Fear in the Forest

by Bernard Knight

  As he went in, ducking his head under the low arch at the entrance, he saw a grossly fat man waddle out of the iron gate, a horn lantern in one hand. He had an almost bald head and rolls of fat hid his neck. Piggy little eyes peered from a pallid, round face, a slack mouth exposing toothless gums.

  He wore a shapeless smock of dirty brown wool, which bulged over his globular stomach, covered by a thick leather apron which had many stains that looked ominously like dried blood.

  For a moment, Robert Barat feared that this revolting apparition might be the coroner, but thankfully the grotesque figure was followed out of the gate by a tall, dark man dressed entirely in black and grey. The reeve walked towards him and they met halfway from the entrance.

  ‘Are you the crowner, sir?’

  De Wolfe stopped and nodded at the man, who seemed to be a respectable peasant, dressed in plain homespun and a good pair of riding boots.

  ‘I am indeed – who are you?’

  ‘Robert Barat, the manor-reeve from Manaton, sir. My lord’s bailiff sent me urgently to find you.’

  John sighed. How many times had he had a similar visit in the nine months since he had been coroner?

  ‘Tell me the worst, Robert. Is it a beaten wife or a tavern brawl – or has another child fallen under the mill-wheel?’

  ‘None of those things, Crowner. It’s a fire in the tannery.’

  John’s black brows came down in a frown. It was true that fires were within a coroner’s remit, but it was rare for him to be told of one in the countryside. In towns or cities it was a different matter, with the ever-present risk of a conflagration sweeping through the closely packed buildings, but out in the villages, fires were less common and certainly less dangerous, so they were rarely reported to him.

  ‘Just a fire, Reeve? Your bailiff must be a very conscientious fellow.’

  The tall, fair man shifted uneasily. ‘It may be more than that, sir. The tanner is missing, too. We don’t know whether he’s still in the ashes or whether he has vanished. There’s something odd about the fire. I’m sure it was set deliberately.’

  John sensed that even this extra explanation was not the whole story, but the reeve was not forthcoming with any more details.

  ‘Who is the lord of Manaton?’ he demanded.

  ‘Henry le Denneis, Crowner. Though he holds the manor as a tenant of the Abbot of Tavistock.’

  ‘What makes you think that the place was fired deliberately?’

  Robert Barat raised his eyes to look directly at the coroner. ‘We have had trouble in the village these last few weeks, Sir John. You’ll know we are just within the Royal Forest, more’s the pity. Although it has always made things difficult, recently it has got worse.’

  John pricked up his ears at this. Almost every day now, it seemed, some problem appeared linked to the forest.

  ‘What sort of trouble?’ he asked, as they walked back towards the daylight streaming down the steps.

  ‘I think you had better ask our bailiff or the lord’s steward,’ the reeve replied cautiously. ‘They know more about it, but it all goes back to the new tannery the foresters have set up near Moretonhampstead. They demanded that our small tannery should close down, so that theirs could take its trade.’

  Though de Wolfe immediately appreciated this familiar situation, he pressed the other to finish his explanation.

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Our tanner, Elias Necke, refused to close down. How could he, for he and his three sons depend on it for their living. He was threatened more than once by that bastard William Lupus. Then, on Saturday night, the place burnt down and Elias went missing.’

  Out in the inner ward, de Wolfe stopped and turned to the village reeve.

  ‘I’ll come out to Manaton later this morning, with my officer and clerk. I have to attend to an inquest first, but will set off before noon. If you get yourself some food and drink while your horse rests, you can set off ahead of us.’

  Robert Barat respectfully touched his forehead and set off for the gatehouse, where his mare was tethered. De Wolfe called after him.

  ‘Tell the bailiff to gather as many villagers as he can for a jury, especially those who may know anything about the fire, even if they only watched it burn.’

  The coroner’s trio reached the village in mid-afternoon, Manaton being about fifteen miles from the city. It was a hamlet typical of the edge of Dartmoor, nestling on the slope of a valley among wooded countryside. Above it was a hill crowned by jagged rocks, and across the vale was a smoother mound of moorland. In the distance, more granite tors stood on the skyline, like broken teeth against the sky.

