Crowner Royal (Crowner John Mysteries) (4 page)

The coroner expected his outspoken officer to reply with more condemnation of the man who had tried to unseat his royal brother from the throne – but Gwyn was staring intently out of the window.

‘What in hell is going on out there?’ he roared suddenly, leaning across the sill and pointing with a brawny arm.

‘Hey, you! Stop, you bastard, stop!’ he yelled at the top of his voice, gesticulating in a frenzy of impotence.

De Wolfe skidded back his chair and strode to the window to see what had so outraged his officer. He looked down past Gwyn’s shoulder at the strip of bare ground that stretched between them and the riverbank. He was just in time to see a figure racing past below them and vanishing around the corner of the building to their right.

‘What happened?’ demanded John, but Gwyn pushed past him and was already lumbering out of the door, shouting over his shoulder as he went.

‘He stabbed some fellow on that landing stage – just a moment ago!’ John craned his neck to look to the left along the bank and saw that someone lay crumpled on the planks of a small pier that projected out into the river on wooden stakes. The body was perilously near the edge, one arm and a leg hanging over the swirling brown water. John pounded after Gwyn, pushing aside a couple of men as he leapt down the stairs three at a time. At the bottom, he caught up with his officer, who seemed uncertain which way to run. They could go back to the main entrance, but that was in the opposite direction from the end of the building around which they had seen the assailant disappear.

‘I’ll go to the front!’ yelled de Wolfe. ‘See if you can get out somewhere that way,’ pointing down the dark corridor on the ground floor. Even after a few weeks, they were still unsure of the layout of the rambling collection of buildings, other than the well-trodden path to their own chamber.

Gwyn thundered off, his big feet slamming on the flagged floor, massive shoulders jostling people aside as he went. John, with a timid Thomas following behind, jogged out into the Palace Yard and doubled back around the Great Hall towards the river.

‘We’d better see how that man has fared!’ he panted, as he raced for the landing stage. It was not the main river approach to Westminster; this was further downstream, where an elaborate pier had been built for royalty and nobles visiting the abbey and palace. The one seen from their room was a much more modest structure used by many small boats, the wherries that ferried people across the Thames and down to the city.

De Wolfe ran towards it, but he was not the first to arrive. As he hurried the last few yards, he heard a commotion ahead and saw three men clustered on the landing stage, peering over the edge. One of them wore the long tunic and round helmet of a palace guard.

‘He’s gone, fell off just as we got here!’ hollered the guard, pointing down at the water. The tide was now ebbing quickly and turbulent eddies swirled around the piles holding up the jetty. John looked downstream and saw a man floating face down with limbs outstretched. He was already twenty yards away and moving further away each second. The skirts of his black cassock wrapped around his legs as a sudden whirlpool in the muddy water spun the body. It submerged momentarily, then resurfaced yards away towards to the centre of the river. There was no boat anywhere near, only a couple of wherries hundreds of yards away and a distant barge moving downriver with the tide.

For a moment, John considered diving in after the man, but he was an indifferent swimmer and the treacherous-looking vortices in the river made him hesitate. The guard, a burly man with a black beard, sensed his indecision and gripped his arm.

‘No point in risking yourself as well, sir! By the looks of it, he’s already a corpse!’

He pointed down between his feet, where a wide stain of dark blood covered the boards, some of it dripping down the cracks into the river.

‘How came he to fall in?’ demanded the coroner. ‘I saw him from my window and he was lying just here!’

One of the others, a fat monk in the black habit of a Benedictine, seemed in genuine anguish over what he had just witnessed. ‘As I arrived, he seemed to have a spasm and rolled over into the water!’ he wailed. ‘There was nothing I could do to save him.’

By now, half a dozen other people had arrived, Thomas de Peyne among them. De Wolfe pulled away from the gabbling, gesticulating throng and grabbed his clerk’s arm.

