[William Falconer 06] - Falconer and the Ritual of Death (6 page)

Better, thought Falconer, that his friend remained in ignorance of the clandestine and gruesome investigation. This new body was another matter, of course. It was already partly dismembered, and was essentially a skeleton with tatters of flesh and clothing adhering to it. It mattered not if they poked and prodded a little. But what interested Falconer most was the item he could not examine - the missing skull. He finally responded to Bullock’s reservations.

‘Does he not deserve the same care and attention you would give to a fresh corpse? He deserves justice, and we will give it to him. Master Bonham can discern what happened to a person from the most fragmentary of evidence. Just listen to what he has to say. Then we can lay him to rest.’ He hoped his confident assertion was true. In his experience, Bonham had anatomized only fresh bodies. Or those that had lain in a pauper’s grave for a few days before a little sleight of hand had transferred them to his slab under cover of darkness. Bullock sighed, and gave in just as the little teacher poked his head out of his front door, and beckoned the corpse-bearers in.

Seven

As Falconer and Bullock toiled with the body-laden hurdle on the steps that led down to Bonham’s cool cellar, the little grey master poked around amongst the bones in the bucket.

‘Finger bones, Master Falconer, and the bones of the forearm.’

‘Yes,’ grunted Falconer, more concerned with not allowing the body to slide off the hurdle than with Bonham’s obvious deduction. ‘The arm was exposed and is in a poorer state than the rest of the body.’

‘Excellent. Then what is it you wish to know?’ Bonham cast a nervous glance towards Peter Bullock, who had dragged his end of the hurdle on to the rough table and planted himself on an upturned wooden box by the side wall of the cool cellar. Falconer, now able to let go of his end, was glad to be relieved of the burden. He was not as fit as he used to be as the years advanced. He leaned with both hands on the table edge.

‘How he died is a good start.’

‘Then we are to assume that he did not die naturally? For there will be little to tell from such remains if his heart simply failed him.’

Falconer drew breath, and looked at Bullock. The constable, slumped on his makeshift seat, briefly nodded his head. It was fine to tell Bonham how and where the body was found.

‘I don’t think he would have died naturally and fallen into the gap in a wall as the house was being built. A gap which was then filled in by the builders unaware that a dead man lay there. And besides, there is the small matter of a missing head.’

Falconer lifted the rough blanket off the top end of the Corpse. Bonham’s grey eyes rounded in surprise. Falconer had not told him the location of the body when he had come to ask him to look at the remains of someone long dead. Nor about the absence of a skull. Still, it was the unusual location that most piqued his curiosity.

‘And you say he has been dead some twenty years. How do you know that?’

‘Simply because that was when those buildings went up. No one could have excavated the wall out to insert the body at any later time. No, he must have been killed twenty years ago.’

‘Or killed long before that, and merely interred there at that time.’

That thought had not occurred to Falconer, but something told him it was a far-fetched possibility. Then Bonham himself confirmed that an earlier death could not have been the case, as he peeled the blanket fully from around the remains.

‘No. That is not possible. Look, there are the remnants of flesh, and this fatty substance -’ he pointed at the parts of the body that had been buried in the wall infill - ‘is formed when a body is kept in damp ground. No doubt the rooms of this house must have been damp. Cheaply built and not very nice to live in. So you are right. His death immediately predated his burial. Or should I even call it a burial, being as it is so high above the ground?’

Falconer smiled at the little man’s attempt at humour. He was used to Bonham relieving the sombre atmosphere of his autopsy cellar with quips he deemed amusing. However, he had avoided any gruesome jokes when poring over the body of Sarah Blakiston earlier. Then, it had not seemed right to joke. Falconer wondered where the man had hidden the remains of the servant girl. He had not given Bonham much warning of the arrival of Peter Bullock, so she could not be far away. He watched as Bonham poked around in the bucket, and then turned his attention to the skeleton on the table. As Bonham fussed over the body, Falconer pointed to the neck bones.

‘What do you make of that?’

