The Tinner's Corpse (3 page)

It was de Wolfe’s turn to sit bolt upright – in sheer indignation. ‘You and your bloody brother have decided, have you? I presume it’s too much to ask what you and our dear sheriff have arranged for me?’

Matilda leaned forward, her prominent jaw jutting pugnaciously at him. ‘We’ve found another candidate for coroner – not making the full three, but certainly two are better than a solitary one. It will help keep you at home at nights.’

De Wolfe scowled at her over the brim of his pot. ‘You’ve found a new coroner? I thought that was the job of the King’s justices – not a provincial sheriff and his sister!’

His sarcasm was lost on Matilda, who now had the bit firmly between her teeth. ‘Don’t you want to know who we found?’ she demanded.

John grunted, staring suspiciously at her over his ale.

‘Theobald Fitz-Ivo!’ she cried triumphantly.

His eyes widened in scornful astonishment. ‘Ha! Not that drunken old fart from Frithelstock? He couldn’t investigate a penny lost in a privy!’

His wife bridled at his scornful response. ‘Beggars can’t be choosers – you need help and he lives in just the right place, near Torrington. He could cover the north of the county and leave the rest to you. God knows, that’s more than enough for one man, all of Dartmoor and the south and east.’

De Wolfe jumped up and paced back and forth in front of the hearth, waving his ale mug. ‘He must be well over fifty, fat and unfit. The man’s useless, he drinks like a fish. His manor, small though it is, depends entirely on his bailiff.’

‘He must be doing well enough – a coroner has to have at least twenty pounds a year to be eligible and he’s proved more than that to Richard. And Richard should know – he has to collect the taxes.’

If de Wolfe had not been so incensed about Fitz-Ivo, he might have taken the opportunity to suggest that not all the taxes the sheriff collected from the county ever reached the royal treasure chest in Winchester. ‘Theobald is a lazy, incompetent fool, who is almost too fat to get astride a horse, let alone travel the county like I do. And where’s he going to get a clerk who can read and write well enough to keep the coroner’s rolls, eh?’

Matilda shrugged her thick shoulders. ‘You can ask Richard. He’s coming to dinner to talk about it.’

De Wolfe groaned again. After a day away, an uncomfortable night sleeping on a floor and ten miles on horseback since dawn, the last thing he needed was the company of his odious brother-in-law at the midday meal. He sat down again and supped his ale silently, thinking what a disaster it had been for his late father, Simon, to insist on his marrying into the de Revelle family. It may have prodded him up one rung on the ladder of Devon county aristocracy and into a richer family than his own, but at what price?

That had been sixteen years ago, though John had managed to stay away from home for most of that time, in the French and Irish wars and later at the Third Crusade. But since coming home two years ago, soon after King Richard had been captured in Austria, he had found no excuse for chasing off to war. He had settled uneasily to his role as a gentleman of leisure, his income assured by his investment in a wool export business with Hugh de Relaga, one of Exeter’s most prominent burgesses, and by a share in the profit from the manors of his own family in the south of the county.

When the ambitious Matilda had suggested to her brother last autumn that her husband should be nominated as one of the new coroners, de Wolfe had been lukewarm about the idea. But Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury and Chief Justiciar of England, had welcomed him to the post with open arms – as had the Lionheart when he was told of it in Normandy. De Wolfe had been a staunch member of the King’s bodyguard in the Holy Land, where Hubert Walter had been left in military charge after Richard had sailed away on his disastrous voyage home. John had been with the King, and always blamed himself for his failure to prevent the capture of his monarch near Vienna – a débâcle that had plunged England into years of debt after she had raised a hundred and fifty thousand marks for his ransom.

As de Wolfe sat gloomily before the fire, staring into the flames while replaying these events in his mind, his wife regarded him steadily through cold eyes. She, too, regretted her marriage, wishing more strongly every day that she had entered a nunnery. As the disappointments of life mounted with every passing year, she found increasing solace in worshipping God. She had discovered early in her marriage that she disliked almost every aspect of her wifely duties, from going to the market to the expected humiliation in bed. Yet she still had the urge for social advancement, drilled into her by her mother, who had single-mindedly schemed towards the best matches for her three children. She had managed to marry her son Richard off to Lady Eleanor de Clavelle, who was distantly related to the great Mortimer dynasty, and was satisfied, too, with the deal she had struck with Simon de Wolfe for his son to marry Matilda, even though John was six years younger.

