Alys Clare - Fortune Like the Moon

‘Yes.’ She swallowed. ‘The skirt and underskirt had been folded as one, and there were three folds. The first raised the garments to knee level, the second to thigh level, the third placed them across her belly. She was, as I think you know, naked from the waist down. And covered in blood.’

Her voice was shaking. She clenched her teeth, hoping he wouldn’t ask her anything else until she had recovered her equanimity.

He didn’t. Instead, he wandered slowly around the place where Gunnora had been found. It was impossible even for Helewise, who had seen her, to say exactly where the dead girl had lain; the small amount of blood that had trickled down into the grass had been ground in by the many boot and shoe soles that had trampled the scene. It was not, then, immediately clear what Josse was gaining from his long perusal. Perhaps he was just giving her some time.

Eventually he returned to stand beside her.

‘There was something about a cross, a jewelled cross?’ he asked quietly.

‘Yes. They found it there, at the bend in the path.’ She pointed.

‘A rape that wasn’t, and a stolen cross that was thrown away. Although it is difficult to see why, unless it was by accident, since the murderer was not being pursued.’

‘Not by us,’ Helewise said. ‘It is possible that someone else saw him.’

‘Someone who prefers not to advertise his presence here in the dead of night?’

‘Quite.’

‘Hm,’ he said. And, again, walking a few paces away, ‘Hmmm.’

She said, ‘About the cross.’

He turned, alert eyes on her. ‘Yes?’

‘It wasn’t Gunnora’s. It was very similar to hers, same gold mounting, same size and colour of ruby. But Gunnora gave hers to me a few months ago, and asked instead to wear a cross of plain wood.’

‘She did? Why?’

That was easy. ‘As a demonstration of poverty, I think.’ A very ostentatious show, Helewise had thought privately at the time, and not a very useful one since Gunnora had specifically asked Helewise to put the cross away safely for her. It would have been more convincing had she asked her Abbess to sell the pretty thing and use the proceeds for the poor.

‘So she would not have been wearing her own jewelled cross when she died?’

‘No.’ It was still secure in Helewise’s cabinet; she had checked. Now the other one, that was found beside her, was there with it. ‘The wooden cross was still round her neck, but it had somehow slipped under her scapula. Probably only another nun would have thought to look for it.’

‘A rape that wasn’t,’ Josse repeated thoughtfully, ‘and, now, a theft that wasn’t.’ He stared at Helewise. ‘Abbess, all we seem to be left with is murder.’

They walked side by side back up the slope to the Abbey, on its ridge. He did not have to shorten his stride greatly; she was a tall woman.

Seen from this side, the Abbey presented a less stoutly walled aspect. Well, Josse reflected, that was understandable; the entrance through which he had first arrived faced the road, and, even if traffic was light, establishments of the size and prestige of Hawkenlye Abbey usually marked out their territory behind high walls and a solid gate that could be locked and barred at night.

Coming up from the pleasant green vale whose tranquillity had so recently been violated, however, the Abbey appeared less formidable, and the gate did not appear, Josse thought, to be any great deterrent to someone determined to break in. That, too, was understandable, since a section of the Abbey’s community lived down there in the valley, and, presumably, required fairly free access to the main foundation.

Nevertheless, it was food for thought.

He stared up at the Abbey as they neared the gate. Now that he had been inside, he could piece together the layout of the various buildings. From down here, as from the road, the roof of the church dominated; running along one side of the church was what he now knew to be the hospital wing. On the other side was the long room where the nuns slept. It was sightly taller than the hospital wing; he recalled the short flight of steps he and the Abbess had climbed to reach the door. There would, he assumed, be a stair leading directly from the dormitory to the church, for the sisters’ use when they were summoned from their beds for the night offices.

The large group of buildings forming three sides of a square around the cloistered courtyard included, he knew, Abbess Helewise’s small room, and also, he surmised, the refectory and the reformatory. Stables and what looked like workshops and storage rooms had been on his right as he came in through the main gate, and, on his left, had been the porteress’s lodge.

His eyes scanned the remaining buildings. Situated just inside the Abbey’s rear wall, they now rose up to dominate the view in front of him. Both were built to the left of the church and close to it; indeed, one appeared to adjoin it. The other, slightly smaller building, was set apart, in the place where the side and rear walls met to form a corner.

From its position, he guessed that it must be the leper house. If so, then it was from there that the sealed passage led to the part of the church reserved for the exclusive use of the lepers and the sisters who cared for them. It was an area of the foundation which Josse fervently hoped he would not have to investigate.

Satisfied that he now had a mental map of the Abbey buildings, he let his thoughts return to the murder.

His mind reverberated all over again from the Abbess’s new revelation. A rich cross, left at the scene — no, planted at the scene, for it had not belonged to the dead woman — surely could only amount to another attempt to confuse the facts? Make Gunnora’s murder seem like a bungled theft, just as the murderer had tried to make it look like rape?

He could no longer ignore his strong conviction that, whoever had cut her throat, it certainly hadn’t been riff-raff released from the local jail. Unless, that is, the jail had enclosed within its walls someone with a more sophisticated mind than your average poacher, pickpocket, sheep thief, or drunkard who had let his fists get the better of his common sense.

My job here is done, Josse reflected as he and the Abbess reached the convent walls. I could return now to Tonbridge, notify the local officials of my findings, and there would no longer be any question of King Richard’s gesture of humanity having led to brutal death. They would surely accept, as I do, that there is far more to this crime than a casual, spur-of-the-moment assault that went too far.

But he knew he wasn’t going to return to Tonbridge just yet. How much more thoroughly would his task be achieved, how much more praiseworthy it would be, if he were able to say not only who didn’t do the deed, but who did.

Well, if he were going to go through with it — as everything in him was urging — then the next step was clear. Unpleasant — in fact, in view of the continuing heat, extremely unpleasant — but quite obvious.

‘Abbess Helewise?’

Until he himself broke the silence, neither had spoken since they had left the spot where Gunnora had been found. He reflected that a nun made an admirable companion when you had things to run over in your mind. Especially — he turned to look at her — one whose wide brow and penetrating eyes spoke so clearly of intelligence.

‘Yes?’ she replied, acknowledging with a brief dip of her head his courteous gesture of standing back to allow her to go through the gate first.

‘Abbess, I have to ask your permission for a task which I wish were not necessary.’ He paused. Lord, was he right? Was it necessary? He wished, not for the first time, that he had more experience of murder. That this particular case were not his baptism into the art of investigation.