For the Love of Old Bones - and other stories (Templar Series) (7 page)

Often a murder scene felt cold and sad, as if the departing soul had removed all warmth as it fled, but here, in the small hall down an alley off Crediton’s high street, there was a sense of poignant gloom that Baldwin had not experienced before, and he looked about him for a moment, wondering where the feeling came from. Certainly it was cold. The fire had been out overnight and there was a damp chill in the air, as though the house had been deserted for months. Apart from that there was little to differentiate the room from many another prosperous artisan’s property - nothing except the comparative emptiness.

Usually there would be tapestries, flowers, and occasional scatterings of fresh herbs among the rushes to disguise the distasteful odours where a dog or hog had soiled the floor. Walls would have paintings on them or hangings to keep the cold at bay, tables and cupboards would have good linen spread over them, chairs would have plump cushions – but not here.
 

Baldwin was honest enough to admit to himself that the decoration was remarkably similar to his own before his marriage. It was unremittingly masculine: there was no indication that it had ever enjoyed the influence of a woman’s hand, as if the dead man wanted nothing that might remind him of feminine comforts.
 

The table tops were plain, scraped wood; stools and benches bare, the fireplace was a rough circle of fire-baked clay on the earthen floor delineated by moorstone rocks. The sole evidence of luxury lay in the man’s upper chamber. He had so valued his sleep that he had constructed a bedchamber reached by a ladder.

‘You recognise him, Sir Baldwin?’

Baldwin nodded as he reached inside the shirt to study the stab wound more closely. There was a rough oval mark about it, and Baldwin considered it thoughtfully before answering: ‘Yes, Tanner. Humphrey the Armourer.’

‘He came here little more than a year ago,’ Tanner said, his gaze moving about the room. ‘Poor bastard.’

Baldwin grunted in agreement. ‘No wife?’

‘He came here when she died. Some disease or other she got in Exeter.’ His tone showed that he was unsurprised by people dying in such a terrible place. Tanner was a heavy man with a square, calm face weather-beaten to a leathery toughness. He always asserted that there were many more vicious and evil creatures in a city like Exeter than in the wilds of Dartmoor.

‘And he left behind all his memories,’ Baldwin murmured, looking about him once more. It was as if Humphrey had intentionally eradicated all trace of her. Baldwin thought it sad. If his own wife were to die before him, he would want to remember her.

‘Some men try to forget dead women,’ Tanner suggested. ‘Makes it easier to snare another.’

‘You think he was a womaniser?’

‘Not really. There were rumours he liked the whores, though.’

Baldwin noted that. Any clues might serve to help find the killer. ‘Was he robbed?’

‘There’s a chest up in his bedchamber. His purse is empty.’

Baldwin grunted to himself, then made his way laboriously up the ladder. He had never liked heights, but today the corpse distracted him enough for him to be able to get into the small bedroom before realising how far from the ground he was.

The chamber was large enough for a thick palliasse and chest, which he opened. Inside were clothes and some plate. A thief would have stolen them. There was one other thing Baldwin noticed: by the side of the palliasse was a cloth, a square of fabric with careful embroidery all about the edge. ‘A pretty kerchief, Tanner,’ he said, letting it fall to the Constable.

Back on solid ground, Baldwin took the kerchief back and smelled it. There was a faint odour of lavender about it. ‘Whose was this?’ he wondered.

‘I’ve never seen it before,’ Tanner said.

‘No? It is a distinctive little scrap, though. And out of place in a bachelor’s hall. Keep it by, Tanner. We may need it.’

‘
He
won’t, will he?’ the Constable observed, stuffing it into his belt.

‘No, Humphrey is beyond caring. Shame he wasn’t wearing some of his armour when this happened,’ Baldwin said.

Blood had flowed thinly from the dead man’s wound, and there were one or two smudges, as if someone had stood in the gore. Perhaps it was the killer? he mused. No matter. The prints were too indistinct for him to be able to tell anything from them. ‘The door was open?’

‘No, Sir Baldwin. Locked. We had to come in through the window.’

Baldwin looked up at the unglazed window. It was high in the western wall to catch the dying sun without allowing a thief to clamber in with ease, and now he looked he could see that the timber mullions had been broken. ‘You got in there?’

