Crowner Royal (Crowner John Mysteries)

by Bernard Knight

  ‘He stabbed some fellow on that landing stage – just a moment ago!’ John craned his neck to look to the left along the bank and saw that someone lay crumpled on the planks of a small pier that projected out into the river on wooden stakes. The body was perilously near the edge, one arm and a leg hanging over the swirling brown water. John pounded after Gwyn, pushing aside a couple of men as he leapt down the stairs three at a time. At the bottom, he caught up with his officer, who seemed uncertain which way to run. They could go back to the main entrance, but that was in the opposite direction from the end of the building around which they had seen the assailant disappear.

  ‘I’ll go to the front!’ yelled de Wolfe. ‘See if you can get out somewhere that way,’ pointing down the dark corridor on the ground floor. Even after a few weeks, they were still unsure of the layout of the rambling collection of buildings, other than the well-trodden path to their own chamber.

  Gwyn thundered off, his big feet slamming on the flagged floor, massive shoulders jostling people aside as he went. John, with a timid Thomas following behind, jogged out into the Palace Yard and doubled back around the Great Hall towards the river.

  ‘We’d better see how that man has fared!’ he panted, as he raced for the landing stage. It was not the main river approach to Westminster; this was further downstream, where an elaborate pier had been built for royalty and nobles visiting the abbey and palace. The one seen from their room was a much more modest structure used by many small boats, the wherries that ferried people across the Thames and down to the city.

  De Wolfe ran towards it, but he was not the first to arrive. As he hurried the last few yards, he heard a commotion ahead and saw three men clustered on the landing stage, peering over the edge. One of them wore the long tunic and round helmet of a palace guard.

  ‘He’s gone, fell off just as we got here!’ hollered the guard, pointing down at the water. The tide was now ebbing quickly and turbulent eddies swirled around the piles holding up the jetty. John looked downstream and saw a man floating face down with limbs outstretched. He was already twenty yards away and moving further away each second. The skirts of his black cassock wrapped around his legs as a sudden whirlpool in the muddy water spun the body. It submerged momentarily, then resurfaced yards away towards to the centre of the river. There was no boat anywhere near, only a couple of wherries hundreds of yards away and a distant barge moving downriver with the tide.

  For a moment, John considered diving in after the man, but he was an indifferent swimmer and the treacherous-looking vortices in the river made him hesitate. The guard, a burly man with a black beard, sensed his indecision and gripped his arm.

  ‘No point in risking yourself as well, sir! By the looks of it, he’s already a corpse!’

  He pointed down between his feet, where a wide stain of dark blood covered the boards, some of it dripping down the cracks into the river.

  ‘How came he to fall in?’ demanded the coroner. ‘I saw him from my window and he was lying just here!’

  One of the others, a fat monk in the black habit of a Benedictine, seemed in genuine anguish over what he had just witnessed. ‘As I arrived, he seemed to have a spasm and rolled over into the water!’ he wailed. ‘There was nothing I could do to save him.’

  By now, half a dozen other people had arrived, Thomas de Peyne among them. De Wolfe pulled away from the gabbling, gesticulating throng and grabbed his clerk’s arm.

  ‘Get the names of these people, so that I can question them later!’ he snapped. ‘See if any of them saw exactly what happened – I’m off to see if Gwyn has found the son of a whore who did this!’

  He jogged off, this time going down the riverbank, with the Great Hall and then St Stephen’s Chapel on his right hand. As he rounded the corner of the furthermost wing of the palace, he met his officer stamping towards him, the scowl on his face telling him that he had failed in his mission.

  ‘Those bloody passages are like a rabbit warren,’ he complained. ‘By the time I found a door out to the back of the place, the fellow had long gone.’

  ‘Did you see what he looked like?’ demanded John.

  Gwyn shook his head. ‘I saw him for barely a few seconds. He struck the man on the pier and as he fell the assailant ran like hell down the bank. He was tall and heavily built, wearing a short tunic and breeches, both brown as I recall.’

