Crowner Royal

CHAPTER ONE

‘Not half as good as Mary’s, but it will have to do us for now,’ grunted John de Wolfe, looking down into a wooden bowl in which a few lumps of meat floated in a pallid stew. Across the small table, Gwyn of Polruan was already slurping his food from a horn spoon, alternately dipping a hunk of barley bread into the liquid.

‘It’s not too bad, Crowner! At least it’s piping hot, though I don’t know that we need that on a day like this.’

He stopped eating momentarily to take a deep swallow from a quart pot of ale and wipe the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. It was just past noon and the sun was at its highest, pouring down its stifling radiance on the lower valley of the Thames.

‘I wonder what my wife’s doing now?’ he added pensively. ‘Pouring better ale than this for her customers in the Bush, no doubt!’

His comment emphasised the nostalgic mood that both men were in at that moment. Though they were sitting in a relatively decent house in Westminster, their thoughts were a couple of hundred miles away. Sir John was contemplating his old dog in Exeter, his mistress in Dawlish and his former mistress now decamped back to her home in South Wales. Given the food situation, he also had thoughts to spare for his excellent cook Mary, who had once been another of his paramours. The only person for whom he had no nostalgia was his wife Matilda, who was sulking in self-imposed exile in a Devonshire convent.

‘Still, I’m glad we’re out of that bloody palace,’ persisted the big Cornishman. ‘The airs and graces of that lot got right up my nose!’

John grunted, his favourite form of response. ‘Thomas seems to enjoy it, though he always loved being with all those damned clerks and priests. But I agree, it’s easier being in our own dwelling.’ He had rented the cottage to get away from the stifling atmosphere of the palace staff quarters where they had spent the first week.

They finished up their stew and waited for Osanna to waddle in and take away their bowls to the kitchen hut in the backyard. The wife of their obsequious landlord Aedwulf, Osanna was an immensely fat woman who did the cooking, washing and perfunctory cleaning of the house in Long Ditch.

As they sat on their stools in expectation of the next course, John went over yet again in his mind the events of the past two months. He was not all that happy with what had taken place, but he consoled himself with the thought that he had had no choice. As a knight of the Crown, he had little option but to obey orders — especially when they came directly from the mouth of his king! For more than eighteen months, he had been the coroner for Devon, but Richard the Lionheart in his wisdom had recently decided that he needed a coroner dedicated to the English court, similar to the one that existed in his Normandy capital of Rouen. Given the past association of de Wolfe with the king and his chief minister Hubert Walter, John had been the obvious choice, so now here he was in Westminster, like it or not.

The move had coincided with an upheaval in his private life, as his mistress Nesta had despaired of any future for them together and gone home to Wales to get married. His surly wife Matilda, equally exasperated by his infidelities, had once again taken herself to a nunnery and this time seemed determined to stay there. To round off the situation, he had resumed his affair with an old flame, Hilda of Dawlish, though distance now seemed to have frustrated this particular liaison.

Gwyn’s deep voice broke through his reverie.

‘We could do with a couple of good murders or a rape to cheer us up, Crowner!’ he boomed, only half in jest. ‘Too damned quiet in this holy village.’

He was referring to the small town of Westminster, which was a unique enclave ruled by the abbot, William Postard. Though geographically part of the county of Middlesex, it lay outside its jurisdiction on both religious and political grounds, as it contained both the great abbey of Edward the Confessor and the Royal Palace, the residence of the Norman kings since William the Conqueror had moved out of the Great Tower.

De Wolfe grunted his agreement, as the caseload so far had been derisory compared with the number they had dealt with across the large county of Devon. He wondered again why the king had been so insistent on having a ‘Coroner of the Verge’, when there seemed so little business for him.

Osanna came in with a platter containing a boiled salmon, which the two men looked at with resignation. It was Tuesday, not a Friday fish day and they had already had salmon twice in the past week. The fish was so plentiful in the Thames and its tributaries that it appeared on the menu with depressing regularity. However, they were hungry and there were buttered carrots and onions to go with it, as well as more fresh bread.

