Authors: Pat Mcintosh
Her mistress nodded. ‘From William Pitmedden, that’s the armourer along the street, one of a batch he brought in from the Low Countries.’ The quilted covering fell away from her arms as her fingers described a long elegant curve. ‘It’s a right bonnie thing, the way the grain shows in the layers and the different colours of the wood.’
‘You mean it’s a longbow?’ Gil said hopefully.
‘Oh. aye. He doesny like a crossbow. He’s aye said there’s nothing like a longbow.’
‘He’s aye arguing wi Brother Dickon about it,’ said Eppie, with another subdued laugh. ‘You’d no think a lay brother would be in favour of a crossbow, would you?’
‘Does Brother Dickon shoot at the butts too?’ Gil asked, amused by the idea.
‘Shoot at them?’ said Eppie scornfully. ‘He oversees it all, orders who’ll shoot next, tells them how to do better. He’s in charge, is Brother Dickon.’
The Blackfriars’ Infirmary had its own small garden, where Brother Euan the Infirmarer grew his herbs and where his patients might take the air. On a day like this it was warm and peaceful, full of the scents of the herbs and the chirping of a colony of sparrows in the holly tree which stood at one corner. Both of the day’s ambulants were sitting there when Gil found the place, Ned dozing and Tam with his injured leg propped on a stool and a stout stick beside him. He looked up when Gil approached, and pushed the fair hair out of his eyes. His face was drawn, and pale under the tan, but he seemed to have no fever.
‘I hoped you’d come back, Maister Gil,’ he said. ‘There’s things you ought to hear, I couldny tell you at the time.’
‘I thought that,’ said Gil. ‘How’s the leg, first?’
‘None so bad,’ the man claimed.
‘Poor way to get a day off,’ Gil said. ‘Tell me these things I ought to hear, then. Start at the beginning. What happened when you got to Dunkeld? Was it easy to find the man?’
‘Oh, aye, no problem. He was lodged in the Bishop’s palace, one of the household, just as you surmised. So we went there, the three of us, and spoke to the heid-bummer, fellow called Geddes, the depute steward, and showed him your letter.’
‘How did he take that?’ Gil asked.
Tam grinned crookedly. ‘He wasny best pleased, for it seems Mitchel had been helping wi some heavy work needed about the place, shifting bales and sacks of goods and that, and he seemed to think you might wait till he’d finished.’ He shifted his foot on the stool, and went on, ‘We came to an agreement about that, wi a wee bit persuasion, and he swore to it that the fellow has been in Dunkeld since the date you asked him about in the letter, and then he sent for the man, and after a bit he came to this fellow’s chamber.’ He hesitated again. ‘I’m no glad I did that, maister, for all it was by your command.’
‘Tam, I think he killed James Stirling and hid the corp,’ Gil said, irritated by this. ‘If I’m right, he’d have hung for it. Instead he’s had a quick death, and been shriven at that.’
‘Aye, but he said he never,’ said Tam. ‘See, maister, he took one look at us, still in pot and plate,’ he gestured to indicate a helmet, ‘and the letter in the other fellow’s hand, and he goes,
I never done it. I never killed him
.’
‘Well, that’s a bad conscience speaking!’
‘That’s what the other fellow said. What’s his name, Geddes. And Ned and Donal made certain to be atween Mitchel and the door. But he said it again, no, he never killed him, he just helped put him away. And he’s carrying on, and swearing by all sorts and more besides, and he keeps saying he never killed him.’
‘Put him away,’ repeated Gil.
‘That’s what he said. So then Ned says,
How did you put him away? Where did you put him?
And he says,
Into the tan-pit where Doig showed me. We cut a hurdle out the fence
, he says,
and carried him into the yard wi’t,
and then he tells us they took the planks off a tanpit and tipped him in, and covered him up. Filthy job it was, too, and the dogs barking all the time, but he said it never took them that long, and Doig tied the hurdle back into the fence, and you’d never ha known he was there. He said he’d show you what tanpit it was, and he swore to the whole tale, offered to go up the High Kirk and swear by Columba’s relics.’
‘He’s right,’ said Gil, staring at Tam. ‘You’d never have known it. So who did kill Stirling? Did you ask him that?’
