The Manor of Death (6 page)

They fell silent as the rest of the food was devoured.

Then the ale-pots were refilled and Sir John returned to the matter in hand.

'My officer and I will finish our examination of the body, then I wish to see that every effort is made to put a name to the victim.'

Luke de Casewold, who had been quiet for the duration of the meal, looked doubtful. 'I doubt my clerk will return this afternoon. By the time he crosses the river, makes his enquiries in Seaton and gets back again, you will not have time to return to Exeter tonight.'

Though the coroner would dearly have liked to get back to the city before the gates closed at the dusk curfew, he accepted that their horses would not relish a forced march after already covering twenty miles that morning. He resigned himself to a mattress in one of the inns, no hardship for such seasoned campaigners as Gwyn and himself, though Thomas would probably whine at the discomfort. He told de Casewold that he would stay over and hold an inquest in the morning, hoping that the corpse's identity would be established by then.

'For now, I will just spend an hour looking at the quayside and questioning some of the shipmen. If this poor lad was a sailor, they may know him.'

The coroner left the bailiff, the parish priest and portreeve together in the house and walked with his assistants and the Keeper of the Peace back to the church. Here Gwyn stripped the clothing from the corpse and, together with John, examined it closely from head to toe. The young man was slim but had plenty of muscle in his arms and legs. His dark hair was plastered to his scalp and forehead by the dampness of his makeshift grave, but there was nothing abnormal to be seen apart from the ligature mark around the neck and the clear signs of strangulation in the face. Gwyn searched the scanty clothing and found nothing useful. 'No belt or pouch, not a coin or badge to help us,' he muttered, as for the sake of decency he pulled the garments back over the corpse.

'How long would you say he's been dead?' ruminated de Wolfe. 'A few days?' He often had a contest with his officer, both reckoning themselves experts in all aspects of death.

'His death stiffness has passed off. It was cool in that grave, but I doubt he was croaked earlier than about Saturday.'

It was now Tuesday, and de Wolfe nodded his agreement. He turned to Thomas, who was hanging about outside the mortuary shed, still queasy about dead bodies even after a year and a half as coroner's clerk.

'There's nothing to write on your roll until we hold the inquest, so I suggest you find Father Henry again and see if he has any useful village gossip. You are usually good at wheedling information from your fellow clerics.' Thomas wandered off, not sure whether the coroner's remark was a compliment or a jibe.

When Gwyn had covered up the corpse again, still lying on the fish-barrow, they began walking towards the quayside. Luke de Casewold still strode alongside them, as John was unable to shake him off. He could hardly order a fellow law officer to go away, especially as this was an obvious murder on the Keeper's own territory. No one seemed quite clear how far the functions and powers of these new officials extended, as far as de Wolfe could make out; only a few knights had been appointed around the country on a somewhat random basis, depending on who could be persuaded to take on the job. Like the coroners, they were unpaid, with expenses doled out from the sheriff's funds, but no salary. The trio walked out through the other town gate, just beyond the church. Here the road turned sharply to the left and carried on along the water's edge, where, on their right, half a dozen ships were settling on to the mud as the tide receded. On the landward side, there was a narrow belt of land under the loom of the large ridge above the estuary. Here were more cottages and taverns, as well as barn-like buildings with thatched or stone-tiled roofs.

'These are storehouses for goods either brought in or waiting to be loaded on to the ships,' said Luke helpfully. 'Though that one is the fish market.'

He pointed to an open-fronted shed where a dozen men and women were gutting fish and dropping them into baskets. The estuary here was wide and open to the sea, and on the other side the villages of Seaton and Fleet also had small ships beached along their banks. Nearer the sea, which shimmered in the distance in the early-afternoon sun, John could see pebble and shingle banks around a tiny island set off the shore at Seaton.

As they walked, John saw that some parts of the water's edge had been strengthened by stone, forming wharves where the cogs could be tied up at high tide and supported when it dropped, so that loading and unloading could be carried on more easily. Elsewhere, at low tide, the vessels leant over a little on their keels, but still the crew and other labourers managed to hurry up and down planks laid to the shore with their sacks, bales and kegs. It was a busy scene, with some of the cargoes being stacked on the ground or loaded into the many ox-carts that trundled back and forth. Still more was being moved in and out of the warehouses on the other side of the track, and John was particularly interested in one that was half filled with bales of wool. Many of these were being carried across the road to a larger ship, to be stacked in the single hold that gaped in the middle of her deck.

The tall, gaunt figure of the king's coroner received many curious stares from both the porters and seamen. His hunched figure, dressed all in black, was an unusual sight on a harbour wharf, especially as he was accompanied by a ginger giant with a large sword. The Keeper of the Peace aroused no interest, as he had been a frequent and usually unwelcome visitor to Axmouth since his appointment.

They walked the length of the quayside and continued for almost half a mile down to where the estuary met the open sea, beneath the cliffs of the headland rising on their left. It was a calm day, and only low waves rippled in across the wide harbour mouth, petering out as they travelled upstream.

'This place would look mightily different in a westerly gale,' observed Gwyn, his maritime past making him a confident expert. 'But these vessels would be safe enough, especially if they moved further upriver if it got really rough.'

De Wolfe grunted. He was not much interested in the ships, but rather in their crews. 'That corpse must have been a seaman, dressed as he was,' he ruminated aloud. 'We should make some enquiries of some of these shipmasters.'

'Checking on gossip in the alehouses might be the quickest way,' suggested his officer, ever keen to find some excuse to enter a tavern. The only tavern John was keen to enter was the Bush in Exeter to see his mistress, but that was twenty miles away.

'You go, then, Gwyn; see what you can discover. I'll have words with a few of these shipmen and we'll meet in the village in an hour.'

