Figure of Hate Read online

  'And that big lump who assists you? Where was he?'

  Robert shrugged indifferently. 'I'm not his keeper, Crowner. He was in the inn as well, but he left before me. God knows where he went - maybe to his bed, maybe to roll a wench - for, like me, he has no wife living.'

  Tired of this verbal fencing, John jerked his head at Gwyn and the two clerks.

  'Come on, I want to see where these men live.' Grabbing Robert's arm in a grip like that of a lobster's claw, he pushed him towards the door. The armourer resisted, but Gwyn came round la the other side and he had no option but to stumble along with them, dropping the sword and shield on the floor. As they propelled him to the door, he screwed his head around to make a last appeal to his master, but Ralph had stalked away to the screens and was shouting for someone to bring him wine.

  Out in the bailey, the coroner and his officer relaxed their grip on the armourer, who angrily shook himself free.

  'Keep your bloody hands off me! I don't know what you expect to find, but for God's sake let's get it over with, then I can get back to some work. The Bristol tourney is only a few days away!'

  He led them around the back of the manor house and past the kitchens and laundry hut to the forge and stables. Back to back with the forge, under the same shingled roof, were a couple of small rooms, and Robert Longus led them to the first door, where a heavy leather flap served to keep out the weather.

  'I live in here and Crues has the smaller one next door,' he explained in a surly voice. 'So help yourself, and be damned to you!'

  He stood back indifferently while John pushed past the flap, followed by Gwyn and Eustace. Thomas decided that a mean, odorous room was no concern of his and stayed outside.

  In the dim light from a small shuttered window, John saw a lodging that was as barren as a monk's cell. A straw-filled palliasse lay along one wall; the only other furniture was a rough table with a three-legged stool below it. Some metal-working tools, a pitcher of ale and two clay cups stood upon it. From pegs and hooks on the wooden frames of the cob walls, lengths of chain mail, two helmets and various oddments of armour hung under a coating of dust.

  'The horses are housed better in the stables than this fellow in here,' grunted Gwyn. Eustace was looking around in astonishment. His first days in the coroner's service were opening his eyes to the way most people lived - a world away from the comparative luxury of his rich parents' home.

  'Nothing for us here,' murmured John. 'Not that I expected much.'

  They pushed out into the daylight, where Longus was waiting, a sardonic look on his face.

  'Satisfied, Crowner? I said you were wasting your time - and mine.'

  De Wolfe scowled at him. 'Do all armourers live in such hovels?'

  'This is only my working home. I am a journeyman with a decent house in Southampton where I live during the winter. The rest of the time I hire myself out to whoever pays the best.'

  Insolently, he turned on his heel and walked away towards the manor house.

  The coroner looked at the other half of the lean-to building that abutted on to the forge. 'We may as well look in there, now we're here.'

  He pushed into a similarly squalid room, which also contained just a mattress and a table, though it was littered with oddments, scattered on the earthen floor and hanging from the walls. Most of it was chain and scrap metal, plus a few broken shields, but John's eye was caught by some belts and straps thrown over a wooden bar nailed across one corner. There were baldrics, one still carrying an empty sword sheath, and other strips of leather which looked like broken pieces of harness.

  'Gwyn, seize that stuff and bring it out into the light,' he commanded.

  Ten minutes later, they were again bending over the bier in the little church of StJohn the Baptist. Agnes's parents had gone, the mother having been so overcome with grief that her husband had helped her home to sit sobbing in their empty dwelling, now bereft of both her daughters.

  John was staring again at the mark on the neck, now slightly more prominent as the blood in the adjacent skin had started to drain away since the corpse had been lying on its back. At his direction, Gwyn was going through the bundle of belts and traces, picking out those that were of about the correct width. He selected fOUr and stretched them out one by one in front of de Wolfe, laying them across the chest of the dead girl, where four pairs of eyes stared at them intently. There was silence for a moment, then the exuberant Eustace could contain himself no longer.

  'That one, Sir John! What about that one?' He pointed with a quivering finger at a worn leather strap about three feet long, which was torn through irregularly at each end and had some short side-straps hanging off it.

