Figure of Hate

by Bernard Knight

  'There's no need for you all to be here, if it distresses you.'

  His attempt at concern for their feelings fell on deaf ears, as they all stood their ground, scowling, defying anyone to try to dismiss them from their own church.

  'He's all bloody underneath,' grunted Gwyn, as he tugged the back of the tunic upward to the shoulders.

  The surface of the bier was slick with blood, which began to drip to the floor as the body was moved.

  'We'll have him over the other way,' ordered the coroner. The family had been offered their chance to leave and he was not inclined to skimp his examination on their account. Hugo Peverel was a large man and his corpse was heavy, but the muscular Gwyn turned it as if it were a mere side of bacon, and laid it on its face.

  'Soaked in blood!' commented the Cornishman cheerfully, grinning at Thomas as the little clerk blanched. Even after more than a year in the coroner's service, he was still squeamish at the sight of gore.

  The back of the tunic and shirt were dark red, almost black, in colour, and at the sides they were stiff where the blood had dried. 'There was nothing like that amount of blood visible when we saw him in the ox byre,' ventured Walter Hog, the bailiff.

  'But I was told that he was found face down,' snapped de Wolfe. 'Is that right?'

  'He was indeed, I'll never forget the sight,' answered Odo, tensely.

  'Then you wouldn't expect him to bleed much, until he was turned on to his back,' retorted the coroner irritably. 'Most of this blood issued from him after death. That's why it was remiss of you to move him. I need to see bodies in their original state.'

  'What difference can that make?' sneered Ralph. 'He was stabbed to death, even our village idiot could have told you that.'

  John glared at him, thrusting his head forward like an angry crow.

  'If you've nothing helpful to say, I suggest you keep your mouth shut, sir! If I could be sure that he had not bled much before his body was interfered with, it would tell me that he was stabbed where he lay, probably face down. And that he died quickly!'

  'How can you say that, Crowner?' asked Odo, with a trace of genuine interest in his voice.

  'The blood has stained his garment only above the waist. If he had been on his feet, even staggering about for a few moments, it would have trickled down over his buttocks and thighs.'

  Gwyn nodded sagely. Both he and the coroner prided themselves on being self-taught experts on death and injury, after twenty years on various battlefields, as well as a year investigating sudden death in Devon.

  De Wolfe turned his attention to the back of the body, revealed now that the clothing was pulled up almost to Hugo's neck. It was a smeared mass of blood, with gobs of shiny clot adhering here and there. He turned to the priest, who was standing wringing his hands at the transformation of his church into a mortuary.

  'Father Patrick, have you a cloth and some water we could use?'

  The rotund cleric hurried away to a small door on the north side of the building, which opened into a small lean-to shelter that served as a sacristy and storeroom. Here, in addition to his second-best cassock and his service books, he had a broom made from a bundle of twigs, a wooden bucket and some cleaning rags for the altar cross.

  'This is all I have, Crowner,' he said, offering a strip torn from an old surplice and some dirty water left in the bucket. Gwyn took them and carefully wiped away as much of the blood as he could from the skin between the dead man's shoulder blades. A ripple of suppressed horror went round the audience, which now also contained the reeve, the steward, the armourer and a couple of other manor officers. They saw a pattern of marks on the skin of the late lord's back which told of a violent attack.

  'You'll need to make a note of these as soon as we've finished, Thomas,' commanded de Wolfe. He peered more closely, his big hooked nose coming within a foot of the bloody wounds.

  'Six, no seven, stabs, both sides of the spine. All roughly in the same direction - the knife must have been held at about the same angle for them all.'

  'Narrow blade, by the looks of it, Crowner. But not all the wounds are the same length.' Gwyn was unwilling to let his own expertise go unemployed.

  'The length depends how far the knife was pushed in, if it was a tapered blade,' answered his master. 'But I agree, a smallish blade - the widest wound is well under an inch across.'

  He clicked his fingers at his officer and pointed to Hugo's own dagger, resting in its sheath on the discarded belt. Gwyn pulled it out and showed it to his master.