‘I’ve got eels for tomorrow, you’ll like those!’ she announced cheerfully, ignoring the glowering look from the coroner. Her accented English was strange after the West Country dialect, but he understood her well enough to be depressed by the prospect of yet another meal dredged from the river.

‘A nice leg of mutton or a joint of beef wouldn’t come amiss!’ grumbled Gwyn, as he filtered the last of his stew through the luxuriant ginger moustache that hung down both sides of his mouth, the colour matching the unruly mop of hair on his head. The Cornishman was huge, both in height and width, with a prominent red nose and pair of twinkling blue eyes.

His colouring was in marked contrast to that of his lean master, who though as tall as Gwyn, exuded blackness, from the jet of his long, swept-back hair to the stubble on his gaunt cheeks. Heavy eyebrows of the same hue overhung deep-set eyes, between which was a hooked nose that gave him the menacing appearance of a predatory hawk. To complete this sombre appearance, his long tunics and surcoats were always black or grey. In campaigns in Ireland, France and the Holy Land, the troops had known him as ‘Black John’, though this was partly from the grim moods that could assail him when things went wrong.

When they had finished their meal, the two men buckled on their sword belts and left their rented house, one of several two-storey thatched cottages facing a muddy channel known as the Long Ditch, which drained into a stream called the Clowson Brook. At the southern end, the track joined the ominously named Thieving Lane, which curved around the landward side of the abbey towards the river. Here the main gates to the abbey and the palace stood together, at the point where King Street formed the start of the ‘Royal Way’ which led along the river towards the bustling city of London, almost two miles away.

The great church of Edward the Confessor loomed above them on their right as they walked slowly towards the palace, where government administration was now largely centred, having been gradually transferred from the Saxon capital of Winchester. The heat was intense and dust lifted from the road as they walked. They took care to keep clear of the central stone-edged gully which was filled with a drying slurry of sewage and rubbish, now stinking in the summer sun.

The north side of the lane was lined with small houses and cottages, built either of planks or wattle-and-daub, mostly with roofs of thatch or wooden shingles. One or two better dwellings were stone-built, with tiled roofs which were less hazardous than straw or reeds, which had caused many disastrous town fires.

The heat was keeping some people indoors, but many remained on the streets. The busiest time was the early morning market, when people were out buying their food for the day, but there were still some haggling at the stalls that sold a whole range of goods. Handcarts and barrows trundled up and down and Gwyn and the coroner had to stand aside as a flock of goats were driven past on their way to the water meadows that lay beyond Tothill Street.

It was little more than a five-minute walk from their door to the palace and it was with some relief that they passed through the arched gate into New Palace Yard, where a sentry struck the butt of his pike on the ground in salute to the king’s coroner.

The palace was a rambling collection of buildings of various types and ages, the major feature being the huge hall built almost a century ago by the Conqueror’s son, William Rufus. Behind and to the sides of that, an extensive collection of stone and wooden buildings had sprung up without much attempt at organised planning. More buildings, stables and houses lay behind the hall, including another hall, a chapel and a large block which formed the king’s accommodation. This was largely unused, as Richard the Lionheart had spent barely a few months in the country during the whole of his reign, preferring to be across the Channel in Normandy or his homeland of Aquitaine. At the farther end, a wall and then the Tyburn stream demarcated the palace precinct from the marshy pastures beyond.

The coroner and his officer walked down the landward side past the great hall and turned into a small doorway in a two-storeyed stone building that housed the Chancery clerks. A gloomy corridor gave immediate relief from the heat; they pushed past worried-looking clerics clutching rolls of parchment as they scuttled between various offices.

‘I’m starting to get the hang of this place at last,’ muttered Gwyn. ‘For the first couple of weeks, I didn’t know where the bloody hell I was!’

He turned left at a junction in the passageway, walking with a sailor’s roll, a legacy of his youth as a fisherman. De Wolfe loped alongside him with characteristic long strides like the forbidding animal whose name he bore.

‘It’s very different from Rougemont,’ he agreed, thinking with some nostalgia of Exeter Castle where his brother-in-law, the former sheriff, had grudgingly allotted them an attic room in the gatehouse.

