Bernard Knight - The Grim Reaper

When de Wolfe asked to see Ralph de Capra, the prior shook his head. ‘He’s not fit to be spoken to yet. The infirmarian has given him a draught to quieten him, though it seems to have had little effect.’

‘I have to talk to him now,’ insisted de Wolfe. ‘It is a matter of the utmost urgency.’ Though the chances were slim, if the deranged priest let slip anything that identified him as the killer, Thomas would be cleared. John could not pass up even the most remote possibility of saving his clerk’s neck from the rope tomorrow.

The scowling prior pulled up the cowl of his black Benedictine robe against a sudden gust of cool night air. ‘If you must, then be it on your head if he goes berserk again,’ he grumbled. He beckoned to a novice who was washing a pan outside the kitchen of the small priory and told him to take the coroner to the sickroom. Following him, John passed the storeroom where more than once, he had attended dead bodies from this part of town, though mercifully, it was empty tonight.

The young man led him into a passage with two cells opening off it, in one of which was locked the priest from All-Hallows. Nervously, he pulled a wooden pin from the hasp and stood aside for the coroner to enter. The moment John slipped inside, he heard the pin being hastily shoved back.

In the tiny room, with only a shuttered slit to admit a little light, he made out a skinny figure crouched on a pallet in a corner. He was stark naked and his tunic lay on the floor, torn into ragged strips. John wondered if he had been trying to make a noose, but there was nothing in the bare cell from which he could hang himself.

De Capra was shivering like a man with the ague, but not from cold. He gave no sign that he had noticed the coroner’s arrival, and sat staring at the floor.

‘Ralph, I am John de Wolfe, the crowner. Do you remember me?’

There was no response, so he pulled over a milking stool, the only furniture in the cell, and sat directly facing the other man. ‘Ralph, you must answer my questions.’

Again there was no reaction and John reached out to take the priest’s chin in his hand. He moved the man’s head so that he could stare straight into the vacant eyes. ‘What has happened to afflict you like this? What have you done?’

Suddenly, the other man was galvanised out of his catatonia. Shocked by the change, John fell backwards off his stool as de Capra leapt up and threw himself against the corner of the cell, standing naked on the straw mattress with his arms outspread against adjacent walls, like a living crucifix. ‘I have sinned, I have sinned!’ he wailed, his eyes rolling up to the wattled ceiling.

‘How have you sinned? What have you done? Have you killed, Ralph?’ The coroner was becoming desperate in his quest for a confession.

‘Killed? I have sent a legion of souls into purgatory!’

De Wolfe’s spirit leapt for a moment, in glorious hope that he had at last found his man.

‘What do you mean? Were they murdered in the city?’

De Capra thumped his lean body back and forth into the angle of the wall, his nails scrabbling at the plaster. ‘I stopped believing! Satan stole my mind! With no faith I shrove many, I betrayed them! I baptised babes with no belief in what I was doing! I shrove the dying without the true grace of God! They are lost! I betrayed them!’ He slid down the wall on to the pallet and sat in a crumpled heap, weeping disconsolately.

With a sinking heart, John made one last attempt. ‘But have you killed , Ralph? The old Jew, the priest at All-Hallows, the sodomite, the whore?’

There was no reply and the sobbing continued.

The door opened and the fearful face of the novice appeared, followed by that of the prior. ‘This cannot be!’ he hissed. ‘You must leave, Crowner. This man is sick in his mind.’

Acknowledging defeat, de Wolfe nodded and, with a last compassionate look at the wreck of a man on the mattress, he followed the monks out of the room. As they left the passageway, Ralph de Capra began to scream, the high-pitched, repetitive wail of a soul in torment. It was the signal that de Wolfe’s last chance of saving Thomas had failed.

The coroner left the priory of St Nicholas at dusk, going from there to Priest Street to find Julian Fulk. Matilda’s news that the priest of St Olave’s was leaving suddenly was curious, but John had little expectation that it was in any way connected to the Gospel killings, unless Fulk was running away in expectation of being exposed.

Most of the dwellings in Priest Street were lodging for clerics and he had to ask directions to the right house. The priest was at home, living in two comfortably furnished rooms, which suggested that he had some means of his own as well as his pittance from parish tithes.

Fulk was resting after his meal before preparing for the midnight Matins, which he insisted on holding even though sometimes he had no congregation at that hour. Confident that one day he would be officiating in some great cathedral, he drove himself to observe most of the canonical hours, even in a tiny church like St Olave’s. He was surprised to see the coroner, but invited him in civilly and gave him a cup of good wine. He seemed more subdued than usual and his normal false heartiness had evaporated. As de Wolfe sat drinking his Anjou wine, he felt that whatever oddities might be in the priest’s nature, he was unlikely to be a serial killer. But, for Thomas’s sake, he had to pursue every chance to the bitter end.

‘They say you are leaving Exeter rather suddenly?’ The plump priest gestured impatiently. ‘This city is like a village. Every time you fart, the news is around the taverns within five minutes.’

De Wolfe agreed with that, but it was no answer to his question. ‘Is there an urgent reason for us losing you? There is nothing wrong, I trust, between you and the Church authorities?’

The priest began to spit out a litany of complaints against the religious establishment in England — their indifference to his ability, their deliberate campaign to keep him in some ecclesiastical backwater and similar expressions of outrage that soon convinced John that he was quite paranoid about the Church’s attitude towards him. But nothing in his tirade gave the coroner hope that Julian Fulk was anything but a vain, self-opinionated wind-bag.

Tiring of the repetitive monologue about the iniquities of bishops, abbots and priors, John finished his wine and took his leave, more depressed than ever that nothing now could save Thomas.

His feet took him the short distance to Idle Lane and he flopped down on his usual bench in the Bush, feeling ten years older than he had the previous day. Even the usually loquacious potman was subdued when he brought over a quart of ale, and when Nesta came in, she sat quietly by his side, with little to say once he had told her of the fruitless efforts he had been making.

He described his visit to Thomas and the clerk’s apparent calm. ‘I’ll see him again in the morning — and, along with John de Alençon, go with him to the gallows at noon,’ he said sombrely.

He saw that tears were running silently down Nesta’s cheeks at his mention of the hanging-tree beyond Magdalen Street, for it brought home with awful finality the fact that this tragedy was really going to take place. ‘I’m a coward, John, for I can’t bring myself to visit him,’ she whispered. ‘I wouldn’t know what to say and all I’d do is weep and make things worse for him. Neither can I come out beyond the walls with you tomorrow, for I couldn’t bear to see him die. But Gwyn will be with you — he called in here earlier looking for you.’