Crowner’s Quest

Chapter One In which Crowner John is disturbed on Christ Mass Eve

For once, Matilda was happy. Flushed with pleasure and self-importance, she sat at one end of the long table in the high, gloomy hall of their house and urged her guests to take more drink, capons’ legs and sweetmeats from the jugs and platters set in front of them.

At the other end sat the brooding figure of her husband, Sir John de Wolfe, the King’s coroner for the County of Devon. Tall and slightly hunched, his black hair matched the thick eyebrows that sat above deep-set eyes. Unlike most Normans, he had no beard or moustache beneath his great hooked nose, but his dark stubble had helped earn him the nickname ‘Black John’ in the armies of the Crusades and the Irish wars.

This evening, though, even his usually grim face was more relaxed, partly due to the amount of French wine he had drunk but also because he had a good friend on each side of him. To his left was Hugh de Relaga, one of the town’s two Portreeves, a fat and cheerful dandy. On the other side was John de Alencon, Archdeacon of Exeter, a thin, ascetic man, with a quiet wit and a twinkling eye.

Around the rest of the table were a dozen other Exeter worthies and their wives, from the castle, the Church and the Guilds. It was about the eleventh hour on the eve of Christ Mass and they had not long returned from the special service in the great cathedral of St Mary and St Peter, only a few hundred paces away from the coroner’s home in Martin’s Lane.

Their timber house was high and narrow, being only one room from floor to beamed roof, with a small solar built on the back, reached by an outside staircase. The walls were hung with sombre tapestries to relieve the bare planks and the floor was flagged with stone, as Matilda considered the usual rush-strewn earth too common for people of their quality.

The guests sat on benches along each side of the heavy table, the only two chairs being at either end. Light came from candles and tallow dips on the table and from the large fire in the hearth. The guests were sufficiently filled with ale, cider and wine to be in prattling mood, especially at Yuletide, when a strangely contagious mood of bonhomie infected the community.

‘Matilda, I thought you usually patronised that little church of St Olave in Fore Street, not the cathedral?’

The high-pitched voice was that of her sister-in-law, Eleanor, wife to Sheriff Richard de Revelle. De Wolfe was not sure whom he detested more, his brother-in-law or the wife. Eleanor was a thin, sour-faced woman of fifty, an even greater snob than Matilda. Spurning the usual white linen cover-chief over the head, Eleanor wore her hair coiled in gold-net crespines over each ear. Her husband was also elegantly dressed, a man of medium height with wavy brown hair, a thin moustache and a small pointed beard – a complete contrast to his brother-in-law, who dressed in nothing but black or grey.

‘Why, in God’s name, is it called St Olave’s?’ drawled de Revelle, leaning back on the bench, the better to display his new green tunic, the neckband and sleeves worked elaborately in yellow embroidery.

‘It’s certainly in God’s name, sheriff,’ replied the Archdeacon, with a wry smile. ‘Olave was the first Christian king of Norway, though I admit it quite escapes me why one of our seventeen churches in Exeter is dedicated to him.’

The conversation chattered on, the noise level rising as the contents of the wine keg lowered. Matilda, her square pug face radiant with pleasure at the success of her party, looked around the hall and calculated her resulting elevation on the social scale, to be gauged when she next met her cronies at the market or in church. For once she had persuaded her taciturn husband, who had been made county coroner only three months earlier, to open up a little socially and invite some people to the house after the Mass on the eve of Christ’s birthday.

Rather to her surprise, even he appeared amiable tonight. At least the party had kept him at home, she thought, with momentary bitterness, and he was not down at the Bush tavern with his red-headed mistress, that Welsh tart Nesta. Outside the unglazed shutters the night was freezing, but a fire was roaring in the big hearth, which had the modern luxury of a stone chimney. Brutus, John’s old hound, was stretched luxuriously in front of the flames, twitching now and then as a hot spark spat out at him.

The wine and food were constantly replenished by Mary, their house-servant and cook, while old Simon, the labourer, carried in fresh logs to stoke the fire. Matilda’s own maid Lucille, the poisonous French hag, as de Wolfe thought of her, was too grand to serve at table and was lurking in the solar, eavesdropping through the high slit window, waiting to help Matilda undress for bed when the party was over.

