Figure of Hate

Chapter Thirteen

In spite of the bailiff's forecast, Reginald de Charterai did not appear at Sampford by the time that John de Wolfe was ready to leave. As he wished to ask him for news of Matilda, he decided to return to Exeter by way of Tiverton, the distance being about the same as going down the CuI m valley via Cullompton.

With Gwyn alongside him and the clerk and his eager pupil behind, he trotted through the early autumn afternoon along the rutted but thankfully dry track. When the village was left behind, they passed through wooded land for a mile, wliere some trees had already turned yellow or russet.

'Maybe we're on Richard de Revelle's land now,' observed Gwyn. 'Perhaps he'll arrest us for trespassing! '

John was in no mood for jokes where his brother-in-law was concerned. 'It's the King's highway, though no doubt he'd like to seize it for himself and put it to the plough,' he rasped. A ready sense of humour was not one of de Wolfe's attributes and the mischievous Gwyn often teased him, though John was usually unaware of it.

'Where are we going to find this French fellow?' he asked.

The coroner nudged Odin with his knees to speed him up a little — he disliked using his spurs except in urgent situations.

'He's lodging there, so if there's a half-decent inn, that should be where we'll find him.'

'Be discreet, then, if he's with two comely ladies!' said the irrepressible Cornishman. 'Best knock on the chamber door first!'

That managed to raise a grin on John's face, though the prim little Thomas tutted under his breath as he caught the gist of it from behind.

But de Wolfe was wrong about finding them in Tiverton, for as they rounded the next bend between the trees, they saw a small cavalcade approaching. At a walking pace, de Charterai was on his black charger between two palfreys carrying Avelina and Beatrice sitting side-saddle, both enveloped in hooded riding cloaks that left only their faces and gloved hands visible. Behind came two grooms on ponies, carrying cudgels and maces. The ladies' maids had been left at home, as the pair of widows acted as each other's chaperone.

The two groups met and remained mounted, but when introductions had been made, they rearranged themselves in an almost hierarchical fashion. John stopped alongside Reginald, Gwyn gravitated to the escorting grooms and Thomas and Eustace went to pay their respects to the ladies. Eustace seemed to make a hit with Bertrice, with his smart clothes, charming manners and cultured speech, and even Thomas became quite articulate with Avelina, who was of a religious disposition and soon learned about the clerk's imminent readmission to the Church. This left de Wolfe free to talk to the French knight about his wife's journey to Normandy.

'Everything went well, I'm happy to report,' said Reginald in his correct, formal way. 'Your charming wife survived the voyage with only a touch of mal de mer, though her poor maid seemed to wish herself dead before we reached Barfleur.'

John wondered how Reginald had come to regard Matilda as charming, but he decided that there was no accounting for taste.

'And she reached her family without incident?' he asked.

'I delivered her to their threshold myself. They seemed surprised to see her arrive.'

That must be the understatement of the year, thought John, but he thanked de Charterai solemnly for his kindness and chivalry, before the Frenchman edged his horse away from the rest of the group a little and leant forward in his saddle to speak more confidentially.

'Have you made any more progress over the death of either of the Peverels?' he asked in a low voice. 'Avelina is more convinced than ever that her husband was murdered.'

John explained that he had had no opportunity to communicate with the Wiltshire sheriff or coroner, as he had been away — but he felt that after this lapse of time and with the absence of any physical evidence there was little that could be done. As for Hugo's death, there seemed to be a conspiracy of silence in Sampford, as far as the family was concerned.

'Tell me,' he added. 'Does Lady Avelina know of any reason why the former sheriff, Richard de Revelle, seems to so earnestly cultivate the friendship of the remaining brothers? You will be aware that his reputation is not without flaws.'

This was another understatement, but de Charterai nodded understandingly.

'Your wife regaled me with some of the facts on the journey. I feel sorry for her, especially as your legitimate role in the matter could not have helped. But as to his presence in Sampford, Avelina can think of no reason but de Revelle's desire to get hold of that parcel of land that he so covets.'

He looked over his shoulder at his mature lady love, then continued. 'But do not think that he is wooing all three Peverels! Ralph seems his main target, as Odo, like his father before him, wishes to keep the manor intact. And like most of us, de Revelle appears to think that Joel is an empty-headed wastrel. It is Ralph that he wants to succeed to the lordship, as then he will have the power to grant him these disputed acres.'

