The Sticklepath Strangler (2001)

by Jecks, Michael

  ‘I don’t care about the girls, whoever they may be. No, I need only concern myself with the body of Ansel. Where did you bury him? Won’t talk? Never mind. We shall find him.’

  ‘Oh, all right!’ Alexander sighed and allowed his head to fall into his hands a moment, collecting his thoughts, before speaking through his fingers. As he spoke, he lifted his head a little way, so that he could meet Baldwin’s gaze. All the time he was aware of Drogo behind him, listening carefully.

  Before he could rally his thoughts, he saw Baldwin eyeing him with a contemplative expression while he fiddled with the thong tying his purse.

  ‘This can wait until the morning, can’t it?’ Drogo said gruffly.

  Baldwin looked into his eyes as he pulled out the splinter of arrow and threw it onto the table in front of Alexander. There was a sudden silence in the room, and Baldwin watched Drogo’s eyes go blank with shock.

  The Forester knew that his own fate was sealed.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Peter atte Moor was uncomfortable in his bed. Although he was exhausted after the last two nights of patrolling his bailiwick, watching and listening for any sign of trouble, sleep evaded him.

  Once he had been a cheerful, tolerant man, but all that had changed one afternoon. One moment’s passion, and his life had been infected, his soul branded, and now all he could do was seek out evil and destroy it. He must fine felons and see them hanged. It was his vocation, it was his only road to salvation. It was his penance.

  The others couldn’t understand. Peter had been born and bred here, like Drogo and Adam, but they had lived most of their time down in the vill, not up on the moors like him. He knew how capricious the moors could be. They could tempt a man to go and investigate them, and then, once he was miles from safety, they would strike; a mist would come down, so swiftly that he had no time to take his bearings, and so thick that he couldn’t see two paces in front of him – and then the wandering soul would be led to a mire from which there could be no escape.

  Peter had been tempted once – they all were, every now and again – but his temptation had caused his destruction.

  It was a girl. He saw her up at the extreme end of his bailiwick, where a stream had been dammed to create a large pool. Massive rocks behind were drizzled with water which cascaded gently down, making the rocks glow in the sunshine as though they were made of glass. It was a beautiful place. Peter had always adored it, and seeing the girl there made him feel as though it had been blighted. This was his own private hollow, and she had ruined it for him.

  She clambered from the pool, stood on the edge, and jumped straight back in. Tall, with long, pale limbs, and thick brown hair that looked almost black now it was wet, she was utterly beautiful, breathtakingly so. Peter had felt his heart thunder in his chest like a caged lion.

  He had gone down to her, his eyes feasting on her as she climbed once more from the pool, shaking her head free of water, self-absorbed and unaware of his presence. There was a rushing in his ears. This girl had appeared from nowhere, as though she was a gift from God, an angel dropped into his bailiwick. When he reached her, there was a strange feeling in his head, as though he was more than half drunk, and there was a weirdness about everything. He could hear nothing. Certainly she must have protested, must have asked him to leave her, for he knew she struck at him and opened her mouth as though to scream, but he couldn’t remember anything about it. He didn’t hear her. It was as though his hearing was cut off. All he was aware of was a high-pitched whistling noise in his ears, which overwhelmed all other sounds.

  It didn’t take long. Afterwards, he knew he was defiled and so was his hollow. She had been a virgin, that was obvious as he surveyed her immature, weeping form on the grass before him, and, realising what he had done, he was sick. The noise in his ears had gone, his lust had flown, and he was left appalled and terrified. A small, frightened man who had lost his life’s direction in a moment of passion.

  Later, he heard that her body had been found by a lay brother from the convent. The girl had been a novice nun, and it was thought that she had slipped on a rock and knocked her head, falling unconscious and drowning. For all he knew it was true: he hadn’t killed her, and he felt sorrow that she had died. He prayed it hadn’t been suicide. He wanted to confess his sin to the Parson, but somehow didn’t feel he could. The rape of the novice was a crime which must wait to be confessed until he lay on his deathbed, begging Absolution before dying.

  God’s punishment was dreadful. For his sins, his family were to pay with their lives. Within a year his wife died, leaving him to bring up their daughter Denise alone. And then she too died, murdered in the cruellest way. Never again could he know contentment. Now his only comfort was walking about his bailiwick; guilt his constant companion. He couldn’t even enjoy a whore! Not after Exeter.

