The Prodigal Son (24 page)

But Anthony also had charm when he chose to exert it, which Dame Audrea, I suspected, had never possessed, nor probably ever could. I had fallen under his spell, even while being made aware that as far as unpleasantness of character went, there was less to choose between him and his younger brother than I had at first imagined. It was obvious, too, that George Applegarth knew Anthony for what he really was, but that he and his wife had always loved and protected him, as the steward was prepared to go on doing for Jenny's sake …

Hercules dashed back along the track to see what had happened to me, then nipped at my boots, jumping up and barking. He didn't approve of all this standing around and thinking. I bent and patted his head.

‘All right, lad. I'm coming.'

We entered Croxcombe woods and I made my way to where Hamo Gough had his hut, but once again, both clearing and hut were empty. I had hoped, because of the earliness of the hour, to have caught him tending his fire before he went off, coppicing. But it was not to be; nor had I noticed him in the neighbourhood of Hangman's Oak. I hesitated, wondering if I should wait for his return, then decided against it. Anthony's plots and schemes no longer mattered to me. I was leaving them behind with every step I took. The only people at the manor who concerned me now were Dame Audrea, her receiver and her steward. No doubt I should be seeing all three very soon in Bristol, and my trust was in George Applegarth that he would be able to convince the other two that my half-brother was not the missing page. At least, it was really Dame Audrea that he had to persuade. Edward Micheldever seemed to me to have no convictions either way: he would simply agree with whatever the Dame decided.

Hercules gave me another nudge and we went on again, but although, by this time, I had overcome my sickness of the early morning and was feeling more like my usual self, there was no spring in my step and my feet dragged. I knew in my heart of hearts that I was doing what I had never done before, abandoning a mystery without having solved it. Without, if I were honest, having done anything much to solve it. As I trudged along, I went over and over the facts in my head, but always coming to the same conclusion. As long as there was no chance – and there was none that I could see – of discovering what had happened to the real John Jericho, I could never prove that John Wedmore was innocent of the accusation made against him. In fact, the whole expedition had been a waste of time and ill thought out, I castigated myself. I should be growing less impulsive, not more, as I approached my twenty-eighth birthday.

All the same, I had been so sure at one point that God had been directing this venture – poking His divine nose into my business, directing me, harassing me as usual – that I had had no doubts that I was doing the right thing. Now I was beginning to wonder if I had overlooked something, some clue that God had given me, but which I had been too stupid to notice. Was I losing the gift that He had blessed me with? And if so, would it be taken away?

Wrapped in these gloomy thoughts, I must have been walking steadily for quite some while, not marking the passing of the hours, but following by instinct the well-worn tracks that had led me through the maze of woodland paths until I suddenly found myself in what seemed to be a familiar spot, by the banks of a gently flowing stream. I rounded a bend and there, standing outside the door of an inn that I immediately recognized, arms akimbo, surveying his domain, was Josiah Litton. He spotted me almost at the same moment as I saw him and beamed all over his face.

‘Chapman!' he said. ‘You kept your promise to call on us on your way home. Come along in, lad! Come along in!'

The aleroom was quiet, filled only with sunshine and dancing dust motes and the sound of Goody Litton's energetically wielded broom. No one, it appeared, had stayed overnight and I was their first visitor of the day. The goodwife laid aside her broom and grinned, as glad to see me as her husband.

‘Josiah! Ale!' she commanded, pulling out a stool from under a table and urging me to sit down. ‘You've been to Croxcombe Manor?' she asked and I nodded. ‘Good! You've been gone three whole days and nights. We were afraid you'd forgotten us or decided not to return.'

I didn't admit that I had indeed forgotten them and that my reappearance had been the merest accident.

‘I came back as quickly as I could,' I lied.

The landlord put a pitcher of ale and three beakers on the table, settled himself on another stool opposite me, and invited me to begin.

‘Anthony reached the manor ahead of you, of course, but not by more than an hour or two if you made good time. You must have witnessed his reception almost from its beginning. Tell us everything.'

