By Murder's Bright Light (23 page)

The man nodded vigorously.

‘So we asked Trumpington if a tiler had been summoned, and when he said yes we accepted his story.’ Cranston leaned over for Lady Maude to fill his goblet. ‘And if the beadle had had the roof examined by a tiler, who had found no signs of disturbance, then this could not be how the thief entered the house. But’ – he waved an airy hand – ‘this is where our logic comes in. Brother Athelstan and I considered the following possibility: what if Trumpington, the beadle, was involved in the housebreaking and the tiler used to check the roofs was also involved?’ Cranston slurped from the goblet. ‘A subtle little piece of trickery that might have deceived us had we not noticed those damp rushes.’ Cranston licked his lips. ‘Isn’t that right, Brother?’

‘Sir John,’ Athelstan said, ‘your logic is impeccable. Trumpington and the tiler were working hand in glove. The beadle would find out which houses were empty and how they were organised. Then, while he was patrolling the streets, bawling out all was well, his accomplice was busy robbing the house.

‘Have they confessed?’ Shawditch asked.

‘Oh yes, and some of the plunder has been found in their houses,’ Cranston replied. ‘They are now in Newgate awaiting trial. For the murder of that girl, both will hang.’

He got to his feet and warmed his great backside before the fire. ‘Master Shawditch,’ he said magnanimously, ‘you may have credit for the arrest.’

‘Sir John, I thank you.’

‘Nonsense!’ Cranston replied. ‘Now be off with you. Make sure that all the stolen property is returned to its owners.’

Once the under-sheriff had left, Cranston was about to continue with his tales of triumph, even threatening to go back to his great victory on the river. But Athelstan yawned and stretched.

‘Sir John, I thank you for your hospitality, but the hour is late and tomorrow we have other business.’

‘I know, I know,’ Cranston replied testily. ‘That bloody Fisher of Men is still sending messages to me. He probably wants to be paid for the corpses he’s plucked out of the river.’

Lady Maude got to her feet and pointed to a corner of the parlour.

‘Brother Athelstan, I have made up a comfortable bed for you.’

Athelstan thanked her, rose and stretched.

‘Now, come on, Sir John.’ Lady Maude seized her husband by the elbow. ‘Come. The poppets will be up early and you know they always cry for Daddy.’

Sir John, mollified, headed towards the door and the stairs to the bedchamber. He turned and waggled a finger at Athelstan.

‘You sleep well, Brother, and don’t worry about Gog and Magog. They are both locked in the kitchen. They won’t get out and eat you!’

Athelstan breathed a sigh of relief- Cranston’s new acquisitions, two great Irish wolfhounds, were harmless enough but so boisterous in their greetings they could knock the wind from the unwary visitor.

Sir John and his wife left. Athelstan snuffed out the candles and knelt by his bed to say his prayers, but his mind kept going back to Crawley lying on the deck and to the words he had uttered just before he swooned.

The door opened behind him.

‘Brother?’

‘Yes, Sir John?’ Athelstan replied without turning.

‘You know I am a terrible teller of tales?’

Athelstan smiled. ‘You are a great man, Sir John.’

‘No, Brother, it is you who deserve the credit. On behalf of that little murdered girl, I thank you. You saw old Jack do justice.’

The door closed. Athelstan finished his prayers, crossed himself and climbed into bed. He had intended to lie awake and think, but his head had hardly touched the bolster before he was fast asleep.

His awakening the next morning, however, was far from peaceful. He woke to find one of the great wolfhounds lying on top of him. The poppets, who viewed Athelstan as a favourite uncle, were staggering about with pieces of bread smeared with honey. They were screaming with laughter as they tried to force the bread between his lips. Athelstan climbed sleepily from the bed in a whirl of hurling limbs, soft little bodies and pieces of honey-coated bread. The other wolfhound, Magog, also appeared and made his contribution to the growing clamour. If Athelstan didn’t want the bread and honey, the dogs certainly did. They began to butt the baby boys in their fat little stomachs.

Lady Maude arrived and her few quiet words had their desired effect. The wolfhounds disappeared beneath the table. The two poppets would have joined them, but their mother grabbed them both and dragged them off for their morning wash. Boscombe, Cranston’s small, fat steward, a model of courtly courtesy, appeared with soap, towel and razor.

