The parish priest crossed the churchyard inside its ring of old yew trees and hauled open the creaking door to admit them. In the pale morning light, de Wolfe saw a bare chamber with a simple table at the far end serving as the altar, bearing a tin cross and two wooden candlesticks.
'There they are, God rest them,' muttered Walter rather grudgingly, and joined Thomas in making the sign of the Cross. In front of the altar, on the floor of beaten earth, lay three still figures, the upper part of each covered by an empty sack to serve as a shroud.
John de Wolfe stalked towards them, his characteristic stoop making him appear to the bailiff like some large crow as he hovered over the bodies. Bending, he pulled the sack away from the nearest corpse and Gwyn did the same for the other two.
'God blast whoever did this!' snarled the coroner. 'It is Thorgils, just as I feared. '
'And I recognise these other two,' boomed Gwyn. 'They're his crew members, though I don't recall their names.'
The three cadavers lay pale and waxy on the floor, dressed in the simple attire of shipmen — a short, belted tunic of faded blue and stout breeches, their feet bare.
Gwyn bent and picked up one of the hands of the man in the middle.
'Still some death stiffness remaining, so they've not been dead more than a couple of days in this cold weather.' He squinted at the skin of the palms and fingerpads, which was wrinkled and sodden. 'Yet they were long enough in the water to get washerwoman's fingers.'
John stood silently, looking at the faces of the three victims. Thorgils was a grey-bearded man of about sixty years, the other two were stocky seamen probably in their twenties. As de Wolfe stood in pensive contemplation of a man he had known for much of his life, the bailiff stole a look at the coroner. He saw a tall, sinewy man who gave an overall impression of blackness. At forty-one, De Wolfe still had hair the colour of jet, which he wore longer than most Norman knights, swept back from his forehead and curling down to the nape of his neck. Luxuriant eyebrows of the same colour overhung deep-set dark eyes and his long, gaunt face carried a big hooked nose. Though he had no beard or moustache, his cheeks were usually dark with stubble between his weekly shaves with a sharp knife. The only relieving feature of this forbidding visage was the full lips, which the bailiff suspected were a sign of latent passion and a fondness for the ladies. De Wolfe's garb suited his face, as he wore a long sombre grey tunic under his mottled wolf skin mantle. One of the archers had told Vado that during the campaigns in Ireland the coroner had been known as 'Black John' from his predilection for dark clothing and often equally dark moods.
De Wolfe suddenly moved, jerking the bailiff from his contemplation of the coroner. 'Let's see these wounds, Gwyn,' he commanded, bending to the corpse of the ship-master. Between them, they unbuckled Thorgils' wide leather belt and raised his tunic.
'Look on his back, Crowner,' muttered the bailiff, starting forward to help. Turning the body over on to its bearded face, they soon saw that there were two stab wounds in the ship-master's back, between the shoulder blades. The tunic had corresponding cuts, though there was little more than pinkish discoloration on the surrounding cloth. When they looked at the two younger men, the findings were much the same, though one of them had three stab wounds.
Thomas de Peyne, still sensitive to these sights of fatal violence even after more than a year in the coroner's service, held his hand to his mouth and murmured between his fingers.
'Why so little blood, Crowner?'
'They've all been in the damned sea!' grated de Wolfe, his temper made even shorter by the sight of a friend so callously slain — even if he had been cuckolding him for years.
'Whatever blood escaped has been washed away,' added Gwyn, ever eager to show his expertise in matters of violence. 'That's why the tunic is hardly soiled. He must have been pitched into the water soon after the knifing, so that the blood had no time to congeal in the cloth.'
William Vado and the men from the village hovered behind the coroner and his men, staring with interest at their activities. Rough countrymen such as these were no strangers to death, whether of animals, their families or their fellows, for life was hard in these remote areas, where disease, accidents and sometimes winter starvation carried off many people before they reached middle age. Murder was quite uncommon, however, and this was a novelty that they had no intention of missing, their eyes following the coroner's hands as he traced the outline of the wounds.
'These are peculiarly wide stabbings, Gwyn,' growled de Wolfe, pulling the edges of one of the wounds apart with his fingers. 'Surely more than two inches across. What sort of knife made these?'
The Cornishman, crouching down alongside his master, scratched his russet hair, which was as disheveled as a hayrick in a storm.
'Not the usual dagger, Crowner! Yet they seem too clean cut for a broadsword. And you don't dig someone two or three times in the back with a sword!'
John grunted and slid a forefinger into one of the holes. He frowned then pulled it out again and stuck the bloody digit into several more wounds, moving to the other bodies to test them in a similar fashion. His finger penetrated up to the knuckle and when he pulled it out, there was an obscene sucking sound which made the sensitive Thomas shudder.
'Very odd! I get the feeling that the tracks curve inside the body, rather than go straight in,' de Wolfe muttered, almost to himself. Wiping his finger on the tunic of the youngest corpse, he stood up and stared down again at the bodies. 'No other injuries … not that the poor devils needed anything more.'
'And no sign of a fight, for their fists are free of any injury,' added Gwyn. 'Stabbed in the back unawares by some cowardly bastard.'
De Wolfe glared at his companion. 'I think you mean "bastards",' he corrected. 'One attacker couldn't do this alone without the two other sailors fighting back! The crew must have been jumped by several assailants at the same time.'
'Especially if there was another seaman whose body hasn't been found,' cut in Thomas, his sharp mind overcoming his repugnance at the morbid scene.
'Cover the poor devils up again!' commanded the coroner, stepping back to allow the village men to spread the sacks over the victims.
'There's nothing more we can do for them, but I'll have to hold an inquest later this morning.'
'What about the corpses?' asked Thomas. 'Will they be buried here or taken back to their homes in Dawlish?' De Wolfe shrugged. 'It's a hell of long way to carry them, either on a cart or slung across the back of sumpter horses. I'll have to ask the families what they want done.'
'You knew these men before this?' asked the bailiff.
'I knew Thorgils, the ship-master. He was the main carrier for the goods our merchant enterprise send across to Brittany and Normandy — sometimes even to Flanders.'
He saw no point in mentioning that Thorgils' wife Hilda had been his mistress on and off since they were both young. The lissom blonde was the daughter of the reeve of Holcombe, one of the de Wolfe family's two manors on the coast near Teignmouth. Though five years older, John had grown up with Hilda, and by the time she was thirteen they were lovers, albeit clandestinely in the hay-loft or out in the woods. He had gone off to the wars before he was twenty, and though they had reconsummated their romance at intervals over the succeeding years, she had eventually married Thorgils, a much older man, while John had been pushed into his loveless marriage with Matilda de Revelle seventeen years earlier.