The Lord Bishop's Clerk (24 page)

There was only a stupefied silence, so he continued. ‘You sent the lad for beer, and that was your chance. You guessed that he would not come back willingly across the courtyard, especially not slowly as he would have to with a full pitcher. He would hang about hoping for a lull. You then went to the cellarer and then nipped up behind Wulfstan on his return trip, broke his neck with those very capable hands of yours, and returned the way you had come.’

‘But that couldn’t be, my lord. I was only barely damp when I returned to the workshop, not soaking wet. What you say is impossible.’

‘Not if you grabbed a piece of sacking and used that as protection and grabbed him as he passed the west porch.’

‘I would have been seen.’

Catchpoll gave a mirthless laugh. ‘Most unlikely. Once the thunder and lightning ceased everyone simply kept indoors, and the rain was so heavy at times that it would be difficult to distinguish anyone even if they were seen. No, it was not too great a risk. All you had to do then was find the body, and you made sure that you had someone with you this time, which was a clever move.’

Master Elias was at the end of his tether. Whatever he said, the sheriff’s men had an answer. It was as if he could feel the noose tightening already round his neck. His breath choked within him, and he felt sick and faint.

‘No,’ he whispered. ‘No, you have made a dreadful mistake.’ He looked Bradecote full in the face. ‘I have not killed anyone, I swear as a guildsman. I was going to meet Eudo the Clerk, yes, but it was at his instigation, and he told me where. It angered me, that, being told what to do like a journeyman. He must have recognised me when he came up while I was talking with Brother Remigius. He looked at me and said something, a phrase that only supporters of the Empress Maud use. He believed I was of her faction.’

‘And are you her spy?’ Bradecote’s voice was chill.

He lifted his head then, and his voice was stronger. ‘I am no spy, my lord, though I think she has the right of it and should have the crown upon her head. I have only ever given what I have learned from my position, at meals, meetings and up high on the scaffolding. I recognised the clerk as having been in Oxford during the siege. There was rumour about him there, playing to both sides like, but I could not have said which was the true inclination of him or his master. I even remembered the lord de Grismont from when I was up at roof level on St Frideswide’s.’

‘He told us he was there, but we have no reason to think he ever met Eudo the Clerk.’ Bradecote was unimpressed.

‘I could not tell you that either, only that he met with the Sons of Abraham.’

‘Met with? You mean he spoke to a Jew.’ Bradecote shrugged. It was not important.

‘I mean “met with”, for he and the Jew of Oxford spoke at length and most privily, so as others would not see. Of course, they did not look up, no one ever does.’

‘But you did not see him and Eudo together.’ Catchpoll had had enough. The kitchen fire had warmed him but now the remaining damp had soaked through his cotte and he was starting to feel chilled in the cool of the chapel.

‘No, I did not.’

‘This gets us no further.’ Bradecote, too, was cold. ‘We will lodge you in the cell used for the punishment of monks for tonight. Tomorrow you will be taken to Worcester for the lord sheriff himself to decide whether you are to be arraigned or not.’

‘But I protest …’

‘Leave it for the lord sheriff,’ Catchpoll sneered, and took the master mason gruffly by the arm. He stood up and went out without any further complaint or sign of struggle.

Bradecote was left alone with the body of Wulfstan the apprentice. He sighed, wearily.

‘I failed you, lad. If I had understood things better to begin with, you might be living yet. God forgive me.’ He crossed himself, and went upon his knees in prayer. After a short while he rose, and turned for the door.

He ought to report his success to Abbot William, but just at present it did not feel like success at all. He was here to discover a murderer, and beneath his very nose that person had killed again, the victim little more than a child, before he had been apprehended. He wanted dry clothes and a hot meal, and the chance to digest the events of the day in private. His stomach was reminding him he had not eaten since the previous day.

