Crowner Royal (Crowner John Mysteries) (5 page)

Hugo de Molis gripped the sides of his lectern and stared at the coroner. ‘A man in minor orders working there?’ he muttered. ‘That can only be Basil of Reigate, one of my assistants!’

‘We have no body to show you yet,’ said de Wolfe gravely. ‘But first I must be sure that this Basil is not alive and well. Can you see if he is at his usual post?’

‘I know that he is not!’ retorted the purveyor. ‘For I myself sent him this very morning across the river to pay for vegetables and to place more orders with the farms in Kennington.’

‘It seems he was attacked as he left a boat returning to this shore, which would tally with what you say,’ replied de Wolfe.

‘Was he robbed?’

‘As we have no body and thus no purse, we cannot tell,’ answered John irritably. ‘Would he have been carrying much money in the course of his duties?’

Hugo de Molis shook his head. ‘If he was attacked on his way back here, then he would have already paid off the farmers. Though perhaps a robber might not be aware of that.’

The coroner considered this for a moment – violent robbery was a common crime and seemed the most likely explanation.

‘Tell me about this man, Basil of Reigate. It may be that I will have to identify his body if and when it is recovered downriver. And you may be required to confirm it.’

De Molis’s lean, humourless face showed some distaste at the prospect. ‘I am a very busy man, coroner,’ he said dismissively. ‘He was but a minor official, employed to serve the guest apartments on the upper floor.’

‘In what way did he serve them?’ persisted de Wolfe.

‘His duty was to make sure that everything necessary for the accommodation and sustenance of palace guests was available to the chamberlain’s men. They have their own cooks up there, so food and drink has to be supplied constantly. He was under my orders as to what was requisitioned from the main storerooms down here.’

This was of little interest to de Wolfe, who had a slaying and a vanished murderer to deal with. Further questions revealed that Basil had no family in Westminster and lived in the clerk’s dormitory in the palace. The Chief Purveyor seemed more concerned at finding a replacement for the dead man than in regretting his death, but he agreed to report the matter to the Keeper of the Palace, Nicholas de Levelondes, who was ultimately in charge of the staff who saw to the running of the establishment. He also grudgingly agreed to send one of his young clerks up to the guest chambers to make certain that Basil of Reigate was not sitting there alive and well.

‘What do we do now?’ asked Gwyn, as they began retracing their steps through the warren that was the ground floor.

‘Wait until we hear of a body being washed up on the mud somewhere,’ muttered John somewhat heartlessly. ‘Thomas was right, without a corpse I have no jurisdiction.’

‘Are you going to report this to Hubert Walter?’

De Wolfe shook his head. ‘He’ll not want to hear of the killing of some obscure clerk, especially as the most likely explanation is a violent robbery.’

‘What happens if we catch the villain who did it?’ persisted Gwyn. Things were so different here from the straightforward routines that he was used to in Devonshire.

John thrust his fingers through the thick black hair that swept back from his forehead. ‘God knows we have enough judges in this place – there’s three sitting almost every day on the King’s Bench in the Great Hall. I suppose Thomas will write up the details on his rolls as usual and we present the case to the justices, just as if it was an Eyre coming to Exeter.’

They reached the bottom of their staircase, familiar territory at last and began to climb to their chamber.

‘But what about the abbot’s jurisdiction here?’ asked Thomas, always mindful of the rights of his beloved Church. ‘He holds the Liberty of Westminster, which includes the abbey, the village and the palace itself. I hear from my clerical colleagues that William Postard is most jealous of his powers, worse than many a manor-lord. In fact, he is also lord of several manors in the vicinity, which he rules with an iron hand!’

Gwyn, ever cynical about anything ecclesiastical, added his pennyworth as they reached the upper corridor. ‘If he’s anything like the Abbot of Tavistock, he’ll have his own gallows tucked away somewhere – unless he uses that one you spoke of at Tyburn.’