Between joining in the gossip and scandal, Matilda stole frequent glances at her husband, willing him to do something socially elegant, such as standing to propose a toast – to Jesus Christ, or the prosperity of Exeter, anything to make his mark and reflect some more glory upon her. Several times, she saw him move as if to get up and she waited expectantly for him to raise his glass to the assembled worthies. But each time she was disappointed, as all he did was reach across for a chicken leg or a jug of Loire wine. Then the opportunity was lost, as her brother jumped up and brandished his beaker, tapping imperiously on the table with the handle of his dagger.

‘We must give thanks to our host and his good wife for inviting us to this most convivial gathering,’ he brayed, the long cuff of his tunic dangling as he waved his cup back and forth. ‘To Sir John de Wolfe, lately appointed crowner to this county, and his good wife, my little sister Matilda!’

As they stood and responded to his toast, John thought that ‘little sister’ was the greatest exaggeration of the twelfth century, as Matilda’s square figure was a good many pounds heavier than de Revelle’s. Then, charitably, he assumed that his brother-in-law had meant little in years, as she was four less than her brother’s fifty. The coroner himself was only forty, though the lined skin stretched over his high cheekbones weathered by more than two decades of campaigning in Ireland, France and the Holy Land, made him look older.

Matilda’s irritation at her husband’s failure to match Richard’s social graces was slowly subsiding, when another blow fell upon her ambition to become one of Exeter’s premier hostesses. Suddenly she saw Mary, whom she rightly suspected of being another of John’s amorous conquests, come up to him and whisper urgently in his ear. He looked over his shoulder at the door to the small vestibule that fronted on to the street. Following his gaze, Matilda glared in annoyance at a large face that peered around the door. It was fringed with unruly red hair and, below a bulbous nose, a huge moustache nestled, its ends merging with carrotty side-whiskers before hanging down past his lantern jaw almost to his chest. It was Gwyn of Polruan, her husband’s bodyguard and coroner’s officer, a Cornishman for whom her Norman soul had even more contempt than for Saxons.

With growing apprehension and annoyance, she heard her husband’s chair grate across the flagstones as he rose and walked across to the door. As she watched him whispering with Gwyn, her concern mounted into fury. ‘If he leaves now, I’ll kill him, God help me!’ she muttered to herself.

Her worst fears were realised when John walked back across the hall, his head slightly forward, looking like some great bird of prey in his grey tunic and long black hose. Bending down to John de Alencon, he murmured something into the Archdeacon’s ear. The emaciated priest stood up immediately.

The coroner cleared his throat and, in his deep, sonorous voice, excused himself from the festivities for a while. ‘I hope it’ll not be long! I have but a few yards to go and hope to be back soon. So, please, eat, drink and be merry until then.’

Now furious, Matilda hurried around the table and caught her husband’s arm as he walked with the Archdeacon across to the door, where Gwyn still waited. ‘Where are you going?’ she hissed venomously. ‘You can’t leave me like this now, with all your guests still here!’

‘It’ll not be for long, wife,’ he grunted. ‘This won’t wait, I’m afraid, but I’ll try to get back soon.’

Fuming with rage, she hissed again, into his ear, ‘What can be more important on a Yuletide Eve than entertaining some of the most important citizens in Exeter?’

‘What about a dead canon in the cathedral Close, woman?’ he suggested, and slipped out of the door without another word.

De Wolfe and the Archdeacon strode on either side of the Cornish giant as they left the coroner’s house. Martin’s Lane was a short passage leading from High Street into the cathedral precinct. It took its name from St Martin’s Church on the corner, from which a line of houses stretched along the north side of the Close. Here lived many of the twenty-four canons of the cathedral, along with some of their vicars, lesser priests and servants, all male, for officially, women were forbidden in their dwellings.

As they hurried through the still, frosty air, the coroner’s henchman told what little he knew of the incident. ‘An hour ago, that miserable clerk of ours came running to me at my sister-in-law’s dwelling in Milk Street. My wife and children are lodging with her tonight, as the city gates are shut until morning.’ Gwyn lived outside the walls, at St Sidwell’s, beyond the East Gate.

‘What did Thomas have to tell you?’ demanded de Wolfe. Thomas de Peyne was the third member of his team, a diminutive, crippled ex-priest who had been unfrocked for allegedly interfering with a young female novice in Winchester.

‘He said that at about the tenth hour there had been a great uproar in the canon’s house near where he lodges and someone came to fetch him out. Being the nosy little swine that he is, he went to see what was afoot.’