After some more polite conversation and John's promise to keep Reginald informed of any developments, the two parties disentangled their mounts and continued on their way. After a few hundred yards, Gwyn looked over his shoulder at the retreating figure of the stately Frenchman, then raised his bushy eyebrows at his master.

'He's a deep one, that! I still wouldn't put it past him to pay back the insults that Hugo Peverel laid on him, both in the tourney field and in that banquet. So don't cross him off your list yet, Crowner!'

Just as the coroner was wrong about finding Reginald in Tiverton, so he was-wrong about next seeing Robert Longus in Exeter for the inquest.

On the second morning after his visit to Sampford, the bells had barely finished ringing for terce, sext and nones at about the ninth hour, when there was a repetition of the familiar pattern of a lone horseman clattering up to the gatehouse with an urgent message for the coroner.

This time it was not the reeve but an ostler sent by the bailiff, to distance the latter a little from the displeasure of the Peverels for meddling in their manorial independence.

'The girl Agnes, sir, she was found dead in the millstream this morning. Walter Hog thinks you should be told about it straight away,' the man announced in his strong rural accent.

John de Wolfe rarely felt much emotion about his deceased customers, but this unexpected news saddened and angered him. He assumed straight away that this would be no accident, and he thought of the placid but intelligent girl who, after nothing but fifteen years of unremitting toil, poverty and abuse, had ended up dead in a brook. Within the hour, they were on their way back to Sampford, with Thomas and Eustace trying to keep up with Gwyn and the coroner as they went at a brisk trot along the shortest route to the troubled manor. By dinner time, they had reached the village and saw the bailiff and a few of his men waiting for them at the edge of the green, opposite the church. There was no sign of the Peverels and de Wolfe was in no hurry to have them ranting their protests at him.

'Is the poor maid still where she was found?' he demanded, as he slid from Odirr's back.

'We had to pull her from the water to make sure of who she was, but the body is lying on the bank,' explained Walter Hog, motioning two of the men to take the horses away for hay and water. Leading the way, he took the coroner's party across the track and down a steep lane at the side of the churchyard, which led down into the little valley below.

'So she didn't go in at the mill?' snapped John, knowing from his previous visits that this was farther upstream.

'No, this is the run-off from the wheel, quite a way down. Shallow it is here, except when there's heavy rain.'

Below a small wooden bridge at the bottom, the brook was only a few feet wide and could easily be waded, but the bailiff took them under some trees and walked along the muddy bank for fifty paces to where a wide, deeper pool was formed where some rocks and a fallen tree had partly dammed the stream. On the edge, under a willow turning brown, was a still body, lying face up on the weeds. Standing near by was Agnes's mother, red eyed and being comforted by a shabbily dressed man who he assumed was her father. John muttered some platitudes of sympathy, which were none the less sincere for their gruffness, then crouched over the pathetic remains of the young woman. She wore a better kirtle than the ragged one he had seen her in before, so her mother must have made use of the two pence that he had given her for the purpose. It was mud-stained on the front and the upper half was soaking wet.

'She was found by a woman picking watercress, soon after dawn,' explained WaIter. 'The poor girl was face down in the trout pool, her hair all streaming out in the current. Most of her body was on the bank — I can't understand how she could drown like that.'

John looked up at Gwyn, who nodded back.

'This was no drowning, Bailiff! Look at her neck!' The victims face-was tinted violet and seemed slightly swollen, even allowing for her normal chubbiness. Around her neck, just above her Adam's apple, was a band of pinkish skin about half an inch wide. Below it, her neck was pale by contrast with the livid colour above.

'She's not been drowned, man — she's been strangled! By a ligature pulled tight around her throat.' The mother burst into tears and her husband awkwardly pulled her to his chest and patted her back. Thomas, full of compassion as usual, knelt by the corpse, crossed himself a few times, then went to the woman and began murmuring consoling words to her and her husband;

'We can't examine her here, especially with them looking on,' muttered de Wolfe to Gwyn.

'The church is nearest, let's get her there,' suggested the Cornishman.

With scant ceremony, apart from John taking off his cloak to cover her, Agnes was carried in Gwyn's great arms like a baby, back up the hill and into the church, where Father Patrick appeared from the sacristy, flushed in the face and smelling of brandy wine.

Waiter Hog and another man lowered the bier from where it was suspended from the rafters by ropes and laid the girl's body upon it, this time near the back of the chancel away from the altar.