So I took him at his word and told him the whole story, including my own involvement in it, my encounters with Hamo Gough, the little I had learned concerning events on the night Jenny Applegarth was murdered, and finished with the previous day's ploy by some unknown person to ensure the Bignells remained at the manor overnight.

‘I suppose I should have assured myself that they were alive and well before I left Croxcombe,' I added uneasily. ‘Anthony was missing from bed this morning when I woke, and I suspect him of being the person responsible for the hoax.'

Janet Litton, who had been listening intently, hanging on my every word, now gave a decided shake of her head.

‘I think you're mistaken, Master Chapman, in laying that trick at Anthony Bellknapp's door. Your reason, or, rather, the jealous husband's reason for thinking Master Bellknapp guilty is impossible to believe. It doesn't make sense that a man would make such intentions known to a girl's own father. Only other men could be so credulous as to think so.'

‘But my love,' the landlord argued, ‘someone wanted the butcher and his family to stay at Croxcombe for the night, and was prepared to go to great lengths to attain his ends. Master Bellknapp seems to be the only person with any motive.'

‘Maybe not,' declared the goodwife shrewdly. ‘Didn't you tell us, Chapman, that Master Bignell saw a rider near the manor on the night of Jenny Applegarth's murder? And didn't you also tell us that he had decided, thinking it over after all these years, that the horseman might have been vaguely familiar to him?'

‘That's so, yes. What are you suggesting?'

‘Perhaps that person overheard the butcher's remarks and doesn't want to risk even the slightest possibility of being identified. And that couldn't be Anthony Bellknapp, for he disappeared years before the murder. The crime has always been laid solely at the door of the page. But suppose someone else had been in league with John Jericho, and that someone is still there, at Croxcombe.'

I stared excitedly at Janet Litton. Her idea might provide the answer to one puzzling aspect of the robbery. How had a young lad of smallish stature, and on foot, managed to carry a heavy bundle of stolen goods clear of the neighbourhood without being apprehended? But an accomplice on horseback could have managed it …

Before I could pursue this line of thought, however, there was the sound of horse's hooves outside and a moment later, Humphrey Attleborough burst through the inn door, his face as white as a sheet.

‘My master,' he gasped without waiting for us to ask what was the matter. ‘Master Bellknapp! He's dead. Drowned in the moat.'

M
y first thought was that it was all wrong. It was Thomas Bignell who couldn't swim, who had been tricked into remaining at Croxcombe Manor for the night, whose body – if anybody's – should have been found floating in the moat. Then I pulled myself together, aware we were all three, the landlord, his wife and I, staring at Humphrey Attleborough as though he were some shade or being conjured up by our overwrought imaginations.

But before I could interrogate him, it was necessary to calm him down. Humphrey was shaking like a leaf in a high gale, and it was obvious from the welts on the palms of his hands that he had been clinging on to the horse's reins like a man possessed. Which made me glance through the open door at the sweating animal and recommend to Josiah Litton that the poor beast be seen to before it took a chill. He immediately bustled off while his goodwife hurried to fill a beaker and bring it to Humphrey; indeed, she had the good sense to fill beakers for us all as an antidote to the shock we had sustained. By the time the landlord returned, having stabled the horse and rubbed it down – although not, I suspected, with such care as he would usually have taken – Humphrey was recovering somewhat and appeared in a fit enough state to reply to the dozen or so queries hovering eagerly on my lips.

‘When was the body discovered? And who found it?'

The lad swallowed another mouthful of ale, his teeth chattering on the rim of his cup. He answered the second question first.

‘I found it. When the master didn't show up for his breakfast, I began to get worried. No one else seemed to care.'

That was understandable. Anthony's absence must have been a relief to almost everyone.

‘Who was at breakfast?' I queried.