Another dozen yards brought them to another junction, but here a flight of stone stairs rose to the upper level. At the top, another corridor abruptly changed from stone to timber construction as they entered an older part of the palace. Clumping across the planks, Gwyn led the way to one of half a dozen doors set along a passage. They were now above and to the river side of the block housing the royal apartments.

Gwyn lifted the wooden latch and stood aside for his master to enter. Though there was a hasp and staple on the doorpost, there was no lock, as apparently it was felt that there was unlikely to be anything worth stealing in a coroner’s office.

‘It’s cooler in here, thank God,’ muttered de Wolfe. He strode across the almost bare room to the window, whose shutter was propped wide open on an iron hook. Leaning on the worn timber of the unglazed frames, he stared out at the river, whose brown waters flowed sluggishly past as the tide began to ebb.

A hundred paces away, the scrubby grass shelved down to a rim of dirty gravel at the edge of the water, but John knew that in a few hours the shallow river would shrink to half its width between wide stretches of thick mud. Indeed, only half a mile upstream, it was possible for carts and horses to cross at the lowest point of the tide.

‘Where’s our saintly clerk? Still saying his prayers, I suppose,’ grunted Gwyn, as he closed the door. The coroner turned away and sat behind his table to stare around the room. It shared one feature with their previous accommodation in Exeter — the sparsity of furniture. A bare trestle table occupied the centre, pitted and stained with years of spilt ink and aimless disfigurement with dagger points. John had a chair, a clumsy folding device with a leather back and on the opposite side of the table was a plank-like bench and two three-legged stools, which Gwyn had ‘acquired’ from a neighbouring empty room.

‘Thomas could have shared the house with us, but he obviously prefers the company of those monks and clerics across the road,’ observed de Wolfe. He said this without sarcasm or rancour, as after three years of dismal exclusion from his beloved Church after being defrocked, John did not begrudge his clerk’s delight in his recent reinstatement.

Gwyn pulled a stool over to the window and sat with his elbow on the sill, catching the slight breeze that came off the river.

‘I reckon we’d be more use back in Devon that sitting on our arses up here, Crowner,’ he growled. ‘Not even a decent hanging to attend!’

One of the coroner’s duties was attendance at all executions to record it and confiscate any property the felon might possess. But so far there had not been one hanging during the six weeks that they had been living in Westminster.

‘I don’t even know where the damned gallows is!’ complained the Cornishman, almost plaintively.

‘They’ve just started using a place up on the Tyburn stream, where it’s crossed by the Oxford road,’ replied John. ‘They strung up those rebels there a couple of months ago — William Longbeard and his followers. Now it’s used as much as the Smithfield elms.’

He was interrupted by a patter of feet on the boards of the passageway outside and the door opened to admit a scrawny young man with a slight hump on one shoulder. He wore a faded black cassock and his lank brown hair was shaved off the crown of his head to form a clerical tonsure. Thin and short of stature, Thomas de Peyne had a sharp nose and a receding chin, but this unprepossessing appearance hid an agile mind crammed with a compendious knowledge about all manner of subjects.

‘I regret my lateness, Crowner,’ he panted. ‘But the archivist engaged me in a discussion about the Venerable Bede and I could hardly detach myself from such an eminent man.’

De Wolfe grunted his indifference as Thomas hurriedly sat himself at the other side of the table. He scrabbled in his shapeless shoulder bag for his quills, ink horn and parchment, and set them on the table, ready to get on with copying the proceedings of a previous inquest on a child who had been crushed by the collapse of a wall in King Street.

‘Take your time over that, little fellow,’ rumbled Gwyn cynically. ‘There’s little else for you to write, so make it last!’

‘Gwyn is right, I’m afraid,’ agreed de Wolfe. ‘Our duties seem very light here. I’m beginning to wonder why the king was so keen to drag us away from Exeter.’

Thomas looked up from spreading a roll of parchment on the table and weighing down the curling ends with pebbles.

‘Sir, perhaps things will soon be different when the court moves away from Westminster into the shires.’

John detected a slight hint of smug satisfaction in the clerk’s voice and stared at him suspiciously. Thomas was always a mine of information, which had often proved useful to the coroner.