  'That certainly didn't cause these wounds,' he grunted. 'Double-edged and much too wide.' Having eliminated the dagger, de Wolfe now explored the depth of the stabs, and without hesitation rammed his forefinger into the biggest wound and pushed until his knuckle was against the skin.

  'Goes deeply inside his chest, between the ribs,' he announced, before withdrawing the finger with a sucking sound. He absently wiped the blood with the soiled rag as he worked out something in his mind.

  'The blade was held diagonally across the back, roughly in line with the ribs, so no bone was broken as it slipped between them. The killer must have been to the side of the victim, either right or left, when he struck - or she struck,' he added.

  'A woman? Or a girl? That's the very thing we are suggesting!' snapped Ralph, with an I-told-you-so sneer.

  De Wolfe shrugged. 'It may be unlikely, but I rule nothing out at this stage. It was a small knife such as women carry - and the force needed to slip a blade between the ribs, rather than smash through them, would literally have been child's play, let alone a woman's.'

  Again there was a murmur of smug agreement among the brothers, who were only too eager to pin the blame on the laundry maid. As the coroner continued his examination, he found nothing else on the rest of the corpse, which he found interesting in itself.

  'Not so much as a scratch on the hands or arms, so he made no effort to defend himself. Often an attacked man will fend off the blade with his forearm - or even grasp it to deflect it from his vital organs. There is nothing of that nature here.'

  'And as the gentleman was an experienced tournament fighter, he would not have been taken easily,' Gwyn reminded him.

  'Then my brother was obviously taken unawares by some cowardly assassin!' snapped Joel.

  'Face down in the hay, he might well have been sleeping,' said John. 'Especially soon after having taking his pleasure with a girl.'

  'Why is the skin dark red in places, but white over the shoulder blades?' demanded Odo, who seemed to have an inquiring streak in his nature.

  'He has been lying on his back now for many hours, so the blood has settled to the lowest point,' explained de Wolfe. 'But lying on this hard bier has squeezed it from the shoulders and buttocks. Another reason for not moving the corpse until I had a chance to see it.' He turned his attention back to the sinister-looking cuts on the cadaver, and together with Gwyn poked and prodded at each gaping slit in the skin.

  'D'you think that a few of the wounds show a blunter end?' he asked his officer.

  Gwyn, pleased to be asked his opinion, nodded. 'This one - and this, almost certainly.' He pointed a grimy fingernail at the upper end of a couple of the injuries, where a slightly squared-off termination did not quite match the sharply pointed lower end. 'I reckon it was a single-edged blade, not a regular dagger with two cutting edges.'

  The coroner nodded his agreement. 'A narrow knife, blunt along the back.'

  Richard de Revelle was determined to be dismissive and obstructive.

  'A great deduction, indeed!' he said sarcastically. 'There are probably forty such knives in this village alone. And for all we know, the killer might well be an outsider, creeping in here at night to thieve.' De Wolfe straightened up and stood with his fists resting on his sword belt. He would have liked to have used them to punch his arrogant brother-in-law on the nose, but restrained himself and said mildly, 'It's early days yet. Every small fact adds up when we are seeking a murderer.'

  He nodded
at Gwyn, who began to replace the clothing and lay the corpse face up on the bier, before covering it again with the sheet.

  'I trust you have finished with poor Hugo now, Crowner?' said Odo, in a sepulchral voice.

  'I have no need to examine his body again, certainly. But I will need to display it to the jury when I hold my inquest, as the law demands.'

  'But surely we can go ahead with the funeral!' exclaimed Ralph. 'It is not decent to leave him above ground a moment longer than is necessary.'

  The coroner shook his head emphatically. 'I am sorry, but that is not possible until I have held my inquiry and recorded it for the King's justices - when they next come to the county.'

  'And when will this precious inquiry be held?' sneered de Revelle, determined to make things as difficult as possible.

