A Wicked Deed mb-5

by Susanna GREGORY

‘It is more than a pair,’ said Michael, straining his eyes as he peered through the shadowy trees. ‘It is a flock!’

  He stepped out of the trees and headed toward the animals, making flapping movements with his hands as he tried to drive them away. But Bartholomew saw that the cats were not the only things moving in the dark.

  ‘Michael! Behind you!’

  His yell of warning came just in time. Michael spun round, and was just able to duck the savage blow from the spade that was aimed at his head. Another figure emerged from the darkness and struck out, sending Michael tumbling into the long grass. With a howl of anger, Bartholomew raced to the aid of his friend, bowling into the second attacker with such force that he sent him clean over the wall of the churchyard. Then there was a scraping noise to his left, a sound that Bartholomew had heard enough times to recognise as that of a sword being drawn from a leather scabbard.

  A weapon whistled through the air, so close that Bartholomew felt it sever some hairs on the top of his head. Meanwhile, Michael had seized the spade, and wielded it like a staff until an expert slash by the sword broke the wooden handle in two. Horrified, the monk backed away, bumping into a third man, and knocking him to the ground. The attacker Bartholomew had propelled over the wall was climbing back again, to rejoin the affray.

  Knowing he and Michael would stand little chance against three men, one of whom was armed with a sword, Bartholomew groped in his medicine bag, fingers fumbling for his surgical knife. He could not find it. Instead, his shaking fingers encountered something small, but heavy: it was Deblunville’s cramp ring. He drew it out, and hurled it as hard as he could, hearing it strike the swordsman’s face with a sickening crack. Without waiting to see the result, he leapt forward and dived at him, hoping to knock the sword from his hand.

  They rolled over in the wet grass, Bartholomew struggling to prevent his opponent from using his weapon, his opponent trying to batter him with the hilt to force him to let go. He was stronger than Bartholomew had anticipated, and the physician sensed that the instant the man freed his sweaty wrist, the pommel of the sword would crash on to his head, and that would be that. With increasing desperation, Bartholomew concentrated on keeping his fingers tightly wrapped around the swordsman’s arm, but the skin was clammy, and slid inexorably out of Bartholomew’s grasp. And then suddenly, it was free. Bartholomew closed his eyes as the weapon glinted above his head, and then opened them again as a dreadful scream tore through the air.

  There was a gasp of fright, followed by the sound of running footsteps. All at once, Michael’s burly silhouette was looming above him, while behind, Cynric crouched, looking this way and that in the dark like a hunting animal. Of the swordsman, there was no sign.

  ‘What happened? What was the dreadful yowl? Was it Padfoot?’ Bartholomew sat up quickly, peering into the shadows to see if the white dog was there, biding its time for another attack.

  ‘Something just as terrifying,’ said Michael unsteadily, brushing leaves and wet grass from his habit. ‘A good Welsh battle-cry.’ He rubbed a shaking hand across his face. ‘That was a close call, Matt! If Cynric had screeched a fraction of a moment later, we would be dead.’

  Shyly, Cynric smiled. ‘Perhaps I should have screamed to terrify Padfoot last week,’ he said.

  ‘But what are you doing here, Cynric?’ asked Bartholomew. ‘You are supposed to be asleep.’

  ‘Old Cynric does not sleep when there is fighting to be done,’ said Cynric reproachfully. ‘Do you think I would leave you to do all this alone? I followed you from Wergen Hall, and saw those men in the graveyard long before you realised they were there.’

  ‘A word of warning would not have gone amiss,’ said Bartholomew curtly. ‘We would not have disturbed them had we known they were so heavily armed.’

  ‘You went after them before I could stop you,’ objected Cynric. ‘You always are incautious. How many times have I told you not to attack without first assessing what you are attacking?’

  ‘We should not sit here chatting while these men escape,’ said Bartholomew. ‘We should catch them before they do any more mischief.’

  ‘They are long gone,’ said Cynric. ‘I would go after them, but my bow is useless, and only a fool chases his enemy with only half his weapons.’

  ‘What happened to it?’ asked Michael. ‘I suppose it was damaged by that potion Eltisley made?’

