The Medieval Murderers - The Tainted Relic

‘See! I told you!’

‘Yes, I see it,’ said Jack. ‘So what?’

Only now did I glance down at the item in my palm. It was a shaped sliver of wood all right, but it wasn’t a piece of the True Cross. For one thing, the wood was new and unscarred.

‘That is a sound-post, Nick,’ said Abel. ‘Every lute has them. They’re put inside to strengthen the frame.’

‘So what exactly was your idea, Nicholas?’ said Jack. ‘That the cutpurse might have slipped what you’re searching for inside the lute?’

‘Stranger things have happened,’ I said.

I could see from the expression on Jack’s face that he was undecided whether to laugh or curl his lip in scorn. Abel merely looked baffled.

Luckily, at that moment the kitchen door opened and once again Gog (or Magog) ushered us into Justice Farnaby’s presence. The scene was much as we’d left it. Peter Perkin, still crestfallen, stood before the oak chair. Ben Nightingale was sitting on a bench, looking dazed. The aged clerk’s pen was poised above a pile of paper. The only change was in the expression on Farnaby’s face. Instead of looking grave and precise, he looked rather as Jack had done just now, somewhere between amused and scornful.

‘They say truth will out, don’t they,’ he said, half to himself. ‘Well, Master Revill, it appears as though you at least were telling the truth. The trouble is that a grain of truth is wrapped up in a tissue of lies.’

I nodded, though I hadn’t the slightest notion what he was talking about.

‘This person here,’ continued Farnaby, indicating Perkin the cutpurse, ‘has made a deposition to Pie-Powder Court. My clerk here will read out the salient features of it.’

The clerk, elderly, with grey hair straggling from under his cap, bent his head to the topmost sheet of paper and cleared his throat in a way that might have been thought excessive onstage.

‘Witness Perkin deposes…let me see…deposes that he is in the habit of attending Bartholomew Fair, sometimes in company with his good friend Benjamin Nightingale, ballad singer of Tooley Street…because he enjoys the honey tones of his friend’s voice when he sings…witness deposes that his mother, that is Ben Nightingale’s mother, knew what she was about when she married a man called Nightingale and that she must have had foreknowledge that her son would grow into a fine-’

‘Never mind all that nonsense,’ said Farnaby. ‘Get to the quick of the matter.’

Put out, the clerk snuffled. He coughed to clear his throat and moved his pen down the page.

‘…er…witness Perkin acknowledges that he is a dealer in small items…he calls himself a, er, “snapper-up of trifles”…this is his sole trade…Perkin says that he went to the tent of one Ulysses Hatch, publisher and bookseller, because he had purchased items from the aforesaid Hatch on other occasions. Once in the tent, Perkin was shown a box which contained a glass tube which contained, in turn, a piece of wood which the aforesaid Hatch claimed to be a fragment from the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. Witness states that he enquired as to the price of the item but then left the tent because his pockets were not deep enough for the item in question. Asked to explain this, he said that he didn’t have the cash. Furthermore, he said, he was somewhat alarmed by the presence of a talking raven in the tent. Outside the tent witness saw three gentlemen who from their shifty expressions he judged to be players…’

We stiffened at this but Justice Farnaby shot us a warning glance.

‘Perkin deposes that he later thought better of his rejection of the item and, after consulting with his good friend Nightingale, returned to the tent to make another offer to Ulysses Hatch, publisher and bookseller…’

At this point the clerk was overcome by a fit of coughing and lost his place in the text. Farnaby looked on with pursed lips. Presumably what we were listening to was what the Justice had recently referred to as a tissue of lies. Perkin as a snapper-up of trifles, eh? Well, that was one way of describing a cutpurse. The only accurate parts of the statement related to Perkin’s account of his two visits to Hatch’s tent. Whether he was there by chance on the first occasion or whether he was on the lookout for what he could filch, he’d been shown the glass vial. Hatch had obviously been as prepared to sell it to the cutpurse as to Tom Gally. Hadn’t he said he’d sell to anyone if the price was right? Perkin had left the tent, bumping into us on the way out. With or without consulting Nightingale, he’d gone back in an attempt to steal the relic. Perhaps he’d sneaked into the tent somehow, been surprised by Hatch and a struggle had followed. Perkin had wrested the pistol from Hatch’s grasp…so that it detonated at close quarters…but if that was so, surely he’d be covered in burns or scorch marks?

The clerk gave a final cough, expelling a bolus of phlegm into a filthy handkerchief. Then he resumed his, or rather Perkin’s, account.

‘…witness deposes that he entered Master Hatch’s tent to negotiate over the sale of the relic. There was a pistol lying to one side on top of a chest. Witness says he does not know whether he was more alarmed by the sight of the pistol or by the presence of the raven which told him to, er, jump to it. For a second time, the aforesaid Hatch produced the box which contained the glass vial which contained, in turn, a piece-’

‘Oh, get on with it, man,’ said Farnaby. ‘We know what it contained. To the quick of the matter.’

‘Yes, sir…witness Perkin states that the next thing which happened was…was that…’

But we were never destined to learn what happened next from the clerk’s own mouth for he was again seized by a coughing fit. His thin frame shook and he unfolded the filthy handkerchief again preparatory to expelling whole flights of phlegm.

Justice Farnaby, despairing of his clerk, had to speak up loudly to drown out the sounds of hawking and spitting. ‘In short, witness Perkin here claims that he is quite innocent of the murder of Ulysses Hatch, publisher and bookseller. He says that the real killler is-’

‘Shut your gob!’

As it happened, the clerk’s titanic throat-clearing ceased at the very moment that these heretical words rang out in Pie-Powder Court. Or rather, the words didn’t so much ring out as squawk out. Another oddity was that the words were delivered not from ground level, where a man might have been standing, but from many feet above our heads. The refectory was criss-crossed by beams.

We all looked up. On a beam almost directly above Justice Farnaby was perched a bird that I recognized. So did Peter Perkin. He held out a trembling arm.

‘That’s him,’ he said. ‘That’s the bird that killed his master. He jumped on the pistol as it was lying there and the thing fell sideways and got discharged somehow and shot Master Hatch in the throat.’

‘Shut your gob!’ said Hold-fast, and then for good measure, ‘Jump to it!’

The raven bent his head downward, assessing the effect of his instructions to the court. Nobody spoke. The Justice was silent. Even the clerk stopped examining the contents of his handkerchief to raise his head.

For some reason I straight away believed what Perkin had said. It was too ridiculous not to be true. Who could make up such a tale? I’d seen for myself the primed pistol and the way in which Hatch laid it carelessly to one side when we were talking. It was quite plausible that the bird had landed-clumsily, accidentally, even intentionally perhaps (for who can tell what was going on inside that dark little head)-on the thing and had set it off. Men are always shooting at birds. Why shouldn’t it happen the other way about, and a bird shoot a man? Even with a bird that had adopted a man and might be presumed to be his special friend.