The Sticklepath Strangler (2001)

by Jecks, Michael

  ‘Will, you wouldn’t hide something from me, would you?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Someone tells me you’ve been putting up a man I know – Ivo Bel.’

  ‘Of course. He’s been here a few days. So?’

  Thomas wanted to reach up and grab Will’s tunic, yank him down and beat his face into the wood of his table. ‘I wanted to be told if he arrived here.’

  ‘Tom, whatever there is between you two, it’s nothing to do with me. I run an inn and I’ll offer rooms to any traveller.’

  ‘That’s an end to it, is it?’ Thomas said, feeling the anger coursing through his body. ‘Do you want me to make it your problem?’

  The innkeeper sighed. ‘If you do, you’ll only make life difficult for yourself, Tom Garde. You’ll have the Reeve on your back.’

  ‘The Reeve, my arse! It’s got nothing to do with him.’

  ‘Alexander came by today, before going to Samson’s inquest, and asked me to let Ivo stay on. So if you’re not happy about it, you speak to him.’

  ‘You could have told him to go to the inn at South Zeal, you bastard. You could have told me he was here, you could have warned me and my wife, couldn’t you?’

  ‘Tom, let go of my hand.’ His voice was cold, and Thomas immediately released him. None of this was the innkeeper’s fault.

  Thomas sipped his ale. ‘This inquest – what good is it doing? How can anyone hope to find what happened to Aline after so many years?’

  ‘God knows. You were here when she disappeared, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yes. We came here just after the famine, about the same time Peter’s daughter was killed. Terrible business, that. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.’

  ‘No,’ the taverner agreed.

  ‘And now Ivo is here again, curse him,’ Thomas sighed.

  ‘Yeah, well. You leave him be. He’ll soon push off. What’s the point of punching him and getting a fine? If you’re that keen to lose money, give it to me. At least I’ll spend it wisely, which is more than I can say for some around here.’

  Thomas managed a wry grin, and by the time he was halfway through his drink, his mood had improved to the extent that he could chuckle at some of the taverner’s sallies.

  ‘All right, Will, I’ll leave him for now, but you tell him that if I find him anywhere near my wife, I’ll kick his teeth so far down his throat, he’ll have to stick his food up his arse to chew on it.’

  Nicole’s words haunted Simon for the rest of the day, and it was with relief that he saw the last of the drinkers leave the inn so that he, Baldwin and Coroner Roger could settle down to sleep.

  ‘You’re quiet, Simon,’ Baldwin yawned.

  ‘Yes, well, there’s been a lot to absorb today,’ Simon said.

  ‘Too many corpses,’ Coroner Roger grunted in agreement.

  ‘You spoke to Houndestail?’ Simon asked. He had forgotten in the emotion of Samson’s inquest.

  ‘Yes. For a fee he agreed to go back to Exeter, the tight-fisted, thieving son of a moorland horse-dealer! Still, it will be good to see whether there was any record of the Purveyor’s death.’

  ‘Tomorrow I suppose the funerals will go ahead?’ Baldwin asked.

  ‘Yes, the miller’s and the girl’s bones.’ Sir Roger sighed heavily. ‘Mind, with that priest, it’s a gamble. I hope he does not get them confused. He was so drunk today it’s a miracle he could remember his Offices.’

  ‘What did you think of the story about vampires?’ Simon asked reluctantly.

  ‘It was nonsense!’ Baldwin stated bluntly. ‘Purest nonsense. A story to scare a child.’

  ‘But your friend, the man who wrote that book . . .’

  ‘William of Newburgh died over a hundred years ago.’

  ‘So how did the folk here know of such things? Why should men mention them?’

  ‘Simon, are you really asking me to guess at the workings of the minds of the local peasants? Dear Heaven, just go to sleep.’

  Coroner Roger chuckled quietly. ‘If you will tell these stories, Keeper, what do you expect? Simon is concerned that someone might come and cut out his liver tonight.’

  As he spoke, a mournful howl shivered on the wind, then a second.

  ‘What the devil?’ Roger demanded. ‘Wolves?’

  Simon explained, ‘I think it’s the miller’s hounds. They started earlier on.’