  Peter had ravished a Bride of Christ, and he must suffer the weight of God’s displeasure. All he could do to win favour from God was seek out other felons and make them pay for their sins. But although he found pleasure in seeing them destroyed, it wasn’t enough. It was never enough.

  He turned restlessly. His body, his very soul, ached with exhaustion, but when he closed his eyes, his brain refused to shut off. And then he realised why – it was the noise from the blasted hounds of Samson.

  He almost prayed that he might be finally punished and released from this hell. Death would be a reward he could embrace with thanks.

  Baldwin stood staring at Drogo for a moment, then he looked down at Alexander. ‘Remember that, Reeve?’

  ‘I couldn’t give a tinker’s fart for all this,’ Sir Laurence said. ‘All that matters is that this man is accused of the murder of Ansel de Hocsenham. Is that correct?’

  ‘Yes,’ Nicole said. ‘He told me that he had control over the Reeve because he saw the Reeve burying the Purveyor’s body. The Reeve had killed him, and Ivo swore not to tell anyone, but the Reeve obeyed his whims, he said.’

  ‘Well, Alexander?’ Baldwin asked.

  ‘Jesus Christ! All right,’ Alexander sighed. ‘Yes, Ivo Bel found me out on the Oakhampton road with a shovel. Next day the Purveyor was missing, and yes, I had hidden him. But I didn’t kill him.’

  ‘Was he stabbed?’ Baldwin asked.

  ‘No. Strangled.’

  ‘Don’t interrupt, good Sir Baldwin,’ Sir Laurence said. ‘Let’s have the whole story, eh? From the beginning.’

  Alexander ignored him and spoke to the Coroner. ‘It was the beginning of the famine. Ansel had been the Purveyor for years. He’d got Meg with pup two years before, but when the famine was really hurting, he arrived just when the harvest had failed, looking like a drowned kitten, bedraggled and soaked. I recall it was a Wednesday when he rode into the vill, and the rain was pouring down. It did every day that summer, or so it seemed, and the summer after. The weather didn’t settle down until this year.’

  Baldwin grunted. ‘You reckon this year is settled?’ he said, as he remembered warm, balmy days in the Mediterranean.

  Alexander wasn’t listening. ‘He demanded a vast amount of grain, although he knew full well that we couldn’t supply it, for he could see how poor our store was. I didn’t realise what he was up to at first, I thought he simply didn’t understand. My Christ, I even took him to the ovens to show him how poor the grain was, how water-sodden it was, and he nodded and said he understood.’

  The bastard! He’d just stood there with that supercilious smile, agreeing that the harvest had been shite, and then he’d put his boot in, saying that the King still needed to feed his army, and it was the duty of all loyal subjects to supply his wants. As if the King could give a fig for the people of Sticklepath! Edward was too interested in his boyfriends to care about a vill collapsing and the people dying.

  ‘I explained, I reasoned, I pleaded and I begged. Christ! I all but crawled on my knees to him, but the Purveyor didn’t want to understand. I can see him right now. As I spoke, the shutters came across his eyes. />
  ‘I told him: “Ansel, if you do this we’ll starve.”

  ‘He said, “That is a great shame.”

  ‘ “Look at the people here, you’re sentencing them to death, man! Can’t you see that?”

  ‘ “All I want is the grain, Reeve. And you must supply it.”

  ‘He was stiff and matter-of-fact, glancing casually at the people labouring out in the quagmire that had once been a field. He didn’t give a damn.

  ‘ “Ansel, please!” I said. “This is me – Alex – you’re talking to. Look at me! The folk here are already suffering from scurvy and starvation; you can see it in their faces, you can see the way the kids are becoming listless. We had two children die last month. Both of my sons are weak. Do you want to execute the whole vill?”

  ‘ “I’ve got nothing to do with it. If you’re hungry, you should improve your husbandry.”

  ‘ “Come on, Ansel! There’s nothing to eat. You take our food and we’ll die. And not just the folk here, either.”

  ‘ “What do you mean?”