  'I see it, lad,' said John as patiently as he could, for he had already recognised it as a possible match. Picking it up in both hands, he stretched it out and moved it back and forth lengthwise across the mark on Agnes's neck.

  'There!' grunted Gwyn, unnecessarily, as the places where three of the side-straps were stitched to the main one came exactly over the squared marks on the skin.

  'Could that be mere chance?' piped up Doubting Thomas.

  De Wolfe lowered the strap and curved it around the front of the neck, adjusting it until the marks coincided to within a hair's breadth.

  'I don't think so. It's not as if the branches were spaced regularly ... there's different distances between them, yet they still match.'

  'Good enough for me, by God!' murmured Gwyn. 'Certainly good enough to ask this Alexander a few pointed questions!'

  'A pity some skin couldn't have rubbed off on to it - that would clinch it,' observed their still-critical clerk. Then Eustace chipped in once more, for his keen young eyes were better than those of the older men and Thomas's slight squint.

  'There's a spot on the back of the strap - look there!' He used a piece of straw from the floor to point out a darker mark on the mottled brown of the old leather. It was half the size of a grain of wheat, but had a glazed shine to it that suggested it. was recent. John picked at it with a dirty fingernail and carefully slid it off on to the back of his other hand.

  Then he licked his forefinger and rubbed it across the loosened fleck. Immediately; a tiny crimson streak smeared across the skin below his knuckles.

  'Blood, by damn! Must have come from her nose or ear,' he exclaimed triumphantly. Having now destroyed this piece of evidence, the coroner earnestly instructed Thomas to write an exact record on his rolls at the earliest opportunity, naming those present who could vouch for the presence of the blood spot and of the congruence of the strap with the strangulation mark.

  'Right, let's go and do the sheriff's work for him!' announced de Wolfe, straightening up and carefully rolling the strap into the pouch on his belt. 'This Alexander Crues has some explaining to do.'

  The assistant arrnourers explanations consisted entirely of denials, his slow mind producing nothing but a dull repetition of the fact that he knew nothing of any girl's death, he hadn't done it and he had no recollection of any strap hanging in his room.

  The coroner's team had found him sleeping in a corner at the back of the empty forge, in a warm spot near the banked-down furnace. Gwyn interrupted his snores by kicking him with the toe of his boot, but Crues was little more articulate when awake than he was when asleep. Frustrated at the man's stupidity, John hauled out the strap and waved it in his face.

  'You used this, damn you - you throttled the poor girl with it! Come on, admit it, we know this was the thing that killed her!'

  For the first time, a flicker of fear appeared in Alexander's bovine features, but he continued to shake his head and mutter denials. Gwyn grabbed him by the throat and shook him as a stimulus to his memory. Crues was not as big as the Cornishman, but he was a strong fellow, accustomed to wielding a forge hammer, and he used his strength to pull free of Gwyn and give him a heavy punch in the chest. He found it was like hitting a stone wall - the only effect was to make the officer roar with anger. He seized the armourer by the wrist an
d twisted his arm up behind his back, at the same time grabbing a handful of his unkempt hair and dragging back his head.

  'Confess, damn you, or I'll break your bloody neck!' roared Gwyn, who was very averse to young girls being throttled. There was a large wooden trough near by, filled with dirty water to cool red-hot metal from the anvil. Without a moment's hesitation, Gwyn forced Crues to his knees, then rammed his head under the surface. Struggling violently, the man was helpless in Gwyn's iron grip, though the filthy water splashed over the floor as he thrashed about in an effort to get free.

  'You did it, didn't you, you bastard?' yelled Gwyn as he hoisted Alexander's head back by the hair. Amidst the spluttering and retching there was a vehement denial, so Gwyn shoved his head back into the trough and banged his face on the hard bottom for good measure.

