‘Quite,’ said William. ‘That is why the pig lies unclaimed. The pudding was to be a token of his devotion, but even the insensitive Hamon balked at the notion of sending a fine blood pudding to another man’s wife.’
‘I would not send one to anybody,’ said Bartholomew, who found the notion of blood puddings repellent. Still, he thought, at least he now understood Hamon’s odd comment about not wanting to slaughter any more of his pigs. Perhaps the young knight would have been more successful in his courtship of the lovely Janelle had he plied her with more appealing gifts – such as a ring made of his first wife’s coffin handle.
William looked around him. ‘When Freeman died, his wife took over his business. It must have been she who slaughtered the pig.’
‘But Norys did not slaughter her,’ said Bartholomew, meeting his eyes. ‘In fact, I think we will find that no one did.’
Chapter 9
Father William stood at the door of the church to keep watch, while Michael stamped furiously down the nave after Bartholomew toward Mistress Freeman’s corpse in the chancel. The two thick candles that burned at the head of the coffin were almost invisible in the brilliance of the setting sun, and the skeletal Walter Wauncy knelt in prayer at her feet, his words whispering around the shadowy building like a voice from the grave. A butterfly flicked through a window in a flash of red, and was gone again, while outside a robin sang piercingly from one of the elms.
‘Master Alcote asks if you would join him at Wergen Hall,’ said Michael, as the priest glanced up. ‘He is having difficulties with one document. I will continue the vigil for Mistress Freeman.’
Wauncy looked puzzled. ‘Alcote professes himself very proficient with these affairs; I cannot see why he should request my help. And anyway, I have been paid for this mass. Would you have me share the fee with you?’
‘I would not dream of taking it,’ said Michael, offended that Wauncy should regard him as the kind of man to haggle over a dead woman’s fourpence.
‘Well, in that case,’ said Wauncy, climbing to his feet with an ease that suggested he had not been on his knees for long, ‘I shall go. He asked for me particularly, you say?’
‘He did,’ Michael confirmed, and the flattered Wauncy made his way towards the door, nodding genially to William as he left. Michael watched him leave, then turned to Bartholomew, his green eyes sceptical.
‘So, your latest theory is that Alice Freeman was not murdered, but that someone doused her house with pig’s blood to make it look as though she had been?’
‘It is a theory based on fact,’ said Bartholomew. ‘The slaughterhouse vat should have been filled with blood from the dead pig, but it was virtually empty. There was a bowl hidden behind it, suggesting to me that someone had scooped the blood out of the vat and taken it to the Freemans’ cottage. And basically, there is far too much of it in the house to have come from one person.’
‘But we have both seen what a mess even a little blood can make,’ protested Michael. ‘A goblet of it spread around can look as though an entire herd of cows has been massacred.’
‘Look,’ said Bartholomew, easing aside the piece of linen that hid the wound in the dead woman’s throat. ‘This is a vicious slash that would have caused massive bleeding instantly.’
‘So?’ asked Michael. ‘Massive bleeding is what we have.’
‘With this wound, she would not have had the strength to spread blood all over her home and garden. I think she would have taken one or two steps, and then collapsed and died where she fell.’
‘She did,’ said Michael. ‘I found her lying in the middle of the floor with all the furniture overturned and smashed.’
‘Then how did the blood get into the garden?’
‘Perhaps it fell from Norys as he rushed away from the scene of the crime. The clothes we found on his roof tell us that he was drenched in the stuff.’
‘There was far too much of it to have merely dripped from a man’s clothes – these are large splashes, Brother, not a few drops. I think they spilled from the bowl as someone carried the pig’s blood from the slaughterhouse to throw around the house.’
‘No,’ said Michael firmly. ‘Mistress Freeman probably left these splatters as she staggered around, reeling from her injury.’
‘Someone with a wound like this does not wander all over the place,’ persisted Bartholomew. ‘And anyway, I told you, there was too much blood to have come from one person.’
Michael frowned. ‘I do not really understand what you are concluding from all this. Do you think someone else died there with her? That Norys claimed not one victim, but two?’
‘No,’ said Bartholomew. ‘I am suggesting that no one was killed.’
Michael folded his arms and regarded his friend with wary eyes. ‘Well, come on. Explain.’
‘I saw lots of mussel shells in Mistress Freeman’s house. I think bad shellfish killed her.’
‘Mussels?’ asked Michael, confused. ‘Where would she find mussels?’
‘Ipswich has a fish market, and so does Woodbridge, both of which are only a few miles away. Many people die from eating shellfish, particularly mussels, and especially between May and October, so it is not improbable to suppose she ate some bad ones. And her cat.’
‘Cat?’ queried Michael, startled. ‘How does her cat fit into all this?’
‘There was a dead cat in her garden. I think she fed it some of the mussels and it died, too.’
Michael raised one finger in triumph. ‘Your theory has a fatal flaw. Mother Goodman told us that Mistress Freeman did not like cats – which was why Will Norys did not offer her the honour of his hand in marriage. So Mistress Freeman would not have fed a cat mussels – good ones or bad.’
Bartholomew ran a hand through his hair, and stared at the woman in the coffin. After a moment he leaned down toward her mouth and sniffed. Michael looked away, revolted.
‘Well, she vomited before she died, which I doubt she would have done had her throat been cut. So, there are three possibilities: she may have eaten bad shellfish and died accidentally; she may have been given bad shellfish by someone who knew they would kill her, and she was therefore murdered; or she may have kept them until she was certain eating them would make her fatally ill.’
‘So what you are saying is that you have no idea whether her death was an accident, suicide or murder?’ asked Michael. ‘Well, that is helpful!’
‘Those are the possibilities,’ said Bartholomew. ‘She ate the bad mussels and died – whether deliberately or accidentally we may never know – and then someone slit her throat after she was dead. Her hands and arms were slashed, too, to make it appear as though there was a struggle.’
‘But what for?’ cried Michael exasperated, his voice ringing around the church and making William start from his position at the door. ‘What could anyone gain from such an obscene act?’
‘It means Norys no longer has an alibi for the time of Unwin’s murder.’
Michael rubbed a flabby cheek with a pallid forefinger. ‘You think someone desecrated her corpse, so that Norys would be found guilty of Unwin’s murder?’
‘It worked. It is exactly what you told Tuddenham – that Norys needed a false alibi from her, she refused, and so he killed her.’
‘I told Tuddenham that, because that is what I am sure happened,’ said Michael. ‘And we have Norys’s bloodstained clothes hidden on his roof to prove that he did it.’
‘Norys’s uncle says those clothes are not his.’
‘Well, he would,’ snapped Michael. ‘People lie to us all the time, Matt, and you should know better than to believe them – particularly when they have very good cause to be dishonest.’