A Plague of Heretics (Crowner John Mysteries)

by Bernard Knight

  ‘Your man is here to see you,’ she announced. ‘He’s brought you some work, by the sound of it.’

  She slipped out again and his officer advanced to the hearth. John knew that Mary must have assured him that Matilda was not at home, or he would not have ventured into the house. Relations between the two were frosty in the extreme, and Matilda usually referred to Gwyn as ‘that Cornish savage’, typical of her Norman disdain of anyone who had Celtic blood – which included her husband, whose mother was half-Welsh.

  ‘We’ve got a murder, Crowner,’ he proclaimed with almost a gleeful air. ‘A real nasty one, too.’

  John rubbed the last of the sleep from his eyes and hauled himself out of his chair. ‘Where is it? If I’m taken out of town and miss these folk coming in from next door, I’ll never hear the last of it from her.’

  Gwyn shook his head, his wild auburn locks shaking like the head of a sheaf of corn. ‘Not more than a few hundred paces away! Just this side of the East Gate, in Raden Lane.’

  John followed him out of the hall and shrugged on his cloak and a pair of boots, while his henchman gave him some details.

  ‘A pair of urchins found him, lying in weeds down a narrow alley between two houses. I went up for a quick look after Osric came down to the Bush to look for you.’ Osric was one of the two constables charged by the city council with the arduous task of trying to keep the peace in Exeter’s crowded streets. The coroner and his officer were out in the lane now and facing the biting east wind as they made for the East Gate.

  ‘So who is he and how did he die?’ snapped John, knowing that Gwyn was wont to make a short story into a long one.

  ‘I don’t know who he is, for in the state he’s in his own mother would be hard put to recognise him!’

  ‘So he was beaten up?’ demanded John.

  ‘Not that simple, Crowner!’ replied Gwyn with relish. ‘He’s had his throat cut and his tongue ripped out!’

  De Wolfe’s black eyebrows rose at this. Though he had seen far more horrible mutilations in campaigns across Europe and the Levant, this was unusual in the remote lands of Devon. However, he held back more questions until they reached the scene. Raden Lane was in the most elite part of the city, on the south side of the High Street just before the road ended at the eastern gate. There were a score of large houses there, occupied mostly by rich merchants and burgesses – it was as far away from Bretayne as possible, both geographically and socially.

  The two men turned into Raden Lane, where some of the houses were stone-built, set back on plots a short way from the street. Others were made of wood or cob and were flush with the edge of the narrow lane. They were close together but had slim gaps between them, and one of these, halfway up on the left, was an actual path, overgrown with winter-dead weeds. Its sides were formed by the wooden fence-stakes of the houses on either side.

  ‘He’s up here, Crowner,’ said Gwyn, pushing ahead of him through shrivelled dock-leaves and withered coarse grass. In spite of being a path, it no longer went anywhere, as beyond the long back gardens it had been cut off by a high fence that faced St John’s Hospital near the city wall. No doubt its isolation from lack of use had led to its being chosen as a dumping ground for a murdered corpse.

  As the coroner followed Gwyn up the narrow corridor, the skirts of his long grey tunic brushing frost from the weeds, he saw figures standing against the tall hurdles of woven hazel-withies which blocked the end. One was the skinny figure of Osric, a painfully thin Saxon, the other his fellow constable, a stocky, rather fat man called Theobald. Both were clutching their long staves and staring down at something on the ground.

  The ‘something’ turned out to be a spectacle that could have been used for a church wall-painting depicting the expected terrors of hell for those who sinned. A man’s body lay on its back in the weeds, a molehill under his shoulders throwing the head back to expose a ghastly wound that occupied the whole of his neck, from jawline to collarbones. Most of his face and the upper part of his body was plastered in dried blood, the colour of his tunic being apparent only below his waist. His grey hair was thick with blackening blood clot, and the front end of a deep laceration was just visible above his left ear.

  What was even more macabre than his horrific injuries was lying alongside his outstretched right hand. Here a complete tongue and attached voice-box was carefully laid out on a bloody stone, like some piece of offal displayed on a butcher’s stall.