Athelstan washed and shaved before the fire then joined Sir John, dressed now in more sober attire, to breakfast in the kitchen. Leif the beggar also arrived. Athelstan was always astonished at the skinny beggar’s appetite – it was as if he was constantly on the verge of death through starvation. Leif had brought a companion, Picknose – so named because of a disgusting personal habit. The two were listening in rapt admiration as Sir John, using knives and pieces of bread, described Eustace the Monk’s attack along the Thames. Athelstan ignored them all, ate a hasty breakfast and went outside. The morning, despite the clear skies, was bitterly cold. Athelstan crossed to St Mary Le Bow, where the friendly priest allowed him to celebrate Mass in a chantry chapel.

Cranston was waiting when Athelstan left the church. He handed the friar his cloak and staff.

‘I have just visited that old nag of yours,’ he said.

‘Philomel is not an old nag, Sir John. He’s a bit like yourself, a stout warhorse who may have seen better days.’

Cranston roared with laughter as they made their way down Bread Street across Old Fish Street and Trinity towards the quayside. The city was beginning to stir, carts crashed along, pulled by great dray horses with hogged manes, the steam from their sweaty flanks raising clouds in the cold morning air. Pedlars pushed their barrows; sleepy-eyed apprentices, not alert enough for mischief, laid out stalls and extinguished the lamps hanging outside their masters’ houses. Night pots were being emptied from upper windows and a burly-faced trader, covered in someone’s night soil, was fairly dancing with rage. The dung-carts were out scraping the muck from the sewers and picking up the detritus from the previous day, which included dead cats and a dog, its back broken by a cartwheel. A group of Benedictine monks escorted a coffin down towards one of the churches. A chanteur entertained the early morning crowds with a story of being spirited away to a fabulous fairy city under a mountain outside Dublin. Some drunken roisterers, halters around their necks, their hose pulled down about their ankles, were being led up to the Tun to spend the morning in disgrace in the huge cage there. At the entrance to Vintry two poles stuck in the ground bore the heads of executed French pirates, their features unrecognisable under the muck and refuse that had been thrown at them.

Cranston and Athelstan reached the quayside, which was thronged with merchant ships; the sky was almost blacked out by a forest of masts, spars and cranes. They passed the
Aleppo,
the
George,
the
Christopher
and the
Black Cock,
their holds open to receive bundles of English wool, iron, salt, meat and cloths from Midland towns. Athelstan looked between the ships and glimpsed the war cogs riding at anchor. Cranston led him down to the alehouse where they had last met the Fisher of Men. He quietly asked the tapster to fetch the fellow, ordered two blackjacks of ale, sat in the same corner of the tavern as before and waited. The Fisher of Men soon appeared. His narrow, skeletal face glowed with pleasure at the profits he had harvested by plundering the dead and taking corpses from the river. His gargoyles thronged in the doorway waiting. The Fisher of Men refused Cranston’s offer of refreshment but clapped his hands and gave Cranston and Athelstan a mocking bow.

‘My Lord, your Holiness! At last you grace us with your presence!’

‘Bugger off!’ Cranston snapped. ‘You are wasting time!’

‘Would I waste the time of the mighty Cranston? No, come with me, my lord coroner, I’ll show you a great mystery.’

Cranston shrugged. He and Athelstan followed the sinister figure and his motley gang out into the alleyway and through a maze of urine-smelling runnels until they stopped before a large, shabby warehouse.

‘Oh Lord!’ Cranston breathed. ‘Mermaid’s paps! He is going to show us his wares!’

The Fisher of Men produced a key, unlocked the door and led them into the darkness. Athelstan immediately gagged at the fishy, stale-water smell mingled with the sickly-sweet stench of corruption. The gargoyles thronged around him. ‘Lights!’ the Fisher of Men shouted. ‘Let there be light, for the darkness cannot comprehend the light.’

Athelstan put his hand out to steady himself and felt something cold, wet and spongy beneath him. He peered down and bit back his cry as he saw it was the grey, puffed face of a corpse. He rubbed his hand on his robe and waited as torches and candles were lit.

‘Oh, for the love of God!’ Cranston breathed. ‘Brother, look around you!’

The warehouse was built like a great barn. Everywhere, in makeshift boxes which the Fisher of Men must have filched from different places, were the corpses of those hauled from the Thames – forty or fifty at least. Athelstan glimpsed a thin-faced young woman, an archer with a bloody wound in his chest, an old woman who lay on a sopping yellow rag, even a small lapdog that must have fallen from someone’s arms.

