The Grim Reaper

by Bernard Knight

  None of this bothered him now as he led the way into the small church, named after the first Christian king of Norway. It was between services and the incumbent was busy at the aumbry, a wooden locker on the north wall of the chancel for storing the paraphernalia of the Mass. Julian Fulk was a fat middle-aged man. His head was bald and shiny, his face round and smooth, with a waxy complexion. To de Wolfe, the man’s smile was benign, until he looked at the cold, blue eyes, which gave the lie to the man’s amiability.

  This smile was turned on as the trio advanced across the floor to where Fulk was placing the cruet, a vessel for the communion wine, alongside the pyx, which held the bread for the Host. He closed the lid of the aumbry and turned to them.

  ‘The word spreads, rapidly, Sir John. I am well aware of why you pay me the honour of a visit.’ There was a slightly mocking tone to his words.

  ‘We are working our way through the more prominent parish priests, Father,’ said the coroner, bending the truth a little.

  Fulk’s fixed smile stayed in place. ‘Thank you, Crowner, but I also know the names on your list and why they were chosen. We are the trouble-makers, as far as the Chapter House and the Palace are concerned.’

  De Wolfe marvelled at the accuracy of the underground signal system in the city, but made no attempt to contradict the priest. ‘Is there any aid you can give us? Anything that might help us make this city a safer place? The last victim, after all, was one of your own brethren.’

  Julian Fulk spent ten minutes being overtly helpful, but his information amounted to nothing. He knew of no fellow priest whom he could even suspect of harming a fly, he said. The only chink in his amiable armour appeared when the coroner brought the questions round to the cathedral clergy. Fulk’s smile slipped a fraction and he was caustic about the worth of some of the upper ranks of the hierarchy in the Close – but hastened to add that none could be imagined as party to any evil works.

  Hoping to provoke him to some indiscretion, de Wolfe led him on to the difference in status between St Olave’s and other city churches, which induced strong words about the lack of preferment that outsiders could expect in the biased organisation of this diocese. But none of this had any relevance to the coroner’s quest and soon he tired of the bland replies. ‘Could we see your church records?’ he asked innocently, implying that this was a matter of mere personal interest.

  Father Julian’s smile became positively sardonic. ‘You want to compare my ability with the quill with your murderous note, no doubt?’ he said, with barbed directness. He went to his aumbry again, for there was no sacristy in the tiny building, took out a heavy book bound between wooden boards and laid it on the lid. ‘This is for the eyes of your clerk, no doubt,’ he said, with a sly dig at John’s inability to read it himself. Thomas had no need to pull out the note left at the Jew’s death scene, as by now he knew by heart every stroke of the pen.

  A few seconds’ looking at entries of births and marriages was enough for him to be able to tell the coroner later that, as with Adam of Dol’s records, he could match up nothing between the disguised script and the writing in the book.

  There was no more to be gained so they took their leave of the priest of St Olave’s, who seemed mildly amused. No doubt he would delight in telling Matilda about the visit, which was why John had been keen not to upset the man too much, for it would undoubtedly rebound upon him via his wife. After leaving the church, he took the opportunity to go down to the Bush for some more breakfast and to see Nesta. Gwyn was naturally enthusiastic about the prospect of food and drink, and only Thomas saw little merit in calling at a tavern at the ninth hour of a Sunday morning. However, he sat quietly at the end of the table, taking a bowl of meat broth that Nesta pressed on him, with her usual concern for the morose little clerk.

  John and Gwyn ate bread and cheese and drank ale while they discussed their lack of success.

  ‘Ralph de Capra was strange and indignant – and Adam of Dol mad and just plain bloody violent,’ observed Gwyn, after de Wolfe had outlined their activities to Nesta, who hovered over the table, avid for their news.

  ‘At least we now have a better method of comparing their penmanship,’ grunted John. ‘I should have thought of the church registers before this. It means they don’t get a chance to alter their writing style further, if that was in their mind.’

  ‘Will all of them keep such records?’ asked Nesta.

  John raised his eyebrows at Thomas, to get his expert opinion.