'We'll only look at the head and neck for now,' grunted John, with a delicacy that belied the appearance of these large, gruff men. 'WaIter, you can get some village woman later — perhaps the one who acts as midwife — to check the rest of the body, to make sure she's not been roughly violated.'

Thomas had finished his pastoral efforts with the mother and came in with Eustace on his heels, to peer around John as he made a more thorough examination of the dead girl. As Gwyn lifted her head, he looked at the back of the neck, where the red band continued around the nape, crossing over in the centre. At the front and sides, it was sharply demarcated on the skin, with a line of tiny red spots along the upper edge.

'Plenty of blood in the skin and eyes,' observed Gwyn, pointing at the outer eyelids, which were peppered with a fine red rash, and at the whites of the eyes, which were visible under the half-closed lids. Here there were angry bright red haemorrhages, and in the skin of the face, especially around the jaw-line, were dotted bleeding points under the congested skin.

'Even some crusted blood in the nose and one of the ears,' piped up Eustace, who was avidly taking in the dramatic scene. Thomas, whose interest in the signs of violent death was non-existent compared to the others', drifted off and went to talk to the rather unsteady parish priest, who stood uncertainly in the middle of the beaten-earth floor of the nave.

'Do you know anything of this, Father?' he asked. The Irishman shook his head slowly and spoke as if his tongue were too large for his mouth. 'Only that she was found in the stream early today. Her mother, God give her peace, told me that she did not come home last night, but I am afraid that that was nothing new for Agnes, if she found a man with a penny to spare.'

He seemed fuddled and could offer nothing else useful, so reluctantly Thomas went back to where Eustace was avidly following the coroner's pronouncements. With the bailiff and his assistant also looking on, Gwyn and John were closely studying the mark around the neck.

'A narrow belt or strap,' declared Gwyn. 'Not a cord or a rope, as there's no twisted pattern and the edges are too regular.'

De Wolfe grunted, which could signal agreement or dissent. Then his long forefinger pointed to three places on the mark, one under the angle of the jaw on the left side, another under the point of the chin and the third beneath the right ear.

'These look too squared off to be mere chance,' he snapped. 'There's something on the strap at those points. '

'What help is that, sir?' ventured Eustace de Relaga. 'If we can find a strap with something fixed to it exactly at those points, then it might well be the instrument of the poor child's death.'

Privately, Gwyn thought this a slim chance, but he kept his opinion to himself. There was nothing else to find and Thomas persuaded the tipsy priest to find an old cassock in the sacristy to cover up the corpse, to allow John to reclaim his wolfskin.

'Best bring the mother in here to keep vigil over her daughter for a time,' suggested de Wolfe. For some reason, the killing of the poor wash-house skivvy had pulled at his heart more than the usual run of pathetic deaths that he dealt with week in, week out.

He marched out of the church, leaving Thomas to say some prayers over the body, in default of any help from Father Patrick.

'Have your masters in the hall been told of this?' he asked Walter Hog.

'Indeed they have, Crowner. Sir Odo seemed quite concerned, but Ralph just shrugged and said she had probably tried to steal an extra penny off a customer and got herself choked for her impertinence. As for Joel, he just sniggered at Ralph's explanation and told Roger Viel that he'd better look for another laundry maid if he wanted clean cloths on the table tonight.'

John's opinion of the two younger brothers fell even more, but their callous indifference was none of his business. Discovering who killed Agnes certainly was, and he strode towards the manor-house compound with grim determination. As they marched through the wide gate in the stockade around the bailey, Gwyn wanted to know how they were going to set about things.

'We've had little success with anything else so far in this damned place,' he said critically. 'No doubt everyone will again claim to have been deaf and blind this last day or so, with nothing at all to tell us.'

As he stamped up the steps to the hall doorway, John half turned to his officer.

'We've got two suspects who may already have killings to their discredit. Robert Longus and his stupid crony Alexander are high on our list of suspects for August Scrape, so let's start with them as candidates for the girl.'

'I'd like to add bloody Ralph to that list, for he's a nasty enough bastard to have got rid of his brother to gain the lordship,' boomed Gwyn, careless as to whether anyone heard him inside the hall. The only one in sight, however, was the steward, Roger Viel, sitting at a table with a roll of accounts before him. Apart from the priest and Odo Peverel, he was probably the only inhabitant of Sampford who was able to read and write, a' necessity for the administrator of a large manor.

