Another shrug and a, ‘Likely.’
‘Who was it? The Drygate and who else?’
‘Answer Maister Cunningham,’ ordered Paterson. After a moment his son mumbled something which might have been,
‘High Street. Stablegreen.’
‘I hope the Drygate won.’ This earned a reluctant grin, delivered sideways under the mouse-coloured thatch. Encouraged, Gil went on, ‘If you mind anything more about this cord, you can let me hear it, or bring it to my man Lowrie. Or aught else you think of that might help me. I want to find who killed the lassie at the Cross.’
‘Aye, wi some o our cord!’ said the elder Paterson energetically. ‘Aught we can do to help, maister, we’ll do right willingly, me and the boy both!’
‘And what did the Almoner say?’ asked Alys.
‘He agreed it was likely some of his,’ Gil said, carving a slice off the roast before him. ‘When it comes into the store, one of the vergers, a fellow called Matthew, cuts it down into lengths of an ell or an ell and a half, and whips the ends. It’s kept on a shelf in the dry store, a box for each length, very methodical. The piece we have is gey like the longer lengths that Jamieson uses to bind up the great sacks of donated goods, though I’d not say he knew which one it came off.’
‘That would be too much to expect,’ said Alys gravely. She accepted a second slice of meat, and held her platter while Gil spooned gravy from around the roast. ‘And what have you learned, Lowrie?’
‘Some new oaths,’ said Lowrie ruefully. ‘Nobody had seen a lady in her shift in any of the houses near the kirk-yard, much though some of them might have wanted to.’
‘So we can discount that idea, and give thought to something else,’ said Gil. ‘Good work.’
‘Maistre le notaire, votr’ valet n’est pas rentré,’ observed Catherine as Gil helped her to a share of the gravy to savour her platter of pounded roots.
‘Euan knows when the dinner goes on the table,’ said Alys. ‘Gil, surely the woman at the Cross is not connected with the theft from the Almoner’s stores? It did not sound as if she had any means at all, much less what she should not have had.’
‘No, I agree.’ Gil served Lowrie and then himself with slices of the roast. ‘She may be connected, but not because she was involved in the thieving.’
‘So what do we know, maister?’ asked Lowrie.
‘I’ve told you often enough,’ said Gil, ‘use my name. We’re both sons of the College of Glasgow, whatever else is between us.’ He used his eating-knife to cut the meat on his platter into smaller pieces, while Lowrie muttered something in embarrassment. ‘We’re still at the stage where we have a great handful of facts which might or might not be related, and no idea how they join up. One lassie was freed from the Cross in the middle of the night, by one or more people, and then vanished in her shift. Nobody seems to have heard of any friends she might have hereabouts, and nobody admits to having seen her.’
‘Why?’ prompted Alys.
‘We don’t know that either.’
‘The reason,’ said Catherine in her elegant toothless French, ‘that the girl was freed and has vanished may indicate the person who freed her.’
‘Very true, madame,’ agreed Gil, and translated quickly for Lowrie, ‘but I’d be grateful for hearing anything at all about her.’
‘And the other lassie,’ said Alys. ‘Peg, is that her name?’
‘Last seen about ten o’clock leaving the Trindle, turned up dead and bound to the Cross wearing Annie Gibb’s sacking gown and her own plaid-’
‘Then Annie had more to wear than her shift,’ said Alys. ‘Or she would have kept the plaid, rather than leave it with a dead woman.’ She chewed thoughtfully for a moment, swallowed, and said, ‘What time did you think Peg had been left there?’
‘Not long after she died, your father reckoned.’
‘I thought that was the cord,’ said Lowrie.
‘Aye, you’re right,’ agreed Gil, running the conversation through his mind again. ‘He said the cord was in place before she began to stiffen.’
‘Could it have been,’ Alys checked, grimaced, and went on, ‘could she have been throttled before she was tied to the Cross?’
‘Mai- Gil thought not,’ said Lowrie, ‘because of the way her hair was caught under the cord.’
‘So she was killed, and then stripped and tied to the Cross, and then throttled,’ said Alys, ‘all before she began to stiffen, although not necessarily all in one set of actions.’
‘If the woman who is dead,’ pronounced Catherine, ‘was killed merely in order to distract the demoiselle Gibb’s friends, that is a great crime. If she was killed by another person, for some other reason, then the demoiselle was fortunate not to encounter the killer herself.’
‘The town must have been going like a fair last night,’ Gil said wryly. ‘The prentices had a battle appointed and all, High Street, Drygate and Stablegreen.’
‘Could some of them have killed Peg?’ Alys asked. ‘Or spirited Annie Gibb away?’
‘I’d not ha thought it,’ Gil said. ‘The night battles aye used to be a matter of stalking, of pursuit and capture. We never involved the townsfolk if we could help it. Lowrie, was it the same when you were a bejant?’
‘It was,’ agreed Lowrie, his first year at the College much more recently behind him. ‘Is it worth speaking to Maister Mason’s fellow Luke? Or to young Berthold?’ He checked, his eyebrows going up. ‘Did Maister Mason not say Berthold was useless the day? That sounds as if he was abroad last night, for certain.’
‘Then you may both go down there after the dinner,’ said Alys, ‘and speak to them.’
Opposite her, Catherine looked disapproving, but said nothing. It was useless, Gil knew, to suggest Alys came too. They had both visited formally since the marriage, but Ealasaidh did not encourage dropping in.
The household at the White Castle had apparently dined later than that at the Mermaiden, and was still at table when Gil knocked on the broad planks of the door. Luke opened it, and greeted them with a wide grin.
‘Come away in, Maister Gil! That is-’ He looked over his shoulder, but his master endorsed the invitation from his great chair at the head of the board.
‘Yes, yes, come away in, Gilbert, take a seat! We have eaten most of the food, but you will take an oatcake and a mouthful of ale? Usquebae? Lowrie, you will take something too?’
Gil bowed to Ealasaidh where she sat tall and forbidding at Maistre Pierre’s right hand, and flourished his hat in a general greeting to the rest of the household ranged along the great board. Apart from Luke, now waiting to take their plaids, young Berthold and the mason’s older man Thomas were the only familiar faces; four women in various forms of the dress of the Highlands stared at him with what seemed like faint hostility. Berthold, on the other hand, was looking terrified. What has the boy been up to, thought Gil, accepting a beaker of ale and a buttered oatcake.
‘What progress have you made?’ his father-in-law was asking him. ‘Is there no trace of the missing lady?’
‘And is that right,’ said Ealasaidh disapprovingly, ‘that she does not wash herself nor comb her hair since her man died?’
‘Little progress.’ Yet again, Gil summarised what he had learned that afternoon, while the four Erschewomen whispered in their own language and Luke and Thomas craned to hear him. Both Maistre Pierre and his wife exclaimed over the thefts from the Almoner’s stores.
‘But does he not guard the place?’ the mason wondered. ‘How do the goods vanish?’