Gervaise was shaken by the news. ‘His squire also? I never knew he had one.’
‘No Norman of good birth would be campaigning in the Holy Land without one,’ observed John drily.
‘Well, we knew nothing of him. What was his name?’
‘Aelfgar, a Saxon,’ said John shortly.
Gervaise turned to the impassive man from Beer. ‘Did you know anything of this, Baldwyn?’
He shook his head. ‘We’ve heard nothing more of Sir Hubert since that messenger from Palestine came last year. Never knew of any squire, certainly.’
John had been squinting covertly at the sheath on the squire’s belt, which sat half-way around his waist on the right side. An ornamental knife-hilt sat high above the sheath, with more than an inch of bare blade exposed. On the edge of the dark brown hide, a small white scar of recently torn leather shone like a little star. ‘Will you come down to the undercroft?’ asked the coroner, with deceptive mildness.
Puzzled, the two men followed him to where the visitors’ horses were tethered to a wooden rail. Gwyn was standing alongside his mare, holding something wrapped in a piece of sacking. As the other three gathered around, he flipped away the hessian and showed them some clothing and an empty dagger sheath. They still smelt of corruption from body-fluids soaked from the Dartmoor corpse, but this was not what intrigued the coroner. He saw another small rip in the top edge of the scabbard, not white, but old and dirty.
‘What’s all this about?’ asked Gervaise irritably. ‘I have much to attend to on this very unhappy day, Sir John.’
‘It may turn out to be unhappier than you think,’ retorted the coroner gruffly. ‘Would you ask your squire to hand me his dagger for a moment?’
The two local men looked uneasily at each other and made no movement.
‘Come on, if you please,’ John barked. ‘Your knife, Baldwyn!’
Slowly, the black-bearded man withdrew his dagger and handed it, hilt first, to John, who took it and, with the other hand, raised the sheath from Gwyn’s sacking, sliding the blade smoothly into the leather. The hilt-guard sat perfectly against the top edge of the sheath. The coroner held it out towards Gervaise and his squire.
‘It seems to fit this much better than it does your sheath.’
De Bonneville, flexing his new superiority as lord of the manor, began to turn away.
‘I’ve no time for charades, Crowner. Why are you playing such games?’
‘This sheath came from the man slain not five miles from here. The man you’ve never heard of.’
Baldwyn blustered, ‘So my dagger doesn’t fit my scabbard so well. Little wonder. I bought it from a man who had returned from the East after I broke my own blade.’
John was ready for this explanation. ‘Indeed? Then look more closely.’ He drew out the dagger again and pointed with a finger at the torn top edge of the sheath, in line with the edge of the blade. On the blade itself, two inches below the hilt, was a deep nick in the metal, where it had been damaged by being struck against something hard. A small tang of steel hooked out from it and when he slid the blade in and out of the scabbard, it was patently obvious that this was the cause of the torn leather.
‘Now show me your scabbard, sir,’ he demanded of Baldwyn.
With three pairs of eyes boring into him, the squire had little option but to slide the now-empty sheath around his belt to the front. John slid the dagger back in and, drawing it up and down, showed that the new tear in the leather was identical with that in the other sheath and caused by the same nick in the blade.
‘What have you to say to that?’ John demanded, with a dangerous softness.
Gervaise de Bonneville jumped in defensively. ‘This is nonsense! Every man in England has a knife. Thousands of them have come back with the Crusading armies … and many knives are damaged. You are building a false story out of trivial coincidences.’
John ignored his intervention, continuing to stare at Baldwyn. ‘I asked you, what do you have to say?’
Hard black eyes bored back at him from an obstinate face. ‘As my master says, it is ridiculous. I have had that dagger for at least two years.’
He took it back into his hand and studied it closely.
John was unperturbed. ‘I doubt if you can produce witnesses to prove that?’ His voice rose in an accusing crescendo. ‘I say it is the weapon of Hubert’s man, Aelfgar!’
By now, a few people had stopped at a discreet distance to wonder what was going on.
Baldwyn, his face above the jet beard becoming reddened in anger, shouted back, ‘I tell you the knife is mine! How can it belong to this dead man? I told you, I’ve never heard of Aelfgar of Totnes!’
There was a dead silence. Then John spoke, with a sinister restraint after his previous roar. ‘Totnes? Who said anything about Totnes?’
Baldwyn stood, his head lowered, looking from one to the other like a baited bull between two dogs.
Gervaise opened his mouth to speak, but before he could attempt to defend his squire the dark man gave a snarl and pushed the coroner in the chest.
Caught unawares, John staggered back and Baldwyn ran towards the stables. Gwyn leaped after him and before he had gone five paces, jumped on his back and brought him crashing to the ground. Gervaise stood transfixed, but John had regained his balance and rushed to help Gwyn secure the runaway.
As he got to the heap of flailing bodies, Gwyn gave a roar and grabbed his own upper arm, where blood was flowing through his fingers. ‘The bastard’s stabbed me!’ he yelled, and ducked as the same blade that they had just been examining, flashed past his ear.
Not for nothing had the two from Exeter been fighting-partners for a dozen years. Trapped because his legs were intertwined with the fugitive’s, Gwyn made sure that he dodged the knife, confident that his master would speedily settle the affair. He was right. With a metallic rattle, John drew out his sword and, using the flat of the blade, crashed it down on the black hair of the knife-wielder. Baldwyn had no protection on his head and, though the sword was not a full-size battle weapon, its thirty inches of steel was heavy enough to stun him.
Gwyn clambered up and brushed the dirt from his front.
‘Are you badly cut?’ asked John.
His officer looked into the rip in the sleeve of his woollen jacket. He dipped a finger in and examined the blood that came out. ‘No, nothing but a prick. My fault. I didn’t expect him to knife me, the swine.’ He aimed a kick at the prostrate body, which was beginning to groan and show signs of revival.
‘Tie him, we’re going back to Exeter with him.’
While Gwyn lashed the wrists of the groaning Baldwyn, using the belt of the dead man as an appropriate form of bondage, the coroner went back to the new lord of Peter Tavy, who stood white-faced and almost paralysed at the turn of events.
‘I think your squire killed your brother and his henchman, this Aelfgar – or if he didn’t kill them himself, he was present when it happened.’
De Bonneville pulled himself together and regained his haughty poise. ‘Well, I do not. And this business of the dagger is rubbish. You come here, on our day of grief, disrupt the mourning, interrupt the preparations for the funeral of one of the most respected lords in the West Country and then you make accusations against my squire, who is a friend as well as a servant.’
Gervaise was made of sterner stuff than John had thought and rapidly recovered his composure to turn defence into attack. ‘My brother must have been killed by some damned outlaws on his way home. And you’ll regret hinting otherwise, Coroner. I have influential friends, from the Bishop to the sheriff, and from our abbot here to others in Winchester. Release my squire at once. Perhaps I will then take a more lenient view of your over-enthusiasm.’