He rose to meet them, anxiety written over his lined face as yet another death brought the King's coroner to the village. After greeting them and calling to a servant behind the far screens to bring food and drink, he invited them to sit at his table, where they were joined by the bailiff, Thomas and Eustace. There was still no sign of any-of the masters and mistresses of the house — the steward said thatJoel had gone off riding with Lady Beatrice and Avelina was in Tiverton visiting Sir Reginald.

'I've no notion where Sir Odo and Ralph might be.

They are probably somewhere about the bailey,' he concluded, but almost as he spoke Ralph Peverel stalked into the hall, slapping his thigh with a pair of leather gloves. Judging by his boots and cloak, he had been riding, and when Robert Longus appeared behind him, carrying a battered shield and a sword, it seemed obvious that Ralph had been training for the coming tournaments at Bristol and Wilton. On a previous visit, John had noticed an area just outside the stockade where the grass was churned into a welter of hoof marks and where two rotating tilts were set up for lance practice.

He strode arrogantly across to the table and stood with his fists on his hips, glaring at John de Wolfe. 'By Christ's wounds, Crowner, are you pestering us again? I'll have to start charging you rent if you spend much more time here!'

His attempt at sarcastic levity was lost on the dour coroner.

'You know damned well why I'm here, Peverel! Another murder in Sampford and I suppose you know nothing about it and care even less!'

Ralph flushed with anger.

'You have no call to speak like that to the lord of a manor — especially before my servants!'

'In my eyes, you are not the lord of this manor until the justices declare it to be so,' retorted de Wolfe. 'Now then, have you anything to tell me about the strangling of this poor girl?'

Ralph walked to the next table and threw himself into one of the three chairs that the hall boasted.

'What should I know about the throttling of some wash-house drab? You know her reputation. Undoubtedly some disgruntled customer from the village took exception to something she did — or didn't do!'

He said this with such uncaring nonchalance that John felt like shaking him until his teeth rattled. 'You do not find it a coincidence that this is the same girl that your brother lay with on the night that he was slain?' he said sarcastically.

Ralph seemed to have an answer for everything. 'Why should it be? We do not have so many whores in this village that the same one should not be at risk with men who wish to slake their passions.'

'Could it not be that someone, like yourself, who declared that the girl was the killer of your brother, took the law into their own hands?'

'The law should be in our own hands, Crowner! This is a manor with all the rights of manorial custom. We told you at the outset that we did not want your interference from Exeter, but could settle this ourselves. '

John glared at the younger man, whose arrogance and insolence seemed to increase by the day.

'Are you confessing to having taken the law into your own hands? Did you kill this girl, Peverel?'

'Don't be so damned foolish, de Wolfe! D'you think I'd soil my hands on the dirty offspring of a serf? And if I had, would I be daft enough to admit it to you?'

The coroner turned around slowly and looked back down the hall towards the door, where Robert Longus was still standing, the weapons trailing from his hands. He glared back defiantly, his hard face devoid of any expression within the rim of beard that encircled it.

'I want to search the dwelling of your armourer — and his assistant, Alexander Crues.' John spoke over his shoulder to Ralph, who immediately jumped up and stalked over to the coroner.

'What in hell's name for?' he shouted. 'Have you not intruded enough into our affairs? This is too much, I forbid you to interfere any further!'

De Wolfe glowered back at the angry man. Gwyn saw that his patience with Ralph Peverel was wearing thin and his fingers wandered unconsciously towards his sword hilt, in case this developing feud got out of hand.

'Are you defying me, sir? Remember that no one is above the King's law, not even manor-lords!'

'I have friends in high places, Crowner, you will hear more of this! Why on earth should you wish to ransack this man's quarters, other than from spite and prejudice?'

'Longus has been accused by a respectable silvercraftsman of being a robber and a murderer,' retorted John. 'Only your word now stands in contradiction, since your brother is dead.'

The escalating battle of words was interrupted by the sudden appearance of Odo, who came through the door that led upstairs. As he had been said to be outside in the bailey, John realised that he must have entered through the postern door 'from the kitchens. In his temper, Ralph seemed to forget that he was not supposed to be speaking to his elder brother and burst out with his complaints about the coroner.

'He wants to search the place, brother! This is becoming intolerable!'

Odo turned a calmer face towards John, though it was still disapproving of this outside interference.

'I fail to see how that can throw any light on the murder of this poor girl,' he said critically. 'But as the innocent have nothing to hide, I see no objection to pandering to his whims.'

