David Dickinson - Death of a Pilgrim

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 potee 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 Planeze, 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.

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.

‘ Tombe, peut-etre ?’ he yelled.

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

‘ Ou pousse !’ 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 trouve 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. ‘ A 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.