  ‘All those who can write,’ answered the clerk. ‘The town priests are mostly literate, or they wouldn’t have been given the living. The ignorant ones are shunted out into the countryside.’

  ‘But does every church keep these books?’ she persisted.

  ‘In some degree, yes. Many never keep full lists of everything, but they have to record baptisms and marriages. Burials come to the cathedral ground, of course.’

  ‘As long as each of these suspect priests has written only a few lines somewhere, that’s good enough for our purposes – though almost certainly the killer’s writing will have been heavily disguised. We have only the one note left with the money-lender to compare with the registers,’ said John.

  Nesta topped up their pots from a jug of her best ale. ‘Why do you have to do all this work?’ she pouted. ‘I thought it was the responsibility of the sheriff and his merry men to enforce the law in Devon.’

  De Wolfe snorted in derision. ‘Dear Richard says he is too busy with the arrival of the justices tomorrow to be diverted by mere multiple murders. And he says that all of his men at the castle are preparing for the ceremonial escort that he hopes will impress them enough to take tales of his prowess back to Winchester and London.’ He took a long drink and wiped his mouth on his hand. ‘Anyway, I prefer to do this my way, however futile it seems. I’ll have three inquests with unresolved verdicts and the only way these will be settled is by finding the bastard responsible.’

  Gwyn ran fingers through his unruly hair. ‘What are we to do next, Crowner? There are another five on the cathedral list, but I’ll wager none of them gives us anything worthwhile, other than a punch in the belly.’ He grinned at the memory of the fracas in St Mary Steps, which he had quite enjoyed. Since he had finished campaigning at de Wolfe’s side, a good scuffle rarely came his way.

  The coroner rose reluctantly to his feet. ‘Carry on with the rest, I suppose. Thomas has the list from the Archdeacon. The fellow in St Petroc is the nearest, so let’s go there.’

  For the next few hours, they walked the city, visiting the other priests whose names had been suggested by the canons. As it was Sunday, they had to wait for some to finish their devotions before they could waylay them.

  The result was just as Gwyn had gloomily suggested: all they met with was hostility, annoyance and indignation. Late in the morning, they climbed the gatehouse stairs to the upper chamber to take some liquid refreshment before going off for their noonday meal. De Wolfe slumped behind his trestle table, with Thomas perched on a stool at one end, while Gwyn sat on his favourite window-ledge. The clerk refused any drink, but the other two supped cider from the stone jar in the corner.

  ‘So, we’re none the wiser, Crowner,’ grumbled his officer. ‘That Robert Cheever was the least obnoxious – too drunk to care what we wanted with him.’ The incumbent of St Petroc was undoubtedly an enthusiastic drinker.

  ‘I would like it to have been that oily swine Fulk,’ muttered de Wolfe. ‘I’ve had to suffer several years of his prancing and preaching when my wife drags me to St Olave’s. But I can hardly arrest him for being pompous.’

  They went over the other futile interviews, including that with Ranulph Burnell at Holy Trinity near the South Gate, who was alleged, on rather tenuous gossip, to have a liking for small boys. Peter Tyler at St Bartholomew’s on the edge of Bretayne was a rather sad individual who openly lived in sin with a woman who looked old enough to be his mother, but he displayed no homicidal tendencies.

  De Wol
fe was already familiar with his neighbour Edwin of Frome at St Martin’s, but given the nature of his peculiarity, the coroner doubted that either a Jew or a whore had provoked him to murder by disputing the true origin of the Scriptures. Peter de Clancy at St Lawrence, towards the East Gate, was the priest who shouted every word of the Mass and his sermons, but used a normal voice when they interrogated him and showed not a trace of any other idiosyncrasy, apart from resentment at their presence. This also applied to Henry de Feugères at St Paul’s in Goldsmith Street, known far and wide for his violent temper. He was extremely annoyed at their visit and, like Adam of Dol, shouted and raved at the indignity. But de Wolfe felt that these manifestations were of no help at all in eliminating or strengthening any suspicions about any of the priests.

  ‘What about this one we couldn’t find – Walter le Bai?’ asked Gwyn.

  ‘He was the only one who isn’t a parish priest,’ ruminated the coroner. ‘A useless vicar to one of the prebendaries – who was it? Hugh de Wilton?’

