“If the place is guarded,” said Cadfael, meeting the abbot’s questioning eye, “whatever it has to tell us can safely be left until daylight. I think perhaps we should not speculate beforehand. It might be all too easy to take a wrong path. I would ask only, Tutilo, at what hour did you leave Longner?”
Tutilo started and shook himself, and took an unexpectedly long moment to think before he answered: “It was late, past time for Compline when I started.”
“And you met no one on the walk back?”
“Not this side the ferry.”
“I think,” said Radulfus, “we should wait, and let be until you have viewed the place by daylight, and the unfortunate soul is known. Enough now! Go to your bed, Tutilo, and God grant you sleep. When we rise for Prime, then will be the time to see and consider, before we try to interpret.”
But for all that, thought Cadfael, back in his own bed but with no will to sleep, how many of the five of us, one who spoke and four who listened, will close an eye again tonight? And of the three of us who knew there was to be a young man on his way down to us by that path during the evening, how many have already made the leap forward to give this nameless victim a name, and begin to see certain reasons why it might be expedient for some if he never reached us? Radulfus? He would not miss so plain a possibility, but he could and would refrain from entertaining and proceeding on it until more is known. Prior Robert? Well, give him his due, Prior Robert hardly said a word tonight, he will wait to have cause before he accuses any man, but he is intelligent enough to put all these small nothings together and make of them something. And I? It must have been for myself as much as any other that I issued that warning: It might be all too easy to take a wrong path! And heavens knows, once launched it’s all too hard to turn back and look again for the missed trace.
So let us see what we have: Aldhelm, may he be home, forgetful and fast asleep at this moment!, was to come and pick out his man yesterday evening. The brothers had not been told, only Radulfus, Prior Robert, Hugh and I knew of it, leaving out of consideration Cynric’s boy, who runs errands faithfully, but barely understands what he delivers, and forgets his embassage as soon as done and rewarded. Herluin was not told, and I am sure did not know. Neither, to the best of my knowledge, did Tutilo. Yet it is strange that the same evening Tutilo should be sent for to Longner. Was he so sent for? That can be confirmed or confuted, there’s no problem there. Say he somehow got to know of Aldhelm’s coming, even so by avoiding he could only delay recognition, not prevent it, he would have to reappear in the end. Yes, but say he reappeared, and Aldhelm never came. Not just that evening, but never.
Detail by detail built up into a formidable possibility, in which, nevertheless, he did not believe. Best to put off even thought until he had seen for himself the place where murder had been done, and the victim who had suffered it.
The early morning light, filtering grudgingly between the almost naked trees and the tangle of underbrush, reached the narrow thread of the path only dimly, a moist brown streak of rotted leaves and occasional outcrops of stone, striped with shadows like the rungs of a ladder where old coppicing had left the trunks spaced and slender. The sun was not yet clear of the eastward banks of cloud, and the light was colourless and amorphous from the evening’s soft rain, but clear enough to show what had brought Tutilo to his knees in the darkness, and yet remained unseen.
The body lay diagonally across the path, as he had said, not quite flat on its face and breast, rather on the right shoulder, but with the right arm flung clear behind, and the left groping wide beside him, clear of the folds of the coarse hooded cloak he wore. The hood had slipped back from his head when he fell, by the way it lay bunched in his neck. He had fallen and lain with his right cheek pressed into the wet leaves. The exposed left side of his head was a dark, misshapen blot of dried blood, a crusted darkness, the ruin on which Tutilo had laid his hand in the night, and sickened with horror.
He looked composed enough now, standing a little apart in the fringe of bushes, staring steadily at what the night had hidden from him, with lids half-lowered over the dulled gold of his eyes, and his mouth shut too tightly, the only betrayal of the effort by which he maintained his stillness and calm. He had risen very early, from a bed probably sleepless, and led the way to this spot among the thickest of the woodland without a word beyond the whispered morning greeting, and obedient acknowledgement of any remarks directed at him. Small wonder, if his own account was truth, smaller still if today he was being forced back to a scene about which he had lied; lied to the law, lied to his superiors in the Order he had chosen of his own will and desire.
Down there, pressed into the earth, the face, or most of it, was intact. Cadfael kneeled close by the shattered head, and slid a hand gently under the right cheek, to turn the face a little upward to be seen.
“Can you name him?” asked Hugh, standing beside him. The question was directed at Tutilo, and could not be evaded; but there was no attempt at evasion. Tutilo said at once, in a still and careful voice: “I do not know his name.”
Surprising, but almost certainly true; those few moments at the end of a chaotic evening had never called for names. He had been as anonymous to Aldhelm as Aldhelm had been to him.
“But you do know the man?”
“I have seen him,” said Tutilo. “He helped us when the church was flooded.”
“His name is Aldhelm,” said Cadfael flatly, and rose from his knees, letting the soiled face sink back gently into the leafmould. “He was on his way to us last night, but he never reached us.” If the boy had not known that before, let it be said now. He listened and gave no sign. He had shut himself within, and was not easily going to be drawn out again.
“Well, let us see what there is to be noted,” said Hugh shortly, and turned his back upon the slight, submissive figure standing so warily aside from the event he had himself reported. “He was coming down this path from the ferry, and here he was struck down as he passed by. See how he fell! Back a yard or more, here where the covert is thick, someone struck him down from behind and to his left, here on the left side of the path, from ambush.”
“So it seems,” said Cadfael, and eyed the bushes that encroached halfway across the path. “There would be rustling enough from his own passage to cover another man’s sudden movement among the branches here. He fell just as he lies now. Do you see any sign, Hugh, that he ever moved again?” For the ground about him, with its padding of last year’s thick leaf-fall sodden and trodden into soft pulp, showed no disturbance, but lay moist, dark and flat, unmarked by any convulsions of his feet or arms, or any trampling of an assailant round him.
“While he lay stunned,” said Hugh, “the work was finished. No struggle, no defence.”
In a small, muted voice Tutilo ventured, out of the shadowy covert of his cowclass="underline" “It was raining.”