Figure of Hate (22 page)

'My brother, like so many other active men, was fond of slaking his surplus virility on common drabs like this girl here.'

'A common and understandable habit, even to be found among senior law officers!' sneered de Revelle, unable to resist a jibe at John's affair with his Welsh tavern-keeper.

De Wolfe again resisted the temptation to observe that if they were talking about the lusts of senior law officers, he had twice caught de Revelle with Exeter whores. Instead he once more applied himself to Odo.

'Though I understand from your reeve that the proper procedure of the first finder raising the hue and cry throughout the village was carried out - and that your bailiff quite rightly lost no time in reporting the death to the coroner - you have already committed two breaches of the law!'

The three brothers stared at the coroner, puzzled that anyone should even consider challenging their absolute authority on their own manor.

'And what may they be?' demanded Ralph.

'First, it looks uncommonly as if you have violated the right of every person to seek sanctuary. In addition, the body should have been left where it was found until my arrival, which I am told has not been done here.'

There was a simultaneous gabble of protest from the Peverels in which de Revelle joined in enthusiastically.

'Do you seriously expect us to leave the lord of the manor face down in his own ox byre?' raged Ralph.

'Really, Sir John, you are a Norman knight yourself.' snapped Odo. 'Would you allow your closest relative to stay more than five minutes in such a degrading situation, for villein and serfs to come gaping at?'
 

De Wolfe glowered at them. 'I did not make the law, sirs, but I have been appointed to see that they are enforced and that I shall do!' he said stubbornly.

'Then you are an even greater damned fool than I thought!' bleated Richard offensively. 'Laws are made for the underlings of this world, not those of us who control it. Why do we need waste time on this tragic matter, when it is so patently obvious that this slut is the culprit?'

John ignored him and turned to the girl and the two men still hanging on to her arms.

'Let her go, I doubt that she'll attack you,' he said sarcastically to the armourer and the hound-master.

Then he addressed Agnes, his tone milder as he looked down at the maid, whose mood swung between fear-and indignation. 'I see no point in you going back into the church, girl. There's no need for you to seek sanctuary at this point. I will see that matters are conducted properly.'

'They'll hang me for sure, sir,' she said sullenly. 'I'm only safe in there.'

The coroner nodded understandingly. 'You were illegally dragged from sanctuary, so I promise that if things go ill with you, you can return here. But for now, you must go home until I come to ask you some questions. D'you understand?'

She nodded, but she was still in the grip of her captors, who looked uncertainly from the coroner to the group barring his way to the gate.

'This is beyond your jurisdiction, Sir John!' boomed Odo. 'Have you the power to override our wishes?'
 

'John, you are insufferable!' brayed de Revelle. 'You have no right to interfere in this way, trying to ride roughshod over ancient manor laws!'

Gwyn moved closer to his master as the four men took a step nearer John and his hand moved gently to the hilt of his sword, but the coroner thrust his dark head aggressively towards his brother-in-law.

'No right? I've every right, and if you deny it you'll answer to the King and his ministers!' he snarled. 'I was appointed to keep the pleas of the Crown and part of those duties is the investigation of deaths from foul play. Another of my tasks is the taking of confessions from sanctuary-seekers and administering the abjuration of the realm. Both seem very relevant here and neither are any part of manorial jurisdiction!'

'Dealing with breaches of the peace is sheriff's business,' bleated Richard.

'And you are no longer the sheriff.' retorted John. 'Not that you did much about keeping the peace when you were one! It so happens that the new sheriff has deputed me to combine his duties with the prosecution of my inquests - with which the justiciar concurs, I might add.'

This was a fairly loose interpretation of Henry de Furnellis's expressed desire not to become involved with casework, but it would suffice to justify John's free hand in investigations. He scowled at the three brothers in turn, defying them to contradict him, especially as he had deliberately laboured the fact that he was a direct agent of the King's chief minister.

'Now, to business! I need to examine the corpse of your unfortunate kinsman and also to see the place where his body was discovered, before you so recklessly moved it.'

He swung away, and the tension of the moment subsided sufficiently for Gwyn to relax his fingers from around his sword hilt. The coroner looked beyond the indignant group in front of him and beckoned to a couple of women who were among the dozen or so villagers gawping over the churchyard hedge.

'Take this girl back to her home. Tell the family to keep her there until I come to talk to her.' Under the sheer force of de Wolfe's personality, the brothers reluctantly stood aside. Grim faced, they watched while Agnes was taken by a pair of good-wives out of the gate and up the road towards the squalid cottage where she lived. Then John strode down the few yards of path towards the porch, followed by Gwyn and Thomas. As he passed the two men who had dragged the girl from the church, he jabbed a forefinger into the chest of Robert Longus, the bearded armourer.

'I want words with you later on another matter! You are now under attachment for failing to attend my inquest in Exeter.'

Without waiting for a response, he vanished into the building with his two assistants, followed more slowly by the three brothers and Richard de Revelle. The rotund Irish priest had scurried ahead, and when John's eyes had adjusted to the dim light coming from a few shuttered slits in the wooden walls, he saw that Father Patrick was standing before a simple altar at the far end. The floor of beaten earth was empty of any furniture, but around the side walls were narrow benches for the old and infirm to rest during services, the rest of the congregation having to stand. There was no separate chancel, the church being a simple oblong, with a large wooden cross hanging on the east wall above the altar, between two of the window slits. The light from these fell on a wooden bier, a narrow table with carrying handles at each corner, on which lay a still shape under a linen sheet.

De Wolfe marched up to one side of this, Gwyn taking up a position opposite. Thomas stood at the foot, bending his knee and crossing himself jerkily, his eyes fixed reverently on the brass cross on the altar table.

