The Sticklepath Strangler aktm-12

by Michael Jecks

  ‘God’s teeth!’ the peasant with the shovel swore, wincing.

  Simon turned away from the melancholy scene.

  He was down on the road with the crowd which had straggled up here. The poorest seemed to stick together, like a herd of cattle seeking protection from a dog, their status apparent from their threadbare clothing and drawn features. Near them were some twenty men and boys in slightly better clothes: wealthier farmers and franklins. These were the fellows who owned their own land, who didn’t have to literally slave in the lord’s strips. The labour of a villein’s body was owned by his master, and the villein must leave his own crops to rot when he was called to his lord’s harvest.

  Looking over this lot, he reckoned that the men of Sticklepath looked less bovine than most. It was strange: in some towns and cities, he had heard that the lowest peasants could swagger and boast like franklins, but usually in the smaller hamlets folk knew their place, and would keep away from the likes of Simon and Baldwin. Here, however, he was conscious that men and women alike met his gaze with truculence. It was slightly alarming. This lot could become a mob, he thought, and unconsciously he tapped the hilt of his sword.

  Ivo was there, too. His long face with its narrow nose was oddly intent as he stared up at the men working above the wall. However, Ivo was not thinking of the inquest, nor even of the child who was being exhumed.

  There were so many children in Sticklepath, and this one had already been replaced. Peasants in this benighted vill bred like lecherous pigs, rolling and rutting in the dirt; it was no surprise the place was overrun with snot-nosed brats.

  As the man cried and dropped his shovel, Ivo glanced up towards him. He knew well enough that this was a dangerous moment for the Reeve and Drogo, for he had seen them burying the body near here; if it turned up now, his hold over the Reeve would be ended. He shrugged. Oh well.

  A small boy ran down the lane, narrowly missing Ivo as he passed, and the man pursed his lips. Illegitimate spawn of a sow and a hog! Next time the little sodomite tried that, he’d get a boot up his arse. See how he liked sprawling in the dirt.

  Ivo loathed children. Always had. Mother had told him that he would love his own, but thank Christ there was no risk of that. His wife was barren, useless cow. Shame he’d ever married her. She was only ever a drain upon his purse, no good as a bedfellow or housekeeper. Couldn’t manage a servant to save her life.

  It was as he was thinking of his wife that he saw her again, and felt his heart flutter: Nicky.

  She had a natural grace about her, an elegance that was without comparison in this dump; it must be her French blood, Ivo thought. He had often heard it said that Frenchwomen had more style and grace than their English counterparts, and Nicky proved it. She was gorgeous. He wanted to take her in his arms and kiss her, strip her naked and lay her on his bed.

  Caution made him glance about, looking for her husband, his brother, Thomas Garde. Tom was a jealous git at the best of times, and he hated Ivo. Jealousy, Ivo thought smugly. Here he was, Manciple to the nuns at Canonsleigh, and Thomas no better then a peasant. If Ivo could, he’d get rid of Thomas, permanently. That would give him a chance to have a proper go at Nicky, without fear of interference. All he need do was think up the right plan… Of course, knowing Thomas’s temper, any attempt to trap him would carry certain risks. He’d have to be very careful.

  It occurred to him that he should use Tom’s well-known temper against him – get him convicted of breaking the peace or something. Nicky would have to ask him for help then, and he could seduce her. Ivo groaned silently. It was a delicious thought.

  Then he remembered his malicious comment the night before, to Sir Baldwin’s manservant at the inn. He had merely thrown out the suggestion that his brother could have been responsible for the recently discovered murder in order to drop Thomas in the shit. No man liked to be interrogated like a felon, especially someone as fiery-natured as Thomas Garde. Ivo sniggered nastily.

  If, however, Ivo was somehow able to implicate him properly – Ivo might yet be grappling with his widow before too long.

  Looking about him, he was relieved to see no sign of his brother, although he must be there somewhere. The only man he noticed was Bailiff Puttock, who was watching him closely. Ivo saw his gaze go to Nicky, as though puzzled by Ivo’s smouldering looks.

