I frowned. ‘Why should he choose to frighten him with the elaborate murder of his wife? Why not beat him and leave him in an alley with no teeth?’
‘That is ours to fathom, but mark me! Hewitt has a black soul and a blacker heart and I can well believe that beneath the crags of his ugly frozen face lies a fiery temper that might well contemplate something demonic.’
‘What is Hewitt’s business? A goldsmith you say?’
Dowling blinked. ‘No. He is a merchant.’
I considered our options. Our option. ‘We must find out where John Giles fled to.’
‘He is at Anthony’s Pig behind the Exchange and has been there an hour.’
‘How do you know?’
‘The Mayor’s men tracked him down. I asked them to.’
It was at that point I started questioning Dowling’s credentials as a butcher. We hurried to the tavern, anxious to arrive before our quarry fled. It was a strange place for Giles to frequent if he was fleeing Matthew Hewitt, for even if Hewitt himself did not visit that day, others of his acquaintance surely would. So it was with curiosity roused that we entered the tavern early in the afternoon. Lucky for me that I had indeed been here on several occasions before, for strangers were not welcomed. The tavern had a narrow frontage out onto the street, but stretched back the depth of two houses, with private rooms to the rear and cosy booths tucked away in the shadows. In one of those booths we found Giles, on his own, still nervous and agitated. His state did not improve when I sat opposite him. At first he made as if to leave, but stopped once Dowling plugged the gap with his considerable bulk. Eventually he stopped his writhing and sat back, resigned, with his back pressed against the wooden wall of the booth staring out into the tavern.
‘Good day, Mr Simpson,’ Dowling growled into his ear.
What was he talking about? I stared at him with my heart in my stomach. The only Simpson I knew of was the fellow that had stolen the key to Bride’s. Now the butcher didn’t think it worthwhile to keep me informed?
‘For who did you steal the key of St Bride’s?’ Dowling wriggled up close. I contemplated kicking him in the shin. He was supposed to be the witless one, not me.
Giles’s head jerked round, a grisly taut smile on his thin lips. He blinked repeatedly as if he was about to have a fit. Then he started to laugh; at least I think it was supposed to be a laugh. Then he looked at me with pleading eyes, licking his lips in a state of high anxiety. ‘How do you know that?’
I didn’t.
‘It is not widely known, sir, nor will it be so. The rector gave us a description of this fellow John Simpson which I established must be you through conversations with others of the household.’
When had he done all that?
‘Someone deceived you.’
Though I still felt like kicking Dowling in the arse and lecturing him upon the obligations of tradesmen to respect their social betters, the indignation soon passed. This new revelation was more interesting. Why should Giles steal the key to a church then kill his wife inside of it? A foolish way to kill your own wife I would have thought, and in any case, Giles didn’t really appear to match the description of the man that Joyce had described. It all seemed most unlikely.
‘Ha!’ exclaimed John Giles with a loud shrill, but he did not deny it. With his hands to his face he shook his head slowly, muttering to himself in despair, using God’s name — though I could not hear how.
‘Was it Matthew Hewitt?’ Dowling whispered.
‘God save us!’ Giles exclaimed white-faced, leaning over the table and peering into my eyes. I stopped myself from recoiling as he stared into me as if looking for the bottom of a deep pool of water. ‘How do you know these things? Are you a magician? Are you bewitched?’
‘No,’ I replied nervously, ‘we have just been talking to people, trying to establish what happened that night.’
‘I did not kill my own wife,’ he said very slowly.
I assured him that he had no need to convince us of it, though of course that wasn’t true.
Suddenly he looked suspicious. ‘Who told you it was Hewitt?’ He sat back, more composed, the expression on his face suggesting that he felt he had been tricked.
I sensed that if we did not press home our advantage then we would quickly be stonewalled permanently. ‘Is it him that you are waiting for?’
‘I will not tell you who I am waiting for, nor will he come until you have left,’ Giles answered, deflated but temporarily calm. ‘So you may stay here as long as you will. It is nothing to me.’
‘Very well.’ I sat back and signalled to a wench to deliver me an ale. Dowling could hardly object under the circumstances.
‘While we wait, Mr Giles, tell us something of your relations at Epsom. You married into wealth. I don’t understand why you live in such poverty.’
‘Aye, poverty.’ Giles smiled bitterly. ‘We live in a stable. We kept a cow there for the first year.’
‘How long were you married?’
‘Two years.’
‘Anne would have been eighteen.’ I struggled to recall the legend on the gravestone.
‘Aye. Young.’
‘Why did you live, then, in such poverty?’
Giles stared into space as if he had the weight of the temple on his shoulders. Then he shrugged. ‘Her father would not allow her to marry the son of a farm worker. She went against his will. He gave her no dowry.’
‘That must have come as a shock to you both.’
‘Aye, a shock. We married anyway, at St Ethelburga, but that was not the worse of it.’ He grasped four fingers of one hand with the other and squeezed hard. ‘My father worked on one of Ormonde’s estates. Ormonde made him stand for my actions at the borough sessions.’
I grimaced sympathetically. ‘Was he pilloried?’
‘He was found guilty at the borough sessions, that left the punishment open. The justice was a friend of Ormonde and decided to make an example of him.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They hung him by the neck. They said that I had acted in accordance with the Devil and had destroyed any chance Anne had of leading a godly life, so that I condemned her to everlasting torment. If I acted of the Devil, then I was born of the Devil, and all touched by the Devil should perish.’
‘An extreme verdict,’ I replied, quietly horrified. Now I could understand why Giles had so little desire to stay at Ormonde’s side in Epsom. But why had he gone there in the first place? He must hate William Ormonde. He must hate the whole borough.
‘Aye. He is a black man with a black soul. He sent men here to fetch me to Epsom for the funeral.’
Neither Dowling nor I said anything for a while, just let time trickle by in silence. Giles sat there calm now, staring away from us out into the tavern with his jaw set rigid.
‘You must hate William Ormonde,’ I said at last.
Giles closed his eyes and sighed. He looked at me again, this time as if I were a simple fool. ‘So you lie. You have decided that I killed my own wife.’
‘I didn’t say so.’ Though the thought had crossed my mind for this man seemed close to insanity. To kill his wife would be to kill Ormonde’s daughter and relieve himself of an unexpected financial burden. ‘Though I am not yet convinced that you did not steal the key to Bride’s of your own initiative.’ Looking at him carefully I wished I could see into his soul. ‘You were quick to confirm our idea that it may have been Matthew Hewitt.’
‘I confirmed nothing. Believe as you will.’
‘If it is believed that you killed your wife, then you will hang.’ I tapped one finger on the table.
‘Richard Joyce will hang for the crime, whatever the truth of it.’
How did Giles know of Joyce, and how was he so sure that the man would hang? What did Giles know?
Dowling’s eyes narrowed and he cleared his throat. ‘What is the truth of it?’
‘I don’t know who killed my wife, nor why.’ I detected a note of resolution in his voice for the first time, and wondered if he was on his own mission to unravel the truth of it.