He went to the kitchen, and persuaded the cook to give him bread and a bowl of thick fish stew, which he wolfed down, with the half-truth of being too busy on the investigation of the latest death to eat with the abbot. He was, he reflected sadly, quickly adopting the subterfuge and craft of Catchpoll. There was, he realised, little to rejoice in with his unwanted job, but he was consoled as he remembered that this last fraught encounter had proved innocence as well as guilt. If Elias of St Edmondsbury was the murderer, then
she
was innocent. The dark fears that had grown to a sickening certainty by noon, had been dispelled as quickly as the oppressive heat by the cleansing storm. Tomorrow the nuns of Romsey could return home with their prize, and he could cast her image safely into the store of memory and dwell on it no longer.

He walked across the still puddled courtyard to the guest hall, making no diversions round the miniature lakes. The muddy water splashed unheeded upon his boots. The rain had ceased, and somewhere in the abbot’s garden a wren’s fluid treble song, sweet and fresh as the cleared air, poured out to all who would listen. Bradecote took in a deep breath and held it for a moment. It was then that the worm of doubt entered the certainty of his deliberations. He had said ‘if’ the master mason was guilty, not ‘since’ or ‘because’. He told himself it was merely a phrase, but something niggled. He had not been convinced of Elias’s guilt before Catchpoll had told him of his findings from the workshop, and was there anything revelatory there? Catchpoll was certainly convinced, but was that experience, intuition or just plain desperation? He had said he would dig up a motive, but had he truly done so? He, Hugh Bradecote, had been so relieved to find that Catchpoll did not share his own belief, that he had welcomed the serjeant’s certainty with open arms. It did not fully explain events, and Master Elias, however shaken, had stuck to his claim of innocence. Could he be innocent?

Bradecote shook his head, trying to clear it. He had come to the stage where he was doubting himself for not having enough doubts. This was madness. It was not even his final decision. If de Beauchamp thought the case against Elias of St Edmondsbury was weak he would free him, castigate his temporary officer, but only mildly, and gratefully give the job back to his usual deputy. This did not prove as helpful a thought as he had hoped. Bradecote had certainly not wanted this task, but failure was not something he contemplated lightly. He was thoroughly confused.

His spare undershirt was dry, if stale, and would keep the lingering damp from his skin, at least for a while. He decided to escape from the pressures within the abbey and go into the town, but before he could leave the guest hall he heard his name called, in an urgent voice. It came from de Grismont’s chamber. The lord of Defford stood at the entrance, frowning.

‘Good. I am glad you are here, Bradecote. Look what my servant found when he turned back my blanket.’ He pointed to the head end of the bed.

Bradecote noticed nothing at first, and then saw what had been left beneath the cot. Lying on its side, as if thrust under the concealing blanket in haste, was an empty jug.

‘I am not one who avoids drink. I can take it as well as the next man, but I have never had recourse to keeping it under my own bed. I take it this has been put here to convince you of my guilt. Well, I tell you it is totally preposterous. Whoever did it wasn’t thinking, because why would I put evidence in my own chamber? You might have demanded to search all our chambers. I shall leave one of my men here all the time from now on, until the killer is caught.’ De Grismont spoke in a mixture of outrage and disbelief. He was clearly aggrieved.

‘Your bringing this to my attention so quickly is of use to us, my lord. Thank you. With luck, your man should not be confined here much longer.’

What else could he say? ‘We have someone in custody, but what you have shown me proves they are almost certainly innocent,’ was not, however accurate, likely to engender confidence. He picked up the pitcher and took it to his own room, where he left the evidence beneath his cot, in a similar position to that in which it had been found. Then he sat for a while upon the bed, head in hands, thinking ever more depressing thoughts.

The finding of the pitcher only strengthened the case for the master mason’s release. It must have been left in de Grismont’s chamber while he came out to see the commotion round Wulfstan’s body, and Master Elias was standing there, dripping, throughout. Waiting until later would have been risky and, as an afterthought, did not beat throwing it away in pease field or fish pond. No, it gave added weight to the circumstantial evidence against his other suspect, Sister Edeva, and the knowledge lay like a weight in his chest, constricting his breathing. By rights, he should get Catchpoll to release the master mason and save him a troubled night, but the concomitant to that was taking the nun into custody and leaving her in the cell instead. Well, it would do the master mason no harm, and he could surely afford to give the woman one last night of freedom. She was unlikely to go about the abbey committing acts of murder in the dark when there was a man in custody, nor to try and escape. The abbey walls were suddenly a prison to him, oppressive and forbidding. He needed fresh air.

