stamped his large foot. He shook his fist at them. Michael Delaney thought the man was swearing at them. Then the Sergeant spoke in a quieter tone to the proprietor.

  ‘Did you catch anything of what he said the first time?’ Michael Delaney whispered to Alex Bentley.

  ‘I think he said something about a dead man, about a corpse,’ Bentley murmured back.

  ‘Christ in heaven!’ said Delaney and looked out towards the party at the door. The hotel man was pointing now, in the general direction of Michael Delaney and his companions on the top table. He’s identifying us as the people in charge, Delaney guessed. The burly Sergeant beckoned to them to follow him and spoke some more words, very loudly and very slowly. Father Kennedy was reluctant to rise from his seat. He didn’t want to leave his delicious stew. It might have gone cold by the time he got back to it. He followed the others slowly out of the dining room, the smell as heady as ever, the pilgrims open-mouthed, Girvan Connolly refilling his glass while he thought nobody was looking.

  The Sergeant took them across the hotel entrance and through a door to the side of reception. He closed the door carefully behind them. Lying on a trolley beside the proprietor’s desk, papers and receipts spilling over on to the floor, an old map of Le Puy on the wall, was what looked like a body totally covered from head to foot in a couple of blankets.

  He shouted some more words in French. Then he pulled back the blankets briefly to reveal the mutilated corpse beneath. The face had been battered out of all recognition. One arm was hanging from his shoulder. Dark stains of dried blood covered his clothes. Then the Sergeant covered him up. He handed a wad of papers to Michael Delaney, pointing three times to his own breast pocket and then to the dead man to indicate that these had been found on his person. Great waves of sadness washed through Michael Delaney as he looked at the train tickets to Le Puy, at the names of the hotels, including the one where they now stood. There was a map of the pilgrim route to Santiago, sent by Alex Bentley to all those coming on pilgrimage. This corpse on the trolley was his cousin, John Delaney from England. The missing guest had turned up at last. But he hadn’t come for a feast. He’d come for a funeral.

  5

  Father Kennedy began praying. ‘Pater noster qui es in caelis, Our Father who art in heaven . . . ’ The Sergeant and his men closed their eyes. Michael Delaney continued staring sadly at the dead man’s papers. Latin, Alex Bentley thought, the last universal language left. Maybe it would be easier to conduct the whole thing in Latin, the trial, if it came to that, adorned with Cicero returning from the dead in his finest toga to entertain the jury with his florid prose for the prosecution. When prayers were over, the Sergeant grabbed Michael Delaney by the arm and pointed to the map.

  ‘St Michel d’Aiguilhe,’ he shouted three times. Delaney stared at him.

  ‘He’s drawing our attention to that great pinnacle of rock, St Michel, sir,’ said Bentley. ‘Maybe that’s where he died, the poor man.’

  As if he had understood, the Sergeant drew a fat finger very slowly almost all the way to the top of the pinnacle. He had been making climbing noises with his feet. Then his finger dropped suddenly down the side.

  ‘Tombé, peut-être?’ he yelled.

  ‘He fell, perhaps?’ said Bentley, trying to put a question mark into his voice.

  ‘Ou poussé!’ The Sergeant turned round and pushed one of his men firmly in the back.

  ‘Or he was pushed,’ said Bentley.

  ‘On ne sait pas,’ the Sergeant said in a quieter tone with a Gallic shrug.

  ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘Alors,’ the Sergeant went on,

  ‘Anyway,’ said Bentley, feeling he was becoming proficient in translating one word at a time.

  ‘ . . . le monsieur ici . . . ’

  ‘ . . . the gentleman here . . . ’

  ‘ . . . est trouvé au fond de St Michel.’ He pointed now at the very bottom of the rock, stabbing his finger into the surface of the glass repeatedly. ‘À huit heures ce soir. Il est mort, naturellement.’

  ‘I think he’s saying the body was found at the bottom of the rock at eight o’clock this evening, sir, but I’m not sure.’ Alex Bentley felt you could have understood what had happened from the sign language alone. Maybe he hadn’t done as well as he thought.

  ‘Aussi . . . ’ The Sergeant brought something out of his trouser pocket. He pointed twice to a jacket pocket and twice to the dead man. He handed the object over to Delaney. It was an Atlantic scallop shell, symbol of the pilgrim journey to Santiago for over a thousand years.

  ‘I think they found it in the jacket pocket, sir.’ Delaney held it in his hands. The dead man hadn’t even started on his pilgrimage.

