Текст книги "The Assassin's riddle"

Автор книги: Paul Doherty

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Paul Doherty
The Assassin's Riddle

PROLOGUE

Edwin Chapler, clerk of the Chancery of the Green Wax, sat in the small, musty chapel built in the centre of London Bridge. Outside the sun had set, though the sky was still gashed with red, dulling the stars and giving the inhabitants of London further excuse to trade, play, or stroll arm in arm along the riverside. The taverns and hostelries were full. The jumbled streets echoed with songs from the alehouses. The pains and hunger of winter were now forgotten, the harvest had been good and so the markets were busy. Edwin Chapler, however, had a heaviness of heart, as any man would, who had to face the truth but couldn’t tell it. He looked round the small chapel. At the far end was the small sanctuary, on the left the Lady Shrine and, to the right, a huge statue of St Thomas a Becket with a sword grotesquely driven into his head.

‘I should be in the Baker’s Dozen,’ Chapler whispered. ‘Listening to a fiddler and wondering if Alison could dance to his tune.’

He had come here, as he often did, to seek guidance, but he couldn’t pray. He opened his mouth but no words came out. He glanced up at the painted window. In the fast-fading light of the day, the tortured Christ still writhed on His cross.

Chapler looked away. In here it was cold and he was all alone; it might be days before he finally decided. Silent terror gripped him. What if he did nothing and it was discovered? Chapler swallowed hard. Two summers ago he had seen a man executed for treason: a clerk who’d sold secrets to the Spanish. Chapler closed his eyes but he couldn’t remove the grisly scene: the high black platform, the butcher’s table underneath the soaring gallows at Tyburn. The unfortunate clerk had been cut down and sliced from gullet to crotch as a housewife would a chicken. His head was then cut off and his body quartered to be boiled in pitch and placed above the city gates.

Chapler shivered as he peered through the gloom. The two candles he had lit before the statue of St Thomas glowed like fiery eyes. The darkness pressed in. Chapler felt some evil force was lurking near, ready to jump like a monstrous cat. Outside, the thundering hooves of a horse made him jump. Chapler recalled why he was here. He had been given sufficient warning to stay silent. He’d gone to his stable and found his horse writhing in pain. A sympathetic ostler had agreed to put the animal out of its misery. When the horse’s corpse had been dragged to the slaughterhouse and its belly slit open, instead of hay and straw, fish hooks and sharp thistle leaves had been found. Chapler had protested but the greasy-faced landlord who owned the stable just shrugged.

‘Don’t blame me!’ he’d snapped. ‘The horses are well looked after here. Look around, master, look around! Why, in heaven’s name, should we feed some poor horse fish hooks and thistles?’

Chapler had agreed and walked away: an enemy had done that. He closed his eyes again, clenching his hands as he knelt beside the pillar. A sound above made him start. He opened his eyes in terror at the black form which hovered under the heavy beamed roof. Chapler moaned in fear. A demon? Some dark soul hunting him? The black shadow turned, feathery wings gently beating the air. Chapler relaxed: it was only a raven, one of those great black birds which haunted London Bridge, hunting for carrion on the starlings beneath or, even better, waiting for the severed heads of criminals and traitors to be hoisted on poles. The raven must have flown in and been trapped. Chapler watched curiously: the bird didn’t caw but flew up to a window ledge, its yellow beak tapping at the horned glass, then it turned on its perch. Chapler suspected it was studying him. A portent? A devil? He wondered whether to open the door and see if the bird would fly out but he couldn’t move. He really couldn’t be bothered; at least the bird was a companion. The raven cawed as if it could read his thoughts; its head turned, looking at the door. Chapler sighed and struggled to his feet just as the door crashed open. The raven cawed in triumph as it floated down and out into the fading light. Chapler ignored it, more intent on the shadowy figure shuffling into the church.

‘Who are you?’ he called.

