The place was apparently the spot where some of the local women would come to wash their clothes. There was a broad sweep of the river in a loop, and because it was upstream from Compostela itself, the waters were clean and not befouled by the ordure thrown in by the thousands of inhabitants and pilgrims. The well-trodden path led down a grassy little bank to the water’s edge. There, some large flat grey rocks provided scrubbing boards while the branches overhanging the place gave drying facilities. From the look of the shards of pottery, many women came here, did their laundry and then supped wine while they waited for their washing to dry overhead. It must have been one of the few relaxing times of the day for them, Baldwin thought to himself.
All this he took in with one glance, but then he smelled the foul odour of death. There was a loud buzzing, and he saw a small cloud of flies. He only had to go a short distance, a matter of ten yards. There he stood among some longer rushes and grasses, and Simon saw him stop and stare sadly down at his feet. For once, he didn’t instantly crouch and touch the body. This time he stood stock still before silently beckoning Simon to join him.
Reluctantly, knowing from Baldwin’s stillness as much as from the obvious fear of the two girls that this must be a murder victim, Simon went to join him. He never could understand the knight’s objective approach to bodies. Baldwin was always, so he said, keen to learn as much as he could from a corpse, and after his experiences during a siege when he was a mere youth, he had picked up much about human bodies when sudden violent death was visited upon them. He had told Simon before that if an intelligent man could observe a body correctly, that body could speak of the murderer. There was more to be learned from a corpse than the mere number of wounds or their depth.
When Simon reached his side, he saw that Baldwin was contemplating the body of a young woman with the figure of a Madonna lying at his feet, head nearest him, body pointing to the river. From her hands and trim figure, she had been well-born. Certainly her hands had not seen much hard work. The flesh was clean and pale olive, like a wealthy lady’s, with few calluses. Her dress was a blue tunic, very well cut, with expensive-looking embroidery at the neck, wrists and hem, but blood had soaked into it, turning it into a reeking, blackened mass.
She lay in some long grasses a short way from the river itself. Her arms were at her side; the back of her right hand was scraped, as though it had been rasped with a rock. A nail was torn away. Her head was turned towards the right shoulder, and a thick puddle of blood surrounded her dark hair, in which the first strands of white showed at the temples even through the thick gobbets of gore. Her legs were spread in the unmistakable posture of lovemaking, the skirts thrown up and over her belly revealing the dark triangle at the junction of her thighs. Simon glanced down and saw the marks of blood on the soft inner flesh. He swallowed hard.
This poor woman had not merely been raped; she had been bludgeoned to death, as though her attacker was enraged by her, as though he wanted to remove every sign of her. Her shoulders, hands and face were a mass of ruined flesh, as though the killer wanted to destroy her utterly.
Chapter Six
For Simon, the next half hour or so was disturbing in the extreme. The screams of the two girls had brought some farm labourers running from a field a short way off, and now five men stood scowling grimly at Baldwin and him. A sixth was retching near the river, and being comforted by one of the girls, who was still dreadfully pale, but seemed grateful for the opportunity of forgetting her own horror and concentrating on someone else’s. Another man had gone with her friend into the city to fetch help.
In England, Simon would have known exactly what to do and say. He was not the First Finder, he was the fourth witness to arrive, after the two girls and Baldwin, and could be sure that he would be fined, but that would be the limit of his expense. But he wasn’t in England, he was in Galicia, and he wasn’t sure what the law said about the treatment of witnesses. However, he knew perfectly well that his neighbours in Devonshire, where he lived, would infinitely prefer to accuse a stranger than think that one of their own could have committed a foul murder such as this. If a local jury accused a local man, it was because he was possessed of a ‘common fame’ — an unenviable reputation for theft or robbery or simply mindless violence.
Here, Simon had little idea how matters would stand. He believed in the superiority of the English legal system, in which a man was innocent until proved guilty. In foreign parts, so he had heard, that rule didn’t hold sway, and sometimes a man could be held until he had been tortured to seek the truth. Simon was appalled by the thought that an inquest could rely on the evidence of a man who had been systematically crippled, but he knew that it happened abroad. Baldwin himself was proof of that. The Templars had been tortured, generally one at a time in front of their comrades, so that each should know exactly what was in store for them, should they refuse to confess.
Torture was not routine, apparently, but that was of little consolation, because all knew that the ways of foreign laws were flawed.
Simon licked dry lips as he and Baldwin waited, trying to avoid the hard stares of the peasants. One in particular was holding his long-bladed knife at the ready as though wishing that one of the two would try to escape.
Simon found he could remember some of the other things he had heard about the legal system abroad. Often, a court case was based on one man accusing another. If he could bring one other witness to support his contention, the case was decided in his favour — unless the defendant could bring more people to support him. From what Simon had heard, it all came down to numbers. Clearly it was a mess, because if two men were prepared to cook up a story between them, they could get an innocent man convicted. And then, if the latter refused to confess, he would be tortured until he admitted his guilt!
In England the law was more effective, because the jury itself determined the guilt or innocence of the accused. The jury would report offences to the judges and, if they knew who had committed the crime, the jury would accuse him. Then it was up to the Justice to impose the penalty. Thus all the folk of the vill were involved; the jury comprised all the adult males, after all. And Englishmen at that, he reminded himself, glancing at the man with the knife.
It seemed hours before there was the sound of a crowd approaching, although Simon was sure, from looking at the sun, that it could only have been a short while. Then he saw a drifting of dust over the low trees towards Compostela, which gradually grew. At the same time, he was aware of his heart beating faster.
This was a novel sensation. He shot a look at Baldwin and saw that his friend was frowning meditatively at the corpse, and although he glanced up a few times in the direction of the city, he was plainly unconcerned about his own or Simon’s safety. Simon wished he could feel Baldwin’s confidence. No matter that he was innocent as a newborn lamb, it was the mere threat of being caught up in the machinery that was so intimidating, especially if the victim was gripped in a foreign system. Still worse if he, the foreigner, did not have a grasp of the language. From now on, Simon swore that he would always treat any strangers at home with more than usual courtesy and kindness, explaining to any man who appeared before him the whole system in which the fellow was caught.
The procession which at last came into view consisted of a man at the front with a broad hat concealing his face, while at his side walked a priest, also wearing a wide-brimmed hat against the sun. Behind them creaked a small cart, obviously prepared for collecting a body as a door was laid upon it. A fair group of onlookers were straggling alongside this makeshift cortege.