The Elixir of Death (31 page)

De Wolfe and Gwyn recalled the cadaverous recluse who had heard the dying sailor mention 'Saracens'.

'But he was a harmless old fellow, surely?' exclaimed John. 'Not worth robbing and surely no threat to anyone!'

'You say he was hanged from a tree?' boomed Gwyn. The bailiff quaffed from his pot again before answering. 'Yes, but I doubt that killed him. He was covered in blood and had many knife wounds upon his body.'

More details came out bit by bit, as William related how, soon after dawn, one of the fisherfolk on his way to the beach smelt smoke. He soon found the hermit dangling from a tree, with a small fire still smouldering on the ground directly under the corpse, though there seemed little damage from the flames apart from some roasting of the feet.

'Bloody strange!' growled Gwyn. 'What's going on in our county these days?'

'At least Peter le Calve and his sons were Norman gentry,' muttered John. 'But this Joel was just some old anchorite, of little account except to God and himself.' A steaming bowl of mutton stew arrived in front of the bailiff, but before he attacked it with his spoon, he looked up at the coroner.

'I wouldn't hasten to dismiss Joel as of no account, Sir John. No one knows much about him, except perhaps our parish priest, who took his confessions, but years ago there was a rumour that he came from a noble family before he renounced the world to live on that island.'

Between dipping a hunk of rough bread into his stew and chewing at it appreciatively, William Vado explained how the fisherman had hurried to Ringmore to report the murder. The bailiff had sent his reeve and some other men to safeguard the body, having learned from the previous episode that the coroner wanted everything left undisturbed. He had taken his horse and ridden hard to Totnes, where he had been given some food and a fresh gelding to get him to Exeter as soon as possible. Thanks to the dry roads, he had made the marathon journey of thirty miles in one day, just failing to reach the city before curfew.

When he had eaten, de Wolfe arranged with Nesta to give him a straw mattress and a blanket up in the loft and, tired to the point of collapse, William gratefully hauled himself up the ladder.

'Remember, we leave at dawn!' shouted John after him, and with fresh jars of ale and cider before them, he and Gwyn sat with Nesta to discuss this latest act in the drama of the mysterious deaths.

'This crucifixion thing,' began the Cornishman. 'Thomas must be right in thinking it must be an unChristian abomination. That must surely mean Saracens.'

'But why now and in a remote English county?' asked Nesta. 'There's no crusading going on that must be avenged.'

'It's quiet out in Palestine, I'll agree,' mused John. 'The King negotiated a long peace with Saladin through the Treaty of Jaffa, though skirmishing never stops out there.'

'And Saladin died more than two years ago,' added Gwyn. 'So I don't see why some Saracens should turn up here and randomly start killing us.'

John shook his head. 'I'll wager it's not random. There's some reason for it, though I'm damned if I can see what it might be.'

They talked on to little effect for some time. To be truthful, John and Nesta were secretly glad that their unhappy heart-searching about Matilda and their own emotional dilemma had been diverted by this news from the far west of Devon. Eventually, mindful of an early start and a long day on horseback ahead of them, the coroner and his officer finished their ale and Gwyn left for Rougemont, where he often found a place to sleep with his soldier friends. They had agreed to let Thomas carry on with his own business, as though his horsemanship had improved since he had given up the side-saddle, he was still an encumbrance when they needed to ride far and fast.

John took himself up to Nesta's small chamber in the loft, passing a snoring William Vado on the way. De Wolfe intended lying awake in anticipation of Nesta's warm body joining him after she had attended to various tasks in the cook shed and brew-house, but when she finally came to bed, he was peacefully asleep. With an affectionate smile, she crept in beside him and snuggled up close, uncaring for at least one night as to what the future might hold for them.

The coroner's return to the banks of the River Avon was not quite as swift as the bailiff's ride to Exeter. His destrier Odin was built for endurance rather than speed and this applied in lesser measure to Gwyn's big brown mare. They got further than Totnes on the first day and slept on the floor of an alehouse in a hamlet a few miles farther south. After another early start, by mid-morning they were at Aveton Giffard, at the head of the Avon estuary. William Vado took them on a track alongside the river which was only passable at low tide, bringing them out near where Thorgils' ship had been moored on their last visit.

'The corpse is just a bit farther on,' promised the bailiff, pointing to a swath of trees along the steep side of the western bank. A few minutes later, they saw a small group of men waiting for them, some recognisable as having been at the inquest in Ringmore. Sliding gratefully from their horses and rubbing their aching bottoms, John and his officer followed Vado into the wood, where gnarled and spindly trees, most covered with grey-green lichen and moss, gave the lonely place a mystical air.

They followed a faint track through the fallen leaves, the river still visible down to their left, until they reached an area where the trees were more widely spaced. Here they came upon a grotesque and pathetic sight which was even more weird than their imaginations had led them to expect.

Hanging by the neck from a branch of an old oak was a thin, naked body. There was a slight breeze and the corpse turned eerily from side to side as if scanning the scenery with open, sightless eyes. It was not very high above the ground, the feet hovering barely a yard over the remains of a small fire, where the unburnt ends of a ring of small logs projected from a heap of grey ash.

As with Peter le Calve, the arms were kept outstretched by being lashed by the wrists to a length of dead branch passing behind the shoulders, though there were also lashings around each armpit to keep the branch in place. Again like the dead manor-lord, the chest was disfigured by stab wounds, though this time they were many more in number. There were also some on the belly, dribbles of dried blood streaking the skin below each stab.

For a moment, the new arrivals stared in silence at the horrific scene.

'At least he's not been disembowelled or castrated,' grunted Gwyn, as if this were something to the dead man's advantage.

'But he's just as bloody dead!' snarled de Wolfe. 'Poor old sod. Why do this to a harmless hermit?'