  Ivo shrugged. He wasn’t the only man to show an interest in his sister-in-law. Finally taking an interest in the proceedings, he glanced back at the grave, and then a frown passed over his face as he heard people mention the name Aline and speak in hushed terms of a girl’s corpse.

  ‘But what happened to him?’ he said in astonishment.

  Chapter Nine

  When the peasant digging gave a shocked curse, Baldwin immediately peered into the grave. The man had exposed the ribs of a skeleton. As Drogo had suggested, this must be an old corpse.

  Baldwin looked up and noticed the three men who had been with Drogo at the inn when he arrived. He nudged the Reeve and pointed. ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Drogo le Criur’s men, the Foresters. Young Vin, Adam Thorne is the man with the limp and the other one is Peter atte Moor.’

  ‘Tell them to come here,’ ordered Coroner Roger. ‘They can help this fellow instead of gawping.’

  Vincent looked as though he might be sick when he saw the blackened bones protruding from the grave. Even Adam crossed himself as he limped over to it, a sad-looking man with heavily lidded eyes, but it was Peter atte Moor’s behaviour which struck Baldwin most: he sprang up onto the wall and stood gazing down into the hole almost hungrily. When the three men were in the grave, they began to tug gently at the fabric and somehow managed to lift the bones from the clinging soil.

  ‘Hurry up!’ the Reeve called.

  Baldwin noted that Alexander de Belston was no longer so languid. In fact, he looked very tense. He appeared almost stunned – but desperate to get the bones out of the grave.

  By some miracle the material held until they had the headless corpse out of the hole and were standing before the Coroner; then there was a tearing sound and the cloth ripped, spilling the discoloured bones in a heap at Roger’s feet.

  ‘Not an adult, then,’ he said thoughtfully.

  ‘No, sir. I think it’s a young girl who disappeared a few years ago,’ the Reeve answered.

  ‘I see,’ Coroner Roger said quietly.

  The Reeve’s voice was convincing, and so was the fact that no one in the crowd saw fit to dispute his words. However, there was something that interested Baldwin. ‘You saw that there was a body and left it covered?’

  ‘What else could it be when we found the skull, Keeper? Yes, I set a guard over it day and night. We are law-abiding folk here.’

  Baldwin smiled suavely. The ‘Keeper’ had almost been spat out, as though the Reeve held men like him in low esteem.

  Alexander beckoned and one of his men came forward with the skull wrapped in a cloth. He set it down with the bones as though hoping the body might reassemble itself.

  Coroner Roger glanced at the Parson, Gervase Colbrook, who was licking his lips and staring at the skeleton. Feeling the Coroner’s eyes on him, he picked up a reed and dipped it in his ink, ready to take down the details.

  ‘All right! Silence! Shut that brat up there!’ bawled Roger. ‘I’m the King’s Coroner and this is the inquest into the death of this child. Does anybody know who it was?’

  ‘Swetricus,’ the Reeve called. ‘Come forward, man.’

  Baldwin watched as a large man shoved his way to the front of the crowd and stood before them all, his head bowed. The knight recognised the shambling gait, the hang-dog stance. Swet’s demeanour was so like those of Baldwin’s comrades after the destruction of their Order that he felt a pang pull at his heart.

  ‘This is Swetricus, Coroner.’

  ‘What do you know of this, good fellow?’ Coroner Roger asked gently.

  ‘I recognise the cloth. It’s like Aline’s. My daughter.’


  The Coroner nodded. Swetricus had a steady, deep voice, but there was a slight tremble in it as his eyes slid down to view the pile of bones that might have been his daughter. ‘When did you last see her?’

  Swetricus looked at Alexander with a pleading expression. ‘Four years ago.’

  ‘I see. What happened to her?’ Coroner Roger glanced down at the corpse again, wondering how someone could want to hurt a pathetic little bundle like this.

  ‘Sir, I don’t know. It was the middle of summer. I was out in the fields. She’d been there with her sisters that morn. First I knew was that night, when she didn’t come home.’

  ‘Did you search for her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Speak up, you dull-witted son of a whore!’ Alexander grated. ‘The Coroner doesn’t have all day for you to order your brains!’