  ‘What about his face?’

  ‘He had a white linen helmet on, tied under his chin, but as he ran he held a hand against his face, so as not to be recognised.’

  The coroner glared around him in frustration, looking at the jumbled collection of buildings that made up this back end of the palace enclave. He had not been here before and saw that stables, wagon sheds, wash-houses and barracks filled the area between the rear of the palace and the boundary wall, beyond which was the confluence of the Tyburn stream with the river. There were a number of people about – soldiers, grooms, farriers, as well as women and children who lived in some of the small cottages that were dotted between the other buildings. None of them looked like the man Gwyn had described, though if he had pulled the white coif from his head, there would be nothing to mark him out.

  ‘He could have slipped into the abbey – or back into the palace before I got here,’ grunted the Cornishman. ‘Or even gone over into the village.’

  De Wolfe shrugged in disgust and turned back the way he had come. ‘Let’s go back to the landing stage and see if Thomas has squeezed anything out of those people.’

  The little clerk had no writing materials with him, but his excellent memory had catalogued half a dozen names, including the guard, three monks and a couple of Chancery clerks who had been on their way out of the palace soon after the incident had occurred. They were still there when John returned and he set about questioning them.

  ‘Does anyone know who the victim might have been?’ he demanded, scowling around at the faces before him.

  ‘It was one of the Steward’s men,’ piped up one of the clerks. ‘I glimpsed his face just before he fell into the water. I don’t know his name, but I’ve seen him around the palace.’

  ‘I think he worked in the guest hall,’ said his companion, a gangling young man whose tonsure looked strange on his bright ginger head. ‘I’ve seen him scribing at a desk in the bottler’s chamber there.’

  The monks knew nothing about anything, being visitors to the abbey from their priory in Berkshire and the guard vaguely claimed to have seen the dead man from time to time.

  ‘What about the villain who did this?’ rasped de Wolfe. ‘Did any of you get a good look at him? Any idea who he might be?’

  There were glum looks and shaking of heads all round.

  ‘I first noticed him only when he was running away,’ proclaimed the guard. ‘It was that that made me look towards this landing stage – then I saw the man lying on the boards here.’

  He gave a description that was as unhelpful as Gwyn’s, but added a small piece of information. ‘I saw a wherry a few yards off the pier, obviously going away after having landed someone. He was well beyond hailing distance by the time I got here.’

  The Thames wherries were almost as common as seagulls – flimsy craft with one oarsman, who plied their trade on a populous stretch of water, which had only one bridge, two miles downriver.

  The clerks and monks looked anxious to go about their business, so John dismissed them, warning them that they might be required to attend an inquest. Thomas quietly reminded his master that this might be difficult with no body.

  ‘Strictly speaking, sir, we don’t even know if he is dead! He might have revived and crawled out further down the riverbank.’

  Gwyn gave an explosive snort of derision. ‘Of course he’s bloody dead! Half his lifeblood is on the timbers here and then his head was sunk under this brown shit that passes for London river water!’

  De Wolfe turned to leave, telling the guard to get someone with a bucket to swill away the blood from the planks of the j
etty.

  ‘We must find someone who can tell us who the dead man was,’ he growled. ‘He might have a family to mourn him.’

  Though the victim was apparently in holy orders, most of these were in the lower grades and were not necessarily celibate like ordained priests. They were all, however, able to claim the protection of the Church through its ‘benefit of clergy’ when it came to a conflict with the secular powers.

  Thomas pattered along behind the two bigger men as they left the landing stage, the old phthisis of the hip that had afflicted him as a child giving him a slight limp. ‘How will you discover who he might be, Crowner?’ he asked. ‘This place must have a couple of hundred people living and working in it.’

  ‘Ask the damned Steward, I suppose, if those clerks reckoned he was one of his staff,’ John replied abruptly.

