Figure of Hate (42 page)

'You have no call to speak like that to the lord of a manor - especially before my servants!'
 

'In my eyes, you are not the lord of this manor until the justices declare it to be so,' retorted de Wolfe. 'Now then, have you anything to tell me about the strangling of this poor girl?'
 

Ralph walked to the next table and threw himself into one of the three chairs that the hall boasted.
 

'What should I know about the throttling of some wash-house drab? You know her reputation. Undoubtedly some disgruntled customer from the village took exception to something she did - or didn't do!'
 

He said this with such uncaring nonchalance that John felt like shaking him until his teeth rattled. 'You do not find it a coincidence that this is the same girl that your brother lay with on the night that he was slain?' he said sarcastically.
 

Ralph seemed to have an answer for everything. 'Why should it be? We do not have so many whores in this village that the same one should not be at risk with men who wish to slake their passions.'
 

'Could it not be that someone, like yourself, who declared that the girl was the killer of your brother, took the law into their own hands?'
 

'The law should be in our own hands, Crowner! This is a manor with all the rights of manorial custom. We told you at the outset that we did not want your interference from Exeter, but could settle this ourselves. '
 

John glared at the younger man, whose arrogance and insolence seemed to increase by the day.
 

'Are you confessing to having taken the law into your own hands? Did you kill this girl, Peverel?'
 

'Don't be so damned foolish, de Wolfe! D'you think I'd soil my hands on the dirty offspring of a serf? And if I had, would I be daft enough to admit it to you?'
 

The coroner turned around slowly and looked back down the hall towards the door, where Robert Longus was still standing, the weapons trailing from his hands. He glared back defiantly, his hard face devoid of any expression within the rim of beard that encircled it.
 

'I want to search the dwelling of your armourer - and his assistant, Alexander Crues.' John spoke over his shoulder to Ralph, who immediately jumped up and stalked over to the coroner.
 

'What in hell's name for?' he shouted. 'Have you not intruded enough into our affairs? This is too much, I forbid you to interfere any further!'
 

De Wolfe glowered back at the angry man. Gwyn saw that his patience with Ralph Peverel was wearing thin and his fingers wandered unconsciously towards his sword hilt, in case this developing feud got out of hand.
 

'Are you defying me, sir? Remember that no one is above the King's law, not even manor-lords!'
 

'I have friends in high places, Crowner, you will hear more of this! Why on earth should you wish to ransack this man's quarters, other than from spite and prejudice?'
 

'Longus has been accused by a respectable silvercraftsman of being a robber and a murderer,' retorted John. 'Only your word now stands in contradiction, since your brother is dead.'
 

The escalating battle of words was interrupted by the sudden appearance of Odo, who came through the door that led upstairs. As he had been said to be outside in the bailey, John realised that he must have entered through the postern door 'from the kitchens. In his temper, Ralph seemed to forget that he was not supposed to be speaking to his elder brother and burst out with his complaints about the coroner.
 

'He wants to search the place, brother! This is becoming intolerable!'
 

Odo turned a calmer face towards John, though it was still disapproving of this outside interference.
 

'I fail to see how that can throw any light on the murder of this poor girl,' he said critically. 'But as the innocent have nothing to hide, I see no objection to pandering to his whims.'
 

With this backhanded agreement, Odo went to the far end of the room and poured himself some ale from a large crock, taking no further interest in the argument. Ralph simmered with anger as he watched de Wolfe walk back to Robert Longus to question him.
 

'We meet sooner than I thought! Can you account for where you were throughout last night?'
 

'I was in the inn until two hours or so after sunset, then in my bed until dawn. I'm not married, so I've no wife to vouch for me!'
 

This was delivered with thinly veiled insolence, in the expectation that Ralph would support him in everything he said.
 

'And that big lump who assists you? Where was he?'
 

Robert shrugged indifferently. 'I'm not his keeper, Crowner. He was in the inn as well, but he left before me. God knows where he went - maybe to his bed, maybe to roll a wench - for, like me, he has no wife living.'
 

Tired of this verbal fencing, John jerked his head at Gwyn and the two clerks.
 

'Come on, I want to see where these men live.' Grabbing Robert's arm in a grip like that of a lobster's claw, he pushed him towards the door. The armourer resisted, but Gwyn came round la the other side and he had no option but to stumble along with them, dropping the sword and shield on the floor. As they propelled him to the door, he screwed his head around to make a last appeal to his master, but Ralph had stalked away to the screens and was shouting for someone to bring him wine.
 

Out in the bailey, the coroner and his officer relaxed their grip on the armourer, who angrily shook himself free.
 

'Keep your bloody hands off me! I don't know what you expect to find, but for God's sake let's get it over with, then I can get back to some work. The Bristol tourney is only a few days away!'

He led them around the back of the manor house and past the kitchens and laundry hut to the forge and stables. Back to back with the forge, under the same shingled roof, were a couple of small rooms, and Robert Longus led them to the first door, where a heavy leather flap served to keep out the weather.
 

'I live in here and Crues has the smaller one next door,' he explained in a surly voice. 'So help yourself, and be damned to you!'
 

He stood back indifferently while John pushed past the flap, followed by Gwyn and Eustace. Thomas decided that a mean, odorous room was no concern of his and stayed outside.
 

In the dim light from a small shuttered window, John saw a lodging that was as barren as a monk's cell. A straw-filled palliasse lay along one wall; the only other furniture was a rough table with a three-legged stool below it. Some metal-working tools, a pitcher of ale and two clay cups stood upon it. From pegs and hooks on the wooden frames of the cob walls, lengths of chain mail, two helmets and various oddments of armour hung under a coating of dust.
 

