The Malice of Unnatural Death: (55 page)

And then the men had walked in. All the twenty-five who were still alive. By then, of course, John was long dead. He had died
before the Easter term while he was in the sheriff’s
custody, the lucky bastard.

There was a rattle of chains further down the corridor of the gaol, and Robert le Mareschal’s ears pricked. No. Nothing more.

Yes, all the twenty-five had stood there, the bastards, and even as Robert declared their crimes, telling how they had offered
him and his master money, how they’d made the first payments, how they’d brought the wax and the linen to make the figures,
and how their money had gone into the murder of de Sowe, they’d shaken their heads like saddened uncles called to witness
the downfall of a favoured nephew.

So the jury, formed only of local men, had found them all innocent. Not one had been found guilty. Which meant that the man
who had accused them must himself be guilty: Robert.

Never before had he appreciated the irony of an innocent man’s making a true statement of another man’s crime which a jury
then found to be wrong. The sheriff had looked and sounded stern as he read out the verdict in the court of Gaol Delivery,
and suddenly Robert understood that the reward for making his truthful statement was this: he should suffer the penalty which
the men he had accused would have endured had they been found to be guilty. He was to hang.

The chains came closer. He huddled against the wall, too scared to move into the darkness in the corner of the cell.

There was a rattle in the lock, and the door opened. Two men stood outside, the gaoler and the sheriff. ‘Come on, you’re all
right,’ Croyser said.

It made him almost fall to the floor with relief, he was so comforted by those few words. ‘Oh … oh … oh, sir …’

‘Get up, man. Come on!’

He
allowed them to lift him. The gaoler put a hand under his armpit and hefted him to his feet, and he was walking, climbing
stairs, shuffling along corridors, his ossified joints complaining at every step, his muscles, so long unused to effort, almost
giving way.

‘Here.’

The gaoler stopped him heading towards the main exit door, and instead he was taken to another door. There was a noise outside,
a feral, thumping, pounding noise, and he couldn’t place it at first.

Then he knew it. He understood. Turning, he would have fled, but the gaoler held a chain from his shackles, and even as he
felt himself soil his clothes as the terror came back, Robert found himself being pulled backwards into the daylight, in front
of the large crowd who stood stamping on the ground in their annoyance at the delay; dragged on his belly to the ladder with
the rope dangling above it.

And his last thought as the life was choked from him was that the look on the sheriff’s face was relief. Because at last he
had removed the last witness to the crime in which he had been a conspirator.

¹
27 April 1324

²
15 November 1324

³
19 November 1324

⁴
20 November 1324

⁵
21 November 1324

⁶
22 November 1324

⁷
23 November 1324

⁸
24 November 1324

⁹
25 November 1324

¹⁰
30 November 1324

¹¹
5 December 1324

¹²
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