  The village straddled the crossing of two lanes, and as the three riders came up the eastern track from the Becka waterfalls, they could smell the fire before the remains came into sight.

  ‘What a bloody stench!’ grumbled Gwyn. ‘Tanneries are bad enough at the best of times, but a burnt one …!’

  Thomas de Peyne, jogging side-saddle behind them, almost retched as they came up to the still-smoking ruin, which lay a few hundred paces east of the village. A thin haze of blue smoke wavered in the slight breeze and the heat from the ashes caused the distant woods to shimmer in the sun. The tannery had been set in a large plot, giving room for the stone tanks set in the ground, where the skins were soaked and which added their aroma to the acrid stench of scorched leather. Their smell came from dog droppings, as the strong ferments in the excreta were used to strip the soft tissue from the cow hides and sheepskins.

  As they halted on the road to look across at the desolation, a group of people came towards them from the wide green in the centre of the village, which consisted of a loose cluster of cottages set around a church and an alehouse. The first to greet them was Robert Barat, who deferentially introduced a fat, self-important man as the manor lord’s bailiff, Matthew Juvenis.

  ‘This is a bad business, Crowner. When you have finished here, my master would like to speak with you at the manor house.’

  ‘Has there been any sign of the tanner?’ asked John.

  The bailiff half turned to wave a hand towards the group of villagers standing a few paces away, most of them gazing at the new arrivals as if they had two heads each. However, three tough-looking young men remained grim faced, the eldest with an arm around an older woman, whose tearful features told de Wolfe that this must be the tanner’s wife and the men her sons.

  ‘They’re sure he must be in there, sir.’ Matthew Juvenis pointed to the blackened ashes. ‘He went from their cottage, which is just down the road, soon after midnight to see why his hound was barking – and never came back.’

  ‘Have you looked in the ruins?’ demanded Gwyn.

  ‘They were still too hot this morning, but maybe we can probe around now.’

  The coroner and his officer slid from their mounts, which were taken off by a couple of villagers to be watered and fed. Thomas let them take his pony, but he kept well back from the smoking ashes. Followed by the tanner’s sons, the reeve and the bailiff, they walked to the edge of the scorched patch of grass that surrounded the remains of the tannery.

  ‘There was a two-storeyed building here,’ grunted the eldest son, a gruff fellow of about twenty-five. ‘And behind it were a couple of sheds, this side of the tanks. All old wood and damned dry in this weather.’

  All that remained of the three structures was a tumbled scatter of charred wood, some of the thicker beams still in pieces up to a few feet long, but split and blackened, with smoke still wreathing from the cracks. The rest was grey-black ash and charcoal, with occasional layers of fragile sheets like the leaves of a large book.

  ‘Those are the stacks of cured hides, which were stored upstairs,’ explained another of the sons.

  John moved nearer, treading among the crumbling ash, which sent up clouds of fine grey dust. ‘Did no one try to put the fire out?’ he snapped.

  ‘It was impossible,’ said Robert Barat. ‘I was one of the first here, when the eldest
boy raised the alarm. He had gone to see why his father had not returned home. But already the place was like an inferno and the nearest water was the stream down in the valley, apart from a couple of small springs there.’ He waved his arm vaguely behind him. ‘By the time we had got enough men and buckets, the roofs had fallen in and we couldn’t get within thirty paces because of the heat.’

  It was still hot, as de Wolfe found as he moved nearer the larger debris in the centre. His feet became warm and, looking down, he saw that the leather of his shoes was starting to blister. He moved back to cooler ground, but a couple of the more enterprising villagers had brought up a few wide, rough planks, pulled from a fence. They laid these end to end into the hot ashes and the coroner walked carefully along them to get much nearer the centre of the fallen building. He peered around him for a few moments, hunched forward with his hands behind his back.

