The Elixir of Death (16 page)

John of Exeter walked rapidly down the centre of the nave, his footsteps echoing on the flagstones of the great empty space. Ahead there was yellow light from the candles and rush-lights within the quire that separated the nave from the high altar. It was in this middle area that services were held. On either side, wooden stalls accommodated the participants in strict pecking order. To separate this august zone from the common herd in the nave, a high and very ornate rood-screen filled the lower part of the huge chancel arch. It was an intricate latticework of carved wood rearing up some fifteen feet, surmounted by a large gilded crucifix in the centre. Between this and the stone columns that supported the arch, each side of the top of the rood-screen was ornamented by a row of wooden spikes carved like spear-heads.

And on the third spike on the left side was impaled a human head, its genitals stuffed into its mouth!

An hour later, a shaken John of Exeter sat in his house in Canon's Row, on the north side of the Close, drinking wine with his namesake, John de Wolfe. He was usually an abstemious man, unlike some of his fellow canons, but tonight he was taking it to steady his shattered nerves, as the coroner attempted to reassure him.

'I've already had the head taken up to Rougemont,' he said. 'Later today, I'll restore it to his sons in Shillingford.'
 

The treasurer shook his head slowly. 'I can't believe that anyone would commit such sacrilege, John. What is the world coming to?'

De Wolfe scowled ferociously. 'I don't know either, friend, but I'm damned well going to find out! All these events are connected somehow, I feel it in my bones.'

The canon took another sip of wine, his hand shaking as he held the pewter goblet. 'It was good of you to climb up yourself and get that ... that thing down from there. Everyone else was too squeamish to go anywhere near it, including myself.'

'I didn't mind getting the head, John, but I'm getting bit old to go shinning up rood-screens! It was fortunate that there was plenty of tracery in that carving to give me good footholds.'

In truth, even the hardened de Wolfe had felt some repugnance as he climbed up and came almost nose to nose with the bloody relic. As he hung on with one hand, he pulled the victim's private parts from its mouth with the other. The wide-open eyes stared straight into his and the dried lips, twisted into a rictus of final agony, almost kissed his own. Lifting the head by its hair, John wrenched the ragged neck-stump from the wooden spike and awkwardly clambered down, clutching the gruesome relics under his arm.

The senior canon shuddered again. 'I told the proctors to call some servants and get a ladder and buckets of water, to cleanse the blood from the woodwork. There was not much of it, thanks be to God, but we will have to carry out some sort of exorcism and rededication in the morning, to rid the place of this evil before we hold services there again. I have abandoned Matins, and we will have to hold our devotions in one of the side chapels until the quire is properly cleansed.'

The coroner made some non-committal noises in his throat, but his mind had moved to the crime, rather than its effect on cathedral protocol.

'Has this Peter le Calve or any of his family ever had any dispute with the cathedral or the diocese?' he asked. 'Perhaps over land or tithes?'

John of Exeter shook his head emphatically. 'Not at all, John. Before all this I knew virtually nothing of him, apart from his name. He supports his own church well enough in Shillingford, to the best of my knowledge. At least, the village priest has never brought any problems to our notice.'

He refilled their cups and took a gulp, rather than a sip. 'But if he had fallen out with the Church, surely it would be a priest who would suffer, not him. I can't imagine any Christian man committing such sacrilege.'

The coroner looked thoughtful at this remark by the treasurer.

'No Christian man indeed! What if it was a non-Christian?'

The canon stared at his friend. 'But we have no non-Christians, apart from a few Jews, who are respectable, harmless traders.'

'What about Saracens or Turks?' suggested John. Then he told the mystified cleric about the killing of Thorgils and his crew and the vague mention by the dying seaman of 'Saracens'.

'In addition, there are these stab wounds,' he added thoughtfully. 'In both Peter le Calve and the three shipmen, the wounds are much wider than the usual dagger-blade. And I get the impression that beneath the skin, they curve back on themselves.'

