“Between here and the bridge?” Hugh suggested, eyeing the little dark, hairy Welshman with respectful attention. Sheriff and waterman, they had worked together before this, and knew each other well.
“With the level as it is, if he’d gone in above the bridge I doubt if he’d ever have passed it.”
Hugh looked back along the open green plain of the Gaye, lush and sunny, through the fringe of bushes and trees. “Between here and the bridge nothing could happen in open day. This is the first cover to be found beside the water. And though this fellow may be a lightweight, no one would want to carry or drag him very far to reach the river. And if he’d been cast in here, whoever wanted to be quit of him would have made sure he went far enough out for the current to take him down the next reach and beyond. What do you say, Madog?”
Madog confirmed it with a jerk of his shaggy head.
“There’s been no rain and no dew,” said Cadfael thoughtfully. “Grass and ground are dry. If he was hidden until nightfall, it would be close where he was killed. A man needs privacy and cover both to kill and hide his dead. Somewhere there may be traces of blood in the grass, or wherever the murderer bestowed him.”
“We can but look,” agreed Hugh, with no great expectation of finding anything. “There’s the old mill offers one place where murder could be done without a witness. I’ll have them search there. We’ll comb this belt of trees, too, though I doubt there’ll be anything here to find. And what should this fellow be doing at the mill, or here, for that matter? You’ve told me how he spent the morning. What he did afterward we may find out from the household up there in the town. They know nothing of this yet. They may well be wondering and enquiring about him by this time, if it’s dawned on them yet that he’s been out all night. Or perhaps he often was, and no one wondered. I know little enough about him, but I know he lived there with his master’s family. But beyond the mill, upstream - no, the whole stretch of the Gaye lies open. There’s nothing from here on could give shelter to a killing. Nothing until the bridge. But surely, if the man was killed by daylight, and left in the bushes there even a couple of hours until dark, he might be found before he could be put into the river.”
“Would that matter?” wondered Cadfael. “A little more risky, perhaps, but still there’d be nothing to show who slipped the dagger into his back. Sending him downriver does but confuse place and time. And perhaps that was important to whoever did it.”
“Well, I’ll take the news up to the wool merchants myself, and see what they can tell me.” Hugh looked round to where his sergeant and four men of the castle garrison stood a little apart, waiting for his orders in attentive silence. “Will can see the body brought up after us. The fellow has no other home, to my knowledge. They’ll need to take care of his burying. Come back with me, Cadfael. We’ll at least take a look among the trees by the bridge, and under the arch.”
They set off side by side, out of the fringe of trees into the abbey wheatfields and past the abandoned mill. They had reached the waterside path that hemmed the kitchen gardens when Hugh asked, slanting a brief, oblique, and burdened smile along his shoulder: “How long did you say that heretical pilgrim of yours was out at liberty yesterday? While Canon Gerbert’s grooms went puffing busily up and down looking for him to no purpose?”
It was asked quite lightly and currently, but Cadfael understood its significance, and knew that Hugh had already grasped it equally well. “From about an hour before Nones until Vespers,” he said, and clearly heard the unacknowledged but unmistakable reserve and concern in his own voice.
“And then he walked into the enclave in all conscious innocence. And has not accounted for where he spent those hours?”
“No one has yet asked him,” said Cadfael simply.
“Good! Then do my work for me there, will you? Tell no one in the abbey yet about this death, and let no one question Elave until I do it myself. I’ll be with you before the morning’s out, and we’ll talk privately with the abbot before anyone else shall know what’s happened. I want to see this lad for myself, and hear what he has to say for himself before any other gets at him. For you know, don’t you,” said Hugh with detached sympathy, “what his inquisitors are going to say?”
Cadfael left them to their search of the grove of trees and the bushes that cloaked the path down to the riverside, and made his way back to the abbey, though with some reluctance at abandoning the hunt even for a few hours. He was well aware of the immediate implications of Aldwin’s death, and uneasily conscious that he did not know Elave well enough to discount them out of hand. Instinctive liking is not enough to guarantee any man’s integrity, let alone his innocence of murder, where he had been basely wronged, and was by chance presented with the opportunity to avenge his injury. A high and hasty temper, which undoubtedly he had, might do the rest almost before he could think at all, let alone think better of it.
But in the back!
No, that Cadfael could not imagine. Had there been such an encounter it would have been face-to-face. And what of the dagger? Did Elave even possess such a weapon? A knife for all general purposes he must possess; no sensible traveler would go far without one. But he would not be carrying it on him in the abbey, and he certainly had not taken the time to go and collect it from his belongings in the guest hall, before hurrying out at the gate after Fortunata. The porter could testify to that. He had come rushing straight up from the chapter house without so much as a glance aside. And if by unlikely chance he had had it on him at that hearing, then it must be with him now in his locked cell. Or if he had discarded it, Hugh’s sergeants would do their best to find it. Of one thing Cadfael was certain: he did not want Elave to be a murderer.
Just as Cadfael was approaching the gatehouse, someone emerged from it and turned towards the town. A tall, lean, dark man, frowning down abstractedly at the dust of the Foregate as he strode, and shaking his head at some puzzling frustration of his own, probably of no great moment but still puzzling. He jerked momentarily out of his preoccupation when Cadfael gave him good-day, and returned the greeting with a vague glance and an absent smile before withdrawing again into whatever matter was chafing at his peace of mind.
It was altogether too apt a reminder, that Jevan of Lythwood should be calling in at the abbey gatehouse at this hour of the morning, after his brother’s clerk had failed to come home the previous night. Cadfael turned to look after him. A tall man with a long, ardent stride, making for home with his hands clasped behind his back, and his brows knotted in so-far-unenlightened conjecture. Cadfael hoped he would cross the bridge without pausing to look down over the parapet towards the level, sunlit length of the Gaye, where at this moment Will Warden’s men might be carrying the litter with Aldwin’s body. Better that Hugh should reach the house first, both to warn the household and to harvest whatever he could from their bearing and their answers, before the inevitable burden arrived to set the busy and demanding rites of death in motion.
“What was Jevan of Lythwood wanting here?” Cadfael asked of the porter, who was making himself useful holding a very handsome and lively young mare while her master buckled on his saddle roll behind. A good number of the guests would be moving on today, having paid their annual tribute to Saint Winifred.
“He wanted to know if his clerk had been here,” said the porter.
“Why did he suppose his clerk should have been here?”
“He says he changed his mind, yesterday, about laying charges against that lad we’ve got under lock and key, as soon as he found out the young fellow had no intention of elbowing him out of his employment. Said he was all for rushing off down here on the spot to take back what he’d laid against him. Much good that would do! Small use running after the arrow once it’s loosed. But that’s what he wanted to do, so his master says.”