He left the enclave and went out into the little town of Pershore itself. Walking through the gateway and back into the secular world, with shrill housewives calling children home to bed and ribald laughter emanating from the ale house, was balm to his troubled mind. Out here all the introverted, ritualised behaviour of the cloister took on a normal perspective. Bradecote wanted suddenly to go home to his manor and await the arrival of his child in peace, disturbed by no more than the rate of ripening in the wheat field, and the depredations of a roaming fox. Here was the everyday he understood, and it looked so deceptively simple. Only when Brother Porter closed the abbey gate with a deadening thump behind him did his disquiet return, and though Catchpoll snored contentedly in the sleep of the just, Bradecote spent another troubled night, his dreams a phantasmagoria of unknown hanging corpses, faces at windows, puddles so deep that they swallowed up those who trod in them, and a tall, alabaster-faced woman in Benedictine garb, who smiled at him with great, sad eyes as he approached her, and at the last moment withdrew her hand from beneath her scapular and, still smiling, stabbed him through the heart with a darning needle of impossible length.

It was near dawn when Bradecote finally gave up hope of rest. He lay for a while with one hand behind his head, the other arm still too bruised to raise above his shoulder, revolving in his mind all the evidence and coming up each time with exactly the same unpalatable answer. His brain seemed to spin until he actually felt sick and dizzy.

Chinks of pale grey light pierced the edges of the shutter to the little window, and from without came the sound of the morning chorus, still in the preparatory stages with individual songs discernible. Bradecote rose, his limbs feeling leaden, pushed open the shutter, and thrust his head out into the new morning. The cold air made him catch his breath, but it was a deliciously sweet, fresh chill. Dew-bespangled spiders’ webs glistened like silver and rock crystal in the growing light, as the eastern horizon turned from the soft grey of putative dawn to the gentle colours of the real thing. A wren, hidden deep amongst the ivy that clung to the wall of the abbot’s garden, sang as if its tiny heart would burst. Bradecote wondered vaguely if it was the same bird he had heard the previous evening. A throstle’s melodious song drifted up from the orchards running down to the river, and undertook a vocal duel with a rival from another bough. There was something pure and unsullied about the notes that made Bradecote forget, for a few moments, the unsavoury duty ahead of him. He emptied his mind of thought and concentrated only on the sound.

The grass had taken on its daylight green now, and from a muted world of shade and shadow the brightness of the day emerged, as bright as a butterfly from its chrysalis. There were no people in sight, and without them it was possible to hide from the ugliness of their deeds.

The birdsong became a crescendo, as though the latecomers feared being ignored. Bradecote could not see the sunrise itself, for the church and the abbot’s garden wall and lodging blocked the horizon, but the change in the light was indicative enough. The long summer day lay ahead, and folk would be rising now to attend their tasks. Bradecote heard the first clumsy sounds of people, and then a yaffle calling in its distinctive dipping flight, somewhere among the beeches beyond the fishponds. It was well beyond Bradecote’s view, but its mocking laugh, carrying in the still air, was an insult. It told him he was a fool to pretend, that life was a cruel joke and he had to get on with it. The brief respite from gloom that the other birdsong had given him was gone. He withdrew his head and set about his preparations for the day with a heavy head and heart.

The firm knock that preceded Catchpoll’s cheerful arrival made Bradecote brace himself. The serjeant appeared far less lugubrious than usual, and rubbed his hands together as if in anticipation of some pleasant event.

‘Good morning, my lord,’ he announced airily. ‘I thought we …’ He halted as Bradecote slowly drew forth the pitcher from under the bed and held it up by the handle as if it was contaminated. He said nothing; words were unnecessary.

‘Ah.’ Catchpoll gazed at the jug, apparently in search of inspiration. ‘I take it that is not a jug you have been keeping under your cot for emergencies, my lord.’

‘No, Catchpoll, it is not. Nor was it put there by person or persons unknown. It was found by de Grismont’s servant, under de Grismont’s bed yesterday evening, and he called me to see it. He was less than pleased at having the finger of guilt pointed at him, you can be sure.’