Scorpion's Nest (2012)

by Trow, M J

  Edmund Brooke lay on his back in his nightshirt. His lips were blue and tightly pursed and his eyes stared at the ceiling. Marlowe looked closely at those eyes, sunken and glazed as they were. There were tiny red spots in the whites and a similar rash over the cheeks and nose. He bent closer, as if to catch a last whisper of breath from the dead man and smelt the heavy aroma of wine. No doubt Solomon Aldred could have identified the vineyard. The bed itself was pulled about, the sheets pulled this way and that and the pillow was hanging half on the bed, with just one crumpled end looking as though it had been thrust under the lad’s head after he was dead. The bed alongside was cold and virtually undisturbed. There was a Bible on the side table, open to a page of St Peter and another tome lying beneath it. Marlowe threw open the door of the makeshift cupboard and took in quickly what was there. A cassock, two or three shirts, two pairs of clogs, old and worn. Nothing that hadn’t been hanging in his own humble wardrobe in Corpus Christi until recently. He was just closing the door when a shaft of weak light from the window fell on something on the cupboard floor. He opened the door again and rummaged under the clogs. It was a loose board, its end jutting proud of the surface as though it had been recently lifted. He prised it up again, easing the wood with his dagger point. It was a hole, perhaps a foot square and it was empty. Whatever had been there once was not there now.

  The bedroom door crashed back and Gerald Skelton stood there, transfixed by the scene he saw. He crossed himself quickly and spun back to the scholars, still cluttering up the corridor and gabbling excitedly.

  ‘You!’ he snapped at the nearest lad. ‘Time for Lauds. Ring the bell, for God’s sake. And the rest of you, about your ablutions. Where is the praefectus for this floor?’

  ‘Doctor.’ A freckle-faced boy pushed himself forward.

  ‘Whose room is this?’ Skelton wanted to know.

  The praefectus was a little dumbfounded by the question, bearing in mind Skelton had just seen Edmund Brooke’s body. It was as though Skelton read his mind.

  ‘The other one, you idiot. The one who isn’t here.’

  ‘Um . . . Martin, sir, Martin Camb,’ the boy volunteered.

  ‘Where is he?’

  The name rang around the corridor and along under the eaves and scholar looked at scholar. There was no Martin Camb. No one had seen him since Vespers the previous night and heads were shaking in all directions.

  ‘Ablutions!’ Skelton roared at them all. ‘Now!’ Then he turned to Marlowe and let the door click closed behind him.

  ‘Well, Dominus Greene.’ The Bursar was calmer now, his public face gone and a horrified, confused bystander stood in his stead.

  ‘Hardly well, Dr Skelton,’ Marlowe said. ‘The boy has been suffocated.’

  ‘Suffocated?’ Skelton crossed to the bed, peering down at the corpse. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘The colour of the face,’ Marlowe said. ‘See, it’s turning purple. The veins in his cheeks have burst as he fought for air.’

  Skelton sniffed. ‘Do I smell drink?’ he asked.

  ‘You do,’ Marlowe said, nodding. ‘Which is why, I suspect, the murderer could do what he did. I was at dinner with this lad the other night. He seemed strong and healthy then. Sober, he’d have been too much of a handful. In his cups . . . well, you’ve heard the phrase “dead drunk”?’

  Skelton saw no mirth in Marlowe’s gallows humour and was about to tell him so when the door opened again and Thomas Shaw stood there. ‘Gerald, I heard there’d been another . . .’ Then he saw Marlowe, saw the body of Edmund Brooke and crossed himself. The librarian was still in his nightshirt too, like everybody else, but Marlowe noticed he wore buckled buskins on his feet.

  ‘Where are your rooms, Dr Shaw?’ Marlowe asked him.

  ‘Across the quad,’ Shaw told him. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Bad news travels fast in the English College,’ Marlowe observed. ‘I’m surprised the Master isn’t here.’

  ‘The Master is away,’ Skelton told him. ‘On College business. Thomas, Dominus Greene, this will be the talk of the College in minutes. It’s important that we keep things on an even keel. Whatever happened in this room is for our ears only – is that clear? The scholars can speculate all they like. Officially – and until the Master returns, I am officialdom – the boy died of apoplexy.’

  The librarian’s mouth opened to say something but he thought better of it and closed it again.

  ‘Who found the body?’ Skelton asked.