  John looked on impassively, not bothered by some coercion if it produced results. It was part of his official duties to attend hangings, blindings, mutilation of hands and genitals and the torture of the Ordeal and occasionally the peine forte et dure, so Gwyn's method of persuasion was mild in comparison. Eustace looked on with a mixture of horror and fascination, his previous experiences in his sheltered life having been' rapidly expanded by the things he had seen in the past few days. Thomas, though more used to the brutal reality of law enforcement, looked away as he crossed himself and murmured prayers for the victim, as he fully expected Gwyn to drown Alexander Crues.

  Gwyn repeated his dunking and shouting twice more, until de Wolfe came to the same conclusion as Thomas.

  'Try not to kill the swine,' he advised his officer. 'He may have some valuable information for us.'

  Gwyn hauled Alexander out of the trough and dropped him heavily on to the ground. He lay still, and Thomas thought that perhaps he was already dead. Then he gave a great retch and vomited water, food and mucus, and began to push himself up on his hands, coughing and spluttering to rid himself of the rest of the foul water in his windpipe.

  Gwyn grabbed his hair again and bent his head back. 'Ready for another bath, you murdering bastard? Or are you going to tell us the truth?'

  Befuddled and half drowned, Crues momentarily forgot that escaping another submersion in the trough by confessing would inevitably lead to a hanging. But as he croaked and gagged his admission, he tried to shift the blame.

  'Not me ... 'twas Robert!' he gasped. 'He made me help, I swear!'

  Gwyn released him and he crawled painfully up on to all fours, then slumped over with his back against the trough, still coughing and spitting out water.

  De Wolfe stood over him menacingly, dangling the strap before him.

  'You used this for the deed, you evil lout! Did you each pull one end, eh?' he snarled. 'I think you're a liar, Longus had nothing to do with it.'

  Alexander shook his head, his sodden hair hanging lankly around his face. 'I tell you it was him. I want to turn approver, Crowner. '

  'Time for that later, maybe,' snapped John. 'You'll first have to prove Robert Longus was involved at all. But I think you ravished this Agnes, then killed her either in perverted passion or because she mocked your lack of prowess.'

  De Wolfe was deliberately inventing this scenario, as there had been no opportunity yet for a village wise-woman to examine Agnes for any signs of intimate violence. Alexander, now miserably cowed, rocked his head like a dying bull in a baiting-pit.

  'It wasn't like that at all. I never laid a finger on her. May God above strike me dead if I lie.'

  'He probably will, on the gallows in Magdalen Street,' retorted John. 'But if you claim you didn't ravish her, why should she be throttled?'

  Crues leaned forward and retched again, spitting water on to the floor.

  Gwyn grabbed his hair again and shook his head until his teeth rattled.

  'Answer the coroner!' he roared, wishing to keep up the pressure and stop the man relapsing into a sullen silence.

  'Because we were afraid that she had recognised our voices when that damned Hugo was killed. There was gossip in the village that said she might have recovered her memory of that night, so Robert said she had to go, for our safety's sake.'

  De Wolfe's phlegmatic nature rarely allowed him to be thunderstruck, but here was a bolt from the blue. In getting this dull-witted oaf to confess to being involved in one killing, they had seemingly stumbled upon another.

  'Hugo? You. killed Hugo?' he barked.

  'I killed nobody, Crowner! I was just there when it happened,' wailed Crues.

  'Are you saying that Robert Longus killed his master? Why, for God's sake?' demanded John.

  Alexander slumped sideways and beat his fist upon the hard earthen floor of the forge. 'I don't know, I just don't know, sir! Robert was thick with all the Peverels, William, Hugo and now Ralph. I don't know what schemes he had with them, but he told me one night that it was too dangerous for him to let Hugo live and that I must help to get rid of him.'

  John was becoming bewildered by the pace of these revelations, and he was to be further astounded by Alexander's next admission.

  'I think he was afeared that Hugo would withdraw his promise of protection over the robbing and killing of that silversmith - but there was something else as well, I'm sure. He never told me anything, except ordering me to do this, do that!'

