The Holy Thief

by Ellis Peters

  When they left their stalls at the end of Lauds, and approached the night stairs to return to their beds, a slight, habited figure arose from its knees to confront them, stepping into what light there was very gingerly, but with resigned resolution, like one expecting a bleak welcome, but braced to endure and survive it. Tutilo’s habit shimmered about the shoulders with the soft and soundless rain of spring, which had begun to fall in mid-evening, his curls were damp and ruffled, and the hand he passed across his forehead to brush them back left a dark smear behind. His eyes were wide and peering from within a blank shell of shock and his face, where his hand had not soiled it, was very pale.

  At sight of him Herluin started forward from Prior Robert’s side with a sharp explosive sound of exasperation, anger and bewilderment, but before he could recover his breath and pour out the fiery reproaches he undoubtedly intended to vent, Tutilo had found words, few and trenchant, to forestall all other utterance.

  “Father, I grieve to come so late, but I had no choice. It was vital I should go first into the town, to the castle, where such news first belongs, and so I did. Father, on my way back, on the path from the ferry and through the wood, I found a dead man. Murdered… Father,” he said, showing the hand that had soiled his brow, “I speak what I know, what was plain even in the pitch dark. I touched him… his head is pulp!”

  Chapter Six

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  When he saw his hands in the light he flinched, and held them away from him, to avoid letting them touch any other part of his person or habit, for the right was engrained with drying blood across the palm and between the fingers, and the fingers of the left were dabbled at the tips, as if they had felt at stained clothing. He would not or could not elaborate on his news until he had washed, twisting hand within hand as though he would scrub off his own defiled skin along with the blood. When at last he was private in the abbot’s parlor with Radulfus, Prior Robert, Herluin, and Brother Cadfael, whose presence Tutilo himself had requested, he launched upon his story baldly enough.

  “I was coming back by the path from the ferry, through the woodland, and where the trees are thickest I stumbled over him. He was lying with his legs across the path, and I fell on my knees beside him. It was pitch dark, but a man could follow the path by the pale line of sky between the branches. But on the ground nothing but blackness. But I felt down beside me, and I knew the round of a knee, and cloth. I thought he was drunk, but he never made sound or move. I felt up from thigh to hip, and leaned close where I judged his face to be, but never a breath or a sign of life. God help me, I put my hand on the ruin of his head, and then I knew he was dead. And not by any accident! I felt the splintered bone.”

  “Could you by any means guess who this man must be?” asked the abbot, his voice level and gentle.

  “No, Father. It was too dark by far. There was no way of knowing, without torch or lantern. And I was knocked clean out of my right wits at first. But then I thought how this was the sheriff’s business, and how the Church is held innocent and apart from all dealings in cases of blood. So I went on into the town, and told them at the castle, and the lord Beringar has set a guard on the place now until daylight. What I could tell I have told, and the rest must wait for the light. And, Father, he asked—the lord sheriff asked—that I should beg you to have Brother Cadfael informed also, and when the morning comes, if you permit, I am to lead him to the place, to meet the sheriff there. It is why I asked that he might attend here. And I will willingly show the place tomorrow, and if he has any question to ask me now, I will answer as well as I may. For he said—Hugh Beringar said—that Brother Cadfael understands wounds, having been many years a man-at-arms.”

  He had run himself out of breath and almost out of effort by then, but heaved a great sigh at having got the load from his shoulders.

  “If the place is guarded,” said Cadfael, meeting the abbot’s questioning eye, “whatever it has to tell us can safely be left until daylight. I think perhaps we should not speculate beforehand. It might be all too easy to take a wrong path. I would ask only, Tutilo, at what hour did you leave Longner?”

  Tutilo started and shook himself, and took an unexpectedly long moment to think before he answered: “It was late, past time for Compline when I started.”

  “And you met no one on the walk back?”

  “Not this side the ferry.”

  “I think,” said Radulfus, “we should wait, and let be until you have viewed the place by daylight, and the unfortunate soul is known. Enough now! Go to your bed, Tutilo, and God grant you sleep. When we rise for Prime, then will be the time to see and consider, before we try to interpret.”

  But for all that, thought Cadfael, back in his own bed but with no will to sleep, how many of the five of us, one who spoke and four who listened, will close an eye again tonight? And of the three of us who knew there was to be a young man on his way down to us by that path during the evening, how many have already made the leap forward to give this nameless victim a name, and begin to see certain reasons why it might be expedient for some if he never reached us? Radulfus? He would not miss so plain a possibility, but he could and would refrain from entertaining and proceeding on it until more is known. Prior Robert? Well, give him his due, Prior Robert hardly said a word tonight, he will wait to have cause before he accuses any man, but he is intelligent enough to put all these small nothings together and make of them something. And I? It must have been for myself as much as any other that I issued that warning: It might be all too easy to take a wrong path! And heavens knows, once launched it’s all too hard to turn back and look again for the missed trace.

