by Peter Tonkin
The Silent Murder
Peter Tonkin
© Peter Tonkin 2014
Peter Tonkin has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published 2003 by Severn House Publishers Inc.
This edition published by Endeavour Press Ltd in 2014.
For Cham, Guy and Mark, as always, and in memory of Wing Commander Leslie West, MBE, C.Eng, MRAeS. 1920-2003.
Table of Contents
One: The Man from Hell
Two: The Dead Letter
Three: The Silent Cry
Four: Dark Waters
Five: Greek Fire
Six: The Heart
Seven: Elfinstone
Eight: Dead Mann’s Kingdom
Nine: The Thirteenth Mouse
Ten: The Sin-Worm’s Steps
Eleven:The Portsmouth Road
Twelve: St Just
Thirteen: Old Harry at Farnham
Fourteen: The Nag’s Head
Fifteen: Justice
Sixteen: Dead Mann’s Message
Seventeen: Buckfast
Eighteen: Cotehel
Nineteen: Rage
Twenty: Repose
Twenty-one: Secrets
Twenty-two: Life and Death
Twenty-three: Post Mortem
Twenty-four: Markets, Meetings and Mysteries
Twenty-five: Preparation
Twenty-six: Traps and Tunnels
Twenty-seven: Feast
Twenty-eight: All Fools
Twenty-nine: Desperate Measures
Thirty: I Love You
Acknowledgements
Extract from A Midwinter Murder by Peter Tonkin
One: The Man from Hell
London, Spring 1595
‘Hold!’ Tom Musgrave threw up his left hand as he snapped the order, and turned the rapier in his right hand safely off-line. Even as he acted so decisively, Tom saw that his opponent was committed to a lunge. Therefore he stepped aside as he spoke and turned, as though he were the most graceful of dancers as well as the Master of Defence.
Kate Shelton’s blade passed harmlessly along the outer curve of his ribs while his armed right hand whispered around her waist and held her, breathless and unusually supine in the crook of his arm, as though they were truly about to dance. Or to kiss. Either was likely enough, for the beautiful, breathless woman was a rising star of the younger generation at Queen Elizabeth’s court, and Tom’s mistress. Down swooped his lean face until his lips just brushed her own. ‘Listen!’ he hissed.
The echo of their swordplay still lingered on the hot air of his long practice chamber like the pealing of discordant bells, but his quick, sharp ears had heard another, more desperate, ringing beyond it. Where they fenced here for amusement, someone out in the street close below was fighting for his life.
They started up together like lovers discovered, turning towards the door that would take them out and down, but Kate froze, stricken. Their exercise since the noon bells had been hard and hot – as warm as the unseasonable weather, which behaved as though June were arriving three months early. Kate had come attired for Court before they had fallen to sporting with his foils, but their play-fighting had been as energetic as all their other pursuits. It had soon become obvious that fashionable clothing for court ladies was never designed to allow the brisk passado or the tempestuous posta longa. Consequently, Tom had served as maid as well as master and slipped off the tightest of Kate’s clothing before returning to their bout. Now her ruff lay discarded on a chair with her sleeves beside it, their points loosed and their slashed silk soughed like snake-skins. Her thoughtlessly unpinned bodice had slid to the floor nearby and the dress-front that had been laced so demurely beneath it gaped now. And so, Kate realized wryly, did the damp shift below, which failed entirely to protect her modesty. From forehead to farthingale, she might as well have been standing naked to the world, like a whore at Bridewell stripped for the whipping. As Tom ran down, therefore, Kate clutched the staid, silken wings of her dress together and hurried to the window instead.
Tom ran out into the stuffy, sweltering street already drawn, supple and afire from his bout with Kate. He saw in a twinkling what the situation was and hurled himself forward. Black Friars was quite wide at this point, up at the Lud Gate end, where Master Aske’s haberdashery stood hard against the City Wall and Tom’s school towered above it. The ancient cobbled roadway was broad enough to accommodate a crowd of some half-dozen onlookers, a gang of four rough-looking footpads and a desperate young gallant standing alone against them.
