Crowner Royal (Crowner John Mysteries)

by Bernard Knight

  His reasoning was now apparent to the others, but Gwyn had an objection.

  ‘The pair of keys might be nothing to do with the same chest. He dealt with many such boxes – maybe he just put them together for convenience.’

  De Mandeville held out his hand. ‘Let me see those keys for a moment.’ He turned them over in his hands and peered at them short-sightedly. ‘They certainly look the same size and type as the locks used on those boxes. The locks are supplied by the Treasury and I think they are all made by the same locksmith.’

  He handed them back to the coroner. ‘But of course, without the actual locks from that treasure chest, I cannot say if they were the keys for it.’

  De Wolfe dropped them back into his scrip. ‘But if the chest has now gone to Rouen, its keys have gone with it, so these cannot be the originals! Presumably you gave your key to the Treasury man who took them, but what about the other key?’

  ‘Simon Basset handed his over as usual,’ confirmed the Constable. ‘He came here last week before the boxes were removed under guard to be taken down to Queenhithe to a king’s ship.’

  It seemed an impasse, but John had one last avenue of enquiry.

  ‘You said the locks probably all came from the same locksmith. Do you know who he was?’

  De Mandeville looked disdainfully at the coroner. ‘I don’t concern myself with such minor matters. But the Treasury keep a few clerks in an office downstairs, who keep records of all the comings and goings of their property. Maybe they might be able to tell you something.’

  They left de Mandeville relieved at their departure and a page took them down to a gloomy archway built into the massive walls of a lower floor. Here an old man in minor orders sat with a shaven-headed youth at a couple of tables covered with parchment lists. The senior clerk scratched his scalp with a quill pen, ruining the tip until he recalled who he paid for the last batch of locks, several years earlier.

  ‘It’s Peter of Farringdon; he has a workshop on the north side of Eastcheap. We use him as he has great discretion, as it would hardly do if he divulged the secrets of the king’s treasure chests. Also, he has been told that if he did, he would be burned at the stake at Smithfield!’

  As they rode through the bustling city, John felt that the ramifications of this investigation were becoming too tortuous to bear. The locksmith was the last throw in this gamble to decide whether Simon Basset was or was not a villain. They found him in a small shop on the main east–west thoroughfare of the city. The shutter of the front window hinged down to form a display counter on the street, covered with metal goods such as candlesticks, sconces, hinges, locks and kitchen appliances such as trivets and spigots. These were guarded by two apprentices working at benches in the front room, who took him through to a forge at the back, where a beefy man of middle age was stripped to the waist in the torrid heat of a furnace. A small boy pumped the furnace. The man was bald, but had red whiskers to rival Gwyn’s and arm muscles that were even bigger than the Cornishman’s.

  He was about to pull an iron bar from the white-hot coals with a pair of long tongs, but when he saw the calibre of his visitors, he thrust it back and came to meet them. John explained the problem and produced the pair of keys, whereupon Peter took them out into the open backyard, where the light was better.

  ‘I didn’t make these!’ he said, within seconds of turning the keys over in his hand. ‘And they are less than a few months old, maybe only weeks. I’ve not had an order for this sort of lock for a year or more.’

  ‘How can you tell they’re not yours?’ asked John, his hopes rising once more.

  ‘Look here, see the shanks?’ he said, pointing with a finger like a pork sausage. ‘They are straight, from the top right down to the wards. I always braze a ring around the lower part of the shank, to hold the wards more easily in the correct position to turn the tumblers.’

  ‘You said they were recent?’

  ‘Very little rust on them, the steel is still shiny. These have not gone through a wet winter like we’ve had this last year.’

  De Wolfe nodded his understanding. ‘So given that you definitely didn’t make these, could they be used for opening the type of lock you supply to the Treasury?’

  The smith looked closely again at the business ends of the two keys. ‘All locks are generally similar, so I can’t be sure. But the Exchequer was insistent upon the most secure ones they could get, so I made complicated wards and gates in the locks – and these are of that type.’ He handed them back to the coroner with a gesture of finality.

