Susanna GREGORY - A Killer in Winter

But by the time Michael reached Bene’t, Harysone had already left, taking with him four marks from scholars interested in reading the treatise and leaving two copies of his work behind. No one knew where the man intended to go next, and Michael was forced to admit defeat. Midwinter Day was looming, and the few hours between dawn at eight and dusk at four passed far too quickly. Michael was running out of daylight. He decided to return to Michaelhouse for the evening, to sit by the fire and allow a cup of mulled wine to banish the chill from his limbs.

The following morning, Ralph de Langelee, Master of Michaelhouse, made a decision that was very popular with most of his students. Because there were only two days left before Christmas, he declared that lectures would be limited to mornings only, while afternoons were to be spent in preparations for the festivities to come. Some undergraduates were dispatched to gather firewood, so that the scholars could relax in rooms that had at least had the chill taken out of them, while others were sent to barter for special foods in the Market Square. Most were delighted by the unexpected reprieve, and Langelee was generally declared to be the best Master since Michaelhouse’s foundation.

Bartholomew was both pleased and frustrated by the enforced break. The two free afternoons would allow him to work on his treatise on fevers and visit his family, but there was a huge amount that his students needed to know if they wanted to be decent physicians, and he hated wasting time. Ever since the plague, there had been a chronic shortage of trained medical men, and Bartholomew was working hard to redress the balance. Teaching was suspended altogether during the Twelve Days, and he fretted that his students were being deprived of too much valuable learning time.

He attended morning mass in the church, although his mind bounced between worrying about his students’ poor grasp of Maimonides and considering the beggar he had found the previous day. He wondered who the man could be, and why he had chosen frigid St Michael’s in which to die. Michael said that Meadowman’s enquiries among the town’s other beggars had so far revealed nothing, so it seemed that the fellow would be buried in a pauper’s grave and be forgotten for ever if no one came forward to claim him as kin.

Bartholomew glanced across to the south aisle, where the body lay under a sheet, and then started to think about whether there would be enough ready-dug graves to last the winter. Digging frozen ground was almost impossible, and he had taken it upon himself to arrange for each church to prepare a few holes before the weather turned bad that year. If there were many more cases like the beggar’s, then they would soon run out.

After breakfast, he had planned to lecture his students on the part of Roger Bacon’s Antidotarium that dealt with mint, but Michael had other ideas. The monk had reluctantly conceded that he needed to forget Harysone for a while and begin his investigation into Norbert’s murder, but he wanted Bartholomew with him when he interviewed the students at Ovyng. Although he was a skilled investigator, it always helped when the physician was there to gauge reactions and observe suspicious behaviour. Michael believed Ovyng represented his best chance of catching Norbert’s killer, and hoped to discover that one of Norbert’s classmates had tired of his cruel tongue and dissolute behaviour, and done away with him. With luck, the case would be resolved quickly and without the need for a complex investigation that would give rise to rumours and speculation about whether a townsman was responsible. Michael did not want Norbert’s murder to spark fights or ill feeling between the University and the town during a volatile period like the Twelve Days.

It had snowed again during the night, but the fall had been light, and many feet had already trodden a groove between the ice-cliffs along St Michael’s Lane. The wind sucked dried pellets of ice from the ground and hurled them in the scholars’ faces as they walked, causing Michael to claim that a more severe winter had not been experienced since the Creation. Bartholomew argued that there was no way to tell, and they were still debating the issue when they arrived at the hostel.

Ovyng was a large house that had been bought for Michaelhouse in 1329, using funds left over from the founder’s will. Michaelhouse could have used the building as accommodation for its own members, but numbers had been low since the plague, and instead Langelee leased it to Ailred for a modest fee. Ovyng was a pleasant place, with a large chamber on the ground floor that served as lecture hall and dining room, and two attic rooms that were used as dormitories.

When Bartholomew and Michael arrived, they found the five students sitting on wooden benches, listening to a lecture given by Ailred himself. It was on Thomas Aquinas’s Sermones , and was a careful exegesis of one of the more difficult sections. It was solid scholarship, but not exciting, and the students looked bored. Three gazed out of the window at the lumpy white blanket that smothered the vegetable patch, while the other two sat bolt upright in an effort to stop themselves from falling asleep. Ailred’s assistant slouched at the back of the class, checking logic exercises that had been scratched into wax-covered tablets.

‘You know why I am here,’ said Michael, as Ailred faltered into silence and the students regarded the monk expectantly. ‘Norbert.’

‘We did not kill him,’ said Ailred’s assistant immediately. He was a large, raw-boned fellow with a ruddy face and teeth that had been chipped into irregular points. He was not much older than his charges, and Bartholomew supposed he had been hired because his youth and inexperience meant that he was cheap. ‘We did not like him, but we did not touch him.’

‘I am accusing no one,’ said Michael, although the cool green gaze that rested on the face of each Franciscan in turn suggested otherwise. ‘I merely want the truth. Does anyone know anything that may help us find the perpetrator of this dreadful crime?’

‘Not really,’ said the assistant. ‘He was not one of us, you see.’

‘Godric means that he was not a Franciscan,’ elaborated Ailred, when the monk’s face indicated that there were several ways this comment could be interpreted, all of them incriminating.

‘It was not just that,’ persisted Godric. ‘He never even tried to be friendly, and he slept more nights away than here.’

‘Godric!’ whispered Ailred in exasperation, closing his eyes and giving them a hearty massage. He looked exhausted, as though the murder of his student had deprived him of sleep. Bartholomew wondered whether the friar’s tiredness derived from the fact that Norbert’s death represented a sizeable loss of income, or whether there were deeper, more sinister reasons for it. ‘When I said we should answer the Senior Proctor’s questions truthfully, I did not mean that you had to betray every one of Norbert’s misdemeanours.’

‘Betray away,’ said Michael, beaming at Godric. ‘A catalogue of Norbert’s indiscretions may prove very useful.’

‘I do not see how,’ said Ailred. ‘But Godric is right about Norbert’s sleeping habits: he was not often found in his own bed. In fact, his repeated absences were one of the reasons why he was not missed for two days. He often stayed away – sometimes with whores, sometimes in taverns and sometimes at his uncle’s house.’

‘I knew he flouted the rules,’ said Michael. ‘But I did not realise he did so on such a regular basis. Why did you not tell me this before?’

Ailred shot him a pained glance. ‘The fees paid by his family were important to us. We did not want him dismissed, although God knows he had no business here. As long as we kept him, the Tulyets would continue paying for his tuition.’