No. Not alone. As Tom hurled himself to the lad’s defence, so a second champion appeared. The two men Tom was set to join could hardly have presented a starker contrast, noted the Master of Logic, racing in Tom’s keen mind; and in truth, his own tall frame could not have been in more immediate contrast to the pair of them either. For he was clad in elegant black doublet, unlaced to reveal snowy linen at his breast, black galligaskin trousers, wide at the hip and narrow at the knee – the very pinnacle of fashion – and thigh-high Spanish-leather boots.
The lad looked scarcely old enough to boast a beard, a callow country youth, well dressed but ill-armed – expensively and eye-catchingly dressed, indeed, in a uniform of livery, which Tom found old-fashioned, out of place, yet faintly familiar: corn-yellow silk, almost cloth of gold, figured with some device and buttoned in moulded silver. Across the breast of the figured-silk doublet was strapped a leather message-wallet, also crested and silver-buckled. Well enough dressed, then, if all too dangerously – seeming to be a very signal crying to all the world, ‘I carry rich and important things – rob me!’
And, in the face of his dangerous costume, the lad was ill-armed both in terms of weaponry and ability. The fashion of an older time was matched by a short-sword almost of antique years – and none too well maintained. Not that this made much difference, considering how ineffectually it was being wielded by the terrified youth as the four assailants crowded round him with their clubs and daggers briskly at work.
The second man, on the other hand, was massive – squat and square, ill-dressed in common clothes though these clean and well-mended if a-strain at every seam. He seemed a man of the streets, a local journeyman, like any other in the gawping crowd – utterly unremarkable, except, in the first instance, for what he carried and what he was doing with it. Almost lost in his massive labourer’s fist, there gleamed a very jewel of the sword-smith’s art: a stark Toledo blade in an ornate Toledo basket hilt. The priceless weapon was being employed, however, as a cross between a whip and a club. A lesser blade would have snapped at such artless ill-usage, but this one survived a little longer – long enough to drive the footpads back.
Back they stepped into the hissing arc of the Master of Defence’s orbit. Loath to kill even a footpad without warning and run him through the back – for professional and legal reasons at the very least – Tom called out, ‘Ho! Kit Callot!’
All four pads turned on his call and froze as much at his familiarity with thieves’ cant, Tom guessed, as with the all-too-immediate threat of his deadly Solingen blade – the match of the labourer’s Toledo, but fashioned five hundred leagues and more to the north, in Germany.
Seeing how they were all but evenly matched in numbers now, and outmatched, indeed, in weaponry, the footpads simply took to their heels. Into the crowd they vanished like smoke; and the crowd, too, vanished, as the City Watch arrived to find Tom and the stranger alone in fashionable Black Friars, kneeling beside the fainting servant as he lay gasping in the gutter.
The big journeyman held the
boy gently and Tom knew from the way he did it that he had been a soldier and seen companions die – in Flanders, like as not, or on the Scottish Borders. Tom knew them both through his own upbringing and adventuring, and recognized the stranger’s gestures because of them.
He held the battered boy with an all too practised hand; and, looking at the hands themselves, Tom in an instant placed his big companion as a bricklayer. Or, looking more closely at his square, lightly-bearded face, an apprentice bricklayer.
‘How is he?’ asked Tom.
‘Fainting like a girl,’ came the answer in a rich, surprisingly cultured voice, much at odds with the body and the hands. ‘Battered and bruised as Hector pulled behind Achilles’ chariot around the walls of Troy, but I cannot see a wound.’
Tom rose and prepared to talk things through with Captain Curberry’s men, the Watch. Here was assault, and perhaps worse than that, though only time would tell; and as the month was March and Her Majesty at White Hall, they all lay under Sir William Danvers’ jurisdiction, therefore. For Sir William was the Queen’s Crowner, the most powerful lawman in the land.
Sir William’s crowner’s quest could well come out from beneath the Verge as this deed had been done within thirteen miles of Her Majesty. All suspicious acts performed so near to the Queen’s sacred person were subject to such close scrutiny, particularly if death came as their end result. The Queen kept her own coroner to look into the most important of them: Sir William Danby – who had been called, for instance, to the murder of Kit Marlowe, playwright and spy, at Deptford scarce two years since, while the Queen herself had lingered at Greenwich.