  ‘I can’t swear that they must be for those locks, as other smiths are just as competent, but there’s no reason why they couldn’t be for the ones I supplied.’

  There was no more to be gained from Peter of Farringdon and they rode off through Ludgate and back to Westminster. In their austere chamber, the heat was so intense that de Wolfe pulled off his knee-length grey tunic and sat behind the table in his linen undershirt and long black hose, which were supported by laces tied to a string belt around his waist. The fact that his nether regions were totally exposed did not in the least disconcert him, as the table shielded him from any casual visitor.

  Gwyn sat in usual place on the window ledge, trying to catch any breeze from the river and Thomas, who seemed immune from overheating, sat at the end of the table, writing an account of the day’s happenings for the record.

  With jugs of cloudy cider before them, John went over the salient facts that they had discovered.

  ‘The canon was murdered, there seems little doubt of that.’

  ‘Are you quite sure it wasn’t an accident or felo de se?’ asked Gwyn.

  ‘A senior member of the clergy like a canon wouldn’t commit suicide,’ retorted Thomas indignantly. ‘Why should he jeopardize his immortal soul?’

  ‘What about almost dying in a brothel?’ objected Gwyn.

  ‘That’s not a mortal sin,’ snapped the clerk impatiently. ‘And as for an accident, how can anyone inadvertently swallow enough to be fatal? He wasn’t out in the countryside, chewing a score of foxglove plants!’

  De Wolfe held up a hand to stop the bickering. ‘That raises the question, where was he before he went to the brothel? The girl said that he told her he had had a good meal in a decent inn, or words to that effect. That’s where he must have been given the tincture of foxglove, given the timing, according to Brother Philip.’

  ‘He also mentioned to her something about dining with a friend,’ added Thomas. ‘Given the circumstances, that friend must have been the killer.’

  ‘With him dead, we haven’t a hope in hell of knowing who it was,’ said John gloomily.

  ‘Could we discover in which tavern it was he ate his last meal?’ hazarded Thomas. ‘Then we might find what friend accompanied him.’

  ‘There must be a score of inns within a half-mile of Stinking Lane,’ scoffed Gwyn. ‘What chance have any of them recalling their customers from last week?’

  ‘The canon seemed a fastidious man, rich and fond of his belly,’ observed the clerk. ‘He would surely go only to the best eating house – that might narrow the search a little.’

  De Wolfe was doubtful. ‘Perhaps so, but is that within our capabilities? In a week or so, we’ll be gone away with the court.’

  ‘What about the sheriff and his men? They would know all the good inns in that part of London. Could they not search for us?’

  John made a derisory noise in his throat. ‘They seem ill-disposed towards us. Although fitz Durand told us about the death of Simon, I feel he just wanted to get rid of the problem, it being a royal cleric from Westminster. I can’t see him putting his strong-arm men to work for me.’

  He went back to his analysis of the whole situation.

  ‘If those keys really do fit the locks on the treasure chest, then as they cannot be the original keys, someone must have had them copied,’ he mused. ‘And the only person who could have done that, given that they were in his scrip, is Simon Basset himself
.’

  ‘When could he have had them copied?’ asked Gwyn, to whom this was all getting a little confusing.

  ‘He had them both in his hands in that strongroom when we delivered the boxes,’ said John.

  ‘But not before or after,’ objected Thomas, who still seemed inclined to defend the honour of his fellow cleric. ‘You had them until you handed them over to him, and after the checking of the inventory one key was given to the Constable to put in his cupboard. How could he have had copies made with all of us, including two knights from the Tower, watching him?’

  There was a thoughtful silence for a long moment. ‘He was often back and forth to the Tower and its strongroom in respect of other chests,’ said de Wolfe, grimly hanging on to some hope of a solution. ‘Perhaps he had the opportunity to borrow the keys then?’

  Even as the words left his lips, he recognised the weakness of his argument. As the treasure chest had not been opened again until its contents were rechecked and found to be deficient, there was no way in which the key from de Mandeville’s cupboard could have been handled.

