Matilda tucked her heavy skirt closer around her legs as a sudden draught sighed across the floor from the east wind gusting outside. ‘If the knight and his squire had been travelling together, I can see it could have been a casual robbery by outlaws,’ she observed carefully. ‘But the two men were ambushed weeks apart and in different places. That seems too much to be a coincidence.’
‘Exactly what I think,’ said John, eager to agree with her. If he had to live with her – and the alternative posed many difficulties – then he may as well try to avoid eternal daily strife.
‘Who knew about them travelling westwards from Southampton?’ she asked, detective fever beginning to stir in her voluminous breast.
‘Many of those returning from Palestine, I suppose,’ he answered slowly. ‘And that Nebba fellow, who keeps cropping up. And, of course, Alan Fitzhai.’
His wife steepled her fingers in a judicial gesture. ‘This Fitzhai certainly seems the most likely candidate. He had an admitted feud with de Bonneville and you have only his word as to when he was travelling back from Plymouth, which puts him within striking distance of Widecombe.’
The coroner nodded, though he was reluctant to abandon his own illogical prejudice that Alan Fitzhai was not the man they sought. ‘He could have been there for de Bonneville’s killing, admittedly – but if the slaying of his squire is linked with it, he could not have been on Heckwood Tor weeks before as he was known to have been in Southampton at that time.’
Matilda was equally unwilling to concede a point against her own theory. ‘He could have used an agent, some footpad he could have paid to follow the squire fellow – God knows, there’s no lack of hired killers about these days. I don’t know what the world’s coming to with all this violence.’
Her husband grunted, torn between argument and his desire for peace. ‘There’s also this Saxon archer, this Nebba?’ he suggested.
‘Does he have an alibi for either killing?’ demanded Matilda, reluctant to give up Fitzhai as her prime suspect.
John shook his head, his black locks swirling about his neck. ‘The timing is too vague for that. This Welsh archer Gwyn found in Southampton, he had no real idea of when the fellow vanished. Nebba could have been involved in either of the murders. But why, in God’s name, should he be?’
‘He’s a mercenary and an outlaw, so you say. Just the type to be hired for a killing. What if this Fitzhai paid him to follow the squire and dispatch him?’
‘There must have been more than one. The squire was an experienced fighter, fresh home from the wars.’
‘So? There are plenty of ruffians eager to kill for a mark or two.’
Her tone was becoming more triumphant and was beginning to weaken his hunch about Fitzhai’s innocence – she could destroy every objection he put up.
‘I think the answer lies at the Dartmoor end, rather than in Southampton or France,’ John said doggedly.
‘It might be both, husband. They were killed out west, surely, but the cause may be elsewhere. If Nebba sold de Bonneville’s horse to the Widecombe reeve, can you really believe that he came upon it innocently, wandering in the forest?’
She smoothed her skirt in a preening fashion. ‘If I were you, I’d find this eight-fingered bowman and put him to the Ordeal too.’
As Thomas de Peyne was away for almost three days, the affair of the slain Crusaders fell into abeyance and the coroner relapsed into his usual routine.
Gwyn reported that, contrary to pessimistic forecasts, Alan Fitzhai was surviving and that his fever was abating, in spite of the adverse ministrations of the ignorant gaol-keeper.
John had tried to get the man moved to the convent, but the sheriff had resolutely forbidden this. The coroner cynically suspected that his brother-in-law hoped that Fitzhai would die of blood-poisoning and so solve the awkward dilemma of whether to try him in the county court, then hang him, or leave him to the Justices in Eyre and then hang him.
Gwyn also reported that Eadred of Dawlish, the pig-keeper stabbed outside the Saracen tavern, had died in spite of the frantic ministrations of his young assailant to keep him alive. Another arrest and hanging seemed imminent.
In the late afternoon of the third day, the coroner and his officer were in the gatehouse chamber when a weary Thomas limped up the stairs, having left his even wearier mule in the castle stables.
John was sitting at his trestle, silently and laboriously mouthing the Latin exercises given to him that morning by his tutor at the cathedral. Gwyn was idly sharpening the blade of his dagger on the soft red stone of the window-sill, but stopped to make a ribald comment about the bedraggled clerk who appeared in the doorway. However, with actions belying his words, he rose to get the little man a hunk of bread and cheese from their wall-shelf and pushed him onto a stool while he poured him a mug of cider, knowing his dislike of beer.
‘The wanderer returns!’ shouted the coroner, surprised at how glad he was to see the fellow home safe and sound after three days’ solitary travelling in a lonely area that seemed overburdened with slain corpses.
They listened attentively to his story, without interruptions or even Gwyn’s usual quips, and John de Wolfe, covertly rolling up his reading homework away from Thomas’s inquisitive eyes, sat back for a moment’s thought.
‘So now we know that both de Bonneville and his squire were killed within twelve miles of each other, both en route for Peter Tavy, which neither reached alive.’
Gwyn, ready to split hairs, pointed out that although the bodies were found within that distance, they may not have been murdered there.
‘No one is going to carry corpses far, man,’ snapped John, in irritation at his train of thought being disturbed. ‘But why were they killed so far apart in time? From Thomas’s information, this Aelfgar left Sampford Spiney a few weeks before Hubert was slain.’
Gwyn scratched at the fleas in his red hair. ‘I was told in Southampton that de Bonneville stayed behind to sell his loot and pay off his men, sending his squire ahead to announce his coming to the family.’
‘Like John the Baptist and the Lord Christ,’ added Thomas devoutly, crossing himself with a lump of cheese. He ventured another observation, echoing Matilda’s views of a few nights earlier. ‘It seems too much of a coincidence that both master and servant were killed in the same area, in much the same fashion but weeks apart. Yet I saw hardly a soul on those evil moors. There’s nothing there except foxes, sheep and crows.’
‘If they were ambushed, the killers must have known when they were coming,’ observed the coroner, contemplatively. He turned to his clerk. ‘How long did this Aelfgar spend in Sampford Spiney?’
‘Two nights, the priest said. His horse went lame and he rested it for a day before going on.’
‘And the village is only a few miles from Peter Tavy?’
‘You could walk between them in under two hours,’ replied Thomas. ‘That’s why I dressed as a Cistercian, in case someone in Peter Tavy knew I’d already been snooping in Sampford.’
John thought this through. ‘This Aelfgar made no secret of being Hubert’s squire?’
‘No, I expect everyone in Sampford knew it.’
‘So some thatcher or pedlar could have carried the fact to Peter Tavy the next day?’
‘No reason why not.’
John looked across at Gwyn and, almost in unison, they both grunted under their breath.
The sheriff was openly contemptuous of John’s suspicions and would hear nothing in favour of questioning the de Bonnevilles. ‘Are you mad, brother-in-law?’ he fumed, as they sat each side of the table in his chamber in the castle keep. ‘The Bishop is a great friend of the family. He has already chided both of us – especially you – for not finding a culprit for Hubert’s death. And now we have had God’s signal from the Ordeal that this odious man Fitzhai is the villain!’ He banged the table hard with his fist. ‘Can you imagine my going to the Bishop’s palace and telling Henry Marshall that we suspect someone in the household of his sick old friend? You must have taken leave of your senses, John.’