The Tinner's Corpse

by Bernard Knight

  The track soon vanished under the rubble and they rode the last few yards along the stream bed, until they could dismount alongside the small hut. Nearby, four moorland ponies were waiting patiently, empty wicker panniers hanging across their backs.

  Some of the workers turned to watch them, but others, after a cursory glance, went back to their hacking and shovelling. One man, who stood alongside the bottom end of the trough, came across to greet them. The bailiff introduced him to de Wolfe. ‘Robert Yeo, Crowner. He’s taken over this gang from today.’

  The new overman was a big blond fellow, partly of Saxon origin. He had a bushy yellow moustache but no beard, and wore a tunic of brown serge, a wide leather belt holding the skirt well above his knees. A short leather cape covered his shoulders, the hood hanging down his back. His greased boots came up to his knees, but de Wolfe could hear the water squelching inside them as he approached.

  Yeo made a token tug at his forelock, then stared almost defiantly at the coroner. ‘Walter Knapman told me I was to take over from Henry,’ he said, without preamble.

  ‘You were here the day before yesterday, the last time Henry of Tunnaford was seen?’

  Yeo nodded. ‘Same as usual. Henry stayed behind to clear up – he always did that, though there was no real need. He was a particular type of fellow, felt responsible for everything.’ He paused, as if a sudden thought had struck him. ‘Like I am now, I suppose. Knapman suffers no fools or idlers in his employ.’

  De Wolfe looked around at the scene of industry and heard the hacking of picks and the grating of shovels, as the alluvium was remorselessly eroded and thrown into the troughs. ‘Let’s see this corpse, then. In this shed, is it?’

  They turned to the hut and Yeo pulled away a few planks that shielded the open doorway. ‘There he is, God rest him.’

  The feet of the victim were near the doorway and as de Wolfe bent his head to enter, he saw that the upper part of the corpse was covered by a rough cape similar to the new overman’s. It lay across the dead man’s chest, but the upper part was ominously flat on the stony ground. De Wolfe motioned to Gwyn with a finger and his officer, well-used to this routine, pushed past him and lifted away the cape.

  Behind the coroner, Thomas de Peyne let out a horrified squeak and began to cross himself as he retreated to the open air. Even de Wolfe, inured to death in every form from his years of campaigning, admitted that this was not a pretty sight. He moved further into the hut and, with the bailiff and overman watching from the doorway, crouched opposite Gwyn at what should have been the head of the corpse. For there was no head, only a ragged stump of neck, which still had a stubbled growth of grey whiskers around it. Dark blood had congealed over the ripped muscles that surrounded the shattered white core of the spine.

  The Cornishman pursed his lips critically under his huge moustache. ‘A rough job, this. What did they do it with? A shovel?’

  De Wolfe stretched out and pulled at the curled-in margins of the neck wound with his finger and thumb. ‘Sharper than a spade, Gwyn. See those many small peaks and troughs? Some edged weapon has sawed away here, hacking it irregularly as the skin rolled into creases.’ He wiped his fingers free of blood on the shoulder of the dead man’s hessian tunic. ‘But you’re right. Whatever the weapon, it was far from sharp. The edges of the skin are scraped and bruised, not cut through cleanly, as a decent knife or sword would have done.’

  He rose to his feet, his head bent to avoid the rough branches that held up the crude roof. ‘Let’s see if he has other injuries.’

  They untied the belt and pulled up the tunic to chest level. The victim wore long woollen hose with as many darns as original material but, as was usual, no underclothing. There was no mark on the torso, back or front, but when they examined the limbs, Gwyn pointed out recent grazes on both knees and the backs of the forearms. ‘That’s from falling to the ground, no doubt,’ he diagnosed, ‘after first being struck a blow on the neck.’

  ‘Or the head,’ corrected the coroner. ‘For all we know, the top of his skull may have been stove in.’ He backed out of the hut and motioned the overman to go inside. ‘You can tidy him up and get the poor fellow carried away.’

  ‘Is he to be taken home to his widow at Tunnaford?’ asked Yeo.

