The Malice of Unnatural Death:

by Michael Jecks

  But for all that, the day was clearing nicely, with the grim clouds floating away, and the sun appearing every so often. Hills in the distance flashed bright in the light, then darkened as clouds drifted past, and from this higher point Simon could see the shadows washing over the hills like an ink poured over them. It was a thrilling sight, and one that made his heart leap for joy. No more sea and arguing sailors, no more John Hawley complaining about the amount of customs due on his imports, no more bickering between his neighbour and his servant …

  ‘How far is it, then?’

  Simon glanced down at the urchin at his stirrup. ‘I will tell you when we are nearly there,’ he grated. Rob was limping. Simon had insisted on buying boots for Rob before they tried to cross the moor, but the lad’s feet were unused to them, and Simon had a feeling that he would take them off before long. He saw no need for such things, when he had never worn them before.

  ‘But how much longer is it?’

  Rob was peering ahead, eyes narrowed as the sun came out again, and suddenly Simon appreciated his interest: this was a lad who had never before travelled more than perhaps three miles from the house in which he had been born. He was a mere child when it came to experience of the world, and here he was, anticipating a visit to the largest city for hundreds of miles. He might never see such a place ever again. Although he had no comprehension of the distance to Exeter, he was as excited as a puppy with its first stick at the thought of it – and probably petrified in equal measure.

  ‘We should be there tomorrow,’ Simon said. ‘It’s a long walk from here. Perhaps forty or fifty miles? And the ground is not so easy as most of the way from Dartmouth to Tavistock. How are your feet?’

  ‘This ground’s fine,’ Rob said. ‘But God’s ballocks, that’s a long way to go.’

  ‘Sooner we get on the sooner we’ll arrive,’ Simon said more curtly, nervously shooting a look at the man who wished to be abbot.

  As if feeling his eye on him, Busse winked at Simon. ‘I can see that a prayer for the easing of profane comments from the mouths of children could be a good idea.’

  Rob frowned, then pulled a face that seemed to indicate that his respect for the monk was not increasing. Not that Simon reckoned it was because Rob was concerned that he might have offended the monk with his language; it was more that Rob hated being described as a child.

  Exeter City

  The messenger had been pulled free of the pile of rubbish and lay face down on the packed earth beside the roadway. When Baldwin enquired, Coroner de Welles confirmed that he had given the body a cursory inspection. The inquest would be in a day or so as usual, and the body would be stripped naked and rolled over and over in front of the jury so that they could see and witness all the wounds. So far, the coroner had merely watched the body being pulled from the rubbish, and briefly glanced at it before seeking Baldwin, who was kneeling at its side now, examining it carefully.

  He looked up at de Welles. ‘Your conclusion?’

  ‘You can see for yourself. The man had a thong pulled about his throat. Dead fairly quickly, I should think, although it wouldn’t have been pleasant. He struggled. Look at the marks on his neck, eh?’

  Baldwin peered frowningly at the thin line about the pale, slightly bluish flesh. ‘Yes. But not a simple leather thong. If you look closely, you can see that there is a weave in the bruise. I should think that this was either a woven leather cord, or a hempen one. But very fine. Perhaps it could have been either, although if I were the assassin I should aim for leather as being stronger and safer. I see what you mean about the marks, though.’

  ‘Yes, he fought back as he might, poor devil.’

  Baldwin nodded. All along the thin line of the bruise left by the ligature there were scratches and scrapes. He had seen them often enough, as had the coroner: when men were hanged with their hands unbound, they would often struggle to release the cord in this way, scrabbling with their fingers at the cord, desperate to tug it free and give themselves some air. This man had tried in his desperation to hook his fingers under the cord and pull it away; his nails had made these sad little futile scratches. The blood had run heavily to the right side of the neck.

  ‘Look here – this is strange. It is as though blood had been smeared over his throat, for none of the scratches under the cord could have bled enough for all this.’