  ‘Unless the bloody Constable is also involved in the plot!’ suggested Gwyn darkly. He had obviously taken against the supercilious Keeper of the Great Tower. ‘If he and Simon Basset had conspired together, they could easily have taken the keys out to be copied. The city is full of smiths who could oblige for a good fee – anyway, they wouldn’t know they were making keys to rob the king!’

  Though John had to admit that this was a possibility, he was dubious about its probability. ‘I just can’t see Herbert de Mandeville risking his neck for a few hundred pounds, even though it’s a great deal of money. His family have been Keepers of the Tower for generations, he surely wouldn’t sully their honour in that way.’

  ‘And he’s been there for years, he could have stolen long before this,’ admitted Thomas.

  ‘Perhaps he has!’ grumbled Gwyn, unwilling to abandon his dislike of the Constable.

  ‘Well, there’s no way we can accuse de Mandeville of complicity with no evidence at all,’ decided John. ‘And for that matter, we’ve no hard evidence against Simon Basset, only a suspicion based on those keys.’

  ‘So why should someone want to kill him?’ reflected Thomas. ‘And why would he want to hang on to those keys, if he is guilty? Surely he would have thrown them into the Thames once the theft was completed, to get rid of any incriminating evidence.’

  De Wolfe threw up his hands in despair. ‘Christ Jesus alone knows! There’s little I can do now, except hold a useless inquest and wait for something else to turn up, if it ever does.’

  As the endless hot weather was not conducive to keeping corpses for long, the inquest had to be held early next day, before a funeral in the cemetery reserved for the clergy, which was behind the abbey. He held it in the west porch of the abbey, with the consent of the prior, William Postard’s lieutenant, so that the small jury could proceed inside and view the body which still lay in the transept.

  John’s pessimism about the futility of the proceedings was justified, as nothing useful could come out of them. He decided not to call anyone from the brothel, to preserve the canon’s reputation, even though it meant that he could not introduce any evidence about Basset’s claim that he had eaten at a hostelry with a friend. The ‘friend’ was unknown, as was the hostelry, so there was little point in mentioning it, just as he refrained from calling Brother Philip, who he reckoned was better off healing the sick than travelling to Westminster. Instead, he called Gwyn and Thomas to say on oath that they had heard the monk explain that death was certainly due to foxglove poisoning. Martin the steward and Gilbert the chaplain both averred that Simon Basset was in good spirits when they last saw him and that he had never returned home. They vehemently denied any suggestion that he might have taken his own life and within a few minutes, after solemnly filing past the corpse on its bier, the jury of twelve men recruited from the Treasury, plus the servants from Basset’s household, delivered a verdict of murder by persons unknown, which the coroner graciously accepted, though he would have instantly rejected anything else.

  They attended the funeral immediately afterwards, filing with many of the abbey monks behind the prior to the large burial plot. As the coffin was lowered into the ground, John could not help wondering whether he was witnessing the final disappearance of a victim or a villain. And if Simon was the culprit, what had he done with the loot?

  Walking back towards the palace, de Wolfe went over in his mind the recent cases that had come his way, none of which reflected any glory upon his office of coroner. The guest-room steward, Basil of Reigate, had been stabbed on the river pier.

  Osbert Morel, the ironworker, had been bludgeoned to death on the marshes, though it was true that John had no jurisdiction over his murder. Now a high Treasury official had been poisoned – and in none of them was there any clue as to the perpetrator.

  There were also hints of espionage and the undoubted theft of a large amount of royal property, yet the Coroner of the Verge seemed impotent to solve any of them. He felt again like getting on his old horse Odin and riding off back to Devon, where at least he felt that he had contributed something to keeping the king’s peace.

  At noon he went home with Gwyn to Long Ditch Lane for dinner, where Osanna was still giving him frosty looks after bursting in on his moment of passion with Hawise d’Ayncourt.

