The Chapel of Bones: (Knights Templar 18) (30 page)

Simon shrugged. ‘There’s probably a simple excuse. He was going to slip in here and release the rope, cover the body with rubble or a strip of cloth or something, but then he heard people coming, so he bolted.’

‘Perhaps,’ Baldwin said.

‘Or,’ Simon said, warming to a fresh idea, ‘he couldn’t fit! What if he was large-sized, with a great paunch, and couldn’t physically slip around the wall like you and me?’

‘He’d climb over the top,’ Baldwin said scornfully.

‘If he was that fat, I doubt it,’ Simon said. ‘Anyway, if this friar’s throat was opened, where is all the blood?’

‘No doubt that lies where the friar was murdered,’ Baldwin said with a sigh.

‘Well?’ demanded the Treasurer truculently. ‘What have you learned?’

He and the others had all left the scaffolding and were waiting for Simon and Baldwin in a huddle near the south-west corner of the Cathedral.

‘Little enough so far,’ Baldwin said. ‘The friar had his throat cut, I think, Dean. The murder must have happened somewhere nearby. There will be plenty of blood at the spot.’

‘So what do you want us to do?’ Treasurer Stephen said more calmly. His face was set, Baldwin noticed. He appeared anxious.

‘I would like you to order your lay servants to look for the place where the friar was killed. Meanwhile we need to know who was the last person to have seen this man. I don’t suppose any of you did so last evening?’ he asked, glancing at the Dean, the Treasurer and Matthew, who stood holding a leather cylinder for a scroll.

They all shook their heads, the Dean with his customary air of benign bafflement, the Treasurer studiously ignoring the Dean at his side; Matthew looked down at the man and shook his head too, as though reluctantly.

‘I shall let you know as soon as we learn anything about either man’s death,’ Baldwin promised, and the Dean took hold of the Treasurer’s arm and led him away a short distance to speak to him. Baldwin watched the two, so apparently at odds, and yet always managing to work together for the good of the Cathedral itself.

‘Sir Baldwin, I know this is quite ridiculous, but …’

‘What is it?’ he asked, facing the man. ‘You are Matthew, I believe?’

‘Yes. I am the Warden of the Fabric, the Clerk of the building work. It’s probably nothing, Sir Baldwin, but I did see the friar late yesterday afternoon. He was here with one of the masons, a man called Thomas.’

‘Here? Where, exactly? What were they doing?’

‘Thomas was at the foot of the wall, and the friar and he spoke together for a while. Then they moved away and I didn’t see anything of them after that.’

‘Thomas? That’s interesting,’ Baldwin said. ‘Do you know much of him?’

‘Not I, no. I had thought—’ he frowned. ‘But no.’

‘You thought what?’

‘It’s ridiculous, but I thought he looked familiar.’

‘He reminded you of someone?’

‘Yes – a man who used to live here in the city many years ago. He too was called Thomas,’ Matthew recollected with a slight frown.

Baldwin felt his mood lighten. If a man should run away for some forty odd years, and then desire to see the place of his birth again, what better method of doing so than coming to a building site like this? It was enclosed, so he need not face any of his old friends; he could remain locked within the Cathedral’s precinct. If any man saw him, it was so long ago since he had lived here, surely he would be all but unrecognisable.

Except, should someone here realise who he was, and be afraid lest Tom reveal their part in the murder of the Chaunter, might not that same someone decide to kill in order to keep his secret silent? Baldwin thought he might.

‘You say that the two were at the Cathedral wall. Where exactly?’

‘There,’ Matthew said.

Baldwin looked at the corner he indicated, and then found his eyes being pulled westwards again, to the rectangular block of the Charnel Chapel. ‘I think I know where he was killed,’ he said as he set off towards the chapel’s door.

Simon hurried to join him. Matthew and the Master Mason stood staring at each other for a moment, until Simon glanced back and beckoned to them authoritatively.

Baldwin stood at the north-eastern wall of the chapel. From here, northwards there was the small circular house that held the conduit; east lay the Cathedral and works. ‘Where did you stand, Matthew, when you saw the two?’