  ‘Aye, so perhaps the killer was himself wounded. I wondered whether the poor fellow managed to get a knife out and mark his assailant. Perhaps he stabbed the man’s hand?’

  ‘Indeed. Yet if he succeeded in that, surely he would have cut the thong that throttled him? A man would not fear a scratch from a knife compared with strangling, would he? But there is blood.’ His gaze moved over the rest of the body. ‘What else?’

  ‘If you open his tunic, you will see he was stabbed, but only when he was already dead. Once he was on the ground, the killer thrust a dagger into his breast – I suppose he wanted to make sure, hey? No other reason for it. The knife was long and thin. I reckon at least nine inches long, because that’s how far into his body the hole goes, and about an inch at the hilt, from the look of the wound.’

  ‘And he was stabbed after death because the wound did not bleed.’

  ‘Not at all. The man opened his tunic and stabbed him through the heart.’

  A good job for someone, Baldwin told himself. Somebody would win these clothes, and at least this way they were undamaged. ‘The body was in the rubbish there?’

  ‘Yes. Well concealed, too. If it wasn’t for the hog finding him, he’d still be there now. Might have been there for a year or more, the way the lazy bastards about this town leave their trash all over the place. Look at the stuff here! Blasted disgrace! Wouldn’t let it happen at Lifton, I can tell you.’

  ‘I think that a hundred like Lifton could be easier to maintain and police than a city the size of Exeter,’ Baldwin murmured patiently. ‘So you say he was fully covered in the stuff?’

  ‘Apart from his hand and the forearm. The hand was pretty badly chewed, as you can see.’

  Baldwin nodded and peered closely at the hand. It made him frown. Certainly it looked as though it had been mangled by the teeth of a hog – the forefinger and middle finger were gone, and there were deep lacerations in between the bones where the hog’s teeth had sunk through the man’s flesh … but then Baldwin stared again at the stumps where the man’s fingers had been removed. ‘What do you make of this, Coroner?’

  ‘Hey? Hmm. Didn’t look so closely at the thing. It didn’t kill him, and the hog had been chewing pretty well at his hand. Why?’

  He leaned over Baldwin’s shoulder as he spoke and then his brows rose and he tutted to himself. ‘I think I am perhaps the most stupid rural coroner whom the king has ever had elected to post. Who could have done that, then?’

  Baldwin was still studying the clean cuts where two fingers had been snipped from the hand. ‘Anyone. Someone who is used to butchery, or a man who is used to skinning, or a cook … the number of men who could be practised in this kind of neat work are too numerous to count. More interesting is why someone would have wanted to do such a thing to him.’

  ‘Torture, you think?’ Coroner de Welles guessed. ‘Punishment, for something the fellow had written?’

  ‘Those are both perhaps possible,’ Baldwin said. But in the back of his mind he was recalling a story he had once heard of another case, when a man’s finger was removed. It had been carefully cut from a living man’s hand for use in maleficium.

  Baldwin was not superstitious, and he often laughed at Simon Puttock’s credulity, but even in broad daylight, with the noise of people pushing and shoving their way past him on the road only yards away, he suddenly felt a sharp chill at the thought that there could be a sorcerer working here in the city.

  Chapter Nine

  Exeter City

  John was exhausted after all his efforts the previous day and night. He had many of the implements, but he still needed some more. Onl
y a complete fool would try to conjure a demon without adequate protection, after all, and he had desperate need of all the requisite tools of his trade. Sadly, almost everything had been left behind in his flight.

  It was enough to make a man spit with fury. To know that all his tools, gathered carefully over the years, were sitting probably in that idiot sheriff’s chamber in Coventry was infuriating. But complaining over that which could not be altered was at best futile. Better that he should forget it and find something similar.

  There must be somewhere he could get hold of the things he needed.

  Baldwin shook his head. There was something unpleasant – he would not use the word ‘evil’ – about this affair. He stood by the messenger’s body, studying the area all about.

