Free Death of a Pilgrim by David Dickinson

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.

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    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