The only thing that disturbed the symmetry was a body sprawled across the chancel steps. The legs pointed towards the altar, the arms were outspread and the head tilted down, the shaven tonsure gleaming in the morning light.
‘There he is, Crowner, just as the first parishioner attending for Prime found him,’ said Gabriel, his voice echoing in the empty nave.
Taking the lead now, de Wolfe hurried up the church, his boots slapping on the sandstone floor. A few yards from the chancel steps, he stopped abruptly. ‘What the hell is his face in?’ he exclaimed irreverently.
‘That’s why I reckon he drowned hisself,’ claimed Osric.
As he moved up to the body, de Wolfe saw that the priest, dressed in a white linen alb, lay with his face in a shallow copper pan, which sat on the floor below the lower step. Stooping down, he could see that it was half full of a red fluid, which looked like diluted blood, submerging his mouth and nose.
‘If it’s a suicide, he was damned clever to have hit himself on the head first.’ snapped Gabriel, scowling at the city constable.
Following the sergeant’s pointing finger, de Wolfe saw that towards the back of the head, in the thick brown hair that surrounded the shaven patch, was a mat of drying blood.
‘Could that blood in the dish have drained from that?’ quavered Osric, his suicide theory demolished.
De Wolfe dipped a finger in the pan and held it to his nose. ‘It’s not blood, it’s wine!’ He got to his feet and stood with his hands on his hips, hunched over the bizarre scene. ‘Drowned in wine, by Christ! This surely has to be unique!’
Gabriel looked at him. ‘Can you drown in a pan? There’s no more than a couple of quarts in that.’
‘Why not? We were built to breathe air, not Anjou red or whatever it is! If the nose and mouth are covered, that’s good enough.’ De Wolfe turned and looked back down the nave, to where a clutch of curious faces was peering in, past Theobald, the rotund constable. ‘Do we know who he is? Which man found him?’
Osric yelled to his colleague, oblivious of the sacred surroundings, and Theobald marched an elderly man down towards them. He was well dressed in a good serge tunic, over which was draped a dark red velvet cloak. A tight-fitting leather helmet was tied with tapes under his chin. His large grey moustache failed to hide the anxious look on his lined face. ‘Crowner,’ he said, ‘we met briefly at one of those guild banquets a month or so past, though you’ll hardly remember me. I am William de Stanlinche, a silversmith from this street.’ He tried to avert his eyes from the corpse on the steps.
‘Who is this unfortunate cleric?’ grated de Wolfe.
‘Our deputy priest, poor Arnulf de Mowbray. I can hardly believe that this is happening, Crowner.’ The silversmith seemed distraught at the loss of his vicar.
‘And you found him this morning?’
‘I was first here, almost an hour ago. I come to Prime several times a week before I go to my workshop. He was lying there, just as you see him. I touched his head and hand to make sure he was dead and he was cold. Then I ran to knock at all the doors in the lane, as we must, and someone went off to find the constable.’
‘Do we know when he was last seen alive?’
William de Stanlinche nodded and pointed quaveringly at the crowd gawping at the door. ‘Several of them were at Matins at midnight. Arnulf held the service for about the usual half-hour.’
‘Why did you say “deputy” priest?’
William turned his back on the corpse and spoke with apparent relief about something different.
‘Father Simon Hoxtone is our regular priest, but he’s been laid low with phthisis these past nine months — sick unto death, I fear. We have had several priests sent here in his place, mostly vicars loaned from the cathedral. The last was Arnulf, who came about three months ago.’
Something in his voice made John suspicious. ‘Was there something about him I should know?’
The elderly man shuffled awkwardly. ‘He was not a great success, Crowner. I fear he had a great partiality for ale and wine. Sometimes he was incapable of holding the Mass or even taking confession, because of his disability.’
He hesitated, and John knew there was something more. ‘Was it only the drink?’ he demanded.
William cleared his throat uneasily. ‘I’m afraid he was seen more than once with loose women when he was in his cups. Some parishioners were outraged, especially some of the wives. It was reported to the Archdeacon, and some other cleric was to have taken his place as soon as they found someone more suitable.’ He paused and gave an embarrassed cough. ‘De Mowbray seems to have been shunted from place to place, as every position he held soon became untenable.’
John gave one of his throat rumbles. Arnulf de Mowbray was obviously a burden to every church that was saddled with him, but he could hardly imagine John de Alençon ridding himself of even such a troublesome priest in such a drastic fashion as this!
He dismissed William with a curt word of thanks and told Osric to hold any others outside who had been present at Matins or who had come to attend Prime. He was just going to curse Gwyn for not being on hand, when his lumbering officer burst through the church entrance with Thomas de Peyne in tow. Pushing aside the crowd at the door, he ambled down the nave with the clerk trying to keep up with him.
‘I went up to Rougemont when the gates opened, but they told me you were down here with Gabriel,’ he boomed, oblivious of his surroundings. When he reached the group at the chancel steps, he stared with interest at the dead priest. ‘Got another, have we? Who’s it this time?’
The sergeant gave him a quick summary while Thomas bobbed his knee to the altar, then began crossing himself spasmodically beside the corpse, muttering to himself.
‘Never heard of the Eucharist wine being dispensed in a wash-bowl before!’ chortled Gwyn irreverently, earning a poisonous glance from the devout Thomas.
De Wolfe ignored his officer’s sacrilege and dropped to a crouch to look again more closely at the head of the corpse. ‘I wonder what was used to strike him? Like the other two, there’s no pattern of any particular weapon.’
Gwyn bent over and prodded the bloody pad at the back of the man’s head. ‘Must have been something round or flat, as the skin is split in a star-shape. Could have been almost anything.’
De Wolfe gazed at what he could see of the face above the few inches of wine in the copper pan. ‘His features are reddened, but he’s tipped downwards, across these steps, so the blood would sink there anyway. We’d better get him up, I suppose.’
He rose to his feet and motioned to Gwyn to lift the dead man on to his back. Just as the Cornishman took a grip beneath the armpits, the coroner suddenly stopped him with a gesture. ‘Wait! What’s this on the stone alongside him?’
Gwyn released his hold and looked to where de Wolfe was pointing, at the lower step, which was almost obscured by the corpse’s shoulder. He saw an irregular disc of dried wax, about half the size of his palm. ‘There’s some marks scratched on it,’ he grunted.
De Wolfe touched the yellowishgrey plaque. ‘Dried candle-wax. It has some letters on it and a strange outline.’
‘Looks like a little snake, with a head and tail. It’s even got an eye and a forked tongue,’ observed Gwyn.
Thomas was too small to see past the two large men hovering over the cadaver, but his master moved aside and beckoned him forward. ‘Thomas, d’you think these four marks are letters? The first looks like a P, but I can’t make out the others.’
Gingerly, trying not to get his face too near the body, the squeamish clerk squinted at the dried pool of grease. He saw that letters had been crudely scratched into it with something sharp, like a pin. ‘They must have been done when the wax was still soft, for the lines have melted a little, making it hard to read,’ he murmured.
‘Maybe, but that’s certainly a serpent,’ snapped John impatiently. ‘What do you say the letters are?’