  De Wolfe stood silently for a moment, contemplating the awful sight. The two constables, though also hardened to blood and gore from dealing with hundreds of street fights and killings, looked rather white around the gills.

  ‘Never seen anything like this before, Crowner!’ ventured Osric.

  ‘Any idea who he is?’ demanded John.

  The constable shook his head. ‘Not until he’s cleaned up, anyway,’ he muttered. ‘You can’t see his features for blood.’

  Osric explained how a lad – or rather his dog – had found him about an hour ago and had run to the constable’s hut behind the Guildhall to raise the alarm. ‘But God knows how long he’s been lying here, as no one comes up this path, for it goes nowhere.’

  ‘Suggests that whoever did it knows his way around Exeter,’ said Gwyn. ‘He obviously knew of a place where it would be some time before it was discovered.’

  ‘And how long was that, I wonder?’ grunted the coroner ruminatively. He snapped off a piece of dead twig from a nearby bush and used it to prod the Adam’s apple. It was stuck fast to the flat stone by dried blood. ‘That’s been shed some long time ago, even allowing for the freezing weather.’

  Gwyn gave the thigh of the corpse a shove with the toe of his boot and the whole body moved as if carved from stone.

  ‘Stiff as a board!’ he commented. ‘But given this frost, it doesn’t help much to tell us when he died.’

  ‘You reckon he’s been here all night?’ asked Theobald, his podgy face starting to recover some colour.

  The coroner shrugged. ‘He’s been dead at least for many hours, I’m sure. But he might have been dead for days!’

  Gwyn had hunkered down alongside the cadaver and was studying the head.

  ‘Looks like a real nasty blow there. Shall I shift him so that you can see?’ he asked hopefully. The Cornishman always relished a bit of drama and mayhem.

  John waved a hand at the two constables. ‘One of you run around to St John’s,’ he commanded. ‘They’ve got that little mortuary behind the hospital, so ask them if they can send a couple of men with a bier to take him away.’

  As Theobald left to do his bidding, John instructed Osric to search the surrounding area to see if he could find any weapon.

  ‘If he’s had a crack on the head, there may be something lying around that caused it,’ he said, then dropped to his haunches opposite Gwyn and waited for his officer to lift up the head. The corpse was so rigid that it came up like a plank, but John was able to see the back of the head. Though obscured by a welter of blood, a deep laceration ran from above the left ear to the back point, above the nape of the neck. He motioned for his officer to lower the corpse to the ground and stood up, after wiping his soiled fingers on some weeds.

  ‘I suspect that’s what killed him,’ he growled.

  Gwyn nodded in agreement – he was always vying with his master over their expertise in matters of violent death.

  ‘All this blood has run down, but there’s no sign of spurting,’ he said, waving a hand at the surrounding vegetation. ‘I reckon he had his Adam’s apple cut out after he was dead.’

  Before he could enlarge on this macabre observation, there was a cry from down the path and Thomas came hurrying up.

  ‘I heard in the castle that you had been called up here. What’s going on?’ he demanded. Then his gaze fell on the dreadful apparition on the ground, and without warning the little clerk turned aside and was spectacularly sick against the nearest fence. After two years as the coroner’s scribe, he had largely o
vercome his sensitivity to the various forms of violent death, but the sight of a bloody tongue and voice-box laid out neatly on a flat stone was too much for him.

  ‘Better out than in!’ bellowed Gwyn jovially as he slapped Thomas on the back. Then he turned back to de Wolfe and carried on their conversation. ‘There would have been blood splashed six feet away, if that wound had been caused while he was still alive,’ he boomed confidently. ‘I remember seeing a Saracen beheaded outside Acre once – there was a fountain of bright blood as long as my arms could span!’

  De Wolfe nodded absently. ‘But it all must have been done here. The corpse wasn’t brought from elsewhere, or there’d be a trail of blood all the way up this lane.’

