‘But he is also out of sight and therefore out of mind. Perhaps the Prior is hoping that he will turn into bones if left long enough.’
‘Good God!’ exclaimed Michael, leaping backwards as he opened the door. ‘What a stench!’
‘I am not surprised the monks do not want this in their cathedral,’ said Bartholomew, recoiling, despite the fact that he had prepared himself for the olfactory onslaught. ‘Such a vile smell cannot be good for the health of the living.’
‘It does not say much about the health of the dead, either,’ muttered Michael. ‘I have never known a corpse to stink so.’
He took a step forward, but then hesitated when he became aware that flies buzzed within. Pulling a face, Michael produced from his scrip a huge pomander stuffed with lavender and cloves, placed it over the lower part of his face, and indicated that Bartholomew was to precede him inside. Bartholomew obliged, taking care to breathe through his nose. It was a popular belief that inhaling through the mouth was the best solution for dealing with foul odours, but Bartholomew had learned that did not work for especially strong smells: he ended up being able to taste the foulness as well as smell it.
It was dark inside the Bone House, and the two scholars waited a few moments for their eyes to adapt to the gloom. Someone had placed a lamp on a shelf to one side, and as Michael lit it, Bartholomew looked around curiously.
A row of shelves in front of him was stacked with grinning skulls, most with missing teeth that lent them rakish expressions. To his left was a pile of long bones – arms and legs – in various states of repair, while to his right lay a heap of broken coffins. Some revealed a glimmer of white inside, while others had apparently been emptied of their contents. An old barrel near one shuttered window was filled almost to the brim with bone fragments – flat pieces of cranium, and tiny carpals and tarsals that had once been living hands and feet.
‘I suppose this must be him,’ said Michael, stepping forward to a human shape that lay on the bare stone of the floor. It had been covered with a filthy piece of sacking, but that was all. Glovere had no coffin, no shroud, and no one had performed even the most basic cleansing of his body. The sacking was too small for its purpose: a bristly stack of hair protruded from one end, and a pair of legs from the other. Michael grabbed the material and pulled it away, backing off quickly when the movement aroused a swarm of buzzing flies.
‘This is horrible!’ he choked through his pomander. ‘Why are we doing this?’
‘Because you promised your Bishop you would,’ replied Bartholomew, flapping at the insects that circled his head as he knelt next to the bloated features of the dead man.
In the summer months, most corpses were laid in the ground within a day or two of their deaths, and it was unusual to see one that had been left for so long. The face was dark, with a blackish-green sheen about it, and was strangely mottled. The eyes were dull and opaque, half open beneath discoloured lids, while the mouth looked as though it had been stretched, and gaped open in a lopsided way that Bartholomew had never observed in the living.
He studied Glovere for a moment before beginning his examination, trying to see the man who had lived, rather than the corpse that lay mouldering in front of him. He saw a fellow in his middle thirties who had been well nourished, and who had sported a head of brown hair and a patchy beard. His skin was puckered in places, as though his complexion had been spoiled by a pox at some point. His clothes were dirty and stained, but of decent quality.
‘He drowned,’ pronounced Michael with authority. He reached out a tentative hand, and plucked something from Glovere’s hair. ‘See? River weed.’
‘There is more of it in his clothes, too,’ said Bartholomew, pointing. ‘And that smear of mud on his cheek doubtless comes from the river bank. His bloated features also indicate that he spent some time in water, along with the fact that you can see a stain on the floor, where some of it leaked from him and then dried.’
‘Nasty,’ said Michael, backing away quickly when he saw his sandalled feet were placed squarely in the middle of one such stain. ‘But, if he drowned, then the Bishop is innocent of murder. Come away, Matt. It is unpleasant in here with all these flies. I will ascertain from the inns in the city that Glovere was in his cups, and we will have an end to the matter.’
‘He fell in the river while drunk and then drowned,’ mused Bartholomew, turning Glovere’s head this way and that as he examined the neck for signs of injury. ‘It is possible, but we should be absolutely sure, if you want to lay this affair to rest once and for all.’
‘Even I can see there are no marks of violence on the body,’ said Michael, too far away to tell anything of the kind. ‘I appreciate your meticulousness, Matt, but do not feel obliged to linger here on my account. Cover him. I will see you outside.’
Flapping vigorously at the winged creatures that swarmed around him, the monk was gone, leaving Bartholomew alone in the Bone House. The physician did not mind; he had found Michael’s commentary distracting in any case. He moved the lantern to a better position for a thorough examination, and began to remove the dead man’s clothes.
Just when he was beginning to think that Michael was right, and that Glovere had simply drowned – although whether by accident or deliberately was impossible to say – Bartholomew’s careful exploration of every inch of mottled flesh paid off. His probing fingers encountered a wound at the base of Glovere’s skull, just above the hairline. Bartholomew turned the body and studied it, noting that the injury was a narrow slit about the length of a thumbnail, and that it appeared to go deep. If it had bled, then any stains had been washed away by the river. Because it was hidden by Glovere’s hair, Bartholomew realised that he might well have missed it, had he not been in the habit of inspecting the heads of corpses very closely when examining them for Michael.
He took one of the metal probes he carried in his medicine bag, and put one end into the hole to test its depth. He was startled when it disappeared for almost half the length of a finger before encountering the solid resistance of bone. He sat back on his heels and considered.
He knew that damage to the whitish-coloured cord that ran from the brain down the spine was serious, and it seemed that the injury to Glovere’s neck was sufficiently deep to have punctured it. Since Glovere was unlikely to have inflicted such a wound on himself, the only explanation was that someone else had done it. It was very precisely centred, and the physician doubted that it could have happened by chance. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully, and then called out to Michael. The monk entered the Bone House reluctantly, but listened to what Bartholomew had to say without complaining, flies forgotten.
‘Lord, Matt!’ he breathed when the physician had finished. ‘Glovere was murdered after all? And worse, someone committed the crime with considerable care, so that his death would appear to be an accident?’
Bartholomew nodded. ‘It is impossible for me to say what happened, but it seems reasonable to assume that a blade of some kind was inserted into Glovere – perhaps while he lay drunk and insensible on the river bank – and then he was pushed into the water so that it would look as though he had drowned.’
‘And would he have drowned? Or did this tiny wound end his life?’
‘Probably the latter,’ said Bartholomew. ‘Injuries to this part of the neck often result in the loss of the ability to breathe. I do not think he drowned. If I lean hard on his chest, the water that emerges from his mouth is clear – it contains none of the bubbles that I would expect if he had breathed water.’
Michael shuddered. ‘You really do know some unpleasant things, Matt. Thank God I am a theologian, and do not have to acquaint myself with how to squeeze water from dead men and where to stab them so it will not show.’ He gazed at Bartholomew in sudden alarm. ‘Would de Lisle know about these things?’