Paul Doherty - House of the Red Slayer

Athelstan shook his head. ‘Such matters are never petty,’ he replied. ‘I attended an exorcism once at a little church near Blackfriars. A young boy possessed by demons was speaking in strange tongues and levitating himself from the ground. He claimed the demons entered him after a ceremony in which the corpse of a hanged man was the altar.’

Cranston shuddered. ‘If you need any help…’ the coroner tentatively offered.

Athelstan smiled. ‘That’s most kind of you, My Lord Coroner. As usual your generosity of spirit takes my breath away.’

‘Any friend of the Good Lord is a friend of mine,’ Cranston quipped. ‘Even if he is a monk.’

‘I’m a friar,’ Athelstan replied. ‘Not a monk.’ He glared at Cranston but the coroner threw back his head and roared with laughter at his perennial joke against Athelstan.

At last they left the congested alleyways, taking care to avoid the snow which slid from the high, sloped roofs, and turned on to the main thoroughfare down to London Bridge. The cobbled area was sheeted with ice, coated with a thin layer of snow which a biting wind stirred into sudden, sharp flurries. A few stalls were out, but their keepers hid behind tattered canvas awnings against the biting wind now packing the sky with deep, dark snow clouds.

‘A time to keep secret house,’ Cranston murmured.

A relic-seller stood outside the Abbot of Hyde’s inn trying to sell a staff which, he claimed, had once belonged to Moses. Two prisoners, manacled together and released from the Marshalsea where debtors were held, begged for alms for themselves and other poor unfortunates. Athelstan threw them some pennies, moved to compassion by their ice-blue feet. Both Cranston’s and Athelstan’s horses were well shod but the few people who were about slipped and slithered on the treacherous black ice. These hardy walkers made their way gingerly along, grasping the frames of the houses they passed. Nevertheless, as Cranston remarked, justice was active; outside the hospital of St Thomas a baker had been fastened on a hurdle as punishment for selling mouldy bread. Athelstan remembered the stale food he had spat out earlier and watched as the unfortunate was pulled along by a donkey. A drunken bagpipe player slipped and slid along behind, playing a raucous tune to hide the baker’s groans. In the stocks a taverner, wry-mouthed, was being made to drink sour wine, whilst a whore, fastened to the thews, was whipped by a sweating bailiff who lashed the poor woman’s back with long thick twigs of holly.

‘Sir John,’ Athelstan whispered, ‘the poor woman has had enough.’

‘Sod her!’ Cranston snarled back. ‘She probably deserved it!’

Athelstan looked closer at the coroner’s round red face.

‘Sir John, for pity’s sake, what is the matter?’

Beneath the false bonhomie and wine-guzzling, Athelstan sensed the coroner was either very angry or very anxious. Cranston blinked and smiled falsely. He drew his sword and, turning his horse aside, moved over to the whipping post and slashed at the ropes which held the whore. The woman collapsed in a bloody heap on the ice. The bailiff, a snarl making his ugly face more grotesque, walked threateningly towards Cranston. Sir John waved his sword and pulled the muffler from his face.

‘I am Cranston the City Coroner!’ he yelled.

The man backed off hastily. Sir John delved under his cloak, brought out a few pennies and tossed them to the whore.

‘Earn an honest crust!’ he snapped.

He glared at his companion, daring him to comment before continuing down past the stews and on to the wide expanse of London Bridge. The entire trackway of the bridge was coated with ice and shrouded in mist. Athelstan stopped, his hand on Cranston’s arm.

‘Sir John, something is wrong! It’s so quiet!’

Cranston grinned. ‘Haven’t you realised, Brother? Look down, the river is frozen.’

Athelstan stared in disbelief over the railings of the bridge. Usually the water beneath surged and boiled. Now it seemed the river had been replaced by a field of white ice which stretched as far as the eye could see. Athelstan craned his neck and heard the shouts of boys skating there, using the shin bones of an ox for skates. Someone had even opened a stall and Athelstan’s stomach clenched with hunger as he caught the fragrant smell of hot beef pies. They continued past the chapel of St Thomas on to Bridge street, into Billingsgate and up Botolph’s Lane to Eastcheap. The city seemed to be caught under the spell of an ice witch. Few stalls were out and the usual roar of apprentices and merchants had been silenced by winter’s vice-like grip. They stopped at a pie shop. Athelstan bought and bit deeply into a hot mince pie, savouring the juices which swirled there and the delightful fragrance of freshly baked pastry and highly spiced meat. Cranston watched him eat.

‘You are enjoying that, Brother?’

Yes, My Lord. Why don’t you join me?’

Cranston smiled wickedly. ‘I would love to,’ he replied. ‘But have you not forgotten, friar? It’s Advent. You are supposed to abstain from meat!’

Athelstan looked longingly at the half-eaten pie, then smiled, finished his meal and licked his fingers. Cranston shook his head.

‘What are we to do?’ he wailed mockingly. ‘When friars ignore Canon Law’.

Athelstan licked his lips and leaned closer.

‘You’re wrong, Sir John. Today is the thirteenth of December, a holy day, the feast of St Lucy, virgin and martyr. So I am allowed to eat meat.’ He sketched a sign of the cross in the air. ‘And you can drink twice as much claret as you usually do!’ The friar gathered the reins of the horse in his hands. ‘So, Sir John, what takes us to the Tower?’

Cranston pulled aside as a broad-wheeled cart stacked high with sour green apples trundled by.

‘Sir Ralph Whitton, Constable of the Tower. You have heard of him?’

Athelstan nodded. ‘Who hasn’t? He’s a redoubtable soldier, a brave crusader, and a personal friend of the Regent, John of Gaunt.’

‘Was,’ Cranston intervened. ‘Early this morning Whitton was found in his chamber in the North Bastion of the Tower, his throat slit from ear to ear and more blood on his chest than you would get from a gutted pig.’

‘Any sign of the murderer or the weapon?’

Cranston shook his head, blowing on his ice-edged fingers. ‘Nothing,’ he grated. ‘Whitton had a daughter, Philippa. She was betrothed to Geoffrey Parchmeiner. Apparently Sir Ralph liked the young man and trusted him. Early this morning Geoffrey went to wake his prospective father-in-law and found him murdered.’ He took a deep breath. ‘More curious still, before his death Sir Ralph suspected someone had evil designs on his life. Four days prior to his death he received a written warning.’

‘What was this?’

‘I don’t know but apparently the constable became a frightened man. He left his usual chambers in the turret of the White Tower and for security reasons moved to the North Bastion. The stairway to his chamber was guarded by two trusted retainers. The door between the steps and the passageway was locked. Sir Ralph kept a key and so did the guards. The same is true of Sir Ralph’s chamber. He locked it from the inside, whilst the two guards had another key.’

Cranston suddenly leaned over and grabbed the bridle of Athelstan’s horse, pulling him clear as a huge lump of snow slipped from the sloping roofs above and crashed on to the ice.

‘We should move on,’ the friar remarked drily. ‘Otherwise, Sir John, you may have another corpse on your hands and this time you will be the suspect.’

Cranston belched and took a deep swig from his wineskin.

‘Is young Geoffrey one of the suspects?’ Athelstan enquired.