‘Going into the shires?’ he demanded. ‘Have you heard anything about that?’

‘It is common knowledge that the old queen is expected to arrive in the near future,’ answered de Peyne. ‘And I did overhear a suggestion that she wishes to progress with the whole court to visit her youngest son at Gloucester.’

There was a snort of disgust from across the room. ‘That bastard Lackland! Do we have to go anywhere near that treacherous swine?’ Gwyn turned and spat through the window to express his feelings about Prince John, Count of Mortain.

‘We must admit he’s kept his head down lately,’ conceded de Wolfe. ‘I think Hubert Walter has got his measure after all the problems John caused our king.’

The coroner expected his outspoken officer to reply with more condemnation of the man who had tried to unseat his royal brother from the throne — but Gwyn was staring intently out of the window.

‘What in hell is going on out there?’ he roared suddenly, leaning across the sill and pointing with a brawny arm.

‘Hey, you! Stop, you bastard, stop!’ he yelled at the top of his voice, gesticulating in a frenzy of impotence.

De Wolfe skidded back his chair and strode to the window to see what had so outraged his officer. He looked down past Gwyn’s shoulder at the strip of bare ground that stretched between them and the riverbank. He was just in time to see a figure racing past below them and vanishing around the corner of the building to their right.

‘What happened?’ demanded John, but Gwyn pushed past him and was already lumbering out of the door, shouting over his shoulder as he went.

‘He stabbed some fellow on that landing stage — just a moment ago!’ John craned his neck to look to the left along the bank and saw that someone lay crumpled on the planks of a small pier that projected out into the river on wooden stakes. The body was perilously near the edge, one arm and a leg hanging over the swirling brown water. John pounded after Gwyn, pushing aside a couple of men as he leapt down the stairs three at a time. At the bottom, he caught up with his officer, who seemed uncertain which way to run. They could go back to the main entrance, but that was in the opposite direction from the end of the building around which they had seen the assailant disappear.

‘I’ll go to the front!’ yelled de Wolfe. ‘See if you can get out somewhere that way,’ pointing down the dark corridor on the ground floor. Even after a few weeks, they were still unsure of the layout of the rambling collection of buildings, other than the well-trodden path to their own chamber.

Gwyn thundered off, his big feet slamming on the flagged floor, massive shoulders jostling people aside as he went. John, with a timid Thomas following behind, jogged out into the Palace Yard and doubled back around the Great Hall towards the river.

‘We’d better see how that man has fared!’ he panted, as he raced for the landing stage. It was not the main river approach to Westminster; this was further downstream, where an elaborate pier had been built for royalty and nobles visiting the abbey and palace. The one seen from their room was a much more modest structure used by many small boats, the wherries that ferried people across the Thames and down to the city.

De Wolfe ran towards it, but he was not the first to arrive. As he hurried the last few yards, he heard a commotion ahead and saw three men clustered on the landing stage, peering over the edge. One of them wore the long tunic and round helmet of a palace guard.

‘He’s gone, fell off just as we got here!’ hollered the guard, pointing down at the water. The tide was now ebbing quickly and turbulent eddies swirled around the piles holding up the jetty. John looked downstream and saw a man floating face down with limbs outstretched. He was already twenty yards away and moving further away each second. The skirts of his black cassock wrapped around his legs as a sudden whirlpool in the muddy water spun the body. It submerged momentarily, then resurfaced yards away towards to the centre of the river. There was no boat anywhere near, only a couple of wherries hundreds of yards away and a distant barge moving downriver with the tide.

For a moment, John considered diving in after the man, but he was an indifferent swimmer and the treacherous-looking vortices in the river made him hesitate. The guard, a burly man with a black beard, sensed his indecision and gripped his arm.

‘No point in risking yourself as well, sir! By the looks of it, he’s already a corpse!’

He pointed down between his feet, where a wide stain of dark blood covered the boards, some of it dripping down the cracks into the river.

‘How came he to fall in?’ demanded the coroner. ‘I saw him from my window and he was lying just here!’