‘Oh, we did. Often and often. He aye said he didny see who shot him, all he saw was the man fall down among the dog-pens and when he got to him he was dead. He said, he didny ken what to do, whether to set up the hue and cry or no, for it seemed to him it could ha been someone on the track or in any of the yards or houses about, he said, but just then Doig cam back to the yard and found him there wi the corp, and created a stushie. Wouldny have a dead man found on his ground. And I think,’ said Tam, the crooked grin appearing again, ‘Mitchel wasny too keen what Doig’s woman would say when she found out. Is she some kind o kin? And that’s why he went along wi Doig’s plans to hide the corp.’
Gil considered this, gazing at a brown butterfly which was sunning its wings on the bed of marjoram nearest them.
‘It’s a good story,’ he admitted. ‘But did the man say why he and Stirling were in the Doigs’ yard? What took him there?’
‘He said,’ said Tam doubtfully, ‘it was an order from their lord. From the Bishop.’
‘From the
Bishop?
’
‘That’s what Ned said. And Mitchel said, Aye, he was sent from the house to find Maister Stirling, that was still walking on the meadow by the Blackfriars, and bid him go to the dog-breeder’s yard and ask for a bar of her soap against fleas, for the wee dog.’
‘Sent? Who by?’
Tam shrugged.
‘We tried asking that, but he just said it was the Bishop’s errand. He seemed mighty certain it was the Bishop’s message and all.’
Gil contemplated the idea. It did not seem to fit into the picture at all. He visualized Stirling, summoned from his meditation by the Ditch. He would have walked round to Mistress Doig’s yard taking Mitchel with him, waited in the yard for Mistress Doig herself to return, perhaps talked to some of the dogs again. Did the liver-and-white bitch go for him too? he wondered. Then, almost silent, wholly unexpected, the crossbow bolt struck home, Stirling dropped dead. But who held the crossbow? And by whose order?
‘Maybe the Bishop right enough?’ Tam suggested. ‘Could he ha wanted rid o him?’
‘Maybe.’ Gil stared at the butterfly again. ‘Did Mitchel say anything else at all, Tam? Why was he in Dunkeld? Who sent him there? Did he mention the hat?’
‘Oh, that was the mimmerkin’s idea, by what he said. Mitchel had to leave it by the Ditch so folk would think he’d fell in. As for who sent him to Dunkeld, he never said, only that he was ordered there as soon as he showed his face the next morning, no even time to let his kinsfolk know he’d be away.’
‘And then kept there kicking his heels, with nothing but maintenance work to do, for two weeks,’ said Gil. He sprang to his feet and strode up and down, as if that would make his mind work more clearly. He was nearly there, he knew it. Some of the cords that linked this knot to the one in Balquhidder still had to be loosened, but he was fairly sure of why James Stirling had been killed. If he could just establish who it was who had killed him, he could take the whole thing to the Bishop, and account for his summons to Mitchel MacGregor in the same breath.
‘Did you say the man was shot, Maister Gil?’ said Tam.
‘Aye, with a crossbow.’ Gil paused in his pacing. ‘He was enticed out to the dog-breeder’s yard, and someone shot him while he stood waiting there.’
‘I was out that way when we were in Perth afore,’ said Tam. ‘It’s right in the midst of other yards and gardens, is it no? How would he get close enough?’
‘It must have been a longish shot, but our man could have hidden close to the yard. He could even have stood on the track itself and aimed across several fences. I’m certain he was a good shot, it had struck the base of the skull just where it needed to.’
Tam nodded his understanding of this, but said gloomily, ‘And how would you find out who in Perth would be that good a shot? There must be plenty folk can use a bow.’
‘Near a’body can use a bow,’ concurred Ned, suddenly opening his eyes. ‘That’s what for they all goes out to the butts on a Sunday.’
‘And there’s my answer,’ said Gil. ‘I need to find Brother Dickon.’
Making his way back to the Bishop’s house by the busy streets, he thought through all he had learned so far today. It was extraordinary how the two problems had proved to be linked; he wondered briefly if Blacader had suspected that, or if he had simply assumed that his quaestor could handle two sets of questions at once. Either possibility was gratifying, he considered, stepping round a stout burgess who was bargaining with a patten-maker.
Deep in thought he might be, but his senses were alert, and when the man darted out of the crowd, the short blade glinting as it rose, it did not take the stout burgess’s cry of ‘Ware cutpurse!’ in his ear to rouse him to action. Almost before he knew it his whinger was in his hand, his other arm was swinging up across the attacker’s throat, his blade was striking the knife aside. He stared, briefly, into a worried, sweaty face under an ordinary blue bonnet, and dimly noticed a leather doublet, hempen shirtsleeves, bare forearms, a smell of horses. The stout burgess was still shouting, and lunging forward to help. His whinger came round again almost of its own volition, caught the weapon hand.