  Delaney led them back to the dining room. He made signs to the Sergeant that he was about to speak. One constable had been put on guard duty at the door. The pilgrims were turning into prisoners.

  ‘Friends, fellow pilgrims,’ he began, ‘I have some terrible news to give you. I have as yet, very few details.
John Delaney,’ he pointed sadly at the empty chair, the unopened napkin, the cutlery still in the correct position, the wine glasses untouched, ‘John Delaney is dead. I believe the body was found at the bottom of the most distant rock pinnacle from here, the one they call St Michel.’

  The pilgrims crossed themselves. Maggie Delaney hunted desperately for her rosary beads but couldn’t find them. She made a grimace and started praying anyway. Stephen Lewis, the solicitor from Somerset, wondered if there were legal angles to come he could assist with. Then he reflected sadly that he didn’t know very much about French law. He didn’t think there were any French speakers in Frome. Probably there weren’t any English speakers in Le Puy.

  ‘For now, I think we should wait here until we can discover what the French authorities propose to do.’

  Michael Delaney was a veteran of strange meetings, of meetings sulphurous and meetings argumentative and meetings violent. One of his competitors had once enlivened proceedings by pulling a gun on the Delaney company secretary. But he didn’t think he had ever been in one as unusual as this. For the moment he was calm. The Sergeant was now sucking on his pencil and inspecting them all silently. The other constable had stationed himself by the kitchen doors as if to prevent escape through the stoves and pots and pans. And it was from the unlikely quarter of the kitchens that assistance came.

  The head waiter was fairly sure that Alex Bentley was much happier with written rather than spoken French. He had after all translated the written menus very quickly earlier that day. The head waiter remembered a tribesman who was fluent in French for some reason, a legendary translator during the head waiter’s days with the military in the Maghreb who had lost his tongue in some tribal vendetta. But his knowledge of Arabic and French was unimpaired. The French officers would make their prisoners write down their statements or their confessions in Arabic. Sitting cross-legged in his tent the man with no tongue would write the translations down in French and hand them over to his employers.

  He wrote a brief message to Alex Bentley. He heard, but did not understand, the translation.

  ‘Our friend here has a suggestion, sir,’ said Alex. ‘He will ask the Sergeant to write down in French what he wishes to say. I think I’ll be able to translate most of that all right. Then you tell me in English what you want to say and I’ll write it down in French. It might work, sir.’

  Michael Delaney stared at him thoughtfully. ‘Might take a lot of time. Never mind. Let’s try it.’

  The head waiter and a colleague departed briefly to the rest of their dining room and returned carrying a medium-sized table able to take four chairs. They brought a large writing book whose pages, Alex Bentley noticed, were not blank or ruled but filled with those impenetrable squares the French are so fond of. Alex wrote a brief message for the Sergeant. The Sergeant looked at him for a moment as if he thought the American was mad and then a slow look of recognition dawned on him. He grabbed a pen and began to write very slowly, pausing regularly to suck the bottom of the pen. French composition had never been his strong suit at school. Alex Bentley noticed that just as people shouted louder when speaking to foreigners, the Sergeant was writing in extra large letters. The pilgrims watched, spellbound. Girvan Connolly thought it would be permitted to refill his glass again; alcohol was always useful in the absorption of shock. Father Kennedy was staring sadly at his plate of congealed stew. It would never be the same now. At last the Sergeant stopped and passed the book over to Alex Bentley.

  ‘This is it, sir,’ Alex Bentley began, pausing every now and then to look down at his page, ‘the Sergeant here is operating under the assumption that this may be a suspicious death. People in Le Puy, he says, don’t go around pushing each other over the edge of St Michel. Nor do they go round throwing themselves off it. Most of them never go near the place. There hasn’t been a death of any kind, murder or suicide, up there for at least twenty years. For the time being, we are all under suspicion, all of us here in this room. Nobody, for the time being, is allowed to leave Le Puy. Nobody is allowed to leave the hotel. The process of interviewing all the suspects, as he calls us, will begin in the morning, one person at a time.’

  There was a moment of stunned silence. All the pilgrims began to talk at once. Jack O’Driscoll had been watching Michael Delaney very carefully all evening. Jack had made extensive inquiries about Delaney before he set off and knew the man had a fearful temper. After this piece of news, he felt, Delaney might be about to blow.