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘A mile away, just off the road back to Chagford. We came within sight of it on the way up here,’ answered the bailiff.

  De Wolfe folded his arms and brooded, like some great black heron at the edge of the stream. ‘I’ll have to hold an inquest in the morning. That will have to be in the town – we need more of a jury than just these men here. The corpse will have to go to Chagford.’

  Justin Green looked unhappy, but he had no choice in the matter. ‘There’s a small mortuary in the churchyard – just a hut like this, where they leave bodies before burial. He could go there.’

  By now the tinners had all stopped working and were leaning on their shovels, watching silently. De Wolfe raised his voice to carry up the glen. ‘There’ll be no labour tomorrow morning, men. You will all be needed at the inquest, as you were all the last to see the deceased.’

  This set off a murmur of discontent, as it meant the loss of half a day’s earnings.

  ‘The funeral can be arranged for soon afterwards, so you can pay your respects to your overman and friend at the same time,’ called out the bailiff, trying to mollify the tinners. He turned to de Wolfe. ‘Where will the inquest be held, Crowner?’

  ‘If the cadaver is to be housed in the churchyard, that will do us. Then he can be put into the earth straight away, if you arrange it with the priest. You can send word to his family on the way back this evening.’

  John turned away and strode up the stream, towards the settling troughs and the rest of the workmen. ‘Who found the body and where exactly was it?’ he demanded, in his deep, sepulchral voice

  A young lad, no more than fifteen, stepped forward, grasping a long rake. ‘I did, sir. We all came up together as usual, but we saw the stream running pink and I ran ahead, thinking maybe a deer had fallen down the breast of the workings and lay dead at the upper end.’

  ‘And what did you find?’

  ‘Henry was under the top of the trough, where the water comes in from the cascade. Face down, he was. I could only see his legs at first, but when I looked under the trestles, I could see he was bleeding into the ground.’ The boy shuddered. ‘Then I saw he had no head.’

  The coroner took him by the elbow, not unkindly, and steered him towards the place. ‘Show me where he was, boy.’

  With the others trailing behind, the pair walked alongside the long, flat trough. De Wolfe felt the cold water seeping through his boots as he crunched over the coarse gravel and pebbles, which were covered with a few inches of water where the stream spread itself across the ravaged ground.

  The trough was made up of flat boards, about a yard wide and with edges a foot high. It became narrower towards the lower end, where a spout allowed the contained water to fall into a large square wooden box, the overflow of which ran on to the ground and found its way back into the stream.

  ‘How does this contraption work?’ he demanded.

  The overman explained, pointing out the various elements of the crude equipment. ‘The tin shode is in small lumps and grains, mixed up with all the earth and pebbles and broken rock of the ground. They say it was washed down in past ages by the river from the deep veins up on the moor.’

  ‘In Cornwall some men are directly mining such veins now, as the ore in the streams has been exhausted,’ cut in Gwyn, anxious to show off his family connections with tinning.

  ‘We dig out the banks of the stream and discard the earth and rocks, throwing them on to those waste piles,’ continued Yeo. ‘Then the small stuff gets tossed into the upper end of the trough, where we lead in a stream of water tapped from the torrent as it falls over the upper breast.’ He indicated a narrow leat, a long U-shaped gutter made of narrow planks, which jetted clear
water into the top of the trough. ‘Look in here, Crowner. See those laths fixed to the bottom?’

  De Wolfe peered into the swirling muddy water and saw that, at regular intervals, cross-slats nailed to the base of the trough formed a series of low dams that impeded the downward flow of water.

  ‘The tin shode is much heavier than the gangue – the ordinary sand and gravel. Much of it sinks to the bottom of the trough and gets caught behind those slats. What gets past falls into the buddle.’

  ‘What’s a buddle?’ asked the ever-curious Thomas.

  ‘It’s that box at the bottom. Every so often, we stop throwing in new burden and clear out the tin shode from the trough and the buddle. The younger lads then pick out any rubbish that’s still in it, then it’s shovelled into panniers for the ponies to take down to the blowing-house.’