When Queen Bess was at Westminster Palace or White Hall, however, a judicial distance had to be maintained between what happened in the sewers and stews of London and what was likely to threaten the Realm itself. The Queen would not be threatened by the murder of a bawd or two or the death of a gallant in a duel – or, indeed, by the fatal robbery of a servant lad up from the country. Sir William Danby would never be unleashed for matters of such slight moment as these. In the meantime, north of the river at least, in the City it was Captain Curberry’s Watch that held the square.
Their leader, Sergeant Virgil Grimes, knew Tom; and Tom knew him as a notoriously slow, deliberate man. Slowly and deliberately, therefore – though as swiftly as Tom could manage – they began to discuss the situation.
The slow conversation had only just begun between them, however, when a cry from on high called Tom’s attention. Kate was hanging out of the end window of the practice room, as careless of her modesty as of his reputation after all. ‘Tom,’ she called. ‘I see their leader; he lingers in a doorway just beyond the gate down into Water Lane.’
Tom turned on his heel and left the bricklayer to deal with the Watch sergeant. Down the street he pounded, eyes busy, mind racing. Racing, but hardly to any purpose: there seemed no pattern to this random robbery, nothing for the Master of Logic to chew upon. Yet Kate had seen – understood more than he. She had recognized, as he had not, that the gang of roughs had had a leader – and recognized which of them it was as well as where he went, lost to Tom’s eyes amongst the vanishing crowd. So if Kate, aloft, had seen more, perhaps there was more still for Tom himself to see down here on the mean street – to see and to understand.
Tom hurtled under the arch that led out of the old Black Friars Priory and into Water Street, skidding to a halt at the first recessed doorway; and there indeed stood the biggest, most brutal of the four men he had called Kit Callot – thieves’ cant for any footpad, robber or low-life. But the footpad did not stand alone: he stood with his back against the doorway looking out at Tom over the shoulder of a slighter man dressed indistinguishably in a travelling cloak and a slouch-brimmed hat. As the footpad’s eyes widened in shocked recognition, so the stranger turned. Over his face he wore a cloth, guarding nose and mouth against city stench and easy recognition alike. Between the top of the cloth and the low-hung brim of the hat there gleamed a pair of cold and narrow eyes. They flashed in the shadows, almost as brightly as the barrel of the pistol that came up from under the cloak in the grip of a gauntleted hand. Had he been closer, Tom might have risked a lunge. As it was, he hurled himself sideways, rolled in the gutter, to the near-ruination of his velvet jerkin, and hurled himself down the slope towards the river. After ten steps he slowed, for there had been no shot. After five more he turned. The doorway seemed empty, but he could not see its shadowed depths from here.
Cautiously, Tom returned, heart thundering and chest heaving, eyes everywhere, until he could see right into the doorway again. In the shady recess stood no stranger, cloaked and armed – stood no footpad. Stood nothing but an ancient, black-wood door – which, when he pounded upon it, remained immovably locked and barred against him.
***
‘Did you see them leave? Did you mark whither they went?’ Tom asked Kate a few moments later.
She shook her head in reply, looking down as she modestly re-secured the strings of her dress-top. Her preoccupation was understandable, for hard on Tom’s heels came the apprentice bricklayer bearing the battered boy and hard on his came the Watch. Nodding fatalistically, Tom turned and directed his new companion into the airy brightness of his own bedchamber, where the fainting boy was deposited gently upon his neatly made bed. The action seemed to stir something in the yellow-clothed messenger, for the dark-ringed eyes flickered in the ivory-cheeked face.
‘Who are ye, lad? Where do you hail from?’ asked the apprentice, his rich voice as gentle as all his gestures and actions so far had been.
In answer, the boy reached up. His arms clasped round the thick bull-neck. The pale lips pressed to the ear beneath the curling, oily hair, and a word or two was whispered, soft as the lightest zephyr of breeze. Then the boy fell back upon the bed and the square apprentice straightened, frowning.