  Michael Delaney banged his fist on the table. ‘Quiet, please, quiet! Alex,’ he shouted, ‘this is monstrous! Monstrous! It’s intolerable! We’ve come on a pilgrimage, for God’s sake. Why can’t we bury the poor man and move on? Haven’t they got a policeman in this place who speaks English? Tell him I want to speak to the Chief Police Officer in the morning.’

  Alex wrote as fast as he could. The reply was short.

  ‘You’re not going to like this, sir. He says the Chief Constable will not be available in the morning. The Sergeant is going now. He says he’s late for his supper. It’s always bad for his digestion, the Sergeant says, to be late for his supper. His wife doesn’t like it either. He will see us here in the morning. His two men will be on duty here in the hotel all night, sir. To make sure nobody leaves.’

  As Alex Bentley finished speaking, the Sergeant rose slowly to his feet and marched out of the room. One of his constables took up a position in the centre of the doors leading to the hotel foyer and the outside world. Delaney restrained himself with difficulty. He downed a glass of red wine at breakneck speed. A French priest, presumably the local curé, came in and began talking quietly to Father Kennedy in a corner of the room. Brother White joined his companions of the cloth. Wee Jimmy, who was closest to them, thought they were conversing about the funeral in a kind of prayer book Latin.

  ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ said Michael Delaney at last. ‘Let’s try and approach this thing in a businesslike manner.’ It is one of the many differences between the French and the American character that the French attach great value to collective action. Fraternity. The Americans are suspicious of the state, and all in favour of individual initiative, of citizens taking responsibility for their own lives, rather than depending on others to do it for them.

  ‘Damn French police,’ Delaney began. ‘Useless, completely useless. If I don’t do anything else I’m going to get my own man to look into this death. Pinkerton’s, Alex, what chance of Pinkerton’s here in this dump?’ Michael Delaney had an account with the great detective agency Pinkerton’s in New York, enabling him to spy on his competitors all across the United States.

  ‘I doubt if there are any Pinkertons to be found anywhere in Europe, sir.’

  ‘Damn! We’ve got to find the top man,’ said Delaney firmly, ‘top private investigator fluent in English and French, able to drop whatever he’s doing and start immediately. Money no object. Anybody got any ideas?’

  He turned to Father Kennedy. God might have some ideas. Plenty of contacts, God. ‘Your friend there, Father. Does he speak English?’

  ‘I’m afraid not, Michael,’ said Father Kennedy. ‘We’re conversing in Latin here.’

  ‘God in heaven,’ said Delaney. ‘Alex, can you take your ouija board over there and ask the man to help us find this bilingual detective. Tell him to ask his bishop, for God’s sake. And ask the bishop to ask his archbishop if he doesn’t know. Not sure where we go after the archbishop. Anybody else got any suggestions?

  Oddly enough, it was the youngest member of the party who had the best idea. He might have been only eighteen years old but Christy Delaney was a very intelligent young man. His parents moved in sophisticated circles in Dublin.

  ‘Why don’t you ask the Ambassadors, sir? Telegraph them in the morning. Ask them to find you such a man.’

  Delaney, unusually for him, didn’t understand at first. ‘Ambassadors?’ he said, looking at the young man in rather a patronizing way. ‘Ambassadors plural? Why plural?’


  ‘Sorry, sir,’ said Christy, ‘I didn’t make myself clear. Telegraph the American Ambassador in Paris and the American Ambassador in London. They may not know the name of such a person but they will certainly know someone who will.’

  ‘Excellent, by God!’ said Michael Delaney. ‘Well done indeed. I’ll do it first thing in the morning.’ He wondered about offering the young man a job in the Delaney organization on the spot.

  As the pilgrims made off towards bed, Father Kennedy was the last to leave. The food had all been cleared away. Looking wistfully at the doors leading to the kitchen he wondered what he had missed for pudding.

  The French telegraph system was busy the following morning. Alex Bentley sent Delaney’s messages to the two American Ambassadors very early in the day. The priest sent word to his superiors. The Bishop of Le Puy was concerned not just about the death of a pilgrim in his diocese but about the damage that could be done to the good name of the town and its cathedral and the practice of pilgrimage itself. When he had dispatched his pleas for help to his brothers in Christ, the Archbishops of Lyons and Bordeaux and the Cardinal Archbishop of Toulouse, he sent word to the beleaguered pilgrims in the hotel. The Church, he assured them, would pray for their safe journey onwards in every service in the cathedral from this morning on. He himself proposed visiting the pilgrims in their hotel and, if possible, organizing some sort of service for the soul of the departed Delaney.