Bernard Knight - Fear in the Forest

John sighed. How many times had he had a similar visit in the nine months since he had been coroner?

‘Tell me the worst, Robert. Is it a beaten wife or a tavern brawl — or has another child fallen under the mill-wheel?’

‘None of those things, Crowner. It’s a fire in the tannery.’

John’s black brows came down in a frown. It was true that fires were within a coroner’s remit, but it was rare for him to be told of one in the countryside. In towns or cities it was a different matter, with the ever-present risk of a conflagration sweeping through the closely packed buildings, but out in the villages, fires were less common and certainly less dangerous, so they were rarely reported to him.

‘Just a fire, Reeve? Your bailiff must be a very conscientious fellow.’

The tall, fair man shifted uneasily. ‘It may be more than that, sir. The tanner is missing, too. We don’t know whether he’s still in the ashes or whether he has vanished. There’s something odd about the fire. I’m sure it was set deliberately.’

John sensed that even this extra explanation was not the whole story, but the reeve was not forthcoming with any more details.

‘Who is the lord of Manaton?’ he demanded.

‘Henry le Denneis, Crowner. Though he holds the manor as a tenant of the Abbot of Tavistock.’

‘What makes you think that the place was fired deliberately?’

Robert Barat raised his eyes to look directly at the coroner. ‘We have had trouble in the village these last few weeks, Sir John. You’ll know we are just within the Royal Forest, more’s the pity. Although it has always made things difficult, recently it has got worse.’

John pricked up his ears at this. Almost every day now, it seemed, some problem appeared linked to the forest.

‘What sort of trouble?’ he asked, as they walked back towards the daylight streaming down the steps.

‘I think you had better ask our bailiff or the lord’s steward,’ the reeve replied cautiously. ‘They know more about it, but it all goes back to the new tannery the foresters have set up near Moretonhampstead. They demanded that our small tannery should close down, so that theirs could take its trade.’

Though de Wolfe immediately appreciated this familiar situation, he pressed the other to finish his explanation.

‘So what happened?’

‘Our tanner, Elias Necke, refused to close down. How could he, for he and his three sons depend on it for their living. He was threatened more than once by that bastard William Lupus. Then, on Saturday night, the place burnt down and Elias went missing.’

Out in the inner ward, de Wolfe stopped and turned to the village reeve.

‘I’ll come out to Manaton later this morning, with my officer and clerk. I have to attend to an inquest first, but will set off before noon. If you get yourself some food and drink while your horse rests, you can set off ahead of us.’

Robert Barat respectfully touched his forehead and set off for the gatehouse, where his mare was tethered. De Wolfe called after him.

‘Tell the bailiff to gather as many villagers as he can for a jury, especially those who may know anything about the fire, even if they only watched it burn.’

The coroner’s trio reached the village in mid-afternoon, Manaton being about fifteen miles from the city. It was a hamlet typical of the edge of Dartmoor, nestling on the slope of a valley among wooded countryside. Above it was a hill crowned by jagged rocks, and across the vale was a smoother mound of moorland. In the distance, more granite tors stood on the skyline, like broken teeth against the sky.

The village straddled the crossing of two lanes, and as the three riders came up the eastern track from the Becka waterfalls, they could smell the fire before the remains came into sight.

‘What a bloody stench!’ grumbled Gwyn. ‘Tanneries are bad enough at the best of times, but a burnt one …!’

Thomas de Peyne, jogging side-saddle behind them, almost retched as they came up to the still-smoking ruin, which lay a few hundred paces east of the village. A thin haze of blue smoke wavered in the slight breeze and the heat from the ashes caused the distant woods to shimmer in the sun. The tannery had been set in a large plot, giving room for the stone tanks set in the ground, where the skins were soaked and which added their aroma to the acrid stench of scorched leather. Their smell came from dog droppings, as the strong ferments in the excreta were used to strip the soft tissue from the cow hides and sheepskins.

As they halted on the road to look across at the desolation, a group of people came towards them from the wide green in the centre of the village, which consisted of a loose cluster of cottages set around a church and an alehouse. The first to greet them was Robert Barat, who deferentially introduced a fat, self-important man as the manor lord’s bailiff, Matthew Juvenis.

‘This is a bad business, Crowner. When you have finished here, my master would like to speak with you at the manor house.’

‘Has there been any sign of the tanner?’ asked John.

The bailiff half turned to wave a hand towards the group of villagers standing a few paces away, most of them gazing at the new arrivals as if they had two heads each. However, three tough-looking young men remained grim faced, the eldest with an arm around an older woman, whose tearful features told de Wolfe that this must be the tanner’s wife and the men her sons.

‘They’re sure he must be in there, sir.’ Matthew Juvenis pointed to the blackened ashes. ‘He went from their cottage, which is just down the road, soon after midnight to see why his hound was barking — and never came back.’

‘Have you looked in the ruins?’ demanded Gwyn.

‘They were still too hot this morning, but maybe we can probe around now.’

The coroner and his officer slid from their mounts, which were taken off by a couple of villagers to be watered and fed. Thomas let them take his pony, but he kept well back from the smoking ashes. Followed by the tanner’s sons, the reeve and the bailiff, they walked to the edge of the scorched patch of grass that surrounded the remains of the tannery.

‘There was a two-storeyed building here,’ grunted the eldest son, a gruff fellow of about twenty-five. ‘And behind it were a couple of sheds, this side of the tanks. All old wood and damned dry in this weather.’

All that remained of the three structures was a tumbled scatter of charred wood, some of the thicker beams still in pieces up to a few feet long, but split and blackened, with smoke still wreathing from the cracks. The rest was grey-black ash and charcoal, with occasional layers of fragile sheets like the leaves of a large book.

‘Those are the stacks of cured hides, which were stored upstairs,’ explained another of the sons.

John moved nearer, treading among the crumbling ash, which sent up clouds of fine grey dust. ‘Did no one try to put the fire out?’ he snapped.

‘It was impossible,’ said Robert Barat. ‘I was one of the first here, when the eldest boy raised the alarm. He had gone to see why his father had not returned home. But already the place was like an inferno and the nearest water was the stream down in the valley, apart from a couple of small springs there.’ He waved his arm vaguely behind him. ‘By the time we had got enough men and buckets, the roofs had fallen in and we couldn’t get within thirty paces because of the heat.’

It was still hot, as de Wolfe found as he moved nearer the larger debris in the centre. His feet became warm and, looking down, he saw that the leather of his shoes was starting to blister. He moved back to cooler ground, but a couple of the more enterprising villagers had brought up a few wide, rough planks, pulled from a fence. They laid these end to end into the hot ashes and the coroner walked carefully along them to get much nearer the centre of the fallen building. He peered around him for a few moments, hunched forward with his hands behind his back.