John glowered at the news. Now how in hell am I ever going to resolve this? he asked himself. Short of going to Rouen, there was now no way of knowing if Simon had been up to no good.
Once again, Thomas’s nimble brain came to the rescue. ‘Sir Herbert, when such chests arrive or depart from your keeping, are the two keys to each box always kept together on one ring?’
The other three men stared at the clerk, unsure of his reasoning.
‘Of course! It would cause great confusion if they were jumbled together,’ replied the puzzled Constable. ‘Sometimes, after the sheriffs have delivered their county farms twice a year, I may get a dozen chests or more brought here.’
‘Then what happens?’ persisted the little priest.
Herbert stared at Thomas in perplexity. ‘Well, after the contents are checked I separate the pair of keys. Simon or whoever it might be, takes one and I lock up the other in that cupboard.’
‘So afterwards neither you nor the Exchequer official has any reason to have two keys paired on a ring?’ asked Thomas.
His reasoning was now apparent to the others, but Gwyn had an objection.
‘The pair of keys might be nothing to do with the same chest. He dealt with many such boxes — maybe he just put them together for convenience.’
De Mandeville held out his hand. ‘Let me see those keys for a moment.’ He turned them over in his hands and peered at them short-sightedly. ‘They certainly look the same size and type as the locks used on those boxes. The locks are supplied by the Treasury and I think they are all made by the same locksmith.’
He handed them back to the coroner. ‘But of course, without the actual locks from that treasure chest, I cannot say if they were the keys for it.’
De Wolfe dropped them back into his scrip. ‘But if the chest has now gone to Rouen, its keys have gone with it, so these cannot be the originals! Presumably you gave your key to the Treasury man who took them, but what about the other key?’
‘Simon Basset handed his over as usual,’ confirmed the Constable. ‘He came here last week before the boxes were removed under guard to be taken down to Queenhithe to a king’s ship.’
It seemed an impasse, but John had one last avenue of enquiry.
‘You said the locks probably all came from the same locksmith. Do you know who he was?’
De Mandeville looked disdainfully at the coroner. ‘I don’t concern myself with such minor matters. But the Treasury keep a few clerks in an office downstairs, who keep records of all the comings and goings of their property. Maybe they might be able to tell you something.’
They left de Mandeville relieved at their departure and a page took them down to a gloomy archway built into the massive walls of a lower floor. Here an old man in minor orders sat with a shaven-headed youth at a couple of tables covered with parchment lists. The senior clerk scratched his scalp with a quill pen, ruining the tip until he recalled who he paid for the last batch of locks, several years earlier.
‘It’s Peter of Farringdon; he has a workshop on the north side of Eastcheap. We use him as he has great discretion, as it would hardly do if he divulged the secrets of the king’s treasure chests. Also, he has been told that if he did, he would be burned at the stake at Smithfield!’
As they rode through the bustling city, John felt that the ramifications of this investigation were becoming too tortuous to bear. The locksmith was the last throw in this gamble to decide whether Simon Basset was or was not a villain. They found him in a small shop on the main east-west thoroughfare of the city. The shutter of the front window hinged down to form a display counter on the street, covered with metal goods such as candlesticks, sconces, hinges, locks and kitchen appliances such as trivets and spigots. These were guarded by two apprentices working at benches in the front room, who took him through to a forge at the back, where a beefy man of middle age was stripped to the waist in the torrid heat of a furnace. A small boy pumped the furnace. The man was bald, but had red whiskers to rival Gwyn’s and arm muscles that were even bigger than the Cornishman’s.
He was about to pull an iron bar from the white-hot coals with a pair of long tongs, but when he saw the calibre of his visitors, he thrust it back and came to meet them. John explained the problem and produced the pair of keys, whereupon Peter took them out into the open backyard, where the light was better.
‘I didn’t make these!’ he said, within seconds of turning the keys over in his hand. ‘And they are less than a few months old, maybe only weeks. I’ve not had an order for this sort of lock for a year or more.’
‘How can you tell they’re not yours?’ asked John, his hopes rising once more.
‘Look here, see the shanks?’ he said, pointing with a finger like a pork sausage. ‘They are straight, from the top right down to the wards. I always braze a ring around the lower part of the shank, to hold the wards more easily in the correct position to turn the tumblers.’
‘You said they were recent?’
‘Very little rust on them, the steel is still shiny. These have not gone through a wet winter like we’ve had this last year.’
De Wolfe nodded his understanding. ‘So given that you definitely didn’t make these, could they be used for opening the type of lock you supply to the Treasury?’
The smith looked closely again at the business ends of the two keys. ‘All locks are generally similar, so I can’t be sure. But the Exchequer was insistent upon the most secure ones they could get, so I made complicated wards and gates in the locks — and these are of that type.’ He handed them back to the coroner with a gesture of finality.
‘I can’t swear that they must be for those locks, as other smiths are just as competent, but there’s no reason why they couldn’t be for the ones I supplied.’
There was no more to be gained from Peter of Farringdon and they rode off through Ludgate and back to Westminster. In their austere chamber, the heat was so intense that de Wolfe pulled off his knee-length grey tunic and sat behind the table in his linen undershirt and long black hose, which were supported by laces tied to a string belt around his waist. The fact that his nether regions were totally exposed did not in the least disconcert him, as the table shielded him from any casual visitor.
Gwyn sat in usual place on the window ledge, trying to catch any breeze from the river and Thomas, who seemed immune from overheating, sat at the end of the table, writing an account of the day’s happenings for the record.
With jugs of cloudy cider before them, John went over the salient facts that they had discovered.
‘The canon was murdered, there seems little doubt of that.’
‘Are you quite sure it wasn’t an accident or felo de se?’ asked Gwyn.
‘A senior member of the clergy like a canon wouldn’t commit suicide,’ retorted Thomas indignantly. ‘Why should he jeopardize his immortal soul?’
‘What about almost dying in a brothel?’ objected Gwyn.
‘That’s not a mortal sin,’ snapped the clerk impatiently. ‘And as for an accident, how can anyone inadvertently swallow enough to be fatal? He wasn’t out in the countryside, chewing a score of foxglove plants!’
De Wolfe held up a hand to stop the bickering. ‘That raises the question, where was he before he went to the brothel? The girl said that he told her he had had a good meal in a decent inn, or words to that effect. That’s where he must have been given the tincture of foxglove, given the timing, according to Brother Philip.’
‘He also mentioned to her something about dining with a friend,’ added Thomas. ‘Given the circumstances, that friend must have been the killer.’
‘With him dead, we haven’t a hope in hell of knowing who it was,’ said John gloomily.
‘Could we discover in which tavern it was he ate his last meal?’ hazarded Thomas. ‘Then we might find what friend accompanied him.’
‘There must be a score of inns within a half-mile of Stinking Lane,’ scoffed Gwyn. ‘What chance have any of them recalling their customers from last week?’