Michael JECKS - The Sticklepath Strangler

‘Where are you going now?’ he asked.

‘Home. He wasn’t at his hut. Maybe he was at the inquest.’

Emma peered at him with interest too, and Simon suddenly recalled Houndestail saying that two girls had found the body. ‘Were you the two that found the skull?’

‘Yes. It plopped out and rolled away,’ Joan said.

‘Ugh! It was horrible,’ Emma added, with a grimace of disgust. ‘It came right at me, and just sat there staring at me. Horrible.’

‘She was sick.’

‘I was not !’

‘She was, and she peed herself. I stayed up there with Master Houndestail.’

‘Have you seen him here often?’ Simon asked. He only had Miles’s word about his infrequent visits to the vill. The girls wanted to return, so he fell into step beside them.

‘I think I saw him once,’ Joan said doubtfully, ‘but I was very young then.’

Emma interrupted. ‘I ran to get help, and soon everyone was up on the road.’

‘Were there many travellers here that day?’ Simon wondered.

Joan answered. ‘Only Master Houndestail and Ivo Bel. I don’t like him.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, he’s my uncle, but he’s never acted like one. My father has been very poor, but Master Bel wouldn’t help him.’

‘What of your parents?’ Simon said to Emma.

She reddened. ‘My father is dead, and my mother was away.’

Her tone was defensive, and Simon wondered whether her mother had a reputation – perhaps she was a whore. Rather than upset her further, he nodded to Joan. ‘It’s a shame when brothers fall out.’

‘They just had an argument, I think, and now they won’t talk.’

‘What did they argue about?’ Simon said, idly spinning another stone.

‘Serlo said it was about the vampire,’ Emma said.

‘Father says there never was a vampire,’ Joan sneered.

Simon had been picking up another stone, but it fell through his fingers. ‘What do you mean, vampire?’

‘It’s nothing,’ Joan said scathingly. ‘Vampires aren’t real. I asked my mother.’

‘This Serlo – what did he tell you?’

Emma looked at Joan, suddenly nervous in the face of Simon’s interest. ‘He just said that a girl had been killed, but not by a vampire.’

Joan said, ‘Parson Gervase says that there never was one here.’

‘My mother was very upset when I asked about them,’ Emma said in a small voice. ‘My uncle wasn’t a vampire, she said.’

They were nearing the main sticklepath, and Simon opened his mouth to ask more, when he heard a yell. It came from the right, down near the river, and he immediately pelted off in that direction. There was a shrill scream, then a woman’s voice shouting for help, then the loud roar of a man’s voice raised again in horror, and what sounded like pain.

It was the mill. Splashing through muddy puddles, he sent jets of filthy water in every direction, and then he was on grass at the rear of the mill’s building, and he could see her. A woman standing near the leat, her hands clenched at her cheeks, but still she gave vent to her shock.

Simon took it all in at a glance. In the water was a man’s body, and even as Simon ran to it, it was sucked under, the massive wooden paddles of the wheel clubbing it remorselessly with the sound of damp cloth being pounded clean in a tub, leaving only a feather of reddened water streaming away from the wheel, and then the foam at its base turned crimson.

Reeve Alexander sat in his hall for a long time after Drogo had left. He heard the Forester greet his men outside, their laughter, then the sound of their booted feet fading away in the distance. He was just about to shout for his maid and a fresh jug of wine, when he heard more steps in the screens.

‘Who the devil is it now?’ he wondered aloud, grimly staring at the gap which gave onto the passage. Then: ‘Ivo? What do you want?’

Bel walked in smiling and went straight to Alexander’s table, taking his seat at the end. ‘Hello, Reeve. I was surprised at the inquest today. Were you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The skeleton. Hadn’t it shrunk?’

‘If you want to talk in riddles, man, bugger off. I’m not in the mood for stupidity today.’

‘Very well. I shall speak to the Coroner instead then, or the Keeper. It’s nothing to me. I was just wondering how that girl could have been found in that grave today.’

‘You’re drunk!’

The smile vanished from Bel’s face. ‘I’ll take no more shit from you, Reeve, and that’s your only warning. You’ve accused me of stupidity and drunkenness; now I’ll accuse you of murder.’

Alexander sputtered angrily. ‘Murder! You primping sodomite! Get out of here! You have the nerve, the ballocks to come in here and accuse me, the Reeve, of–’

‘Cool yourself, Reeve. I saw you – you and the good Forester – both walking up the hill with a man’s body and a shovel. Yes, I watched you, both of you, digging a hole, throwing the man into the pit, covering him and returning to the vill. Do you remember that night?’

Reeve Alexander kept his face neutral. ‘You were dreaming.’

‘That’s better. A measured response. Yes, I am happier with that. Now, I return to my first question: how did the man’s body become a girl’s? Interesting. Perhaps one of the men who buried the man also buried the girl – and that would mean that one of you was also the vampire, wouldn’t it?’

‘Perhaps it was the man who watched the burial who was the murderer?’ Alexander said coldly.

‘Perhaps.’ Bel sat back easily and picked at a sliver of meat between his teeth. ‘But if all I wanted to do was see you hanged, I’d have gone to see the Coroner, wouldn’t I?’

‘So what do you want with me?’ Alexander demanded. This shit could see him dumped in gaol with what he knew.

Bel leaned forward, his long face staring intently at the Reeve’s. ‘What I want is to see that the felon is caught,’ he said quietly. ‘And we know who the culprit is, don’t we? That nasty fellow, Thomas Garde.’

‘But he’s your brother!’ Alexander protested.

Bel ignored him. ‘I want him accused, I want him imprisoned, and I want him dead.’

‘I can’t do that. I have no authority.’

‘You are the Reeve.’ Bel stood, dropping a purse of coins on the table. ‘There you are. Plenty to cover the cost of someone who suddenly remembers seeing Thomas killing the girls.’

Alexander groaned and cast a look at the wall in a gesture of theatrical disbelief. ‘Bel, even if I wanted to, Thomas wasn’t here when the first two died. He was still living in France.’

‘Where there’s a will…’ Ivo patted the purse. ‘I would hate the Coroner to come to the conclusion that you had done it. Oh, and I’d be grateful if you could talk to William Taverner. I believe he has been thinking of telling me to leave his inn and I don’t want that. Right! Well, I’m glad the murders are resolved at last. It’ll be a weight off your mind, I know.’

Chuckling to himself, he walked from the room, Alexander’s eyes following him to the screens. When the door shut behind him, the Reeve picked up the purse and weighed it in his hands, shouting for wine.

By the time Cecilia rushed in, her master was sitting shaking with silent mirth, and when he saw her pour his wine, he began to laugh out loud, tears falling from his eyes.

Not only had he been given a felon, someone to be convicted, handed to him on a plate, he had even been given the money to pay for his conviction! It was only a shame that Thomas couldn’t actually have done the murders.

But, as Alexander reflected, wiping the tears from his eyes, you couldn’t have everything.