‘The absence of the skull, you mean? I wondered when you were going to ask me that. It’s fairly obvious what happened to him, isn’t it? He didn’t get like that falling over. Nor have you merely failed to find a skull that after decomposition has become detached from the rest of the body. Look at the edge of the top bone. It has been sliced with a sword.’

Falconer put on his eye-lenses, and peered closely. It was true - the bone had been sheared off at the top.

‘He was beheaded.’

Bonham nodded.

‘Of course, it is impossible now to tell whether that was pre- or post-mortem. But there’s something else, Master William.’ The little grey man delved once again in the bucket, and produced an arm bone and a handful of the knuckle bones.

‘He saw it coming, and defended himself. Look at the cracks and splinters on this arm bone and on these finger bones. He held his left arm up to protect himself from some blows.’ The long-forgotten scene began to unfold in the imagination of the three men in the dim and chilly cellar, as their minds went back twenty years.

Pentecost, May 1250

The year of Our Lord 1250, the thirty-fourth year of the reign of Henry, the third King of England of that name, began strangely.

An earthquake in the Chilterns led a certain monk chronicler in the abbey of St Albans to note that the words of the Gospel had foretold ‘there shall be earthquakes in divers places’, and that this presaged that the end of the world was at hand. The general mood of despair was seized on by many people whose fascination with numbers led them to realize that the end of the year would mark twenty-five half-centuries since the Year of Grace.

In Oxford, a certain Brother Thomas preached from the pulpit in St Frideswide’s Church that in the last half-century many prodigies and astonishing novelties had taken place.

‘The Tartars left their places of retreat, and ravaged, with the cruelty of beasts, the countries of the East. When Master Oliver preached in Germany the figure of Christ appeared in the sky, and was plainly visible to everyone.’

Though he was merely passing on what rumours he himself had been fed, still it perturbed his congregation, who were Used to hearing truths not falsehoods from the pulpit. They became restless as the fires of Hell seemed to stoke up the temperature of the church itself, and stirred uneasily in their seats. Brother Thomas sensed the mood, and pressed on, eager to bring the fear of God into everyone’s heart.

‘The brethren of the Temple and the Hospitallers of the Teutonic Order of St Mary were twice taken prisoners, dispersed and put to death. The holy city of Jerusalem, with its.sacred churches and holy places, was twice destroyed, and cruelly levelled by the Sultan of Babylon. An eclipse of the sun occurred twice in three years. Stars were seen to fall from the heavens. Remember Christ’s words - "There shall be signs in the sun..." - and repent before it is too late.’ It truly seemed as though the End Times were coming.

Not far from where Brother Thomas was preaching, another more exclusive congregation was gathering. Templar churches were circular in imitation of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

The church at Cowley was no different, and the interior was crowned by a large domed ceiling that was supported by squat pillars around its circumference. Although many torches blazed in braziers high up on the wall, these pillars cast deep shadows around the perimeter of the Temple. And the flickering flames caused the darkness to move as if it were alive. A stone seat ran around the whole outer edge of the edifice, and the Templar knights were sat on it, fight-lipped and gloomy. For in the centre of the Temple stood a stark and forbidding altar at which the chaplain of Temple Cowley stood. He was quoting from Judges, a text that Templars held dear to their hearts.

Though most were illiterate, they had been inculcated with the idea that the deeds of the Israelites as described in Judges and the deeds of the Templars were parallel stories. The chaplain’s warning was chilling.

‘As the Israelites turned from battling other nations to fighting each other, so an incident of rape and murder led to a civil war that nearly destroyed the Tribes of Benjamin. So be warned about internal strife. The recapture of the holy places in the East is part of the End Times, but still the Antichrist must be defeated. King Louis must be ransomed, and the monies raised. Be of good heart, undertake boldly to do good, and God will help you. Amen.’

As the murmured response echoed through the Temple, the young knight next to Brother Michael le Saux leaned over, and whispered in his ear.

‘Tell me, Brother, is it true what they say that as we are fighting for God, if we die in battle we go straight to Heaven?’ The older man, a priest of the Order not a warrior, responded with a tight smile. He had other things on his mind than a direct route to Paradise.

