'What about the prior's man, this Brother Absalom?'
Rof raised a dirty, blood-streaked face, his dishevelled dark hair sprouting stalks of straw from the floor. 'That slimy toad? I wouldn't know, but if he was I'll bet the prior is getting a cut!'
He refused to answer anything else, apart from offering a string of blasphemies, and for the time being John gave up his questioning.
'Perhaps a few days in that hellhole will soften him up,' suggested Gwyn as they moved to the next dismal room, where the young man with the neck injury was curled upon his stone bench, sobbing into his hands. A soiled cloth was wound beneath his chin, bloodstained at the edges. As soon as Stigand turned the rusty key, he pulled himself up, then sank to his knees in front of John as the coroner entered the cell.
'Mercy, sir, save me! I don't want to hang!' he sobbed. 'I didn't want to be a pirate; I was just part of the crew. I had no choice!'
'You were one of the first over the rail, waving your sword!' snapped de Wolfe. 'You didn't seem so reluctant then, did you?'
The young man raised his terrified face to the coroner, his hands held up clenched in supplication. 'I'll turn approver, sir; I'll testify against the others!'
'We've got to catch the buggers first,' grunted Gwyn practically.
'And I don't think we need an approver, thank you,' added John. 'We've plenty of eyewitnesses, including myself.'
The sailor burst into tears and sank to the floor, face buried in the filthy 'straw.
'But you can tell me who onshore was involved, as your captain seems to have lost the power of speech in that regard!'
The man looked up with a flicker of hope in his face, and John felt somewhat false, as he knew that whatever he was told this lad would inevitably be pushed off a gallows ladder with a rope around his injured neck.
'What do you want to know, sir?' he gabbled.
'When pillaged goods were taken back to Axmouth, who dealt with them?'
'They were unloaded and put in the warehouses, sir, the same as any other cargo.'
'But did anyone come to check what was there? The bailiff or the portreeve?'
The sailor grimaced with pain as he tried to shake his head. 'Never saw either of them down on the quay. Only Henry, the agent for some noble merchant here in Exeter — and of course John Capie, he was always hanging around.'
It was soon apparent that the seaman knew nothing more of use and they left, with John promising to ask the monk from the hospital to look at his neck when he came to see the dying man. With the lad's plaintive supplications following them down to the gate, de Wolfe and Gwyn left the prison, leaving Thomas behind to write down the confession that the young man had made, especially his oath that Martin Rof had strangled Simon Makerel.
'Where are we going now?' asked Gwyn as they strode out of the castle down into the quieter lanes near St John's Hospital.
'Someone had better tell Robert de Helion that he's lost a ship from his fleet!' said John. 'And see what he has to say about his agent.'
The august, rather supercilious merchant-knight was aghast when John informed him that one of his cogs had been involved in piracy and was now in the hands of criminals, but God knows where!
John was inclined to think that his shock and indignation were genuine, unless he was as good an actor as he was a businessman.
'Are you saying that I may have lost my vessel altogether?' he cried in distress. 'That cog cost me five hundred marks to have built!'
John shrugged; he had more pressing problems than the price of a rich man's property.
'She may turn up, Sir Robert — who knows? The crew may abandon the vessel and leave her on some beach when they flee to become outlaws. Or perhaps they will sail to Brittany or Flanders and try to sell her there,' he added mischievously.
De Helion groaned. 'That idiot Henry Crik, he should have known that something like this might happen. I'll have the miserable fool flayed alive!'
'It seems likely that your agent was party to this evil trade,' said the coroner. 'I presume you had no suspicions of his involvement?'
There was a veiled hint here that de Helion himself might not be lily white, and he rose to the bait in a temper. 'Sir John, I trust you are not suggesting that I have any complicity in this? I assure you that there has not been the slightest breath of corruption coming from Axmouth, which is but a small part of my commercial interests. The Tiger's voyages have always turned in a reasonable profit, according to the records that Crik brings to my clerks here.'
He shouted for his chief clerk, and soon a bent elderly man hobbled in, looking too threadbare to have made any money from piracy. His master interrogated him about the accounts and the records relating to Axmouth, but the cowed old fellow could say nothing but that everything had always seemed to be in order.
'Yet if the documents were falsified, would you be any the wiser?' asked John. 'The Tiger no doubt spent most of her time on legitimate voyages — but if she returned earlier than expected, who was to know in Exeter that she might make an extra short foray out into the Channel to seize a passing ship?'
De Helion huffed and puffed but had to admit that this was a possibility. He even added that The Tiger might have come across a victim when returning from a normal voyage, especially if she was coming home light or with only a part-cargo, so that there was still room in her hold for pillaged goods.
'That swine Martin Rof is the man behind all this!' he raved. 'I met him but once, when I took him into my service as a shipmaster, and I took a dislike to him then. But I admit that I have had no complaints about his seamanship — indeed, he seems to have made a very successful pirate!'
Neither the merchant nor his chief clerk seemed to know where Henry Crik was at that moment, so soon the coroner left him still bellowing about the loss of his ship and ordering his old clerk to send messengers out along the southern coast in both directions, to see if she had turned up anywhere.
'Where are we going to seek this fellow Crik?' asked Gwyn as they walked back to Rougemont. 'He must surely be the key to this mystery.'
'The only mystery is who is involved in this scandal and who is not!' replied de Wolfe. 'De Helion was trying to include the Prior of Loders in the conspiracy, but I doubt that is the case.'
'I wouldn't trust any bloody priest,' muttered the Cornishman, half to himself, but aloud he said 'Do you think Axmouth have heard of the loss of their Tiger, for she can never go back there, unless de Helion finds her abandoned somewhere.'
'I doubt the news has travelled that fast yet, unless someone guessed why the St Radegund came back to harbour the same day that she left,' answered de Wolfe. 'But no doubt someone will take the news to Axmouth within a day or two. The men-at-arms are bound to boast of their success in the alehouses here, so carters and pedlars are sure to spread the news far and wide.'
'What will that bailiff and portreeve do about it when they hear?' mused Gwyn. 'D'you think they'll make a run for it, if they have been involved?'
The coroner pondered this as he stalked alongside his officer across High Street and up the track that led into the outer ward of the castle. 'I doubt it. Those who are guilty will brazen it out for as long as they can. Otherwise, they can only turn outlaw, and I can't see them doing that readily, after the nice comfortable life they've had stealing so much from the king and the merchants.'
Back in their upper chamber in the gatehouse, they found Thomas at his usual task of neatly scribing the various parchment rolls that the coroner would have to present to the Justices in Eyre, when they eventually came to Exeter. As they sat down to their ritual second breakfast of bread, cheese, ale and Thomas's cider, de Wolfe fretted over what should be done next.