Bartholomew felt the hair on the back of his neck rise, and he wondered whether Wilson was about to confess to murder. Wilson's hand flapped again, and enveloped one of Bartholomew's. The Physician felt revulsion, but did not pull his hand away.
'It was me,' said Wilson. "I fought with you in the dark on the night of Augustus's death. It was me who pushed you down the stairs.'
Bartholomew snatched his hand back. 'Then it was also you who murdered Brother Paul!' he said. 'Poor Brother Paul! Murdered while he lay defenceless on his pallet bed!'
Wilson gave an awful grimace that Bartholomew took to be a smile. 'No! You have that wrong, Physician.
You always were poor at logic. Listen to me and learn.'
Bartholomew gritted his teeth so that he would not allow his distaste for the lawyer to show.
Wilson continued wheezily. 'After I left the feast, I went back to the room I shared with Alcote. We talked for a while, and he went to sleep, as we told the Bishop the next day. But I did not sleep. Alcote was almost senseless with the amount of wine he had drunk. It was a simple thing to slip out of the room once it began to ring with his drunken snores. He woke only when Alexander came to fetch us when you had raised the alarm, and by then I was back in my bed. There was my alibi!'
He stopped speaking, and lay with his eyes closed, breathing heavily. After a few moments, Wilson opened his eyes again, and fixed Bartholomew with an unpleasant stare.
"I allowed quite some time to pass before I went to Augustus's room that night,' he continued, his voice weaker than before. "I was going to send Aelfrith away and offer to pray for Augustus until dawn. I went up the stairs, but saw that Augustus's room had been ransacked, and that he was gone. Aelfrith was unconscious on the floor. The shutters were open, and in the light from outside, I could see that there was an irregularity in the wooden floor. It is doubtful I ever would have noticed it in ordinary light. I closed the shutters and had just prised up the board, when you came. We fought, and you lost.'
He paused, coughing weakly. Bartholomew wiped away a thin trail of blood that dribbled from his mouth and thought back to that struggle. Wilson, like Michael, was flabby, and was well-endowed with chins, but that did not mean to say he was also weak. If Wilson had been desperate and panic-stricken, Bartholomew believed he could have been overpowered by him.
"I assume your intention in going to Augustus's room was not to pray?' asked Bartholomew.
Wilson sneered. 'Damn right it was not to pray!
I wanted to find the seal. I am certain that whoever murdered Sir John did not get it from his body.'
Bartholomew caught his breath. 'You say Sir John was murdered?'
Wilson sneered again. 'Of course he was! He was killed for the seal he always carried, and without which no further messages would come from his contact in Oxford. It was imperative I found that seal. I saw it round his neck as he went for dinner the night of his death. The way in which his body was dressed indicated that it had not been round his neck when he died, or his murderers would not have bothered taking his clothes — they would merely have thrown his body into the mill stream. No murderer stays too long at the site of his crime,' he said with a superior smile.
'The only place Sir John went between dinner and when he left College for the last time was to see Augustus,'
Wilson continued. 'So, the seal had to be in Augustus's room. When you told me he had died, I decided to look for the seal before someone else did.'
'But you did not find it,' said Bartholomew. He thought of Augustus's senile ramblings the afternoon before the feast, exhorting John Babington to 'hide it well'. If Sir John had not hidden the wretched seal as well as he apparently had, Augustus, Paul, and Montfitchet might still be alive.
"I did not,' said Wilson. "I had just felt about in the small hole in the floorboards when you came blundering in. But,' he continued, fastening a cold, but sweaty, hand round Bartholomew's wrist, "I did not hit Aelfrith, I did not drug the wine, and I did not kill Paul.' He looked at Bartholomew. "I also do not know what happened to Augustus, although I do not believe he was responsible for the happenings that night. The poor old fool was far too senile to have effected such a well-considered plan.'
'Well-considered?' said Bartholomew in disgust.
'You call the murder of Paul and Montfitchet well considered?'
Wilson ignored him and lay silent for a while.
'So how did you escape?' asked Bartholomew after a while. 'You did not pass me on the stairs.'
'You are observant, Master Physician,' said Wilson facetiously. 'Had you looked up instead of down, you may have noticed where I was, although I doubt it, for it is very cunningly concealed. The south wing of Michaelhouse was designed with two trap-doors in the ceilings of the upper floor. It is a secret passed on from Master to Master should the need ever arise for him to listen to the plottings of his fellows.'
'Sir John died before you became Master. How did you find out about this?'
'The day the Chancellor told me I was to be Master, he gave me various documents locked in a small chest.
I had to return the box to him immediately after I had read the documents, lest I die without passing certain information to my successor. Reference to these secret doors was included with a stricture that only Masters should be informed of their presence. I immediately went to Augustus's room to look for one of them.
He watched me, but did not understand what I was doing.'
'Who else knows about these trap-doors?'
'When you know that, you will know the murderer.'
Bartholomew's mind began to mull through this information. Wilson's callous dismissal of Augustus had probably brought about his death. Augustus had very possibly babbled to someone else, in one of his senile ramblings, about the trap-door he had watched Wilson uncover, and had thus endangered himself.
So, who might he have told? Evidently not Aelfrith or he would have guessed where his attacker might have hidden himself, and would not have searched with Bartholomew. Was it Michael? Or another Fellow?
Wilson watched him trying to reason the muddle out, his expression smug, as if Bartholomew were one of his students trying to resolve some legal point for which there was no solution. He continued. 'All I had to do once I had pushed you down the stairs was to stand on the window-sill, and pull myself through the opening. I could hear you looking for me and knew you would never be able to spot the trap-door, especially in the poor light. Whoever killed Paul and took Augustus evidently also knew about the trap-doors.'
Bartholomew sat back and thought. It made sense.
As Aelfrith had prayed over Augustus, the murderer had slipped through the trap-door- or perhaps even dropped something on the friar — and knocked him senseless.
The wine was drugged, and Paul murdered so that the commoners would know nothing about what was going on. A search of the room was made, but, not finding the seal, and perhaps hearing Wilson coming, the murderer took Augustus's body through the trap-door to hide it.
'But why steal a body?' asked Bartholomew, still thwarted in his attempt to make sense of the new information.
Wilson sighed. 'You are intractable, Physician. It would not take long to search a corpse, and so the answer is obvious. Augustus was alive, and was taken so that he would reveal where the seal was hidden to the murderer!'
Bartholomew shook his head. 'Augustus was dead, Master Wilson. He was probably murdered too.'
'Rubbish,' said Wilson dismissively. 'He was alive.
Why would anyone wish to steal a corpse? Think, man! Your supposition that Augustus was dead is not a reasonable one.'
He lay back on his pillow, his face red with effort.