  Cynric grimaced. ‘Snapped my string clean in two the last time I tried to use it.’

  ‘Do you know who those men were?’ asked Bartholomew, climbing to his feet and looking around him uneasily. ‘Did you recognise any of them?’

  ‘I saw nothing but shadows lurching and weaving all around me,’ said Michael. ‘Did you see anything?’ He sounded disappointed.

  ‘Not really,’ said Bartholomew, ‘but one of them was an expert swordsman. That should narrow down our list of suspects.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Michael.

  ‘How many people in villages are trained to use swords?’

  ‘Lots, Matt — we are officially at war with France. Lords of the manor are obliged by law to train villagers in the use of weapons, lest the King should need them as soldiers.’

  ‘But this man used a sword with some skill, not like a country bumpkin with a stave.’

  ‘You are no judge of such things,’ said Cynric rudely. ‘He was not so skilled, or he would have dispatched you with ease, and not allowed you to jump all over him as he did.’

  ‘Would you believe that one of those louts had the audacity to hit me with the spade he had been using to excavate Unwin’s grave?’ said Michael, indignantly.

  ‘Is that what were they doing?’ asked Bartholomew, repelled. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘See for yourself,’ said Michael. There was a scrape of tinder, and light from a candle cast a dim circle around them. Something glinted in the grass, and Cynric stooped to retrieve it. It was the coffin ring.

  ‘You would not want to lose that,’ he said, handing it back to Bartholomew.

  Unwin’s grave was partly uncovered. The earth had been carefully piled to one side, almost as if the culprits were intending to fill it in again. Bartholomew took the candle and looked more closely, leaning into the shallow hole to brush away some of the soil.

  ‘They were not digging up Unwin, Brother,’ he said, looking at the fat monk in dismay. ‘They were providing him with a little company. Because here is Norys — your absconded pardoner.’

  Chapter 11

  In the gloom of the church, partly illuminated by five tallow candles, Bartholomew leaned over Norys’s body and began his examination. The parish coffin was already in use for what remained of Alcote, so Norys was relegated to a table borrowed from Walter Wauncy’s kitchen — for a price. Horsey watched in horror as yet another body was laid out in the chancel, and Bartholomew sent him back to Wergen Hall with Cynric, who was also to inform Tuddenham that Norys had been found.

  From the state of the corpse, Bartholomew judged that Norys had been dead for days, perhaps even since the Wednesday when he had last been seen. Whether Norys had first travelled to Ipswich, and then returned to visit Mistress Freeman and secure his alibi, was impossible to tell. Norys might have died on the Wednesday, but he might equally well have died a day or two later. The body smelled powerfully of decay, and gas swelled the stomach under the mud-stained clothes.

  ‘His lips,’ said Michael with a shudder. ‘They are green.’

  Bartholomew studied them closely. ‘How curious. Perhaps it is something to do with where the body has been kept hidden all this time.’

  ‘You mean in Unwin’s grave?’

  ‘No — he is too clean to have been buried there for long. It looks to me as though he has been stored somewhere, until he could be disposed of permanently.’

  ‘I expect he killed Unwin and Mistress Freeman, and then dispatched himself in a fit of remorse,’ said Michael, looking down at the remains dispassionately.

  ‘I expect so,’ said Bartholome
w. ‘Then he hired those three louts to bury him several days later, in the churchyard on top of one of his victims.’

  ‘How did he die? Can you tell?’ asked Michael, ignoring Bartholomew’s facetiousness.

  Bartholomew shook his head. ‘There is no wound that I can see. He was not hanged, stabbed, strangled or hit over the head.’

  ‘Poisoned?’ asked Michael. ‘A coward such as Norys might well prefer poison as a painless way to launch himself down to the fires and brimstone of hell.’

  ‘You sound like William,’ said Bartholomew. ‘And you should not jump to conclusions. Norys may not have killed himself at all — someone else may have done it.’

  ‘How?’ demanded Michael. ‘You say there are no wounds, and he looks as though he may have died in his sleep.’

  Bartholomew prised open Norys’s mouth, and peered inside. ‘Hold the candle closer,’ he instructed. ‘I cannot see.’

