Paul brought their ale and stood with them as they stared down at the body. They had put her on the ladder and, using this as a stretcher, had carried her over to the hall. Baldwin had spent some time digging through the hay, but could find nothing else. There was no sign of who might have killed her.
“You are quite sure?”
The innkeeper threw Baldwin a testy glance. “She was my neighbor. Of course I’m sure! This is Mary Butcher, all right.”
“I had to ask. When did you last see her?”
“Oh, Monday, I think. She was outside when Sir Hector left, and they walked off together.”
Baldwin sighed and looked at Simon, “It seems fairly consistent.”
Simon nodded as the landlord walked out. “With Sir Hector having killed her? Yes. Just like the others.”
“The stab-wounds are the same as those which killed Judith. Two cuts in the back.”
“They’re the same as the ones that killed Sarra too. She had two wounds, didn’t she?”
“Yes, but she was stabbed in the chest; from the front.”
“That was because she was in the trunk.”
“Yes. The killer could merely open the lid and thrust down,” Baldwin commented, motioning with his fist, but then he stopped and stared down at the body again.
“Something wrong?”
“Hmm?” Baldwin shook his head. “No. I was just thinking: Judith and this woman were attacked from behind. I daresay the murderer put his hand over her mouth to stop her screams, and then…” His hands performed the actions as if rehearsing the sequence of events which led to her death. He let his hands drop and stared down at the body meditatively. “I wonder why that seems important to me?”
“What I don’t understand,” Simon said thoughtfully, “is who he was waiting for.”
“What?” Baldwin shot him a keen glance.
“The day when we saw him with Judith. We thought he was waiting for someone, and after today, I assumed it must be Mary; but she has been dead for some days.”
“Yes. Certainly she has been dead some time,” Baldwin mused. “Which does seem strange. Unless he was trying to establish an alibi—pretending to be waiting for her when he had killed her. Another thing, the rats were all over the loft, and yet there is hardly a mark on her.”
Simon raised his eyebrows, then peered at her. “You’re right. There’s hardly a mark on her—only at her fingers and toes.”
“I have never known rats to avoid fresh meat.” Baldwin pondered. “I would have expected more damage.”
“More to the point, though, is why on earth Sir Hector would have put her there at all.”
“It is incredible.”
“Incredible? Bizarre. The man has gone from hiding one corpse in a chest, leaving a second lying in an alley, and now he’s deposited this one under a thin layer of hay where his own men were sleeping. It’s bizarre, all right.”
“Yes,” Baldwin agreed, and turned his solemn eyes back to the woman before him. “She cannot have been there in the hay for long, though. Feel her dress—it is damp. She must have been moved to the stable some time after she died. Before that she was stored somewhere else.”
“Why is she damp?” Simon asked as he gingerly touched the cloth.
“It was raining last night. Heavily. Surely it is not difficult to conclude that she had been secreted away somewhere else, and was then moved to her new hiding place last night during the storm.” Even as the knight spoke his eyes were moving over her body, seeking any further hints as to how she came by her death. She would have been an attractive woman in life, he thought. Slim and well-formed, with large blue eyes and thick brown hair. Her wrists were tiny, and her ankles too, and she had a waist so slender he could have encompassed it with both hands. On her front there was no mark, but for the nibbles of the rats at her fingers and toes. Her back too showed little mark, but they could see where the cloth of her dress had been sliced by the blade which had killed her.
He sighed. It was incomprehensible that someone should snuff out the life of such a dainty young woman. Still more so that this should be merely the third in a sequence.
“Where else could she have been stored?”
“When we know that, Simon, we shall know who killed her, and why!”
“Do you think he will confess?” Simon ignored the other’s brief display of irascibility, and dropped onto a seat. Leaning forward, he studied Mary Butcher.
“I see no reason why he should. Do we have any proof that he was the murderer? All we know is that he was seen with her before she died. It is a tenuous link to this corpse. By the same token, almost anyone could be accused of the murder.”