  ‘But he could have been hit on the head somewhere else,’ observed Osric, who had rejoined them, after having failed to find anything nearby that could have been a weapon.

  ‘Must have been, as I can’t imagine anyone coming up this alley of his own free will,’ agreed John.

  Thomas de Peyne had recovered his nerve a little and after wiping his face with a kerchief came to stand shakily alongside his master, carefully averting his gaze from the corpse. Jerkily, he made the sign of the cross as if this might ward off the horror.

  ‘Who is he, Crowner?’ he asked. ‘And who would do a terrible thing like that?’

  John shook his head. ‘Can’t answer either of those questions, Thomas. When he’s been cleaned up a bit, hopefully someone will recognise his face, if he’s a local man.’

  A few minutes later a couple of lay brothers came up the path, carrying a canvas stretcher supported by two poles. Behind them strode a tall, gaunt figure in a black Benedictine habit. This was Brother Saulf, the infirmarian of the small priory of St John, which was virtually the only place in the city where the poor could get medical attention. The coroner explained the situation and the monk readily agreed to house the cadaver in the lean-to shed at the priory, which acted as a mortuary. As the lay brothers hoisted the corpse on to the stretcher, Thomas joined Saulf in intoning some Latin prayers over it as the best they could do by way of shriving the dead man.

  With an old blanket draped over him, and his tongue tucked under his armpit, the victim went off at a jog down the path, the coroner’s trio following more sedately around to St John’s.

  It was growing dark by the time de Wolfe arrived back in Martin’s Lane and, inevitably, found his wife in a bad temper at his lateness.

  ‘Our neighbours will be attending on us in an hour!’ she grated. ‘You had best change into some decent raiment. I don’t want to be disgraced by them thinking we are too poor to have good clothing!’

  With a sigh, he went off to the solar where they slept, to rummage in his chest to find something to wear. As everything he had was either grey or black, it was hardly likely to dazzle the popinjay next door, but he was in no mood for a confrontation with Matilda over it.

  When he returned, his wife went off to persecute her handmaiden, Lucille. With a face like a rabbit and a timid nature to match, she was servile enough to tolerate Matilda’s bad temper. When her mistress had gone into the convent at Polsloe some months earlier, she had been fobbed off on to Matilda’s sister-in-law, Eleanor de Revelle, but as soon as she returned to Martin’s Lane Eleanor threw her back again like some cast-off slave, with the excuse that she had not been satisfactory.

  Lucille lived in a box-like cubicle under the timber supports that held up the solar built on to the back of the house. Now she was hauled out and taken up the outside stairs to primp Matilda’s lacklustre hair and array her in a suitable gown for the entertainment of their supper guests.

  Supper was another à la mode innovation of Matilda’s, who had heard that an evening meal was becoming popular with the privileged classes. For centuries, a noon dinner had been the main meal of the day for almost everyone, but she felt obliged to adopt these new fads so that she could parade them before her matronly cronies at St Olave’s.

  In due course the physician and his wife arrived and were conducted to a pair of folding leather-backed chairs before the chimneyed hearth, between the two monks’ seats. John gravely provided them with his best wine, served in glass goblets he had looted from a French castle in the Limousin and which came out only on special occasions.

  If John had not known his wife so well, he might have thought that she had suddenly turned into a different person. From her usual glowering, sullen manner, the arrival of favoured guests had given her an ingratiating smile and a convincing façade of pleasantry. Her stocky body arrayed in a gown of dark red velvet, she had discarded her head-veil and wimple in favour of a net of gold thread which confined her hair. She also wore a surcoat of blue brocade, as in spite of the large fire the hall was cold and chilly.

  Though he had met his neighbours before, albeit briefly, John now had time to study them more closely as they politely sipped their wine and listened to Matilda’s prattle about the cathedral and her little church in Fore Street. Clement was a handsome man, with a patrician face but rather thin lips. A few streaks of grey showed in the dark hair that was cut in the old Norman style, being clipped short around his neck and temples, with a thick bush on top. His manner was precise and rather imperious, suggesting that he did not take kindly to his opinions being questioned. What struck John most, seeing him at close quarters, were his eyes, pale blue and unblinking. They seemed to have a strange intensity, which reminded John of a cat waiting to pounce on some unsuspecting mouse.