De Wolfe was used to Gwyn’s leisurely way of telling a tale, but John de Alencon was less patient. ‘So what was afoot, man?’

‘The house steward was standing at the front, screaming that the canon was dead. With some others, our clerk ran through to the back of the house and found the prebendary hanging by his neck in the privy.’

By now the hurrying trio had entered Canons’ Row, with the huge bulk of the cathedral on their right. A full moon shimmered on the great building, which hovered above the disorder of the Close, with its muddy paths, piles of rubbish and open grave-pits.

‘He was undoubtedly dead?’ growled the coroner.

Gwyn pulled up the hood of his shabby leather jacket against the chill air. ‘Dead as mutton, Thomas said. The others felt his heart to make sure, then he ran to fetch me, while a servant went off to take the news to the Bishop’s Palace.’

The Archdeacon, sweeping along in his long black cloak, clucked his tongue in irritation. ‘And the Bishop is away at Gloucester, leaving me as the most senior cleric at this tragic time.’

They had arrived at the fifth house in the terrace, marked by a cluster of people around the narrow passageway that led through to the backyard. One short figure detached itself from the throng and limped towards them. Thomas de Peyne was blessed with a good brain and cursed with a twisted body. Old phthisis had bent his spine into a slight hump and damaged a hip to shorten one leg. As if this was not enough, the Almighty had given him a slight squint in his left eye. ‘Thank God you’re here, Crowner,’ he squeaked, crossing himself nervously. ‘These people are running around like chickens with their heads cut off!’

‘Where’s the corpse?’ demanded John gruffly. He never wasted breath on niceties of speech.

Thomas pushed through to the passageway and the little crowd opened up deferentially for the other men, the servants and secondaries bobbing their knees as the Archdeacon passed. The alley was dark and narrow, running alongside the tall timber house roofed with wooden shingles. It was similar, though not identical, to the other buildings in the row, some of stone, some slated and some thatched.

At the back, the passage opened into a yard with several rickety outbuildings. One was the kitchen, another a wash-house and one a pig-sty. Furthest away, against the back fence, was a small shed that acted as the latrine for the whole house. It was built up on several stone steps, a deep privy-pit dug beneath it.

‘He’s in there, Crowner,’ said Thomas, his thin, pointed nose wrinkling in anticipation. De Wolfe loped across to the shed, lit by the moon and the horn-lanterns of several residents who had followed them into the yard. He pulled open the crude door, whose bottom edge grated across the rough flagstones.

‘Bring more lights here,’ he commanded, as he stepped inside. The stench was strong after the cold night air outside, but as everyone had a stinking privy the coroner took no notice.

Gwyn, the Archdeacon and the clerk pushed in alongside him, holding tallow tapers taken from the servants. Along the back wall was a wooden bench with two large holes cut in it, in case more than one resident was taken short at the same time. Beneath it was a four-foot drop into an odorous pit, which was cleared from the rear by the night-soil man, who came around with his donkey and cart once a week.

But their gaze was fixed on a figure hanging in front of the seat, toes all but touching the floor. It was rotating slowly in the draught coming up from the faecal pit. Eerily, the face revolved close to de Wolfe’s, the eyes just level with his, due to the coroner’s greater height. Staring sightlessly ahead, tongue protruding, the corpse slowed down and stopped, then reversed its mindless study of the privy walls as the cord untwisted again.

For a moment there was shocked immobility, broken only by the clerk spasmodically crossing himself.

‘For God’s sake, cut the poor man down!’ muttered the Archdeacon.

Gwyn started forward, pulling a dagger from his belt, but the coroner laid a restraining hand on his arm. ‘Wait, until I look at his neck.’

Leaving the other three jammed in the doorway, de Wolfe stepped to the side of the dead man and held up his thin tallow candle. He saw that the corpse was a rather slight, elderly man with a rim of white hair around a bald crown. He was dressed in a long robe of thick black wool, similar to a monk’s habit. The thin face was congested and purple, prominent blue eyes glimmering in the flicker of the candle-flame. Even in that poor light, pinpoint bleeding spots could be seen in the whites of the eyes. John grasped a drooping arm as the body turned slowly and stopped the rotation so that he could look at the side of the neck.

‘What type of cord is this, John?’ he asked his priestly namesake.