The cowled figure didn’t answer. Instead it stopped before the altar of St Christopher, just within the porch. A coin fell into the box; a tinder was struck, a candle fit and placed upon an iron spigot before the statue of the patron saint of travellers. The figure turned. It was a woman. Her coarse hair fell from under the brim of her pointed hat and lay about her shoulders in untidy coils. She shuffled closer. Chapler glimpsed a wizened face, bright beady eyes, lips tightly pursed, almost hidden by the furrows of her cheeks. He heaved a sigh of relief. It was only old Harrowtooth. A witch, a wise woman, who lived in a shabby tenement further down the bridge. She was called that because her one protruding tooth hung down like the iron tip of a plough.

‘I’d like to pray above the water,’ old Harrowtooth declared, forcing a smile. ‘A good place to pray says I. Always quiet. God’s water beneath, God’s sky above.’ Her clawed hand seized Chapler’s wrist. ‘And it’s always good to see a bonny young man attending to his orisons. Many a young man I’ve seen in my life,’ she gabbled on. ‘I remember one here, drove me away with curses he did when I asked for a coin.’ She pushed her ugly face closer. ‘Fell ill of a fever he did: a terrible thirst raged in his throat. Yet he was afraid to moisten his lips because he could not stand the sound or touch of water.’

Chapler pulled his hand away, dipped into his purse and handed across a penny.

‘God bless you, sir.’ She held the coin up. ‘God bless you. I come in and spend a farthing for a candle and looks I leave the richer. Who says God does not answer prayers?’ The old woman’s narrow shoulders shook with laughter. She opened the door and turned. ‘A word of caution, young man.’ Her voice was harsh, surprisingly strong. ‘The raven is a harbinger of doom!’ She slammed the door behind her.

Chapler went back and crouched by the pillar. Despite old Harrowtooth’s appearance he felt more serene, as if his mind was made up. If he did what was right, if he did what was proper, then he’d be safe and all would be well. He stayed awhile, thinking through what he would do. He dropped to his knees. Now his soul was calm he could pray, perhaps light another candle before he left? Immersed in his devotions, Chapler didn’t hear the door quietly open.

The shadowy figure came up fast like some spider, moving across the flagstones, not a sound till the iron-tipped mace cracked the back of Chapler’s skull and the young man, blood pouring through his mouth, collapsed to the floor. The figure stooped and dragged him out on to the steps of the church. The assassin paused. There was no one around. Darkness had fallen, the day’s business was done. He picked up Chapler, as if his victim was a friend who had drunk too much, and hurried along the side of the church to the parapet of the bridge. He couldn’t be seen here. The buttress of the chapel came out to shield him from view on either side. He hoisted Chapler’s body upon the rails before dropping him like a sack into the river frothing below.

Three evenings later, as the river ran strong and full to the sea, a long barge slipped out from St Paul’s Wharf and made its way across the bobbing tide. The barge was poled by hooded figures. In the prow and stern stood others, garbed in a similar fashion, holding torches. In the centre of the barge sat the Fisher of Men, his cowl pulled back, lidless eyes staring across the river. He was hunting for corpses: he and his beloveds, the outcasts of London, were paid by the Corporation according to a set list of fees for every corpse they plucked from the water. One rate for an accident, another for a suicide. The highest, of course, was for any murder victim. The Fisher of Men, his eerie, bulbous face carefully oiled against the river wind, crooned a lullaby even as he studied the water.

‘There’ll be bodies,’ he murmured. ‘Look hard and long, my lovelies!’

The few barges and wherries which plied the river steered well clear. The Fisher of Men was not liked: he held special terrors for those who worked along the Thames. Rumours were rife in the taverns and alehouses that the Fisher of Men and his companions were not above arranging for their own victims to be found in the Thames. Every boat-man between Southwark and Westminster prayed constantly to their patron saints that their corpse would not be found by the Fisher of Men and taken to his strange chapel where it would lie in a makeshift coffin until identified. Tonight the Fisher was hopeful. Two days ago they’d plucked the body of a drunk and that of a Brabantine sailor who had been killed in a tavern brawl. Sir John Cranston, the portly coroner of the city, had paid them well. Now the Fisher of Men was hunting again.

‘Ah yes, my lovelies!’ he whispered, misquoting from the Office for the Dead. ‘Remember that terrible day when the earth shall give up the dead and the rivers of God their secrets.’