  ‘Wonderful! At least he’ll soon be in the ground and out of the way!’ Roger said unsympathetically, rolled over, and was soon snoring.

  ‘Baldwin?’ Simon asked a few moments later, but Baldwin was either asleep or pretending to be. He had turned the cold shoulder to Simon, and the Bailiff was left staring up at the ceiling, starting at every creak and groan of the building. No matter how he tried to stop thinking of vampires, in his mind’s eye he could see the cemetery fringed with its pollarded trees, and figures moving among them.

  Next morning, after Mass, Simon joined the funeral parties at the graves of the miller and Aline; a doleful pair of ceremonies, but that of the girl’s bones was strangely touching. Her father Swetricus was there, with his three other daughters, aged from twelve up to sixteen years old, all weeping unaffectedly. The girl had been dead these four years past, and yet from looking at her sisters, Simon thought, one could believe that she had died only days before.

  The ceremony at Samson’s graveside was not improved by the behaviour of the priest, who was already drunk at this early hour of the morning. His voice was a low mumble, his hands shook as though he had the ague, and Simon felt disgusted that he could so demean the service. Matters were not helped by the steady howling of Samson’s dogs; nor by the sudden shriek as they all approached Samson’s grave.

  ‘No, no! I won’t have him put in his grave without a coffin. He must be done properly!’

  Simon turned to see Gunilda, Samson’s wife, their daughter beside her.

  ‘There’s no time to build a coffin, mistress,’ one man said. There was a hint of exasperation in his voice, from which Simon guessed that she, like her husband, was not very popular in the vill.

  Still, they humoured her. Two men went off to the mill, and soon returned with some long timbers.

  ‘We can put him under this. That will have to do.’

  She sniffed, then sobbed again, her daughter wailing at her side, and the grave was dug with the howling of the hounds throbbing in the background.

  Simon watched as a rough board was fashioned from the timbers, two men lashing them together with thongs, and then the funeral continued, the priest looking annoyed that it had taken so long to get things done. When the men were finished, the priest moved to the head of the corpse and swayed gently as he sprinkled it with holy water from a sprig of hyssop. Simon recalled that the ceremony came from Psalm 51, which said, ‘Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.’ As usual there were the solemn Latin phrases, but Simon was sure that the priest missed out a few words. He wasn’t certain, because it was some time since he had learned Latin, and weeks since he last attended a funeral, but one thing he did know – the priest, in his hurry to get away, was rattling through the service faster than he should.

  The body was wrapped in a winding-sheet which was brown and stained, as though it had already lain some months in a grave. At the head Simon could see the blood still leaking from the scalp wound.

  Simon felt sad on behalf of the dead man. To his eye it was disrespectful to put the miller in his grave in this way: hastily, without preparation, wrapped in a soiled shroud, the priest drunk. He watched sombrely as men picked up the corpse and set it down in the grave. One of them placed some large rocks at either side of Samson for the lid to rest on. He may not have a proper coffin, but at least his body wouldn’t be crushed. He would have some dignity in death. The boards were passed down and set over the body and then, while the priest intoned more doggerel and flailed about with his sprig, dashing water into the grave but over many of the congregation as well
, the two men began to shovel soil back into the hole.

  It was a grim scene, made still more bleak and unpleasant by the cross in the middle of the cemetery, which appeared to have chosen this moment to droop. The cross arm had slipped from the horizontal, and as Simon looked at it, he could see that the wood was rotted by the wind and rain which lashed at the vill.

  He felt a sudden unpleasant sensation. The sight was one of utter melancholy, and seeing the men up to their shins in wet soil, women wailing, the priest quivering and looking ready to puke, the crooked cross standing out above them all, Simon felt a trickle of ice run down his spine. He shivered, filled with foreboding.

  Somehow he felt sure that this was not an end, that even the formal inquest tomorrow would not bring his visit to Sticklepath to a close, and depression overwhelmed him.