  This long speech brought on another fit of spluttering and spitting, giving the coroner time to digest the fact that now three of his homicides seemed to be on the point of being solved. But Alexander Crues, slow-witted as he was, seemed to have decided that he had made enough admissions and that the best thing to do when one is in a hole is to stop digging. All further questions were answered by a denial of any more knowledge about anything, and even Gwyn's threats to push his head back into the trough failed to make him concede anything useful. He slid farther over to lay on his side, and apart from intermittent coughing and spitting seemed uncaring about his fate.

  John turned to Thomas and Eustace, who had been listening open mouthed to these dramatic revelations.

  'You are witnesses to what has been said, so mark the words well. And you, Thomas, will get them on parchment as soon as you can, in case our blackbird here refuses to sing any more.'

  Gwyn looked down at the inert, wheezing figure at his feet.

  'What's to be done with him, Crowner?'

  'He'll have to come back to Exeter with us, roped on to a horse. Tie his wrists and feet for now, to stop him wandering off, while we find this Robert again.'

  Chapter Fourteen

  In which Crowner John throws down his glove

  When de Wolfe went back to the hall, he found that all three Peverel brothers were there and, to his dismay, they were accompanied by Richard de Revelle, in riding cloak, boots and gloves. The last thing John wanted was any interference from his brother-in-law at such a sensitive time.

  The former sheriff was seated at a table with Ralph Peverel and the armourer, their heads together in earnest discussion. Odo was standing near the firepit, talking to his steward and the bailiff, while Joel was sitting under a window slit with Beatrice, a chessboard between them. The game they were playing seemed to consist more of pressing their knees together under the small table than moving the pieces on the board. There was no sign of Lady Avelina, and John wondered whether Reginald de Charterai was still in the neighbourhood.

  Conversation ceased abruptly as the coroner walked in ahead of his pair of clerks, Gwyn having stayed in the bailey to guard their prisoner.

  'I hear you continue to intrude upon our privacy, de Wolfe!' sneered Ralph. 'When I next go to London, I shall have something to say to certain barons concerning your behaviour.'

  'We'll, tell them that I have today arrested one of your armourers - and soon I may well take the other one, unless he can provide me with a very convincing explanation.'

  There was a series of scraping noises as the three men at the table skidded back their stools to stand up and face the coroner. .

  'What mischief are you up to now, John?' bray
ed de ReveIIe, his little beard jutting out like the prow of a ship.

  'Arresting who?' shouted Ralph. 'My armourer is here beside me!'

  A grave-faced Odo came across to listen, and even Joel turned his head to watch with a sardonic smile. The steward and the bailiff looked on uneasily.

  'I am taking that man Crues back to Exeter, roped to a horse. He has confessed to being involved in the murder of the girl Agnes and I have sure proof of that.' John could have sworn that a look of relief flitted over Ralph's face, but it was Odo who responded first. 'Alexander Crues? That's hard to credit. He's a stupid clod, but I would not take him for a murderous rapist. '

  'He claims he was a reluctant accomplice - he says the prime culprit is Robert Longus there!'

  John jabbed a finger towards the armourer, who had moved close to Ralph, as if seeking shelter.

  'Crowner, I fear for your sanity!' rasped the middle brother. 'What gibberish are you trying to peddle to us now?'

  De Wolfe ignored him and carried on. 'Not only that, but he implicates Longus in the murder of your brother Hugo, as well as the silversmith Scrope, down near Topsham.'

  'Alexander is an idiot, he doesn't know what he's saying!' yelled Robert, stepping out from behind Ralph and gesticulating wildly at the coroner. 'His brain has been addled since childhood, all he's good for is beating metal with a hammer and cleaning chain mail.' De Wolfe ignored him and addressed himself to Odo, who was looking as worried as if he expected the sky to fall upon them at any moment.

  'Sir, I look to you as the lord of this manor. In view of the accusations of Crues, who has already confessed, I must take this man Longus back to Exeter.'

  'Why, for Christ's sake?' exploded Ralph. 'The babblings of that fool Alexander are no grounds for this! I even doubt his confession is worth a dog's turd. Did you beat it out of him?'

  John avoided an answer to this, but again directed himself to Odo.