He then rapped out an order and the barge turned to avoid a gong cart which stood off the Fleet dumping the ordure and offal of the city into midstream. The dung-collectors cursed and made a sign to ward off the evil eye as the ghoulish barge of the Fisher of Men swept by.

‘Pole towards the bank,’ the Fisher of Men ordered. He pointed to where the river turned before sweeping down to Westminster.

‘Are you sure, master?’ Icthus, the Fisher of Men’s principal swimmer, spoke up. ‘Shouldn’t we stay in midstream?’

‘No, no,’ the Fisher replied. ‘I knows the river: it runs too fast. Any corpses from Southwark or London Bridge will be swept into the reeds.’

The barge turned, the pitch torches flickering and snapping in the evening breeze. The Fisher picked up his hand-bell and clanged it, the sound ringing ominously across the river, telling others to stay clear. The barge moved in closer to the bank.

‘I see one!’ a lookout cried. ‘Master, I see it! There amongst the reeds!’

The Fisher peered through the gloom. There was enough light. He studied the reeds and he, too, saw it, the glint of a buckle belt and something else.

‘Go in closer!’

The barge did so. Icthus jumped over the side. He swam like the fish after which he was named. He caught the bobbing, water-soaked corpse of Edwin Chapler; he stared at the bloated face, staring eyes and blood-encrusted mouth.

‘A corpse!’ Icthus screeched. ‘Master, we have found a corpse!’

In Ratcat Alley, just off Watling Street under the towering mass of St Paul’s Cathedral, Bartholomew Drayton, a moneylender with a reputation as evil as Satan, was also preparing to meet death. Drayton lay on the floor of his vaulted counting chamber. He moaned in agony at the barbed crossbow quarrel embedded deep in his chest. He turned on his side and looked towards the door; he could not possibly pull back the different bolts or turn the keys in the three great locks. Drayton closed his eyes and groaned. He had always prided himself on that door. Six inches thick, steel-hinged, the outside protected by great brass bolts, it had proved to be his death. He’d always thought himself secure, down here in his counting house; here no thieves could break in nor could one of his greedy clerks help themselves to what he had gathered over the years. No windows, not even an arrow slit. In the end it had proved useless. Drayton, an old soldier from the King’s wars in France, knew he was going to die. So strange, here in this vaulted chamber. He gazed across to the wall at the far end. Perhaps it was only right. Justice had caught up with him. He closed his eyes. His feet and legs were so cold.

Drayton, like Chapler, tried to pray but all he could think of were the words from the Gospel, about the rich man who had filled his barns and looked forward to a life of feasting and merriment. ‘Fool!’ God had thundered back, ‘Dost thou not know that the demand has been made for thy soul?’ Drayton murmured a prayer. He had time to ask God’s forgiveness but what about the other crime? Drayton moved to one side. With all his failing strength he tried to crawl to the far wall, to touch it. Yes, if he could touch it he could ask forgiveness. He had moved only a few paces before the pain became too much. A coldness swept up his body and Bartholomew Drayton gave up his soul.

CHAPTER 1

Sir John Cranston, coroner of the city of London, perched his portly frame on a stool, pushed back his beaver hat and mopped his red, glistening face. He would have loved to draw out the miraculous wineskin from beneath his cloak but he was not too sure about the mood of his secretarius, the Dominican, Brother Athelstan, who sat across the chamber. Athelstan was quiet, even more so than usual. His narrow, olive-skinned face under the black tonsured hair was impassive, his usually smiling eyes were now rather stern. He sat, hands up the sleeves of his white gown, chewing on the corner of his lip.

He doesn’t want to be here, Cranston thought. He wants to be back across the river at St Erconwald’s with his bloody parishioners. He studied his friend’s face carefully. Athelstan had not even had time to shave or break his fast. He’d just finished morning Mass when Cranston had called.

‘You’ve got to come, Brother,’ the coroner had insisted. He pointed to the huge tomcat which followed Athelstan in and out of church. ‘Leave Bonaventure to guard St Erconwald’s. Throw some hay at old Philomel. I want to reveal a mystery which will tax even your brain: it certainly baffles mine.’