With this backhanded agreement, Odo went to the far end of the room and poured himself some ale from a large crock, taking no further interest in the argument. Ralph simmered with anger as he watched de Wolfe walk back to Robert Longus to question him.

'We meet sooner than I thought! Can you account for where you were throughout last night?'

'I was in the inn until two hours or so after sunset, then in my bed until dawn. I'm not married, so I've no wife to vouch for me!'

This was delivered with thinly veiled insolence, in the expectation that Ralph would support him in everything he said.

'And that big lump who assists you? Where was he?'

Robert shrugged indifferently. 'I'm not his keeper, Crowner. He was in the inn as well, but he left before me. God knows where he went — maybe to his bed, maybe to roll a wench — for, like me, he has no wife living.'

Tired of this verbal fencing, John jerked his head at Gwyn and the two clerks.

'Come on, I want to see where these men live.' Grabbing Robert's arm in a grip like that of a lobster's claw, he pushed him towards the door. The armourer resisted, but Gwyn came round la the other side and he had no option but to stumble along with them, dropping the sword and shield on the floor. As they propelled him to the door, he screwed his head around to make a last appeal to his master, but Ralph had stalked away to the screens and was shouting for someone to bring him wine.

Out in the bailey, the coroner and his officer relaxed their grip on the armourer, who angrily shook himself free.

'Keep your bloody hands off me! I don't know what you expect to find, but for God's sake let's get it over with, then I can get back to some work. The Bristol tourney is only a few days away!'

He led them around the back of the manor house and past the kitchens and laundry hut to the forge and stables. Back to back with the forge, under the same shingled roof, were a couple of small rooms, and Robert Longus led them to the first door, where a heavy leather flap served to keep out the weather.

'I live in here and Crues has the smaller one next door,' he explained in a surly voice. 'So help yourself, and be damned to you!'

He stood back indifferently while John pushed past the flap, followed by Gwyn and Eustace. Thomas decided that a mean, odorous room was no concern of his and stayed outside.

In the dim light from a small shuttered window, John saw a lodging that was as barren as a monk's cell. A straw-filled palliasse lay along one wall; the only other furniture was a rough table with a three-legged stool below it. Some metal-working tools, a pitcher of ale and two clay cups stood upon it. From pegs and hooks on the wooden frames of the cob walls, lengths of chain mail, two helmets and various oddments of armour hung under a coating of dust.

'The horses are housed better in the stables than this fellow in here,' grunted Gwyn. Eustace was looking around in astonishment. His first days in the coroner's service were opening his eyes to the way most people lived — a world away from the comparative luxury of his rich parents' home.

'Nothing for us here,' murmured John. 'Not that I expected much.'

They pushed out into the daylight, where Longus was waiting, a sardonic look on his face.

'Satisfied, Crowner? I said you were wasting your time — and mine.'

De Wolfe scowled at him. 'Do all armourers live in such hovels?'

'This is only my working home. I am a journeyman with a decent house in Southampton where I live during the winter. The rest of the time I hire myself out to whoever pays the best.'

Insolently, he turned on his heel and walked away towards the manor house.

The coroner looked at the other half of the lean-to building that abutted on to the forge. 'We may as well look in there, now we're here.'

He pushed into a similarly squalid room, which also contained just a mattress and a table, though it was littered with oddments, scattered on the earthen floor and hanging from the walls. Most of it was chain and scrap metal, plus a few broken shields, but John's eye was caught by some belts and straps thrown over a wooden bar nailed across one corner. There were baldrics, one still carrying an empty sword sheath, and other strips of leather which looked like broken pieces of harness.

'Gwyn, seize that stuff and bring it out into the light,' he commanded.

Ten minutes later, they were again bending over the bier in the little church of StJohn the Baptist. Agnes's parents had gone, the mother having been so overcome with grief that her husband had helped her home to sit sobbing in their empty dwelling, now bereft of both her daughters.

John was staring again at the mark on the neck, now slightly more prominent as the blood in the adjacent skin had started to drain away since the corpse had been lying on its back. At his direction, Gwyn was going through the bundle of belts and traces, picking out those that were of about the correct width. He selected fOUr and stretched them out one by one in front of de Wolfe, laying them across the chest of the dead girl, where four pairs of eyes stared at them intently. There was silence for a moment, then the exuberant Eustace could contain himself no longer.