  Whether it was because she had taken a fancy to Hilda when she had stayed there or whether she took exception to Hawise’s autocratic manner, John could not tell, but from the way she banged a platter in front of him and slopped his ale into a jar, he knew that he was not in favour with her. However, her salt cod with beans, onions and last year’s parsnips was palatable, as was a boiled fowl stuffed with bread and herbs. A bowl of quince and small plums was rounded off with cheese and maslin bread of wheat and rye.

  As they finished eating, the sullen heat was suddenly broken by a summer storm. The black clouds that had been threatening for days, decided to accumulate overhead and abruptly unloaded torrential rain upon London, accompanied by rolling thunderclaps and flashes of lightning. Within minutes, the downpour turned the lane outside into a morass, running water even lapping against the stone slab that formed the threshold of the front door. The water began pouring off the wide expanse of marsh and the Long Ditch soon turned into a churning brown torrent.

  John decided he would not bother to go back to sit idly in his chamber in the palace and announced that he was going to sleep the afternoon away. Gwyn seemed indifferent to the storm and said that he would go down to the Deacon alehouse to while away the time at dice with his cronies. He marched away through the mud, his old leather jerkin his only protection, the rain cascading off the pointed hood.

  When he had gone, John climbed the steps to his room and flopped on his pallet, a lumpy hessian bag stuffed with hay, which Osanna renewed every few weeks, before it went damp and mouldy. For a short while, his mind revisited yet again the mysteries of the three killings. He lay on his back, staring up at the inside of the roof, where the irregular branches forming the rafters supported woven hazel withies holding up the thatch outside. The thunder still rolled and though the drumming of the rain was softened by the thick layer of reeds on the roof, it had a hypnotic quality that soon sent him to sleep, in spite of the drips of water that fell on his bed from above.

  It was blessedly cool when he awoke a few hours later. The world seemed fresher and the birds were chirruping again, after having been driven into hiding by the storm. De Wolfe felt better than he had for days in that enervating heat and decided to celebrate by having a shave, two days earlier than his normal weekly scrape. In the backyard, Osanna gave him a few quarts of warm water in a wooden bucket and a lump of grey soap, made from goat fat, soda and wood ash. Stripped to the waist, he managed to get a meagre lather on to his black bristles and scratched at them with a small knife that he kept for the purpose, made of Saracen steel honed to a fine edge.

&nbs
p; In his new mood of determined optimism, his thoughts turned to Hawise d’Ayncourt, the siren of Westminster. He was ambivalent about her, knowing full well that he should avoid any involvement with a woman he knew could be dangerous to him. Yet her sultry beauty and obvious availability was both an attraction and a challenge. He decided that if the opportunity was handed to him on a platter, it would be stupid and churlish to turn it down – but he also felt that he should do what he could to avoid such an opportunity arising by staying out of her way and not supping at the Lesser Hall.

  This noble thought lasted less than five minutes, for as he wiped the last of the lather from his face with a cloth, he rebelled at such craven behaviour. He enjoyed the company of Ranulf of Abingdon and young William Aubrey, so why should he, a knight, a Crusader and a royal law officer, be frightened off by a woman, attractive though she was.

  With a flourish of his towel cloth, he decided to demand a clean tunic from Osanna, who did his washing as part of the bed and board that he paid her for. She was still a little surly, but was coming round and gave him a grey tunic that she had earlier thrown over an elder bush in the yard, where she dried her washing until the rain came. He dressed, then sat with a quart pot in the main room and waited for Gwyn to return. When he arrived, he had some news.

  ‘The old queen has arrived at Portsmouth. William Aubrey has already rushed off with a troop of men-at-arms to join the escort and help organize the transport. She should be arriving at Westminster in about five days’ time.’

  It seemed that Ranulf had remained in the palace, rather than travel to the coast, which reinforced John’s intention to take his supper in the Lesser Hall to hear the latest news. He arrived early enough to stand with a few dozen other patrons and hear a short passage from the Gospels and then a long Latin grace, this night being delivered by Archdeacon Bernard de Montfort. John was somewhat piqued to find that Hawise and her dumpy husband were not present. After having summoned up his bravado to face her after their brief but passionate embrace, he felt rather deflated at being deprived of a challenge.