The de Wolfes had two manors near the coast, at Stoke-in-Teignhead and Holcombe, and both Matilda and her late mother had hoped that the warrior John might rise high in the service of the King. That ambition peaked with the Lionheart’s capture when John returned home, exhausted and disillusioned. At forty it was not easy to find a war to fight, so he had been persuaded to accept the coroner’s appointment – especially as his beloved king and Hubert Walter were keen for him to take it.

Now Matilda looked at this long dark man, brooding at her fireside – and wondered if she had ever really known him. Unusually tall and spare, he was slightly stooped, and gave most men the impression that he was hovering over them. His long black hair, which curled down on to his neck, framed a somewhat morose, saturnine face with bushy jet eyebrows and a great hooked nose. He had no beard or moustache, but always had a dark stubble between his weekly shaves. He dressed in nothing but black or grey, which, with his great crow’s head, had long earned him the nickname ‘Black John’ in the armies.

Now, he was hunched over the fire, his mind somewhere on the battlefields of Palestine or Ireland, and Matilda found it hard to believe that she had ever loved him. Maybe the transient affection she had felt for him sixteen years ago had been a hysterical self-deception whipped up by her mother’s persuasive tongue. Within a month he had left her for the French campaigns and in the succeeding thirteen years he had been at home for little more than twelve months. Their love-life had been a disaster and thankfully, as far as she was concerned, their infrequent and embarrassing couplings had not resulted in children. Yet he was a passionate man, as his rather full lips suggested, and Matilda was well aware of his healthy sexual appetite, which he satisfied with a succession of mistresses, of whom the latest was that Welsh whore down at the Bush Inn.

Almost as if reading her thoughts, her husband suddenly rose to his feet. ‘I have to go to my chamber at the castle,’ he said gruffly. ‘There may have been deaths reported since I left yesterday.’ He felt an overwhelming desire to get out into the air again, away from her glowering presence.

‘Are you sure that it’s to Rougement you’re going?’ she sneered. ‘Not down to that alehouse in Idle Lane?’

Her accurate deduction so nettled him that he altered his plans just to confound her. ‘I said the castle and that’s where I’ll be. I’ll even call on that scheming brother of yours and bring him back to our table.’

Feeling self-righteous, even though he had deprived himself of a visit to Nesta, his mistress, he stalked out, taking a short mantle and street shoes from the vestibule before he stepped into the street. A moment later, he rapped on the outside of the window shutters as a defiant signal that he was turning left towards the high street, rather than right for the Bush Inn.

There was indeed news of a fresh death to be investigated when de Wolfe reached his office. This miserable chamber was at the top of the tall gatehouse of Exeter’s castle, called Rougemont from the red stone of which William the Bastard had built it soon after the Conquest. The castle was on the high ground at the northern corner of the city, in an angle of the walls originally built by the Romans. John laboured up the steep, twisting stairs of the gatehouse and pushed through the sacking that hung as a feeble draught-excluder over the doorway at the top. He was confronted by a giant of a man waving a slab of cheese in one hand and a jug of rough cider in the other.

‘We’ve got a new corpse to look at, Crowner,’ he announced. ‘An odd one, too.’

John lowered himself on to a bench behind a trestle table, virtually the only furniture in the bare room apart from a couple of three-legged milking stools. He looked up at his henchman, a huge man with wild red hair and a great drooping moustache to match. What could be seen of his face through the gingery foliage was roughened and red, with a glowing bulbous nose and a massive lantern jaw. The hands that held the cheese and pot were the size of hams, yet his forbidding appearance was lightened by a pair of twinkling blue eyes.

‘What’s so odd about it, Gwyn?’ demanded his master.

‘A dead tinner – beheaded in his own stream-working.’

De Wolfe’s black eyebrows rose, almost meeting the fringe that hung over his forehead. ‘A tinner? That’s unusual. That lot usually look after their own affairs.’

‘The bailiff from Chagford, Justin Green, rode in early this morning,’ said Gwyn, banging his cider pot down on the table. ‘He’s over in the keep now, getting some food, if you want to talk to him.’