De Alencon, visibly distressed but keeping a firm grip on his emotions, was glad of the chance to divert his thoughts from the death of a colleague. He looked at the ligature, which was around the neck and vanished into the darkness above. It was a twisted rope of brown and black flax, the thickness of a man’s little finger. ‘It looks like a monk’s waist cord, probably from the habit that covers him.’

‘But a canon isn’t a monk,’ objected de Wolfe. He had little interest in the hierarchy of the Church, but knew that canons, or prebendaries as they were often called, were ordained priests and that Exeter was a secular cathedral, not a monastic house.

‘Many people have a monk’s habit,’ piped up the all-knowing Thomas from behind. ‘I’ve got one myself. They make fine wrappings to get out of bed or go to the privy on a cold morning.’

The Archdeacon shook his head. ‘Poor Robert de Hane had a better claim to one than just the need for a warm robe. In his younger years he was an Augustinian from the house of Holy Trinity in London’s Aldgate. This is probably his habit from his days as a Black Canon.’

Gwyn’s large, shaggy head was peering around the privy. ‘I suppose he stepped off the seat after tying the cord to a rafter.’ Looking up into the gloom, he could just make out where the rope was knotted around one of the rough supports for the thatched roof.

John de Alencon shook his cropped grey head sadly. ‘I cannot believe it. Self-destruction is a mortal sin. What man of the Church, especially a senior canon, would take his own life – and on the eve of the birthday of his Saviour, above all times?’ He passed a hand over his eyes in genuine distress. ‘I just cannot accept it, John.’

The coroner had been silently studying the corpse, his hawk-like face drawn into a scowl of concentration. ‘I don’t think you need accept it, my friend,’ he growled. ‘Gwyn, come and look at this.’ He beckoned his henchman to look more closely in the dim light at the side of the cadaver’s neck. The monk’s girdle-cord cut deeply into the left side under the angle of the jaw, then passed around to the right, where it was pulled sharply upwards and away from the skin in an inverted V-shape to reach a knot placed alongside the ear. From there, the cord stretched tautly up to the roof-beam. ‘We’ll see better when we cut him down, but look here,’ he commanded, pointing a finger at the skin below the ligature.

Gwyn of Polruan put his face closer until his bulbous nose almost touched the corpse. ‘There’s another mark around the neck, lower down.’

The coroner looked grim. ‘It can happen. I remember when King Richard executed all those Moors at Acre, and again at Ascalon, some hanged fellows had two marks. But it’s unusual.’

The Cornishman cast his mind back more than three years to when he had been with de Wolfe at the Third Crusade. At the fall of Acre, hundreds of Saracen prisoners were massacred, most by the sword, lance and mace – but many had been hanged.

‘True, the rope can bite first lower down, then slip up with the weight of the body.’ He sounded reluctant to agree.

The coroner’s finger moved to the back of the cadaver’s neck. ‘But it can’t do this!’ he snapped.

The Archdeacon and his officer craned their necks to look, and Thomas de Peyne was almost jumping up and down behind them to get a better view.

On the nape of the neck, just below the monk’s girdle-cord, the lower ligature mark crossed over itself, two short marks lying above and below the brownish-red line. John de Alencon looked questioningly at de Wolfe, his horror temporarily overtaken by curiosity.

‘He’s been garrotted – the cord was thrown over his head, the two ends crossed and pulled tight,’ grated the coroner. He stepped back and motioned to Gwyn. ‘Cut him down – gently now.’ He pulled the Archdeacon back to the door to make room, while Gwyn sliced through the cord high up and took the weight of the dead priest easily in his other brawny arm. The clerk stood watching in fascination, furiously making the Sign of the Cross.

‘Bring him into the house, where there’s a better light,’ ordered de Wolfe, and strode off ahead to the back door of the canon’s dwelling. Gwyn carried the corpse in his arms like a baby, the head lolling back, the fatal rope trailing on the ground.

With the Archdeacon, Thomas, a few junior priests and some servants following, they went through a door and up a passage into a chamber that had a simple bed as the only furniture, apart from a large wooden crucifix on the wall. The canon’s steward, a fat, middle-aged man with tears streaming from his eyes, stood wringing his hands alongside the bed, as Gwyn gently laid the body upon it.

‘Get more lights, Alfred,’ commanded the Archdeacon, and the steward hurried out, gulping orders at the other servants.