  Once, when he had been at Acre, he had seen a man hit by a crossbow bolt, and he had been transfixed with panic and fear. The man was a burly fellow, clad in mail for the most part, with a shining helm which he had taken from another man who had died in an earlier attack. Somehow, Baldwin had felt that the fellow radiated invincibility, and he had edged nearer and nearer to him, hoping that if there was an attack this man’s aura of authority and power might give Baldwin too some protection. And then, suddenly, the man had gasped as though punched in the chest.

  Baldwin had turned in time to see him flung backwards, arms flailing, under the impact of a massive bolt. It passed almost all the way through his body, and hurled him back to be slammed against a wall some yards behind and pinned to it.

  Such a large bolt must have been fired from an enormous crossbow. Yet there was no sign of the man who had fired it, no sign of the weapon’s presence.

  Time, for a while, seemed to stand still for Baldwin. Struck mindless with terror, he was paralysed, and all he could do was stare about him with his mouth agape, as though waiting to be executed. And then a Welshman behind him gave him a shove, and as he stumbled forward he heard a swift thrumming, and saw three, no four, arrows fly up over the castle’s wall at a window in a tower. And he heard the scream, saw the fresh bolt fly from the window, and thump harmlessly into the wall above the Welshman, some yards over the dead man’s body.

  He had the same impression of danger here as he had felt that day. Something was not right here. It was almost as though he was being watched, and someone was lining up a great siege crossbow bolt with his chest even as he stood here.

  To distract himself from these unpleasant reflections, he pointed up another alley. ‘What is that man doing there?’

  The coroner followed his pointing finger. ‘Him? He’s a watchman. There’s another dead man up there. He can’t be anything to do with this fellow, though. He was dead the day before.’

  Baldwin’s brow furrowed, and he glanced down at the body at his feet, then back at the alley again. It was a strange coincidence that on consecutive evenings men should have been murdered in this area. ‘Were the neighbours all asleep for both deaths? Was nothing heard?’

  ‘Both late at night. I’ve found men and women who walked past that spot, for example, quite late at night, and no one appears to have seen him lying there.’

  ‘Nor this messenger?’

  ‘No, not him either. They were attacked by thieves who wandered about late at night.’

  ‘One of them was a man who enthusiastically robbed a messenger of an important letter,’ Baldwin pointed out. ‘Let us go and view the other body as well.’

  ‘Hah! You don’t care that the bishop has commanded us to find his roll?’

  ‘If we are to find it, we’ll need some hints as to who took it, and why, and if the bishop won’t help us, maybe that man will.’

  The coroner nodded amiably. ‘You know, there are times I think you must be soft in the head, old chap. The fellow’s dead.’

  Langatre was a serious practitioner of the mysterious arts, and when there was a knock at his door he would always insist that his servant Hick should go and answer it. It was not dignified for a man of Langatre’s status to perform such a menial task. Far better that he should have his boy go. Apart from anything else, it enhanced his position in the mind of many of his clients if they could see that he was able to afford his own staff.

  This afternoon he was trying to brew some potions. When the door was struck, he was in the middle of straining the fluid from a concoction made from roots and yew berries. It stank, and he was not keen to handle anything made from yew, because all was poisonous, whether the bark, the sap, or the leaves. Still, the mixture smelled very potent, and he had often found that the efficacy of his spells was aided by the odours of the mixtures he sold with them.

  They were worthless, of course. He knew that perfectly well. The real benefit to those who paid him was in the chanting that he alone understood. When a woman came to him and begged for help in keeping her man’s love, or winning it, he would use a sweet-smelling fluid; when it was a farmer who wanted a neighbour’s herd to suffer, the odour was not so pleasant. Either way, it was not the liquor that achieved the result: it was his intellectual efforts later. His prayers would work adequately without hoaxes designed to fool people, but some didn’t believe in his efforts unless they had concrete proof in the way of a small bottle of foul-smelling and probably poisonous juice to go with it. He sometimes despaired of people, he really did.

  ‘It’s a man to see you, master,’ Hick called from the front door.