  So let us see what we have: Aldhelm—may he be home, forgetful and fast asleep at this moment!—was to come and pick out his man yesterday evening. The brothers had not been told, only Radulfus, Prior Robert, Hugh and I knew of it, leaving out of consideration Cynric’s boy, who runs errands faithfully, but barely understands what he delivers, and forgets his embassage as soon as done and rewarded. Herluin was not told, and I am sure did not know. Neither, to the best of my knowledge, did Tutilo. Yet it is strange that the same evening Tutilo should be sent for to Longner. Was he so sent for? That can be confirmed or confuted, there’s no problem there. Say he somehow got to know of Aldhelm’s coming, even so by avoiding he could only delay recognition, not prevent it, he would have to reappear in the end. Yes, but say he reappeared, and Aldhelm never came. Not just that evening, but never.

  Detail by detail built up into a formidable possibility, in which, nevertheless, he did not believe. Best to put off even thought until he had seen for himself the place where murder had been done, and the victim who had suffered it.

  The early morning light, filtering grudgingly between the almost naked trees and the tangle of underbrush, reached the narrow thread of the path only dimly, a moist brown streak of rotted leaves and occasional outcrops of stone, striped with shadows like the rungs of a ladder where old coppicing had left the trunks spaced and slender. The sun was not yet clear of the eastward banks of cloud, and the light was colorless and amorphous from the evening’s soft rain, but clear enough to show what had brought Tutilo to his knees in the darkness, and yet remained unseen.

  The body lay diagonally across the path, as he had said, not quite flat on its face and breast, rather on the right shoulder, but with the right arm flung clear behind, and the left groping wide beside him, clear of the folds of the coarse hooded cloak he wore. The hood had slipped back from his head when he fell, by the way it lay bunched in his neck. He had fallen and lain with his right cheek pressed into the wet leaves. The exposed left side of his head was a dark, misshapen blot of dried blood, a crusted darkness, the ruin on which Tutilo had laid his hand in the night, and sickened with horror.

  He looked composed enough now, standing a little apart in the fringe of bushes, staring steadily at what the night had hidden from him, with lids half-lowered over the dulled gold of his eyes, and his mouth shut too tightly, the only betrayal of the
effort by which he maintained his stillness and calm. He had risen very early, from a bed probably sleepless, and led the way to this spot among the thickest of the woodland without a word beyond the whispered morning greeting, and obedient acknowledgement of any remarks directed at him. Small wonder, if his own account was truth, smaller still if today he was being forced back to a scene about which he had lied; lied to the law, lied to his superiors in the Order he had chosen of his own will and desire.

  Down there, pressed into the earth, the face, or most of it, was intact. Cadfael kneeled close by the shattered head, and slid a hand gently under the right cheek, to turn the face a little upward to be seen.

  “Can you name him?” asked Hugh, standing beside him. The question was directed at Tutilo, and could not be evaded; but there was no attempt at evasion. Tutilo said at once, in a still and careful voice:

  “I do not know his name.”

  Surprising, but almost certainly true; those few moments at the end of a chaotic evening had never called for names. He had been as anonymous to Aldhelm as Aldhelm had been to him.

  “But you do know the man?”

  “I have seen him,” said Tutilo. “He helped us when the church was flooded.”

  “His name is Aldhelm,” said Cadfael flatly, and rose from his knees, letting the soiled face sink back gently into the leafmold. “He was on his way to us last night, but he never reached us.” If the boy had not known that before, let it be said now. He listened and gave no sign. He had shut himself within, and was not easily going to be drawn out again.

  “Well, let us see what there is to be noted,” said Hugh shortly, and turned his back upon the slight, submissive figure standing so warily aside from the event he had himself reported. “He was coming down this path from the ferry, and here he was struck down as he passed by. See how he fell! Back a yard or more—here where the covert is thick, someone struck him down from behind and to his left—here on the left side of the path, from ambush.”

  “So it seems,” said Cadfael, and eyed the bushes that encroached halfway across the path. “There would be rustling enough from his own passage to cover another man’s sudden movement among the branches here. He fell just as he lies now. Do you see any sign, Hugh, that he ever moved again?” For the ground about him, with its padding of last year’s thick leaf-fall sodden and trodden into soft pulp, showed no disturbance, but lay moist, dark and flat, unmarked by any convulsions of his feet or arms, or any trampling of an assailant round him.

  “While he lay stunned,” said Hugh, “the work was finished. No struggle, no defense.”

  In a small, muted voice Tutilo ventured, out of the shadowy covert of his cowl: “It was raining.”

  “So it was,” said Cadfael. “I had not forgotten. His hood would be up to cover his head. This— was done afterwards, as he lay.”

  The boy stood motionless still, looking down at the body. Only the subtle curve of a cheekbone and the lowered eyelids and a lunette of brow showed within the shadows of the cowl. There were tears hanging on the long, girlish lashes.

  “Brother, may I cover his face?”

  “Not yet,” said Cadfael. “I need to look more closely before we carry him back with us.” There were two of Hugh’s sergeants waiting impassively along the path, with a litter on which to lay him for passage to castle or abbey, according as Hugh should direct. From their judicious distance they watched in silence, with detached interest. They had seen violent death before.

  “Do whatever you need,” said Hugh. “Whatever club or staff was used on him is surely gone with the man who used it, but if the poor wretch’s corpse can tell us anything, let us discover it before we move him.”