  They had reached the top of the workings and the boy pointed to the upper end of the trough, supported a couple of feet from the ground on a series of rough trestles hammered into the stream bed. ‘Henry was lying there, sir. His head was under the trough – or would have been if he’d had one. The water was running red around him,’ he added, with the morbid relish of the young.

  De Wolfe raised his head as his eyes followed up the leat. Its upper end was pegged into the side of the small waterfall that gushed over the eight-foot bank which formed the upper end of the workings. ‘Is there anything up there?’ he demanded.

  Yeo shook his head. ‘Just the virgin stream going up the valley to the moor. We’re gradually working back as we dig. Every few weeks we have to dismantle this lot and shift it further up, as the breast falls in because we’re hacking the sides away.’

  The coroner jerked his head at Gwyn, and the big man lumbered away to scramble up the sloping bank in a welter of falling stones and gravel. Using the leat as a handhold, he gained the top and vanished from sight.

  All the men were watching now, making no effort to work even though they were losing pay, which partly depended on their output of shode. ‘I sent three of the men up there yesterday to seek the poor fellow’s head,’ grumbled the overman. ‘They found nothing, even though they followed the stream up as far as Fenworthy Circle where the old pagan stones are.’

  ‘No sign of any weapon that could have done the damage?’

  ‘Nothing, Crowner.’

  ‘Could it have been one of your own tools? The blood might have been washed off in the stream.’

  The overman grimaced. ‘We got nothing sharp enough for that. Couldn’t have been a pick, and our shovels are wooden with a iron band nailed to the edge.’

  John began to walk back down the workings, his feet now cold and wet inside his boots. The prospect of a warm fire and food at Waye Barton manor house was rapidly becoming attractive. ‘Have you any feelings as to who might have done this?’ he snapped at Yeo.

  ‘That I have not, sir! It’s beyond my understanding – we never had any trouble of this sort before.’

  ‘No great rivalry between different gangs of tinners?’

  The overman turned up his calloused hands in a gesture of despair. ‘Not at all, Crowner. To start with, most of the gangs here on the Upper Teign belong to Walter Knapman. No point in fighting among the same team. There may be rivalry between the owners, such as Knapman and Stephen Acland, but that’s nothing to do with us tinners in the stream-works.’

  When they reached the hut again, de Wolfe turned round in time to see Gwyn slide down the slope of the breast, then stride towards them, his great legs splashing through the stream and his ragged cape blowing out behind him in the keen breeze. ‘Nothing to see up there, apart from a few sheep,’ he growled.

  De Wolfe sighed. This was going to be another unsolved murder, unless he could make someone talk at the inquest next day.

  ‘Let’s go, then. There are arrangements to be made back in the town.’ He strode towards the horses, waiting further down, their bridles held by the youngest of the apprentice tinners. ‘Bailiff, you stay and get that body carried down to the church. I’ll find my own way to the manor.’ Under his breath he added, ‘And I trust the lord of Chagford is more hospitable than many others who get saddled with the coroner’s company.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  In which Crowner John presides in a churchyard

  While the headless cadaver was being carried down from the edge of the moor on a makeshift bier of branches, Walter Knapman was having his evening meal at home in Chagford. He lived in the largest dwelling in the town, second only in size to the manor house just outside, where Hugh of Chagford, one of the Wibbery family, was the local lord.

  Knapman’s residence was quite new, built of red sandstone brought from further south, rather than the grey moorstone used for most other masonry. It was on the track into town from Great Weeke, sitting behind a garden, half-way up the hill that led to the church. Instead of a hall, which normally filled most of a house, it had two rooms, one at each side of the front door. A wooden staircase led up to a large room under the thatch, partitioned into a bedroom and a solar. The latter had a window set into the pine end, which – wonder of wonders – had six panes of glass. That was almost unique in Devon: even Exeter cathedral had no glazing. Walter had recently imported these thick slabs of glass from Germany, where much of his tin was sent. Though he claimed it was to make his new wife’s solar more comfortable, everyone in Chagford thought it was to blazon his importance and affluence. Certainly Knapman indulged Joan, a pretty woman fifteen years his junior: she was his second wife, the widow of a tanner from Ashburton, who had died of a fever.

