The Medieval Murderers - Sword of Shame

‘There’s no keyhole, so it must be barred on the inside,’ said the observant Thomas.

Now suspicious, John hammered on the boards with his fist and yelled for Martin Knotte to open it. There was no response and he kicked at the door, this time feeling it creak and bend. A few more hefty blows with his foot splintered several of the thin planks, sufficient for him to put his arm through and push the bar up out of its brackets.

As it flew open, he charged in, shouting angrily. ‘You can’t get away with it by avoiding me, fellow!’ he yelled.

Then he stopped dead, Thomas peering round him at a gruesome sight. Martin Knotte knelt in the corner of the room, as if in prayer. His right shoulder was supported by the wall, keeping his body upright, though he was stone dead. He was impaled on Gwyn’s sword, the point embedded in the lower part of his chest, the pommel jammed into the angle of the walls and floor. Blood lay in a wide, spreading pool around him and dribbled obscenely from the corner of his mouth.

‘Great Christ, what does this mean?’ rasped de Wolfe hoarsely, as his clerk began crossing himself rapidly and murmuring Latin prayers for the dead.

The coroner strode across to the corpse, to make sure that he was past any aid, then pulled the body over on to its side, so that he could withdraw the sword.

‘Is this another murder, master?’ asked Thomas in a horrified whisper.

‘Falling on a sword in a locked room?’ he snapped. ‘I don’t think so, Thomas! The man has committed felo de se ! But why, for God’s sake?’

As he removed the six inches of steel from Knotte’s chest, the more squeamish Thomas turned away and as he did so, his eyes fell on a sheet of parchment left on the end of the table. While the coroner was straightening out the limbs of the corpse, his clerk began reading the document, the ink of which was hardly dry.

He held it out towards de Wolfe. ‘I think I had better read this to you, Crowner!’ he said tremulously.

By noon the following day, Gwyn was back in his usual place in the Bush Inn, sitting opposite John de Wolfe at his table near the fire-pit. Thomas de Peyne was next to him, the pair beaming at the reunion, as was Nesta when she slipped on to the bench alongside her lover.

‘I’ve got five minutes before I need to check that stupid new cook-maid hasn’t overcooked the mutton,’ she said. ‘So tell me what happened today.’

‘I escaped from that damned priory today!’ guffawed Gwyn. ‘Their ale wasn’t too bad, but they live on bloody fish! I’d have grown fins if I’d stayed there any longer.’

‘But why were you able to come out, that’s the point?’ persisted the auburn-haired landlady.

De Wolfe broke in, to begin telling her the story of his suspicions of the whore’s pimp, then of Serlo and Christina, all of which were confounded by Martin Knotte’s suicide.

‘I had it all wrong, twice over,’ he admitted. ‘But there was never any reason even to consider that fat clerk down at the mills.’ He stopped to take a long pull at his quart of Nesta’s fine ale. ‘At least, not until Thomas read out that message that Martin Knotte had penned just before he spitted himself on Gwyn’s sword.’

‘Not my sword any longer, Crowner!’ grunted the Cornishman. ‘Thank God you’ve already taken it back to Roger Trudogge. The bloody thing had bad fortune written all over it, not some Latin message!’

Ignoring his officer’s interruption, John continued with his tale. ‘Serlo and Christina, whatever their secret passions, had nothing to do with Walter’s death, glad though they might now be that it’s turned out this way.’

‘But what about that horrible fellow from the whorehouse?’ demanded Nesta. ‘You said that he had Walter’s purse full of money!’

‘That slimy bastard told the truth for once, that he had taken it from the corpse. When the harlot Bernice told him how much coin she had glimpsed on Walter’s belt, he ran after him, presumably to assault and rob him in the alley. But someone had already done the job for him and all he had to do was snatch the purse and run.’

‘He’ll hang for the theft anyway, even if he didn’t kill Walter,’ observed Gwyn with some satisfaction.

‘But what did Martin Knotte’s message say?’ asked Nesta, impatiently.

De Wolfe gestured at Thomas. ‘Let him tell you, he was the only one who could read it!’

The little clerk wriggled self-consciously, but was quite pleased to be asked. ‘It was a confession of his partiality to the sin of Sodom,’ he began portentously.

‘You mean, he liked buggering boys?’ growled the down-to-earth Gwyn. ‘Then at least that sword did a bit of good, in getting rid of him!’

‘It seems that he had long suffered from this aberration, but had managed to conceal it from everyone, until the night of Walter’s murder,’ continued Thomas. ‘Being a married man, he had to use that hut in the fulling mills for his activities and early that evening, Walter walked in unexpectedly.’

‘Caught him in flagrante delicto with a lad from Bretayne,’ explained John, Bretayne being the slum area down near the west wall of the city.

‘His master was outraged and promised to expose him next day to his wife and the cathedral proctors.’

‘Why them?’ asked Nesta. ‘Surely such a crime should go to the sheriff?’

Thomas shook his head. ‘As a clerk, he was in lower religious orders and could claim ‘benefit of clergy’, he explained. ‘That would remove judgment on his misdeeds from the secular to the ecclesiastical authorities.’

‘Though after the bishop’s Consistory Court found him guilty, they might well hand him over to the sheriff to be hanged,’ added John, with some satisfaction.

‘The note ended with a confession that he had panicked and lain in wait for Walter to come out of the brothel. As his clerk, he knew he was going to the New Inn that night to collect payment for wool, so he followed him and the first chance he had to slay him was in that alley off Waterbeer Street.’ Thomas paused to make the sign of the cross at the memory. ‘He had taken a large knife that was used in the mill for cutting the ropes binding wool bales. He used it to slash at Walter’s neck, then ran away.’

‘Yes, but that was days ago,’ objected Nesta. ‘Why wait until last night to kill himself?’

‘His conscience eventually drove him to it,’ explained the clerk. ‘He knew that Gwyn was being falsely accused by the sheriff and was in grave danger of being hanged. Then the Crowner’s persistence in trying lay the blame on his master Serlo and Christina was the last straw. If he didn’t own up, someone was going to suffer. Even though Martin Knotte was an evil pervert, he still had some sense of honour.’

There was a thoughtful silence, broken by a loud belch from Gwyn. ‘What did that other bastard, Richard de Revelle, say when you took him the parchment?’ he asked.

‘Huffed and puffed, refused to believe it, saying it was a forgery!’ answered John, grinning lopsidedly at the memory of the sheriff’s discomfiture. ‘It took a view of Martin’s corpse, the shattered door and the bloody sword before he grudgingly admitted that it must be true.’

‘A bloody sword indeed!’ said Gwyn with feeling. ‘I wonder what will become of it now?’

John de Wolfe drained the last of his quart. ‘Roger Trudogge said that he might already have sold it again,’ he said. ‘It seems that some knight took a fancy to it before we bought it and wanted the armourer to let him know if it came up for sale again. He wants a good weapon to take on this new Crusade we hear about, the one that’s leaving from Venice.’

‘I wish him luck with it!’ grunted Gwyn. ‘He’ll need it.’