It was true that some of the more powerful churchmen were equally as despotic as barons and earls – and many were more concerned with their estates, politics and even warfare as with the cure of souls and the propagation of the Faith. Hubert Walter himself was not only Archbishop of Canterbury, but was also the Chief Justiciar and had been at the king’s right hand during the later battles of the last Crusade. It would not surprise de Wolfe if Abbot William Postard also exercised the power of life and death in his little realm of Westminster.

Although the coroner feared that the missing corpse might be carried downriver and be lost for ever at sea, it did not in fact travel very far from Westminster.

The Thames was flowing sluggishly after several weeks of dry weather and the neap summer tides were low. By next morning, the dead man’s cassock had snagged on a partly submerged tree stump in the shallows, just past the outflow of the Holbourn or Fleet stream on the northern bank, where the city wall ended.

Though corpses were found almost daily in the great river, ones with a tonsure and clerical garb were not that common and a wherryman rowing empty towards the wharf at Baynard’s Castle was intrigued enough to recover the body. He hauled it aboard and had a quick look to see if the fingers bore any rings that could be looted. Disappointed, he fumbled in the leather scrip on the man’s belt and was equally chagrined to find only two silver pence. He had half a mind to throw the corpse back into the water, but being so near the shore, he feared that he might be seen. Reluctantly, he rowed on to the landing stage, where a handful of citizens were waiting, augmented by some loafers who had seen the sodden body sprawled in the flimsy craft. As the cadaver looked fresh and not bloated or stinking, they helped him haul the victim out on to the wharf, where it was laid on the boards.

‘It’s a clerk,’ declared an old man, hopping nearby on a crutch. ‘May even be a priest?’

At this, a portly monk in the white habit of a Cistercian, pushed his way through the small crowd that had gathered and imperiously waved aside the nearest onlookers.

‘Keep away, let me see!’ he snapped. ‘If it is one of my brothers, he must be treated with all respect.’

Bending over the sodden corpse, he looked at the plain cassock and noted the lack of any pectoral cross or beringed fingers. He decided that this was no archdeacon or even vicar, but merely someone in minor orders.

‘What’s that embroidered on his front, then?’ asked the man on crutches, whose infirmity obviously did not extend to his eyesight. The Cistercian bent lower and squinted at some unobtrusive embroidery just below the left shoulder. The dark red stitching did not show up well against the soaked black fabric, but now his short-sighted eyes made out three small lions, one above the other.

‘This must be a brother in the king’s service!’ he exclaimed, straightening up. ‘Quite probably from Westminster.’

The boatman nodded sagely. ‘That would fit, for he’s quite fresh, even in this hot weather. So he’s not come far down the river, certainly not from Windsor or Reading.’

The monk, losing interest now that the dead man was obviously not someone important in the Church hierarchy, stepped back and began moving towards the end of the landing stage, beckoning the boatman to take him across the river.

‘Get the poor fellow taken to some shelter out of the sun,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘And tell the watch to notify the palace that it might be a royal servant.’

As he lowered himself cautiously into the wherry and was rowed off across the wide river, two large men in leather jerkins and serge breeches came striding down to the upper end of the landing stage from Thames Street, which ran along the edge of the river. They carried heavy staves and wooden truncheons hung from their wide belts. Attracted by the small crowd, these were city watchmen, employed by the mayor and aldermen to keep order in the streets. This was easier said than done, as there were only a few dozen of them to control London’s thirty thousand inhabitants. Employed mainly for their brawn, rather than brains, they still managed to cope with this incident efficiently, as they frequently had to deal with ‘drowners’. Taking the brief story from the onlookers, they decided to move the cadaver to the nearest church, as he appeared to be some kind of cleric. However, as they were tipping the corpse on to a barrow commandeered for the purpose, the change in posture caused blood to start leaking through the cassock. The lame onlooker, who was avidly watching the proceedings, was again the first to spot this and he gave a shout of warning.