  Dressed elegantly in a long tunic of bright green linen, with a fur-edged surcoat of deep blue, he looked exactly what he was, a mature professional man who was sure of his position in society. Then, as he refilled Cecilia’s goblet, John – a connoisseur of women – realised anew that Clement’s wife was extremely attractive. Considerably younger than her husband, she was handsome rather than beautiful. About thirty, slim and straight-backed, she wore a cover-chief and wimple of white silk, though enough hair peeped out to show that it was as black as his own. A smooth complexion and full, slightly pouting lips convinced de Wolfe that she was a very desirable addition to the scenery of Martin’s Lane, especially in her elegant gown of black velvet with a gold cord wound around her narrow waist, the tasselled ends dangling almost to the floor. A heavy surcoat of dark green wool was held across her neck by a gilt chain.

  Her presence undoubtedly made him less taciturn a host than usual, and he already felt Matilda’s censorious eyes upon him as he fussed over Cecilia’s glass of wine. After the usual platitudes about their health and the prematurely cold weather, the physician turned his attention to the news of the day.

  ‘Some sad deaths in the city, I hear,’ he observed. His voice was mellow, and John began to wonder if this paragon could have any faults at all.

  ‘You mean the outbreak of distemper in Bretayne?’ he suggested.

  ‘And the murder of that woodcarver up in Raden Lane,’ added Clement with a slight note of triumph in his voice at being so abreast of the news.

  John was once again amazed at the efficiency of the Exeter grapevine, which seemed to be able to relay news even as it was happening, for it was less than a couple of hours since the identity of the victim had been established. When the face had been rubbed clean of dried blood by the vigorous application of wet rags, Osric was able to recognise him straight away as Nicholas Budd, who had lived alone in a rented room off Curre Street, which was not far away on the north side of the High Street. The two constables, who knew virtually every resident of the city, said that he made a modest living carving wood, both for furniture and especially for religious artefacts for churches or to sell to pilgrims. They knew little else about him, as he was a quiet, withdrawn person, with no relatives that they knew of.

  Matilda seized upon the news like a terrier with a rat, as John had not bothered to tell her why he had arrived home late that afternoon.

  ‘I have heard of the man. He shaped some parts of the rood screen in St Pancras Church,’ she snapped. ‘Why shou
ld someone want to murder a devout man like that? He could have no riches to steal.’

  Clement and Matilda launched on a somewhat patronising discussion about why the good are struck down while the wicked prosper. John, sitting now in one of the monks’ seats, was content to watch Cecilia, who so far had hardly spoken a word, except for some polite responses to a few questions about how she liked her new life in Exeter.

  As he looked across at her profile, the old adage ‘still waters run deep’ came into his mind, and he again had to remind himself that an equally attractive woman awaited him in Dawlish. Cecilia seemed aware of his scrutiny, for she turned her head and gave him a slight, almost secret smile. He thought that she must be well used to men staring at her; it could hardly be otherwise. He was jerked from his daydreaming by her husband speaking to him.

  ‘Is there any reason why this man should have been fatally attacked?’ he asked. ‘As in any town, there are plenty of drunken brawls and knife fights, but this secret killing must be unusual, even for such a large city as Exeter.’

  John raised his shoulders in an almost Gallic gesture. ‘It is too early to say. I sent my officer around to all the houses nearby, to raise the hue and cry, not that it was of any use as the man had been dead for some time. But no one admitted seeing or hearing anything untoward. We can do no more until daybreak tomorrow.’

  He kept the nature of the injuries to himself, but saw no harm in enlarging on the circumstances, as doctors heard things that often no one else could pick up, other than priests in the confessional.

  ‘The victim was severely wounded, so it is probable that the assailant would have been heavily bloodstained. Given this deep frost, it is impossible even to guess at the time of the attack, which must have taken place somewhere else.’