A Deadly Brew (39 page)

They all turned at the sound of a violent altercation between John Cheney and another of Tulyet’s men, who was attempting to inspect a large barrel.

‘I will not broach it,’ the spice-merchant was shouting. ‘That is finest quality sea salt and the rain will spoil the contents. I have shown you all the legal documentation for it and you have no right to press me further!’

‘It will take only a moment!’ yelled the soldier in his turn. ‘Your records show it is almost empty anyway. I just want to ensure nothing has been hidden with its legal contents.’

‘But water will ruin the salt,’ shouted Cheney, putting his hand palm up to emphasise his point. Rain fell steadily in fine, misty droplets.

‘We could move it inside,’ suggested the soldier, more quietly.

Cheney considered. ‘Very well, then,’ he conceded in a more reasonable tone of voice. ‘As long as you put it back where you found it.’

The barrel in dispute stood just inside the gates to Cheney’s yard. An idea suddenly formed in Bartholomew’s mind. Katherine and her pugilistic husband forgotten, he walked over to the barrel and tapped on it. It sounded hollow.

‘And what do you think you are doing?’ Cheney snapped, angry again. ‘Get off my property!’

Bartholomew turned to Tulyet and Michael. ‘I wonder if we might … ?’

He stopped as he saw Katherine clutch her throat and sway dizzily. Next to her, Mortimer watched his wife in disbelief as a smoky bottle slipped from her nerveless fingers and smashed on the ground. Tulyet darted forward and caught her as she swooned, but as Bartholomew ran towards them, he could see there was nothing that could be done to save her. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she began to convulse in Tulyet’s arms. Bartholomew called for water to wash the poison from her mouth, but even as he did so, he knew it would do no good. After a few moments, her desperate attempts to breathe eased and she went limp.

‘My God!’ breathed Tulyet in horror. He eased the body onto the ground and looked up at Bartholomew. ‘She is dead already. What
is
this poison?’

Even a sudden death in one of the town’s busiest thoroughfares did little to slow the frantic activity there. One or two people stopped to look at Katherine Mortimer’s body as it lay in the rain, but most ignored the scene outside the baker’s house, too anxious to ensure their own businesses were in order to risk interfering with someone else’s. Mortimer knelt next to his wife, holding her limp hand in his with an expression of total mystification, as though he imagined she might leap to her feet at any moment and tell him it had been some kind of macabre joke. Tulyet, Michael and Bartholomew stood over him, while the sergeant shouted to one of his men to help carry the body into the house.

‘Do you have any idea at all where this foul stuff came from?’ asked Tulyet, poking one of the bottles in the crate on his cart with his dagger. ‘Or how much of it is currently loose in the town?’

Michael shook his head. ‘I made the erroneous assumption that there were only six bottles in total. Now we find there was a full case of twelve. I have no idea whether this is all of it, or whether another crate is lurking somewhere.’

Bartholomew looked down at the lifeless form of Mistress Mortimer. ‘I have never seen any poison work as quickly as this before. Neither had Philius.’

‘Philius was good with poisons,’ said Tulyet, moving away from the crate with a shudder. ‘He used to help Jonas the Apothecary prepare potions to kill lice and fleas, while his reputation for producing effective concoctions to rid granaries of rats stretched as far afield as Thetford. All the Franciscans in the Friary on Bridge Street are good with herbs and powders.’

‘Well, that’s Franciscans for you!’ muttered Michael. ‘While we Benedictines live our lives in serene contemplation and prayer, the Franciscans find themselves one of the best houses in Bridge Street and find new ways to kill things.’

Something horrible occurred to Bartholomew as he stared down at the lifeless features of Katherine Mortimer. Had he, by encouraging Philius to investigate the nature of the poison that had made him so ill and killed Will Harper, Grene and Armel, inadvertently brought about Philius’s death? He spoke his thoughts aloud.

‘Master Colton of Gonville Hall said he went with Philius to visit the Franciscan Friary – where Philius told me he would ask about this poison among his colleagues. It must have been the fact that he was asking questions that aroused the suspicions of Katherine and her associates, and Philius must have been killed before he could come too close to the truth.’

Michael tapped him smartly on the arm. ‘You could not have prevented Philius’s death, Matt. How were you – or any of us – to know that his asking questions about a kind of poison in his own Friary would make someone want to kill him?’