‘Look at that cut in his clothing!’ he yelled. ‘The man’s been stabbed!’

Everyone crowded around until the watchmen shoved them roughly aside to make sure for themselves.

‘God’s guts, this is getting too heavy for us!’ muttered the senior of the pair to his partner. ‘A king’s clerk, murdered and thrown into the river. This is a job for the sheriff’s men!’

That evening, John de Wolfe decided to eat his supper in the palace, rather than eat alone in the house in Long Ditch. As usual, Thomas was supping in the abbey refectory, where he could converse with his fellow clerics, a pleasure little short of paradise for him after his years in the ecclesiastical wilderness. Gwyn, who was as fond of alehouses as the clerk was of the Church, had gone to his favourite tavern in Thieving Lane, to play dice with new cronies he had made amongst the palace guards.

In the early evening, John left his bare chamber overlooking the river and went down through the passages to the Lesser Hall, often known as the ‘White Hall’, on the abbey side of the main palace buildings. Although spacious, it was a quarter of the size of William Rufus’s Great Hall and had a beamed ceiling, as there was another floor above it, a dormitory for palace staff. When the king was in residence, he ate there on the raised platform at one end, except when there were major feasts in the Great Hall. It was also occasionally used for meetings, including that of the King’s Council, but at other times the hall provided meals for the middle echelons of the palace inhabitants – the high and mighty, like the Justiciar, Steward, Treasurer, Barons of the Exchequer and the Lord Chamberlain, either lived outside in their own houses or ate in private dining rooms upstairs, adjacent to the royal chambers.

As John pushed through the heavy curtain over the side entrance, he met a buzz of conversation, punctuated by raucous laughter and the clatter of ale pots and dishes. Unlike the refectory in the nearby abbey, there was no respectful muting of conversation and no verses from the Gospels or the Rule of St Benedict droned continually by a monk at a lectern during the meal, though a grace was always said by one of the priests present.

A servant near the door offered him a bowl of water and a towel to wash his hands before eating. He looked around at the scene. Two rows of trestle tables ran down the length of the hall and servants were scurrying back and forth from the door to the kitchens that he had seen when he had visited the Chief Purveyor earlier that day. The benches along the tables were occupied by a few score diners and the coroner slid into a vacant place. The meal had already started and grace had been said before his arrival. He found himself between a powerfully built man in a dark-red tunic and a small priest with a completely bald head.

Almost before he had sat down, a young servant boy placed a pint of ale in a pewter tankard before him and another deftly dropped a trencher on to the scrubbed boards of the table. John grunted a greeting to those on each side and nodded to a man and woman sitting opposite. The priest ignored him, continuing to mumble Latin prayers between sucking at a chicken leg with his toothless gums, but the man on his left, a handsome fellow in his late twenties responded civilly enough.

‘You are Sir John de Wolfe, the new law officer, I believe? We heard that the king, God save him, had appointed someone to keep us in order!’

De Wolfe reached out to spear a large slice of roast pork with the eating knife he kept sheathed on his belt. He placed it on his trencher, along with a liberal covering of fried onions ladled from a pottery bowl.

‘I am indeed, though hardly new now, for I’ve been here for well over a month. And I doubt I will be keeping you in order, unless you are dead or suffer severe violence!’ As he attacked the meat with his fingers, his neighbour introduced himself.

‘I am Ranulf of Abingdon, a knight from Berkshire. For my sins, I live in the palace as an under-marshal – and have to endure the food in this place almost every day!’

John raised his ale pot to his new friend and wished him good health. ‘I know your master William the Marshal quite well,’ he added. ‘I served under him in the Holy Land and we met again not long ago when he came as a judge to settle a problem we had in Devon.’

The great William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, was a legend, both for his prowess as a warrior and his eminence in political matters under several kings.

‘He has spoken of you more than once,’ replied Ranulf. ‘I envy the good standing you have not only with the Justiciar and the Marshal, but with the king himself.’