Susanna GREGORY - The Mark of a Murderer

‘Less than fifteen days, but probably more than five. It is impossible to be precise.’

‘I said farewell to him that morning, and he told me he was looking forward to his journey,’ said Wormynghalle, fighting back tears. She turned away abruptly, and hurried to stand outside with Dodenho, staring up at the sky and blinking hard as she fought to regain control of herself.

Paxtone went to put a paternal arm around her shoulders, and Bartholomew saw her struggle not to recoil from his touch. ‘I know this is hard,’ Paxtone said kindly. ‘You were friends as well as room-mates, and he thought very highly of your scholarship.’

Wormynghalle gulped and tears began to flow freely. ‘He said that?’

Paxtone nodded. ‘Many times. He said you were the cleverest man in the College, and boasted that he was the room-mate of the Fellow destined for widespread academic acclaim.’

Wormynghalle turned away in a flood of grief, while Dodenho straightened himself carefully. ‘Surely you are mistaken,’ he said. ‘He must have meant me .’

‘Never mind that,’ said Michael. ‘If Hamecotes died between the time he left for Oxford and five days ago, does it mean he fulfilled his book-buying duties and came back? Or did he not go at all – in which case who wrote the letters purporting to be from him?’

‘They were in his writing,’ said Wormynghalle in a muffled voice. She took a deep breath and entered the shed again, Paxtone and Dodenho following. ‘You can see them, if you like. I retained them because I intended to scrape the parchment and reuse it later. Perhaps I will keep them now, to remind me of his friendship.’

‘I wonder if he wrote them before he left, as a ruse,’ mused Michael. ‘That would have given him a few free days to go about his business – whatever that was. Was he with Wolf, do you think, looking after him at Stourbridge?’

‘Possibly,’ replied Paxtone. ‘But Wolf was reasonably fit when I saw him a few days before he went missing himself – he had a summer chill, but we all suffer those from time to time. He stayed a day or two at the hospital, but he was malingering, medically speaking.’

‘No sign of the pox, then?’ asked Michael bluntly.

Paxtone did not like his supposedly celibate colleagues being accused of contracting sexually transmitted diseases. ‘No,’ he said shortly.

Michael turned back to the body, forcing himself to look at it. ‘So, how did Hamecotes come to be in this building? Who found him?’

‘I did,’ said Dodenho hoarsely. ‘I like to practise my lectures here, because it is more private than my room. I came on Tuesday evening – he was not here then – and I found his body today. Therefore, he must have brought himself here during the last two and a half days.’

‘He did not come under his own power,’ said Bartholomew. ‘He has been dead too long.’

‘I told you that,’ said Paxtone to Dodenho, rather pompously for someone who knew so little about the dead. ‘He was put here: he did not walk to this building on his own.’

‘But who would do such a thing?’ asked Wormynghalle in a small voice. ‘And how did he die? Did he drown? I see from his clothes that he has been wet, and I know he cannot swim.’

‘He may have been in the river,’ said Bartholomew. ‘But that is not what killed him. This is.’ He eased away Hamecotes’s liripipe to reveal a slashing gape across the throat, ragged and uneven, as if some blunt, crude implement had been used to inflict the damage.

Dodenho shot from the room, pushing past Wormynghalle and almost knocking her off her feet. Paxtone reeled back with his hand to his mouth, while Michael inhaled sharply at the sight.

‘And that is not all,’ said Bartholomew softly. ‘This is the man whose body was in the cistern in Merton Hall.’

Michael gazed at Bartholomew in the darkness of the dilapidated stables. The physician could hear Dodenho retching outside, while Wormynghalle and Paxtone stood well back, so they were not obliged to see the horror on the table. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes. I recognise the shape of his nose and the moss-coloured liripipe.’

‘He often wore that,’ said Wormynghalle in a cracked voice. ‘He liked green clothes.’

‘You told me that when I wrote Dodenho’s prescription, and you gave me his emerald ink to use by mistake,’ recalled Bartholomew. ‘I should have put the facts together sooner, because I remember this garment quite clearly from the well.’

‘But how did he come to be here?’ demanded Michael.

No one could answer, and Bartholomew went back to his examination. He quickly established for certain that the throat wound was the cause of death, and ascertained from the state of the body that it had been immersed in water for some time. There was only one other thing that was pertinent: a rope around the corpse’s feet, which had been cut. He supposed it had been attached to stones and used to weight Hamecotes down, to prevent him from floating. It explained why the body had been so heavy when he had pulled it to the surface in the belief that it was Michael. He realised it would have remained hidden indefinitely, had Michael not had the misfortune to fall in with it. He told the others his conclusions.

‘But Sheriff Tulyet said there was no body in the cistern,’ said Paxtone, bewildered.

‘Obviously, it was moved before he conducted his search,’ replied Michael impatiently. ‘And now we know where it went, although I cannot imagine why. Did Hamecotes know Eudo or Boltone?’

‘Not as far as I am aware,’ replied Paxtone. ‘But Boltone is sometimes obliged to travel to Oxford to present his accounts, and Hamecotes has …had friends there. Perhaps they had mutual acquaintances. It was because of his Oxford connections that we were not surprised when Hamecotes wrote to say he had gone there – we were annoyed and inconvenienced, but not worried.’

‘He did know Boltone,’ said Wormynghalle. She rubbed her mouth on her sleeve and Bartholomew saw that her hands were shaking. ‘Boltone’s brother was bailiff on a manor owned by Hamecotes’s sister, or some such thing. They were not friends, but they passed the time of day when they met by chance on the street.’

‘Boltone,’ said Michael in satisfaction. ‘This explains a good deal. It tells us why he tried to beat our brains out when we ventured too near the place where he had hidden Hamecotes’s body. And Eudo must have helped him – either with the murder itself, or with disposing of the corpse.’

‘Hamecotes died in exactly the same way as Okehamptone,’ said Bartholomew. ‘Do you see these indentations? They are tooth marks. I saw similar damage on Okehamptone’s neck. Also, note the way the flesh is torn here, which is indicative of a puncture caused by a sharp canine…’

He trailed off. Was his analysis correct? Were the faint bruises caused by human fangs, or had he allowed Rougham’s claims of being gnawed by Clippesby to influence his conclusions? He found he was not sure. Then he became aware that Paxtone was regarding him with some shock.

‘But Okehamptone died of a fever. I saw the body myself.’

‘You did not,’ said Michael tartly. ‘You prayed over it, but you did not examine it. You missed the fact that there was a wound on Okehamptone’s throat that was identical to this one.’

Paxtone was appalled. ‘But Okehamptone was pale and waxen, not at all like Hamecotes, who is black and bloated.’

‘That is because Hamecotes has been submerged in water for God knows how long,’ said Michael impatiently. ‘Of course they do not look the same now.’

‘But how do you know Okehamptone had a wound in his throat?’ asked Paxtone, regarding Bartholomew uneasily. ‘You did not exhume him, did you? Like the medical men in Italy are said to do? I will not condone that sort of activity, Matthew. It is not right!’