Gianni pointed to his mouth and shook his head.
“Yes, you are right. There is nothing in what Cooper said to suggest he did not meet his killer in the lane.”
Rather than being the poisoner, it was much more likely, Bascot thought, that it had been as the draper’s wife had suggested and Cooper’s murderer had been an outlaw he had known when he was young. Some felon that had mended his ways and come to Lincoln to take up honest work and did not want his past, and his former crimes, known. But Mistress Marchand had also said that Cooper had told her he had found out about a crime this person had committed which he wished kept secret-that did not sound as though the fishmonger’s assistant had been referring to former villainy, but something much more recent.
Bascot thought back over the last few months. The only serious crimes that had occurred in the town were the poisonings. There had been a few petty thefts, some drunken brawls and one case where a man had beaten his wife’s lover so badly that her paramour had almost died, but nothing of sufficient import to warrant killing a man to keep the commission of it from being revealed. He knew Gianni was desperate to help the beekeeper’s family, and proving Wilkin innocent would be a sure way of doing so. It was more than likely that the boy’s desire had led him into imaginings that had no basis in fact. But even so, Gianni’s suggestion had led the Templar into remembering the nagging doubt he had formerly felt about Wilkin’s guilt. Was it possible he had allowed the proliferation of evidence to subjugate an instinct that had been a true one?
He bid Gianni pick up his leather satchel. The boy’s logic had enough merit for him to investigate it further. “The Nettleham apiary is near the alehouse where Cooper once lived. I will question Wilkin about the customers that used it. Perhaps that will give an indication of whether the man who killed the fishmonger’s assistant could have had any connection to the poisonings.”
Twenty-five
When they arrived back at the castle, the Templar sent Gianni to their chamber at the top of the old keep, telling him to unpack the paper and scribing instruments they had bought that morning while he went to question Wilkin. Gianni nodded happily, rubbing his hand lovingly over the soft leather of the satchel before he scampered away. His jubilation had been increased, Bascot knew, by the hope that his master would be able to prove Wilkin innocent.
The potter was in an apathetic state when Bascot entered the cell. He was crouched in the corner, his eyes dull and devoid of any emotion. There were fresh bruises on his face. It would appear the guards were continuing their rough treatment of the prisoner. Bascot called his name and Wilkin looked up.
“The night before last a man was stabbed to death in Lincoln, potter,” Bascot said. “It is possible you may have known the victim. His name was Fland Cooper; he was about twenty years of age and was the son of the man who was the ale keeper at an alehouse on the Wragby road.”
His words produced no response from Wilkin. “We can find no trace of whoever killed Cooper,” Bascot went on, “but it is believed it may be someone from his past, from the days when he was a young lad growing up in the alehouse.” Still there was no flicker of interest from the man in front of him. An incentive was needed to rouse the prisoner from his stupor. “If you help to find his murderer, potter, there is a chance that, by doing so, you will aid your own cause.”
That suggestion brought a response from Wilkin, whose eyes brightened as he drew in his breath sharply.
“I do not promise that such will be so,” Bascot cautioned him sternly. “Only that it might.”
The potter nodded his understanding, but his listless expression had disappeared. “Tell me,” Bascot asked, “did you know Fland Cooper? He has been working in the fish market near Spring Hill for the last few months.”
Wilkin shook his head. “I do not remember him from Wragby, so I would not have known who he was if I had met him in the town.”
“Did you frequent the alehouse his parents ran? It was not far from Nettleham, I understand.”
“I went there only a few times, many years ago, when I made deliveries to a customer who lived in Wragby,” Wilkin replied. “Guy Cooper was not the ale keeper then. His old widowed mother was the one who ran it.”
“I have been told that many of the alehouse customers were outlaws. Is that true?” Bascot wanted to try and ascertain if Cooper’s murderer could be, as the draper’s wife had assumed, an outlaw from the past. If he was, then Gianni’s assumption that the monger’s assistant had been killed to keep secret his knowledge of the poisoning crimes would be in error.
“There were no brigands there while the old woman was alive,” Wilkin told him, “but there was talk of them being there when her son took over after she died.”
“When did the widow die?”
“About three or four years ago, I think,” Wilkin replied. “After her death her son inherited the alehouse and took charge of running it. He was a tosspot. He served his ale to all manner of miscreants. ’Tis said his drinking was the cause of the place catching on fire, that he left a candle burning and him and his wife were too drunk to escape.”
If it had been a brigand who had killed Cooper, three or four years ago was too recent for him to have known one of them in his childhood. Nonetheless, the Templar pressed the potter further, trying to confirm this fact.
“Are you sure that the old alewife did not allow customers of disreputable character to come and buy her ale?”
Wilkin shook his head with certainty. “I wouldn’t have gone there if she had. The widow served good ale and kept a clean house. She would never have allowed any wolf’s heads under her lintel. They only came in after her son became the ale keeper. That’s why I never went in there anymore.”
Convinced that he could eliminate a brigand as a possible suspect for Cooper’s death, Bascot asked Wilkin about the customers who had used the alehouse while the old alewife had been alive, and if, on his occasional visits, there had been any that he knew to be regular patrons. “I need you to go back at least seven years or more,” Bascot told him, reckoning that Cooper would have regarded his childhood as when he had been thirteen years of age or younger.
Wilkin screwed up his face as he searched his memory. As he did so, the bruises on his face were more apparent, with one that was fresh and livid colouring the lower half of his jaw. “That was the only alehouse along the stretch of road between Nettleham and Louth, so the customers were mostly travellers that used it for the same purpose I did, when they had a need to wash the dust of the road from their throats,” he told the Templar. “They were packmen and carters and the like, most of them heading to Lincoln with their wares. Sometimes there would be a merchant or two that was either going or coming back from Grimsby or Louth, but they would not have gone there regular, only when they were on a journey.”
“What about local people? Do you know of any that went in there often?”
“I suppose there might have been a few that lived in Wragby, but the only one I know of that was there more than once is John Rivelar, the old bailiff. He’d pass me on the road near there sometimes, him and his two sons, and a couple of times I saw their horses outside the alehouse. On those days I never stopped for a sup of ale, for I didn’t want to be in his company, but they must have been inside because their horses were there, tied to the hitching post.”
Bascot remembered that Adam had told him that Drue Rivelar had an older brother who had left the area many years ago. He then had a sudden memory of Wilkin’s daughter, Rosamunde, running through the crowd after her father’s trial because she believed, so the beekeeper had said, that she had seen her dead lover. Was it possible it was his brother she had seen?
“John Rivelar’s oldest son, what was his name?” Bascot asked Wilkin. “And what did he look like? Did he resemble his brother?”