Michael Jecks - The Tolls of Death

Roger had found something else, and he held it up now. ‘Look.’

‘A clot,’ Baldwin acknowledged. ‘You are observant, Clerk.’

‘I take that as a compliment,’ Roger smiled, ducking his head. Then his face hardened. ‘If a man was killed here, the water seeping through the soil would have washed most of the blood away before long. There must have been a great deal of blood here in which case, and not too long ago.’

Jules was staring from one to the other. ‘What made you notice this? I can see nothing on the ground even now.’

The clerk gave an apologetic little cough and pointed to his legs. When Jules looked down, he saw that the calves of his hosen were tinged pink.

‘We saw it when you splashed through the blood, Sir Jules.’

The knight stared at him for what seemed a long moment, and then stepped into the river to wash his hose.

It was sad to see how crestfallen Jules was when he saw the state of his hosen, Roger thought, but the man was a fool. Most Coroners were, apart from the ones who had agreed to the position purely for the profit they could make. Those were the truly contemptible ones, the men who’d sell their office and their honour for a few shillings, perhaps even seeing to the execution of an innocent man and the ruin of his family to line his own pocket. And letting the guilty go free, more to the point.

Roger had firm opinions on the law; he thought that the realm, indeed the whole of Christianity, could only function when criminals received their just reward. If the guilty could buy freedom from punishment, the King’s law was a nonsense and the poor must lose faith in it. When that happened, the country would fall into anarchy.

Roger was a thoughtful man. He considered many things: why the sky was blue, how the stars were held in the sky, how a plant knew to grow upwards, instead of upside-down … there was much to study and wonder at in the world. Yet he was unceasingly astonished by the failure of other men to look at things with the same attention to detail.

Sir Jules here, for example: a man born to wealth and power, clearly not one of those mad fighting spirits who’d take a lance to a stranger as soon as shake their hands, but nonetheless, he was not nearly observant enough for his post. The job required a man who would look carefully at the facts of a case, someone who would listen and weigh the evidence before leaping to judgement.

There could be much to listen to today, he thought.

Sir Jules had reached the mill’s door, and was waiting for them. Roger allowed Baldwin to go before him, and then followed. The Bailiff was polite and stood away so that he could enter, and Roger smiled to himself. The man plainly wasn’t that keen on corpses.

The room was dark, the night’s shutters still locked in their wooden runners. Sir Baldwin walked slowly about the place, reaching up and unhooking their strings. All were vertical-drop shutters, held up over the windows by a cord with a loop that hooked over a nail in the wall. As Baldwin pulled the strings, they dropped in their channels to rest on the floor, and daylight began to flood the place.

It was, like all mills, immensely dusty. As the sun’s rays slanted inside, each window created a bright shaft of whiteness, a cone filled with tiny motes moving in the warmth. Baldwin’s passage took him down the longer side of the room, walking away from the doorway, disappearing as soon as he was beyond the second window, hidden by the whiteness. Then he slowly returned, and Roger saw his shape form like that of a wraith, walking in the shadows between light-shafts, reappearing as he stepped into sunlight.

Serlo’s body lay sprawled, mostly upon the floor, arms loose, his head resting upon the wheel of his great toothed cog.

Behind him, Roger heard the quiet, ‘Christ Jesus!’ as Simon took in the sight.

Roger couldn’t blame the man. It was enough to make even him gulp. Serlo’s head had been caught by the teeth of the cog, and pulled around until the teeth from the vertical wheel above, driven by the water wheel outside, had met it. As soon as the hardwood teeth had found his skull, they had crushed it. The right side of his head was gone. A bloody mess had exploded against the machinery and over the floor where his brains had been expelled, and his eyes were forced from their sockets. One dangled by a cord about his cheek near his wide-open mouth.

Jules had entered quickly, and now he left at the same speed. There was a dry swallowing from Simon as he took in the scene, but Roger was glad to see that the Keeper merely stood back from the corpse with a pensive frown. He made no move to touch the body, but stood with his chin cupped in one hand, the other arm around his breast, the hand under his armpit.

‘Roger, can you see his throat?’

‘It’s been cut, has it not?’

‘The cause of the blood outside?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘And then his body brought in here — for why? What possible reason could someone have for leaving his body here in this state?’

‘My Christ! Serlo? Serlo? SERLO !’

And Roger found himself thrust aside as Alexander barged into the room, his mouth wide in dismay, and sank to his knees sobbing beside his dead brother, scrabbling at the body as though trying to pull Serlo from the machine.

Simon grimaced as he helped Roger to remove Alexander from the room. The man had fallen into the pool of gore about Serlo’s body, and he was covered in a bloody mess.

‘He was my brother, my only brother! I loved him! Who could do this to poor Serlo? He was an innocent! Poor boy! I had to look after him from when he was a baby, you know. I washed him and cleaned him and helped feed him — and all for what? So a madman could come here and kill him! Oh, my poor brother! Oh God, why Serlo?’

There was much more in the same vein, but Simon ignored it. The blood all over the man’s tunic and shirt was mingled with streaks of flour, forming a repellent dough, and the Bailiff wanted to get away and wash his hands in the stream. In any case, there was no time for such maunderings: Simon had a duty to see whether he could learn anything from the man. ‘Your brother: did he have any enemies who could have sought his death?’

‘There are always people who’ll moan about the miller,’ Alex said, sniffing back the tears. ‘Of course there are! But who would do this ?’

‘Why should people always complain?’ Jules asked. He had rejoined them, but was looking queasy and stood with his head averted from Alexander, as though the mere sight of so much blood would make him vomit once more.

Simon explained. ‘Because of the multure, the portion of flour paid for the use of the mill. People are often jealous of the miller’s tenth.’

‘Yes. Just as they hate me for keeping the farm of the baking ovens.’

Roger nodded. This was the usual way of things. The lord built, or allowed to be built, the tools which his peasants needed, and in return they paid for the use of them. It seemed as though the two brothers had a near monopoly of the bread-making process, a sensible venture for forward-thinking men.

Alexander was sobbing again. ‘To kill him like Dan, that’s sick!’

‘Who’s Dan?’ Simon demanded.

Perhaps it was the sharpness in his tone, but Alexander looked up at him, and in his eyes there was fear. ‘Serlo had an apprentice called Dan. Last year, Dan tripped and fell into the machine, just as Serlo has there.’

‘Perhaps someone blamed Serlo?’ Simon guessed. ‘Was he a local boy?’

Alex looked away. ‘Serlo took him in to teach him a trade. I don’t think he had any family.’

‘No father, no brother to avenge him? Not even a sister?’