'That one, Sir John! What about that one?' He pointed with a quivering finger at a worn leather strap about three feet long, which was torn through irregularly at each end and had some short side-straps hanging off it.

'I see it, lad,' said John as patiently as he could, for he had already recognised it as a possible match. Picking it up in both hands, he stretched it out and moved it back and forth lengthwise across the mark on Agnes's neck.

'There!' grunted Gwyn, unnecessarily, as the places where three of the side-straps were stitched to the main one came exactly over the squared marks on the skin.

'Could that be mere chance?' piped up Doubting Thomas.

De Wolfe lowered the strap and curved it around the front of the neck, adjusting it until the marks coincided to within a hair's breadth.

'I don't think so. It's not as if the branches were spaced regularly … there's different distances between them, yet they still match.'

'Good enough for me, by God!' murmured Gwyn. 'Certainly good enough to ask this Alexander a few pointed questions!'

'A pity some skin couldn't have rubbed off on to it — that would clinch it,' observed their still-critical clerk. Then Eustace chipped in once more, for his keen young eyes were better than those of the older men and Thomas's slight squint.

'There's a spot on the back of the strap — look there!' He used a piece of straw from the floor to point out a darker mark on the mottled brown of the old leather. It was half the size of a grain of wheat, but had a glazed shine to it that suggested it. was recent. John picked at it with a dirty fingernail and carefully slid it off on to the back of his other hand.

Then he licked his forefinger and rubbed it across the loosened fleck. Immediately; a tiny crimson streak smeared across the skin below his knuckles.

'Blood, by damn! Must have come from her nose or ear,' he exclaimed triumphantly. Having now destroyed this piece of evidence, the coroner earnestly instructed Thomas to write an exact record on his rolls at the earliest opportunity, naming those present who could vouch for the presence of the blood spot and of the congruence of the strap with the strangulation mark.

'Right, let's go and do the sheriff's work for him!' announced de Wolfe, straightening up and carefully rolling the strap into the pouch on his belt. 'This Alexander Crues has some explaining to do.'

The assistant arrnourers explanations consisted entirely of denials, his slow mind producing nothing but a dull repetition of the fact that he knew nothing of any girl's death, he hadn't done it and he had no recollection of any strap hanging in his room.

The coroner's team had found him sleeping in a corner at the back of the empty forge, in a warm spot near the banked-down furnace. Gwyn interrupted his snores by kicking him with the toe of his boot, but Crues was little more articulate when awake than he was when asleep. Frustrated at the man's stupidity, John hauled out the strap and waved it in his face.

'You used this, damn you — you throttled the poor girl with it! Come on, admit it, we know this was the thing that killed her!'

For the first time, a flicker of fear appeared in Alexander's bovine features, but he continued to shake his head and mutter denials. Gwyn grabbed him by the throat and shook him as a stimulus to his memory. Crues was not as big as the Cornishman, but he was a strong fellow, accustomed to wielding a forge hammer, and he used his strength to pull free of Gwyn and give him a heavy punch in the chest. He found it was like hitting a stone wall — the only effect was to make the officer roar with anger. He seized the armourer by the wrist and twisted his arm up behind his back, at the same time grabbing a handful of his unkempt hair and dragging back his head.

'Confess, damn you, or I'll break your bloody neck!' roared Gwyn, who was very averse to young girls being throttled. There was a large wooden trough near by, filled with dirty water to cool red-hot metal from the anvil. Without a moment's hesitation, Gwyn forced Crues to his knees, then rammed his head under the surface. Struggling violently, the man was helpless in Gwyn's iron grip, though the filthy water splashed over the floor as he thrashed about in an effort to get free.

'You did it, didn't you, you bastard?' yelled Gwyn as he hoisted Alexander's head back by the hair. Amidst the spluttering and retching there was a vehement denial, so Gwyn shoved his head back into the trough and banged his face on the hard bottom for good measure.

John looked on impassively, not bothered by some coercion if it produced results. It was part of his official duties to attend hangings, blindings, mutilation of hands and genitals and the torture of the Ordeal and occasionally the peine forte et dure, so Gwyn's method of persuasion was mild in comparison. Eustace looked on with a mixture of horror and fascination, his previous experiences in his sheltered life having been' rapidly expanded by the things he had seen in the past few days. Thomas, though more used to the brutal reality of law enforcement, looked away as he crossed himself and murmured prayers for the victim, as he fully expected Gwyn to drown Alexander Crues.