  ‘I said, “It won’t only be the people of the vill who will suffer, it’s going to affect the folks in the assarts and all about here.”

  ‘ “You threaten me?”

  ‘ “I’m not threatening anyone! I’m telling you the facts, man. If you starve the vill, Meg and Emma will starve with the rest of us.”

  ‘And that was when Ansel’s face altered. His eyes lost their concentration and he looked quite blank for a moment. And then he roared with laughter.

  ‘ “So you are trying to threaten me? Oh Alex, I am sorry, but if you think you can save a mouth or two, go ahead and starve them. She was only ever a comfortable bed for me. Why do you think I never stayed at her assart when I came past here? No, you can starve her or kill her any way you wish, and you can drown her whelp at the same time. It will save me the embarrassment of having to explain them to my wife.”

  ‘ “You are already married? You can’t be! You told Meg you’d married her!”

  ‘ “Oh yes, I did, didn’t I?” he said. “Never mind. She’ll soon forget. She was never very bright, was she?”

  ‘He left me then, still chuckling. It was clear enough what he was after. He wanted the full quantity at a set rate per bushel, which was the same cost as the previous year before the prices all rose. That meant he would pay us between one sixth or one seventh of the actual value of the grain. The vill would never be able to replace it.

  ‘But he knew he could get more elsewhere. It was as plain as the nose on his face that what he really wanted was money. Purveyors always do. They prefer to line their pockets than do the King’s work.

  ‘In the end we settled on three shillings and tenpence. It was all I could promise to collect in a short time, and he gave me a few days to collect it. He said he would wait at the inn and rest until I found it. Afterwards I heard that he had spent much of his time with poor Meg. She can never have known how he spoke of her, prepared to see her starve, and her child, for his own profit, the bigamous son of a poxed ferret!

  ‘It took me almost a week to cajole, wheedle and threaten the money out of everyone. There were many who had nothing, but some of the locals had a few pennies stashed away, and generally I knew who they were, but it was hard. Very hard. No one had that much. This one man was taking another’s yearly income – more! – in a bribe. Extortion, that’s what it was. Give me all your money, or I’ll take all your food and leave you to starve. What a choice! But what choice do we have? We are serfs, villeins, peasants – call us what you will. Our lives are not our own. I once heard a smartly dressed Prior riding through the vill, and when he looked at us all, he overheard a man talking about the cattle we owned, this was before the murrain, of course, when we lost the herd, and this churl, this man of God! Do you know what he said?’

  Alexander was all but spitting now at the memory of that fool on his great horse, fat and smug in his velvets and furs and silks, peering about him disdainfully.

  ‘He said: “These fellows are slaves. All they own is their bellies.”

  ‘ “Their bellies”! Well, all we owned then was our hunger, and fear of dying. I had seen my wife die, and my two boys, during the famine. They were all I ever loved, and I wasn’t alone.’

  ‘This is most interesting, but perhaps you could come to the point?’ Sir Laurence yawned.

  Alexander looked at him, his face carefully composed. Sir Laurence was no better than that Prior: a knight like him had no sympathy for the sufferings of the poor. If the whole of Sticklepath were to perish, Sir Laurence might utter a few words of polite commiseration to Lord Hugh de Courtenay for the loss of his serfs, but that would be all. Peasants mattered less to him than his hunting dogs.

  The Reeve swallowed his frustration. ‘The point is, I got him his money, and he took it and returned to the tavern for the night. Except he didn’t stay there. I went there myself later that evening, only to be told that he had left. I saw Meg the day after, and she was asking where he had gone. She’d been expecting him to turn up at her place the evening before. Poor maid, she was tearful and distressed. He’d cleared off – that was obvious. I didn’t worry myself about it. At least I ’d saved the vill from his greed. But that night his body was found lying in the valley leading up to Belstone.’

  Alexander didn’t look over his shoulder. At this moment he knew he held Drogo’s ballocks in his hand. He could almost hear the Forester’s tension, like a bowstring ready to snap, but he was damned if he would accept all the responsibility. He wouldn’t be the fall guy for Drogo.

  ‘I knew it was Ansel. He’d been throttled with a thong, a simple strip of hide, and dumped.’

  ‘And?’ Baldwin asked keenly.