  ‘I did,’ said Marlowe.

  ‘Really?’ Skelton was a little confused. ‘I heard a scream.’

  Marlowe ducked his head. ‘That would have been me, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘I have always been a little . . . theatrical, when alarmed. It is a habit I am trying hard to break myself of, but when there is a shock . . .’

  Skelton narrowed his eyes. ‘It was very shrill.’

  ‘I was a choirboy,’ Marlowe countered. ‘If you make me jump somehow, I could do it again.’ He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

  ‘No, no,’ Shaw said. ‘For heaven’s sake, Gerald, leave the lad alone. Just because he has a habit of screaming once in a while there is no need to make a meal of it. We all came running, let that be the end of it. But why he was in here in the first place is an interesting conundrum. Dominus Greene?’ He looked at Marlowe with a half smile on his lips.

  ‘I just can’t get my bearings in this place, especially first thing in the morning,’ Marlowe said. ‘I was looking for the jakes.’

  ‘That way,’ said Shaw, absent-mindedly picking up the book that lay beside the Bible and tucking it under his arm. ‘I’ll show you.’

  ‘Many thanks.’ Marlowe smiled and the two men heard Skelton lock the door as the bell for Lauds gladdened the hour.

  It would not have surprised Marlowe to be told that Antoinette had the power to freeze time. She was sitting in exactly the same position in which he had left her. The room seemed to hold its breath so as not to disturb her perfect stillness. Even the grey light of dawn didn’t seem any brighter in here, although it was almost fully light outside.

  ‘Antoinette?’ he said, crouching down in front of her and laying gentle hands on her knees. ‘Antoinette? Can I send for one of your friends? Family?’

  She shook her head, a tiny motion.

  ‘Just someone to help you. Can I fetch the housekeeper? Doctor Skelton?’

  This time the head-shake was much more vociferous. ‘They can’t know I was here,’ she whispered. ‘Please, M’sieur, keep my secret or I will lose my job. They have been angry with me since . . .’ Her voice faltered and she looked anxiously around the room. ‘Angry with me,’ she said, this time with more of a note of finality.

  Marlowe thought he might understand. ‘Since you found Father Laurenticus’ body?’ he hazarded.

  She nodded, tears squeezing out from under her tightly closed lids. ‘It was horrible,’ she breathed, half turning to the bed. ‘There was so much blood.’ She sketched an arc with one arm, which she then hurriedly clamped back across her body, for protection. ‘On the window. The wall.’ She glanced up. ‘The ceiling, even.’ She could see it still, grotesque splashes of crimson running in rivulets as the man’s veins had emptied.

  ‘Was he alone?’ he asked.

  ‘What are you?’ she asked, leaning away from him. ‘How do you know the questions to ask? The Evil One has sent you.’

  ‘No,’ Marlowe said. ‘No. Look at me, Antoinette.’ He trusted to his big brown eyes and his curls. No woman had ever thought him evil for long. ‘Do I look as if I am from the Evil One?’

  ‘He wears many guises, M’sieur,’ she mumbled, crossing herself.

  ‘I am just . . .’ At this point, his French began to desert him. Words he needed like ‘common-sense’ were not in his vocabulary. He settled for second best. ‘I am wise, Antoinette. You are uneasy in this room, so I guessed. But why were you in the boy’s room so early in the morning? Surely, your duties do not begin so soon.�
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  ‘No, not so early. But I had forgotten to take clean linen to the room. The scholars change their own bed linen, but we must take it to them, leave it in their rooms. Doctor Skelton examines the beds once a week. He pulls back the covers and checks throughout. I did not want M’sieur Edmund to get into trouble for dirty linen. He was a sweet boy, that one. He would not have blamed me. So I thought I could quietly take it to the room, leave it just inside the door for the next day. If he was quick, he would have been in time, before the inspection.’

  ‘That was good of you.’

  ‘No, I had been wrong. I should have taken it the day before, but I am not very well these days. Finding –’ again, her arm sketched the blood spray on the wall – ‘finding this, my brain is not so clear. Doctor Skelton is not very understanding. If I make another mistake, he said, I must leave the English College and he will write me no character, nor give me my wages for the year.’ She raised her eyes to his. ‘I will starve. It is that simple. I have nothing but the clothes I stand up in.’