  The Cornishman nodded and kicked the leg of Thomas’s stool. ‘We’ll have to send the ferret here into the cathedral precinct to flush him out like a rabbit.’

  ‘He lives down in Priest Street with most of the others,’ replied Thomas dully. He had relapsed into his sombre mood again, after the excitements of the morning.

  ‘Well, dig him out later today and send him up to us. You can tell him that it’s on the orders of the Bishop – that’s not too far from the truth.’

  There was another hiatus in the conversation: Gwyn was sucking at his cider-pot and Thomas stared glumly at the bare boards of the table, his lips moving in some silent monologue.

  ‘D’you have any feeling about any of this morning’s rascals?’ asked Gwyn, when he came up for air.

  De Wolfe shook his head slowly. ‘None of them took my fancy as a killer. But whoever he is, he’s a cunning devil, not likely to make a slip easily. All we got from that lot was bluster and outrage, a good enough cover for any guilty manner.’ He turned to his clerk. ‘You say there was nothing in their writing to give you any cause for suspicion?’

  Thomas pulled himself back to reality from whatever scenario had been playing within his head and shook his head. ‘The script on that note was heavily disguised, master. Nothing in the registers or on de Capra’s note matched in any way.’

  ‘So what now, Crowner?’ asked Gwyn.

  ‘There’s little we can do, other than watch and wait.’

  As it turned out, they had not long to wait.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  In which Crowner John goes to the well

  De Wolfe went back to his tall, narrow house for another silent meal with Matilda. He knew that she would not be overtly objectionable until after the Justices’s banqueting sessions, but she was still surly, in spite of his attempts to regale her with details of his priestly interviews. He was careful to censor these, making no mention of the rumpus in St Mary Steps or of the nature of his conversation with her hero Julian Fulk. Her only questions were whether he had yet had official invitations to the celebrations at the Bishop’s Palace and the castle. When he had to admit that he had forgotten to make any enquiries about them, she fell into a glowering sulk.

  Long experience of Matilda’s moods ensured that his appetite did not suffer and he did full justice to Mary’s spit-roasted duck with leeks and cabbage, followed by oats boiled in milk with a piece of honeycomb to sweeten it. Washed down with a pewter mugful of watered Anjou wine, he rose from the table as soon as he could and went across to the stables to visit Odin. The previous day his great destrier had suffered a kick on the hind-leg from another horse on the pasture at Bull Mead, just outside the walls.

  ‘It’s no problem, Crowner,’ Andrew the farrier reassured him. ‘I’ve bathed the cut with witch-hazel and covered it with goose-grease. He’ll be fine in a day or two.’

  Unlike the previous month when de Wolfe had spent half his days in the saddle – to the detriment of his lovelife – there had been few distant cases lately, especially now that the north of the county was covered by the newly appointed coroner in Barnstaple.

  ‘I’ll have to take him out when he’s fit – the old horse’s joints will be rusting up from disuse,’ he told Andrew, a wiry young man with an uncanny rapport with horses. They stood talking about the stallion and the farrier suggested de Wolfe take him hunting, though the lumbering warhorse was not really suitable for dashing through the forest after deer or boar.

  As they stood in amiable idleness, a large figure came around the corner of Martin’s Lane from the high street. For once it was not the coroner’s officer, but the portly frame of Brother Rufus, the castle chaplain. He hurried up to them, puffing and red-faced, the twisted cords of his girdle flying from his waist. ‘Sir John, I met your man Gwyn running down Castle Hill and he asked me to fetch you quickly as I was coming this way.’

  ‘What’s the urgency, Brother? Did he say?’

  ‘He had one of the burgess’s constables with him, that thin Saxon. Your man said there was another body. He claimed you’d know what he meant.’

  Yes, John knew what Gwyn meant, and a cold prickling spread across the back of his neck. ‘Where were they going?’ he snapped.

  ‘Across the high street and into the lane that goes towards that little almshouse and hospital – St John’s, I think it is.’