‘Come this way! Come this way!’

The Fisher of Men led them to the far end of the barn, where an arrow box was propped against the wall. There was a man’s body in it. Athelstan, thinking he was going to be sick, looked away. Cranston, though, studied the corpse carefully. It was that of a tall, well-built man with black hair and thin features; the eyeless face bore the marks of fish bites and the flesh was puffy and white like old wool after it has been dipped in dirty water. The man’s boots were gone – they, along with other possessions, were the perquisites of the Fisher of Men. The thin linen shirt was open and Cranston saw a purple-red bruise on the chest and marks on the neck. The Fisher of Men fairly danced beside the body.

‘See, see, see who it is!’

‘I see a corpse,’ Cranston replied drily. ‘Probably a sailor’s.’

‘Correct! Correct! But which sailor?’

Cranston glowered at the man. ‘One of those killed in the battle?’

‘Oh no! Oh no! This is Bracklebury!’

Athelstan opened his eyes in amazement. Cranston peered closer.

‘It fits your description, my lord coroner, though there was nothing on him to identify him by.’

Cranston swore under his breath. ‘By a fairy’s futtock, so it is! Black-haired, a scar under his left eye, past his thirtieth summer, but—’

‘He’s been in the water for at least, oh, five or six days,’ the Fisher of Men said.

Athelstan shook his head. ‘But Bracklebury was alive two days ago! He murdered Bernicia!’

The gargoyles standing behind them tittered with laughter.

‘Impossible!’ the Fisher of Men shouted, stretching out his hand towards Cranston. ‘How can a man be drowned and be walking about murdering people?’

Athelstan forgot his disdain and walked closer. ‘Is there any wound?’ he asked.

‘None,’ the Fisher of Men replied. ‘Not a scratch. Only these.’ He pointed to the purple bruise on the man’s chest and the slight lacerations on either side of the throat. ‘Something was tied around his neck.’

Cranston stepped back, shaking his head.

‘It can’t be,’ he muttered. ‘Bracklebury’s alive.’

‘I claim my reward,’ the Fisher of Men said.

‘Sir John, let’s get out of here,’ Athelstan murmured.

They walked back to the alleyway, the Fisher of Men and the gargoyles clustered around them.

‘Look!’ Cranston bellowed, ‘I need proof.’ He stamped his feet and stared around. ‘I need proof! Proof that this is Bracklebury.’ He pointed a finger at the Fisher of Men. ‘You’ve got spies all over the city. Bring these people to meet me at the alehouse. He rapped out a list of people he wished to see – the ship’s officers as well as Emma Roffel. ‘I want them at the tavern within the hour. I don’t give a rat’s arse what they are doing!’

The Fisher of Men seemed delighted by the prospect of wielding so much power. It was not often that he was able to order about the ordinary inhabitants of the city in which he lurked. He and the gargoyles swept down the alleyway, Cranston still roaring at them that they were to bring everyone to the tavern. He took Athelstan back there. Cranston slumped on to a stool. He pushed his great back into the corner of the wall and roared for refreshment until all the slatterns in the place were hopping like fleas on a frisky dog.

‘It can’t be Bracklebury,’ he breathed. ‘Yet it must be Bracklebury.’

Athelstan thanked the landlord and pushed the platter of food he had brought and a goblet of claret towards Cranston.

‘If the corpse isn’t Bracklebury’s,’ he said, ‘then he is still our principal suspect. But if it is, then, to quote a famous coroner I know, Hell’s teeth!’

‘Or mermaid’s tits!’ Cranston smiled.

‘Aye and those too, Sir John.’ Athelstan sipped from his tankard of ale. ‘If it is Bracklebury, then who is the murderer of Bernicia? And, more importantly, who killed Bracklebury? Why and how?’

Cranston rubbed his face. ‘You know, I have this awful nightmare, Brother, that we have been concentrating on Bracklebury and forgetting the other two sailors. We don’t even know their names. What if they are the villains of the piece?’

Athelstan’s mind teemed with the possibilities.

‘The war cogs will sail soon,’ Cranston said. ‘The officers on board the
God’s Bright Light
will go with them. Everything will remain a mystery.’

‘Do you have the silver, Sir John?’

Athelstan whirled around and Cranston looked up at the two scrutineers who had come to stand silently beside them, the false smiles on their plump faces belied by the hardness of their eyes.

‘The exchequer wants its silver back,’ Peter said.