“Maybe so, but surely we have to arrest him. What if it was him, and he goes on to kill others? He’s killed three already; we can’t take the risk he might kill a fourth.”
“Can’t you?”
Simon whirled round. Sir Hector had entered the hall from behind them, taking even Edgar by surprise. The soldier walked slowly and deliberately over to them, his hand resting on his sword, but not in a threatening way. He scarcely glanced at them, but went to the table on which Mary Butcher rested, standing by her and looking down at her with what Simon could only think was sadness.
“Poor Mary. Poor unhappy, dissatisfied Mary,” he murmured, then faced Baldwin. “I did not do this. I could not have dreamed of hurting her. She was my love, the woman I wanted to take with me.”
“She was having an affair with you.” There was no need to ask it as a question; Baldwin stated it as a fact.
“We met years ago,” the captain agreed. “I wanted her to join me then, but she wouldn’t. She knew little about a mercenary’s life, but Mary always enjoyed her comforts. She liked being able to get the choicest cloths, the finest skins and furs, and I would have given her plenty of these things, but she could have them here too, from her husband, without the risks of losing me through fighting, without her needing to travel constantly, without the fear of being hunted by enemies, without constantly wondering whether the allies of the day would turn on us tomorrow and become our foes.”
“She would not go with you.”
“No.” It was said with blank finality.
“So why come back here?”
The captain turned his disconcerting gray eyes onto Baldwin. “Because I have thought about her every day for the last few years. Because I missed her, and wanted her, ever since I last saw her. Because I felt I had lost a part of me since I left her behind. I had to exorcise her from my soul, and I thought if I were to see her again, I might be cured.”
“So that is why you came this way after being refused a contract with the King?”
“Yes. I thought I might have got over her, and even took the servant-girl to divert me…But it was no good. A servant is no more than that, merely a servant. What I wanted was here, in Mary.”
Baldwin nodded, inwardly wondering how a man could take one woman to try to forget another. And if he could, Baldwin reasoned, would it be so great a step to kill the one who could not match the expectation?
His visage must have betrayed his doubt. The mercenary curled his lip. “You think I would simply have murdered the tavern slut for not being Mary? She was nothing to me! I kill those who harm or threaten me, those who thwart or betray me—the wench did not deserve to die for not being the woman I desired. And I certainly could never have killed my poor Mary, whatever she had done. I loved her with all my heart.”
“When did you last see her?”
“On Monday night. Her servants, and her husband’s apprentice knew I was there, but they didn’t care. They watched me enter her chamber, and they saw me leave in the morning. They all felt I was better for her than her husband.”
Simon doubted that. Any number of servants could be relied on to keep their silence if talking might involve annoying a mercenary captain.
“You are sure that was the last time you saw her?” pressed Baldwin.
“Yes. I tried to many oth
er times…You saw me on one occasion, in the town. I was waiting for her then, that was why I was so irritated by that other slut.”
“Judith?” Baldwin asked.
“Was that her name? The beggar.”
“Did you recall her?”
“Recall her?” Hector’s face showed no emotion, but Simon saw that he had paled.
“Yes, Sir Hector: recall her. She was the woman you took when you last came to Crediton, wasn’t she? Before you met Mary.”
“I…I don’t think so.” He licked his suddenly dry lips.
“You had forgotten her? The woman whom you had enjoyed for a night or more, but whom you evicted from your side once you had met Mary for the first time.”
“No. I…No.”
“And then there is her son, of course. Born a little while later.”
“No!” The captain’s features had paled to wax-like translucency, and he picked at his lower lip as if in an attempt at memory.
“Was he your son?” Baldwin threw out the question swiftly and harshly.
“No, he can’t have been.” The anguish in the captain’s voice was almost tangible.
“I wonder. In any case, Sir Hector, I think I have more than enough reason to suspect you for the murder of these women.”
“Why would I have killed them? What reason could I have had?”
“The first because she stole, you thought, a new dress bought for your lover, the second because she shamed you in the street, telling you she had borne your son.” Baldwin watched the captain narrowly as he guessed at this, and was satisfied to see the dart strike home. Sir Hector flinched. “And then Mary, I assume, because she refused to leave her home and her husband to run away with you.”