‘Get the names of these people, so that I can question them later!’ he snapped. ‘See if any of them saw exactly what happened – I’m off to see if Gwyn has found the son of a whore who did this!’

He jogged off, this time going down the riverbank, with the Great Hall and then St Stephen’s Chapel on his right hand. As he rounded the corner of the furthermost wing of the palace, he met his officer stamping towards him, the scowl on his face telling him that he had failed in his mission.

‘Those bloody passages are like a rabbit warren,’ he complained. ‘By the time I found a door out to the back of the place, the fellow had long gone.’

‘Did you see what he looked like?’ demanded John.

Gwyn shook his head. ‘I saw him for barely a few seconds. He struck the man on the pier and as he fell the assailant ran like hell down the bank. He was tall and heavily built, wearing a short tunic and breeches, both brown as I recall.’

‘What about his face?’

‘He had a white linen helmet on, tied under his chin, but as he ran he held a hand against his face, so as not to be recognised.’

The coroner glared around him in frustration, looking at the jumbled collection of buildings that made up this back end of the palace enclave. He had not been here before and saw that stables, wagon sheds, wash-houses and barracks filled the area between the rear of the palace and the boundary wall, beyond which was the confluence of the Tyburn stream with the river. There were a number of people about – soldiers, grooms, farriers, as well as women and children who lived in some of the small cottages that were dotted between the other buildings. None of them looked like the man Gwyn had described, though if he had pulled the white coif from his head, there would be nothing to mark him out.

‘He could have slipped into the abbey – or back into the palace before I got here,’ grunted the Cornishman. ‘Or even gone over into the village.’

De Wolfe shrugged in disgust and turned back the way he had come. ‘Let’s go back to the landing stage and see if Thomas has squeezed anything out of those people.’

The little clerk had no writing materials with him, but his excellent memory had catalogued half a dozen names, including the guard, three monks and a couple of Chancery clerks who had been on their way out of the palace soon after the incident had occurred. They were still there when John returned and he set about questioning them.

‘Does anyone know who the victim might have been?’ he demanded, scowling around at the faces before him.

‘It was one of the Steward’s men,’ piped up one of the clerks. ‘I glimpsed his face just before he fell into the water. I don’t know his name, but I’ve seen him around the palace.’

‘I think he worked in the guest hall,’ said his companion, a gangling young man whose tonsure looked strange on his bright ginger head. ‘I’ve seen him scribing at a desk in the bottler’s chamber there.’

The monks knew nothing about anything, being visitors to the abbey from their priory in Berkshire and the guard vaguely claimed to have seen the dead man from time to time.

‘What about the villain who did this?’ rasped de Wolfe. ‘Did any of you get a good look at him? Any idea who he might be?’

There were glum looks and shaking of heads all round.

‘I first noticed him only when he was running away,’ proclaimed the guard. ‘It was that that made me look towards this landing stage – then I saw the man lying on the boards here.’

He gave a description that was as unhelpful as Gwyn’s, but added a small piece of information. ‘I saw a wherry a few yards off the pier, obviously going away after having landed someone. He was well beyond hailing distance by the time I got here.’

The Thames wherries were almost as common as seagulls – flimsy craft with one oarsman, who plied their trade on a populous stretch of water, which had only one bridge, two miles downriver.

The clerks and monks looked anxious to go about their business, so John dismissed them, warning them that they might be required to attend an inquest. Thomas quietly reminded his master that this might be difficult with no body.

‘Strictly speaking, sir, we don’t even know if he is dead! He might have revived and crawled out further down the riverbank.’

Gwyn gave an explosive snort of derision. ‘Of course he’s bloody dead! Half his lifeblood is on the timbers here and then his head was sunk under this brown shit that passes for London river water!’

De Wolfe turned to leave, telling the guard to get someone with a bucket to swill away the blood from the planks of the jetty.

‘We must find someone who can tell us who the dead man was,’ he growled. ‘He might have a family to mourn him.’

