When he was shown the letter that had been delivered to the sheriff, accusing Thomas of being at the scene of the cordwainer’s death, the old canon declared that the handwriting was unlike that in any other of the notes.
Though the sheriff and two of the judges argued for several minutes against Thomas’s lack of guilt, they knew they were making bricks without straw and grudgingly, they had to admit that there was no reason to hold him in custody any longer. This was all de Wolfe needed and he bobbed his head in grudging deference to the Justices, gave the sheriff a look of cold disdain and hurried away, leaving them to begin a shortened session, as they had to witness half a dozen hangings at noon — thankfully without Thomas as one of the participants.
The castle constable came across with the coroner and his officer to deliver Thomas from his cell. Stigand would probably not have accepted de Wolfe’s word alone that his clerk was to be released, even at the risk of Gwyn’s threat to tear off his head. When they entered the cell to tell him the news, the clerk was sitting on the edge of his bed, his book open in his hands. Though the foetid chamber was tiny, he still appeared small within it, looking up at them pathetically. His lank hair hung down like a curtain from his shaven crown and his long, sharp nose seemed to dominate his receding chin even more than usual. When de Wolfe gave him the news of his acquittal and release, he seemed less exultant than they had expected and the coroner wondered fleetingly if Thomas had seen hanging as God’s offering of an alternative to the mortal sin of suicide.
Yet Gwyn had more than enough enthusiasm for them all. The ginger giant grabbed the puny man in his arms and danced out through the iron gate, yelling in triumph. With his free arm, he shoved the odious gaoler in the chest, sending him sprawling into the stinking straw, then ran out with the clerk into the sunlight of the inner ward.
A few moments later, they gathered in Gabriel’s guardroom in the gatehouse for a celebratory drink, where even the abstemious Thomas was cajoled into taking a cup of cider. He still had his precious Vulgate clutched in his hand and John suspected that if he had been hanged, it would have been tucked under his arm as he fell from the gibbet.
The coroner explained in detail what had happened the previous night and the clerk nodded at intervals, seemingly dazed by the speed of events. ‘We’ll get you back to the Bush now. Nesta can feed you and give you a bucket of warm water in the yard to wash off the filth and the lice from that damned cell,’ promised his master.
‘Can I start work again today?’ asked Thomas. ‘And go back to the canon’s house to live?’
Gwyn roared with laughter, but the little clerk was serious.
‘Tomorrow, certainly,’ answered de Wolfe gravely. ‘The court session finishes early today.’ There was silence as they realised why this was so and how close Thomas had come to being part of the reason for it.
Soon Gwyn left to take Thomas to the Bush for the promised food and wash, leaving Ralph Morin and Gabriel sitting with the coroner to finish their ale.
‘I’m damned if I’ll attend the hangings today,’ growled John. ‘Let one of the court clerks take the details — we can copy them on to the rolls later.’
Later, as they walked across the inner ward, they were joined by Brother Rufus coming from the keep. He was intrigued by de Wolfe’s Moorish headgear. When he heard the whole story, he congratulated John on Thomas’s salvation, then listened as Ralph again broached the subject of the killer: ‘He’s still out there, John. Why do you think he attacked you last night? He must have been following you, to know that you would be leaving the tavern after dark.’
De Wolfe ran his hands through his thick hair, bunching it back on to his neck. ‘According to the sense of that text he wrote, it seems he was warning me not to investigate so persistently. Some chance he’s got of that — I’m not one to take heed of such threats!’
‘Three times he’s failed to kill,’ mused the constable. ‘Is he getting careless — or was it deliberate?’
De Wolfe snorted. ‘Not much doubt about him being serious when he tied a bag over my head! That’s how he killed the moneylender.’ His hawk-like face, with the downturned lines at each side of his mouth, was a grim mask as he vowed to catch the maniac who still stalked the city. ‘I don’t know how and I don’t know when, Ralph, but one way or another, this bastard has to be stopped,’ he declared.
The Viking-like constable pulled at his forked beard, his favourite mannerism when perturbed. ‘Where can you start, though?’
‘My guts tell me that there’s something very odd about three of the priests on the cathedral list. I’ve spoken to all of them more than once, right up to yesterday — and last night someone tried to put a permanent end to my probing.’
‘Which three?’ persisted Morin.
‘Y our namesake, Ralph, the madman from All-Hallows-on-the-Wall. Then there’s his neighbour, Adam of Dol, who wants to save us all from hell-fire — he seems to have appointed himself as protector to Ralph and gets into a great fury when I question him. And lastly Julian Fulk, who is obsessed with his own importance, through somehow I don’t see him as a killer.’
‘Many of my ecclesiastical and monastic friends are more than a little strange,’ objected Rufus of Bristol, ‘but I doubt that any is a multiple murderer.’
John shrugged. ‘I agree with you, Brother. But the fact remains that someone is killing or attacking our citizens and all the circumstances point firmly to it being a cleric.’
Ralph Morin stuck doggedly to practicalities. ‘So what can you do about it? The bloody sheriff seems remarkably uninterested in the matter, though I suspect that the Justices, aggrieved at losing your Thomas, will soon be kicking his arse.’
De Wolfe winced as a ripple of pain shot through his head from the wound but it soon passed. ‘I’m going down to aggravate those parish priests again,’ he said, with stubborn determination. ‘Especially Ralph de Capra and Adam of Dol. If I tweak their tails hard enough, in their anger they might let something drop. It’s worth a try, for I’ve no other ideas to follow up.’
The castle constable and his sergeant went off about their business, but the persistent Brother Rufus asked if he could accompany John on his visits to the parish priests. As castle chaplain, he seemed to have plenty of spare time, the coroner thought — but his tiny chapel of St Mary near the gatehouse provided only two services a day, except on Sundays so his duties were far from onerous.
‘We’ll wait for Gwyn and Thomas to come back, then walk down towards the West Gate to twist a couple of arms.’
Outside that same West Gate, the river Exe bulged out over an area of marsh and mud, cut through by leats that filled at high tide and during floods. This was Exe Island, covered in reeds and coarse grass, with some huts, a few small houses and several fulling mills. Every year when the river was in flood, some shacks were washed away and people were drowned, but during this particularly dry month, the Exe was behaving itself. Just upstream of the West Gate, the old wooden footbridge was still the only way to cross with dry feet. Below this was the ford, where all carts, cattle and horsemen had to cross, for the new bridge downstream was still incomplete. Its many long arches spanned dry ground on the city side, allowing for floodwater at spring tides and after storms on Exmoor. There was even a small chapel on this part, though the bridge was nowhere near complete, as the construction of the western part had stopped a year ago when the builder, Nicholas Gervase, ran out of funds.