  ‘Your secret is safe with me, Antoinette,’ Marlowe said. ‘And if the worst comes to the worst, I will see what I can do about a new place for you. It might not be in France, though. It may have to be in England.’

  She shook her head and crossed herself. ‘I am a good Catholic, M’sieur,’ she said. ‘England is no place for me.’

  Marlowe looked down at her, a simple soul who would rather starve on the streets of a Catholic country than have a soft bed and a good life in a country that did not follow Rome. He couldn’t help but admire her. ‘Perhaps a place with Monsieur Aldred, then, the vintner,’ he said.

  She looked thoughtful. ‘Perhaps in England they don’t mind if their maids are Catholic,’ she said, after a pause. Then, she smiled. ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. But, I must go.’ She jumped to her feet and smoothed out her skirt. ‘The Lauds bell has stopped and I must be at my work.’ She put a work-worn hand on Marlowe’s sleeve. ‘Thank you for keeping my secret, Dominus Greene,’ she said. ‘If I can ever help you, I will.’

  He patted her hand and opened the door, looking both ways, then, the coast clear, ushered her out. When she had gone, wooden clogs pattering along the gallery, he turned and flung himself on his bed, with a sigh. Edmund Brooke wasn’t going anywhere and Dr Skelton had sealed the scene of the crime. Marlowe had been in need of sleep when he had heard her scream. Now he was exhausted. He closed his eyes and drifted off, blissfully.

  ‘Kit! Kit!’

  He smiled to himself. This was a funny dream. Michael Johns was bouncing him on a big sheet, tied between four trees in a forest. The sheet was stretched taut and with every bounce, he flew higher, till he was in the sky. But still Johns bounced him, calling his name.

  ‘Kit!’

  He was in the clouds now, they were all wet. No. That was wrong. He was wet and people were still calling him. He sat up abruptly.

  ‘Kit, thank goodness. Are you ill? I couldn’t wake you.’ Michael Johns looked like Hell. He was covered in blood and very green about the gills.

  Marlowe was instantly awake. He took in the fact that although there was a lot of blood, it was mainly on the professor’s sleeves and it was dry and browning. Although the man looked far from well, he clearly wasn’t injured. ‘Whose blood is this?’ he asked. It wasn’t the most perspicacious question he had ever posed, but it filled in the time.

  ‘Phelippes’,’ Johns told him. ‘He’s been stabbed. Slashed, rather.’ Johns wasn’t familiar with the effects of weapons. He had to think about it. ‘We had an intruder.’

  ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘No,’ Johns said. ‘He got away.’

  ‘Not the intruder.’ Marlowe still had the patience to be kind to his old tutor. ‘Phelippes.’

  ‘He’ll live, the doctor said. He was slashed across the chest, but it was not a deep wound. Just very –’ he glanced down at himself and ruefully shook out a sleeve – ‘bloody. He’ll be in bed for a while, until he gets back his strength. Solomon Aldred’s . . .’ Words failed him when he tried to give a title to Veronique. ‘She looked as though she might be difficult, but I pointed out that it was the poor quality of her locks that had caused this and not any fault of ours. She seemed to think we had quarrelled and I had stabbed him. Stupid woman. Did you know that she is the vintner? Aldred is just the man who she sends out to sell.’

  ‘I suppose she was right to suspect it,’ Marlowe said. It didn’t surprise him at all to find that Veronique was the brains behind Aldred’s business. If he was as bad at being a vintner as he sometimes seemed to be as a spy, he would have been bankrupt within weeks. But everyone was entitled to a bad day. Look at Spenser, for example; he seemed to have nothing but bad days whenever he picked up his pen.

  ‘I disagree,’ Johns said, suddenly on his dignity. ‘Do I look like a sworder, Kit? Thomas and I get on very well, in the main. They will never have heard raised voices from us.’

  ‘Are they searching for the intruder? Did you see him?’ Marlowe thought he would get the investigation back on a more helpful tack.

  ‘They say they are looking, but I don’t think the Watch here are any better than in Cambridge. As soon as they realized we were English, they rather lost interest. I saw the man briefly in the light from the window. He was wearing a hood.’

  ‘A monk’s hood?’ Marlowe could see a pattern beginning to develop, however tenuous.

  ‘It could have been. It could equally have been a cloak drawn up over his head.’

  ‘You call him “he”, Michael. It was definitely a man, was it?’