  They sat now at meat, side by side at a square oaken table, with Joan’s mother Lucy opposite, next to the parish priest Paul Smithson, who had been invited to eat with them. Lucy, another widow, lived with them – part of the price Walter had reluctantly paid to persuade the delectable Joan to marry him five months earlier.

  Naturally the conversation centred on the death of Henry of Tunnaford, and most of the talking was between Knapman and the priest, though the older woman chipped in now and then, after listening avidly to every word. With the possible exception of the coroner’s clerk, Thomas, she was probably the most inquisitive person in Devon.

  Joan, whose dark hair peeped from her white linen cover-chief to frame an oval face with a look of the Madonna, said little and concentrated on eating the slivers of boiled fowl that her husband placed on the large trencher of bread that lay between them. As he talked, he leaned over and cut slices with his dagger from the carcass that sat on a wooden platter in the middle of the table. They had already demolished a large fish, and other bowls held fried onions, cabbage and turnips. Pottery mugs of ale and pewter wine cups sat before each of them. The household steward, a Saxon named Harold, fussed over them, replenishing their drink and relentlessly harrying the serving maid, who brought new dishes from the kitchen in the backyard.

  ‘What does Hugh Wibbery think of all this?’ rasped the priest, through a mouthful of fowl’s leg. He was a fleshy man, with a pallid face, from which two black button eyes peered out over flabby cheeks. Although he was not a monk, he was tonsured, but curiously with the Celtic type: he had shaved a broad band from his forehead over the crown to the nape of his neck.

  ‘He seems to lack any interest in it,’ answered Walter. ‘Henry was a freeman, and as he lived in Tunnaford his land was owned by de Prouz from Gidleigh, so he had no obligations of tenure to the lordship of Chagford. I paid his wages as a tinner, so Hugh has shrugged off the whole matter, as far as I can see.’

  The priest grunted and dug the yellow pegs of his remaining teeth back into his drumstick, while Lucy Tanner took up the conversation. She was about fifty, but looked much older, worn by the bearing of twelve children, seven of whom had died in infancy. Her thin frame was enveloped in a dull tan kirtle that was too big for her, while lifeless, dry hair poked from beneath her tight-fitting helmet of fawn linen. However, her wizened appearance and creaking joints were balanced by a sharp, if waspish intelligence. �
��Our lord can hardly brush murder aside like that,’ she hissed. ‘It’s his manor and he has a responsibility for the safety of the town, whether the man was his tenant or not. If some madman is abroad, we might all be murdered in our beds.’

  ‘That’s hardly likely, Mother,’ rumbled Knapman. ‘This happened on the edge of the high moor, not in Chagford itself. We have a bailiff, a constable and Hugh’s house-guards to look after us.’

  Lucy continued to mutter under her breath as she speared her food with a little knife, held awkwardly in fingers swollen with rheumy joints. The priest courteously kept their trencher loaded with food as, in spite of her infirmity, she had a healthy appetite.

  So far, Joan had said hardly a word since they began eating. She kept her long-lashed eyes on the table, as if her mind was far away. Her husband had tried several times to coax her into the conversation, but she replied in monosyllables. He turned his attention back to Smithson, the incumbent of St Michael the Archangel, whose new church was largely a gift from Knapman himself. ‘Hugh has done the correct thing in sending for the coroner,’ he said. ‘Justin, his bailiff, went to Exeter at first light and I hear that Sir John de Wolfe has been up to the stream-works this evening. No doubt he will show himself here before long.’

  Vicar Paul dropped his now stripped chicken bone under the table for the dogs and dug between his teeth with a dirty fingernail. ‘First time we’ve had a crowner come to Chagford. I’m still not clear what they’re supposed to do. Don’t you stannators settle all matters of law here?’

  Walter Knapman was a prominent jurator in the tinners’ Great Court, though the priest had used the old word ‘stannator’. ‘We have no say in crimes against life or limb, Paul,’ he replied. ‘That’s where this new coroner business comes in.’

  The priest stared at him. ‘In what way?’ he asked.