'The horses are housed better in the stables than this fellow in here,' grunted Gwyn. Eustace was looking around in astonishment. His first days in the coroner's service were opening his eyes to the way most people lived - a world away from the comparative luxury of his rich parents' home.
 

'Nothing for us here,' murmured John. 'Not that I expected much.'
 

They pushed out into the daylight, where Longus was waiting, a sardonic look on his face.
 

'Satisfied, Crowner? I said you were wasting your time - and mine.'
 

De Wolfe scowled at him. 'Do all armourers live in such hovels?'
 

'This is only my working home. I am a journeyman with a decent house in Southampton where I live during the winter. The rest of the time I hire myself out to whoever pays the best.'
 

Insolently, he turned on his heel and walked away towards the manor house.
 

The coroner looked at the other half of the lean-to building that abutted on to the forge. 'We may as well look in there, now we're here.'
 

He pushed into a similarly squalid room, which also contained just a mattress and a table, though it was littered with oddments, scattered on the earthen floor and hanging from the walls. Most of it was chain and scrap metal, plus a few broken shields, but John's eye was caught by some belts and straps thrown over a wooden bar nailed across one corner. There were baldrics, one still carrying an empty sword sheath, and other strips of leather which looked like broken pieces of harness.
 

'Gwyn, seize that stuff and bring it out into the light,' he commanded.
 

Ten minutes later, they were again bending over the bier in the little church of StJohn the Baptist. Agnes's parents had gone, the mother having been so overcome with grief that her husband had helped her home to sit sobbing in their empty dwelling, now bereft of both her daughters.
 

John was staring again at the mark on the neck, now slightly more prominent as the blood in the adjacent skin had started to drain away since the corpse had been lying on its back. At his direction, Gwyn was going through the bundle of belts and traces, picking out those that were of about the correct width. He selected fOUr and stretched them out one by one in front of de Wolfe, laying them across the chest of the dead girl, where four pairs of eyes stared at them intently. There was silence for a moment, then the exuberant Eustace could contain himself no longer.
 

'That one, Sir John! What about that one?' He pointed with a quivering finger at a worn leather strap about three feet long, which was torn through irregularly at each end and had some short side-straps hanging off it.
 

'I see it, lad,' said John as patiently as he could, for he had already recognised it as a possible match. Picking it up in both hands, he stretched it out and moved it back and forth lengthwise across the mark on Agnes's neck.
 

'There!' grunted Gwyn, unnecessarily, as the places where three of the side-straps were stitched to the main one came exactly over the squared marks on the skin.
 

'Could that be mere chance?' piped up Doubting Thomas.
 

De Wolfe lowered the strap and curved it around the front of the neck, adjusting it until the marks coincided to within a hair's breadth.
 

'I don't think so. It's not as if the branches were spaced regularly ... there's different distances between them, yet they still match.'
 

'Good enough for me, by God!' murmured Gwyn. 'Certainly good enough to ask this Alexander a few pointed questions!'
 

'A pity some skin couldn't have rubbed off on to it - that would clinch it,' observed their still-critical clerk. Then Eustace chipped in once more, for his keen young eyes were better than those of the older men and Thomas's slight squint.
 

'There's a spot on the back of the strap - look there!' He used a piece of straw from the floor to point out a darker mark on the mottled brown of the old leather. It was half the size of a grain of wheat, but had a glazed shine to it that suggested it. was recent. John picked at it with a dirty fingernail and carefully slid it off on to the back of his other hand.
 

Then he licked his forefinger and rubbed it across the loosened fleck. Immediately; a tiny crimson streak smeared across the skin below his knuckles.
 

'Blood, by damn! Must have come from her nose or ear,' he exclaimed triumphantly. Having now destroyed this piece of evidence, the coroner earnestly instructed Thomas to write an exact record on his rolls at the earliest opportunity, naming those present who could vouch for the presence of the blood spot and of the congruence of the strap with the strangulation mark.
 

'Right, let's go and do the sheriff's work for him!' announced de Wolfe, straightening up and carefully rolling the strap into the pouch on his belt. 'This Alexander Crues has some explaining to do.'
 

The assistant arrnourers explanations consisted entirely of denials, his slow mind producing nothing but a dull repetition of the fact that he knew nothing of any girl's death, he hadn't done it and he had no recollection of any strap hanging in his room.
 

The coroner's team had found him sleeping in a corner at the back of the empty forge, in a warm spot near the banked-down furnace. Gwyn interrupted his snores by kicking him with the toe of his boot, but Crues was little more articulate when awake than he was when asleep. Frustrated at the man's stupidity, John hauled out the strap and waved it in his face.
 

'You used this, damn you - you throttled the poor girl with it! Come on, admit it, we know this was the thing that killed her!'
 

For the first time, a flicker of fear appeared in Alexander's bovine features, but he continued to shake his head and mutter denials. Gwyn grabbed him by the throat and shook him as a stimulus to his memory. Crues was not as big as the Cornishman, but he was a strong fellow, accustomed to wielding a forge hammer, and he used his strength to pull free of Gwyn and give him a heavy punch in the chest. He found it was like hitting a stone wall - the only effect was to make the officer roar with anger. He seized the armourer by the wrist and twisted his arm up behind his back, at the same time grabbing a handful of his unkempt hair and dragging back his head.