  ‘Just answer the question,’ the Coroner said, with a long, cold look at the Reeve.

  ‘The Hue was raised. Didn’t find nothing.’

  ‘Really?’ The Coroner’s voice was quieter. ‘How old was she?’

  ‘Must have been eleven. Maybe twelve.’

  That was a relief, Roger thought to himself. So often a father or mother had no idea how old their offspring were. ‘Did she have a boyfriend?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She was buried wrapped in that material. Is that how her body was discovered?’

  ‘As I said, we didn’t uncover all of her,’ the Reeve said. ‘When those wenches Joan and Emma tugged at the scrap of cloth, visible where the wall had crumbled, the skull fell out. There didn’t seem any point in trying to get at the rest of the body without an official being present, and I didn’t want it to be disturbed by wild animals, so we took the head to protect it and left the rest.’

  ‘Who was the First Finder?’ the Coroner called, and Miles Houndestail stepped forward. He answered Coroner Roger’s questions clearly, telling how he had seen the two girls as they discovered the skull, how he had returned to the vill with Joan, and raised the Hue and Cry, contacting the Reeve and the nearest four houses as the law required. He had insisted that the Reeve should send for the Coroner.

  Belston himself was silent. Of the two villagers, Baldwin considered that the Reeve looked even more depressed than Swetricus. The latter had lost his daughter, true, but now at least he knew what had happened to her. The Reeve, on the other hand, was responsible for the fines which would be imposed. And they would hurt his pocket considerably.

  Yet there was another point. ‘I have heard talk of cannibalism,’ Sir Baldwin said strongly, and the watching crowd gasped. ‘Could this poor child not merely have been raped and then silenced?’

  The Reeve turned to the Coroner as though Baldwin had not spoken. ‘Everyone was hungry. You remember the famine. It was just natural to assume the worst.’

  Liar, Baldwin thought. ‘May I take a look?’ he asked.

  Receiving the assent of the Coroner, he sprang lightly into the makeshift grave, where he crouched and studied the ground upon which the girl had lain. There were more pieces of material at the foot, and he saw a fresh piece of bone. Picking it up, he weighed it in his hand a moment, reflecting as he peered about him. In all cases where there was the possibility of murder having been done, he liked to see the bodies because, as he so often told Simon, the body of a dead person could tell the inquirer so much. Sometimes it was the type of wound which might have killed the victim, sometimes the position of the body, or the marks of blood. There was often something which the intelligent researcher could learn. Rarely, however, was the evidence so prominent as this. He bent and picked up a slender loop of leather, much decayed and soiled, but recognisable.

  ‘A thong,’ he said, holding it up, ‘such as a traveller might use to bind a tunic or tie a roll to a saddle.’

  ‘We have travellers coming past here all the time,’ Alexander said dismissively. ‘I have no doubt this evil murderer killed her on a whim as he passed through the vill.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Baldwin said. It was a possibility, he knew. Except… ‘Did no one notice that the field had been dug up?’

  ‘Eh? Oh, when she was buried, you mean? No. This wall is often collapsing. It did so two or three years before Aline disappeared. This last time, we dug back into this ground a couple of feet, built the wall, then infilled. It’s worked until now.’

  ‘I expect it is the steepness of the lane,’ Baldwin acknowledged. ‘So whoever buried her so shallowly must have done so shortly after the wall was rebuilt, or you would have found her. Someone came up here, either with her already dead, or walked here with her. He could dig down and bury her, and then cover her without anyone noticing…’

  ‘Yes,’ Alexander agreed. His face had eased slightly, as though glad to find that there was a simple explanation.

  ‘… probably,’ Baldwin finished. He passed the thong to Coroner Roger and climbed out of the hole. ‘I am still surprised that a grave wasn’t noticed. You can always see where a body has been interred in a cemetery.’

  ‘I don’t know. I expect it was just some tranter or tinker,’ the Reeve said, and there was almost a note of hope in his voice. ‘Perhaps no one came here for a while afterwards.’