Feast of the Beheading of John the Baptist, August 1271

Bullock pushed himself up from the wooden crate where he had been sitting.

‘A twenty-year-old murder on a man we cannot identify. I am sorry, masters, but I cannot afford to waste my time on this.’

Falconer was surprised at the constable’s reluctance to follow up the matter. Usually Bullock was a tenacious fellow, who niggled away at mysteries like a stray mongrel dog at a discarded bone. He wondered if the signs of ageing he felt in his own body were more deeply felt by his old friend. Maybe Bullock just didn’t care any more. Recalling his thoughts about his own arrival in Oxford in 1250, he asked Peter about his predecessor as constable.

‘You were not constable twenty years ago, were you, Peter?’ Bullock pulled a face.

‘No. That was Matt Stokys. He was a brutal piece of work.’ It appeared that that was all Peter was going to say on the matter. He turned away from the two regent masters. ‘I have duties to carry out that will be of benefit to the living. You will excuse me.’

As he watched Bullock’s bent back disappear up the cellar steps, Falconer resolved to find out what was bothering his friend. He could not leave the matter of the constable’s abrupt behaviour there. Nor could he abandon the unidentified body to a pauper’s grave.

‘Master Richard, is there nothing about the body that will tell us who he might have been?’

Bonham shrugged his grey-clad shoulders in a gesture that suggested to Falconer he might have a trick or two up his sleeve. He loved the mystery of his investigation of bodies, almost as though it were a form of necromancy.

‘Leave it with me for a while. I will examine what is left of his clothes, and see if there are any items such as crosses or rings on his person. They may tell us more about the man.’ Falconer nodded his agreement. He had sifted the rubble in-fill of the broken wall, but he had not found anything close to the body. Then he recalled the ring that he had returned to the bucket earlier.

‘You should find a ring in amongst the finger bones. That may help: I will see if I can awaken any memories of missing people, in the minds of those who were in Oxford then. By the way, where did you hide the girl’s remains so that Bullock would not see them?’

Bonham smiled weakly, and pointed at the upturned crate.

‘I am afraid the poor girl was stuffed unceremoniously under that. I nearly died when the constable sat down on top of it.’

Eight

Simon, the curate of St Aldate’s Church, was late quenching all the candles after the solemn Festival of the Beheading of John the Baptist. An old woman had spent hours praying, and despite his deliberately noisy clearing of the impedimenta of the earlier service, she had not been disturbed enough to cut short her devotions. This annoyed Simon greatly, as he had rushed the prayers of the Mass with a purpose. He wished to retire to the stews of Beaumont to enjoy the fleshly pleasures of a whore he had a regular arrangement with. If he was much later, Annie would give up on the chance of his arrival, and take her penny fee from someone else. He knew he had garbled the Latin words of the Mass, but as they were meaningless to him anyway, it was difficult to make complete sense at the best of times. Like a lot of curates, he had lied about his ordination as subdeacon and subsequently as priest by Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln four years earlier, in order to get a living here in Oxford, poor as it was. If someone had asked him to construe the opening of the first prayer of the Canon of the Mass -
Te igitur, clementissime Pater
- he might have offered that
Pater
governed the case of
Te
, because the Lord governeth all things.

So it was long after nones when the annoying woman decided to ease herself from her knees and hobble out of the church. Simon hurriedly locked the sacristy, and left by the outer door that led him to the rear yard. It was dark, threatening rain, and uncannily quiet. So when Simon heard a piercing shriek from the other side of the wall that backed on to the neighbouring property his heart nearly stopped in his chest. He had a great desire to flee, but curiosity overcame his fear, and he peered cautiously over the wall into the next-door yard. He was just in time to see a small body being dragged into the rear of the building, a line of dark blood marking the ground. Illiterate and uneducated as he was, Simon knew when he had witnessed an unchristian ritual of the most horrible sort. He slumped down on his arse on the church’s side of the wall, his legs weak and trembling, wondering what to do next.