  Langatre grunted and shook his head. There was always an interruption of one sort or another. He had an alembic bubbling nicely, and he eyed it doubtfully, wondering whether he could afford to leave it alone for a consultation, but then shrugged. He didn’t dare to leave an expensive piece of equipment lying about here to boil dry and break. Instead, he bent and blew at the flames, putting them out.

  As he did so, there was a rattling knock at his door. ‘Yes, yes,’ he called testily. ‘I am coming, in God’s good time. Wait a moment, Hick.’

  The knocking stopped on the instant, and Langatre picked up a cloth. He doubled it quickly, and used it to pick up the alembic by the snout. As he did so, to his surprise, he heard a step behind him. Someone had entered his chamber without permission!

  ‘What do you …’

  His voice was cut off as a fine leather cord whipped round his throat and was yanked tight, cutting off all air. With his left hand, he grabbed for it, his fingers trying to prise their way behind it to loosen it, but there was nothing he could do. He tried to grab his attacker, poke at his eyes, anything, but the man was out of his reach. At last, desperate, as he felt a rising mist begin to smother him, he swung the alembic over his shoulder.

  There was a crack as the alembic smashed. The shards, fresh from the flames, were extraordinarily hot, and he heard a muffled shriek as the pieces of clay scorched his assailant, and then a piercing scream as the boiling, poisonous liquid sprayed.

  The cord was dropped, and Langatre fell to the floor gasping, grabbing for a knife on his table. There was no time to use it. As his fingers fell on the hilt, his belly was kicked with main force, and his back arched as he felt the air gush from his breast in a great moan of pain. It was so intense, he could not breathe for some moments, and all he could do was roll into a ball to evade any further punishment. When at last he was able to take notice of his surroundings once more, he heard his door slam, and then there was silence.

  ‘Who are you?’ Baldwin asked as they reached the watchman.

  ‘Thomas atte Moor, sir,’ the man responded, but not quickly, and when Baldwin glanced at him he saw that the fellow was chilled through. His teeth chattered slightly as he spoke, and he had to grip his staff tightly with his blue-grey hands.

  ‘How long have you been here, Thomas?’

  ‘I was sent here yesterday to guard this fellow. I thought someone would relieve me last night, but no one came by, so…’

  The coroner glowered at him. ‘Is that our concern, man? Come, pull yourself together! Do you know who this man is?’

  ‘Yes, he was well known. He carved antl
ers and bone to make fine combs and other decorative pieces. His name was Norman Mucheton.’

  The body was in a terrible state. Plainly he had been drunk when he came here, for there was a thick, acrid patch of vomit nearby. Baldwin could smell it even though it was frozen. He could see peas and carrot, and smell malt – a man who had drunk several ales and eaten a good meal, and then thrown up on his way home.

  ‘Where did he live?’ Baldwin asked, studying the man’s throat.

  ‘Down there, over west of the gate, quite near to Westgate Street.’

  ‘Does anyone know what he was doing up here?’ the coroner asked.

  Baldwin peered closely at the body as Thomas spoke of someone who had been drinking with the man until the early hours, a friend who had left Norman near the lane to the bishop’s palace. Many others had seen them, and there was no suggestion of an evil word, let alone a fight.

  ‘He would have turned west from there to go home?’ de Welles confirmed.

  ‘Yes, sir. His friend went home – he lives a little way down South Gate Street. He thought Norman had gone home. It never occurred to him that Norman might have come down here. It’s the wrong direction.’

  ‘Well?’ The coroner sucked at his teeth as Baldwin leaned over the body and gazed down at a pool of blackened, icy blood.

  ‘As you can see for yourself, he’s had his throat cut, and cut so violently that his head has been all but severed. His purse is gone, so I assume it could have been a simple robbery.’

  ‘I’ve only ever witnessed wounds like that on men who were attacked by those who had grudges. It’s the sort of cut that a man who is serious about murder would inflict. No doubt about his intention, eh?’