Bernard Knight - Crowner's Quest

Thomas was hovering behind like a bumble-bee, stealing glimpses from beneath the larger men’s elbows. He was desperate to be included in the affair and, despite the squint, his sharp eyes could see something in the candlelight. ‘His mouth, Crowner! Surely that’s bruising on the upper lip.’

Gwyn prodded him with a muscular elbow. ‘Leave this to the men, dwarf,’ he grunted, half teasing, half serious.

The coroner, though he often joined with Gwyn in making the disgraced priest the butt of their humour, had learned a sneaking regard for Thomas’s powers of observation. He looked at the florid face of Robert de Hane and confirmed that even within the pinkish-blue hue of the skin, there were a couple of small patches of a deeper shade below the nostrils. Taking the lips in the fingers of each hand, he turned them back to expose the gums and brown, decayed teeth. ‘Ha, the plot thickens!’ he exclaimed.

On the inner surfaces of the upper and lower lips, there were angry red patches and a small tear where the lining had been forced against a jagged front tooth. Under the middle of the upper lip, the little band of membrane that anchored the lip to the gum was ripped and had bled. ‘His mouth was either struck or violently squeezed,’ declared de Wolfe, an authority on injuries after twenty years on a variety of battlefields.

‘Held across the mouth to stop him crying out?’ hazarded the clerk, emboldened by his successful contribution to the investigation.

‘Let’s have a look at the rest of his body, Gwyn,’ commanded the coroner.

Under his black habit, the prebendary wore only a white linen nightshirt and a pair of thick woollen hose. The coroner’s officer began to wrestle off the outer robe, helped ineffectually by Thomas. ‘He’s starting to stiffen up — and he’s cold, except in the armpits,’ observed Gwyn.

De Wolfe nodded. ‘I noticed his jaw was tight when I turned his lips. He’s been dead a few hours.’

Soon they had all the clothes off and the sparely built priest lay pathetically naked on his own bed. Instinctively, John de Alencon reached across and, for the sake of decency, draped the nightshirt across the lower belly and thighs.

The trunk was dead white, but there was a purplish discoloration of the legs below the knees. ‘He’s been hanging for a while, the blood has had time to settle in the lowest parts,’ commented the coroner.

‘So he was hung up soon after death as he still has a little heat left in him,’ reasoned Gwyn.

John turned to the steward, hovering in anguish near the door. ‘When was your master last seen alive, Alfred?’ he snapped.

‘He came back from vespers, sir, at about the fifth bell. He ate his supper in the dining room — I served him myself.’

‘Did he seem his normal self then?’ asked the Archdeacon.

‘Yes, sir, he was reading a small book as he ate.’ Alfred snivelled and wiped an eye. ‘Then he went to bed. As it is Christ Mass, he should have been going to the special service, some two hours earlier than the usual matins at midnight.’

De Alencon looked at the coroner. ‘He was not there. I noticed, as I must keep track of who is absent.’

John de Wolfe grunted, his favourite form of response. ‘He couldn’t have been there as he was dead by then, if the stiffening is coming on now.’ He scowled at Alfred. ‘Did anyone visit him this evening?’

‘Not that I know of, Crowner. Once he retires to this room, he is left in peace to sleep or study. His vicar or the secondaries might know better than I, but I doubt it.’

The ranking of the ecclesiastical community below the twenty-four canons consisted first of the vicars-choral, minor clergy over the age of twenty-four who deputised for their seniors so that their perpetual attendance at services was reduced. Then came the secondaries, adolescents over eighteen training for the priesthood, and below them, the choristers, young boys who might stay on to enter holy orders later.

The coroner turned back to the corpse and leaned over the bed to study it intently.

‘The arms — look there,’ squeaked Thomas.

His master glared at him. ‘I can see for myself, damn you!’ he muttered testily, motioning to Gwyn to lift up the left arm. On the white skin, between the shoulder and the elbow, was a scatter of blue bruises, each half the size of a penny.

‘They’re on the other arm, too,’ volunteered Gwyn. ‘And they look fresh to me.’

De Wolfe gestured to his officer to turn the body over on to its face. ‘Let’s see the back of his neck.’

At the centre of the nape, a deep groove began and passed around the left side of the neck. On the right side of the neck, the groove imprinted by the noose rose towards the ear, then vanished. Below it, another continuous groove passed around the right side to the voice-box in front and joined the common groove on the left.

‘What do those marks on his arms imply, John?’ asked the Archdeacon.

The coroner stood back while Gwyn rolled the canon face-up again. ‘Grip-marks, where he was seized. Those round bruises are from hard pressure by fingertips.’

De Alencon’s lean face was a picture of grief. ‘What terror and pain he must have suffered. He was such a mild man, with never any exposure to violence — and then to end like this. What’s to be done, John?’

A new voice answered him from the doorway. ‘A hunt for his killers, with no effort spared, Archdeacon.’ It was the sheriff, the coroner’s dandyish brother-in-law. He strode into the room and looked down at the dead priest with more indignation than sorrow. ‘What a thing to happen on the eve of Christ Mass!’

Almost on cue, the great bell of the cathedral opposite began tolling for the delayed matins. ‘I must go. I cannot miss the service even for this tragedy,’ explained the Archdeacon. ‘And I must tell the other canons what’s happened.’ He went towards the door, then turned back to the coroner and sheriff. ‘I will send word to the Bishop as soon as the gates open at dawn. But I know that although this happened within the cathedral precinct, he would want you secular authorities to deal with it.’

Although they were inside the city walls, the whole of the cathedral Close was outside the jurisdiction of the burgesses of Exeter, which often gave rise to friction. But murder was against the King’s peace and even a bishop would be unlikely to exclude the law officers.

‘I suggest the dead man lies here until the morning,’ said de Wolfe. ‘There’s little point in setting up a hue and cry in the middle of the night, especially as he’s been dead for hours and the trail is cold.’

Richard de Revelle waved an elegantly gloved hand at the Archdeacon. ‘Tell Bishop Marshal that the sheriff will spare no effort to bring these devils to justice. They’ll be dangling from the gallows by the time he returns from Gloucester.’

At this the coroner caught Gwyn’s eye, but his henchman’s face remained impassive, thoughde Wolfe could read his thoughts about the sheriff’s arrogance. As de Alencon left, followed by the anxious steward and most of the residents, the two main law officers of Devon faced each other across the corpse, flanked by Gwyn and Thomas de Peyne.

‘So what’s this all about, John?’ demanded Richard. He stood with one hand on his hip, his fine green cloak thrown back over one shoulder to reveal his richly embroidered tunic of fine linen. The smooth skin of his rather narrow face was pink, both from the cold air outside and from John’s best wine.

Grudgingly, the coroner told him what little they knew so far. De Revelle seemed unconvinced, although he had just assured the Archdeacon that the killers would soon be found. ‘You find a man swinging by his own girdle-cord in his own privy, yet you immediately claim he’s been murdered?’