Gwyn repeated his dunking and shouting twice more, until de Wolfe came to the same conclusion as Thomas.

'Try not to kill the swine,' he advised his officer. 'He may have some valuable information for us.'

Gwyn hauled Alexander out of the trough and dropped him heavily on to the ground. He lay still, and Thomas thought that perhaps he was already dead. Then he gave a great retch and vomited water, food and mucus, and began to push himself up on his hands, coughing and spluttering to rid himself of the rest of the foul water in his windpipe.

Gwyn grabbed his hair again and bent his head back. 'Ready for another bath, you murdering bastard? Or are you going to tell us the truth?'

Befuddled and half drowned, Crues momentarily forgot that escaping another submersion in the trough by confessing would inevitably lead to a hanging. But as he croaked and gagged his admission, he tried to shift the blame.

'Not me … 'twas Robert!' he gasped. 'He made me help, I swear!'

Gwyn released him and he crawled painfully up on to all fours, then slumped over with his back against the trough, still coughing and spitting out water.

De Wolfe stood over him menacingly, dangling the strap before him.

'You used this for the deed, you evil lout! Did you each pull one end, eh?' he snarled. 'I think you're a liar, Longus had nothing to do with it.'

Alexander shook his head, his sodden hair hanging lankly around his face. 'I tell you it was him. I want to turn approver, Crowner. '

'Time for that later, maybe,' snapped John. 'You'll first have to prove Robert Longus was involved at all. But I think you ravished this Agnes, then killed her either in perverted passion or because she mocked your lack of prowess.'

De Wolfe was deliberately inventing this scenario, as there had been no opportunity yet for a village wise-woman to examine Agnes for any signs of intimate violence. Alexander, now miserably cowed, rocked his head like a dying bull in a baiting-pit.

'It wasn't like that at all. I never laid a finger on her. May God above strike me dead if I lie.'

'He probably will, on the gallows in Magdalen Street,' retorted John. 'But if you claim you didn't ravish her, why should she be throttled?'

Crues leaned forward and retched again, spitting water on to the floor.

Gwyn grabbed his hair again and shook his head until his teeth rattled.

'Answer the coroner!' he roared, wishing to keep up the pressure and stop the man relapsing into a sullen silence.

'Because we were afraid that she had recognised our voices when that damned Hugo was killed. There was gossip in the village that said she might have recovered her memory of that night, so Robert said she had to go, for our safety's sake.'

De Wolfe's phlegmatic nature rarely allowed him to be thunderstruck, but here was a bolt from the blue. In getting this dull-witted oaf to confess to being involved in one killing, they had seemingly stumbled upon another.

'Hugo? You. killed Hugo?' he barked.

'I killed nobody, Crowner! I was just there when it happened,' wailed Crues.

'Are you saying that Robert Longus killed his master? Why, for God's sake?' demanded John.

Alexander slumped sideways and beat his fist upon the hard earthen floor of the forge. 'I don't know, I just don't know, sir! Robert was thick with all the Peverels, William, Hugo and now Ralph. I don't know what schemes he had with them, but he told me one night that it was too dangerous for him to let Hugo live and that I must help to get rid of him.'

John was becoming bewildered by the pace of these revelations, and he was to be further astounded by Alexander's next admission.

'I think he was afeared that Hugo would withdraw his promise of protection over the robbing and killing of that silversmith — but there was something else as well, I'm sure. He never told me anything, except ordering me to do this, do that!'

This long speech brought on another fit of spluttering and spitting, giving the coroner time to digest the fact that now three of his homicides seemed to be on the point of being solved. But Alexander Crues, slow-witted as he was, seemed to have decided that he had made enough admissions and that the best thing to do when one is in a hole is to stop digging. All further questions were answered by a denial of any more knowledge about anything, and even Gwyn's threats to push his head back into the trough failed to make him concede anything useful. He slid farther over to lay on his side, and apart from intermittent coughing and spitting seemed uncaring about his fate.

John turned to Thomas and Eustace, who had been listening open mouthed to these dramatic revelations.

'You are witnesses to what has been said, so mark the words well. And you, Thomas, will get them on parchment as soon as you can, in case our blackbird here refuses to sing any more.'

Gwyn looked down at the inert, wheezing figure at his feet.

'What's to be done with him, Crowner?'

'He'll have to come back to Exeter with us, roped on to a horse. Tie his wrists and feet for now, to stop him wandering off, while we find this Robert again.'