Bernard Knight - Figure of Hate

'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.

'Confess, damn you, or I'll break your bloody neck!' roared Gwyn, who was very averse to young girls being throttled. There was a large wooden trough near by, filled with dirty water to cool red-hot metal from the anvil. Without a moment's hesitation, Gwyn forced Crues to his knees, then rammed his head under the surface. Struggling violently, the man was helpless in Gwyn's iron grip, though the filthy water splashed over the floor as he thrashed about in an effort to get free.

'You did it, didn't you, you bastard?' yelled Gwyn as he hoisted Alexander's head back by the hair. Amidst the spluttering and retching there was a vehement denial, so Gwyn shoved his head back into the trough and banged his face on the hard bottom for good measure.

John looked on impassively, not bothered by some coercion if it produced results. It was part of his official duties to attend hangings, blindings, mutilation of hands and genitals and the torture of the Ordeal and occasionally the peine forte et dure, so Gwyn's method of persuasion was mild in comparison. Eustace looked on with a mixture of horror and fascination, his previous experiences in his sheltered life having been' rapidly expanded by the things he had seen in the past few days. Thomas, though more used to the brutal reality of law enforcement, looked away as he crossed himself and murmured prayers for the victim, as he fully expected Gwyn to drown Alexander Crues.

Gwyn repeated his dunking and shouting twice more, until de Wolfe came to the same conclusion as Thomas.

'Try not to kill the swine,' he advised his officer. 'He may have some valuable information for us.'