  Michael looked away in revulsion as Bartholomew leaned towards the dead man’s mouth. When the physician put his fingers inside it and began to feel around, Michael felt sick.

  ‘Look at this,’ said Bartholomew, sounding interested.

  ‘No,’ said Michael, studiously staring in the opposite direction. ‘I do not want to see whatever it is. You can just tell me about it.’

  ‘It is a piece of food that was trapped between his teeth,’ said Bartholomew. Michael looked round in surprise, and saw a fairly large strand of something yellowish between the physician’s fingers. Michael turned away quickly, feeling his gorge rise.

  ‘So?’ he asked, trying to dispel the image from his mind.

  ‘I cannot be certain — it is too mangled and decayed — but it looks and smells like shellfish.’

  Michael dropped the candle and charged outside. When Bartholomew found him, he was sitting on the wall of the churchyard looking off into the silent night.

  ‘What is the matter with you? You are not so squeamish when you demand that I examine bodies in Cambridge.’

  ‘That is not true,’ said Michael unsteadily. ‘I find the whole business repellent wherever we happen to be. But fishing bits of half-eaten food from the mouth of a rotting corpse is an impressively revolting thing to do, even for you.’

  ‘But you realise what this means?’ asked Bartholomew, holding the fragment of food up in the darkness. ‘If this is indeed shellfish, it implies that Norys enjoyed a meal of mussels with Mistress Freeman before she died — before they died.’

  ‘That sounds a little far-fetched,’ objected Michael.

  ‘It isn’t, Brother,’ said Bartholomew, certain facts coming together in his mind. ‘I told you at the time that I thought Mistress Freeman might have died because she ate tainted mussels — I could smell vomit in her mouth, and I suggested that someone came after she was dead and cut her throat. Now we have Will Norys, dead from no obvious cause, but there is a strand of what looks to be mussel in his mouth. And then there was the dead cat in her garden.’

  ‘I do not see the point you are trying to make,’ said Michael irritably.

  ‘The point is that Norys and Mistress Freeman ate mussels together, and that Norys had brought one of his cats — or, more likely, the cat followed him there. He gave it some, as owners of much-loved animals are wont to do — and so the cat died, too.’

  ‘So?’ asked Michael after a moment. ‘This tells us nothing that we had not already considered.’

  ‘It does,’ said Bartholomew. ‘It tells us that Mistress Freeman probably did not commit suicide, and that Norys probably did not kill her.’

  ‘How in God’s name do you deduce that?’ asked Michael tiredly.

  ‘If Mistress Freeman had planned to poison herself with bad shellfish, she would not have given any to Norys. And if Norys had wanted to kill her with them, he would not have eaten any himself or given them to his pet.’

  Michael shook his head. ‘He may have brought the shellfish as a means to inveigle his way into her house. He may have planned to kill her after they had eaten — if his transparent attempts to ingratiate himself and force her to lie for him about his alibi failed.’

  ‘In that case, Mistress Freeman, Norys and the cat ate the mussels unaware that they were tainted, and all three died in or near the house. The only logical conclusion from this is that someone else found them before you ever discovered Mistress Freeman’s body, and tried to make her death appear as murder. This same person must therefore have removed Norys, intending to dispose of him later in a place he would never be found — namely Unwin’s grave. And finally, this person must have put the bloodstained clothes and Unwin’s empty purse on Norys’s roof, knowing that you would find them there and be convinced that it was Norys who killed Unwin.’

  ‘I see,’ said Michael flatly. ‘And who might this cunning someone be?’

  ‘It could be Eltisley,’ said Bartholomew. ‘Perhaps his murder of Alcote yesterday made him realise that he needed to destroy the evidence of his other crimes, and so forced him to dispose of Norys’s corpse quickly. What better hiding place than in the tomb of the man Norys is accused of killing?’

  ‘I do not think so, Matt. We have evidence that Norys killed Unwin and Mistress Freeman; we have nothing but your nasty accusations to show that Eltisley has killed anyone. And do not forget what Dame Eva said — Eltisley could not possibly have left his tavern during the Fair to harm Unwin, because there were people demanding ale and he would have been missed instantly. Perhaps the killer is someone we have not yet considered.’