‘I was over there at the entrance to the Exchequer.’

Baldwin looked eastwards. The Exchequer lay beyond the tower of St Paul, the northernmost of the two Cathedral towers. ‘Any man slipping down here would have been invisible to you, then; or a man who went behind the conduit?’

‘Yes.’

Baldwin stalked to the conduit. The little building had its door facing east. ‘If they had entered here, you would have seen them?’

‘I think so, yes.’

Baldwin nodded, and he looked up at the Charnel Chapel once more, a feeling of leaden reluctance entering his bones. ‘He was killed in there, I think.’

He led the way across the grassed cemetery to the steps descending to the crypt itself. His eyes spotted the tell-tale marks on the stone steps. ‘Blood.’

He went down the steps into the crypt, pushing the door wide. It moved easily on well-oiled hinges, and Baldwin found
himself in a dry, musty-smelling chamber as large as the chapel above: some twenty feet by forty. The floor was flagged, and there were thick pillars supporting heavy arches that formed the floor of the chapel. Baldwin could hear Simon’s breath growing sharper, faster, and usually it would have alleviated his own sombre mood, but not today. Baldwin had a strange feeling that he had been leading up to this moment for a long time, as though the crypt was in some way a culmination.

However, while Simon’s anxiety was based on the purest of superstitions about bones, Baldwin felt that there was an aura of evil in this specific building. He had felt it generally upstairs in the chapel, but here in the crypt it seemed more potent. I do not like this place, he thought to himself, and even the thought itself felt dangerous, as though the spirit of the building might read his mind.

‘Nonsense!’ he muttered aloud, annoyed with himself for allowing the atmosphere to colour his mood. It was ridiculous! He could only assume that his guilt at his treatment of his wife had caused this aberration. With a renewed determination, he marched further into the crypt.

On either side were piles of bones, skulls nearest the door, thigh and leg bones further on, stretching over to the far wall. The skulls themselves were set somewhat haphazardly, unlike the tidily piled thigh and arm bones. They were stored neatly; respectfully. The skulls were not. Some had fallen from a neat pile, and one had rolled across the floor. Baldwin picked it up, gazing into the empty eye-sockets, wondering what sort of a person had once inhabited these ounces of bone.

‘I don’t know how you can do that,’ Simon muttered from behind him.

Baldwin said nothing, merely set the skull back among the others, then studied the floor nearby. With a grunt, he removed
the skull again, and then started taking away all the others too until he had cleared a space. He touched the bare flagged floor and rubbed finger and thumb together.

‘He died here.’

‘Could you take me to this man Thomas?’ Baldwin asked when they were once more outside.

‘My mason?’ Robert asked. ‘The clumsy one? Yes, I can take you to him. He was talking to me only this morning about leaving here and coming with me to another site. Can’t settle.’

‘I should be glad to speak with him,’ Baldwin said, walking into the sunshine and taking a deep breath. In the crypt he had felt the onset of claustrophobia, and it was a relief to inhale the fresh air with the sound of birdsong in the trees, the wind soughing in the branches, and people shouting. In his distraction he missed the Master Mason’s reference to clumsiness.

It took little time for Baldwin to tell the Dean what they had learned. ‘This murderer tempted his second victim into the crypt somehow, and then stabbed him once in the neck. I think that the Coroner will find a stab wound in his throat on the right side. The rope burn was fortuitous, but wasn’t intended to cover the stab, I don’t think. When the man had killed the friar, he carried him over to the works, and put the rope about his neck, lifted him up and had him drop down into the hollow where the Master here found him.’

The Dean gave a firm instruction that the Master Mason should help Baldwin and Simon in all that they required, and then left, his face grim. The Treasurer went off with Matthew to return to their work in the Exchequer, and Simon and Baldwin followed Robert de Cantebrigge over towards the breadhouse.

