John intervened to pay back de Alençon’s support. ‘But it makes it no easier to detect — the opposite, in fact, for, as you say, this person has a clever mind.’
Serlo, the Chancery judge, leaned across from further along the top table. ‘I hear you’ve tried matching these messages against the writings of certain priests in the city, to see if their hand corresponds?’
‘We have indeed, but my clerk, who has a considerable facility with literary matters, assures us that the writing was deliberately disguised.’
Serlo smiled his secret smile. ‘Well, perhaps it was in his own interests to say that, if he himself is the perpetrator.’
The Archdeacon bristled at this further indictment of his nephew. ‘Not so, sir! The same opinion was given by our cathedral archivist, Canon Jordan de Brent, who spends his life with manuscripts and scribes.’
The discussion went back and forth, getting nowhere, with the Justices sticking to their opinion that the coroner’s clerk was the most likely candidate for the killings. With the Bishop retired, the party gradually wound down, hastened by the servants who finally stopped replenishing the wine and ale. The guests began to drift away and de Wolfe signalled to a servant for Matilda’s cloak. He was thankful that this time there had been no sign of Gwyn signalling urgently from the doorway to tell him of some new death — and glad that, so far, the Gospel killer seemed to have taken a night’s rest.
Matilda made the best of the remaining minutes to parade herself around her other matronly acquaintances, taking care to grip John’s arm to emphasise her ownership of the King’s coroner, even though everyone in the city was well aware of his identity and status. At last he prised her away from the final farewells to her friends and rivals and they passed under the pitch flares along the garden path.
Matilda had studiously ignored her brother and his wife all evening, but at the gate they came across the de Revelles as they bade goodnight to Henry Rifford, one of the city’s Portreeves. Forced to acknowledge them, Matilda muttered a frosty greeting to Richard, and turned her back on him to falsely admire Lady Eleanor’s mantle. Then she jerked John onwards towards Martin’s Lane.
Relieved that the night had gone without incident, de Wolfe loped silently alongside her, his weary body and tired mind welcoming the thought of even their loveless bed in the solar — but envying his clerk, sleeping in the loft of the Bush within a few feet of his beloved Nesta.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
When de Wolfe slid out of bed before dawn next day Matilda was still sound asleep. He dressed and had boiled bacon, eggs and bread in Mary’s kitchen-hut before setting off alone to the bottom of the town. He wanted to stir up the priests who were on the cathedral’s suspect list, to see if any allowed their guard to slip. He also hoped, rather forlornly, that he might find some clue as to who had sent the anonymous note to the sheriff. It must surely be one of the suspected priests, he thought. The court began at the eighth hour and he had to be back at Rougemont by then, so early morning was the only opportunity for him to make such visits.
He hurried down to the West Gate, which was just opening to admit the flood of dawn traders, then turned towards All-Hallows and found that an early Mass, de Capra’s version of Prime, was just finishing. He waited for the dozen parishioners to leave, then walked into the barren church. A figure was on its knees before the altar, still wearing a creased surplice over his cassock, with a threadbare stole around his neck and a maniple over his arm.
Ralph de Capra was muttering to himself, but as soon as he heard de Wolfe’s footsteps behind him, he jumped to his feet. ‘You again, Crowner! Why don’t you leave me be? I’ve nothing to tell you.’ His face was haggard and suffused, the defect in his upper lip looking like a white scar against the flushed face.
‘Did you write an unsigned letter to the sheriff, falsely accusing my clerk of being at the scene of a killing the other night?’
De Wolfe had neither the time nor the inclination to be circumspect, and he wanted to provoke the priest as much as possible. Even as de Capra was hotly denying it, he followed up with a barrage of questions and accusations about his movements during the past few nights. Prodding the man in the chest with his forefinger, he drove him back down the nave, hoping that the confusion and resentment he was generating might cause him to drop some unguarded statement.
However, the priest frustrated the coroner’s tactics by screaming suddenly and, dropping his surplice on the floor, turned to rush towards his simple altar. Throwing his arms across the cloth, each side of the Cross, he hung across its front and began to wail and gabble. He was largely incoherent, but de Wolfe picked out some words. He seemed to be making a desperate plea for forgiveness for ‘his great sin’.
‘What sin is that, Ralph?’ he asked loudly, as he came to stand behind the man. ‘Is it the sin of murder? Did you kill the Jew, the whore and the merchant?’
The priest slid down the front of the altar and squatted in a crumpled heap on the floor below the Cross. ‘Let me be, Crowner,’ he whimpered. ‘My sin is greater than ten thousand murders. It is the sin of rejecting God Almighty, for which I will surely roast in hell.’
De Wolfe failed to get any further response from him and, feeling compassion, embarrassment and frustration, abandoned the attempt and left the little church.
He had even less satisfaction at his next calclass="underline" at St Mary Steps there was no sign of Adam of Dol, either in the church or at his dwelling around the corner.
At St Olave’s, further up on his route back to the castle, John found Julian Fulk on his knees at the chancel step, deep in silent prayer. On hearing someone enter, he crossed himself and rose to his feet, but his smile of welcome faded when he saw the coroner.
John knew that shock tactics would be wasted on an urbane, calculating person like Fulk, so he asked his questions in measured terms. As he expected, the moon-faced priest answered him coldly but civilly, denying any knowledge of the note sent to de Revelle and flatly rejecting any notion that he had been skulking in the midnight streets of the city. ‘I realise that you have your obligations as a law officer, Sir John,’ he said levelly, ‘but it really is a waste of your time and mine for you to come here repeatedly asking me questions, the answers to which are self-evident. No, I am not the avenging killer of Exeter, I do not know who it might be, and I appear to have no information that could possibly help you. Now, is that sufficient for you to leave me in peace to attend to my own duties — which includes ministering to my congregation, among which your good wife and, indeed, yourself are numbered?’
Though de Wolfe had a thick skin, he felt put in his place by this reasoned statement and, partly spurred by the fear that Fulk would complain to Matilda, he muttered some platitudes and left Julian Fulk to his prayers.
In the Shire Hall that morning de Wolfe found the same mixture of cases, with the same organised confusion of milling people, harassed clerks and clumsy soldiers shunting prisoners in and out. At least the whole of that week would have to be devoted to the Eyre of Assize, dealing with a great backlog of civil cases, plus current criminal matters and ‘Gaol Delivery’, meant to flush out the chronically overcrowded jails in the city. Many of these long-term prisoners never made it to trial, as they had either escaped, bribed their way out, died of gaol fever or been fatally abused by their fellow evildoers in the stinking cells.
The second part of the judges’ visit, the General Eyre, which looked into the administration of the county, was not due to begin until the following week, so Richard de Revelle had a few more days in which to cook his accounts, and to fret about the vigilance with which the four Justices would probe his management of Devon on behalf of the King.