  ‘Pass me a long stick or a pole, Gwyn,’ he called. The Cornishman, who was itching to look for himself, relayed the command to the villagers and in a moment one ran back with a long bean-stick, filched from the vegetable plot of the nearest cottage. It was about eight feet long, and with it de Wolfe could prod well into the centre of the fallen beams. They were mostly ash and either crumbled to the touch or rolled over easily. He poked about in various parts of the smoking heap for a few minutes, then walked back and asked the reeve to put the planks on the other side of the cindered plot. This was too much for his officer to endure.

  ‘Let me try this time, Crowner,’ he pleaded.’ You’ll be roasted if you stay there much longer.’

  With the hot sun and the radiant heat from the hot ashes, John was sweating like a pig and gladly handed his bean-pole to Gwyn. The big redhead started poking vigorously at a different part of the blackened debris and almost at once let out a cry of triumph. He had rolled over a short, thick length of burnt timber, which had probably supported the upper floor of the main building. ‘There’s what looks like bone under here!’ he yelled over his shoulder.

  Using his crooked pole like a lance, he leaned forward to carefully spear something, and a moment later backed down the plank, bearing a bleached white object dangling from the tip.

  When he reached the edge of the scorched area, he laid it down gently on the grass and withdrew his bean-stick. The others crowded around, de Wolfe, the reeve and the bailiff in front. However, the sons and their mother were at the other side and a screech went up from the woman. As she burst into a torrent of wailing and weeping, a son and several good-wives clustered around and drew her gently away. What she had seen was the remains of a skull, partly blackened, but the cranium a brittle white from the incandescent heat of the fire.

  John dropped to a crouch over it, almost nose to nose with Gwyn.

  ‘Looks like a man to me, by the size and those thick ridges over the eyes,’ said the coroner’s officer judiciously.

  ‘God’s teeth, Gwyn, it’s hardly likely to be a woman, in the circumstances,’ growled de Wolfe, but his officer just grinned at the sarcasm.

  ‘Talking of teeth, this one’s got big gnashers, like a man,’ he persisted. The lower jaw had fallen away, but in the upper there were still some teeth, blackened and split at the tips, but still intact.

  ‘What’s that big hole in the side?’ asked Juvenis.

  ‘Was our father struck on the head by those bastards who set the fire?’ shouted the tanner’s eldest son, in whom sorrow, revulsion and rage vied for priority.

  Gwyn shook his untidy head. ‘That’s where my stick went through, I’m afraid. The burnt bone is as soft as dried clay, owing to the heat.’

  John de Wolfe stood up and ineffectually brushed the grey dust that had smeared the front of his long black tunic. ‘We can never be sure that this is actually your father,’ he said gently to the sons. ‘Of course, there is every likelihood that it is, I’m afraid – but for all we know, it could just be one of the fire-setters, if that was what happened.’

  ‘So where is my father, if that’s not him?’ demanded the eldest lad, his attitude belligerent following the tragedy that had befallen their family.

  The coroner nodded.

  ‘I agree that there is little doubt that this is your father, and for the purposes of my inquest that is what I will assume. I’m sorry, lad.’

  He turned to the bailiff. ‘When the ashes are cold, you must make a careful search and retrieve any more bones you can find. What’s left of the poor man deserves a decent burial.’

  John looked down at the pathetic skull on the grass. ‘Be careful with that, it will fall to pieces if it’s not handled very gently.’

  The bailiff made a gesture to someone on the edge of the crowd and a fat man came forward, dressed like a farm labourer in a rough smock, a shovel in his hand.

  ‘This is Father Amicus, our parish priest. He will take care of any remains and give them a pious send-off in the church.’

  The priest looked down rather ruefully at his very secular garb.

  ‘The stipend is poor here, Crowner. I work most of the time in the fields,’ he explained. ‘But I will do the right thing by poor Elias here.’

  John nodded as Gwyn carefully handed the still-warm skull to Father Amicus.

  ‘I will need it to put before the jury when I hold the inquest later this afternoon. After that, see that he is put to rest in a dignified way.’

  The priest took it, then hesitated before moving away. ‘There is something I should tell you. It may have some bearing on what’s happened.’

  De Wolfe’s dark features stared at him questioningly, especially when the father steered him well away from the crowd and spoke in a low voice, his lips close to John’s ear.