  Cadfael kneeled behind the dead man’s shoulders, and looked closely at the indented wound, in which white points of bone showed in the centre of the encrusted blood. The skull was broken just above and behind the left temple, with what looked like a single blow, though of that he could not be sure. A staff with a heavy rounded handle might have done such damage, but the crater it had made was large indeed, and jagged, not regular. Cadfael took up carefully the edge of the hood, and rounded it out on his fist. It was seamed at the back, and running his fingertips the length of the seam he encountered a small patch halfway down that was sticky and stiffening, and withdrew them smeared with drying blood. Very little blood, surely from the first blow that felled its victim through hood and all. And this was at the back of the head, only the central seam contaminated, and that only meagerly. He straightened the folds, and ran his fingers through the dead youth’s thick thatch of reddish-brown hair, up from the nape to the rounding at the back of the head, where that seam had rested, and surely helped to break the force of the blow. He found a graze that had oozed a small crust of blood into the thick hair, almost dry now. There was no break there in the skull beneath the skin.

  “It was no very fearful blow that felled him,” said Cadfael. “It cannot have knocked him out of his wits for very long, had that been all. What was done after, was done quickly, before he could come to himself. He would never have died of this. And yet what followed was cold, deliberate and final. A drunken man in a squabble could have done this.”

  “It did what was required of it,” said Hugh grimly. “Laid him at his enemy’s mercy. No haste! Time to judge and finish at leisure.”

  Cadfael straightened out the coarse folds of the hood, and shook out a few pale feathery fragments from among them. He rubbed them in his palm, slivers of tindery, rotted wood. Plenty of that, no doubt, in this overgrown, untended woodland, even after it had been combed for firing by the urchins of the Foregate. But why here in Aldhehn’s hood? He ran his hands over the shoulders of the cloak, and found no more such minute splinters. He lifted the edge of the hood, and laid it gently over the shattered head, hiding the face. Behind him he felt, rather than heard, Tutilo’s deep intake of breath, and sensed the quiver that passed through him.

  “Wait a few moments yet. Let’s see if the murderer left any trace behind, if he stood here any length of time waiting for his man.” For here was certainly the closest cover on all that path from the ferry down into the Foregate. The track had, he recalled, two branches, separating as it dropped from the heathy ridge that looked down upon the river. One branch went down directly to the Horse Fair, the other, this one, cut through to emerge halfway along the Foregate, almost within sight of the abbey gatehouse. By this one Tutilo must have set out for Longner, and by this one he had returned, only to happen upon this grievous discovery along the way. If, of course, he had ever been nearer to Longner, that night, than this disastrous place.

  Cadfael stepped back to measure again the angle at which the body lay, and the few paces back along the path where the assailant must have been hidden. Thick cover, bristling with dryish branches and twigs, dead wood among them; he looked for broken ends, and found them. “Here!” He thrust through the screen of growth sidelong, into cramped space between trees, where a thin grass grew, mottled with dead leafage and glistening from the night’s rain. Soft ground, trodden flat by uneasy, shifting feet not so many hours ago. Nothing else, except a thick dead branch lying tossed under the bushes, and just aside from it, the bleached shape in the grass where it had formerly lain. Cadfael stooped and picked it up, and the thicker end, broken and dangling, shed a fluttering debris of tindery flakes as he swung it in his hand. Thick enough and heavy enough, but brittle.

  “Here he waited. Some time, by the way he’s pounded the mould. And this, this was what he found to his hand. With this he struck the first blow, and broke it in striking.”

  Hugh eyed the branch, and gnawed a thoughtful lip. “But not the second blow, surely. Not with this! It would have shattered in flinders long before it did that damage.”

  “No, this he threw back into the bushes when it snapped and turned in his hand. And looked quickly for something more deadly? For clearly, if ever he trusted to this in the first place, he had come without any weapon.” Perhaps even, thought Cadfael,
prompted a step further, he came without even the intent to kill, since he did not come prepared. “Wait! Let’s see what offered.”

  For he could not have had to look far for whatever it might be, there had been no time for that. A few minutes, and Aldhelm would have been stirring and hauling himself to his feet. Cadfael began to prowl uphill along the edge of the path, probing into the bushes, and then downhill again on the opposite side. Here and there the limestone that cropped out among the heather and rough grass on the ridge above broke through the grass and mould in stony patches, fretted away occasionally into small scattered boulders, bedded into the turf and moss. Cadfael turned downhll some yards. The assailant had hidden on the left of the track, he probed first on that side. A few paces below where the body lay, and a yard or so into the bushes, there was a patch of free stones, loosely overgrown with grass and lichen, and to all appearance undisturbed for a year or more; until something about the clear outlining of the upper stone made him look closer. It was not bonded to those below it by the neat filling of soil and small growth that bound all the rest, though it lay aligned precisely to fill the place it had surely filled for a year or more. Cadfael stooped and took it in both hands, and lifted it, and it parted from its setting without trailing a blade of grass or a torn edge of moss. Once already in the night it had been uprooted and replaced.