‘We misjudged Colton, too,’ said Bartholomew, facts coming together in his mind. ‘I was certain his determination to suppress knowledge of Philius’s murder was a sign of guilty involvement. Now I see his suspicious behaviour was nothing more than a desire to keep the Sheriff well away from his College and its activities while he was indulging himself in a little smuggling.’

‘Of course,’ said Michael, nodding. ‘That explains why he was so nervous, and why he tried to claim his College could not be connected to the poisoned wine and the deaths of Grene and Armel – he did not want me or the Sheriff to start digging too deeply into Gonville’s affairs given that the cellars are probably well stocked with all sorts of contraband.’

‘But why would someone kill Philius for asking about the poison?’ asked Tulyet. ‘Its nature is no secret – half the town saw Grene die.’

‘It seems a curious substance to me,’ said Bartholomew, kneeling to look more closely at Katherine’s body. ‘It killed Grene, Will Harper, Armel and now Katherine almost instantly, but it only made Philius ill. And it killed the rat, but the cat which I saw drinking it escaped unscathed.’

‘You and that wretched cat!’ exclaimed Michael, exasperated. ‘You must have been mistaken about it. The wine has certainly killed Katherine stone dead.’

Bartholomew continued to inspect the corpse. Her husband still held one of her hands and gaped at her in stunned disbelief, while the sergeant muttered meaningless and trite words of comfort in his ear and attempted to make him stand up. On Katherine’s other hand was a burn where the wine had attacked her skin as she had opened the bottle, like the ones on Isaac and the porter at Valence Marie.

The sergeant finally succeeded in prising the baker from his wife’s side and led him into the house, leaving two of his men to cover Katherine with a cloak and carry her inside. The soldiers treated the body with an exaggerated care that had nothing to do with respect for the dead and a good deal to do with their respect for the poison. Bartholomew helped them, protecting his own hands with the gloves Katherine herself had given him just a few days before.

‘I suppose we can assume he is innocent in all this?’ asked Tulyet, watching Mortimer stumbling through the door to his house with the sergeant behind him.

‘He certainly acted as though he were,’ said Michael. ‘His unbearable arrogance and temper must have led his wife and son to plot against him. She was quite happy for him to take the blame for owning the poisoned wine.’

‘But Mortimer was right – we had no real evidence against her,’ said Bartholomew. ‘I am sure what we have reasoned is correct, but she must have seen we had no proof.’

‘I have known Constantine Mortimer for many years,’ said Tulyet with a sigh. ‘I can see he would have given his wife no peace over this – whether your accusations were unproven or not. He kept her on a short rein, and she was never allowed out unless he or Edward were with her. I am sure she knew her chances of running away from him were remote, and so she must have decided to drink the wine when she realised her future was bleak.’

‘You mean just saying what we did induced her to take her own life?’ asked Bartholomew, horrified. ‘I sincerely hope you are wrong.’

‘She killed herself because she knew we had her measure, and that it would be only a matter of time before we had the proof of it,’ said Michael firmly. ‘We are not responsible for her death.’

Bartholomew looked at Cheney’s barrel, his scrutiny of which seemed to have tipped her to drinking the poisoned wine in the first place. Was there proof of her guilt concealed within it? ‘Perhaps she has more of this wine stored there. Or perhaps …’

His voice trailed away as he regarded the barrel. Gradually, as realisation dawned on him, it went from being a simple container to something sinister, and he was certain that whatever it contained, it was not salt. He walked slowly towards it and borrowed a dagger from one of Tulyet’s men to prise off the lid.

‘What are you doing?’ demanded Cheney crossly, trying to snatch the weapon away from him. ‘That is finest sea salt from Hunstanton and it will be no good if it gets wet. Sheriff Tulyet! Stop this man at once!’

‘Perhaps you should allow one of my soldiers to do this,’ said Tulyet without conviction, leaning against the wall with his arms folded, making no attempt to prevent Bartholomew from levering at the lid, but watching with interest. ‘Master Cheney does not seem to like it.’

‘I most certainly do not!’ shouted Cheney. ‘If water spoils that salt, I shall expect you to pay for it. You have no right to force your way on to my property and take liberties with my barrels.’

The lid came off with a creaking pop and Bartholomew glanced inside. Immediately, he backed away coughing. Cheney elbowed him out of the way and looked himself. He gave a gasp of horror, hands flying to his mouth as he saw what was in it, the blood draining from his face.