  They went back into the palace through the main entrance behind the Great Hall, the two helmeted sentries saluting de Wolfe as he marched towards the doorward’s chamber just inside. Here a fat clerk sat behind a table, talking to a sergeant of the guard. This was a tall man with three golden lions passant guardant, the royal arms of Richard Coeur de Lion embroidered across the chest of his long grey tunic. The soldier recognised John – in fact, he remembered him from Palestine where Black John’s prowess in the Crusade was almost legendary. As soon as the coroner had explained the problem, the sergeant insisted on personally conducting de Wolfe to the Steward’s domain and set off ahead of the trio into the bowels of the palace, which to them was uncharted territory.

  After a number of twists and turns, all on the ground floor, they came to a wide passageway, on one side of which were kitchens, full of smoke, steam, raucous voices and the clatter of pots. Opposite were storerooms, with men trundling baskets, sacks and barrels from a wide door leading to a carter’s yard at the rear.

  ‘One of the Steward’s top men lives in here, Sir John,’ declared the sergeant, going to a doorless arch between two of the stores. He waved de Wolfe inside, then excused himself and strode away. John saw a cluttered room, with two desks occupied by young clerks wrestling with lists on parchment and piles of notched wooden tallies. Between them, on a slightly raised platform, was a sloped writing desk like a lectern. Behind this stood a thin, austere-looking man of late middle age, dressed in an expensive but sombre tunic that reached down to his ankles. Unlike John’s collar-length black hair, the man’s greying thatch was shaved up to a horizontal line around his head, in the typical Norman fashion. He stared haughtily at the visitor and enquired as to his business.

  ‘I am Sir John de Wolfe, the king’s coroner,’ snapped John, who had taken an instant dislike to this man. ‘And who might you be, sir?’

  The official’s manner softened immediately – everyone in Westminster had heard of the appointment of the new Coroner of the Verge – a man high in the favour of both the Chief Justiciar and of King Richard himself.

  ‘I am Hugo de Molis, the king’s Chief Purveyor in England,’ he said with pride. ‘When the court is here at Westminster, then I offer the Steward my help in provisioning the palace.’

  This sounded to John like a roundabout way of saying that he was the assistant steward, but even so, this was a responsible task. The Steward was one of the important officers of the court and always a nobleman, so this Hugo must be at least a manor-lord. His declared appointment as Chief Purveyor would make him one of the most disliked men in England, for the purveyors were those officials who went ahead of the court when it progressed around the countryside. Their task was to ensure that food and lodging were available each night for the hundreds of men, women and animals that trundled along with the monarch and his nobles. Except where they stayed at the king’s own manors, the purveyors ruthlessly confiscated beds, food, fodder and everything else needed for the court’s sustenance. They were constantly accused of failing to pay the market price for what they took – or not paying at all. A plague of locusts could not have been more efficient in laying waste the countryside and many folk on hearing of the approach of the court, fled into the woods with as many of their possessions as they could carry. John explained what had happened during the last half-hour.

  ‘I am the court’s coroner, charged with dealing with all fatal and serious assaults within the Verge. It seems virtually certain that this man has met a violent death and I need to know who he was, so that I can begin to deal with the matter.’

  He added that two palace clerks seemed convinced that the victim was a member of the Steward’s entourage, probably working in the guest chambers.

  Hugo de Molis gripped the sides of his lectern and stared at the coroner. ‘A man in minor orders working there?’ he muttered. ‘That can only be Basil of Reigate, one of my assistants!’

  ‘We have no body to show you yet,’ said de Wolfe gravely. ‘But first I must be sure that this Basil is not alive and well. Can you see if he is at his usual post?’

  ‘I know that he is not!’ retorted the purveyor. ‘For I myself sent him this very morning across the river to pay for vegetables and to place more orders with the farms in Kennington.’

  ‘It seems he was attacked as he left a boat returning to this shore, which would tally with what you say,’ replied de Wolfe.

  ‘Was he robbed?’

  ‘As we have no body and thus no purse, we cannot tell,’ answered John irritably. ‘Would he have been carrying much money in the course of his duties?’