His assailant cried out and ducked sideways, dropping the dagger, and took to his heels through a rising torrent of exclamations and grasping hands. Gil turned and pushed after him, shouting ‘Stop thief! Hold him!’ through an eddy of noise which built up along the street as people turned to see what was happening, exclaimed, reached for one man or another.
With some trouble, he managed to get as far as the corner of the Northgate, and realized he had lost his quarry. He stood still, heart hammering, breathing deeply and staring over the heads, but there was no disturbance to the cheerful bustle of the street. The man must have ducked down a vennel, or else simply stopped running and lost himself in the crowd. Every other man in the burgh wore a blue bonnet, and in this weather many were in doublet and shirtsleeves, he would never pick him out by his clothes.
‘Did you ever!’ said a voice in his ear. It was a stout citizen in a blue stuff gown and felt hat, clutching his own purse securely at his belt and puffing slightly. ‘I never saw sic boldness! To try for your purse in broad day, and then to get away like that!’
‘Was it you that shouted?’ said Gil, understanding. ‘My thanks, man.’
‘It’s up to us all to keep an eye to each other’s purse,’ declared the burgess, ‘and Our Lady be thanked he never got your money.’
It wasn’t the money he was after, Gil thought, turning towards the Bishop’s house again. That blade was going for the heart. Now I know I’m close to the solution.
‘Do you say, Maister Cunningham,’ said George Brown formally, ‘that you have discerned who slew Jaikie?’
‘I have, sir,’ agreed Gil. At the Bishop’s side Rob Gregor bleated in what seemed to be dismay. ‘And I think I’ve learned more than that.’
‘Well, let me have his name, maister,’ requested the Bishop. His dog, curled in the basket by his feet, raised its head to look at Gil.
‘First, could we have your steward in, with Maister Stirling’s kist?’
‘His gear’s all in order,’ said Maister Gregor. ‘I packed it up mysel, my lord, when Wat asked me, and made a list and all.’
‘Why do you want Wat present?’ asked the Bishop over his chaplain’s assurances.
‘If he could bring the kist,’ Gil said, ‘I’ll make all clear.’
Brown rang the bell on his desk and gave the order, then sat in brooding silence, his round face shadowed and serious, until Currie arrived with two servants bearing the kist by its rope handles.
‘Wat,’ the Bishop said. ‘Set it down there and wait. Maister Cunningham has something to tell us.’
Currie turned a startled face to Gil, but dismissed one of the servants and muttered in the ear of the other, the man Noll, who looked sharply at his superior then nodded and went out. Jerome bustled across the chamber to inspect the kist, snuffling at the leather strap which held it shut. Currie bent and patted the dog, then stood back against the wall to wait as he was bidden.
‘Well, maister?’ said the Bishop.
Gil settled himself on the padded backstool, gathering his concentration, wishing Alys was present. If I could explain a head in a barrel to the King, he thought, I can explain a man in a tanpit to a Bishop. But I’d sooner be more certain of the facts.
His audience was waiting.
‘We know,’ he began, ‘that Maister Stirling was party to the negotiations for the English treaty, and we know that some of the terms of the treaty have got to ears or eyes they should never have got to. We also know,’ he said carefully, ‘that Maister Stirling was at the sang-schule in Dunblane along with Andrew Drummond, and also with David Drummond, who vanished, and William Murray, who is now Precentor at Dunkeld.’
‘He’s told me that often,’ said Maister Gregor happily. ‘At least, no about the laddie that vanished.’ He paused, finding his master looking at him, and bleated in faint apology.
‘But are the two connected?’ asked the Bishop.
‘More than you’d think,’ said Gil. ‘You’ve described him to me as an able man, my lord, a good secretary, well content with his position here.’ Brown nodded. ‘I’ve also heard of his humour, of his trick of making clever remarks at other folk’s expense, though he seemed not to make enemies by it.’
‘Och, no, he was a right good friend,’ protested Maister Gregor, ‘you could never take offence at what he said –’ He subsided as his master looked at him again.
‘Now, the day he vanished, Stirling went out to see about the rents as you bade him, my lord.’ Brown nodded, his mouth tightening. ‘Then he saw his own tenants, and then he went out to the dog-breeder’s yard, looking for Doig himself rather than Mistress Doig. I think you’d given him no errand there, my lord.’