[William Falconer 06] - Falconer and the Ritual of Death (17 page)

Peter Bullock’s voice startled Falconer, and he tipped the bucket over, scattering bones across the beaten earth floor.

‘Peter I didn’t hear you coming.’

‘No, you were preoccupied with that bucket of old bones.’

‘Well, someone has to be, Peter. Now that Master Bonham is dead, I appear to be the only one who cares what happened to him.’

Bullock’s face darkened at the clear criticism of his behaviour. But he would not be diverted from his enquiries.

‘I have to ask once again. Who is this girl laid out on the table?’

Falconer pulled a face as he picked up finger bones, and told his friend the truth. What did it matter any more, now that Bonham was dead? Bullock listened with a stony face.

‘You should not have been involved in this, William. It is an illegal, if not a blasphemous act. Only victims of murder may be examined for reasons of pursuing justice, and dissection should only be practised on the bodies of criminals. This girl should not have been cut open. Unless ... did the jury of the eyre decide she was not in her right mind?’ Bullock was raising the matter of the decision of the local court because if the girl had taken her own life while sane, she could not be buried in consecrated ground. Falconer shook his head, knowing from what Bonham had told him that her lord, Gilbert de Bois, had dealt with the matter with great despatch. And the jury he had arranged to be called had agreed she had been in her right mind. It had been felonious self-murder. The girl was not to be allowed a Christian burial, and Bonham could legally lay his hands on her, as she was a criminal.

Bullock sighed.

‘Then I will arrange her burial. And as the perpetrator of this outrage is dead himself, there seems no reason to pursue the matter further. As for Master Bonham’s death, we can only guess that it was an unfortunate accident.’

‘Hmm. There have been too many unfortunate accidents here of late, Peter.’

Falconer’s attitude to the tortuous affair of the ancient death, and that of the mason he was trying to tie in with it, was beginning to exasperate Bullock. If now he thought the death by fire of this odious little regent master who delighted in carving up bodies was connected, then to Bullock’s mind he was very much mistaken. There seemed no connection whatsoever, and if his determination to put an end to all this speculation resulted in the loss of his friendship with Falconer, then so be it. There were greater matters in this world than obsession with mere detail and an assemblage of facts. For Bullock, logic was an aberrant pursuit, and faith in a higher power more significant. But he couldn’t tell Falconer that throughout their friendship the regent master’s dubious hold on faith had often troubled him. He merely shrugged his shoulders.

‘Well, you must do what you think fit, William. But don’t cross me, or I will have to apply the law as impartially to you as to anyone.’

Falconer frowned, shocked by his old friend’s intransigence.

‘I can ask no more of you than honesty and impartiality, old friend.’

Both men then climbed the steps back up to the street, and went their separate ways, as far apart as they ever had been.

Seventeen

The streets of Oxford were a sea of mud as the rain clouds piled up over the town. The River Thames was swollen and ran fast and deep under the arches of Grandpont, the causeway bridge that spanned the marshy land to the south of the walls. If it rose much higher it would burst its banks, and inundate the Dominican friary that sat precariously astride the water meadow between the river and the town walls. The River Cherwell to the east had already risen to the level of the bridge that arched over its normally placid stream. The Jews’ cemetery outside the walls was already partially under water, and St John’s Hospital on the opposite side of the road was close to being abandoned.

Falconer was ignorant of all this impending disaster as he wrestled with his latest unfortunate encounter with Peter Bullock.

He had never known the constable so uncooperative. Difficult to convince, and intransigent, yes. He had been all those things in the past. But he had always been willing to listen to his friend.

Now, it was as though some other loyalty had tossed his friendship abruptly aside, just when William had his most puzzling set of murders yet to solve. Aristotelian doctrine suggested that a set of truths, when put together, would lead to a single greater truth. Falconer had used this method many times to discover motive and identity in murder cases. This time collecting sufficient truths in the matter of the killing of the man immured in the walls of Little Jewry was hard enough. Twenty years was a long time, and the trail was as cold as a winter’s morning on Port Meadow. But if the death of the mason Wilfrid Southo was linked, then he could at least hope that it would provide a clue to the earlier murder. And as for the horrible death of Richard Bonham, that seemed to be the most puzzling of the lot. Why would anyone wish to kill a harmless scholar? Unless he had uncovered something from the skeletal remains.