  ‘Sir Baldwin, please don’t interrupt his fascinating speech,’ Sir Laurence pleaded.

  Alexander sighed. ‘Yes. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he’d been eaten, too. Not by animals. I mean, dogs and the like had chewed at him and his eyes had been pecked out, but those wounds couldn’t hide the fact that a man had butchered him.

  ‘It was too much to bear. I knew that the result would be more than a straight fine: this could cost the vill very dearly, perhaps even cause us all to starve to death. I’m not joking, Keeper. You remember how bad that famine was?

  ‘So . . . I had to choose, and as Reeve, I chose life for the vill. I deliberately hid the body. I found a shovel and buried him, and I came home and . . . God! Won’t those damned hounds ever shut up?’

  Baldwin eyed the silent man at the wall. ‘Did anyone help you?’

  ‘Drogo did. It was he and his Foresters who found the body,’ Alexander said firmly.

  ‘You fucking—’ Drogo’s forward leap was halted by Baldwin’s bright blue sword, which was suddenly at the exposed gap between his jack and his hose. He could feel the razor-sharp point at his groin.

  ‘Did this Purveyor have a purse on him?’ Simon asked. ‘Could the butchery have been to hide a robbery? I’ve known Foresters who’ve turned to robbery themselves.’

  ‘Whoever killed him certainly took the purse.’

  ‘This is most intriguing. I have all I need,’ Sir Laurence said, rising.

  ‘Wait, Sir Laurence.’ Coroner Roger smiled politely. ‘I am the Coroner, and this witness is helping me to conduct an inquest.’

  ‘Without a jury?’

  ‘That will be organised tomorrow, or perhaps the day after,’ the Coroner said happily, knowing that the knight would not want to wait more than a single day.

  ‘I see,’ Sir Laurence said. He gave a faint smile and nodded to the Coroner, acknowledging that he had lost, and resettled himself in his seat with a good grace, waving a hand and murmuring, ‘Please continue.’

  Coroner Roger nodded. ‘So you say Drogo was First Finder?’

  ‘Yes. Him and his men. They fetched me.’

  Drogo felt the colour rising to his cheeks. He hated this: he had expected the Reeve to mention him, but then it had appeared that Alexander wasn’
t going to. Now he knew his fear was plain. His face always reddened at the drop of a hat; it didn’t matter a damn whether he was entirely innocent or not, it was the mixture of embarrassment and irritation that mingled to bring on his flush. Vin’s eyes were on him, too, but he daren’t look at the lad.

  Baldwin asked, ‘Where exactly was the body?’

  ‘Under some furze near the river.’

  To Baldwin, Drogo looked like a man who was losing his temper quickly. ‘What do you say, Drogo?’

  ‘It’s true that I found him. I sent my man to fetch the Reeve and stood with the body until he returned, and when he did, I carried the corpse with the Reeve and buried it with him.’

  ‘Who was sent?’

  ‘Adam.’

  ‘You confirm this, Adam?’

  ‘Yes. On my oath.’

  Drogo said, ‘The Reeve was worried, of course. We both were. I sent Adam and Peter away and fetched a shovel myself. Then I started digging.’

  ‘Where?’

  Alexander smiled without amusement. ‘You remember I told you that the wall kept falling where Aline was found? It is all too common. Probably because of the tree roots there. Anyway, the wall had just been rebuilt. All we had to do was dig down a short way in the soft soil and put the body in.’

  ‘What? Aline was buried in the same grave? That was why you saw different material where Aline had lain, Simon!’ Baldwin realised.

  ‘Yes. Dig a little deeper; you’ll find him.’

  Baldwin looked at him very closely. ‘And then this girl was buried on top of him by someone who knew that Ansel was already there. It was the perfect hiding place for Aline, wasn’t it? Somewhere the Reeve himself would have been careful to make sure was never searched. Is that right? You prevented people from searching that place for Aline’s body?’

  ‘Nobody suggested it,’ Alexander said heavily.

  ‘But the person who concealed her there must have known about Ansel,’ cried Simon. ‘It’s too improbable that someone could have buried the girl on top of an existing grave without knowing it. The burial right there must have been conducted by someone who had been involved in hiding Ansel. And that means you, Reeve, or you, Forester.’