The priest, thankfully ignorant of such gruesome technicalities, was uncomprehending.

'What are you talking about, John?'

'These injuries could be explained by the use of oriental daggers, whose blades are very wide at the hilt and usually curve to their points.'

The archdeacon looked dubious. 'This is very flimsy evidence on which to start blaming Devonshire murders on Mohammedans, John.'

The coroner shrugged. 'I have to agree with you, but it still bears thinking about. As you say, what Christian would imperil his mortal soul by impaling the head of a murdered man on the rood-screen of your cathedral?'

The treasurer could only suggest some Barbary pirates attacking a ship off the coast, but this failed to explain their penetration inland to Shillingford and then into Exeter itself.

'How could such villains move around without being noticed?' objected de Wolfe. 'In every village, a stranger is noticed within a dozen heartbeats of his arrival! Unless they went slinking through the forest at night, there's no way that a gang of Turks' in flowing robes and turbans could go parading through Devonshire to commit mayhem!'

They discussed the matter until the wine jug was empty, but made no progress with such poor evidence. The priest announced that he would not be able to sleep that night, as he had much to see to in view of the awful events of the past hour, but the coroner made his way back to his bed. In spite of seeing that grisly face dance before his closed eyes as soon as he lay down, within minutes John managed to slide back into a deep sleep.

CHAPTER FIVE

In which Crowner John travels again to Ringmore

The missing head of Sir Peter le Calve was taken back to his manor the next morning, slung unceremoniously in a corn sack from Gwyn's saddle. The coroner and his officer had examined it closely in Rougemont before leaving, the grisly object having spent most of the night in a corner of the garrison chapel of St Mary in the inner ward. The chaplain of the castle, a jovial Benedictine called Brother Rufus, had studied it with them, having an insatiable curiosity, especially about violent crime.

'Does the way it was cut off tell you anything?' he asked, as the three men crouched over the decapitated head, which lay on its left ear on the earthen floor. Unlike the cathedral priests, the padre seemed to have no qualms about desecrating his place of worship with such an object.

'It's just a ragged cut, which could have been done with anything-sharp,' opined Gwyn.

De Wolfe agreed with him. 'The jagged edges are due to the skin wrinkling up as the blade is dragged across it. It was a keen knife, no doubt about it, for between the zigzags the cuts are very clean.'

'What about the bony part?' persisted Rufus. 'Could a knife cut through that as well?'

John, still crouched on his haunches, picked up the head, turning it up so that the stump of the neck was uppermost. They peered at the pinkish-white bone, surrounded by beefy muscle.

'Again, a clean cut, no shattered bone. It's gone through the gristle between the joints of the spine.'

'So not hacked off with an axe?' grunted the monk, sounding rather disappointed.

'No, it could have been the same knife as cut through the soft flesh,' growled Gwyn. 'Looks as if the killer knew what he was doing - perhaps he had been a butcher!'

'You say 'killer', but was this poor fellow dead or alive when his head was cut off?' demanded the bloodthirsty chaplain.

John shrugged. 'No way of telling, Brother. If he had been still alive, there would have been a fountain of blood from the pipes in his neck - but he was found in a stream, which would have washed most of it away.'

'And remember, he also had a stab wound to his vitals, which may well have been the cause of his death,' Gwyn reminded them. 'I'd wager his head came off afterwards.'

John rose to his feet and motioned to his officer to put the remains back into the sack. 'Whichever way it was, he's dead - and he was murdered, so we have to discover who did it. At the moment, only God knows, begging your pardon, Chaplain.'