  Leaving the farrier holding Odin’s bridle, de Wolfe marched off and within seconds had vanished around the corner into the high street. He loped along towards Eastgate, thrusting aside the few Sunday afternoon drifters that got in his way. The Benedictine hurried after him unbidden, almost keeping up with him. Although he was heavily built, much of Rufus’s bulk was muscle rather than fat.

  A few hundred paces along the main street, John turned right to dive into Raden Lane, which led to the little priory and hospital of St John. This north-east quadrant of the city was relatively affluent, and most of the houses there were owned by burgesses and merchants. Many had a garden behind high walls and it was outside one of these that the coroner saw Gwyn, waving his arms to attract attention.

  ‘We’ve got another body, Crowner!’ bellowed his officer, as his master came near. A few curious heads were already poking out of nearby doors and a couple of urchins were dodging Gwyn’s slaps as they tried to see past him through the garden gate. Even before he asked for details, de Wolfe stopped to look at the place. The solid two-storey house of new stone had a round arch over the central front door, with shuttered windows on each side and on the upper floor. The roof was of slate slabs and a chest-high stone wall ran in a rectangle around the sides and back, with a narrow lane on each side separating the house from its neighbours.

  The coroner glared at Gwyn, daring him to spin out the story. ‘Well, tell me the worst!’

  ‘Osric called me – I was in the guardroom playing dice after dinner.’ He hurriedly continued, before de Wolfe could berate him for his usual irrelevancies. ‘This house belongs to William Fitz-William, a burgess of the Cordwainers’ Guild.’

  ‘I know who lives here, damn it! What’s happened?

  For once, Gwyn was brutally brief. ‘He’s dead. Dropped into the well.’

  ‘Dropped? How do you know? He could just have fallen in.’

  ‘He’s lived here for years, so why should he now fall down his own well? And the water can’t be very deep so he could have stood up, not drowned.’

  ‘He might have hit his head on the way down.’ The coroner was sceptical about Gwyn’s intuitions, but the officer was stubborn in his opinion. ‘I just feel it in my water, Crowner. Something isn’t right.’

  ‘Let’s have a look, then. Why are you so sure it’s another murder?’

  His officer pulled worriedly at his shaggy red moustache. ‘There’s something strange about this household. Judge for yourself.’

  As he stood aside to let de Wolfe though the gate, which stood at the side of the house, Brother Rufus came panting up, closely followed
by Thomas de Peyne, who had been sent down from the castle by Sergeant Gabriel.

  ‘Can I come with you?’ asked the monk. ‘If there’s something related to the scriptures, maybe I can assist young Thomas here.’

  The coroner nodded his assent and his clerk scowled behind Rufus’s back, but they all trooped through the gate, which Gwyn shut firmly in the faces of the gathering onlookers.

  De Wolfe saw a large yard with the usual huts for kitchen, privy and wash-house, as well as a small stable at the back, beside a vegetable patch. In the centre, between the house and the thatched wooden kitchen, was a well, with a knee-high circular stone wall. A leather bucket with a length of thin rope lay on the ground alongside, at the feet of Osric, the lanky Saxon constable. Sitting on the wall, slumped in a posture of despair, was a lad of about ten and alongside him was an older boy, probably thirteen or fourteen, whose hand rested on the younger one’s shoulder as if to comfort him.

  The constable beckoned urgently. ‘Over here, Crowner. Take a look down the well first.’

  John strode across the yard and peered down the shaft. About ten feet below ground level the surface of the water was broken by the buttocks and thighs of a man. The visible part of the body was clothed in a red tunic with a wide embroidered pattern on the hem.

  The coroner stood back and looked at the top rim of the stone wall. He waved at the young boy to get off, so that he could see the whole circumference. ‘Fresh scratches here,’ he grunted to Gwyn, pointing. The others followed his finger and saw three irregular lines running roughly parallel to the inner edge of the shaft, a few inches apart. He turned at last to look at the boys, whom he had so far ignored. ‘Who are they?’

  Osric took it upon himself to explain. ‘These are the two servants of William Fitz-William. This one is Edward,’ he said, tapping the elder on the shoulder, ‘And that’s Harry.’

  De Wolfe stared at the lads, who seemed cowed and speechless in the presence of these large strangers. ‘Young for servants, are they not?’ he barked.