Athelstan had followed quick and quiet. They strode across London Bridge up through the crowd to the house of the usurer, Bartholomew Drayton, in Ratcat Lane.

‘Tell us again.’ Cranston gestured at Henry Flaxwith, his principal bailiff.

The fellow breathed out noisily.

‘I know, I know,’ Cranston added sweetly. ‘But Brother Athelstan needs to be told all the facts. We could all be elsewhere. However, Drayton is murdered and a great deal of silver is gone.’

‘It’s like this, Sir John,’ Flaxwith began. ‘This morning, long before the bells for Matins rang, I and Samson…’

‘Bugger him!’ Cranston intervened. ‘I don’t want to hear about your bloody dog!’

‘I and my dog,’ Flaxwith continued remorselessly, ‘were doing my tour of duty. Now Samson,’ he winked at Athelstan, ‘now Samson,’ he intoned, ignoring Cranston’s sigh of exasperation, ‘always walks slowly, he likes to stop, sniff and cock his leg. I’d bought an eel pie because I hadn’t broken my fast Cranston closed his eyes. O God, give me patience, he prayed. Flaxwith was as lugubrious as he looked but he was honest and meticulous, with a sharp eye for detail.

‘I had just finished the pie,’ Flaxwith continued, ‘when we came into Ratcat Lane. Two young men, Drayton’s clerks, Philip Stablegate and James Flinstead, stood pounding on the door of their master’s house.’

‘These are the two lovelies upstairs?’

‘Precisely, Sir John. Anyway, I asked what the matter was.’ Flaxwith lifted his podgy face. ‘I really should see how Samson is doing…’

‘Samson’s fine,’ Cranston cooed. ‘I found a sausage in the scullery, he’s eating it as if there’s no tomorrow.’

‘Anyway, I ask them what the matter be. They told me they had rung the bell and pounded on the door but Master Drayton had not answered. Now, you have seen the front door, Sir John, thick as a Frenchman’s head. So we went round the outside. All the windows were boarded and shuttered up.’

‘Is there a back entrance?’ Athelstan asked.

‘Oh yes, but the door’s like that at the front, hard as oak. We would have needed a siege machine from the Tower to break them both down.’

Cranston could stand it no longer but helped himself to a quick mouthful of claret from his wineskin. He offered it to Athelstan who just shook his head.

‘So, we break in. Master Philip climbs on Master James’s shoulders. He uses a knife and prises open the shutters. Behind them is one of those small gate windows. He breaks the glass and lifts the handle.’

‘You are sure of that?’ Athelstan interrupted.

‘Of course I am,’ Flaxwith replied. ‘You could see it yourself, the wood’s all broken, the bars scored. Indeed, it looks as if it hasn’t been opened for years. In gets Master Stablegate. He unbolts the front door, turns the lock and we enter the house.’

‘How was it?’ Cranston asked.

‘Dark as night. Smelly and musty. No candles, no torchlight.’ Flaxwith’s voice fell to a whisper. ‘Quiet as a tomb, Sir John, it was.’

‘Go on!’ Cranston barked.

‘Well, all the rooms were empty. Just like this one.’

Athelstan broke from his reverie and stared round. He thought of the verse from the Gospels: What does it profit a man to gain the whole world if he suffers the loss of his immortal soul? Drayton, though one of the city’s principal moneylenders, must have also been a miser. The chamber was shabby, with only a few sticks of furniture, whilst the rushes on the floor looked as if they hadn’t been changed for years. The walls were greasy, the whitewash blotchy and peeling. Athelstan was sure he’d heard the squeak of rats along the passageway.

‘Am I going too fast?’ Flaxwith asked.

Cranston just smiled.

‘We reached the strongroom,’ the bailiff gabbled on. ‘We knocked and we knocked, fair to raise the dead. There was no sound.’

‘You checked the upstairs chambers?’ Athelstan asked.