Suddenly, Falconer slapped his forehead in annoyance. What with Deudone’s story of childhood deeds and the deadly blaze, he had simply forgotten the vinegar-soaked bundle he had picked up from the doorway of Bonham’s house. Had Bonham left him a message? He hurried through the muddy streets to Aristotle’s Hall to find out.

The inclement weather was irritating Richard Thorpe beyond measure. The site for Bassett’s College was cleared, but the rain meant no progress was being made on the rebuilding.

And Dame Elia refused to understand that laying foundations in the rain was impossible. She was badgering him to get going, so that was why he was squatting under the cover of his lodge on the site chipping away at some stonework. Around him, a few glum workmen were trudging through the drizzle desultorily preparing the ground. He laid his chisel down, and looked around the site. Since the untimely death of his foreman, he had been forced to supervise the day-to-day work himself, and it was beginning to pall. He called over to the giant Trewoon, a man he had encountered on various sites for at least twenty years, and who would never progress beyond the stage of apprentice in his journey towards being a mason. But his strength was of value, even if his brain wasn’t.

‘John, where is Pawlyn? I asked him ages ago to prepare me some more stone blocks.’

Trewoon stood up from his task of shifting timbers from the growing puddle at the lower end of the site to a drier spot.

He looked a little embarrassed, and mumbled something Thorpe couldn’t catch.

‘Speak up, man.’

‘He’s answering a call of nature, Master Thorpe.’ Thorpe grunted in exasperation, smacking his hands on his leather apron to knock the stone dust off them. He doubted that Pawlyn was merely taking a piss somewhere behind a wall. The runty little man was up to something, he was sure of it.

‘Well, send him to me when he turns up.’

Trewoon nodded, and picking up a massive baulk of timber, staggered away across the site. Once he was out of the master mason’s sight, he dropped the timber and scurried off down Little Jewry Lane. He knew where Pawlyn was, and needed to warn him that Thorpe was aware of his absence. In the shelter of the overhanging buildings at the end of Schitebarne Lane, just a few yards away, he could see the missing Peter Pawlyn.

He was listening to some instructions from a hooded foreigner, and was hopping nervously from one foot to the other. Trewoon supposed it was where Peter had got his full purse the other day. Now it seemed the bearded man wanted more from him.

He jabbed at Pawlyn with his finger until Trewoon saw his friend reluctantly nod. The foreigner smiled, passed him a coin, then disappeared down Schitebame Lane. Head bowed, Pawlyn crossed the street, almost walking into Trewoon before he saw him. Which was no small feat considering Trewoon’s bulk.

‘John. What the hell are you doing here?’

John Trewoon put on an apologetic look. ‘Master Thorpe knows you have been off-site, Peter. I thought I’d best warn you.’

‘Damn Thorpe. He’s the least of my worries right now.’ Pawlyn plunged past Trewoon, and hurried back down Little Jewry Lane. Trewoon followed him at a loping pace.

‘What’s troubling you, Peter? Is that man you were talking to causing you problems? If so, I could...’ He clenched his fist to suggest how he might help.

Pawlyn stopped abruptly, and suddenly stuck his face into Trewoon’s.

‘You can’t do anything, John. In fact you never saw that man. Understand?’

Trewoon stammered an apology for his inadvertent error.

He didn’t know why he had so angered his friend, but he would do as he said.

‘Y-yes, of course, Peter. I never saw him.’