Humphrey pressed a hand to his forehead. ‘I – I can't rightly recall. Dame Audrea and Simon and the Bignells – Master and Mistress Bignell and the son – they were all there, at the high table, I'm sure of that. The dame was enquiring what sort of night they had passed. There were some servants at the lower board, the ones who don't take their meals in the kitchen with the cook, but I can't remember which. I was beginning to worry about Master Bellknapp by that time and was watching the doors into the hall, expecting him to appear at any moment.'

‘What about the receiver, the bailiff, the chaplain, were they present?'

‘Oh, Sir Henry was. Yes, of course, he said grace before the start of the meal. But as for the others, maybe.' He sounded distressed. ‘I really don't recall.'

‘Steady.' I laid a hand on Humphrey's arm. ‘You'll remember later, when you're calmer. What about the steward?'

‘George Applegarth? Yes, now you mention him, he was busying himself around.' Humphrey suddenly grew petulant. ‘But what does it matter, where anyone was at breakfast? My master had been in the water for several hours. He was all stiff and blue. His body had caught in a patch of reeds just where the moat curves away to the west in the direction of the woods.'

I was still puzzled. ‘But how did he come to drown? I know the moat is fairly wide there and the bank must have been slippery after yesterday's rain, but is he, like Thomas Bignell, unable to swim?'

Humphrey began to shiver again. ‘It wouldn't have mattered whether he could swim or not. Someone had hit him a stunning blow to the back of the head. He stood no chance. He might have been dead before he fell in.'

‘Murder, then,' breathed Goody Litton, her eyes wide and frightened.

‘No chance of an accident in that case,' her husband agreed, trying, not altogether successfully, to suppress the excitement that violent death arouses even in the gentlest of us when it doesn't touch us personally.

My own feeling was one of dismay although not of surprise. There were too many people at Croxcombe Manor who had wished the prodigal dead. Whoever had the thankless task of investigating this sudden death would not find himself short of suspects … A thought occurred to me; more than a thought, a suspicion.

‘What are you doing here?' I demanded, rounding on Humphrey with an angry suddenness that made him jump. I could tell at once by his guilty expression that my suspicion was correct.

‘I – I was sent after you.'

‘By whom?'

‘D-Dame Audrea.'

‘Why me?' I asked grimly. ‘And who has ridden for the local sergeant-at-law?'

‘Dame Audrea doesn't want the law involved.' Of course she didn't, not with the finger of suspicion pointing straight at Simon as the suspect who had the most to gain by his brother's death. But she wanted to know who the murderer was, not only because she was thankful for present deliverance, but also to be wary of him in the future. A person who had found the strength of purpose to kill once, might well find it a second time if the need ever arose. Unless, of course, the murderer was Dame Audrea herself, in which case it was even more desirable for her to keep the law's representative at arm's length.

‘So, why have you been sent to find me? How did you manage to track me down?'

I could guess the answer to the first question. I had opened my big mouth so wide that everyone must know by now that I had been employed by no less a personage than the King's brother, the Duke of Gloucester, to solve several murder cases for him, not to mention other mysteries that I had unravelled on my own account. This would teach me not to boast. It was high time I cultivated that much maligned virtue, modesty. As for how Humphrey had managed to find me, he simply said vaguely that he had asked people if they had seen a travelling pedlar with a dog; and because of my unusual height – and because Hercules had chased and frightened half to death three ducks, a sheep and an unknown quantity of chickens – my progress had been marked and remembered. I cursed fluently under my breath.

‘Dame Audrea,' he concluded, glancing at me doubtfully, ‘wants you to discover the murderer for her.'

I was just about to refuse this request with less than my usual courtesy, when a thought struck me. To do as the dame asked would give me a powerful bargaining counter. I would try to track down Anthony's murderer – and hold my tongue about the result if that was what she wished – and in return she would promise to drop her charge against my half-brother. When I eventually returned to Bristol, she would give me letters exonerating him addressed to the sheriff, the mayor, her kinsman, Alderman Foster, and to anyone else it might concern. So, instead of snapping Humphrey's head off, I smiled benignly at him.

‘Naturally, I shall do my very best to assist Dame Audrea and bring the killer of her son to justice.'