Bernard Knight: The Grim Reaper

De Wolfe locked the chest, stood up and slipped the key into the purse hanging from his belt. ‘Let’s have another look next door.’

They trooped back into the front room, where the constable was still stationed outside the window to keep away curious eyes. The fletcher had vanished, and the three members of the coroner’s team stood around the body, staring at it as if urging it to tell them what had happened.

Thomas’s eyes roved around the room, taking in details of the bare chamber. Always insatiably curious, his long thin nose seemed to point like that of a hunting dog, and the squint in his left eye was accentuated as he turned his head slowly back and forth. Though unfrocked from the priesthood several years before, he still affected a tonsure, the shaven patch surrounded by lustreless black hair.

‘Better get the body carted up to the castle,’ growled the coroner. ‘It can go into one of the store sheds until we hold the inquest.’

His officer looked puzzled. ‘What do we do with Jews, then? They can’t be buried in the Close.’

Everyone who died in Exeter had to be buried in the cathedral precinct, unless their relatives purchased a dispensation to inter them at some other church outside the city. The cathedral jealously guarded this additional source of revenue for the funeral Mass and the sixpence for the grave-pit digger, but of course it could not apply to the body of a Jew.

‘Let’s see what his relatives have to say. He has a daughter, according to the constable. We may have to bury him temporarily outside the walls, in the Jew’s plot, if he’s not claimed within a day or two.’

De Wolfe turned to leave, but Gwyn pointed to the overturned table, where coins had slid on to the floor. ‘What about that money? We can’t leave all those split pennies on display in an empty house.’

De Wolfe ran a hand over the black stubble on his face as he considered the matter. ‘Best collect them up and put them in that chest next door.’

As he fished in his purse for the key, de Wolfe remembered the scrap of parchment in the dead man’s hand, rooted again in his pouch, then handed it to his clerk. ‘What does this say, Thomas? Is it something more about lending money?’

The little clerk walked delicately around the stiffened corpse. The familiarity with violent death that had been forced on him since his appointment as coroner’s assistant had not lessened his squeamishness. He studied the brief note, then crossed himself and looked up at his master with a puzzled expression. ‘It’s a quotation from the Bible, Crowner — if I remember rightly, from the Gospel according to the Blessed St Mark.’

Half an hour later, the three men climbed Castle Hill, which led up from the eastern end of the high street to Rougemont. This was the local name for the fortress of red stone built by the Conqueror at the highest point of the city, in the north-east angle of the old Roman walls.

The coroner and his officer strode energetically across the short drawbridge over the dry moat, while the clerk limped despondently behind. Once under the raised portcullis of the tall gatehouse, they turned left into the guardroom and climbed a narrow staircase in the thickness of the wall to the topmost floor, where de Wolfe had his office. This was the smallest and most uncomfortable chamber that his brother-in-law, Sir Richard de Revelle, the sheriff, had been able to find for him. It was still early, less than two hours after a May dawn, but as usual Gwyn was ready to eat. Though John was himself a good trencherman, his appetite paled into insignificance alongside that of his officer, who needed to stoke his huge body at frequent intervals.

This morning, with a halved penny from the coroner, Gwyn had bought three meat pies, a loaf of barley bread and a chunk of hard cheese from the stalls on their way back from Southgate Street. Now he spread these on the coroner’s trestle table, pushing aside some parchment rolls of recent inquests as he did so. A bench and two stools made up the whole furniture of the bare chamber, which had two slit embrasures looking down on Exeter. The doorway at the head of the stairway was hung with sacking to block some of the draughts.

By the time Thomas de Peyne entered, the other two were working at the food, washing it down with rough cider that Gwyn produced from a gallon crock that stood in a corner. The sad-looking clerk refused the pie Gwyn pushed towards him and contented himself with a slice of bread and a pottery cup half filled with cider. While the jaws of the other pair champed rhythmically, Thomas sat on his stool and stared glumly at the rough boards of the table, his lips working in some silent conversation with himself.

Gwyn broke the rejected pie in two and gave half to his master. There was a further delay until the last of the food had been washed down with the acidulous cider, then after a final belch, de Wolfe got back to business. He turned his dark, glowering face towards his clerk. ‘Now then, Thomas, explain to me again what you meant about that message — from the beginning.’

Rousing himself from his reverie, the former priest fumbled in the brown leather shoulder bag that held his writing materials and came out with the ragged scrap of parchment. Though John could now write his name and read a few simple sentences in Latin, anything more than this was meaningless to him and he waited for his clerk to explain.

‘As I thought, the writing is a direct quotation from the middle of St Mark’s Gospel,’ said Thomas quietly.

De Wolfe nodded, but Gwyn was mystified. ‘So what does that tell us — the name of the killer?’

For answer, Thomas again burrowed in his bag and brought out his most prized possession, a leatherbound manuscript Vulgate, given to him by his father when he was ordained, long before his shameful ejection from the Church. He turned over the pages reverently until he found the place he wanted. ‘I was right, my memory didn’t play false,’ he exclaimed, with a momentary return of his old enthusiasm.

Gwyn groaned. ‘Have we got to listen to a damned sermon now?’ he demanded.

De Wolfe was well aware of the Cornishman’s antipathy to religion, though even after twenty years as a close companion, he had never discovered the cause of Gwyn’s phobia for the Church.

Thomas ignored the interruption and began to read from the Gospel, translating the Latin as he went. ‘ “And Jesus went into the temple and began to cast out them that sold and bought and overthrew the tables of the money-changers.”’ He closed the book and looked up at de Wolfe. ‘A most appropriate text in the circumstances, Crowner.’

Gwyn snorted. ‘The Jew was a money-lender, not a money-changer. And how does it help us to catch the killer?’

John was more appreciative of his clerk’s acumen. ‘It’s near enough — and the table was overturned. Well done, Thomas.’

The little man’s depression lifted a little: praise was rare from his master’s lips, which made it all the more welcome when it came. ‘As for being in the temple, that house does belong to the cathedral Chapter,’ he said. ‘It opens into the cathedral precinct at the back, which is near enough to having a money-trader and usurer on ecclesiastical premises.’

Gwyn drank deeply and wiped cider from his moustache with the back of his hand. ‘Which tells us nothing about who did it,’ he objected.

De Wolfe shook his head. ‘You’re wrong. It tells us that the killer could read and write, and that he knew his Bible. Which strongly suggests a priest.’

Thomas nodded in agreement. ‘And perhaps a senior cleric, for some of the ignorant parish priests can’t put two words together and know as much about the scriptures as this hairy monster here.’ He dodged a playful swipe from the Cornishman.