As the coroner nodded to his officer to pull off the shroud, Ralph Peverel strutted forward in protest.

'Is this necessary, Crowner? Why can you not let my brother rest in peace?'

'Murder is murder, sir! Have you no desire to discover who took his life and see justice done to his killer?'

'Of course. But the deed has been done - what use is it to defile the dead further by your examination?'
 

His elder brother now came and put a restraining hand on Ralph's arm.

'The coroner has his duty to perform and we must tolerate anything which leads to the discovery of the perpetrator of this foul crime,' he said in a conciliatory tone, strengthening John's impression that, although a miserable sort of fellow, he was the most reasonable member of this prickly family. He had already dismissed the junior brother Joel as an immature and feckless young man.

Gwyn pulled the sheet back from the corpse's face and folded it down to lie across the feet. Hugo was dressed in a short tunic of dull yellow that came to mid-thigh, under which were woollen hose ending in pointed leather shoes. He wore a belt with a small dagger sheathed at the left side and a small scrip purse on the other. Wisps of hay and straw adhered to his clothing and his dark red hair.

'Can you not close his eyes, for decency's sake?' snapped Ralph, determined to be as critical as possible.

John bent to look closely at the blue eyes, which stared upward at the inside of the roof, where small birds chirruped and fluttered among the woven hazel withies that supported the thatch. The fronts of the orbs were already becoming flattened and cloudy with death, but otherwise the eyes were normal.

'No bleedings into the whites, nothing at all,' he muttered to Gwyn, and with his fingers he drew down the lids. The rest of the face had the pallor of death, and when he pushed down on the point of the chin he felt that the jaw was locked solid.

'He's stone cold and as rigid as a plank,' he announced, half to himself. 'Been dead many hours, that's for sure.'

'We don't need a coroner to tell us that,' sneered Joel. 'He was found earlier this morning and has been missing since last night!'

De Wolfe ignored him and nodded again at his officer. Gwyn, a veteran of scores of similar procedures, began his ritual of exposing the rest of the body to his master. He undid the belt and pulled up the tunic and undershirt, revealing the separate legs of the hose, supported by laces tied to a thong around the waist. John turned to the brothers and their servants, who were clustered behind Thomas at the foot of the bier.

'There's no need for you all to be here, if it distresses you.'

His attempt at concern for their feelings fell on deaf ears, as they all stood their ground, scowling, defying anyone to try to dismiss them from their own church.

'He's all bloody underneath,' grunted Gwyn, as he tugged the back of the tunic upward to the shoulders.

The surface of the bier was slick with blood, which began to drip to the floor as the body was moved.

'We'll have him over the other way,' ordered the coroner. The family had been offered their chance to leave and he was not inclined to skimp his examination on their account. Hugo Peverel was a large man and his corpse was heavy, but the muscular Gwyn turned it as if it were a mere side of bacon, and laid it on its face.

'Soaked in blood!' commented the Cornishman cheerfully, grinning at Thomas as the little clerk blanched. Even after more than a year in the coroner's service, he was still squeamish at the sight of gore.

The back of the tunic and shirt were dark red, almost black, in colour, and at the sides they were stiff where the blood had dried. 'There was nothing like that amount of blood visible when we saw him in the ox byre,' ventured Walter Hog, the bailiff.

'But I was told that he was found face down,' snapped de Wolfe. 'Is that right?'

'He was indeed, I'll never forget the sight,' answered Odo, tensely.

'Then you wouldn't expect him to bleed much, until he was turned on to his back,' retorted the coroner irritably. 'Most of this blood issued from him after death. That's why it was remiss of you to move him. I need to see bodies in their original state.'
 

'What difference can that make?' sneered Ralph. 'He was stabbed to death, even our village idiot could have told you that.'

John glared at him, thrusting his head forward like an angry crow.

'If you've nothing helpful to say, I suggest you keep your mouth shut, sir! If I could be sure that he had not bled much before his body was interfered with, it would tell me that he was stabbed where he lay, probably face down. And that he died quickly!'
 

'How can you say that, Crowner?' asked Odo, with a trace of genuine interest in his voice.

'The blood has stained his garment only above the waist. If he had been on his feet, even staggering about for a few moments, it would have trickled down over his buttocks and thighs.'

Gwyn nodded sagely. Both he and the coroner prided themselves on being self-taught experts on death and injury, after twenty years on various battlefields, as well as a year investigating sudden death in Devon.

De Wolfe turned his attention to the back of the body, revealed now that the clothing was pulled up almost to Hugo's neck. It was a smeared mass of blood, with gobs of shiny clot adhering here and there. He turned to the priest, who was standing wringing his hands at the transformation of his church into a mortuary.

'Father Patrick, have you a cloth and some water we could use?'

The rotund cleric hurried away to a small door on the north side of the building, which opened into a small lean-to shelter that served as a sacristy and storeroom. Here, in addition to his second-best cassock and his service books, he had a broom made from a bundle of twigs, a wooden bucket and some cleaning rags for the altar cross.

'This is all I have, Crowner,' he said, offering a strip torn from an old surplice and some dirty water left in the bucket. Gwyn took them and carefully wiped away as much of the blood as he could from the skin between the dead man's shoulder blades. A ripple of suppressed horror went round the audience, which now also contained the reeve, the steward, the armourer and a couple of other manor officers. They saw a pattern of marks on the skin of the late lord's back which told of a violent attack.

'You'll need to make a note of these as soon as we've finished, Thomas,' commanded de Wolfe. He peered more closely, his big hooked nose coming within a foot of the bloody wounds.