One of the others, a fat monk in the black habit of a Benedictine, seemed in genuine anguish over what he had just witnessed. ‘As I arrived, he seemed to have a spasm and rolled over into the water!’ he wailed. ‘There was nothing I could do to save him.’

By now, half a dozen other people had arrived, Thomas de Peyne among them. De Wolfe pulled away from the gabbling, gesticulating throng and grabbed his clerk’s arm.

‘Get the names of these people, so that I can question them later!’ he snapped. ‘See if any of them saw exactly what happened — I’m off to see if Gwyn has found the son of a whore who did this!’

He jogged off, this time going down the riverbank, with the Great Hall and then St Stephen’s Chapel on his right hand. As he rounded the corner of the furthermost wing of the palace, he met his officer stamping towards him, the scowl on his face telling him that he had failed in his mission.

‘Those bloody passages are like a rabbit warren,’ he complained. ‘By the time I found a door out to the back of the place, the fellow had long gone.’

‘Did you see what he looked like?’ demanded John.

Gwyn shook his head. ‘I saw him for barely a few seconds. He struck the man on the pier and as he fell the assailant ran like hell down the bank. He was tall and heavily built, wearing a short tunic and breeches, both brown as I recall.’

‘What about his face?’

‘He had a white linen helmet on, tied under his chin, but as he ran he held a hand against his face, so as not to be recognised.’

The coroner glared around him in frustration, looking at the jumbled collection of buildings that made up this back end of the palace enclave. He had not been here before and saw that stables, wagon sheds, wash-houses and barracks filled the area between the rear of the palace and the boundary wall, beyond which was the confluence of the Tyburn stream with the river. There were a number of people about — soldiers, grooms, farriers, as well as women and children who lived in some of the small cottages that were dotted between the other buildings. None of them looked like the man Gwyn had described, though if he had pulled the white coif from his head, there would be nothing to mark him out.

‘He could have slipped into the abbey — or back into the palace before I got here,’ grunted the Cornishman. ‘Or even gone over into the village.’

De Wolfe shrugged in disgust and turned back the way he had come. ‘Let’s go back to the landing stage and see if Thomas has squeezed anything out of those people.’

The little clerk had no writing materials with him, but his excellent memory had catalogued half a dozen names, including the guard, three monks and a couple of Chancery clerks who had been on their way out of the palace soon after the incident had occurred. They were still there when John returned and he set about questioning them.

‘Does anyone know who the victim might have been?’ he demanded, scowling around at the faces before him.

‘It was one of the Steward’s men,’ piped up one of the clerks. ‘I glimpsed his face just before he fell into the water. I don’t know his name, but I’ve seen him around the palace.’

‘I think he worked in the guest hall,’ said his companion, a gangling young man whose tonsure looked strange on his bright ginger head. ‘I’ve seen him scribing at a desk in the bottler’s chamber there.’

The monks knew nothing about anything, being visitors to the abbey from their priory in Berkshire and the guard vaguely claimed to have seen the dead man from time to time.

‘What about the villain who did this?’ rasped de Wolfe. ‘Did any of you get a good look at him? Any idea who he might be?’

There were glum looks and shaking of heads all round.

‘I first noticed him only when he was running away,’ proclaimed the guard. ‘It was that that made me look towards this landing stage — then I saw the man lying on the boards here.’

He gave a description that was as unhelpful as Gwyn’s, but added a small piece of information. ‘I saw a wherry a few yards off the pier, obviously going away after having landed someone. He was well beyond hailing distance by the time I got here.’

The Thames wherries were almost as common as seagulls — flimsy craft with one oarsman, who plied their trade on a populous stretch of water, which had only one bridge, two miles downriver.

The clerks and monks looked anxious to go about their business, so John dismissed them, warning them that they might be required to attend an inquest. Thomas quietly reminded his master that this might be difficult with no body.

‘Strictly speaking, sir, we don’t even know if he is dead! He might have revived and crawled out further down the riverbank.’

Gwyn gave an explosive snort of derision. ‘Of course he’s bloody dead! Half his lifeblood is on the timbers here and then his head was sunk under this brown shit that passes for London river water!’

De Wolfe turned to leave, telling the guard to get someone with a bucket to swill away the blood from the planks of the jetty.