De Wolfe stood at the foot of the narrow bed and laid a consoling hand on his friend’s shoulder. ‘You knew him well, John?’

The senior cleric nodded. ‘Even before I came from Winchester eight years ago. I had met him in London when he was still at Holy Trinity. A good man, very learned in the history of the Church.’

As they waited for more illumination, John asked more questions. ‘What did he do in the cathedral community?’

‘He was a regular canon and had a prebend, like the rest of us, but held no particular office. Most of his time away from daily worship was spent in the cathedral library. I’m not quite sure what he was doing – you would need to ask Canon Jordan de Brent, the archivist.’

The coroner stroked his long jaw, dark with black stubble. ‘Was he politically active? I mean, in the Church hierarchy. Could he have made enemies?’

De Alencon’s lean face wore a sad smile, in spite of the tragic circumstances. ‘Never! He was quiet and retiring, hardly said a word at the chapter meetings. An unworldly man, his mind was lost in books and manuscripts.’ He waved a hand around the bare room. ‘You see this, a Spartan life, unlike some of our fellows, I’m afraid. Too many canons have forgotten the Rule of St Chrodegang and relish lives of comfort and even luxury. But not poor Robert de Hane here.’

The steward and a servant came back with a three-branched candlestick and a pair of tallow dips, which greatly improved the lighting. De Wolfe seized the candelabrum and advanced to the bed, with Gwyn on the other side. ‘Let’s have a good look at this. How much of the cord did you leave attached to the beam?’

Gwyn held his hands about a yard apart. ‘About this much. Another few inches were sticking out from the double knot around the rafter.’

De Wolfe held up the cut end of the rope that was still around the canon’s neck. ‘Another half yard here. Could he have reached from the privy seat to tie it to the roof?’

The Cornishman pursed his lips under the luxuriant cascade of ginger moustache. ‘He’s not very tall, but perhaps he could just do it on tiptoe.’

De Wolfe turned his attention to the knot in the monkish girdle. It was a pair of simple half-hitches, not a slip-knot. He pulled on the cord and the knot lifted well away from the skin. ‘There’s a gap in the mark under that, as would be expected,’ he muttered, half to himself. The upper mark, tight under the front and right side of the jaw, was a clear groove with a faint spiral pattern corresponding to the twist of the flaxen cord. But slightly lower was a similar, less pronounced mark, with narrow reddened margins, that circled the whole circumference of the neck. As he had pointed out in the privy, near the back of the neck this lower mark showed a blurred blob of abrasion on the skin, from which two short tails projected, one in either direction. He used a bony finger to point it out to the Archdeacon. ‘That’s not a hanging mark, John. Someone has dropped the cord over his head and pulled the two ends tight from behind.’

‘Are you sure?’ asked the worried cleric. A dead canon was bad enough, but a murdered one was ten times worse.

‘No doubt about it – it’s almost horizontal and there’s no gap where the rope pulled upward to the roof, like the other false mark. And those red swollen edges mean that it was done during life. They can’t be seen on the upper line, so he was dead when that was caused.’

Thomas was hovering behind like a bumble-bee, stealing glimpses from beneath the larger men’s elbows. He was desperate to be included in the affair and, despite the squint, his sharp eyes could see something in the candlelight. ‘His mouth, Crowner! Surely that’s bruising on the upper lip.’

Gwyn prodded him with a muscular elbow. ‘Leave this to the men, dwarf,’ he grunted, half teasing, half serious.

The coroner, though he often joined with Gwyn in making the disgraced priest the butt of their humour, had learned a sneaking regard for Thomas’s powers of observation. He looked at the florid face of Robert de Hane and confirmed that even within the pinkish-blue hue of the skin, there were a couple of small patches of a deeper shade below the nostrils. Taking the lips in the fingers of each hand, he turned them back to expose the gums and brown, decayed teeth. ‘Ha, the plot thickens!’ he exclaimed.

On the inner surfaces of the upper and lower lips, there were angry red patches and a small tear where the lining had been forced against a jagged front tooth. Under the middle of the upper lip, the little band of membrane that anchored the lip to the gum was ripped and had bled. ‘His mouth was either struck or violently squeezed,’ declared de Wolfe, an authority on injuries after twenty years on a variety of battlefields.