  The party at the side of the grave watched as the diggers finished their work and stood back, one of them with his shovel over his shoulder, the other leaning on his. The two wailing women covered their faces. Slowly, in dribs and drabs, the crowd began to move away, only a few remaining to console the widow and daughter. Soon even this last remnant started to make their way to the mill, whose wheel could still be heard rumbling like far-distant thunder.

  That last picture would remain with him: the mourners helping each other through the mud towards the machine which had caused their loss. And that sound of thunder grumbling far away.

  Drogo yawned, leaned against the oak and scratched at his ear. There was a bite there from the midges last night, and it itched like the devil.

  He was tired, so very tired. The long sleepless nights, the constant fear that the Coroner might notice something amiss – all had taken their toll. All those children. Denise, Aline, and Mary, the disobedient little brats.

  Leaving the tree, he slumped down and picked up his skin. It was made from a kid goat, stitched into the form of an animal, and it held a few pints of water, enough to permit a man to survive even if he got lost out on the moors. Not that Drogo was worried about survival.

  He had often thought about death but never before had it seemed so appealing. Now he looked upon it as a long rest. There had been times, especially during the famine, when he had done everything he could to survive, but what was the point? His woman was dead, and with her, all love had shrivelled. There was nothing left for anyone else. He had once had a daughter, but she was dead now, and all he felt for other men was an intense, burning jealousy that they should still have what he missed so badly, so desperately. The death of his little Isabelle was a terrible agony, and he couldn’t do a thing about it. While he lived, that pain would be there.

  He hated the others, men whose daughters were still alive. Sweet, pretty things, who could cuddle up to their father, snuggle beneath the blankets on a cold winter’s evening. None of them truly understood. All thought they did, but none of them could.

  Staring out over the bleak wasteland that was the valley from Cosdon to Steeperton, over the Taw Marsh, he felt his face twist once more into his habitual grimace. Now he only had his son. He couldn’t lose him too. He wouldn’t.

  But questioning from strong men like the Coroner could scare people, especially feeble cretins like the Parson. He was terrified, a drunk, because he had led the vill to murder Athelhard. If he hadn’t told them Meg’s story, they wouldn’t have killed her brother.

  Drogo sniffed, sipped more water, then shouldered his skin. He must speak to that moron Gervase, and the sooner the better, before he could blab to anyone.

  After the funeral Simon walked up the steep pathway to the hole in the wall where the skull had been found, and stared at it for a few moments, peering inside. Now that Aline’s body had been removed, he could see that there were still scraps of material, some red, some brown-stained, some almost black, lying on the floor of the grave.

  It was a nasty, mean little hole in which to secrete a poor young girl. How someone could seek to end a life was incomprehensible, but then to stuff the child’s body into this grave was another act of cruelty that Simon could never hope to understand.

  Another short life ended unnecessarily. Only one day in this place and already he had learned of five deaths, if he included the Purveyor’s, Samson’s he had been close enough almost to witness, the poor fellow. The idea of being mashed up in his machine was somehow repulsive, almost an act of betrayal. There was something obscene about a machine which was designed to serve men crushing the life from one of them.

  Looking up, he realised that it was almost midday. No wonder his belly felt empty. Glad to be leaving the road, he bent his steps towards the inn. He found Baldwin sitting with his wife on a bench.

  ‘Simon, sit with us and drink to the warm weather!’ Baldwin exclaimed, bellowing for ale.

  ‘It’s good to feel the sun on your face again, isn’t it?’ Simon agreed.

  ‘Where have you been? Sir Roger and I went to question the peasants to find out whether any of them remembered the Purveyor, or whether they could shed light on this girl Denise’s death. We looked for you, but you had gone.’

  ‘I went to watch the funerals, then looked at the hole again.’ He frowned. ‘There are scraps of cloth still in there. Some looked different from her winding-sheet.’

  ‘Oh?’ Baldwin was interested. That was something he had missed. ‘The Coroner’s gone to speak to people in South Zeal to see whether they know anything of the Purveyor, so I doubt we’ll see him again today.’

  ‘I assume you learned nothing new?’

  ‘If we wish to find out anything, it must be without the help of the local population.’ Baldwin grimaced. ‘There seems to be nothing that any of them can tell us.’