‘What did he say?’ asked Tom, his open face also folding into a frown as he crossed to the pair of them, seeing with his experienced, soldier’s eye the passing print of Death’s own footstep here.
The stranger stepped back, his broad young face pale with shock. ‘He said Hell,’ he answered, dark eyes wide and burning, searching Tom’s face as though some explanation might lie there. ‘There’s no mistake. I’m certain. He said he came from Hell.’
Two: The Dead Letter
‘If Hell’s where he came from, then Hell’s where he’s bound for,’ observed Grimes mournfully, showing more wit than Tom, for one, had credited him with. The Watch sergeant stood between the bricklayer and the bed, looking down into the boy’s staring eyes. Tom crossed to the opposite side and sat beside the still body, leaning forward, eyes busy and fingers itching – but restrained. All too regular, and recent, experience had taught Tom the simple rules of his calling as Master of Logic: eyes first and most; fingers second and least. Logic always but carefully, leaning on the proofs of his sharpest sense. Deep into the dead eyes he looked, therefore, wondering, What could have killed you, boy? For, as the bricklayer had said, there was no wound obvious, no deadly contusion on head or neck, no bleeding apparent from body, eyes or ears; but the wide, fixed eyes looked dead, and Tom’s nose and cheek, brought perforce close to the sagging gape of the silent mouth, detected neither movement nor odour of breath.
The boy was dead, then, in spite of the lack of immediate, obvious cause; but the face was waxen – a thing of linen and ivory. The lips so often blue in the corpses beneath Tom’s sharp notice – were as bloodless as all the rest. As he looked at the frozen death mask, Tom was put in mind of the heads he had found spiked upon London Bridge last year, lopped off murdered women and placed as a warning to the world. But there he had known where the blood that should have coloured the pallid skin was gone.
Back, then, further still in time, to Julius Morton, murdered on the stage of the Rose Theatre in his friend Will Shakespeare’s famous play of Romeo and Juliet, all the rage last summer. Morton, too, had been as white as this – and, initially, as bloodl
ess, for he had been run through the chest from back to front with the finest of foreign steel...
Tom looked up at the apprentice, suspicion rearing like a monstrous hound within his mind. ‘Your Toledo sword,’ he said. ‘Where is it?’
‘God’s my life, I left it in the gutter when I carried the boy aloft,’ came the answer, and the big man whirled away through the door.
‘Sergeant! Follow him,’ rasped Tom. And for once Grimes was not slow to obey.
No sooner was he gone than Tom turned back to his task. Thoughtlessly, like a parent bereft of a hopeful son, he swept a tangle of straw-coloured fringe aside and closed the staring eyes. Then he restrained his eager fingers once again and looked away from the livid face, letting his acute gaze travel down the length of the slight, still frame. A ruff at the throat, the same colour as the flesh; the cloth beneath as yellow as daffodils, as heavy as brocade, with a woven pattern of cats and mice; buttons moulded in a strange shape to figure...what? Nutmegs? The black pouch was buckled tight and held between white fingers that might have clenched had not their strength run out too soon. That gave Tom pause, for he suddenly saw that the boy’s dead hands had not fallen loosely from the apprentice’s neck: they had fallen here to clutch the message pouch with the very last of his failing strength. The pouch was the last thing he had thought of, therefore – the pouch, or the message it contained. Several messages, perhaps, thought Tom. For he noticed that the black leather was full and fat. Both pouch and messages would bear careful examination in consequence, when the eyes were finished and the fingers could begin their work at last.
Below the old-fashioned doublet were old-fashioned breeches of plain daffodil cloth; stockings – of white wool; new shoes, country-cobbled but soiled by London’s streets. And that was all.
Mindful of Morton, Tom stooped forward and allowed his fingers some licence. As he had done with the murdered actor, he rolled the boy on to his side and checked the bright brocade of his doublet between his shoulders – but there was no mark on the cloth. Logic dictated, therefore, that there would be no wound on the flesh beneath – and yet...Tom’s ears were acute enough to hear a gentle slopping, as though he had tilted a barrel half full of ale, when he rolled the body back.