‘Oh yes, nothing, so we knew Master Drayton must be in his counting house. Now you’ve seen the door, Sir John, heavy oak, steel hinges, embossed with steel bolts on the outside. By now I was afeared. I went out to the street. I paid a penny to four dung-collectors to come in. We found a chopping block in the garden and used that to smash the door down.’

‘That would be impossible,’ Athelstan asked, ‘if you say the door was as heavy as it was?’

‘You are right, Father,’ Flaxwith replied. ‘But one of the dung-collectors had served as a soldier, knocking down doors in France. He told us to concentrate on the hinges, so we did. Fair smashed them loose and the door gave way. Inside we found Drayton on the floor. We haven’t moved the corpse, a crossbow bolt deep in his chest and the silver’s gone.’

‘How much silver?’

‘According to the ledger, at least five thousand good pounds sterling.’

Cranston whistled through his teeth. ‘Good Lord, what else have you learnt?’

‘Well, the two clerks, Stablegate and Flinstead, left the house, as they always did, just before Vespers last night. Once they had gone, Master Drayton locked and bolted the doors: that was well known, Sir John, he let no one in and no one ever came out.’

Athelstan rose and played with the wooden cross hanging on a cord round his neck.

‘So, Master Flaxwith.’ He smiled at the bailiff. ‘According to you, here is a man who bolted and locked himself in his treasure house but he never went out and would allow no one in. In the morning the doors and windows are still bolted and shuttered. Downstairs the strongroom is still locked and secure but, inside, our moneylender is dead and his silver gone.’

‘In a word, yes.’

‘And there are no secret entrances, passageways or postern gates?’

‘None whatsoever, Father. You’ve seen the house, it’s built of stone, one of the few houses round here that are: that’s why Drayton bought it.’

‘And the strongroom?’

‘See for yourself, Father,’ Flaxwith retorted. ‘It’s a square of stone. The ceilings are plaster but that’s unbroken, the walls are of pure stone as is the floor. If Drayton wanted fresh air he’d simply open the door. Father, I know house-breakers. They go through a window as quickly as a priest into a brothel…’ He abruptly stopped. ‘I mean a ferret down a hole: it would take a nightwalker hours to break into that strongroom.’

‘Then let’s see it.’

Flaxwith rose and led them out of the chamber. Cranston grasped Athelstan by the arm. ‘Brother, you are well?’

‘Why, of course, Sir John. Rather sleepy, I…’

‘You never slept last night, did you?’ Cranston accused. ‘You were on that tower studying your bloody stars again, weren’t you?’

Athelstan smiled apologetically. ‘Yes, Sir John, I was.’

‘It’s nothing else, is it?’ Cranston asked. ‘I mean Father Prior has not written to you about relieving you of your duties at St Erconwald’s and sending you to the Halls of Oxford?’

Athelstan seized Cranston’s huge podgy hand and squeezed it. ‘Sir John, Father Prior asked me a month ago if I would like such a move. I replied I would not.’

Cranston hid his relief. He loved his wife, Lady Maude, his twin sons, the ‘poppets’, his dogs Gog and Magog, but especially this gentle friar with his sharp brain and dry sense of humour. Cranston had served as a soldier, as well as a coroner, for many a year. He’d met many men but, as he told the Lady Maude, ‘I can number my friends on one hand and still have enough fingers left to make a rude gesture at the Regent. Athelstan’s my friend.’ Cranston stared mournfully at the friar.

‘You won’t go to Oxford, will you, Brother?’

‘No, Sir John. I am going down to the strongroom.’

Athelstan stared round the paltry parlour. ‘This is a subtle murder, Sir John, but why are you here?’ He added, ‘Why are you so anxious about it?’

‘Drayton usually kept his money with the Lombards,’ Cranston replied. ‘The Frescobaldi and the Bardi brothers in Leadenhall Street. He drew most of it out: he was about to give our most noble Regent, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, a loan of five thousand pounds silver.’

Athelstan sighed.

‘So you see, Brother, Gaunt couldn’t give a fig if Drayton is in heaven or hell. He wants that silver, particularly now as Drayton has no heirs and he won’t have to pay it back. He also wants the thief captured. As you know, my dear monk…’

‘Friar, Sir John!’

