‘The canon seemed a fastidious man, rich and fond of his belly,’ observed the clerk. ‘He would surely go only to the best eating house — that might narrow the search a little.’
De Wolfe was doubtful. ‘Perhaps so, but is that within our capabilities? In a week or so, we’ll be gone away with the court.’
‘What about the sheriff and his men? They would know all the good inns in that part of London. Could they not search for us?’
John made a derisory noise in his throat. ‘They seem ill-disposed towards us. Although fitz Durand told us about the death of Simon, I feel he just wanted to get rid of the problem, it being a royal cleric from Westminster. I can’t see him putting his strong-arm men to work for me.’
He went back to his analysis of the whole situation.
‘If those keys really do fit the locks on the treasure chest, then as they cannot be the original keys, someone must have had them copied,’ he mused. ‘And the only person who could have done that, given that they were in his scrip, is Simon Basset himself.’
‘When could he have had them copied?’ asked Gwyn, to whom this was all getting a little confusing.
‘He had them both in his hands in that strongroom when we delivered the boxes,’ said John.
‘But not before or after,’ objected Thomas, who still seemed inclined to defend the honour of his fellow cleric. ‘You had them until you handed them over to him, and after the checking of the inventory one key was given to the Constable to put in his cupboard. How could he have had copies made with all of us, including two knights from the Tower, watching him?’
There was a thoughtful silence for a long moment. ‘He was often back and forth to the Tower and its strongroom in respect of other chests,’ said de Wolfe, grimly hanging on to some hope of a solution. ‘Perhaps he had the opportunity to borrow the keys then?’
Even as the words left his lips, he recognised the weakness of his argument. As the treasure chest had not been opened again until its contents were rechecked and found to be deficient, there was no way in which the key from de Mandeville’s cupboard could have been handled.
‘Unless the bloody Constable is also involved in the plot!’ suggested Gwyn darkly. He had obviously taken against the supercilious Keeper of the Great Tower. ‘If he and Simon Basset had conspired together, they could easily have taken the keys out to be copied. The city is full of smiths who could oblige for a good fee — anyway, they wouldn’t know they were making keys to rob the king!’
Though John had to admit that this was a possibility, he was dubious about its probability. ‘I just can’t see Herbert de Mandeville risking his neck for a few hundred pounds, even though it’s a great deal of money. His family have been Keepers of the Tower for generations, he surely wouldn’t sully their honour in that way.’
‘And he’s been there for years, he could have stolen long before this,’ admitted Thomas.
‘Perhaps he has!’ grumbled Gwyn, unwilling to abandon his dislike of the Constable.
‘Well, there’s no way we can accuse de Mandeville of complicity with no evidence at all,’ decided John. ‘And for that matter, we’ve no hard evidence against Simon Basset, only a suspicion based on those keys.’
‘So why should someone want to kill him?’ reflected Thomas. ‘And why would he want to hang on to those keys, if he is guilty? Surely he would have thrown them into the Thames once the theft was completed, to get rid of any incriminating evidence.’
De Wolfe threw up his hands in despair. ‘Christ Jesus alone knows! There’s little I can do now, except hold a useless inquest and wait for something else to turn up, if it ever does.’
As the endless hot weather was not conducive to keeping corpses for long, the inquest had to be held early next day, before a funeral in the cemetery reserved for the clergy, which was behind the abbey. He held it in the west porch of the abbey, with the consent of the prior, William Postard’s lieutenant, so that the small jury could proceed inside and view the body which still lay in the transept.
John’s pessimism about the futility of the proceedings was justified, as nothing useful could come out of them. He decided not to call anyone from the brothel, to preserve the canon’s reputation, even though it meant that he could not introduce any evidence about Basset’s claim that he had eaten at a hostelry with a friend. The ‘friend’ was unknown, as was the hostelry, so there was little point in mentioning it, just as he refrained from calling Brother Philip, who he reckoned was better off healing the sick than travelling to Westminster. Instead, he called Gwyn and Thomas to say on oath that they had heard the monk explain that death was certainly due to foxglove poisoning. Martin the steward and Gilbert the chaplain both averred that Simon Basset was in good spirits when they last saw him and that he had never returned home. They vehemently denied any suggestion that he might have taken his own life and within a few minutes, after solemnly filing past the corpse on its bier, the jury of twelve men recruited from the Treasury, plus the servants from Basset’s household, delivered a verdict of murder by persons unknown, which the coroner graciously accepted, though he would have instantly rejected anything else.
They attended the funeral immediately afterwards, filing with many of the abbey monks behind the prior to the large burial plot. As the coffin was lowered into the ground, John could not help wondering whether he was witnessing the final disappearance of a victim or a villain. And if Simon was the culprit, what had he done with the loot?
Walking back towards the palace, de Wolfe went over in his mind the recent cases that had come his way, none of which reflected any glory upon his office of coroner. The guest-room steward, Basil of Reigate, had been stabbed on the river pier.
Osbert Morel, the ironworker, had been bludgeoned to death on the marshes, though it was true that John had no jurisdiction over his murder. Now a high Treasury official had been poisoned — and in none of them was there any clue as to the perpetrator.
There were also hints of espionage and the undoubted theft of a large amount of royal property, yet the Coroner of the Verge seemed impotent to solve any of them. He felt again like getting on his old horse Odin and riding off back to Devon, where at least he felt that he had contributed something to keeping the king’s peace.
At noon he went home with Gwyn to Long Ditch Lane for dinner, where Osanna was still giving him frosty looks after bursting in on his moment of passion with Hawise d’Ayncourt.
Whether it was because she had taken a fancy to Hilda when she had stayed there or whether she took exception to Hawise’s autocratic manner, John could not tell, but from the way she banged a platter in front of him and slopped his ale into a jar, he knew that he was not in favour with her. However, her salt cod with beans, onions and last year’s parsnips was palatable, as was a boiled fowl stuffed with bread and herbs. A bowl of quince and small plums was rounded off with cheese and maslin bread of wheat and rye.
As they finished eating, the sullen heat was suddenly broken by a summer storm. The black clouds that had been threatening for days, decided to accumulate overhead and abruptly unloaded torrential rain upon London, accompanied by rolling thunderclaps and flashes of lightning. Within minutes, the downpour turned the lane outside into a morass, running water even lapping against the stone slab that formed the threshold of the front door. The water began pouring off the wide expanse of marsh and the Long Ditch soon turned into a churning brown torrent.
John decided he would not bother to go back to sit idly in his chamber in the palace and announced that he was going to sleep the afternoon away. Gwyn seemed indifferent to the storm and said that he would go down to the Deacon alehouse to while away the time at dice with his cronies. He marched away through the mud, his old leather jerkin his only protection, the rain cascading off the pointed hood.