‘We must find someone who can tell us who the dead man was,’ he growled. ‘He might have a family to mourn him.’

Though the victim was apparently in holy orders, most of these were in the lower grades and were not necessarily celibate like ordained priests. They were all, however, able to claim the protection of the Church through its ‘benefit of clergy’ when it came to a conflict with the secular powers.

Thomas pattered along behind the two bigger men as they left the landing stage, the old phthisis of the hip that had afflicted him as a child giving him a slight limp. ‘How will you discover who he might be, Crowner?’ he asked. ‘This place must have a couple of hundred people living and working in it.’

‘Ask the damned Steward, I suppose, if those clerks reckoned he was one of his staff,’ John replied abruptly.

They went back into the palace through the main entrance behind the Great Hall, the two helmeted sentries saluting de Wolfe as he marched towards the doorward’s chamber just inside. Here a fat clerk sat behind a table, talking to a sergeant of the guard. This was a tall man with three golden lions passant guardant, the royal arms of Richard Coeur de Lion embroidered across the chest of his long grey tunic. The soldier recognised John — in fact, he remembered him from Palestine where Black John’s prowess in the Crusade was almost legendary. As soon as the coroner had explained the problem, the sergeant insisted on personally conducting de Wolfe to the Steward’s domain and set off ahead of the trio into the bowels of the palace, which to them was uncharted territory.

After a number of twists and turns, all on the ground floor, they came to a wide passageway, on one side of which were kitchens, full of smoke, steam, raucous voices and the clatter of pots. Opposite were storerooms, with men trundling baskets, sacks and barrels from a wide door leading to a carter’s yard at the rear.

‘One of the Steward’s top men lives in here, Sir John,’ declared the sergeant, going to a doorless arch between two of the stores. He waved de Wolfe inside, then excused himself and strode away. John saw a cluttered room, with two desks occupied by young clerks wrestling with lists on parchment and piles of notched wooden tallies. Between them, on a slightly raised platform, was a sloped writing desk like a lectern. Behind this stood a thin, austere-looking man of late middle age, dressed in an expensive but sombre tunic that reached down to his ankles. Unlike John’s collar-length black hair, the man’s greying thatch was shaved up to a horizontal line around his head, in the typical Norman fashion. He stared haughtily at the visitor and enquired as to his business.

‘I am Sir John de Wolfe, the king’s coroner,’ snapped John, who had taken an instant dislike to this man. ‘And who might you be, sir?’

The official’s manner softened immediately — everyone in Westminster had heard of the appointment of the new Coroner of the Verge — a man high in the favour of both the Chief Justiciar and of King Richard himself.

‘I am Hugo de Molis, the king’s Chief Purveyor in England,’ he said with pride. ‘When the court is here at Westminster, then I offer the Steward my help in provisioning the palace.’

This sounded to John like a roundabout way of saying that he was the assistant steward, but even so, this was a responsible task. The Steward was one of the important officers of the court and always a nobleman, so this Hugo must be at least a manor-lord. His declared appointment as Chief Purveyor would make him one of the most disliked men in England, for the purveyors were those officials who went ahead of the court when it progressed around the countryside. Their task was to ensure that food and lodging were available each night for the hundreds of men, women and animals that trundled along with the monarch and his nobles. Except where they stayed at the king’s own manors, the purveyors ruthlessly confiscated beds, food, fodder and everything else needed for the court’s sustenance. They were constantly accused of failing to pay the market price for what they took — or not paying at all. A plague of locusts could not have been more efficient in laying waste the countryside and many folk on hearing of the approach of the court, fled into the woods with as many of their possessions as they could carry. John explained what had happened during the last half-hour.

‘I am the court’s coroner, charged with dealing with all fatal and serious assaults within the Verge. It seems virtually certain that this man has met a violent death and I need to know who he was, so that I can begin to deal with the matter.’

He added that two palace clerks seemed convinced that the victim was a member of the Steward’s entourage, probably working in the guest chambers.

Hugo de Molis gripped the sides of his lectern and stared at the coroner. ‘A man in minor orders working there?’ he muttered. ‘That can only be Basil of Reigate, one of my assistants!’

