Bernard Knight - Fear in the Forest

‘Looks as if they’ve got the idea!’ said Gwyn, to whom dogs were preferable to most men. They all hurried after the hound-master, who was trying to keep up with his charges. The party swished through the sparse undergrowth beneath the tall trees, the stench from crushed garlic strong on the still air. After some four hundred yards, labouring up a slope from the defile, they saw the green tunic of the hound-master in a small hollow at the base of a huge oak. As they panted up, the man looked crestfallen.

‘I think they’ve been misled by the scent of a fox, my lord.’

The six dogs were milling around a wide hole between the roots of the great tree, which was poised on the edge of a dip in the ground. Red Devon earth was exposed, and fresh soil was scattered downhill from the tunnel mouth. The hounds were milling about in circles, yapping and barking, and one had his head in the hole, trying to worm his way inside.

Gwyn bent to look closely at the ground around the hole.

‘This doesn’t look right for a foxhole or a badger sett,’ he grunted. ‘The earth has been thrown up against the bottom, not dug out from it.’

The hound-master looked and agreed with him. ‘There was a sett here — a big one, but it’s been partly refilled.’

The two men, watched by the rest of the party, seized a couple of fallen branches and broke off four-foot lengths to use as crude spades. They attacked the soft, crumbly soil, pulling it back to slide down the slope below the hole, which now appeared as a much larger aperture. The dogs, which had been hovering excitedly around them, whimpered even louder, and one, more daring animal again dived head first into the hole. The houndsman yelled at it and gave it a smack across the bottom to get it out. Gwyn took its place, dropping to his knees to peer down the shaft, which went obliquely down between the tree roots.

‘See anything?’ snapped the impatient coroner.

Instead of answering, his officer dropped on to his side, careless of the damp rusty earth soiling his clothing, and stuck his right arm up to the shoulder into the hole. The onlookers watched his face change to an expression of disgust as he pulled his arm out of the tunnel and looked at his hand.

‘No wonder the hounds were so excited,’ he said with his usual infuriating slowness in imparting information. ‘How long has this man been missing?’

A jabber of consternation broke out among the watchers as Gwyn held up his hand to show a piece of greenish skin stuck to his palm.

‘Is that human?’ demanded Guy Ferrars.

‘It slid off something with five fingers and a thumb!’ answered the Cornishman with black humour. ‘I think he’s in head first, with the legs under this earth.’ He clambered to his feet and pointed to the soil that was still piled below the hole. Now the baron snapped into activity, shouting orders at his retainers, while de Wolfe and his henchman stood and watched. The dogs were called off and three Lustleigh men energetically began scraping away the earth with pieces of wood. Within a couple of minutes one of them gave a yell and bent to brush away loose soil with his hand, exposing a bare foot. It was white and wrinkled but not decomposed, and very soon both legs were uncovered.

‘Can you drag it out now?’ demanded the manor-reeve, who was hovering over the three villagers. They dropped their branches and heaved on the ankles of the corpse. After a momentary hesitation, there was a minor avalanche of powdery earth and the body slid out of the hole, into which it had been pushed up to the knees, then covered with loose soil. One arm below the elbow had been exposed within the tunnel, and it was this that Gwyn had felt. The diggers brushed off most of the earth from the body and stood back to allow everyone to see the dead man.

‘There’s no doubt it’s William Gurnon,’ said the reeve. ‘He’s not too mortified, considering it’s a week since he died.’

‘The earth helps preserve them,’ said John de Wolfe, an expert on corpses. ‘Only that hand is green and slimy, because it was out in the air.’

‘Some animal, rats or a fox, must have unearthed it,’ added Gwyn, not to be outdone in matters of death. ‘All the tendons on the back have been laid bare where it’s been nibbled.’

Guy Ferrars was more interested in what had killed his servant, rather than the effects of death. ‘Have a look at him, de Wolfe. He’s a coroner’s responsibility now.’

John and his officer went into their familiar routine of examining the cadaver. As he squatted by the body. de Wolfe observed aloud that someone had already committed several offences, by failing to report a sudden death to him and by concealing the corpse from his view. A week’s hot weather had begun to affect the body, though as John had already pointed out, being buried in a cool wood had markedly slowed down putrefaction. The dead man wore a short tunic and knee-length breeches, his feet being bare. The upper garment had ridden up over his worn leather belt and the exposed belly was greenish and slightly swollen. His face was somewhat flattened from the weight of soil on it and the eyes were collapsed and opaque, but the features were still recognisable to the other men from Lustleigh.

‘Here’s the trouble, Crowner!’ said Gwyn, pointing to ominous brown staining on the neutral-coloured wool of the tunic. On both sides, coming around under the armpits, the staining was partly obscured by adherent loose soil, but when Gwyn rolled the corpse over, the whole of the back of the clothing, from shoulder blades down to waist, was stiff with dried blood. When the belt was removed and the tunic pulled right up, the cause was obvious.

‘Stabbed in the back — twice!’ barked Ferrars, who was peering over John’s shoulder.

‘Bloody cowards! Two with arrows in their backs, and now a knife in the same place,’ added his son belligerently.

The coroner traced out the two wounds with his finger. One was a few inches from the centre of the back on the right side, where the lower ribs began. It was two finger-breadths wide and shaped like a teardrop, with a sharply pointed lower end and a rounded top.

‘A single-edged knife, that!’ said Gwyn. ‘Quite a wide blade, too.’

‘Probably the same weapon did this other one,’ observed de Wolfe. He rested his forefinger alongside the second stab wound, which was slightly higher and in the exact centre of the back, over the knobs of the spine. It was half the length of the other, but had the same shape.

‘A tapered blade couldn’t go in so deeply, because of the bone underneath,’ he muttered, half to himself. He poked his finger into the hole to measure the depth and gave a short exclamation as he jerked his digit out again and examined the tip, which now had a small cut on it.

With a curse, he wiped it on the dead man’s coarse tunic, then sucked it vigorously, spitting repeatedly on to the ground.

‘Careful with that, Crowner!’ growled Gwyn. ‘Corpse juice can give you a nasty septic wound. Was it a spike of bone that you hit?’

‘Didn’t feel like it. Let’s have a better look.’

He pulled out his own dagger from the back of his belt and enlarged the stab wound over the spine with a slash a few inches long. Taking the free edge of the dead man’s tunic, he carefully mopped up the blood and tissue fluid from the wound, revealing a metallic glint inside. Using the point of his dagger, he levered out a piece of steel, which he displayed on his palm.

‘Whoever did this snapped off the tip of his knife in the bone,’ he announced to the heads craning over him to see what he was doing. ‘The other wound was the one that killed him. It’s gone deep into his chest and belly.’

He displayed the small triangle of sharp metal, which had an irregular edge where it had been snapped off. As he wrapped it in a dock leaf and put it away carefully in his belt-pouch, he turned to Guy Ferrars.