Bernard Knight - A Plague of Heretics

As the coroner followed Gwyn up the narrow corridor, the skirts of his long grey tunic brushing frost from the weeds, he saw figures standing against the tall hurdles of woven hazel-withies which blocked the end. One was the skinny figure of Osric, a painfully thin Saxon, the other his fellow constable, a stocky, rather fat man called Theobald. Both were clutching their long staves and staring down at something on the ground.

The ‘something’ turned out to be a spectacle that could have been used for a church wall-painting depicting the expected terrors of hell for those who sinned. A man’s body lay on its back in the weeds, a molehill under his shoulders throwing the head back to expose a ghastly wound that occupied the whole of his neck, from jawline to collarbones. Most of his face and the upper part of his body was plastered in dried blood, the colour of his tunic being apparent only below his waist. His grey hair was thick with blackening blood clot, and the front end of a deep laceration was just visible above his left ear.

What was even more macabre than his horrific injuries was lying alongside his outstretched right hand. Here a complete tongue and attached voice-box was carefully laid out on a bloody stone, like some piece of offal displayed on a butcher’s stall.

De Wolfe stood silently for a moment, contemplating the awful sight. The two constables, though also hardened to blood and gore from dealing with hundreds of street fights and killings, looked rather white around the gills.

‘Never seen anything like this before, Crowner!’ ventured Osric.

‘Any idea who he is?’ demanded John.

The constable shook his head. ‘Not until he’s cleaned up, anyway,’ he muttered. ‘You can’t see his features for blood.’

Osric explained how a lad — or rather his dog — had found him about an hour ago and had run to the constable’s hut behind the Guildhall to raise the alarm. ‘But God knows how long he’s been lying here, as no one comes up this path, for it goes nowhere.’

‘Suggests that whoever did it knows his way around Exeter,’ said Gwyn. ‘He obviously knew of a place where it would be some time before it was discovered.’

‘And how long was that, I wonder?’ grunted the coroner ruminatively. He snapped off a piece of dead twig from a nearby bush and used it to prod the Adam’s apple. It was stuck fast to the flat stone by dried blood. ‘That’s been shed some long time ago, even allowing for the freezing weather.’

Gwyn gave the thigh of the corpse a shove with the toe of his boot and the whole body moved as if carved from stone.

‘Stiff as a board!’ he commented. ‘But given this frost, it doesn’t help much to tell us when he died.’

‘You reckon he’s been here all night?’ asked Theobald, his podgy face starting to recover some colour.

The coroner shrugged. ‘He’s been dead at least for many hours, I’m sure. But he might have been dead for days!’

Gwyn had hunkered down alongside the cadaver and was studying the head.

‘Looks like a real nasty blow there. Shall I shift him so that you can see?’ he asked hopefully. The Cornishman always relished a bit of drama and mayhem.

John waved a hand at the two constables. ‘One of you run around to St John’s,’ he commanded. ‘They’ve got that little mortuary behind the hospital, so ask them if they can send a couple of men with a bier to take him away.’

As Theobald left to do his bidding, John instructed Osric to search the surrounding area to see if he could find any weapon.

‘If he’s had a crack on the head, there may be something lying around that caused it,’ he said, then dropped to his haunches opposite Gwyn and waited for his officer to lift up the head. The corpse was so rigid that it came up like a plank, but John was able to see the back of the head. Though obscured by a welter of blood, a deep laceration ran from above the left ear to the back point, above the nape of the neck. He motioned for his officer to lower the corpse to the ground and stood up, after wiping his soiled fingers on some weeds.

‘I suspect that’s what killed him,’ he growled.

Gwyn nodded in agreement — he was always vying with his master over their expertise in matters of violent death.

‘All this blood has run down, but there’s no sign of spurting,’ he said, waving a hand at the surrounding vegetation. ‘I reckon he had his Adam’s apple cut out after he was dead.’

Before he could enlarge on this macabre observation, there was a cry from down the path and Thomas came hurrying up.

‘I heard in the castle that you had been called up here. What’s going on?’ he demanded. Then his gaze fell on the dreadful apparition on the ground, and without warning the little clerk turned aside and was spectacularly sick against the nearest fence. After two years as the coroner’s scribe, he had largely overcome his sensitivity to the various forms of violent death, but the sight of a bloody tongue and voice-box laid out neatly on a flat stone was too much for him.

‘Better out than in!’ bellowed Gwyn jovially as he slapped Thomas on the back. Then he turned back to de Wolfe and carried on their conversation. ‘There would have been blood splashed six feet away, if that wound had been caused while he was still alive,’ he boomed confidently. ‘I remember seeing a Saracen beheaded outside Acre once — there was a fountain of bright blood as long as my arms could span!’

De Wolfe nodded absently. ‘But it all must have been done here. The corpse wasn’t brought from elsewhere, or there’d be a trail of blood all the way up this lane.’

‘But he could have been hit on the head somewhere else,’ observed Osric, who had rejoined them, after having failed to find anything nearby that could have been a weapon.

‘Must have been, as I can’t imagine anyone coming up this alley of his own free will,’ agreed John.

Thomas de Peyne had recovered his nerve a little and after wiping his face with a kerchief came to stand shakily alongside his master, carefully averting his gaze from the corpse. Jerkily, he made the sign of the cross as if this might ward off the horror.

‘Who is he, Crowner?’ he asked. ‘And who would do a terrible thing like that?’

John shook his head. ‘Can’t answer either of those questions, Thomas. When he’s been cleaned up a bit, hopefully someone will recognise his face, if he’s a local man.’

A few minutes later a couple of lay brothers came up the path, carrying a canvas stretcher supported by two poles. Behind them strode a tall, gaunt figure in a black Benedictine habit. This was Brother Saulf, the infirmarian of the small priory of St John, which was virtually the only place in the city where the poor could get medical attention. The coroner explained the situation and the monk readily agreed to house the cadaver in the lean-to shed at the priory, which acted as a mortuary. As the lay brothers hoisted the corpse on to the stretcher, Thomas joined Saulf in intoning some Latin prayers over it as the best they could do by way of shriving the dead man.

With an old blanket draped over him, and his tongue tucked under his armpit, the victim went off at a jog down the path, the coroner’s trio following more sedately around to St John’s.

It was growing dark by the time de Wolfe arrived back in Martin’s Lane and, inevitably, found his wife in a bad temper at his lateness.

‘Our neighbours will be attending on us in an hour!’ she grated. ‘You had best change into some decent raiment. I don’t want to be disgraced by them thinking we are too poor to have good clothing!’

With a sigh, he went off to the solar where they slept, to rummage in his chest to find something to wear. As everything he had was either grey or black, it was hardly likely to dazzle the popinjay next door, but he was in no mood for a confrontation with Matilda over it.