The odour of fresh baked bread was enough to set Simon’s belly rumbling; they had been asking questions of people all morning, and soon they should think of a meal. Simon was used to the old mealtimes – a breakfast very early in the morning, dinner a couple of hours before noon, and a good supper in the mid-afternoon – and he found it hard to travel to places where the mealtimes were different. He knew that the Exeter canons tended to stick to the routine of monks, so they would have their main meal after Nones, or mid-afternoon, while their supper was after Vespers. Through the morning they survived on the odd hunk of bread and a little breakfast of weak porridge. It wouldn’t keep him going.

As they passed around the tower of St Paul, there was an enclosure, and in it was a group of masons working on a huge rock. They were fashioning it into the shape of a column, cutting the top face smooth and setting rounded edges on the sides. A mason with a thick, bushy beard and long hair tied back in a pony-tail, was using a straight-edged stick to ensure that there were no bulges in the uppermost surface, while at his side was a large wooden mould cut into the precise curve that the stone should follow. Men would take this and measure the outer shape of the pillar to ensure that it would fit with all the other sections that would make up this support.

‘Thomas!’ Cantebrigge called, and the lead mason glanced at him, nodding. He put down his stick, and then seemed to realise that the Master Mason was not alone. His eyes flitted from Baldwin to Simon and back before he made his way to join them.

‘This is Sir Baldwin de Furnshill, this is Bailiff Simon Puttock. They want to speak to you.’

Baldwin did not bother with any preamble. ‘There has been
another murder here last night. A friar was stabbed, and then hanged. Where were you last night?’

‘I was in the city earlier in the evening, then I returned here and remained in the Close all night.’

Thomas was a brawny fellow with a beard as thick as a bramble bush. His deep-set eyes were distrustful and apprehensive, from what Baldwin could see of them, and his age was surely comparable with Henry’s confederates. His heavy brow made him look a little slow of thought, but Baldwin reckoned that there was no dull-wittedness here.

‘The dead man was a friar called Nicholas. Did you know him?’

‘Why should I? Friars don’t often come here to the Close.’

‘You may know him because he was one of the men attacked forty years ago when the Chaunter was murdered here,’ Baldwin said grimly. ‘
Did you know him
?’

‘No. I wouldn’t think so.’

Simon smiled. ‘That’s a lie, friend. You were seen talking to the man last night.’

‘Perhaps the man who told you
that
was a liar,’ Thomas said sharply.

‘Your accent sounds just like an Exonian’s,’ Simon commented.

‘I’ve been here a while looking to the rebuilding. Maybe I’ve picked up a little of the local way of talking.’

‘Have you heard of the murder of the Chaunter?’ Baldwin tried.

‘Yes. It was after that the Bishop asked permission to be able to build his wall about the place, I think.’

‘That’s right. Because an armed band of assassins came here and slaughtered the Chaunter. We’ve heard that not many escaped that attack.’

‘What? What’s it got to do with me?’

‘Be calm, friend,’ Baldwin said, showing his teeth in a smile that held little humour. ‘It is merely the oddness of this chain of coincidences: we’ve heard that the friar was one of those who was attacked with the Chaunter. He had been there that night and won his scars from those who would have tried to kill his master. He was brave and honourable. And there were others there that night. There was a man called Henry, a saddler. He lies dead now in the Charnel Chapel.’

‘What of it?’

‘How long have you been here working on the Cathedral?’ Simon asked suddenly.

‘Almost a year, I suppose,’ Thomas said with a sidelong glance at the Master Mason.

Baldwin shot Robert a look and caught the brief pause, then the slight nod, as though he was considering and calculating before agreeing. ‘Good. And these murders began a short while ago. Perhaps you would like to tell us where you were before that?’

‘I have been all over the country. Immediately before coming here, I worked on the walls in London, I’ve been to the castle at Conwy, and I’ve helped with many churches.’

‘Where were you born?’ Simon asked.

‘At Axminster.’

Baldwin knew the town slightly. Set in flatlands on the Devon and Dorset borders, not very many miles from the sea, it was a pleasant small market town. He had seen the place when he had visited Forde Abbey some years before. ‘Was that where you learned your trade?’