‘Give me some of that cider first. Arguing with my wife has given me a thirst.’

The big Cornishman lumbered to a small alcove built into the thickness of the wall, took down another pottery mug and wiped the dust from it with a grubby rag. He poured into it a murky stream of rough cider until it slopped over the brim. In the same alcove was a loaf of bread and some more hard cheese, wrapped in a slightly less soiled cloth. Gwyn slid his dagger from his belt, cut two hunks of bread and divided the cheese into three, offering some to his master.

‘Better keep some for that little turd when he arrives,’ he grumbled, referring to their clerk, the third member of the coroner’s team.

‘Where is he? He’s usually here by this time.’

‘Gone down to the cathedral scriptorium, to cadge some ink. He complained that it was too expensive to buy, given all the work he has to do.’

De Wolfe stretched out his long legs under the table, then shivered in the dank air of the spartan chamber as Gwyn settled himself on a window-sill. A pair of unshuttered slits looked down on the city, letting both light and a cold draught into the room. The sheriff had grudgingly provided the worst accommodation he could find for his brother-in-law, to emphasise his opposition to the new post of coroner.

‘Tell me about this Chagford business,’ he ordered, biting into the rough horse-bread.

‘The overman of a gang of stream-workers was found dead yesterday morning when the men arrived. His body was lying under the washing trough, but he had no head.’

‘Was it nearby?’

‘Not a sign of it, not within the workings.’

De Wolfe scowled – he often did so, as an aid to thought. ‘Were they sure it was the overman, if he had no face?’

Gwyn pulled at the ends of his bushy red moustache, which hung down to his collar-bones. ‘No doubt about it. The men recognised his clothes, and he had a finger missing from his left hand, so the bailiff says. He never returned home to his wife the previous night nor has he been seen since.’

The coroner pondered this. ‘Who does the working belong to?’

‘Walter Knapman of Chagford. He has at least a dozen stream-works on the east side of the moor.’

‘Did they leave the body there?’

‘His men hauled it from the trough, it seems. But they had the sense to leave it at the workings in a hut.’

John swallowed his bread and cheese and finished off his cider before rising to his feet. ‘We’ll have to go there today. I’ve got the sheriff coming to eat at the house first, but we’ll leave in the early afternoon.’ He walked to the doorway and bent his head under the lintel. ‘Find that bailiff – and that scrawny clerk of ours – and be at the West Gate well before the Vespers bell. We’ll be away from home again tonight, which’ll give my dear wife something more to whine about.’

At the bottom of the twisting stairs he left the gate-house through the guard-room, saluted respectfully by the two men-at-arms. Sir John de Wolfe was popular with soldiers, who knew of his exploits in many foreign campaigns and his faithful service to the King in the Holy Land during the Third Crusade.

He walked into the inner ward and crossed to the keep, a square two-storeyed building near the northern wall. As he trudged across the refuse-strewn dried mud, the bare stone box of the court-house was on his left, and the tiny garrison chapel of St Mary on his right, but he registered none of these familiar sights as he thought about the prospect of Theobald as a fellow coroner – and the fuss Matilda would make when she knew he was off again today on his travels.

As his gaunt black figure absently navigated the inner ward, people stepped out of his way, either from respect or caution, depending on whether they knew him or not. The yard bustled with activity, with soldiers crossing from their billets in lean-to huts around the walls and the women and children of the garrison filling much of the space that was not occupied by horses, ox-carts or porters pushing trolleys piled with equipment. On the other side of the enclosure, a dozen men in chain-mail hauberks and round helmets were being drilled by Gabriel, the sergeant-at-arms, an activity that produced much shouting, swearing and clattering of shields.

De Wolfe reached the wooden steps that led up to the door of the keep, placed high above the undercroft for purposes of defence. Most of the first floor was occupied by the hall, another hive of activity as clerks, officials, servants, burgesses, merchants and soldiers strode, sauntered, gossiped, conspired, worked, ate and slept in it. Some were there to petition the sheriff but were kept at bay by a man-at-arms outside the door of his chamber, which lay behind the hall. The coroner went straight to the door, nodded curtly at the guard, opened it and marched in.