“No, that’s not it at all. It’s all wrong, completely wrong.”
“She wouldn’t go with you, would she?”
“If that was all, I’d have killed him, not her! It had nothing to do with—”
“She wouldn’t go away with you, so you decided to kill her instead. You decided that if you couldn’t have her, nobody else would either. Even her husband.”
“That’s nonsense. Why should I do that? I couldn’t have hurt her, not my Mary. I loved her.”
“Yes,” Baldwin said, resting himself against the table and crossing his arms. “But I have to wonder what that word means to you. You are a soldier, Sir Hector. You are used to taking what you want. You wanted Mary Butcher—and you took her. You had no thought for her husband, her reputation, or for anything else. You wanted her, so you had her.”
“That’s a lie!”
“Is it? Do you really understand what the truth is, I wonder? Your whole life is a series of thefts. You agree terms with a lord or baron, and then ravage a whole area. You take what you want—isn’t that how your band survives? And then you come here and try to carry on the same way. A woman here, a woman there. Sarra, and Judith, and Mary. All of them were yours until you became bored with them. And then you killed them. All of them, all stabbed twice, all killed the same way.”
“Even Mary?” His voice had fallen to an awed horror.
“Even Mary,” Baldwin agreed mercilessly. “You killed them all, didn’t you? Why did you do it?”
Simon watched as the two men confronted each other. Sir Baldwin seemed to grow in stature as he spoke. It was as if he was trying to convince himself that he did not truly believe his own words, that the concept of such hideous crimes was so awful that he could not credit anyone with the ability to commit them. His face was hard with a kind of desperate urgency, like a man who wanted to be proved wrong, but who was convinced nonetheless that his worst imaginings were shortly to be confirmed.
But while they spoke, Baldwin found himself becoming more sympathetic to the captain. It was not that the Keeper was gullible, or that he was prepared to condone the mercenary’s life, but the man appeared to shrink even as Baldwin, alive with a new strength, invigorated with his disgust and revulsion at the crimes, railed at him.
To Simon, Sir Hector looked as if he was shrivelling in on himself, reducing to the scale of one of the hill farmers whom the bailiff saw every week; old beyond his years, worn and ravaged by cares and ill-health. Simon nodded. There was all too often no way to prove who might have committed a particular crime, but in this case he was convinced that he and his friend had caught the correct man, and it gave him a fierce pleasure to see the effect of Baldwin’s words.
There was something in Sir Hector’s haggard visage which made Baldwin study him hard as he spoke. Something about the man’s manner made his voice soften a little. It was not the immediate sympathy which a man felt for another accused of heinous offences, for the Keeper had become hardened to seeing criminals suddenly realize the degree of their crimes as their doom approached. It had often occurred to Baldwin that nothing was better capable of assisting a poor memory and inducing contrition than a rope. But if his sensitivity had become blunted after years of prosecutions, his empathy remained, and with this captain, he was sure that there were signs of his pain.
That itself was no proof of innocence. Baldwin had known of cases where men had killed women they loved: from jealousy, from sudden rage, from any number of reasons. All had expressed their shame, and appeared honestly devastated by their actions. It was not rare. But as he mentioned the name of the latest victim, he was assailed by doubts. The captain stood, head bowed, shoulders sagging, and hands limp by his sides, the very picture of misery. This was not the arrogant warrior-lord, ready to quarrel with anyone, and to back up his argument with the point of his sword; this was a man who had lost everything he held dear. His life, his posture suggested, was at an end. There was nothing more for him.
Baldwin ground to a halt and viewed Sir Hector pensively, his head on one side. The captain made no gesture, spoke no word of denial, gave no statement of outraged innocence, and suddenly the knight was doubtful. His mind ran through the evidence, and he was forced to admit to himself that the only links which connected the captain to the dead women were tenuous.
“Sir Hector, you are free for now, but I demand that you do not leave this inn. I will speak to your men, and make sure that they do not abet you in an escape, but I see no reason to lock you in a cell. You may remain here.”