‘As you know, my dear friar, no one upsets our Regent and walks away scot-free.’ Cranston paused as he heard Flaxwith calling. ‘We’d best go, Brother.’

They went out into the passageway, dingy and gloomy, smelling of tallow fat, boiled oil and other unsavoury odours.

‘Flaxwith found the chamber pot upstairs full of stools,’ Cranston whispered. ‘Drayton was as dirty as he was mean.’

At the top of the steps Flaxwith was waiting with a cresset torch. ‘Sir John, what about Samson?’ the bailiff pleaded.

‘Bugger that!’ Cranston retorted. ‘Henry, your dog will live for eternity, which is more than I can say for myself if we don’t get this silver back.’

Flaxwith shrugged and led them down the narrow stone steps. At the bottom, the huge door he had described was leaning against the wall. Flaxwith led them into the counting house and put the torch in a cresset holder.

Athelstan stared down at the corpse sprawled on the stone floor. A pool of blood had seeped out, and now ran in rivulets down the paving stones. He crouched down and stared pityingly at Drayton’s scrawny features: the eyes closed in death, the blood-encrusted mouth sagging. He felt the neck; the skin was cold and clammy. Athelstan closed his eyes; he prayed that Christ, in His infinite compassion, would have mercy on this man who had lived beneath his dignity and died like a dog. He turned the body over. Drayton was dressed in a shabby jerkin and hose. The battered boots looked rather pathetic on his spindly legs; he had no chain round his neck nor rings on his fingers. Athelstan wondered what pleasure this man had ever found in life.

‘Was he a bachelor?’ he asked.

‘He was married once,’ Flaxwith replied. ‘But many years ago, after the peace of Bretigny with France, his wife upped and left him. Who can blame her? He had no other family or kinsfolk.’

Athelstan examined the wound inflicted by the crossbow bolt: the quarrel had entered deep into Drayton’s skinny, narrow chest. He then sat back and studied the bloodstain further down the room near the door. He hitched his robe and edged along the paving stones.

‘What’s the matter, brother?’

Athelstan pointed to the doorway. ‘The blood begins at least a foot from that: this is where Drayton first fell.’ He turned and pointed to the far wall. ‘Now, here’s a man who is dying, the door is bolted and locked, yes?’

Flaxwith agreed.

‘Over there,’ Athelstan pointed, ‘is Drayton’s desk, the place where he did all his business. Where he’d sit and marvel at the wealth he had amassed.’

‘Yes, of course,’ Cranston breathed. ‘But he doesn’t try and go towards the door or his desk but to the far wall. Why?’

He walked across and, pulling out his dagger, tapped at the whitewashed bricks. ‘They sound solid enough to me,’ he declared. ‘Listen, Athelstan.’

Cranston tapped the wall again, up and down; the only response was a dull thud. ‘There’s no secret passageway,’ he asserted, resheathing his dagger.

‘Perhaps Drayton was delirious?’ Flaxwith commented.

‘It does prove one thing,’ Athelstan remarked. ‘The door must have been still locked and bolted, otherwise the poor man would have crawled towards it.’ He got up, wiping his hand on the black mantle over his white robe. He stared round the chamber. ‘You are correct, Master Flaxwith, a square of pure stone and plaster.’

Athelstan walked around: there was the counting desk against one wall and a boxed chair with cushions. On the desk were weighing scales, scraps of parchment, quills, inkhorns and a coffer, its clasp broken. Athelstan studied this and realised it must have been so for years. Inside there was nothing but strips of wax and more quills. The rest of the room was bare and gaunt.

‘Not even a crucifix,’ Athelstan whispered. ‘Drayton must have been a very close and narrow soul.’

For a while all three searched the square musty chamber.

‘Not even a rat could break in here,’ Cranston declared, mopping his brow and taking another swig from his miraculous wineskin.

‘Except through the door,’ Athelstan pronounced. ‘It’s time we examined it.’

