The two men stared at him with their food halfway to their mouths, indignation being swamped by anxiety that this menacing figure might do them an injury. Herbert Gale struggled to his feet and stared anxiously at the coroner. ‘I don’t know what you are talking about, Sir John!’ he muttered uneasily.
‘You know damned well what I mean,’ snarled de Wolfe. ‘A house is burned down and the whole family deliberately killed! Do you not think it strange that the householder was the one man left from your crusade against heretics?’
William Blundus glared up at the coroner from his stool. ‘We had nothing to do with that! You can’t come here unjustly accusing us with no evidence.’
Angrily, John kicked a spare stool across the room to relieve his feelings.
‘Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do! I am investigating four deaths, and I intend getting the truth from the most likely perpetrators, for which you are good candidates.’
Gale, the senior bailiff, had recovered much of his confidence and began blustering at the coroner’s intrusion.
‘We are just servants of the cathedral. Why should we take it upon ourselves to commit such a crime?’
John leaned forward and banged their table with his fist.
‘Perhaps because you were so dissatisfied with the release of the other heretics, you wished to mete out your own type of justice?’
The exchange carried on in this vein for some time and became more heated with every minute, but John could get no trace of a confession or unearth any incriminating signs. They obdurately denied both involvement in the deaths and his right to accuse them.
‘The canons shall hear of this!’ threatened Herbert Gale. ‘And the bishop when he returns.’
‘Then tell them to ask their Archbishop at Canterbury why he introduced coroners two years ago,’ snapped de Wolfe. ‘They will find that it was exactly to investigate events such as this.’
As he saw that at present he would get nowhere with these men, he marched out with a promise that he would be back as often as it took — an empty threat, but it relieved his feelings.
He made enquiries in the cathedral precinct and eventually traced Reginald Rugge to the cloisters on the south side of the great building. The lay brother was sweeping dead leaves from the garth, the central area of grass between the arcades on each side. When he saw the coroner loping towards him, he went rigid and gripped the handle of his besom as tightly as a drowning man grasping a floating plank.
‘You are supposed to be locked in the proctors’ cells!’ barked de Wolfe. ‘But for your convenient rendering of the “neck verse”, you would be awaiting trial for attempted murder before the king’s justices!’
Rugge had a hangdog look, laced with defiance, as he knew he was protected by the invulnerable ecclesiastical machine.
‘I was released on condition I stayed within the Close,’ he muttered.
‘And did you?’ demanded John. ‘Or did you just happen to sneak out on Sunday night with some naphtha and a flask of brandy-wine, eh?’
Rugge glared at him sullenly. ‘Where would I get such things? I don’t even know what that naphtha stuff is!’
‘Last week, I saw you trying to hang men with the same beliefs as the man that died in Milk Lane. Why should I believe that you didn’t make another attempt?’
Rugge’s temper flared up briefly. ‘Well, I didn’t, see! Though that blasphemer deserved to die, by rope or fire or any other means. A pity about his family, though no doubt they would have had the same evil beliefs.’
It took an effort for de Wolfe not to strike the man for his callous words.
‘You are the one with the evil beliefs, you cold-hearted bastard!’ he shouted, making several clerics walking in the cloister turn their heads. ‘If your guilt is proven, I will come to see you swing from the gallows and cheer at every spasm of your jerking limbs as your poisonous life is choked out of you!’
The lay brother went pale at the vehemence of the coroner’s words and gazed about, looking for someone to rescue him from this vengeful knight. A young vicar came hesitantly out on to the grass towards them, but John waved him away imperiously.
‘Rugge, I will fetch a priest from the castle, a priest with a copy of the Vulgate. And you will swear upon that holy book that you did not leave this precinct on Sunday. Is that understood? If you lie, then as a devout man of the cloth you know you will suffer eternal damnation!’
As several other figures under the cloister arches were now pointing at him and debating about intervening, John saw no point in provoking them further and left the garth. Outside, on the paths through the Close, he found that he was quivering with suppressed emotion, an unusual state for the normally phlegmatic coroner.
He felt that Reginald Rugge could well have committed this heinous crime, but there seemed no chance of getting him to confess. John wondered if the man confessed his guilt to a priest, whether any cleric might be so appalled that he would break the sanctity of the confessional. He knew this was a futile hope, but as he was in the Close he decided to seek the opinion of his friend John de Alençon, so made his way to a side door into the great church. It was the time of the morning when Prime, one of the early offices, was in progress, and he stood alone in the huge, empty nave of the cathedral to wait for a break between the prayers and chanting that endlessly praised God behind the ornately carved wooden screen that separated the nave from the quire.
As he waited, with only chirping sparrows for company, he looked up at the screen and recalled that it was exactly a year since he had had to climb up it, to retrieve the severed head of a murdered manor-lord, impaled on one of the spikes at the top. It seemed as if violence and religion were never far apart, even in Devon.
The distant chanting eventually ceased and a final benediction allowed the black-robed celebrants to file out of the chancel and disperse themselves in the crossing, where the two great towers flanked the axis of the cruciform building. John walked around the side of the enclosed quire and saw the archdeacon in conversation with several other canons and vicars, some young secondaries hanging around the outside of the group. He waited, and in a moment John de Alençon noticed him and broke away to come to speak to his friend.
‘I suspect I know what brings you here, John,’ he said.
His voice was subdued, and he looked over his shoulder to see if anyone was in earshot, as Canon Robert de Baggetor and William de Swindon were among those to whom he had been talking.
‘Yes, this abominable tragedy in Milk Lane,’ growled de Wolfe. ‘There can be little doubt that it was a deliberate assassination — and equally certain that it was because Algar was the only one of those heretics who stayed behind in the city.’
The grizzled-haired priest nodded sadly. ‘I only wish I could contradict you, John, but any other explanation seems unlikely. My heart is saddened by the thought that differences in faith could lead to such suffering.’
‘Not even differences of faith, for surely everyone concerned professes to be a Christian,’ replied the coroner bitterly. ‘It is over differences in how to pursue that faith which makes it all the more tragic’
‘I cannot believe that anyone connected with the cathedral could stoop so low as to commit this outrage,’ murmured the archdeacon. ‘But no doubt it is your duty to investigate the possibility.’
‘Where else would I look for candidates, other than those who have already plainly exhibited their hatred of these people?’ asked John with suppressed ferocity. ‘It is but a few days since a mob, egged on by the dictates of some of your colleagues, tried to kill a few harmless folk down on the quayside. Only the intercession of your ecclesiastical rules saved two of them from facing trial for murder. Can you wonder that I now come looking at these same people?’
De Alençon’s shoulders slumped and he gave a great sigh.