Crouched in the barrel was the body of a small man wearing rough, homespun clothes, while on his lap lay Egil’s decapitated head. The stench was overpowering, a sickly, sulphurous reek of decay mingled with salt and rotting wood. Cheney regained the use of his legs and backed away hurriedly, colliding with Michael as he did so.

‘It is Sacks,’ said Tulyet, looking down at the thief and wrinkling his nose at the smell. ‘Sacks and someone else’s head.’

‘Egil’s head,’ said Michael, after a very cursory glance. ‘Hacked from his shoulders after we left his body for Oswald Stanmore to collect from the Fens. We wondered what had happened to it.’

‘And
we
wondered what had happened to Sacks,’ said Tulyet’s sergeant, emerging from Mortimer’s house and peering over Michael’s shoulder into the barrel. He showed no particular emotion at the grisly sight, not even surprise: he had seen a good deal worse as a soldier during the King’s wars in France. ‘When we realised we had not seen him for a few days, we assumed he had decided to move away from Cambridge after his spell in our prison, to try his skills where he was less well known.’

‘His hands have red marks,’ said Bartholomew, pointing to blisters on the thief’s fingers. ‘The Bernard’s students said there was something wrong with his skin. He must have been burned by one of the bottles.’

He leaned in and poked around, digging into the coarse-grained salt in search of more evidence. After a moment he found it.

‘Here are Egil’s hands,’ he said, drawing one out and holding it up. Tulyet slapped his arm down, aware that a curious crowd was beginning to gather, and that their mood was uneasy. While Katherine Mortimer dropping stone dead in Milne Street might not be cause for more than a passing glance, dismembered corpses in spice barrels were another matter entirely. Cheney gave another stifled exclamation of horror and swallowed hard.

‘I suppose I will not be able to use that lovely salt now,’ he said shakily. ‘No one will buy it if they know where it has been.’

‘You should dispose of it quickly, then,’ said Bartholomew, aware that if the spice-merchant did not rid himself of the tainted salt while the vile memories were fresh in his mind, he might have second thoughts about throwing it away. Apart from one or two patches that were stained black, it certainly appeared to be clean enough, and could easily be stored until the time was right to sell it.

‘My sergeant will relieve you of it now,’ said Tulyet, apparently thinking along the same lines. ‘He will throw it in the King’s Ditch and have the barrel scoured out with boiling water for you.’

‘We were right about the poison and Egil – there
are
burn marks on his hands, just like the ones on Sacks’s,’ said Bartholomew. ‘And there are small blisters on Egil’s face, too, although they have nearly healed. We must have been blind not to notice them earlier. I imagine Egil spilled the wine when he transported the bottles across the Fens. His face was probably burned when he transferred the poison to it from his hands – while Sacks’s hands were burned when he touched the bottles he sold to the Bernard’s students and Thorpe.’

Michael turned to Tulyet. ‘Do you need more from me or can I leave this matter with you? Matt may be happy to poke about with dismembered corpses, but I have had quite enough of all this!’

Tulyet nodded assent. ‘I have only one question. Matt, how did you guess Sacks’s body and Egil’s missing parts were in Cheney’s salt? It was when you walked over to it that Katherine realised the game she was playing was over and drank the poisoned wine.’

‘I did not,’ said Bartholomew tiredly. ‘I was going to ask Cheney if he had another of similar size that we might borrow as a water barrel for people to use while the well is drained.’

The following afternoon, Bartholomew perched on the trunk of a fallen apple tree in the orchard behind Michaelhouse and watched Tulyet. The Sheriff leaned against the wall and kicked at a rotten apple left from the previous summer and somehow missed by worms and maggots. Next to Bartholomew, Michael sat devouring the last of a fruit pie he had stolen from the kitchens. There would be hell to pay when Agatha discovered it was missing.

‘I think you succeeded admirably,’ Michael said to the Sheriff, ducking out of the way as pieces of apple flew from under Tulyet’s boot. ‘You clearly could not arrest everyone involved in this business, or the town would have lost virtually its entire population. You gave sufficient warning so that most had the opportunity to dispose of their ill-gotten gains, but yet the offenders have had enough of a fright from their narrow escape that it will be a long time before they think of cheating the King out of his taxes again.’