‘Yes. But when I got here, there was no key in the door.’

‘Where was it?’

‘On a ring of keys on his belt. Here.’

Tanner passed him the heavy keyring and Baldwin stood weighing it in his hands. ‘You suggest that somebody was in here, stabbed the armourer, left, and the armourer then obligingly rose and locked the door after him? Not with that wound.’

‘No,’ Tanner agreed. ‘He couldn’t have got to the door and locked it. He must have died almost immediately.’

‘So someone else locked the door, Tanner. From outside, or from in here?’

‘There’s no other way in or out that I’ve found.’

‘Good! So they left by the door,’ Baldwin said. ‘And that means that they must have had a key of their own. Who would have been that friendly with this man?’

‘That I don’t know, Sir Baldwin.’

‘Neither do I, so let us speak with the neighbours.’

They were all waiting outside under the suspicious gaze of a watchman who held his wooden staff like a man keen to show his expertise. No one would dare to run away.

Not that there was much point, Baldwin reminded himself. There was nowhere to run to for people whose business and livelihood were tied up with Crediton. However, all the neighbours must be kept until they had been
attached
– made to pay a surety that guaranteed that they would attend the Justice’s court when he next appeared. All of them would be fined anyway, because any man who lived near a murder was taxed for the infringement of the King’s Peace, which was why the men shuffled resentfully.

‘You have sent for the Coroner?’ Baldwin asked Tanner quietly.

‘Yes. The messenger left at the same time as the man sent to fetch you.’

‘Good. So we need not keep these folk too long, hopefully,’ Baldwin said. ‘Although the dull-witted fool may take his time.’

‘He usually does,’ Tanner growled.

Both knew the Coroner. Sir Roger of Gidleigh had been a useful ally in Baldwin’s previous investigations, but he had been thrown from his horse earlier in the summer and confined to his bed, a shrunken, twisted reminder of his previous hale and powerful self. In his place had been installed Sir Gilbert of Axminster.

Compared with Sir Roger, Sir Gilbert was a weakly and insipid youth. Sir Gilbert had never taken part in a battle, nor had he earned his rank from proving his honour or courage. No, he had become a knight under the ridiculous law by which any man who owned an estate worth more than £40 each year could be compelled to take up knighthood; it led to cretins like Sir Gilbert wearing the golden spurs, Baldwin thought contemptuously. Feeble-minded doddypolls who were scarcely capable of lacing their enamelled sword-belts. And once knighted, Sir Gilbert’s puerile sense of humour and effeminate manner had led to his advancement to Coroner. With a King such as Edward II, who preferred favourites like Piers Gaveston and the appalling Hugh Despenser to his own wife, it was no surprise that men like Sir Gilbert found senior posts.

It hurt Baldwin particularly because he had been a ‘Poor Fellow Soldier of Christ and the Temple of Solomon’, a Knight Templar, who had risked his life in the hell-hole of Acre in 1291 as that great city fell to the Saracen hordes. The Templars had been honourable, devoted monks who had taken the threefold oaths of poverty, chastity and obedience, and yet they had been slaughtered for personal gain. The French King had coveted their wealth, so he unleashed a storm of impossible accusations against them, having them arrested and then burned at the stake like heretics, all because he wanted their money.

That was the prick that drove Baldwin to investigate crimes: he had been the victim of persecution; he had suffered from the lies of politicians; he knew how difficult it was to deny the claims of bigots. All made him determined to protect others who suffered from injustice.
 

The memory of his comrades’ foul deaths made him wear an expression of glowering bitterness which lent his dark features a ferocious air, a fact which was brought home to him when he caught the eye of a young girl, who recoiled as though from a blow.

Abruptly he turned and glanced again at the dead man’s hall, trying to drive away the memory of Templars burning in their pyres.
 

‘Looks new still, doesn’t it?’ Tanner said, following the direction of his look. He was still unused to his Keeper’s sudden mood swings, even after six years.

Baldwin grunted assent. The hall shone, showing the gleaming white of fresh limewash. The oak timbers were light-coloured, fresh, and had hardly twisted or cracked yet. It would need a couple of good winters to weather them.

Alongside was the man’s place of work, and before talking to the waiting neighbours, Baldwin entered it.