  'I will first have to speak to everyone who might have some information - which I'm afraid includes every member of the family and your manor-servants. Then anyone else in the village who may know something about this tragedy. As today is already well advanced, that will take until tomorrow morning, but I have to return to Exeter then, as I already have another inquest set for the afternoon.'

  'So when are you coming back here?' demanded Joel.

  'The day after tomorrow - Wednesday. You may arrange your burial for later that day. The weather is cool for October, there will be little problem with the body. Matters may have been more difficult in high summer. He can rest with dignity here before the altar.' The brothers and their neighbour, de Revelle, protested at the delay, but the coroner was implacable.

  'Now I need to begin speaking to all those who might have some information for me,' said John brusquely. 'Starting with that girl Agnes.'

  'It was very unwise of you to insist that she be released so easily from our arrest,' huffed Richard de Revelle. 'That may be the last we see of her!'

  'And where could she go, might I ask?' countered John. 'She'd hardly be welcome in the next manor, or anywhere else around here - a runaway serf belonging to Sampford.' He turned his back on Richard and addressed Odo. 'I'll walk to where she lives now, if someone will show me where that is.'

  'We'll accompany you, Crowner!' snapped Ralph. 'She is our serf, I need to interrogate her myself.'

  Again John noted that the 'we' slipped into 'I' - and he also observed that Odo's scowl deepened at the lapse. There was little filial affection between these two, he thought.

  'You are certainly entitled to speak to your subjects as much as you wish,' he said. 'But not when I am conducting my enquiries. I wish to speak to her alone - or at most, with her mother present.' The Peverels huffed and puffed, but de Wolfe was adamant.

  'In that case, the bailiff can take you,' grunted Odo. 'We will return to the manor house to discuss the matter further with Sir Richard and our ladies.' With ill grace, the brothers and their steward left the church and a few moments later Walter Hog led the coroner and his assistants up the dusty track towards the western end of the village. Beyond the green they passed the manor house on their left, its stockade seeming to dominate the rest of the dismal village with menace, emphasising the downtrodden status of the folk who laboured to keep the Peverels in relative comfort. The whole place seemed shabby to John, especially in comparison with his home manor of Stoke-in-Teignhead, where his brother William prided himself on ensuring a decent living for both his freemen and his bondsmen. Here many of the houses were little better than hovels, with mouldy grass-grown thatch and in some cases, disintegrating walls where the cob had eroded from the frames on which it had been plastered. As he walked up the rough track, he noticed that many of the fences around the crofts were broken and had been roughly mended with branches and sticks to keep the livestock from straying.

  There were a few decent houses, and the bailiff proudly pointed out one as his own and another as the dwelling of the reeve.

  The dusty road sloped up towards the west, where it went on to Tiverton. On the left, behind the line of crofts and toffs, were strip fields running away at right angles until they reached the meadow and waste, which in turn gave way to the edge of the forest. On the other side of the road, the fields sloped down into the shallow valley that carried the mill-stream, beyond which was more waste ground until the trees began again. Above these, low hills filled the horizon, sloping up towards the distant edge of Exmoor, the green beginning to turn brown as the autumn advanced.

  As the village began to peter out, the dwellings became smaller and even more dismal. These belonged to the cottars, inferior bondsmen who had no land allotment in the fields like the freemen and villeins, but eked out a living by working for the lord at the more menial tasks. They tended cattle and goats, did the fencing, milking, ditching and thatching and some of the ploughing and raking on the lord's demesne.

  Others were labourers for the farrier, smith or miller, or cleaned the stables and byres and spread the dung on the fields.

  The bailiff stopped at the last shack, a mere few hundred paces from where the dense trees closed in at the edge of the village.

  'This is where Agnes lives. It's a poor place, I'm afraid,' announced Walter, with a trace of embarrassment.

  There was a ragged thorn hedge around the quarter acre plot and John pushed aside an apology for a garden gate, which was a few branches tied with twine.

