Fitzhai nodded slowly. ‘No one wants a fellow soldier dead – unless he’s on the other side of our lances.’
‘So who was this man?’ John demanded bluntly.
Fitzhai looked from him to the sheriff and back again, reluctant to commit himself irrevocably to a situation that might bring him nothing but grief.
‘Come on, man!’ snapped de Revelle. ‘What evil are you hiding?’
This stung Fitzhai into a retort. ‘No evil at all, Sheriff – but wagging tongues never did any man good service,’ he added obscurely.
The sheriff glared at him. ‘Your silence might condemn you, Fitzhai. If you persist in obstructing the law, you can expect to be treated with suspicion.’
The mercenary’s cheeks flushed even deeper, but he held his ground. ‘Why should I help dig a hole for myself to fall into, Sir John? I’m not involved in this matter – that’s why I shied off answering the questions of your nosey little clerk. If I’d not saved his miserable skin from those footpads outside the inn, you’d never had heard of me, would you?’
He was pugnacious and aggressive, but John felt an undercurrent of anxiety, even fear, in his voice. He guessed that Fitzhai had seen too many hangings to want to become involved in a murder investigation. He had some sympathy with this, but he knew he must ignore it.
The sheriff was less tolerant. ‘You know more than you’ve admitted, fellow. Either you tell us what you know or you’ll spend the night in the cells under my castle keep. Which is it to be?’
John saw that Fitzhai was weakening, and, sure enough, he said, ‘All right, I’d seen the fellow before somewhere.’
‘A name, for the Virgin’s sake!’ exploded the coroner.
Fitzhai looked from one face to the other. Stony stares met his gaze and he capitulated. ‘It was Hubert de Bonneville, if the description is right.’ The words came out in a defiant rush.
John looked at his brother-in-law, their animosity temporarily forgotten in their mutual interest at this revelation. ‘De Bonneville? Are there not de Bonnevilles near Tavistock?’ he asked.
De Revelle was better versed than John in the Norman occupancy of the county. ‘At Peter Tavy, where old Arnulph de Bonneville holds the manor from the de Redvers. The last I heard of him, he was sick near to death.’
John stared hard at Alan Fitzhai. ‘How well did you know this man? Were you with him in Palestine?’
The mercenary shook his head, but said nothing.
Suddenly Gwyn spoke up, jerked out of his usual gruff silence. ‘Alan Fitzhai! I recollect that name now. You were in trouble at Ascalon, after the retreat from Jerusalem!’ Richard the Lionheart had twice come almost within sight of the Holy City, but had failed to reach it. The coastal city of Ascalon had been refortified before the King sailed for Europe as a base for the remaining English troops.
‘What trouble was that?’ demanded the sheriff.
John answered him without hesitation. ‘There were all kinds of scandals and rackets going on there. Twenty thousand men-at-arms and knights, all with little to do, while the King and Saladin thrashed out their peace treaty. A recipe for trouble, idle hands with nothing to occupy them.’
Gwyn went on, ‘Two hundred Moorish prisoners had their throats cut, after being promised as exchange for our men taken captive. You were accused of being party to that – and of looting and raping local families in Ascalon.’
‘It was all damned lies,’ protested Fitzhai, his present problems suddenly overshadowed by old rumours.
Gwyn supplied more details. ‘There was a trial of the ringleaders by Hubert Walter. Twenty men were hanged on the testimony of other Crusaders.’
‘But maybe this Hubert de Bonneville laid testimony against you, eh?’ asked the sheriff.
The mercenary looked genuinely astonished. ‘Nonsense! I never laid eyes on the bloody man in Palestine. There was trouble, I admit, but I was judged free from all blame. What the hell has all this to do with me now, eh?’
The argument went on for a few moments, but Fitzhai stubbornly denied that he had had any dealings with de Bonneville in Palestine, or even that he had ever set eyes on him there.
‘So how could you recognise him in Honiton if you never knew him in the Holy Land?’ demanded de Revelle.
‘It wasn’t like that, at all!’ yelled Alan Fitzhai.
‘Well, how was it, for God’s sake?’ snapped the coroner.
‘I met him not there but on the journey home,’ said Fitzhai. ‘Three months ago I landed in Marseille by ship and joined a party of English Crusaders making their way back up to the Channel ports. De Bonneville was one of them, though I didn’t know him well – there were more than forty of us in the band.’
The sheriff looked suspiciously at him. ‘You say “not well”, but how well? Were you friends, comrades-in-arms?’
Fitzhai was now evidently uncomfortable, under the gaze of two senior law officers, a stolid sergeant, a coroner’s officer and a curious clerk. There was a heavy silence.
‘Well, were you?’ barked de Revelle, his lean face and pointed beard pushed forward agressively.
Fitzhai shifted from one large foot to the other and folded his arms. ‘If you must know, I heartily disliked the man, God rest his soul. He was too fond of pushing his nose into other people’s business.’
The sheriff, for all his many faults, was a shrewd judge of men and felt vindicated that he had indeed smelt a rat. ‘So! You fell out with de Bonneville, this man you hardly knew. Perhaps you killed him?’
Fitzhai leaned forward and indignantly punched the table with his fist. ‘For God’s sake, of course I didn’t kill him! I hardly knew the man. I kept clear of him in France, and when we arrived at Harfleur, I never saw him again, live or dead.’
‘You left him in Normandy?’ asked John.
‘Yes, I took ship for Southampton within two days, as the wind happened to be favourable. The devil knows what he did. Why should I care? He was nothing to me.’
As the coroner digested this, Richard de Revelle asked, ‘If you knew him so slightly, how can you be sure that he is the dead man, on such a slight description?’
‘I’ve seen the belt and the scabbard, haven’t I?’ retorted Fitzhai.
‘Those may have been stolen from him – and they’re common enough.’
‘Well, he always dressed in green, either his surcoat or his cloak. And he had that hairy mole. How many other fair-headed men have such a distinctive blemish on their neck as your officer described?’
John tried another approach. ‘Do you know anything about de Bonneville? His family, where he came from, where he was going?’
‘I’ve told you, I do not! Neither did I want to know. I’m sorry the poor fellow is slain, but I couldn’t abide him, what little I knew of him.’
De Revelle steepled his fingers together, elbows on the table.
‘Why this dislike of Hubert de Bonneville, eh? There must have been bad blood between you?’
Alan Fitzhai shook his head obstinately. ‘It was a personal matter, Sheriff, with respect, none of your business. He put on superior airs and acted as if he was the soul and conscience of our party as we came up through Burgundy and Aquitaine.’ He wiped a hand across his luxuriant moustache. ‘He was a sanctimonious prig, with an attitude far above his station.’
‘You sound as if you know him better than you admit,’ observed the sheriff, but a few more minutes of questioning showed that Fitzhai either could not or would not tell them anything more.