Falconer sat at his cluttered table, and picked up the bundle left him by Bonham. It was wrapped in white cloth stained with a dark fluid. He smelled vinegar, and suddenly remembered that he had smelled the same odour, only more strongly, when he had first picked it up. Why would Bonham have steeped the cloth in vinegar? He untied the knot and unfolded the cloth. Inside were a number of folded parchment pages, and on opening them, he could tell they were old sheets scraped clean of writing and reused. On each page was Bonham’s handwriting, small and concise with many abbreviations to ensure the fullest notes were kept on the smallest possible space. Bonham had always been economical if nothing else. The top sheet held a message to Falconer, and the rest appeared to simply be notes made by Bonham to himself.

Falconer carelessly swept his arm across the table to clear a space to lay the notes out fiat. The parchment was inclined to fold itself up again, so he clamped the top down with the large stone that revealed a curious shape on its surface. He held the bottom down with his fingers, and started reading the cramped and feverish text.

Master Falconer,

Someone just reminded me that ritual plays a great part in our lives. And so it does in death. When you are reading this I will be dead, or at least I hope so. It’s hopeless for me, and I can only hope to save you and others. I pray that you are safe, but you must look out for symptoms of severe headaches, fever, muscle pains and sensitivity to light. The later symptoms are stupor and delirium, and I fear the latter is upon me. So I cannot forget the thoughts of the ritual of death. I must not pass the affliction on, so I will cleanse my house. The disease was first described nearly two hundred years ago in a convent in Salerno, and you will know it as the stupor disease. In Greek,
τυφος

Bonham

Horror tightened Falconer’s throat. Typhus. Bonham had contracted typhus, no doubt from his careless behaviour when dissecting his cadavers. He could not work out what Bonham meant by his reference to the ‘ritual of death’, but assumed that the delirium of typhus had gripped him. He joined Bonham’s prayers in wishing he too had not caught the disease. No wonder Bonham had wrapped the notes Falconer now held in vinegar-soaked cloth. No one was sure how it communicated itself, but typhus was deadly. He wondered if it came from the skeleton or the girl. But he could not imagine the old bones carrying such a disease over all that time. Nor could the girl have passed it on so swiftly, as it was said typhus took at least two weeks to develop in the victim’s body. Bonham must have been singularly unfortunate to have found a body to dissect some weeks ago, which itself had not had chance to pass on its evil to others, until he broached the integrity of its flesh. No outbreak of the disease was recorded locally.

Falconer reread the lines about Bonham cleansing his house.

It was then he saw that Bonham had taken his own life in order not to pass the disease on. So his death need not be attributed to someone obscuring the death of the Templar priest twenty years ago. On the other hand, Bonham had deemed his notes significant enough to leave them for Falconer. He scanned the next few pages carefully.

The top two sheets described the meticulous process of examining the skeletal remains. As Falconer had learned, Bonham had worked out that the bones were those of a Templar priest, who had suffered a violent death. The damaged arm and hand bones demonstrated that he had tried to protect himself from several heavy blows, but the absence of the skull meant it was difficult to confirm the cause of death. Bonham wrote in his notes that no cut marks were evident on the ribs, nor in the adipose flesh left on the undisturbed body. So he surmised that he had not died due to a blow to the heart or due to blood loss from a cut. The rest of the notes were a detailed description of the state of the body, but offered no more insights. Falconer turned with interest to the final two pages. They were not about the skeleton, but about Sarah Blakiston. At first the notes recalled what Bonham had already told Falconer concerning the girl and her condition. There was a graphic and very accurate sketch of her womb and its contents. But when Falconer turned to the last page, he saw Bonham had added something new at the end, and marked it with quick scrawled lines in the margin which were in complete contrast to the rest of his neat, cramped style.

I was completely wrong about the girl killing herself, Falconer. After you and Bullock had left I looked again at her. Your interest in assembling truths, no matter how trivial, until a greater truth is revealed, made me think again about how I might dissect a victim of suspicious death and make discoveries. I found something on the girl’s body. Though I was told she had been found hanging from a beam in the barn on Sir Gilbert’s estate, the marks on her neck were horizontal. She had been strangled with the rope found round her neck, but not hanged. The way she was found was to mask the real cause of her death. She was murdered.