  Johns stopped to think. He was clearly letting his mind drift back to recent events. He scowled and narrowed his eyes, then nodded. ‘Yes. It was definitely a man. I couldn’t tell much about him, but I remember thinking that it wasn’t you. It was too big around the shoulders.’

  ‘Why should it be me? I wouldn’t hurt you. Either of you.’

  ‘No.’ Johns tried a smile, but it was a little weak around the edges. ‘No, not when Phelippes got hurt. Before. He stood very still, with his head turned. Just like you do sometimes when you are engrossed in something. Then he turned his head again and I could see he was just, well, as I said, bigger. Thicker set.’

  ‘Well,’ said Marlowe, ‘that cuts us down to most of the men north of the Marne.’ He looked at his friend, who had begun to shiver. ‘You’re in shock. Take that bloody shirt off and lie down here and rest. I’ll go and see Solomon, see if he has any ideas.’

  ‘Is that likely?’ said Johns, his voice muffled as Marlowe helped him off with his shirt by pulling it over his head.

  ‘I know you haven’t seen Solomon in an altogether wonderful light thus far,’ Marlowe told him as he pushed him back on the pillows and pulled up the covers. ‘But he knows this town, and if anyone can help with a name or two, he can. Now, sleep.’ But the instruction was too late. Johns, with one last sigh, was fast asleep and snoring. Marlowe drew the curtains to keep the man safe behind the velvet.

  Thomas Phelippes was sleeping too when Marlowe reached him. Like Johns, he had had a shock. Unlike Johns, he had been gashed across the chest. And unlike Johns, Phelippes had been given a secret potion by the doctor that would have knocked out a horse.

  ‘Strange business, this, Marlowe.’ Solomon Aldred was at his elbow in this guests’ room, oddly sober for this time of the morning.

  ‘What do you make of it?’ Marlowe asked.

  The intelligencer-turned-vintner jerked his head towards the door and followed Marlowe out. They crossed the narrow landing and went into Aldred’s inner sanctum, a tiny closet with ugly, home-made furniture and rushes on the floor.

  ‘Cosy.’ Marlowe nodded, ducking so that his head didn’t collide with a beam.

  ‘Handy,’ said Aldred and nodded towards a wooden panel at his shoulder. He tilted it and the light shaft shot through like a crossbow bolt. ‘Have a look.’

  Marlowe did. The newly opened slit looked directly at Aldred’s fr
ont door along the Rue de Valvert. Aldred flicked another one on the opposite wall and Marlowe could see the yard behind the house where the homely Veronique was hanging out her washing.

  ‘Clever,’ Marlowe said. ‘But it didn’t help last night?’

  Crestfallen, Aldred let the shutters close. ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘One of Nicholas Faunt’s little gadgets. Utterly useless after dark. And anyway, I’d have to be in this room at the time to have a commanding view of the back and front.’

  ‘Veronique wouldn’t like that?’ Marlowe couldn’t resist a smile.

  ‘She is very demanding in that respect.’ Aldred sighed and the thought of it made him reach for a goblet and decanter of wine. ‘But that’s not it. She knows nothing about my alter ego, so to speak. To her, as to the rest of Rheims, I am just Solomon Aldred, the English vintner.’

  ‘And what are you to your visitor of last night, do you think?’ Marlowe asked.

  Aldred shrugged. He wasn’t just turning into a vintner. He was turning into a Frenchman. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve been racking what’s left of my brain. I couldn’t get anything rational out of Phelippes. If his attacker had horns and a cloven hoof, I shouldn’t be at all surprised. Johns wasn’t much better.’

  ‘Was it wise to involve the Watch?’

  ‘Johns’ idea, backed up by Veronique. For some reason, which I admit escapes me, she seems to think that this is a respectable house. She has personally buried three husbands.’ He paused to consider what he had said. ‘I obviously don’t mean she personally buried them, but she has been present when they needed burying.’ He shook his head, still not sure he had made himself clear, but plunged on anyway. ‘None of them was actually her own husband and the wives were a little testy, but she is a rich woman by anyone’s reckoning, so paid them off. I am her latest . . . addition to the household and possibly a little more respectable than the preceding incumbents, in that my wife is—’

  ‘Living with a fish-curer from Lowestoft,’ Marlowe added, to show he had been listening.