‘We have no body to show you yet,’ said de Wolfe gravely. ‘But first I must be sure that this Basil is not alive and well. Can you see if he is at his usual post?’

‘I know that he is not!’ retorted the purveyor. ‘For I myself sent him this very morning across the river to pay for vegetables and to place more orders with the farms in Kennington.’

‘It seems he was attacked as he left a boat returning to this shore, which would tally with what you say,’ replied de Wolfe.

‘Was he robbed?’

‘As we have no body and thus no purse, we cannot tell,’ answered John irritably. ‘Would he have been carrying much money in the course of his duties?’

Hugo de Molis shook his head. ‘If he was attacked on his way back here, then he would have already paid off the farmers. Though perhaps a robber might not be aware of that.’

The coroner considered this for a moment — violent robbery was a common crime and seemed the most likely explanation.

‘Tell me about this man, Basil of Reigate. It may be that I will have to identify his body if and when it is recovered downriver. And you may be required to confirm it.’

De Molis’s lean, humourless face showed some distaste at the prospect. ‘I am a very busy man, coroner,’ he said dismissively. ‘He was but a minor official, employed to serve the guest apartments on the upper floor.’

‘In what way did he serve them?’ persisted de Wolfe.

‘His duty was to make sure that everything necessary for the accommodation and sustenance of palace guests was available to the chamberlain’s men. They have their own cooks up there, so food and drink has to be supplied constantly. He was under my orders as to what was requisitioned from the main storerooms down here.’

This was of little interest to de Wolfe, who had a slaying and a vanished murderer to deal with. Further questions revealed that Basil had no family in Westminster and lived in the clerk’s dormitory in the palace. The Chief Purveyor seemed more concerned at finding a replacement for the dead man than in regretting his death, but he agreed to report the matter to the Keeper of the Palace, Nicholas de Levelondes, who was ultimately in charge of the staff who saw to the running of the establishment. He also grudgingly agreed to send one of his young clerks up to the guest chambers to make certain that Basil of Reigate was not sitting there alive and well.

‘What do we do now?’ asked Gwyn, as they began retracing their steps through the warren that was the ground floor.

‘Wait until we hear of a body being washed up on the mud somewhere,’ muttered John somewhat heartlessly. ‘Thomas was right, without a corpse I have no jurisdiction.’

‘Are you going to report this to Hubert Walter?’

De Wolfe shook his head. ‘He’ll not want to hear of the killing of some obscure clerk, especially as the most likely explanation is a violent robbery.’

‘What happens if we catch the villain who did it?’ persisted Gwyn. Things were so different here from the straightforward routines that he was used to in Devonshire.

John thrust his fingers through the thick black hair that swept back from his forehead. ‘God knows we have enough judges in this place — there’s three sitting almost every day on the King’s Bench in the Great Hall. I suppose Thomas will write up the details on his rolls as usual and we present the case to the justices, just as if it was an Eyre coming to Exeter.’

They reached the bottom of their staircase, familiar territory at last and began to climb to their chamber.

‘But what about the abbot’s jurisdiction here?’ asked Thomas, always mindful of the rights of his beloved Church. ‘He holds the Liberty of Westminster, which includes the abbey, the village and the palace itself. I hear from my clerical colleagues that William Postard is most jealous of his powers, worse than many a manor-lord. In fact, he is also lord of several manors in the vicinity, which he rules with an iron hand!’

Gwyn, ever cynical about anything ecclesiastical, added his pennyworth as they reached the upper corridor. ‘If he’s anything like the Abbot of Tavistock, he’ll have his own gallows tucked away somewhere — unless he uses that one you spoke of at Tyburn.’

It was true that some of the more powerful churchmen were equally as despotic as barons and earls — and many were more concerned with their estates, politics and even warfare as with the cure of souls and the propagation of the Faith. Hubert Walter himself was not only Archbishop of Canterbury, but was also the Chief Justiciar and had been at the king’s right hand during the later battles of the last Crusade. It would not surprise de Wolfe if Abbot William Postard also exercised the power of life and death in his little realm of Westminster.