The Medieval Murderers - King Arthur's Bones

Malinferno leaned forward into the light and patted the old man’s hand.

‘I am glad you did, Augustus. But if only you had told me where you found the bones, I might have known earlier what this was all about. Trevenna meant nothing to me.’

Augustus gurgled with delight.

‘I had to put you off the track. If I had told you straight away the church was half a mile from Tintagel Castle, you would have guessed the connection immediately.’

Malinferno smiled ruefully.

‘And I might not have got into so much trouble. Never mind. We shall have a resolution to your dilemma very soon.’

Malinferno had a good reason to draw the evening out, as he was now expecting a visitor. That is, if his guesswork was correct. If it wasn’t, the bones would be lost and Kitten’s murderer would remain undiscovered. Though Bromhead was unaware of his friend’s intense look, deep in his cups as he was, Malinferno noticed that Doll was eyeing him closely.

‘Something on your mind, Miss Pocket?’

Doll narrowed her eyes and frowned. ‘It’s not me, Signor Malinferno, who looks like they got something to hide. Want to tell us what you’re up to?’

Malinferno laughed. ‘You are very perspicacious, Doll. I am hoping matters will resolve themselves pretty soon, actually. However, it will involve a little play-acting from you. But seeing as how you told me recently that such a profession was an aspiration of yours, you will not mind, I am sure.’

‘I don’t know who this Percy Caysius feller is, but tell me what you want, and I will oblige.’

‘I am expecting a caller, but he will not come if you are still here. I suggest that, now Augustus has finished his meal and told us his story, you appear to take the remains of the repast back to the chophouse. Leaving me on my own.’

Bromhead belched gently and asked the obvious question. ‘What of me, Giuseppe? Do I leave too?’

Malinferno put a restraining arm on Bromhead’s. ‘That will not be necessary, Gus. Our caller does not know you are here, I think. And I could do with your assistance when he arrives. All I suggest is that you place yourself behind the door here when I turn out this lamp, and retire to my bedroom.’

Bromhead shuddered at the possibility of a physical encounter, but he nodded his head in acquiescence.

‘And what am I to do, Joe?’ This retort was from Doll. ‘Run away like some weak female?’

‘You can run, Doll Pocket, but I suggest that when you have returned the dirty crockery, you run in the direction of the nearest magistrate, and bring him here forthwith.’

Doll gave him an angry look full of storm clouds and thunder. But she collected the empty plates and ale-jug and made her way down the stairs. When Malinferno heard the front door close, he took the oil-lamp and turned the wick low. Crossing the landing, he went into his bedroom, making sure that the lamp stood in the window there. Then he turned the lamp out. Anyone observing from the street would assume that Malinferno had retired for the night and that he was now alone.

Almost half an hour passed, and Malinferno began to doubt his own convictions. After the fiasco of incarcerating the government spy and then discovering he was not the man seeking the bones, he had been in a quandary. Then he remembered something Doll had said earlier on. When he tried to put the evidence together, she had said his story was full of holes. In fact it had been Doll who had said there was no proof Augustus was dead. She had been correct about that. It had set him to finding other holes, and he had seen it as they had been walking back to Creechurch Lane. Casteix had said it first. The man who sawed his leg in half had resembled a Breton peasant. Swarthy, he had said, and no doubt stocky. Dale had suggested the family interested in guarding Arthur’s bones was Welsh, and Crouch had said the same. Bromhead had virtually confirmed that with his reference to a dark-skinned eel of a man. That he had not exactly said he was short was not surprising, taking into account Bromhead’s own lack of stature. The only conclusion Malinferno could come to was that two men had been following him all this time. And the one who had killed Kitten was still on the streets of London searching for the bones.

Suddenly he heard a scuffling sound on the stairs, and the slightest of creaks. He knew exactly where the man now mounting the stairs had stepped. He had trodden there himself once when he had been sneaking a willing young girl to his room. It had alerted Mrs Stanhope, and he had never made the same mistake again. The intruder, unfamiliar with the stairs, had stepped on the middle step on the half-landing. Malinferno poked his nose out of his door, but could not see the pale face of Augustus staring back at him across the landing. He was afraid the old man had perhaps fallen asleep and that he was on his own. His heart raced, and he tucked himself in behind his bedroom door. After a few more seconds the door began to swing silently open.

How he then came to be disposing of a dead body was something of a mystery to Joe Malinferno. When he sat down with Augustus and Doll later, he reasoned that the man, who was clearly Merrick, had been a step ahead of him. He had felt the prick of a blade through the crack in the door on the side where the hinges were. Merrick had guessed he was hiding behind the door somehow, and attacked. He had stumbled forward, blood pulsing from the wound in his back. A wound that Doll had now expertly bound with a torn section of her muslin dress, so that she now revealed a satisfying expanse of white thigh to Malinferno’s hungry gaze. Matters had from the point of being stabbed got quite confused for him. When Merrick fell on him, he had feared for his life. But a saviour had arrived in the form of Doll Pocket. It seemed she had spurned the idea of calling out the Runners on the grounds that they would not take too kindly to the requests of a common bawd. Besides, Malinferno hadn’t expected them to come. He had only asked it of her to get her out of danger. But Doll had other ideas than being typecast as the weak and fainting female.

‘I left the dirty dishes at the door of St Mary Axe church and sneaked back,’ she explained. ‘The man wasn’t all that hard to spot, once you knew where he was hiding. I’ve hung around in plenty of doorways myself, making sure the charleys or the Runners don’t notice me. When he entered the house, I followed him. And just as well for you it was, Joe Malinferno. For I pulled him off your back just in time.’

The man in question nodded sagely and glanced across at where Augustus Bromhead sat. The little antiquarian was ashen-faced and deep in thought, and Malinferno was unsure how to break into his reverie. It was Doll who spoke up boldly.

‘And we must both thank Gus for his bravery. That sly little bastard Merrick was as slippery as Gus said, and he would have done for us both if he hadn’t come in when he did.’

Bromhead gave a despairing cry. ‘But I killed him.’

Doll walked swiftly over to him and buried his head in her ample bosom. Malinferno looked on with envy. ‘No. It was an accident. You tried to wrest the knife off him, and his arm got twisted around. He fell on his own blade, if you ask me.’

Bromhead’s sobs subsided, but he kept his head between Doll’s breasts longer than Joe thought necessary.

The disposal of the body had been relatively easy. It had merely required calling on the services of Ben Crouch, who with a free ‘large one’ on offer ended up bearing them no more ill will. He even made light of Doll’s assault on his jewels.

‘I do like a good tussle before the main event. It perks up the spirit, don’t it?’

But he was quick to exit with his body, when Doll offered to reacquaint him with the force of her grip. Merrick, the killer of Kitten, was soon fated to decorate the autopsy slab at St Bartholomew’s, where he would be drawn and quartered in the most modern of ways. Justice of a sharp and rough kind, but justice all the same.