It was a long, low building, as new as the hall. At the far end were the huge hammers which were tripped by cams beneath, driven by the massive wheel outside in the leat. A large anvil sat in the middle of the floor, stapled to a section of tree trunk, and all about were sheets of metal, tools, and at the wall, neatly swept piles of the detritus of the forge: steel shards and metal filings. A box held broken blades, larger offcuts from helmets or plate armour, while at one corner there stood straw dummies with armour bound to them. A trestle contained two helms and various farming implements: scythes, hammers, axes, and sharpened edges for shovel blades.

Everywhere there was the stench of the armourer: the sharp tang of metal and rust, the insidious odour of oil, the brackish, unpleasant scent of the filthy water used to quench the red-hot metal and temper it, but above all there were two smells: the sweetness of the beeswax which was rubbed over the metal while still hot to protect it from rusting, and the noisome stink of animal excrement, almost human in its foul pungency.

‘He has a pig?’ Baldwin asked. There was no sign of it.

‘Everyone has a pig,’ came Tanner’s laconic reply.

Baldwin nodded as he walked to the corner where the smell came from. ‘It is not here now. Where is it?’

‘Maybe it’s out in the orchard or the woods?’

‘Odd time of year for that,’ Baldwin said. Hogs were usually left to rootle about in yards on their own, which was why they so often escaped and caused such mayhem in the roads. They were such a nuisance that if someone caught another man’s pig, he could demand its execution and claim its trotters as his reward.

He could learn nothing from a pig’s excrement. Baldwin peered about him again. It was a remarkably well-ordered smithy. Blacksmiths he had known tended to work bare-chested, apart from their leathery aprons, in black, sooty rooms. They were invariably wiry, lean men, with hands scarred from gripping hot metal, their faces weathered and crazed with wrinkles from staring into white-hot charcoal as they tempered blades and armour. Humphrey’s forge was almost clean and tidy by comparison. Only by the anvil itself were there the fine, silvery flakes which showed that red-hot metal had been worked.

It was almost as though the place had been cleaned, ready for his death.

‘Massive hammers, those,’ Tanner said.

‘You need them to make good blades,’ Baldwin said, then he paused. ‘I wonder if it was one of his own that killed him?’

Back outside, he studied the shuffling, anxious men.

‘Who lived nearest the armourer?’ Baldwin called out. Although there was a general movement among the men standing before him, no one cared to volunteer information to the Keeper of the King’s Peace. He was the most powerful and important of all the King’s local officials, and as such inspired fear. It was a constant cause of irritation and near-despair for Baldwin. He could never understand why he should be viewed with such alarm. However today he was aware of a certain lethargic dullness growing within him. It was not his place to investigate and report on murders – that was the Coroner’s duty – and Baldwin wished to be gone from here. In truth it was tempting to go and leave Sir Gilbert to his task – but if he did, he knew there was a risk that the wrong man could be arrested for the murder. He had no faith in Sir Gilbert.

With a sigh, Baldwin accepted that he must inquire himself, just to ensure that the innocent might walk free.

The crowd was a curious blend of people. Two poor-looking churls, Ham from Efford and Adam Weaver, and one more affluent serf, Jaket the Baker. Ham and Jaket’s women clung to their husbands with terror in their eyes, while Adam’s wife Edith stood proudly apart. Children mingled with the adults, plainly fretful, and a pair of dogs fought, egged on by two lads with sticks.

Baldwin could smell the fear rising from them like a sour miasma that crept into his nostrils and made him feel tainted. Poor people always stood to lose when they were investigated, he reflected: the rich could afford a pleader to lie for them.

Picking a man at random, he pointed at Ham. ‘You! Come here!’

Ham started, nervously smiling, a weaselly fellow with sallow complexion framing sunken dark eyes and pinched cheeks. ‘My Lord?’

Baldwin beckoned. Ham had been standing with his wife and two young girls. He left them reluctantly, approaching Baldwin with his eyes downcast.

‘You are Ham from Efford, aren’t you?’ Baldwin demanded. He vaguely remembered that the man had been working with a cloth-maker some while ago.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You work with John in …’

‘No, he let me go when he took on a new apprentice. An apprentice is cheaper than a trained man.’

Baldwin nodded, and his voice became more gentle. ‘Where do you live?’