  In front of the hut was a garden where vegetables grew, though many had already been harvested and others, such as rows of beans, had died back at the end of the season. He could hear the bellow of a cow and the grunting of pigs behind the house and as he walked to the door he saw a female goat tied to a stake on a patch of coarse grass.

  The building was of the usual cob under a tattered thatch, once whitewashed with lime, but patches of the surface plastering had fallen away to reveal the straw and clay underneath. The door was a sheet of thick boiled leather hanging from the lintel, and the bailiff pushed this aside and stuck his head in to shout.

  'Aelfric! Gunna! Are you there? The coroner wants to talk to Agnes.'

  A small lad, little more than a toddler, shot out of the doorway, pursued by a barking mongrel, and vanished around the side of the house. Then a large woman of Saxon blood appeared, probably not more than thirty years old, her face lined and worn with toil.

  She had a small baby in her arms and her soiled and patched dress was pulled aside to allow it to feed from her breast.

  She looked with lacklustre eyes at the bailiff, then at John and the two men standing behind him.

  'My man is working, but Agnes is here. Two neighbours brought her home.' Her voice was flat and apathetic. 'You'd best come in if you want to talk to her. God knows how we'll manage if she loses her work at the wash house.'

  Walter Hog held the door-flap aside and de Wolfe went in, Gwyn and Thomas standing at the threshold where they could hear what was being said. John found himself in a long room that smelt strongly of cow manure as at one end a wattle screen penned in two brown calves and a stinking billy-goat. At the other was a heap of dried ferns on a wooden shelf that served as the matrimonial bed, under which was more bracken to soften the sleeping place of three children.

  A fire-pit in the centre was only smouldering at present, so there was little smoke to choke the atmosphere. Along the back wall was another wide wooden shelf with pots and dishes which appeared to be mainly used for skimming milk and brewing ale. Around the fire-pit, over which was an iron trivet from which hung a small cauldron, a few more pots and dishes indicated the cooking facilities. A couple of milking stools were the only other furniture, but the object of his visit was sitting on the floor with her back to the wall. Agnes had a sullen, defiant look on her round face, but this cleared somewhat when she saw who the visitor was.

  'Thank you for delivering me from those men, sir,' she said, in an unexpected bout of gratitude. 'I have done nothing wrong, I swear it.'

  'You went with that.., that man again,' snapped her mother. 'Is that not wrong?'

  Agnes jumped to her feet, her face flus
hed with anger. 'What choice did I have? He was our lord and master - and you were glad enough of the two pennies I brought home.'

  The woman shrugged and pulled the baby from her breast and laid it on a grubby cloth spread on the bed.

  Agnes went to the infant and sat alongside it, gently stroking its sparse fair hair to soothe it to sleep, while her mother unselfconsciously rearranged her dress and tucked the ends of her head-cloth into her neckline. 'You answer this lord truthfully, girl,' she said sternly.

  John thought it time to interrupt this domestic tableau. 'I'm no lord, woman, but an officer of the King determined to see justice done.' He turned to the girl, who looked up at him with suspicious eyes.

  'Agnes, if as you claim you have done no evil, you have nothing to fear. I will not allow the new lord of this manor, whoever he might turn out to be, to blame you unjustly. Do you understand?'

  She looked at her mother, then back at the coroner and finally nodded.

  'Were you in that ox byre last night?'

  'Yes, that's where he took me the time before; It's always empty this time of year, the beasts are kept on the waste.'

  'When did you go there?'

  'I left the wash house after they brought the cloths from the hall. Every night, we have to wash the table linen that they use for supper. Lady Avelina won't eat from bare boards, so they say.'

  This was about as accurate an indicator of the time as anyone in a village would be able to offer, with not yet a single clock in the isles of Britain. Dusk and dawn were the only sure markers, unless one stood within sound of the bells of a cathedral or abbey, whose sand glasses and graduated candles indicated the times for the daily services.

  'Was it dark, then?'

  'Getting dusk, sir. Near enough dark by the time he had finished with me.'

  John had no interest in hearing the details. 'Had Sir Hugo been drinking, Agnes?'