‘Held across the mouth to stop him crying out?’ hazarded the clerk, emboldened by his successful contribution to the investigation.

‘Let’s have a look at the rest of his body, Gwyn,’ commanded the coroner.

Under his black habit, the prebendary wore only a white linen nightshirt and a pair of thick woollen hose. The coroner’s officer began to wrestle off the outer robe, helped ineffectually by Thomas. ‘He’s starting to stiffen up – and he’s cold, except in the armpits,’ observed Gwyn.

De Wolfe nodded. ‘I noticed his jaw was tight when I turned his lips. He’s been dead a few hours.’

Soon they had all the clothes off and the sparely built priest lay pathetically naked on his own bed. Instinctively, John de Alencon reached across and, for the sake of decency, draped the nightshirt across the lower belly and thighs.

The trunk was dead white, but there was a purplish discoloration of the legs below the knees. ‘He’s been hanging for a while, the blood has had time to settle in the lowest parts,’ commented the coroner.

‘So he was hung up soon after death as he still has a little heat left in him,’ reasoned Gwyn.

John turned to the steward, hovering in anguish near the door. ‘When was your master last seen alive, Alfred?’ he snapped.

‘He came back from vespers, sir, at about the fifth bell. He ate his supper in the dining room – I served him myself.’

‘Did he seem his normal self then?’ asked the Archdeacon.

‘Yes, sir, he was reading a small book as he ate.’ Alfred snivelled and wiped an eye. ‘Then he went to bed. As it is Christ Mass, he should have been going to the special service, some two hours earlier than the usual matins at midnight.’

De Alencon looked at the coroner. ‘He was not there. I noticed, as I must keep track of who is absent.’

John de Wolfe grunted, his favourite form of response. ‘He couldn’t have been there as he was dead by then, if the stiffening is coming on now.’ He scowled at Alfred. ‘Did anyone visit him this evening?’

‘Not that I know of, Crowner. Once he retires to this room, he is left in peace to sleep or study. His vicar or the secondaries might know better than I, but I doubt it.’

The ranking of the ecclesiastical community below the twenty-four canons consisted first of the vicars-choral, minor clergy over the age of twenty-four who deputised for their seniors so that their perpetual attendance at services was reduced. Then came the secondaries, adolescents over eighteen training for the priesthood, and below them, the choristers, young boys who might stay on to enter holy orders later.

The coroner turned back to the corpse and leaned over the bed to study it intently.

‘The arms – look there,’ squeaked Thomas.

His master glared at him. ‘I can see for myself, damn you!’ he muttered testily, motioning to Gwyn to lift up the left arm. On the white skin, between the shoulder and the elbow, was a scatter of blue bruises, each half the size of a penny.

‘They’re on the other arm, too,’ volunteered Gwyn. ‘And they look fresh to me.’

De Wolfe gestured to his officer to turn the body over on to its face. ‘Let’s see the back of his neck.’

At the centre of the nape, a deep groove began and passed around the left side of the neck. On the right side of the neck, the groove imprinted by the noose rose towards the ear, then vanished. Below it, another continuous groove passed around the right side to the voice-box in front and joined the common groove on the left.

‘What do those marks on his arms imply, John?’ asked the Archdeacon.

The coroner stood back while Gwyn rolled the canon face-up again. ‘Grip-marks, where he was seized. Those round bruises are from hard pressure by fingertips.’

De Alencon’s lean face was a picture of grief. ‘What terror and pain he must have suffered. He was such a mild man, with never any exposure to violence – and then to end like this. What’s to be done, John?’

A new voice answered him from the doorway. ‘A hunt for his killers, with no effort spared, Archdeacon.’ It was the sheriff, the coroner’s dandyish brother-in-law. He strode into the room and looked down at the dead priest with more indignation than sorrow. ‘What a thing to happen on the eve of Christ Mass!’

Almost on cue, the great bell of the cathedral opposite began tolling for the delayed matins. ‘I must go. I cannot miss the service even for this tragedy,’ explained the Archdeacon. ‘And I must tell the other canons what’s happened.’ He went towards the door, then turned back to the coroner and sheriff. ‘I will send word to the Bishop as soon as the gates open at dawn. But I know that although this happened within the cathedral precinct, he would want you secular authorities to deal with it.’

Although they were inside the city walls, the whole of the cathedral Close was outside the jurisdiction of the burgesses of Exeter, which often gave rise to friction. But murder was against the King’s peace and even a bishop would be unlikely to exclude the law officers.