  ‘One of the youngsters in the village came to me this morning, in a state of guilt. What he told me was not a confession, in the true religious sense, so I can divulge it.’ He suddenly looked rebellious. ‘Though maybe I would, even if it had been, given the awful thing that has happened in our village.’

  ‘What is it you have to tell me?’ asked John impatiently.

  ‘This lad was out in the fields late last night – with a girl, if you get my meaning.’

  John nodded – the meaning was clear and by no means unusual in any place or at any time.

  ‘Just before the fire was seen, these two were lying under a hedge where the strip-fields meet the common land. They saw two men hurrying along the edge of the field from the direction of the tannery, then they went on to the common and vanished into the woods.’ He pointed eastwards, where the road ran down towards the deep valley of the Bovey river in the distance.

  ‘Did they see who they were?’

  ‘Not a chance, Crowner. It was a half-moon, but being in an awkward situation so to speak the lad could not move or let himself be seen. And at that moment, of course, he had no reason to think that anything evil was to come to light.’

  ‘Who is this young man?’ demanded the coroner.

  Father Amicus shifted from foot to foot. ‘It’s very difficult, sir. If the village get to know about this, there’ll be hell to pay, both from his father and the girl’s family. You don’t need another murder on your hands, do you?’

  De Wolfe considered this for a moment. By rights, everyone who had information should speak up at the inquest, but as the boy had no idea who the shadowy figures were – or even if they had anything to do with the fire – it seemed unduly harsh to expose him and the girl to the vendetta that might engulf them and their families in a closed community like Manaton.

  He reassured the parish priest that he would keep the information anonymous, then arranged with Gwyn and the manor-reeve to collect as many men as he could for the inquest in a hour or two. This done, he turned to Matthew Juvenis.

  ‘Bailiff, I need to see your lord – and you said he wishes to talk to me.’

  The bailiff inclined his head. ‘The manor house is just along the track, Crowner, hardly worth getting to horse again.’

  They left Gwyn to organise the inquir
y, but before they left de Wolfe took Thomas de Peyne aside and gave him some murmured instructions. The little clerk brightened up at being asked to assist his revered master and limped off in the direction of the church. The bailiff walked beside the coroner through the village to the crossroads and turned up the lane that ran northwards past the village green and the church. Most of the dwellings were typical of Devonshire hamlets, small tofts of cob or wattle and daub within rough-hewn wooden frames. They were separated by plots of varying size, crofts now harbouring summer vegetables and grass for goats and the milk cow. At the edge of the green was the alehouse and a small forge, and opposite stood the small stone church which in recent years had replaced an even smaller wooden structure bult in Saxon times. Alongside was a tithe barn and priest’s cottage, up the path to which Thomas was pursuing the man with the skull and spade.

  The coroner and bailiff continued along the lane out of the village for a few hundred yards past the last of the cottages. Three fields of oats, wheat, rye and beans stretched away from the track in narrow stripes of different greens, then came a patch of common land, beyond which was the old fortified manor, nestling under the slope rising up to Manaton Rocks.

  A deep ditch ran around a large square plot, guarded by a high fence of wooden stakes. Double gates stood open to the road, and John’s experienced eye told him that the manor had not feared any attack for many years, as the gates were rotten at the bottom, where rank weeds grew up against the planks. He followed the bailiff into the compound and saw in the centre a substantial manor house, built of granite moorstone, with a roof of thick slates. Stables, a byre, kitchen, brew-shed and various huts for servants half filled the rest of the space within the stockade. An older man came out of the main door, which was at the top of the steps over the undercroft.

  ‘That’s Austin, the steward,’ said the bailiff. ‘He’ll take you to the master.’

  The grey-haired steward, a slow-moving man with a long, mournful face, greeted the coroner civilly and led him inside, the bailiff vanishing somewhere behind the house. The large hall, which had a fireplace and chimney in place of a fire-pit, had doors on either side leading to extra rooms, as there was no upper floor. Knocking at one on the left, the steward stood aside and followed John into a solar, which had glass in its one window, a sign of relative affluence on the part of the owner.