The man nodded, and walked away, through to the solar, and Baldwin’s keen stare followed him until the door had shut. “Edgar. Fetch me Wat, and the man Will who found this woman today.”
22
Wat walked in with a rolling swagger that put Simon in mind of the sailors he had seen in Plymouth and Exeter. The old mercenary wore a grave expression, but Simon was convinced that a grin of sheer exultation was battling for dominance, and it was no great surprise. He had wanted the leadership of the company, and his master had allowed it to slip from his grasp and fall into Wat’s lap almost unnoticed. It made Simon glower with disapproval, to see a man so pleased by the results of three deaths.
“Wat,” Baldwin said, once the man had entered and Edgar had closed the door behind him, “we are holding your captain here. I place him under your control. Do not you, or any of the other men in the group, try to leave Crediton, or let Sir Hector go. He is your responsibility, and you will answer for it if he escapes. Is that clear?”
“Absolutely clear.”
“Now you,” Baldwin said, and turned to the man called Will, who glared back truculently. “How did you notice the body there today?”
“I told you. I sat down and it felt hard and nobbly, so I tried to see what I was sitting on.”
“And you uncovered her tunic?”
“Yes.”
Baldwin nodded as if to himself. “And that was right where you have been sleeping for how long?”
Swallowing, Will was a little gray-faced as he responded, “All the time we’ve been staying here.”
“So you think you have been sleeping on top of her every night?”
He nodded, aware of the nausea returning.
“I think you did not. If she h
ad been there, you would have felt her,” Baldwin sighed. “It seems to me that someone must have hidden her there only recently. Last night, in fact.”
“Eh?” sputtered Wat with a start. “What do you mean? No one’s going to dump a body like that—it’s asking to be found out. No one would commit murder and then make sure their crime’s found out!”
“Did you leave your bed last night?” Baldwin asked.
The man shot a look at Wat, then gave a shrug. “Yes. I was there until the storm, but then I got up…just as the rain started.”
“When did you return?”
“I didn’t. I…hurt myself, and a couple of the men took me into the hall.”
Baldwin nodded, his eyes going to the wound, and Will reddened.
“This is mad!” Wat burst out.
“Some would say that any man who decides to kill must be mad,” Baldwin said evenly. He had the impression that the mercenary was trying to distract him from his study of the wounded man. “Even if it was for money.”
Wat made a gesture of rejection. “That’s got nothing to do with it. Why should Sir Hector dump the body there? He’d know it’d be found. And when it was, the trail would lead right to him.”
“Perhaps Sir Hector did not put her there.”
“Then who did?”
“That is what we must discover. She was not there at dark last night, I assume, for she was not noticed. If a man could feel her when he sat on her, she would surely have been felt by someone lying on top of her. Her dress is wet in places, too, which tends to show she was being carried around last night.”
Simon stood and paced the room, then stopped and faced Baldwin again. “There are only two explanations why someone should have put her there. One is because another hiding place was unsatisfactory; the other because, as you say, the body was intended to be discovered.”
“Yes. I can see no other reason.”
“But the first is inconceivable.”
“Why?” demanded Wat hotly.
Simon threw him a contemptuous look. “Why? Think, man! If you were to kill someone, would you leave the body in an accessible place?” The mercenary was silent, and Simon suddenly realized that he might well have been in such a situation in his past. “Er—anyway, if somebody murders, they try to hide the corpse far from prying eyes. The last thing they’d do is keep a body in town. They move it out into the country, if they have the chance, and dump it in some quiet spot. Oh, the run-of-the-mill killings, the arguments over ale or gambling, get finished and resolved quickly; two men fight and there’s one dead afterward, and the killer is soon found, but in a case like this, where there would seem to be some kind of plan being followed, to judge by the fact that three are dead, the thought uppermost in the killer’s mind is how to cover his tracks, and that means concealing the death. If a corpse cannot be found, no man can be prosecuted.”
Crediton Killings Page 25