  ‘If Houndestail is right about the Purveyor dying, that would explain them keeping quiet,’ Simon said. He recalled his conversation with the two girls. ‘There is one who might know something: the Warrener, Serlo. He lives up on the moor, according to the girl Joan.’

  The innkeeper arrived as he spoke, depositing a large jug of ale before him, and Simon asked him, ‘Where does Serlo Warrener live?’

  ‘Up on the side of the moor behind the vill,’ William said. ‘But it’s a good climb up the hill.’

  ‘We can manage, I am sure,’ Simon said.

  ‘Tell me, Taverner,’ Baldwin said. ‘What do you know of vampires?’

  ‘Me?’ The man shook his head vigorously. ‘Nothing! I don’t know nothing about them. You ask the others about them.’

  He hurried away, and Baldwin smiled at Simon. ‘Everyone is so helpful here,’ he murmured. ‘What would he say were I to ask about the curse, do you think?’

  Soon they were on their way. Baldwin had patiently listened to his wife’s protestations as she pointed out that he should be resting, but then he politely overruled her and called to Aylmer.

  ‘Jeanne will fret,’ he said, with the nearest to impatience Simon had ever heard in his voice when discussing his wife. ‘She has this ridiculous fear that the moors are dangerous for me.’

  ‘You are sure that they are not?’

  ‘Not you as well, Simon!’ Baldwin exclaimed.

  Baldwin and Simon crossed the pasture behind the tavern and forded the river, then followed the riverbank on an old trackway among tall trees. After a half mile, they were out of the woods and their left flank was bounded by ferns and furze. They saw the path of which the innkeeper had spoken. Here they turned off and began to climb, a steep ascent at the side of a stream.

  They walked in companionable silence for a while, and then Simon said, ‘Women can sometimes be right when they fear for their man’s safety.’

  ‘Superstition!’ Baldwin spat. ‘It is all about us here. The people fear vampires or the discovery of a Purveyor, and at least the second is likely. The taxes which Roger will impose on them all will be enormous, let alone the punishment to be meted out to the killers.’

  They had reached the top of the slope and it now became shallower. Baldwin stood and rested his hands on his hips, starin
g back.

  Behind them the vill was concealed by the curve of the hill. There was a constant noise of water, but over all there was the whistle of wind in their ears. ‘Look at all this,’ Baldwin said, flinging an arm in the general direction of the scene. ‘Beautiful! Clean, unsullied land, ready to be farmed and improved by men. This is the fourteenth century since the birth of Christ, and Jeanne and you would have me believe in some spirit of the moor that seeks my death! Ludicrous!’

  ‘There is something here.’

  ‘From the time that the first people came here,’ Baldwin said, ‘when Brutus escaped from Troy and defeated the giants who lived here, the moors have been Christian.’

  ‘I know my history too, Baldwin. But if that is so, what of the vampires?’

  ‘Stories to scare children.’

  ‘They seem to have upset several people here. Could it have caused the strange atmosphere?’

  ‘Fools, the lot of them. Vampires, indeed!’

  ‘It was you who told me of them,’ Simon pointed out.

  ‘Yes, well.’ Baldwin was reluctant to confess that it was a joke which had turned sour. He said lamely, ‘I thought you would be interested, that was all.’

  They had reached a thin track, little more than a sheep’s path, and turned along it. The ground was soon boggy, and their boots grew stained from the peat-laden soil as they marched along a stretch which passed through a series of streams, each glinting and sparkling in the sunlight. Aylmer chased after a rabbit, exulting in his freedom and the space.

  ‘Look at it, Simon! How could anyone think that this place was in any way cursed?’

  ‘You are seeing it on a clear bright day, Baldwin. I’ve been on the moors in rain and snow. It gives you a different perspective.’

  ‘Perhaps. Look! That must be the place,’ Baldwin said, pointing to the long, low shape of the warren and the circular hut beyond.

  They trudged on, but suddenly a cloud passed over the sun and blotted out the light. In an instant, the pretty streams became dull lead, the air was chilled, and Simon felt a shiver rack his frame. Baldwin said nothing, but Simon wondered whether the spirit of the moors had been offended by his levity.