John was angry that the local population seemed so unaware or heedless of the new royal office. It was not that he felt a personal slight at this indifference, but that his unfailing devotion to King Richard interpreted this widespread apathy as a mild form of treason. He was silent, so Gwyn suggested, ‘Let’s get up there and look for ourselves.’
They turned their mounts about and plodded up the prominent hill to the south of the track. As they rose, they could see over the crest of the right shoulder of the tor into a deep dip where a flock of several hundred sheep was being guarded by two shepherds and their dogs.
‘Go down and see what they know,’ John commanded. Gwyn urged his horse over the crest, and a few moments later, John saw him haul one shepherd on to the back of the big mare. The pair came back to where the coroner waited with his clerk.
‘He knows where the body lies. It’s still there, above us in the crag.’
With the young shepherd clinging on behind and giving directions, they all climbed almost to the top of the tor, where granite boulders lay in tumbled disorder. The shepherd, clad in shapeless woollen garments little better than rags, slipped from the horse and ran the last few yards, vanishing into a cleft between two grey rocks that were each the size of a small hut.
The others had dismounted and John left Thomas to hold their mounts. By the time the coroner and Gwyn had caught up, the shepherd was crouched over a bundle lying at the foot of a rock face. He was prodding it with a piece of stick and muttering to himself, which suggested to John that he was simple.
‘What have we got here, boy?’ growled Gwyn, pushing the lad aside with his leg.
It was the badly decomposed body of a man in a sitting position against the rock. Unlike the one in Widecombe, it was partly mummified. The skin of the face was almost black, and leathery, stretched tightly over the cheekbones like a mask on a skull. The eye-sockets had collapsed to deep holes and the lips had dried to an open circle, as if the corpse was uttering an eternal cry. The hands, protruding from a brown leather jacket, were like bundles of sticks, the skin dried tightly around spidery finger-bones, with loosened nails on the ends.
‘The sun and the wind have shrivelled him instead of the usual corruption,’ observed John, with his usual detached interest.
‘How long has he been dead, I wonder?’ ruminated Gwyn, tapping the hard skin of the forehead with his knuckle.
‘In the desert, in the burning sun and dry air, they can stay like this for months – even years,’ said the coroner, veteran of Palestine. ‘But here the maggots, the foxes and the rats would see him off in a few months, so I reckon on five or six weeks.’
He turned to the shepherd, a slack-jawed lad of about fifteen who was crouching nearby, gaping at these visitors from another world. ‘When did they find this, boy?’
‘’Bout two weeks back, sir. I can’t reckon time very well, but it was past a couple of church days ago. Will Baggot found it, looking for a missing ewe up here. He told the reeve a few days after, back in Sampford Spiney.’
‘A few days!’ exploded John. ‘No hue-and-cry, no one telling the sheriff or myself? I despair of these idle people.’ But it was no use railing against the shepherd, who had no idea of what went on outside his little world.
‘Let’s have a proper look at him, Gwyn. Surely we have another soldier here.’
They examined his tough leather jerkin, with reinforced shoulder covers and studded sides. He still wore a tight-fitting cap, like a bowl of tough leather, with a deep flap to protect his neck. His legs were encased in strong linen breeches with boots coming above the ankles, spurs still in place.
‘He has no baldric or sword belt, but the waist-loops of his breeches are snapped through,’ said the Cornishman. ‘I reckon his belt, with sword, scabbard and dagger, has been wrenched off.’
The coroner was looking at the man’s boots. ‘Eastern work again, I’m sure. That traced stitching is a Mussulman design, just like Hubert de Bonneville’s. This is another Crusader.’
Gwyn stood up and regarded the corpse from head to toe. ‘Yet he’s no gentleman. His clothing is coarser and of less value. He’ll be a squire or perhaps even a mercenary soldier.’
John nodded. ‘But the great question is, how did he die? And why is his body up here, in this God-forsaken place? And how long has it been here?’
Gwyn had no answers. Then he spotted something and bent again to put a hand inside the front opening of the corpse’s jerkin. He pulled out a small crucifix, made of some base metal like tin or pewter but of a complex design and good craftsmanship. Thin wires were wrapped around the shank of the cross, like crude filigree work. It was held on a leather thong around the neck and Gwyn tried to lift it free from the body for a better look. The shrunken head was flexed with the chin on the chest and Gwyn lifted it to free the thong.
‘Look there, at the neck,’ said the coroner.
Gwyn took off the thong, but held back the head to expose the front of the throat. The skin there had been protected from the elements and was white with a tinge of green. Across the throat, almost from ear to ear, was a wide slash, exposing the Adam’s apple, the muscles and vessels of the neck.
‘A cut throat, for a start,’ said John sombrely. There was a strong bond between all those who had made the arduous journey to the Holy Land to fight the defilers of Jerusalem, and it saddened him to think that two had survived the often lethal rigours of the journey and the campaign only to be slaughtered like beasts on their return to their homeland.
With the shepherd boy watching, wide-eyed, John and Gwyn struggled to undress the body to examine the clothing and the skin surface for other clues. On both arms, and across the chest, were thin lines of hard scar tissue, typical of long-healed war wounds – both Gwyn and the coroner carried similar signs of sword and lance combat on their own limbs.
When they moved the body, they found beneath it an empty sheath, but there was no sign of the dagger it had once held. They rolled it over, an easy task as it had shrivelled to half its original weight. On the brown wrinkled skin of the back, there was something that raised the eyebrows of both the coroner and his attendant. Just to the left of the spine, whose knobs corrugated the stretched skin, was a one-inch slit, sharp at the lower end, blunt and slightly notched at the upper extremity. John stared at the wound, then at Gwyn. ‘Same wound, same place,’ he observed.
They let the body slump back to the ground, as Gwyn made a cautious response. ‘Many a man gets stabbed in the back – and most knife blades are much of a muchness, so the slits are similar.’
John stood up straight and stretched his aching back. ‘Two men on Dartmoor, both with Levantine accoutrements, both stabbed in the back within a few weeks of each other. Is that coincidence?’
Gwyn held his peace.
Unlike de Bonneville’s, this man’s clothing seemed intact, although the inside of the leather jerkin, the undertunic and shift were blackened by dried blood, which had poured from the arteries and veins of the slashed neck. A small slit in the back of the clothing corresponded with the stab wound, which did not appear to have bled much.
Under the cap, they found an area of crushed, bloodied scalp, though the cap itself had not been penetrated. The blond hair was cropped short.
‘He was struck a heavy blow with some blunt object,’ was John’s opinion. ‘Enough to make him lose his senses and not resist having his throat cut … though maybe, by then, he had also been stabbed in the back.’
‘Another unexpected, cowardly attack?’ suggested Gwyn.
John raised his stooped shoulders in a gesture of doubt. ‘That Fitzhai fellow said that de Bonneville was travelling alone in Honiton. And we have no idea how long this corpse has lain here, though I have no doubt that he died weeks before de Bonneville. So what connection can there be?’