There was no answer to this, and they moved nearer for a closer look.

John noticed some scraps of part-burned cloth at the edge of the dead fire.

'That must be the remains of his clothing,' he grunted. 'Even in death they had to further humiliate the old man by stripping him naked!'

Gwyn was looking up rather than down, and nudged his master.

'No need to ponder if this is connected with Shillingford, Crowner! Look at those lashings and the cord around his neck.'

The coroner followed his officer's gaze and nodded. 'More red silk. And I'll wager two marks that those stab wounds are far wider than usual.'

De Wolfe felt nauseated by the evil nature of this killing. Though he had seen far worse mutilations in battle, this cold-blooded perversity both sickened and infuriated him.

'Cut the poor old devil down!' he snapped. 'He's suffered enough indignity.'

As Gwyn and Osbert the reeve supported the frail body, one of the younger men shinned up the tree and clambered out along the branch to cut through the thin but strong cord that was knotted over it.

'We left him there for you to see, Crowner,' said William Vado apologetically. 'There were those in the village who said it wasn't seemly to leave him hanging for two days, but in the circumstances I thought I'd best abide by your rules.'

'It's a dilemma, with Exeter so far away,' admitted John, with uncharacteristic sympathy. 'But you did right, Bailiff, we need all the information we can get to catch these bastards.'

'But where do we start?' growled Gwyn pessimistically. 'Have any strangers been seen around here?' demanded John of the bailiff.

Vado shook his head. 'This is a lonely spot, sir. Even the river fishermen rarely come up from the water's edge. Who's to see any strangers?'

They paused as Gwyn and the reeve went forward to gently take the victim's body as the lad finished cutting through the silken cord. The old hermit was laid on the ground away from the fire, and one of the men took off his ragged cape and laid it over the anchorite's body, a simple act of compassion that was not lost on the coroner.

'When was he last seen alive?' he asked.

'I saw him the day before he went missing,' volunteered one of the fishermen. 'About noon, it was. He was up on the top of his hut, looking out to sea. He does that for us, scanning the water for shoals.'

'Why should he be here?' boomed Gwyn. 'I was wondering whether he was brought here forcibly or whether he was ambushed.'

'Old Joel used to wander the woods looking for fallen branches for his fire,' said the reeve. 'I know this was one of the places he came for that.'

De Wolfe looked around as if for inspiration, but all he saw was the silent trees. If only they could speak, he thought whimsically.

'There are no horse tracks here. Whoever did this must have come on foot,' observed the bailiff.

'No mysterious hooded monks this time?' said John bitterly. This was a mystery with no clues, as far as he was concerned. They watched as the youth with the knife cut the cords holding Joel's arms to the crucifying branch and allowed the dead limbs to be pushed against his side.

'The death stiffness is passing off,' said Gwyn. 'That fits with him dying more than a couple of days ago.' He knelt down alongside the pathetic figure of the old man and gently pulled back the cape to look at Joel's face and trunk. The coroner came to bend over him, hands on knees.

'He didn't die of hanging, anyway,' commented John. 'His face isn't discoloured and there's no swelling around the cord on his neck.'

'Doesn't have to be like that, though I agree it usually is,' said Gwyn, unwilling to be overshadowed in his knowledge of violent death, even by his master.

De Wolfe pointed to some of the stab wounds, which, as he had prophesied, were seen on closer inspection to be very wide.

'The blood dribbling from some of them show he was lying down when they bled, not hanging from a tree.' This time even Gwyn failed to argue, just nodded his head. He turned the body over and looked at several similar wounds on the back.

'Ten wounds all told, including those on his belly. Only one is needed to kill, so why inflict all these?'

'Does that mean the killers were in some sort of frenzy?' asked the bailiff.

John shrugged. 'Could be - though I've known of some cruel bastards stabbing a man many times just for the pleasure of it.'

Gwyn collected up the cut cords and stuffed them into the shapeless pouch on his belt. 'I'll keep these to add to the others. You never know, maybe we can match them with something if we catch these swine.'

There seemed nothing further to do in the wood, so John told Vado that they would take the body back to Ringmore.

'This is in your manor, I presume?' he asked, looking around.

The bailiff nodded. 'Only just. The boundary with Bigbury is over there.' He waved a hand vaguely. 'No use expecting them to do anything, anyway! They don't have a resident bailiff, he's in Aveton - and their reeve is a drunken idiot.'

They set off through the trees in the opposite direction to which they had come, moving down the side of the estuary towards the sea. The path was narrow and they had to thread their way through the trees, leading their horses by the reins. When they came out of the woods, it was about noon and the tide was in, so John's intention to go on to Burgh Island to look at Joel's hermitage was frustrated. They rounded the point and were able to mount their horses again for the mile or so to the village, leaving the others to tramp in their own time with the skinny body, which four men carried between them, a limb each.

In the old manor-house of Ringmore, William Vado soon organised food and drink and afterwards they sat around the fire-pit in rather muted mood, saddened by the apparently senseless murder of a penniless recluse.

'How long has this Joel been here?' asked Gwyn. 'Since I was a child, and that's more than twenty years ago,' answered William. 'I don't remember him coming.' The reeve, Osbert de Newetone, was a decade older and recalled Joel's arrival.

'He just walked into the village one day. Autumn, it was, a real good harvest year. He wore a plain tunic and a pilgrim's hat, was bare-foot and carried a pilgrim's staff. He kept those clothes for years until they fell to pieces. Then someone in the village gave him the cast-offs he wore to this day.'

'And you know nothing of where he came from?' persisted the coroner.

The bailiff turned up his hands. 'He never said and it wasn't our place to ask. But he spoke well, and he could read words on parchment when someone needed to. I don't remember where this story came from about him being a former nobleman or knight, but I could quite believe it.'