‘I suggest the dead man lies here until the morning,’ said de Wolfe. ‘There’s little point in setting up a hue and cry in the middle of the night, especially as he’s been dead for hours and the trail is cold.’

Richard de Revelle waved an elegantly gloved hand at the Archdeacon. ‘Tell Bishop Marshal that the sheriff will spare no effort to bring these devils to justice. They’ll be dangling from the gallows by the time he returns from Gloucester.’

At this the coroner caught Gwyn’s eye, but his henchman’s face remained impassive, though de Wolfe could read his thoughts about the sheriff’s arrogance. As de Alencon left, followed by the anxious steward and most of the residents, the two main law officers of Devon faced each other across the corpse, flanked by Gwyn and Thomas de Peyne.

‘So what’s this all about, John?’ demanded Richard. He stood with one hand on his hip, his fine green cloak thrown back over one shoulder to reveal his richly embroidered tunic of fine linen. The smooth skin of his rather narrow face was pink, both from the cold air outside and from John’s best wine.

Grudgingly, the coroner told him what little they knew so far. De Revelle seemed unconvinced, although he had just assured the Archdeacon that the killers would soon be found. ‘You find a man swinging by his own girdle-cord in his own privy, yet you immediately claim he’s been murdered?’

As always, his tone of patronising criticism made de Wolfe itch to punch him on his sharp nose but, with an effort, he held his temper in check. ‘A senior priest is hardly likely to jeopardise his entry into heaven by taking the life God gave him – especially almost on his Saviour’s birthday! But we don’t need theology to prove that. Just look there.’ He pointed at the still figure on the bed. ‘Does a suicide bruise his own arms, strike himself in the mouth and then, before he hangs, throttle himself from behind?’ he asked sarcastically.

The sheriff sniffed delicately. He had no interest in the state of the body, only in any political implications that might involve him. He needed to avoid trouble, but also to milk the best advantage for himself with influential people like Bishop Henry Marshal, brother to William, Marshal of England. ‘Cover the fellow up, for God’s sake!’ he snapped imperiously at Gwyn, flicking a glove at the folded blanket at the foot of the bed. Then he turned to leave. ‘I’ll send up to the castle to get Ralph Morin to send men-at-arms to search the town.’

Morin was the constable of Rougemont, the castle perched at the highest point of the city in the northeast corner of the walls. It took its name from the colour of the local sandstone from which it was built.

De Wolfe was scornful of this useless gesture. ‘What are they going to do after midnight? Beat every passerby into a confession?’ Knowing de Revelle’s methods, he thought that this was not as fanciful as it might sound.

The sheriff gave John another of his pitying looks, as if humouring a backward child. ‘And how would my new coroner handle it, then?’

John angrily opened his mouth to shout that he was the King’s coroner, not de Revelle’s, but bit back the words: they had been through these arguments time and again. The sheriff resented the establishment of coroners in England four months previously, but he was in no position to defy the edicts of Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury and Chief Justiciar to Richard the Lionheart. ‘We need to know why Robert de Hane was killed,’ he said tersely. ‘Then that should tell us who killed him. Rushing aimlessly around the streets will get us nowhere.’

‘Was it robbery? Some of these prebendaries are rich men,’ asked de Revelle, going off at a tangent.

For answer, de Wolfe waved a hand around the bare room. ‘Not this one. He has a reputation for a modest, even Spartan way of life. There’s little worth killing for here.’

The sheriff seemed to lose interest. ‘We’ll leave it until the morning, then. I must get back to my good wife.’

John straightened his back until his head almost touched the ceiling beams. ‘I’ll walk back to my house with you, then.’

De Revelle pulled on his gloves. ‘Lady Eleanor has gone back to Rougemont. I sent her with an escort when I came here. Your guests have dispersed, I’m afraid.’ He said it with a certain spiteful glee, knowing that his sister would blame her husband stridently for the collapse of her cherished social occasion.

The sheriff was right, for when John arrived in Martin’s Lane ten minutes later, he found the hall deserted, the table scattered forlornly with empty cups, tankards and scraps of food. Brutus still lay before the dying fire and gave him a slow wag from his bushy tail, the only welcome he was to get that night.