They took the torch from the wall and scrutinised the door. Athelstan’s curiosity grew. The wood was at least nine inches thick, the hinges were of steel. He could tell from the three bolts and two locks, with keys still inside, that the door must have been secure when it was broken down. He studied the metal bosses. On the outside these were conical-shaped, fitting into the wood with a clasp on the inside. He felt some of these but they were all tightly secure. The only opening was a small grille high in the door, about six inches across and six inches high. He pulled at the wooden flap which covered it.

‘Was this up or down?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Flaxwith replied. ‘It’s hanging down now. Perhaps all the force we used knocked it loose?’

Athelstan stared at the small grille. It was broad enough for a man to see out but the bars were so close together it would be difficult to slip even a dagger through, let alone a crossbow bolt. Athelstan went back to the great steel bosses and began testing each of these.

‘What are you doing?’ Cranston asked curiously.

‘I want to see if any are loose,’ Athelstan replied. ‘They are fitted into the door by clasps.’

‘I did that myself,’ Flaxwith declared triumphantly. ‘Father, there’s none loose.’

And if there was,’ Cranston intervened, ‘surely it would have shaken free when Master Flaxwith and his colleagues were hammering at the door?’

Athelstan grudgingly conceded and scratched his head. ‘Therefore the problem still remains,’ he said. He walked back into the counting house. ‘Master Drayton would have his silver here, yes?’

Cranston agreed.

‘What puzzles me,’ Athelstan continued, ‘is that the assassin had to kill our moneylender, take the money and escape. Yes? In the ordinary course of events the door should have been left open but, instead, Drayton is inside, the door barred and secured. So, if the robbers struck first and took the silver from the room, why is the door closed?’

And if it is closed,’ Cranston finished, ‘how did the robbers enter in the first place, kill Drayton, steal his silver and get out, leaving the door barred and locked from the inside?’

‘Precisely, Sir John, the perfect conundrum.’

‘What is more,’ Flaxwith added, ‘they not only stole the silver but also any loose coins. Moreover, Drayton’s clerks claim two silver candlesticks and a gold pendant are missing.’

Athelstan sat down on the stool and stared at the corpse.

‘How?’ he murmured. ‘In or out?’

‘What do you mean?’ Cranston took a swig from his wineskin.

‘Well, I can understand them killing Drayton and taking the silver but how did they get in and out? That door is better than a wall of steel. There are no gaps or breaks. If they’d approached the door, Drayton would have left the flap down. He was safe behind the grille. He would have refused to open the door. Now I could understand a man like Drayton letting in a clerk or a friend.’ He glanced at Flaxwith. ‘You are sure the key was in the lock, the bolts were drawn?’

‘It’s the first thing I checked,’ the bailiff retorted, jumping from foot to foot. ‘Oh please, Sir John, may I see my dog? Samson begins to pine if he’s away from me.’

‘Oh, go and see the bloody animal!’ Cranston breathed. ‘Give it my best regards!’

Flaxwith almost ran from the room.

‘And there’s another problem,’ Athelstan went on. ‘How did the assassin get in and out of the house without forcing a door or window?’

‘Bloody mysterious!’ Cranston took another slurp from the miraculous wineskin.

‘The clerks are still here?’ Athelstan asked.

‘Oh yes, Brother. They are waiting upstairs.’

They left the chamber and went up to meet them. Athelstan took an immediate dislike to Master Philip Stablegate and his colleague James Flinstead. Oh, they were pleasant enough. They rose politely as he entered. They were of personable appearance, hair neatly cropped, their faces clean-shaven and washed. They were dressed in sober apparel, dark tunics and hose. Stablegate was fair-haired, pleasant-faced, ever ready to smile. Flinstead was darker, rather dour. Nevertheless, Athelstan felt repelled. Clever men, he thought, full of mockery. Both clerks made little attempt to hide their amusement at what they considered the coroner’s antics. Cranston waved at them to sit down, then he helped Athelstan pull a rather shabby bench across to sit opposite them. Athelstan placed his writing bag between his sandalled feet and waited patiently as Sir John took another swig from the miraculous wineskin. The coroner closed his eyes and burped with pleasure. Stablegate dropped his head and sniggered. Cranston, wobbling on the bench, put the stopper back in. He must have caught the mockery.