Michael JECKS - The Sticklepath Strangler

Felicia was relieved. It was done now. Even the hounds appeared to have realised and both had stopped their howling. When they had stopped, she didn’t know, for she had been watching the events at the graveside, but now that she turned back, she noticed that they were both silent in their kennel.

She left them and walked through the crowd, pushing her way onwards until she came to her father’s body. All about him were the men of the vill, standing and staring down sombrely, while Gunilda knelt weeping nearby. Felicia looked at her, feeling a curious detachment.

There was an almost total absence of feeling for her mother. It was strange, but now, as she looked at Gunilda, she felt only a vague sympathy for her. Gunilda had tried to protect her from Samson, but she had failed.

Then the knight was in front of her, turning her slightly so that her attention couldn’t focus on the dead body of her father.

‘Are you all right?’ Baldwin asked softly. ‘This is a terrible place for you to be, child.’

‘I’m fine. Why shouldn’t I be?’

Baldwin studied her for a moment. She stood quietly, her eyes steady. If he had to bet, he would gamble that she was less affected by the dreadful scene than he was himself.

‘I have come to fetch Mother,’ Felicia said.

‘Yes,’ Baldwin said, standing aside. He saw the Coroner glowering, and walked to him. ‘Don’t worry, Roger. There’s nothing to concern you here.’

‘Nothing? I just witnessed a murder!’

‘Maybe you saw a woman stab an already dead man. I don’t know, we shall have to discuss the matter with the Church authorities. I may be able to talk to the Bishop. Essentially, it is an ecclesiastical affair. Nothing to do with us.’

‘I can just see the King’s Sheriff taking that view,’ Coroner Roger scoffed, but then he nodded. ‘Whatever happens, though, I’ll be able to consider it more rationally tomorrow morning after a good night’s sleep and a meal.’

‘Yes,’ Baldwin said, but he was troubled as he watched Felicia go to Gunilda’s side. She bent, taking her mother’s arm, and Gunilda gazed up at her with alarm, as though she could not remember her own daughter’s face. A young lad walked over to them, and Baldwin recognised Vincent. He took Gunilda’s other arm, and she allowed herself to be led away between the two youngsters.

Baldwin could not help but think that he would himself prefer death to life, rather than see such a lack of sorrow on his own daughter’s face. Felicia had witnessed her father’s murder, but she looked as triumphant as a woman who has seen her husband’s murderer executed.

Felicia opened the door and thrust it wide with her hip. Carefully she pulled her mother inside, and Vin trailed in their wake, halfheartedly holding Gunilda’s hand.

‘I’ll leave you, then,’ he said.

‘There’s no hurry,’ Felicia said, settling her mother on a stool and wiping Gunilda’s brow.

Vin looked away with embarrassment. He thought there was every chance that Gunilda would be taken for the murder of her husband, although there was the claim of homicide while her mind was unbalanced. Anyone could believe that, having witnessed the scene. Perhaps she was fortunate that the Coroner and Keeper were there to see the whole terrible affair.

Felicia was silent. Passing him a jug, she drank deeply from a cup, then said, ‘You remember that day by the river? You ran away then. Why?’

He couldn’t meet her eyes. ‘I was scared of your father.’

‘You’re safe from him now, Vin.’

‘I know,’ he said with a half grin. ‘That was why I came back last night.’ Her hand touched his, gripping it and lifting it to her heart, where she held it gently cupping the swelling of her breast. Leaving his hand there, she tugged at the laces of her dress. Both hands now, pulling the material apart so that he could glimpse the rounded flesh beneath, and then the cloth of her tunic came away and he could see her flat belly, the rising dark hairs at the base, her thighs.

‘Do you want me again?’ she murmured, shuffling out of her clothes and reaching up to kiss him.

He responded eagerly. ‘I thought last night proved that well enough.’

‘You seem to like my body,’ she smiled, chuckling throatily, the hard points of her nipples almost brushing his chest. He had the fleeting impression that they could stab him to the heart.

‘Your father… I was scared. He’d have killed me,’ he said as she picked up her clothes unselfconsciously, bundling them into a ball and throwing them into a corner next to a little torn apron.

She took his hand and lifted it to her breast, feeling how he trembled. ‘He’d never have known, Vin.’

‘ Bitch! ’

They had both forgotten Gunilda, who had remained seated on her stool, and who now stood and hurled herself at her daughter, flailing with her fists.

‘Get away from him! What are you, a she-devil? You would whore in my own house? Get out, you fool, leave this place!’ she shrieked at Vin, and he retreated from her.

‘You call me a bitch?’ Felicia bawled. ‘You dare call me that after lying back and letting him rape me every night? And you know what he did with those girls, don’t you? When they batted their eyelashes at him, he went with them! And you let him, you old cow!’

‘Get out, boy! Have nothing to do with her!’ Gunilda shouted at Vin.

All he could do was flee, and he pelted from the place, out to the yard. He could remember every curve and swell of her body as though it was there before him, and the thought of lying with her tore at him, making him wonder whether he should go back, ask her to walk out with him, away from the house, back to their riverbank, but as he reached the main roadway, he paused and leaned against a pollarded tree, resting his brow on the bark. A thin mizzle was falling, kissing his face with a touch as light as a fairy’s, gentle little kisses that began to soothe him.

Then, listening to the river, he realised that he now knew what had happened. And he couldn’t tell anyone.

Baldwin rose with the first light, and was up at the table before the host had woken or stirred the fire.

He was more concerned than he could remember over the events of the previous evening. Never before in England had he witnessed that sort of crowd behaviour, with a whole vill joining together against the law, prepared to destroy a man from the worst motives, from bigotry and superstition. It was a hackneyed word, ‘superstition’, one which he had used too many times recently, but it was the only one which fitted the behaviour of the mob last night.

The memory of that terrible anger, and of his own frustration, and worse, the image of that dagger rising and plunging again and again into the breast of the hapless Samson, made Baldwin feel physically sick. He was not squeamish, he had killed men himself: he had killed one already this summer, but that was different. This was the slaughter of a man whose only crime at the time was that his own companions and neighbours had mistakenly thought him dead when in fact he was only wounded.

At least his murder was less cruel than leaving him buried alive. Not that the reflection was itself particularly comforting. The man had been rescued, only to be struck down. No matter how brutal he had been in life, he didn’t deserve that end.

The people had wished to burn him alive, believing him to be guilty of the murder of the vill’s children, and yet Samson was already buried when Emma died. The killer must be someone else.

Baldwin leaned on his elbows, resting his chin on his hands. There had been six murders, if he was right. First Ansel de Hocsenham in 1315, the first year of the famine. That happened before Thomas and Nicky arrived, so they were innocent. From what the Reeve had said, Denise died in 1316, so she too died before Thomas got here, and Athelhard was killed that same year; the other girl, Mary, was strangled a little while after his death, as though the true killer was cocking a snook at the vill. Aline died in 1318, and Emma now in 1322. There was no logic to these deaths in terms of the gaps between each one, no apparent sequence that Baldwin could detect.