They left Brother Rufus to his contemplation of the wicked ways of man and set off on the short journey to Shillingford. An early morning carter had already taken the news from Exeter to the village, and they found the sons and their steward and bailiff waiting anxiously for their arrival. Godfrey and William le Calve had the distressing task of formally confirming that the contents of the sack were indeed the head of their late father and, this done, the coroner suggested that, together with the genitalia, it be reunited with the rest of the body without delay. The surly parish priest was summoned and told to get the sexton and dig up the coffin. An hour later, John accompanied the brothers to the grave-side, where the manor servants joined them in silence as the sexton replaced the head in an approximately correct position, packing it with cloths to hold it in place.

The priest muttered some dirge in Latin as the coffin lid was nailed back and the mortal remains of the manor-lord were once again lowered into the red soil of Devon. As they turned away from the grave, John again noticed the pale woman standing inconspicuously in the background and guessed that this had been Sir Peter's leman.

A subdued pair of brothers offered them meat and ale in the hall and de Wolfe sat with them as he tried to squeeze out more information.

'He had no connection with the cathedral or any of its canons that you know of?'

Godfrey shook his head sorrowfully. 'None at all. He attended Masses here in our own church, as we all do. But he had no further interest in religion, beyond what is expected of everyone.'

The old steward, perhaps wiser in the ways of the world than the others, broke his silence with a more profound thought.

'Perhaps this sacrilege was aimed not at Sir Peter himself, but at the Holy Church in general - some gesture of hatred or contempt?'

The others mulled this over for a moment.

'Both he and his father Arnulf had been Crusaders,' said William. 'But that should raise his esteem in the eyes of the Church.'

'But not in the eyes of Saracens,' observed the steward. John's face swivelled to look at the old greybeard. 'Strange that you should say that, for it hovers temptingly close to certain ideas that I have had myself.'

Godfrey was scornful of this train of thought. 'Saracens! Crowner, this is Shillingford, about as unlikely a place to expect Turks and Mussulmen as anywhere in England.'

John was not prepared to share his scraps of information gleaned from the Justiciar, or his theory about the shape of the knife blade, so he let it pass, but he felt that the venerable steward might not be too short of the mark.

The denizens of the manor had no further information of any help, as no one had come forward to report any unusual happenings or the appearance of strangers in the village. Frustrated once again, the coroner set off for Exeter, arriving there in time to attend two Tuesday hangings, then go home for his dinner.

On Wednesday, John was determined to make some progress in investigating all these deaths. He resolved to revisit Ringmore and the banks of the Avon.

'We'll leave first thing in the morning,' he told Gwyn. 'Matilda will carp and gripe again at my absence for a few days, but to hell with her!'

Even at the Bush that evening, his announcement that he was riding off to the southern coast was received with raised eyebrows on the part of his mistress. He guessed straight away that she suspected that the part of that coastline might embrace Dawlish, so he made a point of emphasising that their path would lie through Buckfast and end at Ringmore, which seemed to dampen Nesta's hovering jealousy.

By midnight, he was sound asleep in his own bed, dreaming of shapely women, prancing horses and the sound of battles long past.

The hut that Alexander of Leith entered at the old castle at Bigbury was even worse inside than it appeared from the exterior. There was a fire-pit in the centre which was producing the smoke that he had seen lazily wreathing from under the thatch, but very little else. A rough table and a shelf on the wall held cooking pots and some dishes, as well as a few jars of ale and cider. Some piles of dried bracken in the corners appeared to be all there was in the way of sleeping accommodation. A bench and two milking stools completed the furnishings. The little Scot glared around in indignation.

'You don't expect us to live in this hovel?' he demanded, in his Gaelic-accented English. The target of his outrage was the man who had waved them into the bailey on their arrival. Raymond de Blois was a tough-looking Frenchman, with the appearance of a soldier but the manners of a gentleman. Of average height, he was lean and wiry, with a long clean-shaven face and short-cropped dark hair. He wore a calf-length tunic of good brown broadcloth, girdled with a heavy belt and diagonal baldric, from which hung a substantial sword and dagger. Alexander had met him before in France and at Prince John's court at Gloucester, and had been impressed by his courage and intelligence.