  ‘I suppose Deblunville might have killed Unwin to embarrass Tuddenham,’ said Bartholomew, reluctantly trying to generate alternatives. ‘The rumour about him killing his first wife seems to have had some truth, so murder was not wholly foreign to him. But Deblunville died yesterday, and so could not have been burying Norys tonight.’

  ‘Hamon?’ suggested Michael with a shrug. ‘You said that whoever attacked us was proficient with a sword, and he is a lout.’

  Bartholomew nodded slowly. ‘He has a motive: the prevailing opinion is that Norys is Unwin’s killer, and as long as Norys remains at large, Michaelhouse will decline to send another of its members to Grundisburgh like a lamb to the slaughter, and Hamon can therefore select his own priest when he inherits the estate from his uncle.’

  ‘Tuddenham will live for years yet,’ said Michael dismissively. ‘And once Isilia’s child is born, it will inherit the estates, not Hamon.’

  But Bartholomew knew very well that Tuddenham would be cold in his grave long before Isilia’s child made its appearance, and that if it were a girl, Hamon would inherit anyway. If it were a boy, Hamon would run the estates until the child was old enough to manage them himself — if he lived that long and if Hamon did not find some way to wrest them away from him in the meantime.

  Michael sighed. ‘It could equally well be Bardolf or Grosnold. None of these lords seem to like each other much. And there is the curious fact of Eltisley seeing Grosnold holding Unwin by the arm shortly before he died.’

  ‘Eltisley says he saw Grosnold with Unwin,’ said Bartholomew. ‘But who is to say he is not lying about that in order to throw us off his own track?’

  ‘True. But remember what Bardolf said about his fellow lords — that any of them might kill a priest who tried to promote peaceful relations when each has so much to lose. What a muddle!’

  Bartholomew stood and stretched, looking at the sliver of mussel he still held. He walked to the stream that trickled across the village green, and bent down to release it into the persistent tug of the current, watching as it was swept away into the darkness.

  When he returned, Michael was still sitting on the churchyard wall waiting for someone from Tuddenham’s household to come and view Norys’s body. The monk’s head was tipped back, and he was gazing up at the glitter of stars in the black night sky, and at the wispy silver clouds that floated across the face of the moon.

  ‘You know, Matt, we should review what we have learned, just to see if we can
reason some sense from it.’

  ‘Must we?’ asked Bartholomew, sitting next to him. ‘I am heartily sick of all this.’

  ‘So am I,’ said Michael. ‘But we cannot leave later today unless we are certain that we know who killed Unwin. The Master would never forgive me if I had not done all I could to catch whoever killed Michaelhouse’s best student. So, first we had the hanged man at Bond’s Corner, clearly murdered and found half-burned in a shepherd’s hut. We have no idea who he is, or who killed him and why, although we know he was wearing clothes stolen from Deblunville by Janelle.’

  ‘No, Brother. First came Alice Quy and James Freemen, both dead in odd circumstances after claiming to have seen Padfoot. Second, we have the hanged man. Third, we have Unwin, stabbed — and his purse stolen, only to appear on Norys’s roof minus its relic.’

  ‘And we have two different descriptions of someone fleeing the church after his murder, and we have Grosnold seen talking surreptitiously with him just before his death. I remain certain Norys is responsible; you cannot see reason and are inclined to think the culprit was someone else.’

  Bartholomew sighed. ‘Fourth, we have Mistress Freeman, dying in her home because she ate tainted mussels — perhaps alone, but probably with Norys and his cat — and then the throat of her corpse slit because someone wanted her death to appear like murder. We do not know why, although it seems to me that someone wants us to believe that Norys murdered her because she declined to provide him with an alibi for Unwin’s death.’

  ‘Deblunville was fifth,’ said Michael. ‘He died of a wound to his head, which may or may not have been inflicted when he slipped on wet grass. But if someone did kill him, I doubt we will ever know who, given that you say half the county was out that night, looking for golden calves.’

  ‘Alcote was sixth,’ said Bartholomew. ‘Killed by the explosion that destroyed Eltisley’s tavern. I think it was deliberate; you believe it was an accident. And now seventh, we have Norys. Still, at least we know he did not kill Deblunville or Alcote — he was already dead by then.’