With the Keeper still in tow, he loped back to the cog that was loading wool, as Gwyn vanished across the road to a shack that had a wilting bush hanging over the doorway. The blunt vessel was leaning a little towards him, but men were padding across from the storehouse over the road, each with a large bale of wool on his back, securely trussed with coarse twine.

As they clambered up the gangplank to the deck, a man in a russet tunic and green breeches stood at its foot, staring at each load and muttering to himself.

'Who's this fellow?' grunted de Wolfe.

'That's John Capie,' answered Luke de Casewold. 'He's the tally-man who reckons up the Customs dues though I suspect that far more gets past him than he records!' he added cynically.

John looked more closely and saw that the sallow-faced Capie had a long cord in his hands, which had a multitude of knots tied along its length. As each man hurried past with his burden, his fingers moved on another knot, his lips moving as he counted.

The coroner nodded in understanding. Now he knew how his own export taxes were calculated on the quaysides of Exeter and Topsham. The lucrative wool business he shared with Hugh de Relaga would be even more lucrative if they could avoid the Customs dues that the king's Council had imposed upon England in order to pay for the Lionheart's adventures overseas. Like de Casewold, he had his suspicions that not all the tax due on the bales that sailed out of the River Exe was actually declared, but this was something he did not wish to know about.

He looked up at the rising stern of the vessel and saw a burly man with a bushy red beard standing on the afterdeck. With his hands planted firmly on his hips, his posture suggested that he was the man in charge, as he glared at the procession of seamen and stevedores as if daring them to slow their efforts.

'That must be the shipmaster. I'll get up there and have a word with him,' grunted de Wolfe. He fitted himself into a gap between two men lugging bales up the plank and strode up to the deck, the Keeper following behind the next porter.

The man with the beard scowled at him as he approached.

'What do you want, sir?' he growled, though his habitual bluster was tempered by his recognition that this was a man of substance. The sombre but good-quality clothing and the expensive sword that swung at his hip told of wealth and authority.

'I am Sir John de Wolfe, the king's coroner for this county. Have you heard of the finding of a man's body near the village today?'

Impressed as he was by the rank of this law officer, the shipmaster remained surly. 'I have too much work here to listen to gossip,' he grunted.

'News of a strangled youth is somewhat more than gossip,' snapped de Wolfe. 'And this fellow appeared to be a shipman. We need to know who he is, so have you any of your crew missing?'

Red Beard shook his head. 'Half my men were paid off when I arrived yesterday. God knows where they are now. We only had one young 'un; he had hair the colour of wheat straw, if that's any help.'

As the dead boy's hair was almost black, this ruled him out, if the sullen shipmaster was telling the truth. The coroner climbed back down to the quayside and strode along the river, calling at each vessel and asking similar questions at every one of them. He had little but reluctant answers and surly shakes of the head, which made him suspect that there was a conspiracy of silence amongst these seamen.

'Not a very helpful bunch, are they?' he growled to Luke de Casewold as they finally reached the gateway into the village.

'Sailors are a strange lot; they stick together against the world, just like tinners,' observed the Keeper, who seemed to possess a philosophical streak.

'I got the feeling that they were hiding something from me,' grumbled John.

'They're like that with all law officers,' said Luke reassuringly. 'On principle, they are reluctant to give us even a 'good morning' if they can avoid it. Not that that's confined to shipmen; every damned man and woman in the hundred answers me grudgingly. Everyone has a guilty conscience about something!'

'What have these seafarers got to hide, then?' demanded de Wolfe.

As they entered the village, de Casewold sniggered. 'They are all crooked, Crowner! Smuggling is their main sin, though I'd not put a little piracy past some of them.'

'I thought that tally-man down there was supposed to check all the goods. How does he operate, then?'

There was an alehouse just inside the town gate, on the left side of the track opposite the church. It was known by common usage as the Harbour Inn. Luke waved the coroner to a rough bench outside and yelled through the door for jars of ale. As they sat together in the sun, he explained the system that collected the dues from a busy port such as Axmouth.

'This fellow John Capie does his best to record all taxable goods that go out or come in from the harbour. Christ alone understands how he does it, mainly with knotted strings and notched tally-sticks, for he can neither read nor write.'

A slattern brought out two quart pots of ale, which tasted better than it looked, though John pined for the good stuff brewed by Nesta in the Bush back home. He drank and listened while the Keeper carried on with his explanation. 'Capie then goes twice a day to Elias Palmer, who writes down what Capie calculates has been loaded or discharged from each of the ships.'

'But he can't be at every ship all the time,' objected John.

'That's very true, though he checks the goods in the warehouses as well, trying to get some idea of what is being moved in and out of the port.'

De Wolfe saw Gwyn approaching in the distance and gulped down the rest of his ale, confident that he would need another jug as soon as the Cornishman arrived.

'This system seems wide open to error and abuse, if you ask me!' he growled. 'How does he actually get the money paid?'

'That's Elias Palmer's job. He charges both a manor tax and a county tax, squeezing it from whoever owns the wool or wine or whatever the goods happen to be. The first levy goes to the Priory of Loders, who own the village, then the royal tax goes to the sheriff as part of the county farm.'

Gwyn of Polruan stamped up the last few yards to the Harbour Inn and dropped heavily on to the bench.

'Waste of bloody time! Nobody knows a thing - or so they say!' he reported. 'Wouldn't tell us if they did, by their attitude! Something strange about this village, I reckon. As if they are keeping some big secret.'

Luke de Casewold nodded sagely. 'I've felt the same ever since I started coming down here as Keeper,' he asserted. 'The whole damned place is up to something, I can feel it in my bones!' He drained his ale-jar and stood up. 'I'm going to get to the bottom of it, too, whatever the cost! I was appointed to keep the peace - and that includes anything that's to the detriment of our good King Richard.'