  Hugo de Molis shook his head. ‘If he was attacked on his way back here, then he would have already paid off the farmers. Though perhaps a robber might not be aware of that.’

  The coroner considered this for a moment – violent robbery was a common crime and seemed the most likely explanation.

  ‘Tell me about this man, Basil of Reigate. It may be that I will have to identify his body if and when it is recovered downriver. And you may be required to confirm it.’

  De Molis’s lean, humourless face showed some distaste at the prospect. ‘I am a very busy man, coroner,’ he said dismissively. ‘He was but a minor official, employed to serve the guest apartments on the upper floor.’

  ‘In what way did he serve them?’ persisted de Wolfe.

  ‘His duty was to make sure that everything necessary for the accommodation and sustenance of palace guests was available to the chamberlain’s men. They have their own cooks up there, so food and drink has to be supplied constantly. He was under my orders as to what was requisitioned from the main storerooms down here.’

  This was of little interest to de Wolfe, who had a slaying and a vanished murderer to deal with. Further questions revealed that Basil had no family in Westminster and lived in the clerk’s dormitory in the palace. The Chief Purveyor seemed more concerned at finding a replacement for the dead man than in regretting his death, but he agreed to report the matter to the Keeper of the Palace, Nicholas de Levelondes, who was ultimately in charge of the staff who saw to the running of the establishment. He also grudgingly agreed to send one of his young clerks up to the guest chambers to make certain that Basil of Reigate was not sitting there alive and well.

  ‘What do we do now?’ asked Gwyn, as they began retracing their steps through the warren that was the ground floor.

  ‘Wait until we hear of a body being washed up on the mud somewhere,’ muttered John somewhat heartlessly. ‘Thomas was right, without a corpse I have no jurisdiction.’

  ‘Are you going to report this to Hubert Walter?’

  De Wolfe shook his head. ‘He’ll not want to hear of the killing of some obscure clerk, especially as the most likely explanation is a violent robbery.’

  ‘What happens if we catch the villain who did it?’ persisted Gwyn. Things were so different here from the straightforward routines that he was used to in Devonshire.

  John thrust his fingers through the thick black hair that swept back from his forehead. ‘God knows we have enough judges in this place – there’s three sitting almost every day on the King’s Bench in the Great Hall.
I suppose Thomas will write up the details on his rolls as usual and we present the case to the justices, just as if it was an Eyre coming to Exeter.’

  They reached the bottom of their staircase, familiar territory at last and began to climb to their chamber.

  ‘But what about the abbot’s jurisdiction here?’ asked Thomas, always mindful of the rights of his beloved Church. ‘He holds the Liberty of Westminster, which includes the abbey, the village and the palace itself. I hear from my clerical colleagues that William Postard is most jealous of his powers, worse than many a manor-lord. In fact, he is also lord of several manors in the vicinity, which he rules with an iron hand!’

  Gwyn, ever cynical about anything ecclesiastical, added his pennyworth as they reached the upper corridor. ‘If he’s anything like the Abbot of Tavistock, he’ll have his own gallows tucked away somewhere – unless he uses that one you spoke of at Tyburn.’

  It was true that some of the more powerful churchmen were equally as despotic as barons and earls – and many were more concerned with their estates, politics and even warfare as with the cure of souls and the propagation of the Faith. Hubert Walter himself was not only Archbishop of Canterbury, but was also the Chief Justiciar and had been at the king’s right hand during the later battles of the last Crusade. It would not surprise de Wolfe if Abbot William Postard also exercised the power of life and death in his little realm of Westminster.

  CHAPTER TWO

  In which Crowner John disagrees with a sheriff

  Although the coroner feared that the missing corpse might be carried downriver and be lost for ever at sea, it did not in fact travel very far from Westminster.

  The Thames was flowing sluggishly after several weeks of dry weather and the neap summer tides were low. By next morning, the dead man’s cassock had snagged on a partly submerged tree stump in the shallows, just past the outflow of the Holbourn or Fleet stream on the northern bank, where the city wall ended.