  ‘A traveller who didn’t know this area – some tranter or pilgrim who was unused to building walls?’ Baldwin mused. ‘Does it sound credible to you? Some fellow who wasn’t aware that the wall had only recently fallen, who didn’t know that the soil would be easy to dig up – does it seem likely that they would choose this spot? Surely this was done by someone who lived here, someone who knew about this wall falling, someone who could come here at night and bury her.’

  ‘How long would it have taken a man to bury her?’ the Reeve wondered.

  ‘The same time for a local man as for a traveller,’ Baldwin said drily, ‘but a local man would have known where to lay his hands on a shovel. A traveller probably would not.’

  Alexander looked devastated. ‘This is terrible!’

  ‘And a man who had friends to help him might bury the girl still faster.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Just what I said.’

  ‘No one here could do such a thing,’ he choked.

  ‘Really?’ Baldwin looked at him steadily. ‘Tell me, Reeve, what is all this talk of cannibalism?’

  Alexander felt as though the ground was moving beneath his feet. ‘I–I… Well, what else could it be?’

  ‘Almost anything!’ Baldwin snapped, allowing a little of his impatience to show. ‘I would have said it could have been rape, anger, perhaps even an accident that someone was afraid to admit. The very last thing I would have thought of would be cannibalism. This body has no flesh on it: any evidence disappeared long ago, so why did your mind turn to it, Reeve?’

  Alexander opened his mouth but no sound came. He frowned at the body, then down at his feet before looking towards Swetricus and the villagers as though seeking advice or reassurance. ‘I…’ He broke off helplessly, and it was Miles Houndestail who answered for him. Coroner Roger beckoned him forward and he stood at the Reeve’s side.

  ‘Because they had already had one,’ he stated firmly.

  ‘One what?’ the Reeve demanded irritably.

  ‘A case of cannibalism.’

  Peter could only hold his face still with an effort. He had never cared for that kid Aline, but he had known her dad Swetricus for years.

  Swet and he had worked together in the fields as children, and when they grew older, they married within a few months of each other, before both losing their wives during the famine. The only difference was, Swet still had his family.

  Peter tried to keep his bitterness at bay, but it was hard, so hard. His wife had died, and then Denise was gone. Ever after he suffered from the torments of loneliness, but Swet still had his other three girls. Aline and his wife might have died, but Swet hardly needed them, did he? His life was unchanged, and he could go and enjoy the use of other women. Peter couldn’t. Somehow they never attract
ed him, or if they did, as with the whore he’d bought in Exeter two years ago, he could not manage the act.

  At the time, he had been ashamed at first. She was just some cheap slattern from a tavern, and she’d taken him to a room at the rear, where a worn and malodorous palliasse showed that she shared the place with other girls.

  He had grabbed her, his blood inflamed by ale, and she had responded eagerly, thrusting her hips at his while she slobbered over his face, whining like a bitch on heat, moaning and pleading that he should satisfy her. He wanted to, God in Heaven, how he wanted to.

  The light was poor, and with the ale coursing through his veins, he almost imagined her to be his wife when they married: young, slender and supple. He closed his eyes as he kissed her, and he was once more a young man and she his twelve-year-old sweetheart.

  But then the whore had shoved her hand at his cods, speaking quietly and filthily about what she wanted him to do for her, what she would do for him, and as she spoke, his vision slipped away, along with his erection. She wanted him, badly – or so she kept telling him – but he couldn’t do anything.

  That was when the anger took hold of him. She wasn’t his wife, she was counterfeit. Just another woman trying to get her hand on his cods and then into his purse. That was all she wanted, his money.

  He had shoved her from him, the bitch. Bitch! Yes, he’d thrust her away, and she’d protested, just like they all did. Claimed he’d torn her tunic, wanted money. Told him he was a eunuch, that maybe he’d prefer a boy – and that was when he bunched his fists and went for her.

  Afterwards, he found himself wandering the streets of Exeter with the money from her purse in his hand. He went to the bridge and stared at the coins, for a while, unsure where they’d come from, and as the memory came back, he had held them out over the water and let them fall slowly, one by one, into the cleansing waters of the Exe. They fell with the small drips of blood where one of her teeth had broken on his knuckle.