When he climbed the wooden stairs from the backyard to the solar chamber, he found a grim-faced Matilda sitting in the only chair. The rabbit-toothed Lucille was unpinning her hair and helping her off with her new kirtle of stiff brocade and laying out her bed-shift.

There was an ominous silence until the ugly Frenchwoman left for her cubicle under the stairs. Then the storm broke. ‘You’ve done it again, husband,’ Matilda snarled. ‘You seem to delight in spoiling every effort I make to increase your standing with the better folk in this city.’

‘Increase my standing, be damned!’ he retorted. ‘I’m the King’s coroner, I don’t need to kiss the arses of any burgesses or bishops. If you want more social life, so be it – but don’t pretend it’s to advance my career for I’m quite content as I am.’

Matilda had never been one to duck a fight and she counter-attacked with relish, her solid, fleshy face as pugnacious as that of a mastiff. ‘You’re content, are you? I should think so! You spend most of your time in taverns or in bed with some strumpet. You use this new job as an excuse to avoid me. You’re away from home for days and nights at a time – God knows what you get up to!’

‘A senior canon of this cathedral has been murdered, Matilda. You’re so thick with the clergy of this city, surely you know what a scandal this will be. Did you expect me to tell the Bishop when he returns that I was sorry I couldn’t attend to it but my wife was having a party?’

They had had this particular argument so often that de Wolfe was bored with it. Her accusations were always the same, and none the less objectionable because there was some truth in them. Married for sixteen years, he had spent as much of that time as he could away from her, campaigning in England and abroad. Now forty years old, he had been a soldier since he was seventeen and rued the day his father had insisted that he marry into the rich de Revelle family. ‘If I’m often away, it’s because the responsibilities of being coroner force it upon me, woman,’ he growled. ‘You were the one who was so insistent on me seeking the appointment. You nearly burst a blood vessel canvassing on my behalf among the burgesses, the priests and your damned brother.’

Had she but known it, her efforts had been unnecessary. Both Justiciar Hubert Walter and Richard Coeur de Lion himself had been more than happy to give the post to a Crusader knight whom they both knew well – in fact, John de Wolfe had been part of the King’s escort on that ill-fated journey home when he was captured in Austria. But once the bit was between her teeth, Matilda wanted no excuses from her saturnine husband. Angrily she flounced on to the low bed and struggled to change from her chemise into her nightshift under the sheepskin covers to hide her naked body from him. This was no punishment for John, who had long given up forcing his husbandly duties upon her. Six years older than him, she had never been keen on consummation, which was perhaps why they had remained childless all these years.

‘Being coroner doesn’t mean you have to live in the saddle of that great stallion of yours – when you’re not riding a two-legged mare, that is,’ she added nastily. Pulling out her thin chemise after wrestling on the nightgown, she threw it at the chair and returned to the fray. ‘My brother is the sheriff of all Devon, yet he doesn’t spend his days tramping across the county. He has men and stewards to do his bidding. But you have to pretend to be needed everywhere, just to get away from home.’

De Wolfe’s thick black brows came together in a scowl. ‘I don’t have a constable and men-at-arms and a castle full of servants at my beck and call like your damned brother! All I have is my officer and a clerk.’

She laughed scornfully. ‘That hairy Cornish savage and a poxy little priest! They were your choice. Richard would have given you two better men, if you’d accepted them.’

‘I owe my life to Gwyn, several times over. There’s no more trustworthy man in England. As for Thomas, he writes a better hand than anyone in this city – and you know damned well that I was obliging the Archdeacon when I took him on, for John de Alencon is his uncle.’

Sitting up in bed, the heavy fleeces clutched to her breasts, Matilda glowered at him. With that white linen cloth wound around her hair like a turban, she reminded him of a Moorish warrior he had fought hand-to-hand at the battle of Arsouf.

Also like the Moor, she threw something at him suddenly, not a spear but a half-eaten apple that had been on the floor alongside the mattress. ‘Oh, go to hell, you miserable devil!’ And with those final words, she slid down the bed and violently pulled the sheepskins over her head.

Slowly de Wolfe took off his own outer clothes, blew out the tallow dip that lit the room, then slid into the opposite side of the large bed. Lying back to back, there was only a yard between their bodies, but a mile between their souls.

Listening to her regular breathing, as she feigned sleep, he sighed. ‘And a merry Christ Mass to you, too!’ he muttered bitterly.