Though the victim was apparently in holy orders, most of these were in the lower grades and were not necessarily celibate like ordained priests. They were all, however, able to claim the protection of the Church through its ‘benefit of clergy’ when it came to a conflict with the secular powers.

Thomas pattered along behind the two bigger men as they left the landing stage, the old phthisis of the hip that had afflicted him as a child giving him a slight limp. ‘How will you discover who he might be, Crowner?’ he asked. ‘This place must have a couple of hundred people living and working in it.’

‘Ask the damned Steward, I suppose, if those clerks reckoned he was one of his staff,’ John replied abruptly.

They went back into the palace through the main entrance behind the Great Hall, the two helmeted sentries saluting de Wolfe as he marched towards the doorward’s chamber just inside. Here a fat clerk sat behind a table, talking to a sergeant of the guard. This was a tall man with three golden lions
passant guardant
, the royal arms of Richard Coeur de Lion embroidered across the chest of his long grey tunic. The soldier recognised John – in fact, he remembered him from Palestine where Black John’s prowess in the Crusade was almost legendary. As soon as the coroner had explained the problem, the sergeant insisted on personally conducting de Wolfe to the Steward’s domain and set off ahead of the trio into the bowels of the palace, which to them was uncharted territory.

After a number of twists and turns, all on the ground floor, they came to a wide passageway, on one side of which were kitchens, full of smoke, steam, raucous voices and the clatter of pots. Opposite were storerooms, with men trundling baskets, sacks and barrels from a wide door leading to a carter’s yard at the rear.

‘One of the Steward’s top men lives in here, Sir John,’ declared the sergeant, going to a doorless arch between two of the stores. He waved de Wolfe inside, then excused himself and strode away. John saw a cluttered room, with two desks occupied by young clerks wrestling with lists on parchment and piles of notched wooden tallies. Between them, on a slightly raised platform, was a sloped writing desk like a lectern. Behind this stood a thin, austere-looking man of late middle age, dressed in an expensive but sombre tunic that reached down to his ankles. Unlike John’s collar-length black hair, the man’s greying thatch was shaved up to a horizontal line around his head, in the typical Norman fashion. He stared haughtily at the visitor and enquired as to his business.

‘I am Sir John de Wolfe, the king’s coroner,’ snapped John, who had taken an instant dislike to this man. ‘And who might you be, sir?’

The official’s manner softened immediately – everyone in Westminster had heard of the appointment of the new Coroner of the Verge – a man high in the favour of both the Chief Justiciar and of King Richard himself.

‘I am Hugo de Molis, the king’s Chief Purveyor in England,’ he said with pride. ‘When the court is here at Westminster, then I offer the Steward my help in provisioning the palace.’

This sounded to John like a roundabout way of saying that he was the assistant steward, but even so, this was a responsible task. The Steward was one of the important officers of the court and always a nobleman, so this Hugo must be at least a manor-lord. His declared appointment as Chief Purveyor would make him one of the most disliked men in England, for the purveyors were those officials who went ahead of the court when it progressed around the countryside. Their task was to ensure that food and lodging were available each night for the hundreds of men, women and animals that trundled along with the monarch and his nobles. Except where they stayed at the king’s own manors, the purveyors ruthlessly confiscated beds, food, fodder and everything else needed for the court’s sustenance. They were constantly accused of failing to pay the market price for what they took – or not paying at all. A plague of locusts could not have been more efficient in laying waste the countryside and many folk on hearing of the approach of the court, fled into the woods with as many of their possessions as they could carry. John explained what had happened during the last half-hour.

‘I am the court’s coroner, charged with dealing with all fatal and serious assaults within the Verge. It seems virtually certain that this man has met a violent death and I need to know who he was, so that I can begin to deal with the matter.’

He added that two palace clerks seemed convinced that the victim was a member of the Steward’s entourage, probably working in the guest chambers.